The award was made by European Best Destinations, which represents 158 tourism organisations across Europe and they gave the top award to the French beach over stunning beaches in Croatia and Greece. The judges said that the Notre Dame beach is noted for being in an environment where nature is preserved, has outstanding flora and fauna, plenty of pine forests surrounding the beach, and good quality water. Just looking at the photographs of the beach is enough to induce a severe case of traveller’ s itchy feet!
In a similar move, also in the south of France, Cannes bay, with its two Iles des Lérins, is being nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Another survey finding released the other day said that 80 per cent of children polled about their favourite holiday destination opted for France, followed by the US and Spain. However, it turned out that the survey was very UK- centric, since four out of five of the children interviewed were all living in the UK. But the survey merely confirms what everyone in the travel business knows, that France is the world’ s number one tourism destination, with 84 million tourist arrivals last year.
There was more nature news from the Pyrenees. Last year, ibex were reintroduced to the area and the first birth has just been recorded. A baby ibex has been spotted, in the company of its mother, in a forested area, 1, 800 metres up, in the regional park that covers most of the French side of the Pyrenees.
But nature isn’t always pleasant and good to look at. Last weekend, a 59 year old man was walking with his wife near the village of Réallon in the Ecrins national park in the Hautes Alpes, when he was attacked and killed by a bull. Something similar happened two years ago, in the Pyrenees, when an 85 year old walker was killed by a cow. Walkers under- estimate at their peril how dangerous cattle can be.
There couldn’t however be a bigger contrast between the natural life of the south of France and the intensely urban environment of Paris. An investigation into air quality on the Paris Métro has found that at best, the air quality in the carriages is four times worse than it is on the péripherique, the motorway that encircles Paris. And the busier the Métro gets, the worse the air pollution gets, so that travelling at rush hour is a positively unhealthy experience.
Talking about the Métro, I’m currently reading a book called Paris Underground, the maps, stations, and designs of the Métro, written by Mark Ovenden and published by Penguin in 2009. It’ s a graphically detailed history of the Métro from the time in the 19th century when an underground system was first mooted, right up to the present day, including the RER system. The amount of detail in the book is astonishing, as is the sheer variety of illustrations, everything from bygone photos of Métro stations to old maps of the system, more than 1, 000 illustrations altogether. Truly fascinating stuff!
Mind you, at the moment, you’ d be better off underground rather than overground in Paris, the weather is so horrible. Yesterday, for instance, the top temperature was 12 degrees C, with rain pelting down all day. It’s all most unseasonal- you’ d be hard pressed to think that we’ re actually coming up to the end of May. The weather has been equally wintery here in Ireland, and it’ s all in total contrast to the overwhelming heatwave in the past week or so in Spain and Portugal. To make matters worse, the El Nino warm water current has been reported starting in the Pacific and over the next few months is likely to have devastating results on weather patterns in the whole Pacific region and beyond.
Meanwhile, property prices in the south of France continue to climb, just like the thermometer in Spain and Portugal. Marina Picasso is the 64 year old grand daughter of the great artist and she has decided to sell La Californie, the luxurious villa and studio in Cannes originally bought by Picasso himself. She wants to
sell the house to fund her charity work and already, she has received an offer of €150 million. Marina also wants to sell 126 pieces of pottery made by Picasso, for the same reason, and that pottery too is likely to bring in some eye- watering sums of money.
Off the eighth arrondissement of Marseilles last Saturday, three teenage boys dived off the cliffs into the sea, but only one of them made it back to land. The bodies of the other two were recovered from the sea on Sunday, a tragic end to a typical teenage prank. And yesterday saw a man called Bernard Fischetti, aged 45, gunned down in the same part of Marseilles. He was described as a member of the grand banditisme in the city and that’ s something that needs absolutely no translation.
Technology is also making the news. A man was arrested the other day for flying a drone over Disneyland, east of Paris, so that he could take photographs of the site. Down south, a teenager called Tom Bittmann is hoping to break the world record for the number of people in a selfie. On May 26, he’s hoping to get 3,000 people together at the Theatre de Verdure in Nice for a gigantic selfie. He hopes to break the current world record, of 1,151 people gathered together for a selfie by Microsoft.
When it comes to records, it turns out, with a total lack of surprise, that the French are among the heaviest drinkers in any OECD country, rivalling fellow heavy drinkers in Austria and Estonia. The average alcohol consumption is over 12 litres per person per year, but it turns out that the heaviest drinking 20 per cent of the population in France consume half of all the alcohol that’ s drunk in France. And an interesting drink- related story emerged from the Loiret department of central France at the weekend.
Last Saturday, a 41 year old man went on a fishing expedition, which seems to have been an excuse for some serious drinking. When the time came to go home, he was in no fit state to get behind the wheel, so he got his 12 year old son to drive their car home. While the 12 year old was making a pretty good job of driving, he got stopped by police, who found the lad’ s father slumped in a seriously drunken state in the passenger seat. Now, both the man and his son are facing various driving charges.
There are always surveys going on in France and one of the most recent shows that traditional attitudes towards housework have changed little. It seems that even now, the bulk of domestic housework is done by women, with men making little contribution, a very antiquated attitude. As the compilers of the survey noted, most men in France wouldn’t know a feather duster if it tickled them on the nose.
But against all the odds, the French economy is showing some signs of growth. Figures for the first quarter of this year show that France had 0. 6 per cent growth, which was double the figure for Germany. In another economic move, the EU has approved the takeover of Eurostar by SNCF, the French State- owned railway company, with just one proviso, that SNCF allows rival companies to use the route as well. But all this slightly better news from France hasn’t deterred the renowned French economist, Thomas Piketty, whose best selling work last year showed just unbalanced the world economy is, between the super rich and the rest of us, departing for London. He’s taking up a professorship at the London School of Economics.
An ongoing legal battle surrounds the mystery of a Breton fishing vessel that sank off the Cornish coast in south- west England 11 years ago. The Bugaled Breizh went down with the loss of all 11 crew. The five families affected had tried to reopen the legal case but in a recent appeal court decision, they were refused permission. Now, the families are talking about taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights; they remain convinced that a NATO submarine was responsible for the sinking of the fishing boat.
Ructions of a different kind plague sections of the French media. Le Monde, the prestigious daily newspaper, is looking for a new editorial director. The man put forward for the job, Jerome Fenoglio, who has been with the paper for 23 years, didn’ t make the grade when it came to the staff vote. Rather uniquely, the staff at Le Monde have a decisive role in the appointment of editorial director and Fenoglio didn’ t make the 60 per cent acceptance rate needed from the staff. Internal dissension is also gripping Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose offices in Paris were the subject of a jihadist attack last January. One of its best- known cartoonists, Luz, is leaving, because he says it’s torture trying to work without the company of all his colleagues who were murdered in that attack. It also turns out that €4. 5 million of the money donated by the public following the attack will go to relatives of those killed at the magazine. Change is also possible at the Front National, at least according to Florian Philippot, the vice-president of the party. He said the other day that it’s perfectly possible the name of the party could be changed. But the question remains, what on earth is Marine going to do about her father, Jean- Marie, a loose cannon to say the least.
But at least there’ s one bit of good news about the printed media, from Glasgow. In the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence last September, a new national newspaper was launched called The National, which is almost alone among the national newspapers published in Scotland that backs independence. Up to now, it was published Mondays to Fridays, but a Saturday edition two days after the recent UK general election proved so popular that the Saturday edition has now been made permanent. The Scottish National Party has made dramatic inroads, taking almost all the Scottish seats at Westminster, so The National is very much reflecting the public mood in Scotland.