So here we are watching the Right fracture

Of course, with a view to being fair and objective I can hardly put "So here we are relishing the appalling spectacle of the UMP making complete dicks of themselves and thus annihilating all crediblity" though this would actually be pretty fair & objective.

So what's new on the French political scene? It's true that with all this Baby Bullshit (BBBS) the political posts have become few and far-between.

Well to start, it turns out that the Socialist party won the presidential election on May 6th; François Hollande has been prez for just over six months and to say that his presidency has started rockily would be the understatement of the millenium. In fact it would be more accurate to say that Sarkozy lost rather than Hollande won, as it was clearly the anti-sarko sentiment and the rise of the far-right party FN that contributed to the PS victory more than Hollande's shining charisma and promises to increase taxes. It'd also be easy to say that Sarko lost because of his personnality and the crisis context, but in fact we have to go back to the French presidential campaign to understand why the right, represented by the UMP, is in the dire straits it is today.

Sarkozy was always shadowed by a bunch of more or less well-known "conseillers" who advised him with more or less success what ideas to put forward in order to be in the air du temps. In the final stretch of the campaign, his main counsellor was Patrick Buisson, a man with a far-right background who advised taking the hard "security, Islam, immigration" line. As a result, during the campaign when Sarko should really have been focusing on unemployment, debt, competitiveness and the euro crisis, he gravely went on about the bad integration of immigrants, Roms, the risk of Islamist revolution and the secular state in peril. These positions, which found their audience in the part of the UMP represented by Jean-François Copé and the "droite poulaire" (read: populist) were undoubtedly meant to drain away votes from the FN ( a well-known Sarko technique, read here for an example) and gather the far-right and the more moderate centre of the UMP- as represented by Prime minister François Fillon- together.

It was pretty much a massive fail. The moderate Gaullists (centre-right) felt alienated and the FN loved that the UMP was recycling their favourite themes. Some of the former voted Hollande and the FN did an amazing score, and in the end, Sarkozy lost.

It could have been the end of it, but the question then arose of who was going to be the UMP's new leader. Sarkozy had the been the natural one: a new generation, with a wish to rehaul the French welfare state and economy and an "décomplexé" ( 'unashamed' is the best translation I can come up with) approach to money. He had managed to reunite all the trends present in the UMP with a clever dosage of microeconomics, labour, international affairs, security and immigration policies.

Now two different candidates had emerged.

On the one hand the current leader (since presidential campaign), Jean-François Copé. MP and mayor of Meaux, a town 50 kilometres from Paris famous for its Brie, he is also from the younger generation (nearly 50), omnipresent in the media, and could be described as a pale imitation of Sarkozy, who you either hated or loved but had to admit was the real spontaneous driven thing. Copé is smooth, has nice eyes but a shark's smile and is really a bit slimy. Wasp's honey to Sarkozy's flintstones. Copé represents the "droite décomplexée" which is conservative and a tad xenophobic and anti-islam.

On the other we have former PM François Fillon, a grave and silent man, who goes about his reforms and shuns interviews and TV appearances. He is the man who oversaw the major reforms of the last half-decade, as he was Sarko's right-hand man during the whole presidency. He represents the more moderate wing of the UMP, which  is more liberal and "social gaullist".

An internal election was organised for the 300 000 UMP card-holders to vote on these two candidates. There were some other fleeting candidacies but on D-day only Fillon and Copé remained.

In the polls Fillon was given as the clear winner, 40 points ahead. And then the election happened. At 8pm the voting centres shut but no clear trend was visible. Same at 11. Then at around 11.20pm Copé came out and said he had won, 200 ballots ahead, though this result had not yet been validated by, well, anyone. They'd simply counted up the results as they came through from the various federations.

Twenty minutes later, Fillon made a statement,saying he had won, from tallying up all results from France and overseas, by about 1000 votes. This hadn't been confirmed by anyone either.

The Copé side retaliated saying that there had been evidence of fraud in Nice and Paris in particular, with ballot stuffing and people being turned away.

Chaos. On TV, other UMP figures tried to defend their side, some getting swept away like Christian Estrosi, mayor of Nice, who talked about the 'other party' forgetting that they're all supposed to be on the same ship.

Chaos continues during the next day, and finally JF Copé is declared victor by about 90 votes. He offered Vice-prez to F Fillon, who flatly refused and is now contemplating "his future in politics", clearly meaning he can't work with a populist little squit like Jean-François. And it would seem quite a lot of UMP voters might feel the same.

The belief is that the focus should be on the economy, micro and macro, with reforms to make French companies more competitive, dealing with the deficit and debt, and handling the euro-crisis, not Islam, gay marriage and yet more security. For example, Copé is famous for an anecdote he related on TV to illustrate the rise of an anti-white racism present in the dangerous 'burbs. Here a young French "gaulois-white" had had his pain au chocolat stolen at school by young French "musulmans- arabes" who had told him not to eat during Ramadan. Nevermind that there hasn't been a Ramadan during the school year for years, this was hot news to show that it's the white kids who are being treated badly because of the muslim invasion.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front national is rubbing her hands in glee. And it seems she might be the real winner of the UMP election, which has simply shown the fracture that exists in the French right. She and Jean-Louis Borloo who has just founded the centre-right party Union des démocrates et des indépendants.

The Socialists however are having a tough enough time with their own cock-ups, controversies and U-turns to milk anything out of this. They also have to remain very silent as they went through pretty much exactly the same thing, accusations and fratricide included, in 2008. It's worth noting that neither of the two candidates to the 2008 PS leader election were selected to run for President in 2012.  

So here we are being logical

I love these, especially when they're in text form without the handy little pre-prepared tables!  Thanks Fergus.

There are 5 adjacent houses. Each house has a unique color, and each owner has a different nationality. Each owner keeps a different pet, drinks a different type of beverage, and has a different occupation. The Brit lives in the red house, the Swede keeps a dog, and the Dane drinks tea. The green house is on the immediate left of the white house. In the green house they drink coffee. The postman has birds. The fireman lives in the yellow house. In the middle house they drink milk. The Norwegian lives in the leftmost house. The baker lives in the house next to the house with the cats. The fireman lives in the house next to the house with the horse. The bus driver drinks beer. The German is plumber. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house. They drink water in the house that lies next to the house where the baker lives. One of the owners keeps a zebra.

Who owns the zebra?

So here we are drooling over cute baby stuff

You know that super annoying fad, where people bombard you with cute kitten stuff? Kitten yawning, kitten asleep in slipper, kitten falling off chair arm, kitten looking woozy? Well, it's really annoying. Which is why I'm only going to do it with cute baby stuff. Not cute babies, god no, how last season, but the clothes... I have to admit, I finally see what all the fuss is about. IT'S JUST ALL SO BLOODY CUTE. And expensive I might add, but will leave that rant for another post maybe.

There are two types of cute that I have identified so far. The cute because it's funny, and the cute because it's tiny (I'll probably have a heart attack due to overcuteness if both are combined).

Yesterday, Gorgeous Chook and I spent a fortune on the latter as we have to start thinking about putting the maternity bag together, and as Elspeth will arrive in the depths of winter (we hope) it has to be all warm and woolly and fluffy (more cuteness). So here are a couple of the cutest so far.



 Scale is important to grasp tiny- cuteness so here is our reference.

 Please note the bobble on the woolly hat. This is lovely and soft and will be hell to wash.

 This is as pink as it's going to get I hope, but the little feet were just to much to resist

  And my personal fave, possibly due to the late 19th century sleeping hat. The booties I can barely talk about without getting cuteness spasms.














Feeling sick yet? So, time to move on to that first category of cute which  maybe is more accessible to people who are not sobbing hormonally into little pairs of socks: yes, the novelty-funny cute.I spent an entertaining Friday evening on various websites, such as ThinkGeek and CafePress looking at little babygros and outfits that Elspeth, being her parents' daughter, might have. It sometimes takes a bit of understanding some major nerdy, geeky and gamer references to get the full humour, but most are accessible to the masses.

Funny slogans include "Tired? there's a nap for that", "QTπ", "I like formula (a² + b² = c²)", "my daddy can outcode your daddy"and a million references to role-playing games, WoW, physics, Star trek and wars, Fermat, Linux, Perl and co, etc etc. Well I think they're hilarious.

So, hint hint, if you were hesitating between that little pale pink Laura Ashley ensemble and the t-shirt emblazoned with "diaper downloading", there's one we definitely won't be returning to the shops.Or of course you could just go for the cute.