So here we are celebrating Labour day

May 1st, Labour Day, was on a friday so we had a lovely long weekend. Protest on the friday and picnic on the saturday, good stuff! Here are the highlights in pictures.

What is so totally cool about French protests are the slogans, which are usually rude, subtle and/or funny.

A personal favorite: This is a play on words on "Gone with the wind" (Autant en emporte le vent in French) with the first word a homonym of OTAN- Nato. A lot of French people are pissed off with Sarkozy for making France rejoin its integrated military command, which it famously left in 1966.




Protests in France are for all, of every age. This little girl, who had been casually left sitting on the reycling bin, had a sign that read: Nobody should let themselves be walked over, not even Carla! referring of course to France's first lady.





You could hardly move for these posters, the "Casse toi pov' con" ones. This means "sod off you sad bastard" and was famously said by Nicolas Sarkozy to a guy who refused to shake his hand.at the Agricultural Fair, and caught on video.





Another fave: "Couilles en or", or Balls of gold is slang for someone very rich. This says that as long as there are golden balls, there will be steel blades...


Karcher, Taser, Charter: the State's sponsors. Karcher is a brand of industrial hose, which Sarkozy poetically said he would use in the suburbs to flush away all the undesirables. Taser for the increasingly violent police methods. Charter for the 30000 expulsions of illegal residents


Outside the Republican guard.







Everybody had something to protest about: here the Tamil community marching about the current situation in Sri Lanka.




Paris, Notre Dame, the river... and politics.









These were plastered all over to Paris to represent the 28000+ people who have been deported.









It all ended at la Bastille, the symbolic location of popular uprising. Another protest started at Hotel de Ville.


One of the joys of living in Paris is the picnics by the Seine. In the summer it can get a bit crowded as the parisians squeeze on the riverside flagstones. But in Spring, on a chilly night, it was great!

Aaaah! Paris!











before...and after













As we were walking home, we crossed the Town Hall. In protest to the Pecresse Law on Higher Education and Research, professors, librarians and researchers have been walking in a circle for, at that point, 972 hours!! Not the same people obviously.

So here we are debating climate change

Last Friday, my dear friend Olivia who works for the Mairie (town hall) of the tenth on town planning and sustainable development issues asked me along to a play/debate on climate change. Out of solidarity and a little curiosity I agreed : it seemed original- a play put on by journalism students- and was free.

It was playing by the canal at the espace Jemmapes. A nice room with a fair sized stage, decorated to look like a café and terrace. The play was uneven: at best amateurish, at worst hopelessly incompetent. The plot was pretty good : we are in an undetermined near future, the warming of the planet is significant and the government & scientists have injected the atmosphere with sulphur to cool it down. (FYI: this is a real theory and solution put forward by... the Nobel prize winner for chemistry). However acid rains, respiratory problems and hideous climate change in other regions of the world have appeared as a result, though all this is hushed up by the government.

So various characters wander through the café giving their opinions and showing the various positions that people have on the issue. One girl is conspiracy-theoried up, suspects the government and is depicted as being closest to the truth. Her aunt is a farmer whose crops are suffering. There is a incompetent journalist who doesn't research anything but is spoon fed her story by a stern and corrupt climatologist. The plot gets a bit complicated as the long-forgotten murder of a climatologist is introduced and trails off, which is disappointing as the general idea was pretty good, though perhaps portrayed in a slightly black & white way (EVIL government! NICE hippie!). The acting was very uneven, some good, some forgetting their lines. Little things like empty glasses and crappy props made it difficult to suspend disbelief. That said, the one hour didn't feel too long.

What got me a little worked up however was the debate that followed. There were three experts : a young chick, a funkily dressed man and a quiet older guy. The chick knew nothing and kept turning to funky man for answers, figures and arguments. The funky man I quite liked: he had the guts to say that we were potentially all fucked and that it was possibly to late to do anything about climate change, and was also stern about some of the hypocrisy that underlies the climate change debate (do as I say not as I do, especially rich countries vis a vis poor ones). Then the third chap started to talk. He said that it was't so hard to save the world: we "just" have to cut out CO2 emissions by 4. So : if you have a car, always fill it up: by driving four people around instead of just one, you are cutting emissions by 4. Er... He then said that we had much to learn from the developing world. "Look at Senegal!" he said. Taxis and busses only leave when they are full. So let's do that in Paris! Er... Finally he said that we had a lot to learn from Ethiopian housing, which is biodegradable and moveable as made of mud. Great! It also lacks plumbing and electricity would dissolve in the rain, but who cares! It's all about saving the planet right?!

I left after he suggested this master world-saving solution. I am all for saving the planet and do my utmost to reduce at my own little level my CO2 emissions (public transport, veggie box, no shitty imports, avoid planes, recycle and so on.) but live in a mud hut in Paris? Lol. We could also suggest only having electricity one day in four (at the local hospital e.g) and that would also save energy.... This is the problem : we need feasible solutions that won't actually make the situation worse, so let's forget mud huts, car sharing and sulphur injections... and reopen the nuclear debate...

So here we are commenting randomly

The posts are more and more infrequent, even though so much is happening, all day every day and all around the world. So much to say and so little time to say it in ; here is a random selection of all that I think is worth mentioning.

Schengen has grown !! At 00.01 on the 21st of decembre nine new countries joined, eight of Eastern Europe. Schengen is now a vast zone where 404 million people can travel freely without having to cross borders as they ain't any. Now we, in Paris, have a border with Russia and the Ukraine and it is possible to go from Lisbonne to Talinn without a passport. Incredible or what ? Britain, of course stays out of Schengen, undoubtedly fearing the hordes of AIDS ridden commies who would come over to eat their kids (on holiday). Still, 24 countries are now part of the Schengen area so see you all, passportless, in Gdansk !

Gordon, Gordon! what the hell do you think you are doing ? Talk about complete lack of diplomatic skills, lack of credibility skills, lack of popularity skills, lack of skill full stop in fact.
On December 13th 26 EU countries' leaders met in Lisbon to sign the Lisbon treaty (see previous posts). The LT will clean up the way the EU is run, making it more efficient both internally and on the world scene. Love it or hate it, one has to admit that getting the 27 to agree on it has been an incredible feat, and credit goes to the Portuguese and German presidencies of the EU, and to a certain extent Tsarkozy. So when the time comes to sign it, there is of course a certain amount of ceremony and pomp and champagne in Lisbon. Even the ghastly polish president, anti - Europe and mad, was there to sign and sip the Champers. France was represented by no less than four people : Tsarkozy, PM Fillon, Foreign Affairs Kouchner, and EU secretary of state In fact everyone was there, except for, yup, Gordon Brown who thought it a better idea to go to some dire meeting of a commitee in the House of Commons rather than turn up for the greatest European event of the century. As a result, he has lost all credibility with everyone. The EUphiles wept from frustration as Miliband signed in his place and the EUphobes guffawed with disgust as Gordon crept into the empty hall hours after the party was over to sign the treaty anyway. What the hell was he thinking ?

A glass of Chablis, at the sumptuous Parisian Hotel Meurice, costs 16 euros. The nibbles are terrific though.

Wednesday night, a small & cosy bar/restaurant/theater in the 20th called the Ogresse. The play : Tiffany Memory, starring Chucky Nylon. The food : Confit de canard with apples and potatoes, with pollen and honey. The red wine : not very nice. We troop downstairs in to the basement, where the lights and speakers are hanging from the plumbing and what seems to be the building's central heating. Very dark and small, the stage is an open space in front of us. Tiffany Memory, aka Alexandra, is wearing a low cut dress in black and looking like a 1950s cabaret hooker. Chucky, aka the other one, is wearing skinny black jean, a knitted black t-shirt and killer red high heels. He sings depressed glam rock, she talks in a sulfurous low voice. They ask us to miaow, and to cum loudly and we do. And we have no idea what they are on about but the music is cool - Chucky is like a young David Bowie; has peacock feathers in his hair - and Alex is scorching hot. Check it out here.