If you are concerned about American problems, you might consider reading this lament for France at Brussels Signal by Kevin Myers:
The most traditionally-French thing about modern France is its ability to conjure riots out of thin air: this time last year, in a single nation-wide eruption 2,000 cars were torched, 3,380 buildings set on fire, 220 towns and cities were swept with violence and 40,000 police were mobilised, with 250 of them being injured. Which is why the gendarmerie has banned fireworks during this summer’s national feast day, especially since the latest “festive” rockets can be fired horizontally at 100 km/hr.
Not Belfast: Bastille Day. Aux armes, citoyens!
I have been to Normandy on four occasions in the past two years. Each time was like visiting an old folk’s home as the residents slumbered their way to the grave. The last trip. the two of us, just off the ferry and searching Cherbourg for breakfast, finally found the only café that promised both coffee and baguettes (or so we thought).
The result was intrinsically Egyptian: the coffee tasted like the effluent from the Cairo fever hospital and the baguette was one of the “long-life” variety, this one apparently from the age of Tutankhamun and resembled a condom filled with wet sawdust ….well, I hope that’s what it was.
Thereafter, matters grew worse, like time-travelling to Poland in the 1960s. Even finding somewhere that served lunch would usually take at least an hour. One day we consumed an omelette that had apparently died after a long and painful illness, bravely borne, and sought consolation in two coffees. “Désolée, monsieur,” yawned the waitress [ed.: sorry, sir] through her tattooed hand. “Nous n’avons pas de café aujourd’hui. Demain peut-être?” [ed: We have no coffee today. Maybe tomorrow.]
Lunch the next day in a different café seemed to consist of road-kill on toast. The menu promised café au lait, which we asked for, it being a café. “Désolée, monsieur,” snuffled Waitress Mark Two through her nose-ring, “nous n’avons pas de lait aujourd’hui. Demain peut-être?” [ed.: We have no milk today, etc.]
No milk in Normandy? There was a supermarket two doors away. Travail is such travail in modern France.
Read the whole sad thing. I just received some photos from friends who live in Paris, one of the Seine. They’re planning to swim in that? They might be able to walk across it.
