Rue Rude

Minister in nightcap

The other night I had dinner with some friends from Toulouse and they spent the evening regaling each other with anecdotes about Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister. He used to be mayor of Toulouse and is a cardiologist from Lourdes. He doesn't speak any foreign languages, or have any obvious qualifications to be foreign minister; but then I don't claim to understand French politics.

My favorite was one I don't feel like publishing (you never know when your taxes will be investigated) but another was that when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called him up one Friday evening from Washington, "Douste" told her to call back Monday morning.

(Just now, looking up some confirmation of that story, I found a long account  by a French blogger of Douste-Blazy's gaffes, which notoriously include asking, at the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, why England did not feature with France as having sent Jews to the concentration camps.

"To hear his ex-friends is to listen to a long list of funny and awful stories of betrayals and dirty tricks. It is seeing Douste invoke for the twentieth time the suffering of his father (who is, however, in perfect health), or a meeting with Jacques Chirac (when the radio has just announced that the president is in the provinces) as a reason for his lateness....")

The laughing bureaucrat

I had to go to the police prefecture on Île de la Cité, an experience that always reminds me that the word "bureaucracy" is French.

After the security controls and welcome desks, I was given a long, long list of documents à fournir. After my number was called, I found myself speaking to a jovial African immigrant with a strong accent, seated a meter away behind a thick glass protector. The man was very hard to understand through the glass and I had to keep saying, "Could you repeat that, please?" Several people at nearby counters gave me commiserating looks. It didn't help that the bureaucrat kept turning his head as he was talking, to laugh and flirt with a colleague hovering behind him.

He snatched the paper I gave him and in several places scribbled "original" where the list said "photocopie," and "photocopie" where the list said "original."  The list was returned to me covered with red ink, x's, additions, and strikethroughs. My heart sank.

"Oh, oui, ha ha ha! It will take at least three weeks, ha ha! Three weeks after you deliver all the documents correctly stamped, ha ha!" He agreed with a frank smile that the requirements were extremely difficult, even contradictory. "Ah oui, c'est souvent même impossible! Ha ha! Les gens abandonnent! Ah oui oui!"*

When I came out, I went around the corner to take a photo of the Christmas tree at Notre Dame. Paris is full of tourists this year and there was a long line just to get into the church, even though it was unusually cold, below freezing. I wondered how many of the tourists shared the faith of its builders.

  **"Oh yes, it's often actually impossible! People give up!"

Eiffel Tower, upside-down Christmas tree

Since Christmas Eve, the Eiffel Tower is sporting a strange new green appendage.

The holidays: A good time

A good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

        --Charles Dickens on the Christmas season

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas holiday 

Yankee Frog in Britain

Just back from London, where my only internet access was a filthy Easy Internet cafe on the King's Road, the kind of place where you want to type with your gloves on. I decided to wait to check my email till I got home.

I heard a lot of rude remarks about the French, as usual, but really, fewer than the last few times. And I feel there is a backlash against the kneejerk anti-Americanism of the "chattering classes." Is it becoming... middle-class?

Anomalies of French Life: Non-fresh milk

In a country famous for its high standards of food and drink, why is so hard to buy fresh milk?

Le patronat vs the bosses

Today I don't have much to say, so I thought I would ask for opinions about this interesting comment on my French-English wordlist post from Flip. First what I wrote.

                                 French words with no real English equivalent

le patronat [the class of bosses, as if they're separate from normal people; I find this concept very French]

Flip wrote: 

About "le patronat", I don't know in usa, but here if you look some statistics, I would not be surprised to discover that the bosses are bosses from father to son, too, from ex-aristocratic families (with a particule devant le nom)... This sound a cliché, but here I think that the patrons are often (but not always) from the same social class : the rich.
And I don't feel that the average french is the one that think that he CAN DO IT ! Maybe in USA it's different and creating a company, even small is someone that you fear less ?

Mayor Delanoë, are you listening?

This morning I heard the head of the RATP (public transportation in Paris), Pierre Mongin, being interviewed on Radio France Info.

"How did you get here this morning?" the interviewer asked.

"By métro, of course!" he answered.

The interviewer went on to press him on the subject of the new tramway that is being inaugurated this week, the T3. It is a vastly expensive replacement for the PC bus, which went around the inner Périphérique (the Périphérique is the highway around Paris; the inner Périphérique is the ordinary boulevards just inside it).

Monsieur Mongin admitted that the T3 was partly an effect of fashion; in the late 1930s, Paris tore out all its tram lines, and now it is putting them back in.

It was hard for the interviewer to get a straight answer to any question, for example when he asked about a "service minimum" in case of strikes. Mr Mangin has the thankless task of trying to please both touchy public employees, ready to strike at the drop of a hat, and the millions of usagers who need the RATP to get to work each day.

"We need twice as many buses. Also, the métro does not have the capacity to handle all the passengers we have now," said Mr Mangin. "Line 13 is saturé almost all the time." He mentioned the possible future métrophérique, a metro that would run in a huge circle around the city, five kilometers out from the Périphérique.

Mayor Delanoë, are you listening? You are on a crusade against the hundreds of thousands of people who drive in this city, but as Mr Mangin admitted, the RATP can't even handle the current number of passengers; and your own administration has been forced to acknowledge that there are also no taxis where and when people need them.

Monsieur Delanoë, how about making it possible for drivers to get around without their cars before you deliberately clog the city, block streets, and make their lives miserable?

Paris, City of Lice (poux to that!)

Before I came to Paris, I had the vague idea that lice were something that existed only in refugee camps and war zones. I was horrified to see a little sign on the door of a classroom in one school I checked out here, warning of a lice infestation, and immediately crossed that school off my list. How naive I was!

The only thing unusual about that school was that they warned you.

About three months later, I had my first experience of the little bêtes when one of my kids came home from school with a note from the maîtresse. I freaked out. My American Medical Association all-purpose family handbook said that after treatment of the entire family, I should burn the child's clothes and bedlinen, spray all upholstery and discard stuffed animals or quarantine them for months. I remembered that scene in The Thorn Birds where the young girl has her hair shorn off and her scalp washed in kerosene. I bought some nasty produit at the pharmacy, spent days doing laundry, and we all went around in turban towels with a horrible taste in our mouths. Suddenly terms like "nit-picking" or "lousy" or "crawling with..." or "going through with a fine-tooth comb" took on a whole new meaning.

"And it's so expensive!" I complained to another mother. What with the product, the extra laundry soap and shampoo, and the special combs, etc., I probably spent close to $100 on lice that week. And then a week later you had to do it all again. The worse thing about it was that it was hard to be sure that you'd gotten every single one... and one was enough to reinfest the whole family.

"Don't be silly!" said my new friend. "Just comb the child's hair twice a day, wash the pillowcases and look carefully at all the coat collars. You'll see, it's not a big problem! Everyone gets them, it's part of childhood."

Maybe it is here, I thought sniffily.  (I never did learn if lice have become more common in America since my childhood, since even my sisters gagged and changed the subject if I mentioned it, but certainly you don't hear about lice as much. Maybe people are just more embarrassed about it there. Still, I can't help feeling that the more thorough, stigmatizing approach has its advantages.)

The AMA book said that children had to be nit-free before being allowed back into school. At my child's French school, no one even asked if I'd done anything when we came back the next morning. I looked suspiciously at the other children. Who was the guilty party?

In the next few years, we had a louse infestation on the average once every two or three months. I cut my long hair and was alert if anyone around us scratched a neck or behind an ear. In the metro I moved away if someone's hair came near my shoulders, and I carefully inspected the cloth doilies on the back of airplane seats (so that's what they were for!).

Nothing seemed to work. The kids got lice like clockwork, and I usually discovered it on holiday, on a ferry or in the car or just before a big party. I became more relaxed and expert. I discovered that some children are têtes à poux (often the popular kids) and others rarely had them. 

I had become one of those parents.

I started to notice that French children's books, far from treating lice as disgusting,  tended to portray them as naughty rascals and kind of cute. For example, a little boy brings one of his to class in a matchbox and everyone is very amused when it escapes.

My children are mostly past the age of lice now and the methods of treatment have evolved too. No longer the poison that crept into your bloodstream, stuck to the roof of your mouth, and had unknown effects on your soft tissue. No longer the little electronic comb that zapped the little crawlies and sometimes just dandruff with a spark, or the long-tined metal combs that you raked through tangled hair for hours. The latest treatment is to suffocate them, and it's high time, as lice evolve quicker than scientists can discover "safe" poisons to kill them.

All this came back in a wave to me the other day when I saw a cute little furry green beast high on a shelf in my local pharmacy.

 

Guest editorial: N'allez pas à Nowhere!