Salut!

The slow death of newspapers

Until last week, this had been the scene at la Maison de la Presse since my return to France. The main newspaper distributor went broke and for nearly two months, this - plus a blockade by affected employees - prevented most national French newspapers and magazines, and all international titles, reaching already struggling vendors in a large area of southern France. We are now seeing the French publications back on sale but no sign yet of the usual selection of foreign ones. As if the printed press did not have enough problems on its plate ... 

France and its truculent voters. They can give voice to their truculence on Sunday

Not much to do with French elections but I quite like the photo: Antibes after the market closes ...

In my own little 'commune', the mayor won 42 per cent of the votes in the first round of polling, way ahead of anyone else, and should therefore be expected to keep his position with ease in Sunday's run-off. But 'anyone else' - everyone else - has chosen to combine forces despite glaring differences of their own. So it's the devil you know versus devils you don't.

Not far away, in Cogolin, a woman who was aligned to the centrist Macron party, La Repubique En Marche,  has switched to the list headed by someone 'close to' the dreaded far-right mob of Marine - 'honest, I'm not as bad as my dad' - Le Pen. Her old man, a Macronist candidate, was in the paper threatening legal action to stop her dragging his family name through the mud. Hey ho or dis donc as they might say here. Coalitions and unlikely alliances are happening in bigger places as my piece for The National tries to explain ...

The French president Emmanuel Macron is widely expected to receive a significant blow on Sunday when municipal elections throughout the country give western voters their first post-lockdown chance to judge their leaders’ performance during the Covid-19 crisis.

With ecological issues increasingly important to electorates across the world, green candidates could be the main winners, joining left-wing parties in coalitions taking control of major cities including Marseille, Lyon and Montpellier.

Paris is likely, on the basis of most recent opinion polling, to remain in the hands of Anne Hidalgo, who represents the mainstream socialist party but has built a reputation as a mayor with strongly environmental credentials including ambitious new plans to remodel the celebrated Champs-Elysees avenue as the heart a traffic-free park.

Mike Amos: the memoirs of a local newspaper legend

 

 

Mike Amos is a great friend, a fellow product of Shildon, Co Durham and the man responsible for the chance in journalism that my deeply unimpressive educational background failed to justify. As my first chief reporter, running the Bishop Auckland district office of the Northern, later Evening Despatch (and later still defunct relic of provincial evening newspapers), he was an invaluable mentor. To boot, he's the godfather of my elder daughter and once accepted my Blonde on Blonde double album by Bob Dylan in settlement of a stubborn debt.

Declarations of interest over, Mike is beyond sane doubt a giant of journalism, a multiple award winner and arguably the giant of journalism's regional newspaper form. A reporter bold or vain enough to publish memoirs finds his or her work of notoriously little interest to those not in the trade or having blood ties to the author; Mike, with his newly published autobiography is one exception (another friend contemplating his own may yet prove another).

My copy is paid for and in the post. Given the state of postal services, I'll be lucky if the book has yet crossed the Channel and Mike's cheque will probably arrive just after Brexit causes the pound to be devalued still further. Here, in a third-person but as-told-to kind of piece intended for the Shildon Town Crier but delayed by that organ's non-appearance during the Covid-19 crisis, is a snapshot of what to expect from the book ...

 

La Haine antiflics; the French policeman's lot is not a happy one

Photo credit:  Thomas Bresson — own work ... https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75971045

Events since the wonders of modern media enabled the world to watch in horror the last moments of George Floyd have caused lots of people to think more deeply about racism, especially the institutional kind, and also the relationship between police and ethnic communities.

But misgivings about the way the forces of law go about their necessary work are not confined to issues of race as shown by a powerful documentary from the France 2 team that carries out the Envoyé Spécial investigations. It prompted me to offer analysis to The National, which kindly permits reproduction of my work here ... 

 

Image of Adama Traoré: Chris93

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto (34th edition here): the end of the road or just a lay-by?

We should have been together in Rome at the height of lockdown, not two of us - Bill and Lesley  - making the best of it in Toronto and us - Colin and Joelle - waiting for the moment, which did eventually come, to flee London for France.

Throughout this grisly period, Bill Taylor has kept up a daily stream of funny, incisive, sad, angry, despairing, hopeful, reflective, downbeat, navel-gazing, pertinent, thoughtful diaries from Canada. He claims to have run out of his own adjectives and for the second time - there has been a comeback tour after his first announcement of the end of the series two or three weeks ago - Bill has decided to call a halt.

As you read on, you'll see it's not exactly definitive. It just won't be daily any more. The wonder in any case is that he's produced such gems every day for so long, invariably accompanied by his own photographs; 34 in the series as reproduced here doesn't tell half the story and only just tells more than a third of it. The rest is at his Facebook pages though I may well get round to bringing it all together here unless Bill gets the publishing contract his efforts clearly merit ...

 

 

La Grotte de Sainte Marie-Madeleine: a steep learning curve

A solitary figure, a monk with book in hands, sits in silent reflection at the the church built in the cave we know as the Grotte de Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. It's probably a prayer book and the location is high above the village of Plan d'Aups, on the border of the Var and Bouches-du-Rhône départements of southern France.

Maybe he was just tired. I was, after the challenging 2km ascent of an uneven, sometimes unmade path. "The route is up, up, up, but you can reach it in your own pace," someone from Finland wrote on TripAdvisor, adding (correctly): "It is definitely worth it."

It took George Floyd's death to rid Bristol of the Colston statue

 

My photo from just pre-lockdown. Sorry about the lamp post. It shall be toppled into Avon Gorge asap

Some years ago, I covered the industrial tribunal case of a young man who complained of unfair dismissal after being sacked from his position at a job centre in Bristol because he deliberately sent black applicants for interview by employers he suspected of being racist.

I remember only a few details of the proceedings but, very vividly, the response of a few readers of The Daily Telegraph, then my employer. I made a point of stating in my reports that the job centre clerk was white, since this seemed entirely relevant.

Photographic reproduction at the Telegraph was some way short of perfection at the time. I received several letters, some of the green ink, exclusively upper case variety, accusing me of trying to hoodwink readers by presenting the applicant as white when he, so evidently, was a person of colour.

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto (33) Bonnie and Clyde minus the guns

Image: Jim Fisher

I call it Bill Taylor's 33rd Covid-19 diary entry but there have been more than twice as many, posted daily at his Facebook page and avidly followed by his friends there. The story of how Bill and Lesley met is a good one, made better by his amusing memories of the early part of their romance. The first photo was taken goodness knows how long AND promoted their friend Dale Brazao to offer the comment that gave me my headline. The second recalls our much more recent holiday together - remember holidays? - in Havana. The third has an explanatory caption ...  

Monette, the ungovernable French cat, is no more. RIP

My favourite photo of Monette, still a kitten, nestling on the mess that constituted my desktop in Paris

 

She took her name from her birthplace, a restaurant used by visitors to Giverny, home of the French impressionist Claude Monet, west of Paris, and of the water lilies he famously and beautifully painted. Monet died there in 1926, aged 86. Monette - her name was simply feminised - died in the less elegant setting of a vet's surgery in Whitton, not far from Heathrow, at sometime between Thursday evening and Friday morning. She would have been 16 in July, not a bad age for a cat though every member of the family is devastated by her loss.

Monette became the fourth of our family cats soon after Mme Salut and I moved to Paris in 2004. We had no intention of acquiring another but, on that day, this kitten only days old was making herself known around our feet as we ate following our visit to the house and gardens. And she was adorable. Joelle asked if they had one from the litter for sale and the waitress, after consulting la patronne, said: "Take her if you want."

The story is better told in an abandoned book project dating from 10 years ago. I shall repeat that below. The book idea - in the form of a feline autobiography - never got beyond this opening chapter after friends who know about such things said it had been done before and wasn't worth the effort.

But I am glad now that I wrote it. There would have been a later chapter about why I described her as Monette the ungovernable French cat (it was at one of those times when the French were showing themselves to be pretty ungovernable). 

Monette lived in Giverny, Paris, the south of France, London and Abu Dhabi. She died, I hope, in whatever knowledge cats have that she'd led a good and longish life and was a cherished pet, lovingly cared for in her last few days by our younger daughter Nathalie and granddaughter Maya. RIP.

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto: (32) pure poetry

 

We haven't heard (here) from Bill Taylor for a little while but his daily slices of Toronto life continue to please his Facebook friends long after he announced that the time had come to end them. His followers saw things differently. 'Pure poetry' is how another friend described a previous instalment of Bill's diaries. This is just as good and is accompanied, as usual, by a photograph from his own repertoire ...