And Out Went the Light...

Fresh from having his seventy five per cent tax on incomes over one million euros thrown out by the (Sarkozy appointed) Constitutional Council, President Hollande has come up with another cracker....

Puting out the lights in Paris at one o' clock in the morning in order, as his environment minister says, to give an example.
An example of what, exactly?

An example of how to keep the Green ministers in the government and the Green party voting with the Socialists in the National Assembly while hoping no one will notice the rape of the land in the interests of private enterprise in the affair of the proposed airport at Notre Dame des Landes ....duplicating the far from overcrowded international airport at Nantes, just up the road....

An example of hoping that bullshit will baffle brains......

An example of how to annoy the Maire of Paris.....

An example of how to allow lowlife as free a rein in the centre of Paris as in the ghettos of the suburbs in the interests of equality...

Goodness only knows.

President Hollande exhausted his intellectual resources in becoming elected.....now, in power, he is waiting for the economic cycle to turn up, like Fortune on her wheel, to see him re elected in 2017.

Only someone trained....not educated...at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration could have such faith in the powers of the classical Roman goddess to scatter good fortune as she rolls through the darkened streets of Paris.

Experience would indicate that she will either be mugged or that no one will notice her passage.

However, there is always a positive side to things. Depardieu has departed for Belgium, so the hostesses of Air France can put aside their bleach and mops.


Still, the lights are going out here too. but not in sympathy with Monsieur Hollande.

I had hoped that the stalking problems were over.....but find that they are not.

Already, I had been thinking twice about what I wrote about, but when, while staying with my mother, some limb of Satan saw fit to call her to ask if I were actually in  Europe or just laying false trails on the blog it was clear that the pleasure in blogging here was no adequate justification for having a woman in her nineties disturbed and upset by an obsessive.

I have enjoyed all the comments made, the friendships found, the opening of horizons offered by blogging......and would like to thank you for all the pleasure you have given since I started to blog.

I will continue elsewhere...away from prying eyes.... and would be very happy to meet you again there. Send me an e mail, should you have the inclination, and I'll send you the new address.

Happy New Year to you all.

End of the world...it's Joanna Southcott's box all over again....



I returned home before the date announced by a plethora of charlatans as being that of the end of the world according to the Maya - a bloodthirsty bunch much admired by the 'peace and love and only five hundred dollars a head for a conference on Sirius' brigade.

I had seen the preparations to prevent the devoted and the demented from clambering about Mount Bugarach in south west France....provided not only by the local gendarmerie but even by the Garde Republicaine complete with horses, making a change from their usual country break guarding the vines of the Champagne region from theft by persons or other vignerons unknown.....the whole urged on by the director of the bit of the surveillance services that survey sects.

As until fairly recently the Anglican Church in France was suspected of being a sect - weird rituals with tea cups after the service and the sale and exchange of books in a foreign language providing grounds for suspicion - the news that someone had left the village in order to buy clean underpants before Der Tag was clearly enough to set the surveillance wheels in motion.

All in vain. The portals to another dimension did not open up, no more than the usual number of UFOs were sighted and Plod's overtime was cancelled.

A non event.  

But it was the means of reminding me of something I enjoyed and continue to enjoy about rural France.......its sheer, unadulterated parochialism.
The delight in small happenings, from the shock horror of fourteen people being fined for speeding through Ste. Conasse in the course of one afternoon - about half the population of the commune - to the delight at the reopening of the village hairdresser in Ste. Barbe, everything local is worth attention.

So it was with much pleasure that I clicked on the post from the super blog Le Cafe de la Ville, to find that the blogger's own town had not been left out of the End of the World scenario.....

The area around the station, undisturbed by much activity since the passing of the steam locomotiv, had been reported as experiencing strange noises......

All good fun, even if  retribution is to be expected from the owners of the minibus, the gentlemen of the football club........and how pleasant it is to think that someone can take the time and effort to celebrate  their  own home patch.

I'm on mine, I hope that you are on yours and I wish you a merry Christmas, wherever you are.