La Femme Adultere

I thought for a change I would write down a little story, and the title gives it a nod to Camus, but a barely perceptible one.  Thanks Mrs C.  You can have it back when you like.

They had steak frites and salad.  Steack, they spelled it.  Why, she wondered.  She often wondered why things were as they were.   He never seemed to wonder about anything.  It was uncomfortably hot, in the car, in the cafe, in the room they had booked ahead (by post, sending a cheque to the agent, this was before the Internet) and the air seemed to be full of grit.  The two children were cheerful but tired.  The girl, always the sunnier of the two, ate her dinner and mooned her eyes at her parents.  She hadn't seemed to mind anything, although most of it had been horrible.  They had had ten days in a gite, in Brittany, a truly vile place with mice.  Mouse urine has a smell which gets into everything.  She couldn't understand how it had seemed to get into the baguettes she brought back fresh from the boulangerie every morning, but to her it did.  But the little girl, at four, was cheery and matter of fact.  She said she was hot, she said her dress made her itch, she said she wanted a drink, but everything she said had a point.  The boy was too little, he was a baby, and sometimes he was discontented.  He would be discontented, she thought.  She could imagine him, at perhaps nineteen, blond like her, white skin, pale eyes, tall, awkward limbs.  He would get into trouble, she thought.  She was an only child, and had sometimes thought that if she had been a boy she might have said no.  No to being good.  No to passing all your exams.  No to doing your best to be the best you can.  She might have joined the army if she had been a boy, or been a builder's labourer, or in some other way turned her back on it all, everything her parents had fought for and worked for and hoped for.  She might have broken her parents' hearts.  But she had not.  She had worked, and studied, and now she was married, and here were these children, and here they were having holidays in gites.

His feet were always dirty, she thought again.  Hers had been, too, once, that term at college when she had gone barefoot for seven weeks (and never worn a bra either) and the Christian Union had thought she and her best friend Lynne were a pair of Jezebels.  But afterwards, not.  Peppermint foot lotion, even.  But his feet were dirty.  He wore the same belt, always, no matter which trousers he had on.  It had an enormous buckle that seemed to dig into the concave space between his hipbones.  At this time he affected a pipe.  She thought this was because he did not really like smoking, and used the pipe so he could spend most of his time tamping, and knocking, and puffing, without much tobacco result.   She, she liked smoking. She did it all the time.  In those days nobody minded smoking.  You could smoke while you were changing your baby's nappy.  She did that too, sometimes.

Now they were silent, at the table, in the stuffy and uncomfortable little cafe, above which was the room all four of them would sleep in tonight.  The bar in the other half of the room, which had been empty when they arrived but for two old men with bright green drinks in front of them, had filled up.  The television was on, football results and Mitterrand.  "Dieu". was Mitterrand's nickname, she knew that much, which, although she was not religious, seemed faintly blasphemous.  She had been brought up in a secular, rather non-conformist, household, the child of parents past their first youth, almost of an age when they might have begun to give up on the idea of having children, but if she had said "My God" at home there would have been swift punishment.  Her mother had thought she was too fat, the last time they had met, a few months before, and she had half-heartedly followed the WeightWatchers recipes her mother had given her.  There was no problem there any more.  She remembered her mother in Amateur Dramatics, smoking a cigarette on stage and looking like Lauren Bacall.  She herself had on a pair of black satin drainpipe trousers and a skimpy multi-coloured T-shirt.  Her hair was naturally straight and blonde, her skin and eyes pale.  She wondered, suddenly, if he would really do the things he often talked about.  Would he lead a generation into a new understanding of the English vernacular literature and of the real meaning of the critical works of F.R. Leavis?  She had no idea.  But suddenly she remembered Madame Bovary.  She had read this book before this holiday, thinking she would understand something about France.  And what she had learned was that an adulterous woman must die.

She looked across the table at him.  He had fallen silent, and gestured across the room for the bill.  She knew he wanted to go across into the bar, and speak French with the locals.  He had gone to school in Paris for a little while, as a child, and it had left him with a command of French she could never muster.  She knew he wanted to drink more booze.  The children were a hindrance to that, and anyway the boy's nappy needed changing.

She went upstairs, with the children.  The room was a shoe box on its end, stuffy and gritty, with a tiny window high up.  The bed creaked.  The day bed, she supposed, was meant for the little girl, who was quickly and happily asleep across the end of the huge cot, whose purpose she could not quite work out, and which was too short for her to sleep on but too big for the baby.  She used it to change the boy's nappy, smoking as she did so, and laid the boy down in the baby's cot.  She lay down herself on the day bed,  and opened the book again.

She felt unused, un-looked-at.  She looked again at the book.

The death by poison was too horrible to read now.  Gruesome.  No.  These things do not happen any more.

She lay there, much of the night, and read Emma, from Charles to Leon to Rodolphe to the end.

where did the money go?

this has been in His Master's Voice (so it must be true)

Members of the public will be able to scrutinise what happens to the millions of pounds paid by developers to Reading Borough Council.

The authority has been forced to open up its books after an external investigation found hundreds of thousands of pounds had been misallocated.
Chief executive Michael Coughlin has vowed to make the process more transparent and publish a record of the cash received from each developer and where it is spent.

Congratulations to those, especially Cllrs Ballsdon and Swaine, but not only them, who have worked to expose this.  Of course, the "hundreds of thousands of pounds" identified by the external investigation must be a tiny fraction of the whole, because if it is true that systems were not in place to identify where the money is spent then that must apply to all S106 receipts, not just what has been found.  At least it is clear and in the open that it took the Labour administration to be ousted before any of this was even looked at, and that now they are back in "control" they are toning down the report and minimising what gets into the public domain - it can be seen from His Master's Voice that that noted local organ is complying fully with this.  No shock banner headlines for them.  The Prospect Park games area is a good place to look at, as developer money was found for that basically to provide Mr Salter with photo opportunities and vote-gathering.  Be careful though.  I never tried to expose this kind of thing publicly, only to have private words and ask questions from time to time, both when I was a councillor and later as an MP, and they went for me pretty savagely.  I note too that Zim One Lovelock says that Cllr Ballsdon has a "bee in her bonnet" about the correct allocation and monitoring of developer contributions.  Er, yes.  Shouldn't every councillor?  Despite the trivialising turn of phrase?

I am not suggesting that there has been personal corruption, other than a few councillors getting their roofs replaced by council workers at no or minimal cost some years ago, and Mr Salter getting free parking at the Civic Offices throughout the time he was an MP and never declaring it, as well as having a coned space with a council sign on it so he could always park outside his house when he lived in Clifton Street, in a house he still part owns and did not declare as an interest.  Chicken feed. No, it is more to do with siphoning off of developer money for vanity projects and using it to plug budget gaps created by vote-buying spending schemes..

At the very least, this is a PR disaster for the Labour administration on a Howarthian scale.  At most there could be prison sentences for more than one.  *rubs hands*

the audacity of - hope?

the Hitchster has some questions for the "Gaza flotilla".  The conclusion he draws is this one:

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a "warrant for genocide" forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.


Your starter for ten: the document referred to is an official part of the Hamas programme.  What is its name?

I watched an item on al-Jazeera English this morning featuring a bunch of Italian "activists" in Gaza who describe themselves as human shields protecting the civilian people of Gaza against Israeli weaponry.  What really struck me was the cemetery.  The man speaking to camera said the Palestinians looked after the cemetery with care, and it certainly appeared so - "even the Jewish graves", he said.

Anybody? (sound of tumbleweed)

retirement the boomer way

special pleading I suppose, but as there has been so much written lately about people who were born in the few-months window in which I was born, 1953-54, and their retirement plans and prospects, let me put my oar in.  But first let me commend this, which obviously I did not read at first as it is in the Filth, none the less is it is worth reading.  Anyway, it is a good and intelligent read, but makes the rather simple point too that the future pension benefits of the young are being sacrificed so that the likes of me can have a happy and prosperous retirement.  Er, I think people are a bit more various than that.  If you start work at 22, never stop, buy a house at say 31 and stay in it, and you are my age, you are probably going to be one of those prosperous baby boomers.  I didn't do that.  Although I have not had many jobs, and have stayed quite a long time in each of them, and they have all had good pension schemes.  Also, unlike many women, I never stopped work.  So I have significant pension build-up.  But not enough for a fab lifestyle.  I was divorced at 40, and divorce rarely makes anyone better off financially.  It helped me to understand the adage "'Divorce: cut out the middle man.  Find someone who hates you, and buy them a house.'"  That is precisely how it is.  So I have no property wealth, because I had to start again in my forties.  Shit happens.  I don't cry about it.

I don't have a huge amount of sympathy with those who say that they have built their life on the assumption that they would stop work at 60, and are disappointed that they cannot.  Ditto, shit happens.  But I do have sympathy with those who want, and need, to work as long as possible to ensure their retirement, and who find themselves perhaps made redundant in their late fifties and unable to find other work.  Then their plans go right down the toilet.   And my generations has parents who are very elderly now and who often need care.  And who is going to pay for it, blah blah blah?

Well, no-one said the answers were easy.  But let us remember that we are rich.  Very very rich.

Black Swan Green

Sig other was given 'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell for Christmas one year, and I read it before he did and fell for it totally.  I have been working my way through his others, which I will come to writing about in due course.  This one is actually a bit different from the others I have read so far, in that it is a single story, about a boy growing up, a little, in a village in the 1982  English Midlands.  This is a background quite a long way from my own - in 1982 I was pushing my thirties and had two children, and I have almost always lived in urban places and not villages - but there is plenty here to recognise.  I liked especially the 13-year-old narrator and his take on Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands (he thinks Thatcher is wonderful), and the buttoned-upness of the adult characters reminded me that 1982 was pre reality TV, and things were different then.

The boy has a stammer he manages, mostly, to conceal from his peers (as I did mine) but it seems as though Mitchell may not know what stammering is.  The boy calls it Hangman, playing on the removal of the possibility of words in the game, but it is not like that.  It is more like an iron bar, or perhaps a horizontal iron door, preventing the words from getting through.  Or perhaps each stammerer experiences it differently.  I can't know.  But I was sometimes not sure about the descriptive language: "birdsong strafed and morsed from the oak on the village green" (p. 139).  Although maybe (p. 164) an English church's bells do go "trip, trip. drangg and baloom".  A village.  "Black Swan Green ain't got space for secrets" (p. 178).

And then suddenly we find ourselves back with the Belgian composer from 'Cloud Atlas' - but why not? (p. 201)  And if you haven't read the other book he is still cool.  Or at least the storyline is.

He does write very nicely  "Listening's reading if you close your eyes" (p. 203) and "a sleek black Porsche lay waiting for its master" (p. 236).

Well, in the end it is a coming-of-age story.  A boy grows up, a little.  Finds out about girls, a little.  Someone dies.  A baby is going to be born.  A family fractures.  A childhood home is left behind.  And I guess the period details are right.  Part of me wanted to say, though, at the end, that I wasn't quite sure what was the point of it all.  It was published in 2006, and reminded me a lot of the Jonathan Coe books, especially 'The Rotters' Club', published several years earlier, not I suppose surprising.  When we went to a signing for the French translation of Coe's book about B.S.. Johnson, Coe advised sig other to read Mitchell, in fact this very book, to experience a sense of place and time.

a free and Hanseatic city

Hamburg of course, where last week I spent several very good days.  It is a port city 100 km from the North Sea, Germany's largest and up there with the most important in Europe and the world.  If it had not been bombed so much it would be a city of Jugendstil architecture, as Riga, another Hanseatic port and one in which I have lived, still is.  Riga is a much less important port because it is frozen for about three months of the year.  Much of the emigration from Europe to the then-called New World went out from Hamburg, and much of Europe's trade happens through there too.  This, not surprisingly, is the country much concerned.

We had the good fortune to be there at midsummer, the time to go north in Europe, and the skyline at dusk looks something like this:

I went some years ago to Liverpool, another European port city from which there was much emigration, but which did not do so well in terms of trade.  It is best known now outside the UK for the Beatles, but the city did not seem to wish to remember them.  Hamburg however does:

at the Beatlemania museum in St Pauli, which has a fantastic collection of authentic artefacts, like this:

we ate herrings with apples and sour cream, and we saw Bob Dylan play at the Stadtpark. 

the Fischmarkt is open only on Sunday mornings, from very early, and all the stalls have been taken out of the market hall.  The above is what goes on inside, namely breakfast, beer and rockabilly.  Excellent.  You can buy not only fish on the quayside but fruit, vegetables, flowers, pasta, chocolate and, surprisingly, live animals (rabbits and chickens) which I do not think are intended as pets. 

Go there, you really won't be sorry. 



DSK to go free?

"a source" has told the New York times today that the case against DSK is close to collapse, as credibility issues emerge in respect of the accuser.  It appears still to be the case that the authorities believe that there was a sexual encounter between DSK and the chambermaid (who is not being named in the US media but who is in the French press - her surname is Diallo) but that they are less inclined to believe that it was a forced one.  I have posted before on this, ever since the arrest of DSK in May, and it has always seemed unlikely to me.  I said at the time that if DSK wanted a woman he could pay for one.  Hotels organise that sort of thing for you.  When DSK was taken to court in New York there was an angry demonstration by hotel staff, who booed him and shouted that they were the victims of sexual exploitation.  No doubt.  But more likely by their bosses and fellow employees, especially if they are illegal immigrants, as is often the case.  Guests pay for it if they want it.  Eminent guests in public life do not usually want to draw much attention to themselves.  I remember a few years ago sig other and I were in a rather nice hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria.  I was in the bathroom when our room service order arrived, and it seemed that the exchange of words in the doorway was going on for a long time.  I thought room service worked like this: you order it, they bring it, you tip them, they leave.  But quite a chat was happening.  Then the person left and I came out of the bathroom, to be told by sig other that the person who had brought the order, a young woman of African appearance (not a common sight in Sofia even today) had made it very clear that if he wanted company she would be happy to come back in a little while.  And she would like a present in return.  And I do not think this is unusual behaviour.

The Parti Socialiste is holding open primaries for its potential presidential candidates, in October.  The closing date for candidates' expressions of interest is 13th July.  Talking head on France 2 this morning said that in theory there was still time for DSK to put his name forward.  In theory, yes.  There are already several candidates, including the party leader, Martine Aubry, of whom I am a fan.  (She is Jacques Delors' daughter btw).  Inexplicably the polls favour the odious git Francois Hollande, who has no discernible merit whatever, and who seems to be campaigning only on the fact that he used to be fat and is not any more.  He also had a problem last week when Jacques Chirac took the piss by saying he was voting Hollande.

Anyway, the PS has no leader at present, as Martine has temporarily stood aside to campaign for the candidacy.  Maybe that's just as well.  How much, if any, interest do my UK readers have in French politics?