1968 remembered: barricades forever

May 2008

Paris, May 1968 and French youth was famously manning the barricades. It was a protest which began in the Universities, lead to running battles in the streets, a general strike and the ultimate collapse of the de Gaulle government.

With protest in the air, further demonstrations broke out across Europe while in America they were protesting the Vietnam war. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia saw a fleeting glimmer of freedom before being crushed by Soviet tanks. In China, Mao was overseeing the worst excesses of the cultural revolution (while Western Maoists ignorantly espoused his doctrine). Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were also assassinated in 1968. Some year.
But back to those Paris barricades. The protests were, as protests generally are, anti-establishment: down with the bosses - i.e. anyone in a suit - who are capitalist pigs all, and the police, the tools of oppression, fascist pigs the lot of them.

(Plus ça change. Today’s protests may be against GM crops, oil wars or the destruction of the planet but the baddies are still the capitalist and “fascist” pigs.)

Of course we know that all this anti-establishment, anti- bourgeois rage is eventually tempered by marriages, mortgages and cleaning ladies.

"I hope that my children
will man their own barricades one day"

Perhaps that’s why we look back with a certain nostalgia on the long-haired, unwashed anger of the moment, the tatty banners with their great slogans.

Although students and CS gas are back on the streets of Paris as I write, it has been a long time since Western Europe was truly gripped by revolutionary fervour. Indeed it can be hard work, in the relatively comfortable, relatively free West to feel truly oppressed.

The great British playwright Tom Stoppard recently recalled how he tried to throw himself into the 60’s protests but having just witnessed tanks rolling into his homeland, Czechoslovakia, found it hard to empathise with the “oppression” in London. In the 1980’s I shared a flat in London with a left-wing South African refugee who, having fled a police force which shot demonstrators dead, found it hard to shout ‘fascist pigs’ at London Bobbies.

But the spirit of revolution has thrived elsewhere. As a foreign correspondent, I was lucky enough to watch crowds dismantling the Berlin Wall by hand and later I met my husband on the barricades surrounding the Russian parliament building, just feet from where Yeltsin was famously clambering on top of a tank in defiance of the right-wing coup attempt. To be part of these crowds was to witness what it means to be alive.

OK, it’s naïve to believe that practical economics and politics don’t play a greater role in the collapse of untenable regimes than a handful of brilliant slogans: Communism couldn’t sustain itself.

And, let’s face it, Nelson Mandela probably didn’t walk free just because we danced along to the Specials’ “Free-ee-ee... Nelson Man-DE-la”.

But let’s not give way entirely to cynicism either. Protest is essential. It is only our refusal to accept the way things are that keeps society alive and moving forward. Questioning the status quo and seeking to overturn it is what makes us intelligent beings.

Stop doing this and we might as well line-up to become delta-minuses in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Which is why my heart still gladdens at the sight of a bunch of angry students clutching (still badly made) placards, bringing traffic to a halt and getting in the way of those of us with deadlines to meet and dinner to get on the table.

At least they are tasting the spirit of revolt and if it’s against the size of their grants today it might be repression in Tibet tomorrow.

So although, like most parents, I bring up my children to respect the teachers and do as they say, I also sincerely hope that they will grow up to question and reject, to stand up and be counted and, if necessary, (peacefully) man their own barricades one day.

Of course the next generation of youth may be too fat to go out onto the streets and have to confine itself to virtual protests online.

But let’s hope the croonings of boy bands being pumped directly into their brains via their iPods doesn’t render them too comatose to care.

As graffiti on the 1968 Paris barricades proclaimed: “We don’t want a world where the certainty that we won’t die from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom”.

Long live the revolution!

***********

You may have seen the picture of the English setter in last month’s Noticeboard, “abandoned by owner and looking for a good home”. He was chained up outside the owner’s property which was up for sale when we went to photograph him so, being soppy English animal lovers, we took him back with us to await the flood of calls offering him a good home. And the calls came in - but too late.

He is so funny and clever and loveable that, even though the last thing we need is more animals, we couldn’t part with him. He’d been on his chain for three weeks when we collected him. Awful the way the French treat their dogs, isn’t it? Except - his owner was English.

Virtual Passions - April blog 2008

I am one of those mean parents who considers that a television, computer and Game Boy is quite enough screens for one child and am thus deaf to pleas for Gamecubes, Nintendo Wiis, PlayStations, X boxes or whatever else is on the market.

Of course there are excellent and informative television programmes, great films on DVD and brilliant computer games like the Civilisation series or Age of Empires which are not just absorbing and creative but educational, imaginative and thought-provoking as well.

And we all need a dose of junk TV from time to time - not least children who have just walked in from a ten-hour school day.

Recently, however, my son’s best friend lent him a Gamecube installed with the most mindless games whose sole purpose is to run around empty warehouses or bits of no man’s land blasting opponents to a bloody pulp using an arsenal ranging from snipers to bazookas and hand grenades.

“I too had become
a zombie,
jabbing
incessantly at buttons”

The two of them not only played for hours on end but morphed into hyperactive zombies - jabbing incessantly at buttons whilst so transfixed by their quest that they were unaware of anything going on in the room around them and deaf to repeated attempts to distract them.

Then the friend fell ill and couldn’t come round any more. But we still had the Game cube. My son tried to interest his sister in playing but she said she “couldn’t see the point” of a game that consisted only of shooting people without any strategies or creative content. (Boy, was I proud of her!).

He approached his father, who tried to interest him in a bike ride or some target practice with his new bow and arrow instead.

Adolescents spend an increasing amount of time in the virtual world and thus, inevitably, significantly less time in the real world while we parents try to explain that “taking a break from the TV” does not mean switching to the computer, it means throwing a ball for the dogs or baking a cake or having a face to face conversation with a live human being.

In desperation he turned to me and I took pity on him: the cube was only on loan for a few more days and his horrible parents wouldn’t buy him one of his own. I offered to be taught and to play with him.

I am not a techno-Luddite but nevertheless I was useless. With a set of buttons in each hand controlling different movements it was a bit like an IT version of the old trick where you have to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

My choice of weapons was pathetic. Generally I opted for the bazookas and machine guns to give me the best chance of hitting something when, my son pointed out, a revolver or shotgun would have been more appropriate (how is it boys know these things?). Every time I threw a hand grenade I forgot to run away but just stood and watched, thus blowing myself up rather than my opponent (who had run away).

My son was patient. He invested time in “training” me (to turn me into me a more interesting opponent, I suppose). He encouraged me, commenting periodically on my improvement and he congratulated me on a good shot.

It was fun spending time with him doing something he wanted to do and I was impressed with the range of skills and co-ordination he had mastered to be able to play so well as well as by his ability to instruct me.

And there was a moving moment when he said proudly that he didn’t think “any of the other boys in my class have a mother who plays Medal of Honour with them”.

Gradually I got better. Not just that, I got hooked. Absolutely bowled over addicted. My daughter might ask for help with her homework, my husband try to establish if the animals had been fed and I didn’t hear a word. This is such a fast moving game you don’t have time to break concentration for a second to answer irrelevant domestic queries. I too had become a zombie, jabbing incessantly at buttons. Worse still, when I wasn’t playing, my fingers were itching to play.

It was a secret vice I shared with my son. I would be busy proofing pages of the Rendezvous and he would sidle into the room and suggest a quick game.

“Only twenty minutes - max”. He nodded. Two hours later we were still playing.
If you are tearing your hair out watching your kids fritter away their lives playing mindless electronic games, believe me, they can’t help it. It’s frightening.

Eventually, the friend reclaimed his Cube and of course I was as disappointed as my son.
“Now you know what fun it is I don’t suppose you’d think of buying one for us?” he asked hopefully. But he knew the answer already.

Absolutely no way.

Mother's Day - editor's blog for March 2008

Whether you still celebrate UK Mother’s Day or now mark the French date - depending on where your mothers and children are - March daffodils and the reawakening of spring still evoke Mothering Sunday for many - be it looking forward to a hand drawn card and tea in bed or a dash to Interflora.

This annual recognition is pretty fleeting - but everyone takes mothers for granted, so long as they have one.

If only the reverse were true! If we could take our children for granted, how much more bearable motherhood might be.

"the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep"

Instead, as soon as that first bundle is placed in our arms we turn animal like in our passion to protect. Understanding that you will never again be the most important person in your own life is a shock. The enduring state is one of exquisite agony.

When mothers say “kids - who’d have ’em?” or tell childless women they are lucky, I long to silence them quickly: that’s such a lie! And, call it a latent protestant background or plain superstition, but: what if somebody’s listening?

Yet while our instincts cry out to lock our children in a room and keep them safe for ever, the true story is of a journey separation - and one which it is our job to encourage.

Each success is a stab to the heart. The first time they smile at a child minder. Leaving them at pre-school while they beg you to stay and you pretend to be hard hearted and turn your back. When they start secondary school, you burst into tears because you have no babies left and any minute now - that’s what six years will feel like - they’ll be leaving home for good.

Each morning, I scowl at the bus driver in case he’s had a heavy night and in any case because he whisks my children away to a life in which I have no place.

In the evenings I am kinder because he has returned them safely, prompting a little leap of joy and relief.

For it is this, this fear of the ultimate separation - every time they go out on their bikes or on a coach trip - which means that the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep.

Then, whatever their age, we are allowed to brush their forehead lightly and know that, for the next few hours at least, our babies are safe.

Editor's blog February 2008

Love...
You may get a Valentine’s Day card this month or at least a text message: luv u :). Which your phone will store for about a week. Or maybe you’ll find a loving email in your inbox - to treasure until your next computer crash.

But do you have any love letters? Any hand-written words of endearment? Correspondence from friends and family?

OK, this is the modern world and a transitory one. We are urged not to print out emails and digital photos to save the planet.

But we are missing out on sensory pleasures: the thrill of seeing the familiar handwriting of a loved one on an envelope, the tactile pleasure of pulling out the letter and smoothing the pages, carrying it to a quiet spot to read.

A friend and I still determinedly correspond by post. We no longer manage the hand-written bit but send real letters for the sheer near-obsolete - pleasure of opening something that is neither bill nor junk mail.

Photographs, too, are now digitally stored on disk or in the ether rather than in boxes in the attic. We are moving into an age when we will leave nothing physical behind, no clues to who we were. Yet, it is only when parents die that children wonder who they were.

Clearing the family home after my parents died I spent hours sifting through old photographs, remembering some, turning others over to see what was written on the back. Often they were unmarked and I have no idea who the people were - but even that mystery is appealing. There were letters and diaries, even old lists - my mother was a hoarder. But it was physical evidence of a life lived and, sitting on the floor surrounded by it, I suspect more comforting than staring at the same details on a screen.

Our delete-in-a-click existence will make the biographers’ task almost impossible. And some of our greatest literature or most fascinating glimpses into the past come from posthumously published letters: Tolstoy’s daily outpourings to his wife and her’s to him or, published last year, the Mitford sisters’ letters. We learn much from the passions of the past - future generations may find little evidence of ours.

...& Politics don’t necessarily make happy bedfellows.

While many a great leader has been sustained by the steady love of an excellent spouse, going doolally whilst actually being a world leader frequently leads to trouble.

Traditionally, it has been the British who are served the fulsome details of politicians’ private lives over breakfast but, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine PM Brown, one month divorced, cavorting with the likes of, say, Nancy Dell’Olio.

“We don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just scream” remarks a French colleague as toute la France is hypnotised by the Sarko-Bruno shenanigans. The man who devoted his entire life to becoming president is now in thrall to a woman who reputedly sends herself to sleep by counting the number of her famous lovers including, of course, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.

Hands up who thinks a middle-aged man who has just started going out with a super model is going to be able to sit at his desk and concentrate deeply on the minutiae of the next G8 summit, say, or third world carbon footprints?

Editor's Blog January 2008

Do you really want to change out of your working clothes, get the car out (in the rain) and spend the evening eating poule au pot and struggling with the farmers’ patois? Is it worth slogging an hour across Normandy for that book swap you said you’d go to? How many times have you flicked through the listings, circled an event, but not got round to going?

It’s always easier to stay in. And with e-mail and Skype you can keep in touch with old friends and live a virtual social life when building a new one seems like too much effort.
If you have been used to a professional, city life it’s easy too to be a metro snob and turn your nose up at parochial shindigs. I remember my horror when, having spent the previous years working in the cultural meccas of London, Paris and Moscow, I downsized to rural Britain (to introduce the children to fresh air) and found myself in a village hall with strip lighting being offered tea and Rich Tea biscuits -at 8pm! Yet through a phone number swapped in this unlikely setting I met a woman with whom I had a hundred and one things in common - including that she had shared university lodgings with my best childhood friend and her husband I had had great fun working together on a BBC documentary. They lived just six miles away and our two families grew inseparable.

"Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen."

And here in Normandy, we recently dragged ourselves reluctantly to a gallery opening where my husband met a fellow Russian through whom he discovered that his best friend from Moscow state school No. 34 is now working as a mathematician in Paris.

Amazing coincidences, surely? But the point is that if you sit at home in front of the telly you miss life’s great coincidences.

Every time you leave the house you will be rewarded: discover a place you didn’t know existed, see a view that lifts the spirits, meet someone who may become a friend or introduce you to another who will.

So if you make just one resolution for 2008 it should be this: accept every invitation. No matter how dull it sounds, you never know what it may lead to.

This magazine, of course, was founded precisely to help everybody get the most out of life in Normandy by letting you know what is going on, where you could be going and bringing people together.

This issue is no exception. Follow the example of our estate agents in the French property feature: they got their jobs by getting out and about. There are more tips on the essential business of learning French or, if your language is good, finding out what makes your community tick. In art de vivre Brigitte takes the fear out of inviting French friends to dinner - or why not join the Normandy bird count? Or follow the example of the hundreds of readers who have already made friends through our Noticeboard: if you are looking for others with shared interests, want to start a local get together or, as one reader has, open your house for an “at home” to meet people in your area, put your announcement here.

Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen.

Read the Editor’s blogs online here at the-rendezvous.blogspot.com
and send us your photos for the Rendezvous Photo Journal (details p.15)

December Editor's blog

Is religion dead? It is true you may manage to eat your way through the festive season without even hearing the name God or Jesus. Even the Christ in Christmas conjures sentiments of Mammon or visions of jolly red-faced men with sacks on their backs rather than of a divine infant.
2007 has seen a swingeing counterattack on religion by high ranking intellectual atheists.
But the question surely is: Does God Exist? rather than is religion dead? Religion is alive and kicking. In America, Christian fundamentalists, the self-proclaimed “moral majority” are seeking to dominate the primaries and dictate the choice of Republican candidate: even a Mormon so long as they are bigoted enough. In Britain, they are trying to replace science with Christian evolution in schools. Then there is the Islamic question which states, correctly, that all Islamic terrorists are Muslims but forgets that this does not mean that all Muslims are Islamic terrorists.
Closer to home, I was surprised when a Jewish lady, wanting to put a notice in this magazine to meet fellow Jews, asked for a box no. rather than risk putting her contact details in print. Surprise turned to shock when some of those replying were equally afraid to pass on their addresses and gave only a mobile telephone number. In 2007? In civilised Western Europe? This is appalling.
It is contempt for the bigotry that uses religion as its excuse that prompted three contemporary authors to attack the very concept of belief. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith all entered the best seller lists this year.
True, fundamental dogmatists, both Islamic and Christian, are today apparently more hostile to democratic secularism - the separation of church and state - than at any time since the Enlightenment.
However, the vehemence of this trio of attacks on faith and religion has caused widespread unease.
Heading the condemnation of Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris determination to prove that religion is not just redundant but positively evil, is British national treasure John Humphrys. His years of working as a journalist had caused his own loss of faith, he admitted. Yet these sneering attempts to disprove God infuriated him. In an attempt to rediscover the existence of a god, of whatever faith, Humphrys asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and a leading Muslim academic to try and convince him.
They did not succeed. But, surely, argues Humphrys, who now calls himself a failed atheist, the existence of conscience begs the possibility that something greater than ourselves exists?
In any case, he asks, is there really anything to be gained by convincing millions of decent, god-fearing, non-fundamentalist believers - of whatever faith - that the trappings of their belief and church are mistaken?
As a moral code by which to live, religion is a comfort blanket to many. A belief in goodness.
Atheists, of course, argue that conscience is a scientifically evolved device which allows society to function. And that they are superior to believers since they do good without any hope of future rewards or fear of eternal condemnation.
Whether or not God exists is clearly not a question we are going to answer here. Faith is a matter of personal belief.
But Christmas is also the season of peace and goodwill - which we can all believe in.
So I make no apology for putting Happy Christmas on the cover of this month’s issue - not least because it is far more jolly than the anodyne alternative: “Seasons Greetings”.
In doing so, I wish peace and goodwill to our readers - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Agnostic - all.

Editor's blog November 2007

Lack of crime, gentle pace of life, unhurried mealtimes ...these are common reasons British incomers give for moving to France.

It is true that in some aspects France still differs from Britain: shorter working hours, family meals, quiet Sundays. But much of what so many love about France is, in fact, an appreciation of the countryside rather than the country itself.

If you have moved from UK city life to the French countryside it is easy to confuse what is rural and what is specifically French. You can still leave your car or house unlocked and pass the time of day with your neighbours in much of rural Britain - the country living is different from city living in any country.

But another reason many believe that life in France is so much kinder than in Britain is that thanks to the language barrier and satellite television which allows incomers to continue watching UK television, many remain unaware of greater France: looming strikes, racial tensions, economic crises, threats to healthcare and social security systems. In fact, the stresses of urban and rural France are much the same as they are in the UK.

This state of blissful ignorance may suit you just fine. Or perhaps you find it slightly bizarre that there is a life going on around you about which you know very little?

While the political shenanigans in Paris are complex and far removed, grassroots - local - democracy in France is active and far more effective than in the UK where few people know the name of their local mayor or where to find them.

French municipal elections take place next March and you, as an EU citizen, are entitled to vote (see Sue Collard’s piece on P. 11 for how to register). Once we are signed up with a voice that counts, local councillors will stop seeing the British as a group who have gone into political purdah, but actively encourage us to join the debate.

You can also stand in these elections. There are already several British councillors in Normandy, elected in 2001 when British incomers were fewer on the ground and still something of a novelty. If more British stand now that we are more numerous, will this cause alarm? According to my mayor, older residents, while welcoming British neighbours, would feel alarmed if the incomers started to wield local power.

This is understandable, of course, although our concerns are likely to be those of our neighbours rather than specifically British - witness the number of British residents already active in landfill, wind farm and high voltage overhead cable action groups (see pp 6-7).
If you want to know where your local candidates stand on these and other issues, sign up to vote and ask them. Or challenge them!