France

Lying by the rooftop pool of the Hotel Sun in downtown Lefkosa, I felt like a cowboy about to stir from slumber beneath his hat to cause a scene. I had turned into someone in an Elmore Leonard story. My view was a mountain range in full panorama with one hill entirely painted in the red and white flag of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The poolside music was country and western. Several times a day it mingled with the call to prayer coming from the minarets along the main drag. In this frontier society where West meets East, I felt like anything was possible. I lay by the pool, watching the scene from under my baseball cap, listening to ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ and ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’, the first song I loved as a child.

It’s that time of year again in Paris, when the cool breeze and light rain announce the arrival of the back-to-school rush known as the ‘rentrée scolaire’. Every year, I am mildly alarmed at the sight of small schoolchildren carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. I watch them lurching head-heavy down the pavement, burdened by large backpacks stuffed with textbooks and school supplies. I wonder how on earth their tiny frames can possibly carry such heavy loads. They have no choice. A list of compulsory school supplies (called ‘fournitures scolaires’) is sent to French parents and published as an official decree on a government website.

Provence ‘Imbeciles! I told them! When the fire comes on the hill there, it always goes that way… did they listen? They did not! They fought it from the wrong side. Look at the mess.’ The old man, the last in the village still wearing a beret, was angry with the pompiers. This was two days after the fire which almost engulfed American Cathy’s house. Now the centre of the village was filling with brown smoke from a fire on the eastern side of our closest hill and the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Grâce was threatened a second time. In fairness to the pompiers, the last time fire struck there was in 1962. Following the first world war, many parts of rural Provence were depopulated.

There was something surreal about my visit to La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux’s wine museum, last Saturday. From the top floor, with its panoramic view of the city, you could see the smoke from the Gironde wildfire turning the sky yellow, yet none of the staff seemed remotely concerned. This was in spite of the fact that the conflagration had already triggered France’s largest evacuation since the second world war and was getting closer to Bordeaux every hour. OK, maybe they thought it unlikely they’d be asked to leave their homes, but weren’t they worried about the region’s vineyards? These people worked at a museum dedicated to celebrating wine, for Christ’s sake.