France

Friday

Tom Goodenough

The tragic timing of the Nice terror attack

The death toll from last night's Nice terror attack has now topped more than 80. It also looks as though some 50 people were injured when a truck driven by a 31-year-old man, who was known to police but not to the intelligence services, tore through the crowd of people celebrating Bastille day. Isabel Hardman, who was in Nice at the time of the attack, has reported on the aftermath. In the hours following the devastating incident, the analysis has also started. What seems particularly tragic about this horrendous incident is that it strikes a France which was on the mend after last year's attacks in Paris in November, which left 130 people dead, and in January, when the offices of Charlie Hebdo - a French satirical magazine - were targeted.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 July 2016

Bonjour mes amis! Cydney spaniel ici, en France! Well, the Eurotunnel was very nice, although the dog departure lounge could have been grassier. I’m not a fan of AstroTurf. Doesn’t hold a scent very well. No one checked my passport either. Mummy passed it through the window with hers and his as we went through, but the French police laughed and said they didn’t want it. What a cheek. Mummy was cross because it cost over a hundred pounds. Hopefully they will check it on the way back so we can get our money’s worth. The other passengers were friendly. There were a few dachshunds and a Hungarian vizsla in the dog-agility area, stretching their legs before departure. No sarcastic growls about Brexit.

Isabel Hardman

At least 80 dead in Nice after lorry crashes into crowds

A lorry has ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day by the beach in Nice;  there are reports of at least 80 people killed. I am currently in the city, having watched the fireworks in the crowd on La Promenade des Anglais near the sea, where the attack took place. I was just walking home when the screaming began, and people started running from the main square. The streets were full of people running in panic and sirens ringing: no one, at present, knows what happened. At first there were reports of a dozen dead; now it's several dozen. One of the papers here, Nice Matin, has published a photograph of a HGV saying it was ‘riddled with bullets’. That squares with some of the reports on French TV.

Philip Sime

Theresa May’s first day and Boris at the Foreign Office: How the foreign press reacted

A new British Prime Minister is always big news on the continent and around the world. This time around, with Mrs May tasked with redefining Britain’s relationship with the EU, the foreign press has taken a special interest in recent events in Downing Street. One of the big stories aside from Britain's new Prime Minister taking up her role is Theresa May's decision to make Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. Here's how the press around the world reacted to the news: France: With France bracing itself for a protracted period of arduous negotiations with the UK, Britain's new Prime Minister is big news across the Channel. Le Figaro goes as far as to brand Theresa May Britain’s new 'Iron Lady'.

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Frexit – oui ou non?

In France, Brexit has provoked resentment and shock. For many years-Britain has been seen in both Paris and-Brussels as the European ‘bad boy’, out for what it can get and intending to give as little as possible in return. The first news was greeted with headlines such as ‘Can Europe-survive?’ but there was also a note of relief: ‘End of 40 years of love-hate’. Even before the referendum, Emmanuel Macron, the finance minister, had denounced the British record in Europe, claiming that the-United Kingdom had hijacked the great project and diverted the Union from its political destiny in order to reduce it to a single market.

Thursday

Jeff Noon

A choice of crime novels | 30 June 2016

Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into reason’, and finds it in the form of Étienne, a man who helps her when her car breaks down. She invites him into her lonely home, and her life. When her neighbour’s son is killed in a road accident, it becomes obvious that her new lover is linked to this tragedy in some way, and yet Éliette reacts strangely: she welcomes the criminal behaviour, and in fact becomes criminalised herself.

Monday

Philip Sime

Frexit and Italexit? Support for the EU dwindles in France and Italy

Various freak political events—the unexpected Tory election victory, the rise of Ukip—have conspired to allow Britain to hold its referendum on the EU this week. But if the rest of Europe were asked, what would they say? The Berlin-based Bertelsmann Foundation commissioned a study of 11,000 people in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland to find out their attitudes towards Brexit and to the EU. Just 41 per cent of French and 54 per cent of Germans want us to stay. The Spanish are most keen for Britain to Remain, with 64 per cent opposing Brexit, followed by Poland with 61 per cent.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 June 2016

‘This EU passport is an outrage. I want a British one!’ Not my words, Cydney’s. The spaniel is coming round to my way of thinking on the EU referendum after visiting the vet’s to get the necessary paperwork for her forthcoming trip to the Dordogne — or Dor-DOG-ne, as she prefers to call it. After spending a small fortune on her bed and board at the dogsitter the last time I went away, I decided she would come on holiday with me this summer. As soon as I have cast my Leave vote on 23 June, I shall be packing us into the Volvo and heading for the Eurotunnel and a lovely break in a gite in France. If the result of the referendum is that we are to remain in the EU, I shall be doing a spot of house-hunting while I am there too.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 June 2016

Michel is one of those Frenchmen one encounters now and again whose shining saintliness is beyond rational understanding. This great bear of a man, with heavy silver rings on his fingers and thumbs, is always cheerful, always kind, always puts others before himself. Whenever he speaks with me, it is always under the pathetic delusion that he might learn something from me that he did not already know. The only thing that makes him in any way contemptuous is my pointing out his goodness to him. Michel was a teacher. For many years, he taught English at a private school in Somerset. Now retired to his native Provence, he has grown corpulent — or ‘bloody fat’, as he puts it.

Thursday

James Woodall

Spellbound | 2 June 2016

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling. Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions. Ninety minutes after our meeting, she will be on stage. I sense she wants this interview over fast. But at the start she makes me, I must report, comatose with wonder. I have adored Mme Huppert on screen for three decades, in which she seems to have had barely a month off work. I am, pathetically, spellbound.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 2 June 2016

Hours before boarding the cross-Channel car ferry, I received a text message from the company warning of severe fuel shortages on the other side of the Channel. Nevertheless, it went on to say, for safety reasons the transporting in vehicles of fuel-filled jerry cans was strictly forbidden. Bugger that. I went out and bought two five-gallon second world war-style green steel jerrycans, filled them to the brim with diesel, and concealed them in suitcases. As we queued to board, I looked around at the lines of vehicles, many with trailers and roof boxes, and hoped and trusted that every one of them was packed to the gunnels with fuel containers of every description, because surely they weren’t going to search every car before letting us on board — were they?

The Spectator

Continental drift | 2 June 2016

It is a long time since the term ‘sick man of Europe’ could be applied to Britain. France is now a worthier candidate for the accolade — it -increasingly resembles a tribute act to 1970s Britain. A package of modest labour-market reforms presented by a socialist president has provoked national strikes on the railways and Air France. This week, the streets of Paris resembled one big Grunwick or Saltley Gate — the trials of strength between employer and union in which so many of Britain’s most bolshy trade unionists cut their teeth. This week is not a one-off: in recent years France has had a strike rate more than twice that of Denmark, its nearest European competitor. Britain now looks a paradigm of -industrial virtue by comparison.

Martin Vander Weyer

Hollande equals Thatcher? Not quite, Monsieur le President, but keep trying

Have you ever tried discussing the merits of gun control with a Texan, or of deregulated labour markets with a Frenchman and his Belgian cousin? The prejudices involved are much the same. Many Americans believe that guns in the home and the pick-up truck are their best protection against violent attack, and that the 13,286 US gunshot deaths last year would have hit an even higher number if gun ownership was more restricted. Likewise, French trade unionists believe a 35-hour working week combined with laws restricting any company that is a going concern from making redundancies are the best protection of their economic wellbeing, rather than a root cause of the fact that more than 3.5 million of their compatriots are unemployed. That’s 10.

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Hollande’s hollow crown

 Paris Sitting on a crowded café terrace in Rue Saint-Antoine on a sunny evening last week, there was no sense of national crisis. When a motor scooter backfired, no one jumped. The constant racket of police car sirens was ignored. The National Assembly had just voted for the third extension of a seven-month ‘national emergency’ following terrorist attacks that left 130 dead and 368 injured. But talk of violence in the streets generally referred to the police; have they been too rough with the student demonstrators who are conducting all-night sit-ins in the nearby Place de La République?

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 May 2016

A fresh start in a new gym in a foreign country. The serious young gym attendant didn’t speak a word of English, so we did the best we could using my limited French. He weighed me then asked me to hold a device that measured my body mass index via my palms — how it does that I can’t even begin to guess — and he carefully wrote down the result on the induction form. Had I ever exercised before? I had, I said, but about three years ago, after a cancer diagnosis, I had lost heart and stupidly given it up. What kind of exercise did I used to do? Swimming, karate, cycling and gym, I said. He carefully, and a touch sceptically, I thought, wrote all that down. How tall was I? Six feet exactly, I said.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Surreal, strange and scatological

Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick them on the wall as if they were butterflies or beetles, putting similar species together: an array of impressionist flowers, baroque altarpieces, pictures by a certain painter. But there are other ways to do it. Carambolages, a refreshing and highly entertaining exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, presents a dizzying diversity of stuff according to a quite different principle: namely, billiards. ‘Carambolage’ is a term that originates from the game of carambole, or French billiards, as once observed by Van Gogh and Gauguin in the Café de la Gare, Arles. It translates into English as ‘cannon’: hitting one ball so that it strikes two others.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 May 2016

On Sunday we were invited for lunch at Chez Bruno, an unbelievably posh restaurant in the south of France. At Chez Bruno all the dishes, even the ice-cream desserts, are flavoured with truffles. Resting on the gate pillars as we drove in were two gigantic stone truffles, and next to the entrance was a long painted fresco of the Last Supper, with Bruno’s face superimposed on that of Jesus and 12 Michelin-starred chefs as his apostles. In the carpark a dignified old gent stepped in front of the car. His job was to park it for us. I took my foot off the clutch thinking the gears were disengaged, but they weren’t, and the car kangarooed forward, knocking him on to the bonnet.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 5 May 2016

The tourist information office of the small French country town looked closed. Peering between the posters on the window glass, I couldn’t see a light on inside or furniture or people. I tried the door anyway and it gave way. The office was open. In the corner of a large expanse of tiled floor was an office desk. Seated at the desk was a woman aged about 20 absorbed in a fat paperback called Think and Grow Rich. My appearance on her office tiles seemed to astonish her. She leapt out of her chair and almost ran to welcome me. Did she speak English? I said. Yes, of course. How could she help? I said that I had read somewhere that the town boasted an Olympic-sized outdoor swimming-pool and I was wondering where I could find it.

Friday

Jonathan Meades

The art of Jonathan Meades

Ape Forgets Medication: Treyfs and Artknacks Londonewcastle Project (28 Redchurch Street, E2), until 23 April Process, means, method: it was these rather than the results which initially fascinated me. There was an unmistakable exhilaration in discovering that I was not merely learning a new language but that I was creating a language peculiar to myself. Given that it was non-verbal the word 'language' is inappropriate. In every instance the words, the capricious titles I have appended to the works (the treyfs and artknacks) came after. Treyf signifies that which is not kosher. Artknack is a neoligism which suggests arts, a knack or facility, a knicknack or cheap bling, arnaque (French for a scam).

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 April 2016

On Monday morning I was in a blind panic. The deadline for posted manuscript entries to the Daily Mail First Novel competition is 1730 GMT on Saturday 16 April. But I was in France again. A letter sent from France to Blighty takes between three days and a week. Therefore I had to get my entry — 5,000 words in 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced, and a 600-word synopsis of the rest — posted by midday at the absolute latest. The winner gets £20,000 and a book deal if he or she can faithfully promise to deliver the finished novel by 31 October. On Monday morning my problems were threefold: the printer had run out of bloody ink; I couldn’t work out how to change my page format from single- to double-spaced; and I couldn’t find a paper clip.