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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
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Supervising his erection in the Haute-Vienne, Barry Cornell finds he has to
contend with tradesmen who speak French, Welsh, Yorkshire and Latin.
The builders are in. Or rather, some
of them are in. Some of them
haven’t turned up, of course. Now
when I was teaching in England, we
had a phrase for those colleagues who
seemed to have a disproportionate
amount of absence. We called them
‘Teachers Who Are There Sometimes’,
and the acronym was rather apt.
Well, I have Tradesmen Who Are
There Sometimes, again how apt. To be
fair, Damon, our brilliant English
builder, is there all the time and works
non-stop. And Monsieur Lavergne, the
fosse septique man, is very reliable too.
As are Elwyn, the Welsh joiner, and
Jean-Marc, the electrician. The difficulty
is trying to get them all there at the same
time. It’s like trying to herd cats. Jean-
Marc will come on Wednesday, he says,
but then adds a thoughtful “en principe”.
And en principe means of course that,
while he will certainly be there in
principle, the slightest unexpected event
– a full moon, a dodgy mussel, a cold
sore, a sick goldfish – might prevent him
from being there in practice. En principe
is a wonderfully useful phrase: it sounds
so much better than ‘maybe’ or
‘possibly’ or ‘if you’re lucky’, which is
what it really means. By the same token,
the tradesmen sometimes use another
phrase – à priori – as a get-out clause.
“Can we run the TV cable under the roof
tiles to conceal it?” I ask Monsieur
Meyer. He studies for a while, scratches
his chin and says, “À priori, oui”, or in
other words “I can’t see any good reason
why it shouldn’t work, but bitter
experience has taught me that it is highly
likely that in trying to do it we shall
encounter some totally unexpected
problem which will, ultimately, defeat
us.” You have to admire their economy
with words.
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Alain Sachs’s production of ‘Un Fil à la Patte’ (hamstrung),
one of the most hilarous of Feydeau’s farces, offers a good
night out. Not only can you sit in the velvet comfort of the
luxurious scarlet and gold Théâtre de Paris, but the
production offers at least two and a half hours of laughs, a
highly polished production and quality cast.
Georges Feydeau’s relationship with the theatre was
precocious and intense. Between 1892 and 1908 he wrote a
number of successful farces, including ‘Monsieur chasse!’,
‘Un Fil à la patte’, ‘La Dame de chez Maxim’s’ and ‘La
Puce à l’oreille’. He is famous for intermingling stock
character archetypes with wildly improbable situations that
verge on the dangerous and the tragic. The range of
characters include high livers, music-hall singers, mothersin-
law, not-so-innocent virgins and people with comic
handicaps – bad breath in ‘Un Fil à la patte’. He is
renowned for accelerating standard farce scenarios such as
mistaken identity and misunderstandings to the point of
near disaster, and for how he manipulates space, with highspeed
inopportune entrances and people being in the wrong
room at the wrong time.
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
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• The latest INSEE survey reveals that there were 4.9
million immigrants in France in mid-2004, up from 4.3
million in 1999. This covers the whole range, from very
elderly widows of Spanish Republicans who arrived in
1939 to the latest arrivals at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle.
• Of this total, 2 million are now French, either by marriage
or naturalisation. There have been 960,000 new arrivals
since 1999. A quarter of them are from EU countries.
• The biggest recent change is the growing percentage from
Africa, up 45%.
• Today’s immigrants are better educated. The percentage
of those with further education qualifications has
increased from 6% to 24% since 1982.
• It is estimated that there are 400,000 illegal immigrants in
France. That is 1 per 1,000 of the population, compared
with an estimated 7 per 1,000 in the United States.
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Nataliya Terentyeva,
works in transport to
Eastern Europe,
from
Alsace
“I’m Ukrainian and
have been in France for
six years. I came to
France legally, by
passing a language
aptitude test at the
French Embassy in the
Ukraine and I had €60
housing benefit – a lot
less than, for example,
an asylum seeker gets
each month. Plus they
get accommodation more easily than people who come to
study or work and I don’t think that’s logical or fair. Those
on benefits can always find work in France if they want it.”
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
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The President’s election was helped by winning over some of the far-right
voters with his hard line on immigration. What are we to expect now? Robert
Harneis looks at the stated policies of the new multi-purpose ministry.
Since he first became Minister of the
Interior in 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy
has made control of immigration
his trademark. Now that he is President
he has to retain the confidence of his
natural electorate to get himself reelected
in five years’ time. This means he
has to get results.
He has set up a ministry dedicated to
dealing with immigration and is
introducing tougher laws on family
grouping while aiming to make
immigration more useful for the
French economy.
He has always understood that, to
have any chance of success, an
immigration policy has to be what he
calls “balanced”. To a modern electorate
it must appear not only firm and
effective but fair and, above all, humane.
The phenomenon of the electorate’s
split personality is a particular problem.
The same voters who want immigration
controlled recoil in the face of the one
method of achieving this: the forcible
expulsion of illegal immigrants. Along
with their spouses and children, they
often return to extreme poverty and
political persecution. During the election
campaign, the media made a huge fuss
over the case of the Chinese grandfather
who was seized as he delivered his
grandchildren to school.
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| Results 163 - 171 of 201 |
