The holiday is over

I thought I was going to post a kind of resume of my hols in London and Tuscany, but instead I found myself starting this political ramble about the UK riots and so it would seem that I have something to say about this past weeks' events and I should just get on with it.

I'm old enough to remember the riots in the '80's and being one of Thatcher's children I've seen society change around me. When I was a kid, the neighbourhood I lived in was still working class, where I would come home to tales of nights spent in the Anderson shelter during air raids. As these people died or moved away each house was gradually yuppified until even if I had wanted to, there was no hope of ever living in the same place I grew up in. I felt quietly left behind by the people who just wanted to make money and lots of it, I doggedly pursued my goal of being a teacher.

I'm not sure who found the '80's riots a surprise. I didn't. The day National Front posters were pasted outside my school we leant over the fence during PE and ripped them off. All brown people were called 'Pakis' and everybody else of a darker complexion 'wogs'. There was some kind of complicated colour code to do with the laces you wore in your DM's which singled you out as a Skin or a racist Skin. When there is that kind of constant tension things kick off. That's why the 2005 riots here in France did not surprise me. Yet again you have a whole generation of people who were born and brought up in France, who thought of themselves as French, but whose educational prospects were low, getting a good job downright difficult if you had the wrong name and don't even think about renting an apartment outside of your citè.

After devouring everything I could on Sunday night I woke up on Monday with two conclusions, 1) The BBC news site is a bit facile. Even the features and analysis is a bit lacking in analysis. 2) These riots were different.

Do you remember those days when you were called 'rent a mob' because you went on a march or two? Well maybe we were the same people going on different marches, but we went because we cared about issues. We believed in democracy and the differences in political parties. But look at the ballot boxes today and people don't care enough to vote their own government in . It doesn't matter who you vote in anyway because be they left or right the policies are broadly similar and every government is shit. We fill our lives with 'things' nowadays and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. My conception of society is just so different from the rioters who are so disenfranchised from society that we have no common ground.

I wondered if my lack of understanding was down to being outside the country for fifteen years, but I read the same lack of comprehension about the mentality of the rioters in the comments pages of many papers and the status updates of my friends in London. What I kept reading again and again was 'disenfranchised', 'marginalised', a society where there is little chance of social mobility and where the gap between rich and poor is constantly growing. I found Cameron's words empty and lacking in analysis. The idea that cutting benefits or evicting rioters is downright stupid and send them to already overcrowded jails and see what happens, that will really solve all the problems.

The last slightly political post I made here was about library cuts, but I do realise that everything is being cut, everything that is a lifeline to the most vulnerable in society, the young and old alike, from libraries to bus services that connect communities. I know that it's easy to proselytise from the comfort of my home, but I do hope that lessons will be learnt and that changes will be made. We changed into a society where it was all about money and borrowing and having and now we are a society that is bankrupt in so many different ways. Is there a way to change this? And if so how? These are the questions I think politicians should be asking in the next few weeks, rather than how hard can we punish these perpetrators. Let us learn from history, instead of repeating the same old mistakes.

Book reviews, writerly rambles and maybe a little summary of my holidays will now resume...

Meanwhile a couple more links:
Art Li: Riots and Evictions
Provoke. history: London and Rioting: Historical Perspective

five hundred and twenty five thousand and six hundred minutes

May

The Cow Parade came to town, I started blogging and I met Shameless, Minx, Marie, Debi and Skint for the first time.

June

I completely fucked up booking my ticket to Bali and decided that this was my favourite Eiffel Tower pic. Funny that’s not the one that’s printed and put on my wall.

July

I found a new flat, got attacked by moths, washing powder and various other things. France got to the final of the World Cup and lost (I didn't post about that) and I tootled off on holiday.

August

I returned from holiday with fantastic toes and discovered as I moved that I had a lot of STUFF.

September

I reminisced about KECAK.

October

I fell in love with Julian Barnes and was cruelly silenced.

November

I remained cruelly silenced as my modem lights continued to NOT blink, my phone continued to NOT have a dial tone and France Telecom tried to lead me to an early grave.

December

The Fifty Word Challenge was issued. Glad it wasn't a competition because I still can't decide on my favourite

January

I came 4th in The Clarity of Night's Silent Grey short fiction competition. How many times did I mention that one?

February

I went to Berlin and fell in love with this little guy below. And THIS post is the one that draws more new visitors to my site than any other. I won't write the title again because frankly I'm in shock at the amount of people searching for this and I don't want to repeat the incident again!

March

Matt at Turbo Art interpreted me and that little Minx in Cornwall outed me. Bloody cheesy photo.

April

I went to Lyon and saw Shameless's play (well the one he did the music for) and Tacky Rover where I belly danced (not) and got mad at tourists and Sego and Sarko got through to 2nd round of the presidential elections (see below)^.

May 1^st

122 posts later A Wanderer in Paris celebrates one year today.

In the past year I’ve made some bloggy mates, learnt not to do the horrendously long posts I did at the beginning, written poetry again (I’m not saying it’s any good, but I’m gonna keep on doing it), written loads and seem to have cut down on swearing in the blog posts (so I thought I'd catch up today!). It’s been great. Hope to carry on seeing you guys

Happy ONEIVERSARY to me!

Bad Taste

So I’m back with a carpet burn on my left elbow and a head full of questions. I’m knackered now, and maybe that’s why I have a returned with a certain sense of distaste. And then again I think the thoughts that found their form in my head while I stared into the turquoise of the Mediterranean have been brewing for a while. I guess sitting on a bus for hours on end with a bunch of ignorant wrist banded tourists brought it to a head. I don’t have the eloquence of our guide Osman who silenced a bus load of the righteous wrist bands, I just get angry and want to shake people and make them see what I see, but I will try to explain

Part of the wrist band deal is that you can venture out of the safety of the four walls in a nice coach and get a small flavour of Turkey. Our guide certainly tried to do that and more, he talked non-stop for two days and whenever we stopped the bus driver gave me and Lise Turkish lessons. As we passed through a village the guide told us to look out for bottles on the roofs. It meant that the family had a daughter of marriageable age and whichever man shot the bottle down could ask for the daughter’s hand in marriage. The wrist bands were in uproar, how backward they thought. And the women weaving the beautiful silk carpets, oh how that made them sad, these women were being exploited they said. Are they? I asked myself. They are keeping a tradition alive and being paid a comparable Turkish salary for doing so. Who’s more exploited; them or the illegal Chinese women working in the sweatshops in Paris, or the Mexican farm workers in the States? Isn’t it easy to say what’s wrong in another country yet be blind to what is going on in your own? In the two days we spent on that bus I never once heard our guide try to cover up the way his country was. The wealth is in the main cities and the East is agricultural and reaped in tradition; tradition that is sometimes unpalatable to us westerners.

Inevitably the conversation on the bus turned to Turkey’s attempts to enter the EU. Human Rights issues the wrist bands twittered, Algeria I thought, Northern Ireland. The Turkish feel the EU keep moving the goalposts for them, meanwhile letting other countries into their select club. But it’s not really in Europe they riposted. Well it’s either the EU or Turkey turns to the Islamic states, it shares a border with Iran and Iraq. But there haven’t been many bombings in Turkey, the wrist bands gasped. I banged my head against the window. Well the EU need to make a choice, Osman said or Turkey will make its own choice and the benefit of trying to get in the EU is that economically it has developed and is continuing to develop quickly. The wrist bands turned to the question of Islamic fundamentalism. Well, Osman shrugged, the Saddams, the Bin Ladens of this world, they didn’t just drop out of the sky from nowhere. He cut the mike and not another word was said.

Now I’m not saying that I agree with the lack of Women’s Rights in Turkey. There may well be female Prime Minster and head of the Judiciary, but there are a bunch of women up in the mountain villages who still have their marriages arranged, who are not educated or murdered because they dishonour their families. But let’s face it Capitalism is not akin to Human Rights is it?

As BBC World reported 157 killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad I wondered why the US couldn’t see that Iraq and Afghanistan was a complete fuck up, Nicaragua and all the rest and then I realised something. Actually they are not, the countries are broken and in ruins and dependent on the West. Our lives go on, we carry on buying our soya burgers and Ecover washing powder while driving our bigger and better cars and tapping away on our smaller and faster computers and a bit of human loss now and again is neither here nor there because that’s the way Capitalism works. Our bio, green, vegetarian existence is steeped in Capitalism and perpetuates it and I’m left with a slightly bad taste in my mouth.

I’m sorry but 3 hours snatched here and there in the last eighteen and a half hours does not make for a very optimistic Miss V.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

In eleven days time it’s the French Presidential Elections. I suppose it’s in my head because before turning off my TV last night I did that procrastination thing. You know there is nothing on, you really want to do something else, but you zap anyway. So, the last images were a quick flash about the number of undecided voters there were in France. I can’t remember what the percentage of undecided voters was but it was enough to send a chill down my spine and bring back memories of April 2002.

Now I don’t really understand how voting works in France, so anything I tell you hereafter might be completely wrong. About a million and five people put themselves forward as potential presidential candidates, honestly. In 2002 I thought that Olivier Bescancenot was representing Post Men. Having once done a temporary job as a post woman I had a little soft spot for the young presidential candidate who was actually representing the Communist Revolutionary League. Still, he didn’t have a hope in hell and most people were expecting Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin to romp through to the second round quite easily. The problem was that Chirac was a crook (having been accused of stealing a fair amount of money out of the French coffers when he was mayor of Paris) and Jospin was a kook; the left in France was a mess. I remember watching those percentage bars that reminded me of the points bar in Going for Gold and realising that something was seriously wrong; Jospin was behind Jean-Marie Le Pen.

And so the rest as they say is history. On the 1^st May I and tens of thousands of others marched ... somewhere. This is terrible but I can’t remember where. All I can remember was that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people and we were so far at the back of the march that it took us something like three hours to amble past the starting point. It wasn’t a happy march, it was grim and determined. I for one was questioning what the fuck I was doing living in this country.

I still do. France is a seriously screwed up country; it’s racist, elitist and has an entrenched class system that no amount of revolutions has got rid of. I think I’ve finally decided that I don’t agree with ‘laicite’ law that was reintroduced meaning that as a secular country no religious symbols should be worn in schools. I don’t believe that we change opinions by making everybody the same. You may not be wearing a veil, but if you have an Arabic name it doesn’t matter if you were born in Saint Denis, Ile de France, France, because that still means that the job or the apartment will go to sweet little Amelie. If you went to a Grand Ecole your future is made. And don’t tell me that the competitions to get into university make everyone equal, in the words of Billy Bragg the French are ‘victims of geography’, everything in this country is centred around Paris.

But... I think if we sit down and examine any country long enough we can draw up a list of faults as long as our arms. France needs a big shake up, tension here is riding high, and only a few weeks ago there was a riot at the Gard du Nord because a man was stopped for not paying his fare. I’m not sure that voting is the answer, but it’s the voice we’ve been given for the moment, so I hope all those undecided people make their mind up soon.

I did a quiz on the Le Monde website this morning and it turns out that if I could vote here my politics are closest to José Bové the McDonald smashing GM crop destroying politician! And the Greens and the Communist Party, it was all level pegging really but I figured Bové was the best known figure!

The pictures are of Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy the two main candidates in the Elections. Francois Bayrou is also a contender and a whole smattering of Left wing candidates that will make sure that the vote is well and truly split.