Monday Moan 40

An Apology

Actually, a few apologies. First, for the non-appearance of the moan yesterday - caused by my having had an extended and very enjoyable weekend in Paris.

 

Second, for not being bothered to comment on such issues as this week's budget or the rather boring debate over regulation of the press and the royal charter - other than to say is anyone surprised that the majority of the UK press believes the current proposals are the first step towards the end of a free society? Talk about a predictable response.

 

Finally, for the late appearance today – caused by teething problems with the upload function of this site.

 

 

The meaning of quiet

          Quiet = making little or no noise. 

 

I travelled in one of the quiet carriages of the Eurostar last weekend in their standard premier coach.  Most train companies offer some guidance to their customers who travel in such carriages. Eurostar do not appear to do so. However, the most commonly used guidance amongst train companies is that customers should not make or receive mobile phone calls in this carriage, but go elsewhere if they need to call, that electrical equipment should be used in silent mode, and that if chatting with fellow passengers, people should do so quietly and with consideration for others.

 

The four ladies in the seats across the aisle from mine, who travelling to Paris for a weekend free from husbands and children, paid no attention to any of this.  I don’t think they stopped talking for more than 5 minutes during the entire journey.  And they weren’t just ‘talking’, they were ‘performing’ – trying to outdo each other and let everyone know how important they were, and how much money they had.  I wasn’t that interested in their relationships, their many foreign holidays, their au-pairs, or any of the other things they found it necessary to tell us about.  The amazing thing was that when they discovered that there was to be no free champagne, they didn’t want to go to the buffet car to get some – not sure if they thought it an affront to have to pay or an affront to have to be in the same carriage as people who couldn’t afford to pay.

 

And to think that I only paid extra to use standard premier so as to be away from the children who usually sit opposite me kicking my shins (until they receive the glare) and whining the whole time.

 

From our Paris correspondent

Paris at the weekend was wonderful.  Great city, great weather and above all, the best company imaginable.

 

So what follows are a few observations rather than a few moans.

 

Paris is easy to cover on foot – except that what looks like a short distance on a map always turns out to be further than you thought!  All that energy you have at the start of the day gradually disappears, as you think ‘just one more place to see and then we’ll call it a day’.  It’s always one place too far, in my experience.

 

The Louvre is one of the world’s great museums – absolutely no doubt about that.  It has some wonderful paintings and sculptures and is set in one of the grandest looking buildings you could imagine.  However, it is also a magnet for every tourist that ever comes to Paris – and over the years there seem to have been more and more tourists each time I have been there.  Most obviously, there are now hordes of coach parties, not just schoolchildren, but predominantly so. These children have next to no interest in what they are seeing. It’s just a great time to be away from home with their friends.  They either shout to each other wherever they are, or when weariness overcomes them they sit in groups in all the available places and play with their smartphones. They, like most other visitors, stop and look at virtually nothing as they plough from one major attraction to the next, where they crowd in front of the picture so that they can have their photo taken.

 

The free plans of the museum mark the spots where you can find those ‘major’ attractions (da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, etc) – which means that these become the targets for the rampaging hordes. 

 

So, if you can do without seeing them yourself, head in the opposite direction and enjoy some quiet and space in the less crowded parts of the museum.  It’s well worth it.

 

The Paris Metro is easy to use and allows tourists and locals alike to get around the city very quickly.  

 

But that’s not to say all is perfect.  Arriving at the station for the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday we found our exit had been closed. There are at least 9 of them, so that didn’t seem to be a problem – we just headed for another. That was also closed – and it soon became obvious that all the exits were closed.  No doubt this is what the announcements in French had been saying, but most of the people milling about in the underground corridors were tourists and none the wiser about what was going on.  And by the time these unwary passengers had discovered that there was no way out they had already passed through the barriers from the platforms, so in order to get back in and go to another station they had to use another ticket.  My wife is not one to take such things without a fight and she discovered that the tickets we had used could be re-programmed by the ticket clerk to allow us another entry, but not everyone was so persistent and the re-programming took so long that it would have been impossible for everyone to have been processed in this way.

 

Still, at least the security closure meant that we got a great traffic-free photo when we eventually made our way back to the monument after a long walk from another station.

 

I don’t want to sound like I’m getting old, or anything like that, but it was not terribly reassuring to see machine-guns being wielded at major tourist attractions by soldiers who looked barely old enough to be on a week’s work experience.  I know it was half-term week, so perhaps that’s what they were?  Obviously we can assume they will have been trained on how and when to use them, but how do you give someone so young the experience to know how to deal with a security issue that would, by its very nature, be unexpected and probably overwhelming?

 

Finally, as on almost all occasions that I travel abroad, I found my own pathetic attempts to communicate with the locals in their own language were futile and, frankly, embarrassing.  It used to be that we thought the French, particularly Parisians, would never deign to speak to you in anything other than their own language.  Not so now – at least not in the tourist sector. The hotel receptionist, the Metro clerk, every waiter or waitress we met, even the Starbucks employees, although their inability to understand that I wanted cold soya milk and not have it heated and steamed like it was for a latte was just a touch irritating.  Most impressively of all the armed gendarme, who came over to tell us that we couldn’t sit and eat our sandwich on the wall of the building he was guarding, turned out to be very polite and with excellent English, when I recited my normal ‘pardon mais je ne parle pas francais’ line.

 

Wish I had studied harder at school.

 

Good value?

Apparently, we are supposed to rejoice that after months of wrangling, with deals nearly reached and then scrapped, with legal challenges made by those who feared they were being overlooked, and with work on the rest of the Olympic site progressing well, agreement has finally been reached on what to do with the magnificent and much-admired main Olympic Stadium - the venue that throbbed to the noise of 80,000 spectators for every session of last summer's sports extravananza.

 

It is to be turned into a 54,000-seater new home for West Ham United football club.

 

It seems that the breakdown of funding for converting the fabulous stadium looks something like this:-

 

• the UK Government contributes approximately £60m
• Newham Council loans £40m
• the London Legacy Development Corporation loans £20m
• there is unspecified funding from the Mayor of London

 

and West Ham contribute £15m.

 

Sounds like a good deal for the East End wheeler-dealers in charge of this relatively small and unsuccessful London football club, but I'm not so sure about the rest of us.