France is on strike today.

It amazes me how tolerantly the French public accept the disruption. The schools closed with a day's notice, so parents all over Paris had to scramble for solutions. Transport is out or severely reduced in many parts of the city, and since you can't rely on the reputedly undisrupted services you have to treat it all as disrupted.

Yesterday I foolishly went to the nearby centre to buy a few things for a slap up dinner, and it was closed. The butcher was closed, the bakeries were closed, the wine shops were closed. The 'supermarkets' (yeah right) were closed, the flower shops were closed, the sweet shops were closed, the cheese shops were closed. The seafood place? Closed. The greengrocers? Closed. All of them. The only shops open were the small clothing stores. Go figure. It was Monday, so that accounted for many of them, but this is also the season of the strike, when Parisiens customarily return from work and go on strike in their moods of grumpiness.

I mean, I support the right of workers to organise collectively to secure fair employment conditions. But doesn't it seem suspicious that there is a strike season?

I walked to another centre a mile away, so it's no big deal and maybe that's why consumers are tolerant. 'We are all going on strike sooner or later.'

Apparently 65% of the population aspires to hold a job in the public sector. Few aspire to their own businesses.