Pagani in Paris

This morning I asked Maria if she could say something in French and she thought for a while and then said, 'bonjour.'

Not much to show for eleven months I thought.

"How would you say 'I'm going to the kitchen'?"

And she rattled it off, although she may have said canteen rather than kitchen.

"What about 'I've got a sore foot'?"

And she rattled it off.

"Tell Carlo to put up his arm."

And she did. And he did.

Yesterday on the phone to her uncle to sing him happy birthday, she chose the tongue of her new home.

Soon those two will be having conversations where their ignorant immigrant parents will understand not a word.

Something in the sub-zeros today.

On Saturday afternoon I ducked down the pub to watch the All Blacks play their last football game of the year, as by now you know I do.

The bar was packed with South Africans in town to watch the Springboks play France. I got talking to Flippie van der Floppie who happened to have a spare ticket and next thing you know I was out at Stade de France in the freezing cold.

The French were wonderful spectators. How could I not join in La Marseillaise, inhibited only slightly by not knowing the words? I sat in about the same position as I was in at Twickenham a week before and the atmosphere was completely different. For a start the stadium is glorious. The crowd though go to have fun. Sure they chip the other side, but they bounce up and down with delight, they sing and play. It's fun, even in the freezing cold. Asamatteroffact it's just like the Wellington Stadium but about four times bigger.

Couldn't help feeling one of those two teams will play the All Blacks on that ground in the world cup final in 2007. The South African backs are really bad. If they were half decent they would have won. The French footie team are always good to watch. They play like the All Blacks, or the other way around.

Outside our bedroom window.

The seasons have changed as if a mechanic pulled a lever.

Flecks of snow bounced on the kids yesterday as we walked home from school.

In the thuggish cold, in an overcoat, gloves, scarf and snow boots, I bravely declind a hat.

The evil night crawled down my collar until the flesh was chilled like fridge meat.

Then as we lounged snugly inside this morning fat chunky snowflakes floated lightly past, while the kids stared in wonder. "It's Christmas!" Maria said.


Watching the winter begin.

As you lay snugly in the mild Antipodean pre-summer heat dreaming of barbecues and beaches (*Wellington readers excepted, of course) fat flakes tumbled into our street for an hour or so

Scalpers outside Twicks were asking three hundred quid for a single ticket. Almost resolved to watching the game in a pub and trying the scalpers at half time I was lucky to find a group from a club where someone hadn't turned up. My cash went into club funds and the beer I bought them in gratitude went into club members, immediately.

They insisted I stayed with them - insurance I wouldn't re-sell the ticket to a tout, and the delay in the pub nearly meant we missed the start. On the way in a drunk shoved past me, and a cop on horseback called out 'stop'. She reached down to grab his collar and knocked him over. Three other cops appeared from nowhere, leapt on him, twisted his arms and cuffed him. Don't mess with me, sucker.

We couldn't get inside the stand in time for the anthems, so I was stuck with a couple of hundred poms hollering 'God Save the Queen' in my ear. They can keep her, thanks. Then we charged to see the haka. I saw someone report the haka was booed - not where I was. It's a part of the game everyone wants to see. Everyone was anxious to get in and watch it.

There is a peculiar joylessness about English spectators. At the Wellington Stadium we roar support for our side. Abuse is mostly vented as wisecracks. The ref gets a bit of curry but it's not relentless and tone is unimpeachably good natured. The poms lose just as much as the Canes but for the nation that invented irony the crowd is witless. They booed the All Blacks and the ref like their team plays football: Vigorously and without creativity. Tana and the Canes backrow were special targets of some horrible abuse. Most of it was just boorish. 'Kiwis are wankers' the bloke next to me chanted throughout the game.

Earlier his buddy asked him, 'where is New Zealand. Is that down by South America somewhere?' Maps aren't his strong point, he explained to me. No, mate, never mind geography - I'm impressed a simian can function in society at all. These are people whose chants indicate some belief they are racially superior. On the basis of, uh, what?

There are no good All Blacks - just cheats, and English players who are rubbish for not being able to get past the cheating rubbish ABs who are nowhere near as great as they used to be. The English insisted during and after the game the ref was cheating throughout on the side of the ABs, even when he sent three of them off.

Why would you bother paying to see sport when there is so little pleasure in it for you?

The game was not the greatest spectacle, but it was tense and tough, a classic test match. The All Blacks were skittish and seemed over-awed at first, maybe by the venue or the nearness of a Grand Slam. The English forwards are useful, especially their locks. In the last twenty minutes, when the ABs were a player down, there was never concern they could lose the game as long as the poms kept giving the ball to their backs.

So I can say I was there at Twicks for the Grand Slam. It is a damp, dark stadium in a damp country, it was cold, the game spluttered along, the yobs were menacing.

And for all that, it was perfect.

Go them blacks.

Post-match happy. Scoreboard behind.

Carlo, who couldn't speak a word when we arrived in Paris, is now putting together whole sentences.

"Maria, got runny eyes," he told us when Maria cried.

But he can be much more sophisticated. "This goes here, that goes there," he burbled as he built a town with his blocks.

My favourite is, "Nooooo, I don't like it. I don't want it."

On Tuesday night 163 cars were burnt around France.

But no reason to be alarmed because that's "almost down to the levels seen before the riots began last month."

National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said on Tuesday the decline showed France was "getting back to normal".

That's alright then.

"Japanese Princess Sayako, the emperor's only daughter, quit the world's oldest monarchy and married a commoner, setting out for a new life at age 36 as a middle-class housewife. Sayako quit her job as a part-time bird researcher and, under a now controversial tradition, loses her imperial status by marrying a commoner."

What a beautiful love story. And a good reason to be a republican...

Turns out, if you get cold there is an increased chance you could ... catch a cold!

Who knew?

In the US, where the electricity is too wussy to boil water, consumers are suddenly learning of a brilliant new consumer appliance.

The electric jug.

Wow, whatever next.

Apropos of nothing at all...

The odd English word 'curfew' comes from French, 'couvre-feu'. Literally 'smother fire'.

Some form of curfew has been introduced in forty small towns and larger suburbs around France since the state of emergency was announced on Wednesday. Mostly the rules prevent under-18s from assembling late at night.

Though rioters stoned the police in downtown Lyon last night, the level of unrest is waning.

Last night the bars and cafes in the entertainment districts were far quieter than usual. This was on a Saturday night when, as usual, Paris was alive with events - a major football test against Germany at Stade de France, rock concerts, shows and all the life of a world city.

Walking around the old Marais, where 65 years ago Nazi militants hurled incendiaries into Jewish homes, we saw the occasional squad of police. Exactly as normal. But then that is how the Paris streets have been throughout the seventeen days of unrest.

The world has watched live TV crosses from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees and wondered if these were the venues of the riots. But they are simply the most Parisien of back-drops for a stand-up. Its peaceful there and entirely calm.

Untrue headlines claim the city is 'under lock-down'. Expats have been phoned by anxious relatives and I've heard of companies worried about the safety of staff jetting in for meetings. It's nonsense. If visitors keep the TV switched off they won't see a thing. Paris itself feels the same as it did a month ago, six months ago.

The number of cars burned each night are a bizarre indicator of calm. When only a hundred were destroyed in the Paris suburbs, the 'banlieue', the police declared the night 'ordinary'. They're right but only because the 'banlieue' have bubbled with tension all year.

A poll shows seventy-one percent of French believe the President, Jaques Chirac, can't handle the social problems underlying the riots. They are almost as likely to have confidence in the xenophobic lunatic Jean Marie Le Pen.

Only thirteen percent are willing to say they understand or have sympathy with the rioters.

The TV talkshows are full of analysis - and this is a country with more current affairs talk shows than most. But in casual conversations there are few who accept or even recognise the depth of discrimination and alienation in the suburbs.

Perhaps that's not suprising. The rioters, after all, are hooligans. They are not representative of anyone. There are no useful political conclusions to be drawn from the wild intentions of young men throwing petrol bombs into cars.

Putting the rioters aside for a moment, the unrest has exposed in mass media deep seething resentment among many 'visible minorities' about racial discrimination and alienation from French society.

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn blames events on 'multiculturalism'. Mark Steyn might be the stupidest person on earth. It is rare to find someone who is so confident with opinions so totally eliminated of fact or reasoning.

France is not multicultural at all; it has absorbed multiple cultures in its borders and pressured them to assimilate. It won't even allow headscarves to be worn in schools; Muslim immigrants are told, 'when in France, be French'.

In a country where it is illegal to collect data on ethnicity, 'visible minorities' are often descendants of grandparents who emigrated from what were French territories - Senegal, Algeria and more. They are French, their parents were French, and the French claimed their grandparents were French. But too many are not accepted as French.

The romantic revolutionary slogan 'liberty, egalite, fraternite' has produced a conformist idea of 'egalite'. If you enter French society, the pressure is to behave as the French, look French, practice the French way. Yet it's too easy to call that xenophobic. France's insistence on the French way is what makes France, well, French.

Huge resources have been poured into deprived communities for decades. It fails for the same reason paying welfare benefits and Housing NZ subsidies to Ruatoria or Mangere fails to deliver long-term opportunity. Those communities need something more - respect and dignity, jobs, opportunity and celebration of their diversity.

Time and again it's been noted not a single mainland member of parliament or television anchor is from a minority.

Discrimination is only one reason why unemployment is high in the banlieue. The so-called French social model has been blamed as well. Heavily walled job protections have made employers reluctant to hire.

I doubt petrol throwing car-burners are thinking anything so sociological. Their more immediate resentment is directed at police. Policing by quasi-military force has failed and there are glimmers of awareness that community policing methods produce the best long-term results, just as 1981's Brixton riots shook up British policing. In the banlieue patrolling officers have been ordered to address people with the formal 'vous' rather than 'tu' as one uses to a child.

For police, as for the political leadership, there will be a delicate decision over when to lift the couvre-feu. It appears to be working for now but it is also damaging France, as authoritarian crisis measures do. Much of the damage is done. The fire might be smothered but embers of resentment will smoulder for a long time.

King of all media...

Apparently Germany is among the countries to have issued a travel advisory warning tourists about coming to France.

This would be the first time in a couple of centuries the Germans have been worried about their safety while travelling to France.

Palestine needs more of this wisdom:

The parents of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank have donated his organs for use in Israel, in the hope of promoting peace.

So call me a wishy-washy hand-wringer. The only way Palestine will ever win genuine peace and nationhood is through the wisdom of a Ghandi, King or Mandela.

John Fowles has died, aged 79.

There's an obituary here.

Predictably everyone angles on the French Lieutenant's Woman, though I think only because it was a successful movie. Personally I couldn't get into that book, alone of all his output.

I loved John Fowles' writing.



I felt I grew up when I read The Magus.

It is the single best novel ever, a transcendent, brilliant novel like no other, where he toys with the reader, creates with ease and control. His sentences flow into paragraphs and into chapters and the plot spins like layers being added to an onion, at once appearing to be stripped away and forever becoming mistier. You can't but be humble at the author's skill, that anyone can reach those heights of control over their narrative. The way magic and reality moved seamlessly is genius.

Well, the sentiment is shared by the obituary writer on his website, here, who says it was Fowles' favourite book too.

The Magus' closing quote, 'cras amet qui numquam quique amavit cras amet' translates as,

"Tomorrow let him love who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow."

We are a long way from the riots to date, bolted behind layers of security as Paris apartment dwellers are. And though we rented a car for this weekend, we don't have our own parked on the street to be burned by the hordes. So we are safe and unaffected personally.

Last night, police say thirteen hundred cars were set alight.

We knew Saturday night would erupt into the worst night yet. There were battalions of police, hundreds have been arrested and yet the suburbs still burned and the riots spread, to the South of the city, to the centre and to other centres - Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nantes, Normandy. Cars, schools, businesses, shops are being attacked with molotov cocktails.

Most of the action is out beyond the Periphique in the 'banlieu', the suburbs. It's beyond the arrondisements, beyond the limits of the metro lines, served by suburban rail. There have been confrontations out there all year. On Bastille Day two hundred cars were burned and police used tear gas and rubber bullets. So far this year, twenty thousand cars have been set alight.

These areas are poor, badly served, isolated. There are housing projects packed with jobless young immigrants. In the burning suburbs, most are Arab or Muslim - but not all.

They are ignored by the political elites, except to be scape-goated, blamed and derided.

This is a country beleaguered by a vicious class system, and a few who have a sense of national superiority. Five million immigrants feel shut out and often unwelcome.

Unemployment in France is over ten percent. In the banlieu it's more than double that. Among immigrants in the banlieu it's 35 percent. Among the young Arab men it's approaching fifty.

Despite the size of the constituency virtually no elected officials in France are Muslim or even immigrant. So what an easy target they are when reporters go out to the communities, and collect quotes like:

"All the politicians care about are laws for homosexuals and all those immoral things. They are against headscarves, against beards and against the mosques."

The Interior Minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, is an ambitious little upstart with the manner of a ferret on cocaine. He fancies himself as the next President; until this started, so did a majority of voters. Much of what he says sounds like fresh air - loosening up the constricted, sclerotic centralism; he's pro-American. But he has also scratched the law and order itch. His government has been cutting services in the poor suburbs, it does nothing about unemployment and it attacked Muslims for looking different (banning headscarves in schools? There's a priority issue). It has insisted on assimilation and done nothing to help them assimilate. The problem is not only the Govenrment's. The socialist opposition here, and the unions, are objectively pro-unemployment too.

Sarkozy has called the rioters scum. Well they are scum, but the attempt to sound tough has sounded like abuse of the entire community.

The police are little better integrated than the political institutions. There are more police per head of population in France than anywhere else in Europe. They ride around on pushbikes and even roller-skates, and turn up to trouble in huge numbers, heavily and conspicuously armed. But they're not there when the trouble goes away. Where kiwis see in our police defenders of our own side, too many communities here seem to see an opponent.

So it's no wonder authorities can't control the criminal hooligans on the rampage. They don't know them.

The more they fail, the more those communities feel let down by those authorities, and the more young hooligans with little to lose seem to feel this is licence and motive to join the destruction.

They are burning their own communities. Their own neighbours are losing their small possessions. How hard do you have to work in those places to build something up? It's so easily taken away.

Today we drove out for a day in the countryside, motoring past the estates, the ugly high rises, the graffiti scarred walls and broken pieces. These places are far from the elegant Paris apartment blocks, the leafy rues and the wide avenues. We drove and wondered how we would cope there in those blocks. How would we manage with a family and a typical income confronting the wealth barriers surrounding the suburbs unseen? How would we cope when we know as we do now the adjustment problems this society takes for granted as part of the price of membership?

These riots may be put down soon. They need to be. But the conditions that let hooligans loose take much more patience and wisdom. We'll see whether there is an appetite for it soon.

Well I exchanged a couple of smart-alecky messages with Rod, through an intermediary, just before the election. I asked facetiously if he was disappointed he would never get into Cabinet. He sent back something suitably derisive.

As we sat outside the campaign party in Christchurch the night he got elected in 1996 I told him I was pleased he was going to parliament, unlike some of the others we put into parliament that night. I came to retract my delight later when we differed on a few decisions he made, though I always thought he had MP quality.

I never saw Rod get truly angry or, alternatively, sulk at anyone. I can't think of another MP I could say that about so I suppose that testifies to uniqueness, cheerfulness and professionalism.

The only decent MPs are those who go there to further ideas; poor MPs go simply because they have an inflated idea of themselves, though you need to have belief in yourself to be successful. Well Rod had belief in himself, and he had a commitment to ideas and he was consistent and persistent in promoting them.

He arrived at parliament wearing braces, put a flower pot on his desk in the chamber, made a noise about his possum seat cover and moved to re-name the whip 'Parliamentary Co-ordinator' (For Crying Out Loud!). Then he tried to have rules changed so that he didn't have to wear a tie in the debating chamber. It all seemed a bit marginal when there was real work to be done.

He grew more effective, especially after 2000. He could have accomplished a lot more. He could have been a Cabinet Minister if he'd done things differently. By this year there was a long list of things I did not agree with him about - though, equally, a long list I approved of. It's hard to follow politics from this distance. He handled himself very well this year from what I saw. He locked on message and maintained a sober reassuring composure even after he got shafted on Cabinet.

I'm shocked he has died so young and with so much still to do.

We talked that night, 12 October 1996, about the costs to his family of his parliamentary job. He was aware of the load he was imposing through the time away and through the stresses, changes and emotional strains public figures drag back home. How his family must wish back some of those hours and days now. His parliamentary super was diverted into the Greens' special fund that bought a house and helped the party raise cash. I hope it's been arranged to ensure his family are secure.

We visited a thousand year old Gothic cathedral in Chartres today just after we heard the news. Inside the ancient stone walls Josie lit a candle for Rod. I'm not sure - but I suspect - Rod was no more Catholic than I am... but there is a small corner of France where he is remembered.

In a cafe just off the Arc de Triomphe late on Saturday afternoon there were groups of Parisiens sitting at tables sipping coffees and wine, smoking, talking, flirting, arguing.

A lone New Zealander leant on the bar watching the TV. The barman turned up the volume a little for national anthems. The New Zealand anthem, sung beautifully in Maori by Hayley Westenra, turned a few heads. People looked around to see what was going on, saw it was sport, rugby, smiled and kept chatting.

And then the All Black haka began and the cafe went totally silent. Every head turned to the screen. Tana Umaga strutted and slapped and Ka Mate rang.It was as if passers-by stopped on the street outside. It was the moment in a western movie when the protagonist walks through the saloon's swing doors. The breath of the room seemed to be sucked away by the ferocity..


How could you not be a proud New Zealander? The admiration filled the room. The snatches of pleasure afterwards...All Blacks! Nouvelle Zelande!

Superbe.

And what followed? Heh. No one paid much attention save that lone New Zealander. Even he didn't recognise a few of the All Blacks now. The wizened old men in the bar would look up and saying something admiring every time Rico Gear scorched over the pays-de-Galle line or Dan Carter racked up more points. Which, lets face it, was pretty often. Heh.

Ha ha...get a load of this:

"Patenting is in the works for a non-alcoholic fermented beverage that smells and tastes like coffee but has the body of beer."

They might be missing something quite important about the consumer uses of both beverages.

I mean, imagine Sunday morning after a bender, pouring yourself a cup of that. Unless on the bender itself this was substituted for actual beer. Wouldn't that, umm, defeat the whole purpose of drinking beer in the first place?

Imagine the swivels your eyeballs would be doing after a six pack of these.

"Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts."

We're better looking too.

Nicolas is a chain of pleasant bottle stores, popular enough that the stock turns over every week, and not so snooty you avoid the shop for the pressure of paying too much.

They have a promotion this week on 'wines of the world'. Drooling over the thought of a Marlborough sav blanc I tore down there only to find wines from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, California and Australia.

Australian Sauvignon blanc? What are they thinking?

Well it says something about the vaunted promotion of New Zealand wine that a quality chain puts on a promotion of foreign wines and we're not even there.

And then far away in a corner almost out of reach I spotted a solitary bottle of something called 'Matahiwi'. New Zealand sauvignon blanc! Never heard of it, but what the hey.



Unfortunately it's from the Wairarapa, not Marlborough, and it's twice the price of the next most expensive sauvignon blanc on display. Still it's only nine Euro and best of all it has a screw top!

Man, I can't tell you how much I loath corks. I have to suppress a sneer when I hear wine snobs wittering about cork.

CORK = BAD WINE. CORK = ROTTEN. CORK BAD, CAP GOOD.

The only reason wine is still sold with environment-destroying, wine-oxidisng cork is bulk-buying wine snobs confused about quality.

Anyway, the Matahiwi is delicious.

It is a quintessential New Zealand SB. Grassy, unbelievably fresh, that delicious distinctive tang.

A treasure. A real treasure. Five stars.

Mmmmm.

Just posted a quick flash-album movie of photos the kids' nanny, Nataliya, took at the square next door.

Click on 'kids at the park' from the menu on the right.

Comments are always good...