Gleeden, the
‘extra-marital dating site created by women’ has reached France. Every second metro
station is carrying the ad: le premier site mondial des rencontres
extra-conjugales créé par les femmes. When I typed in Gleeden I was sent straight
to an English-language site so I assume it’s been active in the US for some
time. It claims to have 1 28 987 members already.
Their logo is
a half-eaten apple which is puzzling: a site promoting guilt-free good times
with someone other than your husband (or wife) but here we are again, with our
old friend Eve? Perhaps I should write to them and suggest they substitute a
half-eaten cup-cake with lots of pink (or blue) American frosting on the top –
‘yes, you lucky married men and women, it’s official. You can now have your
cake and eat it’ (just give us your credit card details and we’ll do the
rest...) You can't really teach the French about rencontres extra-conjugales
– they’ve been doing it for centuries.
This is a
summer bulletin so it would be nice to report that the weather matches the
season. Today it does but generally speaking it hasn’t. June has been
exceptionally wet and grey. Umbrella sales have probably done well but there
have been lots of damp tourists wandering about disconsolately.
I spent a
happy couple of hours in the Daniel Buren Monumenta exhibition that I mentioned
in the last bulletin. It is a marvellous use of the space of the Grand Palais
with its hundreds of disks of yellow, blue, green and orange plastic planted
out like a forest and forming
multi-coloured canopies over your head. It’ll all be taken down by the
end of next week. Not so some others and there are lots, including Degas nudes at
the Orsay and a big retrospective of Gerhardt Richter at the Pompidou.
I walked back
from the Grand Palais as far as the Madeleine. I wanted to find a chocolate
shop that a friend had told me about, somewhere near the Dior shop on the rue
Royale. Patrick Roger calls himself an ‘artiste chocolatier’ ( www.patrickroger.com). The shop is in an
arcade off the rue Royale and currently displays two enormous chocolate hippos
rising out of chocolate water. They have wonderfully life-like eyes – look
dewy, wet and appear to be staring at you through the glass. You can spend a
fortune in there, as with most high-end chocolate shops these days, or you can
get 12 euros-worth and get the merest taste of affluence.
a Patrick Roger chocolate gorilla
It’s like
they say about Athens just now – go to certain parts of that city and you’d not
know that Greece is on its knees and ordinary families are using soup kitchens
as never before. Same in Paris. There are vast areas of the city, both
commercial and residential districts, where there’s not a hint of the wobbly
state of France’s finances. But soup kitchens are doing big business in Paris,
just as they are all over the UK. How will Hollande and his Socialist majority
steer the country through the mess is anyone’s guess. They seem to be making a
good start but it’s early days and there are a lot of voters who will want to
see Sarkozy-era cuts reversed, in Education especially. Time will tell. David
Cameron is of course making what capital he can out of Hollande’s intention to
tax the very rich more heavily. I know which side of the English Channel I
prefer to be on at present, in political terms at least.
Some things
go on whether the markets rise or fall, like birds nesting and trees coming
into leaf. There are two families of mallard ducks on the little canal in the
jardin d’Eole at present, one has four baby ducklings, the other five. I
believe they have survived and prospered not only because no dogs are allowed
in the garden, and mostly none get in, but also because at the back of the
canal is a low wall. On that low wall at all hours of the day you will find
clusters of unemployed young men, passing the empty hours away as best they
can. They are extremely protective of their ducks – I have heard them myself,
telling children to back off and leave them alone. It’s amazing what you can
learn from watching two mother ducks, nine ducklings and a handful of ‘idle
youth’.
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