Posts from — November 2008

I was interested to read in Liberation that Segolene Royal has won the Socialist Party’s endorsement of her policies. In the voting, Royal received 29%, with Aubry and Delanoe following with 25% each, and Hamon with 19%. Bertrand Delanoe, who has the support of Royal’s ex-partner Francois Hollande, is also mayor of Paris.

I’ve always liked Royal, and thought she conducted a reasonable campaign back in 2007. Stylish and assertive, she even wears heels when visiting remote farms! A good debater, she was a match for Sarkozy in their final debate, perhaps too much so, since as Adam Gopnik remarked in his article, ‘this allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he’d never had the chance to play before–a sympathetic, erring, middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.’

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The only problem with euphoria is that everything that goes up has to come down. Am I the only one feeling flat today? The rain and grey skies don’t help. There’s only one thing for it—a brisk walk to the market.

The ubiquity of markets is one of my favourite things about Paris. I never tire of buying my fresh produce this way. It’s a supremely soothing experience. Perhaps because markets are one of the few things still existing in which humans have participated since time immemorial. Better than any ‘social networking’ on the computer, the touch and smell of all that lovely organic matter, the banter of the marchands and occasional offers of ‘buvons un café ensemble?’ (always politely declined), the experience never fails to cheer me up.

Today strawberries are on special. I buy half a kilo and decide to make compote to go with my Saturday baguette.

Compote aux Fraises à Carolyne

500g strawberries (can be ‘cooking’ quality), hulled, washed and halved

A little wine or sherry

Sugar to taste

Cinnamon

Juice of one lemon (optional)

4 teaspoons of gelatine

Throw everything except the gelatine and sugar into a heavy bottomed pan and simmer gently until the strawberries are as cooked as you want them to be (I don’t cook them for very long). Add just the amount of sugar to make it sweet enough. When the strawberries are cooked to your liking (I prefer them to be still whole, and not too mushy), take saucepan off the heat, and spoon out about a third of a cup of the syrup. Add the teaspoons of gelatine to this hot liquid, and whisk to dissolve it thoroughly. Stir this mixture back into the stawberries and mix gently but thoroughly. Pour into jars or containers and keep in fridge. This does not keep for long (scarecely a week, even in the fridge) so I pour it into containers of a size that will last me for a few days, and freeze all but one (the amount in this recipe makes only about two medium-sized jars—enough for two people for a few days, depending on how thickly you ladle it onto your baguette).

Eighty-four percent of French people are ‘satisfied’ with Obama’s victory. In fact, 36% are ‘totally satisfied’, according to an article in Le Monde, reporting on a survey of 1008 people of voting age who were asked their opinion on Wednesday.

In Australia, 75% of people polled in the last few weeks ‘wanted to see the 47 year-old African American become 44th president of the United States,’ according to an article in Melbourne’s Age, written by Michael Gawenda, who was that newspaper’s Washington correspondent from 2005-2007.

Back in Paris, left-wing newspaper Liberation has brought out a special Obama edition with 40 of its 48 pages ‘devoted to the first black president of the United States’. For readers who can’t get to the newspaper kiosks themselves, this and other special editions can be purchased in PDF form over the internet. [Read more →]

I don’t think I know anyone who is not elated about Obama’s win. A friend and I watched the election results on his i-phone during an all-day meeting in Melbourne today and held our breath until the votes moved beyond the point of no return.

Obama should, however, watch out for anyone phoning with a French accent. The Masked Avengers like calling the newly-elected (as well as the too-idiotic-to-ever-be-elected) and Chirac and Sarkozy have both been pranked. See the clip below, in which Sarkozy takes a call from the ‘Canadian President’…

‘SARAH PALIN piégée par un faux SARKOZY’ screamed Le Monde’s headline. But I’d already listened to the ‘interview’ myself, and read the story online, thanks to the Melbourne Age newspaper. It can also be found on YouTube.

Devised by Canadian comedy duo Les Justiciers Masques (the Masked Avengers), the fake Sarkozy was played by MARC-ANTOINE AUDETTE, with the ‘interview’ aired on a Quebec radio station.

Trust me, SARAH PALIN was completely taken in. How she could be so gullible is beyond belief, especially given the fake SARKOZY’S fluency in English, including his use of idiom (describing his wife as ‘so hot in bed’), and several clues, such as his ‘special adviser to the United States—JOHNNY HALLYDAY’.

When PALIN says at the end ‘Oh, have we been pranked’, there should have been no question mark after ‘pranked’ as inserted in the story in The Age. From my listening, her oral inflection was unmistakably on the ‘have we’, meaning ‘Oh dear, we have really been taken in’.

’Meanwhile, according to the report in The Age, AUDETTE is saying he hopes he won’t be given ‘a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay’.

Campaign poster, early 2007

(Phrase of the week: avoir le vent en poupe = to be on the road to success; literally ‘to have the wind in the stern’)

Could the next FRENCH PRESIDENT be a communist? This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, according to a report I’ve just read in Le Monde, headlined (and please correct me if my translation is wrong!): Olivier Besancenot has won credibility among left-wing sympathizers. More on this below. First some background…

As many will recall, in the French presidential elections of early 2007, Besancenot was the candidate for the LCR, the Revolutionary Communist League. A university graduate who works as a mail delivery man, in his election posters he looked about sixteen, although he’s in his early thirties (I wasn’t the only one to think he looked young; later I read another Le Monde article which described him as having a ‘chubby Tintin face’). Under this face on his election poster was the slogan, ‘Our lives are worth more than their profits’.

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