Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

The Happy Gardener

  In our business, you come across a lot of successful people but it is not often that you feel that you would like to be in their shoes or that your spirits have been lifted simply by meeting them. Big politicians and other power figures are usually stressed and harried; creative types and sports stars are often neurotic and insecure. I came across an exception this week in the sumptuous grounds of the Château de Versailles.

His name is Alain Baraton and his job is chief gardener at the palace built in the 17th century by Louis XIV as residence and seat of his absolute power. Baraton, 49, has been something of a celebrity since the great storm -- actually a hurricane -- of December 1999 blew down 18,000 trees in the château's 2,000 acre park. France then discovered a self-made man who is not only passionate about gardening but who has an extraordinary gift for communication. The articulate gardener became a media figure and his accounts of the devastation helped raise the funds for the renaissance that he has directed at Versailles.

Baraton is a warm-hearted raconteur with an endless fund of anecdotes, as I discovered when we dropped in on him at the former stables by the Grand Trianon palace where he has lived and worked since becoming chief in 1982.  The Sun King lodged Molière in the house when the playwright was in favour.

In Romania for the rush

No, that's not the Arc de Triomphe. It's the Romanian version in Bucharest, where I am spending two days trying to nail down a few facts on the subject that has fed a frenzy in the British media and political world this week: The arrival of workers from the Balkans in Britain once Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union next January.

There is nothing like a dip into the old east bloc and the land of Nicolae Ceausescu, the megalomaniac dictator who was executed in 1989, to restore a little reality after our agonies over punctuation and spelling (last post). 

The pleasures of correction

This must be the only Times blog to generate heat over a spelling mistake  -- complete with a skirmish over a circumflex accent, no less. Thank you to everyone who has piled into this very French debate. It has exposed some national sensitivities and illustrated the point in my Waiters item about the way that culture colours perceptions about what is rude or not. 

First, as Frank Schnittger suggests, Sandrine must be rescued. I have no objection at all to being corrected and I thanked her in an e-mail after putting the e on the other side of the u in accueil. Despite my years in the word trade (and a degree in Eng lang and lit), I often muddle spelling in English as well as French. A blog exposes failings that are disguised in the newspaper thanks to the efforts of those unsung heroes, sub-editors. One of the healthy things about blogging is that it forces a lazy journalist to sharpen up spelling and punctuation. There is no-one to clean up after you. I shall write out accueil 100 times.

Combat with French waiters

In 10 months of blogging I have been trying to steer clear of the clichés and stereotypes that get foreigners going about France. Thanks to a run-in with a waiter I am about to break the rule and deal with that old chestnut: bad service.

Those who have suffered from truculent waiters and hostile sales people might deem the expression "French customer service" to be an oxymoron. Despite a decade of state campaigns and commercial efforts to promote service with a smile, it is still possible to run into astonishing rudeness. But the old French paradox strikes again because, when not driving or waiting table, the French remain a formal and courteous people. France is still far from succumbing to the yob culture and crass over-familiarity that prevails in Britain, as bemoaned by Lynne Truss in her book Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life. A London-based French listener phoned into a France Inter radio show this week to rant about the unpleasantness of life in modern Britain. "The behaviour of the young English is just unbelievably vulgar," he said.

In France, every shop transaction requires an opening Bonjour Monsieur/Madame and a formal goodbye. When I picked up the newspapers from a kiosk this morning, the vendor replied to my merci with a "Je vous en prie, Monsieur" --  You're welcome, or literally, I beg of you, Sir. 

Back to the waiter episode and an attempt to explain:

Bourgeois-bohemian, French-style

Today, the Feast of the Assumption, is the quietest public holiday of the French year. Like New Year's Day, August 15 is a seasonal turning point. The day of Notre Dame is a lull near the end of the grandes vacances when the mood changes and thoughts turn to la rentrée -- the return to work, politics and school. All is quiet on the Place de l'Opéra, outside The Times office, so I will tackle a seasonal song.

The radio stations are busy plugging what will become one of the hits of la rentrée: Les bobos. The single (listen here) is the latest offering by Renaud, a singer-composer in the Brassens-Brel-Gainsbourg tradition but more of a rock rebel. The post-sixties generation (I admit to being one) like his working class attitude and caustic, poignant lyrics. Les bobos is funny because Renaud, 54 years old and somewhat the worse for wear, does such a good job skewering les bourgeois-bohêmes, the class that includes much of his fan base.

Are the French literate ?

  Good to see that the August heat has not sapped the vigour of our favourite debate. Sarkozy's book has offered another nice field for the eternal Gauls-versus-Anglo-Saxons match. Putting aside the grand, sometimes apocalyptic, themes that some commentators have come up with, I would like come back on the point about France being a cultivated nation.

Richard Prevett took me to task for the remark that the French are more literate than most and he suggests that I hang out too much with "the highfalutin Parisian grandes écoles dinner party set." Michel R of Aix-en-Provence straightened the record by noting that French 15-year-olds score about average in the OECD's PISA rankings of school performance in the industrialised democracies (France of course disputes the PISA scores, saying that they are biased towards Anglo-Saxon criteria). 

I stand by my sweeping statement. "Average" French adults have a broader general culture and are more articulate than, say, average Americans or Brits. Here is why.

Ségolène's beach manifesto

This will no doubt earn me the displeasure of serious-minded readers, but I can't resist, given the uptight way that French media are supposed to treat their politicians. In the bikini is Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who might well become President of France next spring.    [picture from Closer magazine]

Ségo's entourage is of course shocked, just shocked, that Closer, one of the brasher celebrity magazines, has just violated her privacy by publishing paparazzi shots of her on the beach near Cannes. The 52-year-old Socialist and François Hollande, the party leader, her partner and father of their four children, have a family house at Mougins, nearby.  "It is not right," an inevitable "friend" of the couple told Le Parisien today in a report on the "sulphurous" breach of France's famed privacy laws -- which of course included the offending pictures (more below).

Babar the eternal earner

If you have been driving with small children this summer down the A6, or, to use its corny nickname,  L'Autoroute du Soleil, you may have been the lucky recipient of a Babar bag.

Handed out at toll booths, this consists of a few toys and booklet in which Babar the Elephant lectures children on ecologically correct behaviour. "I shower with soap rather than gel. It's more natural!" Babar tells the under eights who are his fans. "I prefer to eat fresh products when it's their season. They are tastier."

With "Babar le P'tit Ecolo (the little environmentalist)", the Environment Ministry has recruited one of France's best-loved children's characters to its cause, as the amiable king of the elephants is being deployed in a blitzkrieg of celebration and merchandising for his 75th birthday.  Never before has Babar and his world been so fêted. The French post office has even put out 17.5 million stamps featuring him with a birthday cake.

The Babar phenomenon shows how timeless values plus marketing can overcome the forces of political correctness. For PC hardliners, Babar is a racist bourgeois who showed have stayed in the colonial era.

Sarko's blockbuster

The opening line of France's summer best-seller sounds a bit like Marcel Proust but it hardly leaps off the page: "For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to take action." There is a fair chance, though, that the author will succeed President Chirac in the Elysée Palace next spring. This explains why Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right political star, has scored the surprise hit of the season with Témoignage (Testimony), a 280-page tome that is a mix of manifesto and memoir.

It is hard to imagine other peoples flocking onto the beach with copies of a minister's musings, but the French are more literate than most and they take politics seriously. 

Art tumbles

  Smashing a valuable work of art is regrettable, especially when it belongs to someone else. The Pompidou Centre, home of France's national modern art collection, has just done it twice.

Two celebrated pieces from a three-month show of Los Angeles art were destroyed when they fell off the wall in incidents in March and last month. No word leaked until the owners vented their wrath in the Los Angeles Times yesterday and the Pompidou centre had to come clean.