Marriage for all

Some recommended reading: Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. She’s done all the research on marriage that you could wish for. Nothing is new:  The story of Mr and Mrs Loving, in their day mixed marriage caused a lot of trouble!

 Tomorrow the first ever gay couple in France will officially marry. This is at the end of several months of sometimes violent protest by the anti marriage for all movement. The movement has been led by Frigide Barjot (a play on the name of Brigitte Bardot), who in my opinion often shoots herself in the foot. She said that marriage is for a man and a woman who want to make babies. Does she mean that couples who do not want children, couples who cannot have children and couples who are too old to have children, cannot marry?

Then we get on to the subject of adoption. “A child needs a Mummy and a Daddy in order to thrive properly”. In France one child in 5 is being brought up by a single parent. How do they think lone parents feel when they hear that statement? What about parents whose partener just went off. “The responsibility of a family is too much for me” (We know someone who left their wife and two children with those parting words)? Not to mention the children who end up murdered or ill treated by their step-fathers? What about the wives of Soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan and Mali; what do they make of that statement?

As I see it, any idiot can make a baby – and they often do. I’ve worked with teenagers who were well aware that they were unwanted by their parents from an early age. Only highly committed couples get the opportunity to adopt the baby or child that they really want. Children need love from consistent adults in their lives to thrive.

 I wish Vincent and Bruno all the best in their future life. If they choose to adopt, I hope that they are treated with the same fairness that any heterosexual couple could expect.

We voted

Well , we voted first thing this morning as Rob had to go to work afterwards. Rob was the first voter in our village.

It hasn’t been an easy campaign for us, the long suffering public. The ecology candidate seemed to have lost her way. There was more about her coming from Norway as an au pair girl when she was 16 than real issues. Everyone seems to think that they will have unlimited money to throw around if they become president. The national front candidate will just abolish everything. The ex-president? Well if he gets to be president again he will do things differently.

Unless a miracle occurs (outright winner) we’ve got another two weeks to go…

Disgusting!

Not long after French soldiers killed in Afghanistan were brought home with full honours....

This week soldier’s wives were protesting in order to bring notice to the powers that be that their husbands salaries were not being paid in full. In France if you can’t pay your bills you become ‘interdit bancaire’, which means that you cannot own a credit card or have a cheque book and the bank allows you the minimum for your needs. This is already happened to some soldier’s families and one wife has had her gas supply cut off. The powers that be have assured the families that the problem is due to a computer fault and that hundreds of staff are working 24/24, 7/7 to resolve the problem, which should be solved within the next couple of months!

 I could also write from experience about how long teachers that are new to the payment system have to wait months before their salaries come through…..

Eric for President?

I apologise for bringing up the coming elections again. This time it's good news; Eric Cantona the ex footballer, artist and actor is looking for the 500 letters of support from mayors to allow him to stand for election. He wants to draw attention to the homeless and near homeless that live in the most terrible conditions in our big cities.  I mentioned Emmaüs in a post on my Still Learning blog. Since Emmaüs' founder, Abbé Pierre, died in 2007, the homeless have lacked a high profile champion.  Well if Eric gets onto the lists, he's got my vote!

 This is Eric Cantona's ad about poor housing in France.  It is in French, but I think it's understandable, at the ends he asks 'will you take it?'

Joan of Arc; Saint, Sainte or political gadget?

 France has recently celebrated the 600th birthday of St Joan of Arc.  Unfortunately for poor Joan, her reputation is becoming more and more tarnished.

Recently a scolar has decided that Joan was in fact a man. The French soldiers would never have followed a mere peasant girl into battle.  The reason why the French wanted her to be known as a woman was that the English would have been terrified of a woman sent by God to fight for the French.  Was God not supposed to be on the English side? I don't think this theory holds water as the French handed Joan over to the English for execution.  I think that would have blown her cover, if there was one. 

We're having an election for a new President later in the year.  There is a lot of fighting, name calling and so on, as usuall.  St Joan has cropped up in the midst of this as she has been venerated by the far right  for many years for booting out the English and leaving France for the French.  Last week president Sarkozy laid flowers in rememberence of Joan and visited where she was born in  Domremy. This has caused feathers to fly as some seem to think that they have exclusive right over the Saint.  

Can I put the record straight?

In order to start receiving a state pension in France you have to have worked for 41.5 years. People who are entitled to retire at 60 will be people who started full time work before the age of 19. This means that they didn’t go far in their education and worked in low paid jobs. Most people in low paid jobs work well into their 60s in order to obtain a decent pension. Nearly every one works extra years to bump up their pensions. People who work on the black market never get a pension and work until they die or become too infirm.

The marine biologists I used to give lessons to calculated they could start thinking about retiring after they were 70.

How to use up lots of paper

We voted on Sunday with about half of the population of the village who were eligible to vote. It was Olivier’s first turn to cast his vote. The thing that annoys me about French elections is the amount of paper involved. A pile of lists of each party’s candidates is laid out on a table, you then pick up a list from each pile with an envelope before you go into a booth to put your chosen list into the envelope. The rest goes into a bin. I refuse to pick up a National Front list.

The week before the election every person of voting age receives an envelope with all of the same lists and a paper about each party in it. The idea is you can take your lists with you if you want to. The paper gets recycled and the envelopes are the kind that can be used again. I prefer the English system BUT I remember that my voting ticket had a number on it. They could check who you voted for if they wanted to. d

One of Rob's colleagues was running as a candidate for the Royalist Party. There party was too small to have lists distributed everywhere so you could download them if you wanted to. Would you believe this? They only had women’s names on their list because it is obligatory and most of them were a name only as the party didn’t really expect to get enough votes to have a representative at the European parliament.

As usual that’s the last we will hear until the next election.

Omnipresident

This is what our newspaper called Nicolas Sarkozy the other day. I remember asking myself 'just what does the French president do' in the past because we only saw M. Chirac on special occasions. M. Sarkozy seems to be getting involved in anything and everything. It must really annoy his staff. I used to know the names of the French prime ministers, but this time I don’t, because the president is very high profile.

Just in case he does happen on my blog (he is a blogger and perhaps he is a member of Blogmad or Blogexplosion and he's the same age as me), my husband works for a government department. Recently if his salary slip runs to two pages he receives them in two envelopes. Think of the money and paper which could be saved…..