Watch this space

It has been a few weeks now since Nicolas Sarkozy has made it to the Presidential Palace.

The Unions immediately made the predictable early warning shots across the bow like ‘touch anything like our super early retirement or gold pensions and you’ll be for it’, but he didn’t bite. This guy is going to be one to watch. Whereas Margaret Thatcher took the way too powerful British Coal Miners unions head-on in a ‘we’re gonna to see who runs this country’ fight to the death, N.S. I feel is using a different tack and is going to out-manoeuvre them. He’s cute and I feel he’s going to leave them flat-footed.

This guy is like the Energizer bunny with a computer for a brain. He’s already got his ministry lined up including strategic centrist placements to defuse the Socialists whose pitiful rallying cry is now reduced to ‘join us - not because we have any real policies, but just because we want to try to block this person (who quite convincingly beat us) out of spite’.

I think the French people realise that the Socialists were still offering more of the same tired old formula which hadn’t worked in the past (and they had many years to prove it did), and that something new is needed. The GDP has slipped in ten years from 7th in the world to 17th! Clearly something is wrong and more ‘regulations’ (there are already volumes as thick as telephone books full of them) are not the answer!

There’s talk of lowering corporate taxes to encourage corporate investment and stop the transfer of head-offices (and profits) to European tax havens (Luxembourg, Switzerland, etc.). There’s talk of loosening the labour laws so bosses can hire people without being forced by the state to be ‘married’ to them ‘til death do us part’. There’s talk of laws to provide a minimum service level for all state utilities and stop the endless annual public service strikes. (It is a common joke in Europe that May and school holidays is when the Airlines/Trains/Air-traffic controllers/Students etc., go on strike). It's an annual event that you can set your watch by. Each airline has it's own nickname in the industry - British Airways or 'B.A'. is known as 'bloody awful' and the national carrier here it's 'Air France - take a chance'. There are a lot of good things in France, but the Unions are not one of them and have held this country to ransom for far too long.

As for Franco/U.S. relations, I think both sides need to pull their heads in on that one and get past the silly ' Freedom Fries' era slinging match and work together on what they do agree about.

There’s talk about all the right issues and all the right ideas to do something about them. Let’s just hope that unlike his predecessor, he won't be the first one to blink. It’s going to get interesting…

Americana and days gone by...

I bought a book a few weeks ago by an American expat living in Britain named Bill Bryson.

I'm a big fan of Bill Bryson as he seems to possess a synergetic combination of both American enthusiasm combined with wry British wit from his adopted home.

The book was called 'The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid' and recounts his days growing up in mid-west Des Moines in the 1950's. Whilst parts are obviously more familiar to those who grew up in that country, it is a universal narrative of youth that all of us can relate to wherever we were.

He tells of the innocence of youth and the era where children had lolly-rolling escapades at character-filled giant old movie theatres, of arcane Department stores with Eagle-eyed elderly sales ladies just waiting to pounce on little boys using pens and papier-maché pellets as blow guns from strategic hiding places on the wooden mezzanine floor. Of trips to Burger joints and long finned cars and sodas and music that just jumped with positivity.

Of comic books of all types of super heroes (and ocassionally 'zapping' his annoying older sister with his 'laser-vision'!).

He strikes a sober note in one chapter reflecting on the shoe-box multiplexes we visit today, the sanitised, compartmentalised shopping experience, the safety warnings on everything it seems now from dental floss to a cup of coffee, cars that all look like they were squeezed from the same tube of toothpaste and how we now run to lawyers looking to lay blame instead of accepting to take responsibility.

I couldn't put the book down as he took me back to those days and the innocence and promise and excitement of the 1950's.

Bill Bryson said he had the best growing up experience in those golden years a kid could ever have and compared to the complexities of today's world where kids are forced to grow up at age five, and wouldn't trade it for the world.

I'm inclined to agree with him.

Point me to the Tropics if you please...

It's now official. I've decided that working for a living has knobs on it

You may not have twigged, but today I'm not exactly feeling in a warm and fuzzy mood today about the 9:00-5:00...

Maybe it's just me, but don't you also tired of getting up at the crack of dawn, working all the hours the Big-Fella sends, seeing sunlight only sporadically and attending long-winded meetings about stuff you were never all that interested in in the first place?

Our owner came in yesterday - man he's a squillionaire and when he gets bored (poor bugger), he just takes a Net-Jet down to Florence or Ibiza and books into a 5-star hotel to chase away those negative vibes for a few days.

But, I've still got a little while longer before my plans come together (I sound like George Peppard as Hannibal from, the A-team!) and I can do something remotely similar albeit on a smaller scale! So I guess in the meantime I just keep plodding and studying away. As Mao Tse Tung once said, 'the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step'.

So in the interim, my lucky lottery ticket for 25 million Swiss Franc sits in my wallet just waiting for the draw to tell me the good news and let me buy that glass-fibre sailboat and sail the islands in the tropics - bikini-clad lovelies helping with the ropes between sunbathing spells on deck...

Excuse me Boss, which way to the exit. I got a life waiting for me...