Free and Easy.

The simplest and most rewarding pleasure in life when you're a parent is to cuddle your children. The Fingernails decided over dinner that what was really needed before bedtime was a tickling match, so after clearing the kitchen, that's exactly what we had. There were lots of screams and lots of laughter, then the little ones announced they wanted a round of hugs, so we lay there for a few minutes with our arms around one another until Fingernail II said she'd had enough. Fortunately, the Social Services weren't on the prowl, as they might have confiscated our children on the grounds that we were being too affectionate, or some such tosh.

Whatever has happened during the day, just the sight of your own children as you get home heals everything. Nature knew what it was doing.

Stand on your own two feet.

You can tell a lot about people by the way they walk. Some progress with purposeful tread, others amble and meander with no apparent goal. My feeling is that the society in which you live is partially responsible for this. Take London and New York, for example. The pace is fast, the populace is going somewhere and wishes to achieve, close or progress. Countries where the State is preponderant do not move with the same verve or intent; their lives have been taken care of; all they need to do is avoid traffic and hold their hand out. I often think about this as I cycle through pedestrian masses on on my way to work. Many on foot, brandishing shopping bags full of rubbish they'll never need or use, are happy to stop and let the person coming towards them take responsibility for the safe conclusion of the momentary encounter. Rarely do you see people look up, assess the traffic and steer a path accordingly. Some do tend to slalom, keeping their momentum even if the resultant diversion means adding a few yards to their journey. Toulouse City Council has recently given me an unwitting extra agar plate for my studies: they've closed half of the main shopping street to begin remodeling the whole city centre area. Rue Alsace-Lorraine now has half the space for the same amount of people and, strangely, the people are starting to show more initiative: before the work started, with a wonderful, broad thoroughfare at their disposal, the various shoppers, businesspeople and terminal idlers would wander listlessly and aimlessly the length and breadth of the thoroughfare, their movements beyond interpretation and anticipation. Now, with half the space available to them they've become more observant. It's easier to make eye contact and broadcast directional intent as more and more people are aware of the lack of space. And this in a country where 35% of the working populace is sucking rapaciously on Marianne's shapely, munificent jugs.

A Harvard Economics professor recently published a book stating that 'Cities are civilisation's greatest achievement'. Apparently, they foster and nurture creativity, encourage interaction and raise awareness and tolerance. I can only imagine he's never been to Birmingham, but that's not the point, here. If we take the idea of a city as a place where people are huddled together, then I can only agree with him; given too much space, people lose the connection to others. Shoe-horn them into a sardine tin and they start to adapt to their surroundings. To push the analogy a step further, we can also cite the statistic, true or fictive, that racism is most marked amongst people who've had the least to do with foreigners.

A five-minute bike ride to work can do wonders for your tenuous grasp of shallow pop psychology, you know.

America

Just so there's no misunderstanding regarding what I wrote last night, I'd like to make the following clear:

What I love about America and Americans:
1) The courtesy, the positive, 'can-do' attitude;
2) Their professionalism;
3) The countryside;
4) Their generosity.

In short, I'm a fan of the country and its denizens. However, despite the always incredible production values, I abhore Hollywood Cinema. I find it shallow, formulaic and manipulative.

I feel better, now. Thanks.

What a load of...

In the midst of the current, government-initiated public debate on the place of Islam in France, Nicolas Sarkozy has started standing strategically in front of churches so that voters don't run off and put their 'X' by the name Marine le Pen come the next Presidential Election in 2012. I'd have never seen this if I hadn't hooked up our Darty Box TV decoder the other day and virtually everything that has passed before my eyes since that fateful afternoon has only served to reinforce my feeling that I commited an act of the rashest stupidity. TV News is, at best, vacuous entertainment, but the worst feeling of all is that so many people take it as gospel. It's so dreadfully easy to manipulate the masses and yet so difficult to form one's own opinion when every news outlet has its own agenda.

Worse still was Sofie Coppola's film Marie Antoinette which finished about ten minutes ago. Who needs books when we have Hollywood? The Omaha Landings, William Wallace and Marie Antoinette to name but three, have all been so grossly misrepresented as to constitute a crime against anyone serious historian devoted to recounting past events as accurately as possible. Tonight, Mrs. F and I learned that Marie Antoinette took baths in her nightdress, presumably to ensure that any film made about her life 220 years after her decapitation would not endure a commercially suicidal '18' or 'R' certificate (we used to know them as 'X', but there you go; another bit of heritage Britain has eagerly abandoned in its unstinting quest to be the 51st State). The masked ball in the Palais Garnier (inaugurated 86 years after the French Revolution) was another howler, but the icing on the cake was surely the soundtrack. Somebody must have told Ms Coppola that, in those days, people listened to baroque music, of which she could only have understood the second syllable and thus treated her audience to Adam and the Ants, an appallingly-sung version of Only Fools Rush In as well as other lesser-known pop anthems. The cloying, obligatory (at least since 1980's American TV and Film) applause at any public event was omnipresent. This was a film to show the Palace of Versailles to an American audience with a pretty, Arian-looking, all-American star, but had little, if anything, to do with the Austrian princess bride of Louis XVI. Anyone who has seen Sascha Guitry's Talleyrand and Napoleon films knows how this period could, and should, be treated, at least on film. Better still, read well-researched books on the subjects.

I've nothing against America or the Americans; I've lived there, worked there, been married to one. But I can't abide the systematic distortion of historical facts for entertainment's sake, particularly when, for many people, this will be their only exposure to these episodes in history.