Election Fever!

You know that an election is on its way when the council bulldozer, normally out of action for repairs caused by being unwise enough to start it up, is seen, not alone, but in company with the council road leveller, also usually hors de combat for similar reasons.

Not just seen as in passing the door of the council workshops…but working! Out on what are laughingly called the roads of the canton.

For the last three years the council has doughtily refused to waste public money on improving the roads….there are priorities, we are told. What those priorities might be has remained a closely guarded secret, save for a proposal to replace the current system of prowling traffic wardens with parking meters. Who is to provide these, and the relation of the firm to the sixth cousins once removed of current councillors also remains a mystery, as does the future of the current traffic wardens who must be related to someone to have got the job and so must be absorbed into the bosom of the council staff….probably to empty the meters, unless they introduce meters which only take bank cards as in San Jose, which is asking for trouble.

No! Mea culpa! I forgot…their staff have been repainting all the yellow lines in the town to improve traffic flow which was fine on the day the lines were painted and back to chaos the next day as there is little or no parking available in the centre. I solve the problem by making a small weekly contribution to the well being of the gentleman who looks after the parking lot of one of the supermarkets but most just park and hope that the traffic police don’t turn up with their crane and low loader….

A propos of parking, we have been investigating the process of having a handicapped sticker for the car…a process wrapped in mysteries like a Russian doll. I am convinced that you need a medical examination, from hints on the Ministry of Public Works website, but which institution for the handicapped delivers this remains obscure, given that their websites do not mention it and they do not answer e mails.

Seeing a gentleman sitting in a car with a handicapped sticker the other day I thought I would ask him how he went about getting it.

The process was simple, he informed me. I had to go to the MOGO print shop in town…turn right, then left and right again…and they would give me a photocopy of the sticker which would make life very simple.

The MOGO option sounds tempting….I wonder what the fine for having a false handicapped sticker might be…

Not that it is a great problem as yet…not here…but I notice that in San Jose the authorities are getting nasty with non stickered cars in handicapped parking areas so no doubt it will come here in time.

Still, roadworks are not the only sign of elections to come….the council have instituted rubbish collections for the outlying areas, not just in the town centre. We have received a leaflet detailing how to separate the rubbish into ordinary and recyclable, telling us which areas will be served…apparently on a Monday…but with no indication as to when it will start, so I suppose that we shall have to pin back our ears every Monday in the hope of hearing the dustcart’s loudhailer advertising its presence…

And, come to think of it, how come that the dustcart has emerged from hibernation, like a woolly mammoth emerging from the Siberian permafrost?

It could be because the council were threatened with an appearance before the Constitutional Court…but it might well be down to the elections.

As a friend said

‘We should elect the councils every year…that way we would get three months of action every year instead of every four years.’

Still, I bet the major political parties in the U.K. wish they only had to produce a dustcart to remove the menace of the Brexit Party and Nigel Farage in this week’s elections to the European Parliament…

Advertisement

After the Ball was Over….the European Elections

 

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National

 

Hello, Clement! Quiet evening, thank goodness.

Do you mean the European election results last night…..or the ruckus you had in here this afternoon?

Oh, that….! You think you’ve seen everything when you run a bar, but this beat the band! What can I get you?

Zizi tells me that you’ve managed to get something from Antoine….

Yes, I was lucky. He had a client who let him down….there you are……what do you think?

A good drop….you had a bit of luck getting his grolleau gris now it’s become fashionable!

Well, yes…fashionable…but the fashionable bastard from the fashionable Paris bistro who ordered it couldn’t pay up front and Antoine doesn’t do tick; well not to Parisians anyway…

Ah well, his loss our gain…..it’s getting to be something when you can’t get hold of decent wine because some blasted journalist comes down here on his holidays and puts his ‘friends’ in the know…

Well, as it turned out it was lucky for me…that’s a nice drop he makes.

So it is! Hang on…here’s Victor! The gendarmes let you out did they?

Hello, Victor! Glass of Antoine’s?

On the house I hope…all the custom I brought you today!

Custom! Don’t talk to me about custom! After his gorillas carted you lot off that obnoxious pest Malfrat was here sinking it as if there was no tomorrow!
Mark you, I gave him that stuff you offloaded onto me…your- what was it – biodynamite stuff that you were going to sell to the English…

Serve him right…enough to kill an ox, that stuff, even the English wouldn’t drink it….I don’t suppose he paid you….

Pay! He’s a gendarme! Don’t make me laugh!

Well,  all that will change once we get into power! No more swilling for Malfrat…and he can keep a civil tongue in  his head while he’s about it….I haven’t been called names like that since my time in the army!

Oh, no, Victor, please! That’s how it started this afternoon!

What do you mean…’when we get into power’….didn’t see your name on a ballot paper!

Of course you didn’t, Clement! I’m not standing for office at my age, and anyway I don’t want my tyres let down…let alone be forced to go to Belgium with all those foreigners…….No, our party, the Front National! And our lovely leader, Marine Le Pen, next President of France!

Oh, come on, Victor! Your lot only did so well because people couldn’t be bothered to go out to vote…come the real elections in 2017  it’ll be a different story! No one’s going to vote for a party that blames everything on immigrants!

Ho! Don’t you be so sure! That’s what Theo said this afternoon; typical know all communist that he is – always knows best. Well, as I said to him then and I say to you now, just you wait! People didn’t turn out this time because they know there’s nothing you can do about the European Union…the parliament members are just so much whitewash for the crooks and madmen running the place on our money…but the Presidential is the real one and all the people who are sick and tired of being taxed to the hilt to keep a bunch of freeloaders in foie gras will be out in force! Then you’ll see…which is what I said to Theo, but he wouldn’t have it.

That’s as may be, Victor, but you didn’t have to push his wheelchair outside and set it off down the hill…

Oh, he didn’t come to any harm…and it’s hardly a hill, just a slope down  to the Place d’Armes….and there’s no point trying to argue with him, he’s always right!

Well it’s hardly an advertisement for your party, is it…pushing old cripples down hills if they disagree with you! What about the rest of your party’s policies?

Unbeatable, mon pote! And a surefire election winner among them! Out of the Euro…just think about it! We’ll be able to use the francs we’ve been hiding in the mattresses all these years!

You haven’t still got francs in your mattress! Not even you, Victor….

Yes…I couldn’t work out a way of converting them all into euros at the changeover without the taxman getting wind of it or someone denouncing me and, anyway, I was sure the euro couldn’t last…and now I’ll be able to use them again! That’ll get the people out to vote, you see if it doesn’t!

But what about the racism…all the anti immigrant stuff…people won’t stand for that, you know…

What’s racist about saying that you can’t come to France and expect a free hand out? And you can’t say we’re prejudiced…if we pull out of the European Union all those English can go back where they came from too unless they can afford to pay their way…not just the Arabs and Africans from the colonies…

Bit much, that, Victor…having a go at the English because they wouldn’t buy your wine….

Look at them! Come over here, buy places you wouldn’t keep a respectable pig in and think they own the joint! Even stand for local councils! No more of that, I can tell you….France for the French!

But that’s absurd….and trying to get out of being called racist by lumping the English with Arabs just won’t wash!

See, I give you a reasoned argument and you come back with rubbish! Just like Theo when he came back this afternoon with his mates from the old peoples’ home. Mob handed they were…I told them it just showed the weakness of their arguments if they had to resort to violence…

Violence! Old boys in their eighties!

In their eighties they might be, Clement, and so’s Victor after all, but most of them were on the railways when we still had steam trains and they can handle themselves! It all started peaceably enough, having a go at Victor over a few glasses, but then he took offence when  Jerome called him a capitalist lackey and things got out of hand…

Capitalist lackey…better that than a lackey of Moscow and so I told him!

So you did, Victor, so you did…..and then Lionel whacked you in the shins with his crutch and you grabbed Jean-Michel’s zimmer frame and laid about you until you got it caught up in the coat rack and they were on to you! Pity the national rugby coach couldn’t have seen them…they’d do better in the scrum than the current lot…

And which spoil sport called the gendarmerie, I’d like to know! I was just getting my second wind when they burst in and trapped me behind the door! Nearly put the false teeth through the back of my neck! And as for being manhandled down to the paddy waggon…! No respect, that’s what! You’d think we were a bunch of Arabs in the Paris suburbs…though they’d never have dared come the old acid with them as there’d have been hell to pay! Half the bleeding hearts who live well away from the suburbs writing to the newspapers and looking disapproving on the television…

I tell you, come the revolution – I mean when we get into power –  there’ll be changes!