La Place Jean Macé, Lyon

La Place Jean Macé is one of my favourite places in Lyon, which is just as well as I see it most days whilst out and about. Just outside the city centre, It is situated on the site of what used to be a military barracks-fort back in the 1800's before it was demolished.

When I moved to Lyon 15 years ago it was a rather quiet and nondescript place with just a couple of run-down bars and old shops, but it has since been transformed into the city's third-biggest transport hub after the Part Dieu and Perrache centres. Buses, trains, trams and the metro all run through it today, as do major roads, and the Place Jean Macé is now a thriving and bustling area which welcomes many thousands of people each day.

The resulting increase in the number of shops, bars, restaurants, transport options and services means that I regularly eat, drink, shop, bank and travel through the Place Jean Macé, so I thought I'd share a few photos I took of it in the evening, as it was preparing to bed down for the night...

Blue is the predominant colour at and around the new overhead railway station.

Yup, that's blue. Unless I'm colourblind, that is blue...

 

The 19th century arches leading to the station have had a facelift

 

Lyon as it was at the time of the revolution

There's a tramway too, and a bar, both conveniently situated just next to the railway station.

Trams, trains, food and drinks. Blue too.

A tram and a trainline. Blue. Again.

And the bar's neon is also...BLUE!

...as is, of course, the lighting in my favourite bar

But it's not all blue of course. Here's the elegant Avenue Jean Jaures, which runs through the square, here on green..

Heading home by car, at the end of the day

Yellow, anyone?

If I was any good at Photoshop I'd get rid of that car-thingy

And here's some yellow, blue, and red all at once.

This would look completely different without the trees...

The Place Jean Macé gets ready to sleep at the end of the day. The streets and bars below beautiful building facades are now emptying...

Bonne soirée messieurs et mesdames

....and the children, sleeping now, will be back tomorrow to play on the slide in the playground in front of the Mairie..

Kids here are tough. They slide down elephant's tusks!

Have a good evening everyone....

France's 'race' and 'terrorist' issues highlight the failure of laïcité and social policy

A group of laïcists brush off social issues with a smile

Here are the headlines of the eight articles which were to be found, one after the other, at the top of the Figaro website homepage at 11:30 this morning;

Prasquier: a warmongering Islam is developing
Terrorism: Manuel Valls promises more arrests
Do you fear an increase in terrorist acts by Islamists in France? (poll, with over 80% of 'yes' votes as I type)
Valls: these terrorist networks are within our communities
Bruguière: Muslim proselytes are the most dangerous
Twelve apprentice Jihadists ready to die as martyrs
The Jews of Sarcelles refuse to give in to fear
CRIF: Radical Islamism is Nazism (CRIF = Representative Council of Jewish organisations in France.)

These articles and more were posted over the last 24 hours and they all concern issues related to weekend raids on alleged jihadists in various cities by anti-terrorist police which resulted in twelve arrests and the death of one suspect, who was shot after he opened fire on police officers who wanted to arrest him. Those arrested are suspected of being implicated in a grenade attack on a kosher grocery store which took place in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles on September 19.

Although the other French papers did not put quite as much emphasis on the story as Le Figaro did they all ran prominent coverage and analysis by various experts and former terrorist police chiefs. In what is being interpreted as a riposte to the arrests, drive-by shooters fired blanks at a synagogue, also in Paris, on Saturday evening which prompted President Hollande to meet urgently with CRIF representatives to reassure them and promise increased police protection for "religious sites".

The fact that France is preoccupied with these events to this exaggerated degree may surprise some but this situation has been brewing for months, as anyone who follows race and terrorist issues in France will attest, with each week bringing its lot of race and terrorist-related articles and pronouncements by politicians.

The Mohammed Merah affair, in which a young French-Algerian man who described himself as an Islamic terrorist shot and killed seven people and seriously wounded several others during three attacks in March, shocked the country. Three of the victims were off-duty soldiers and most of the remaining victims were Jewish. He was killed after a 30-hour siege.

The story dominated the press for many weeks, but it has since been overtaken in importance by a slew of more recent race/terrorist-related incidents and statements.

Jean-François Copé, candidate for the presidency of the right-of-centre UMP, has been quite busy stoking the fires of racial tensions in France over the last few weeks. He caused outrage a while back with the assertion that "anti-white racism" existed in predominantly immigrant areas of cities and he was even rounded on by his own party.

Undeterred however, last week saw him back in the headlines with a statement in which he said that young thugs (read Muslim thugs) steal food from other children on the pretext that "you mustn't eat during Ramadan."

Other headlining stories over the last month or two include that of the Charlie Hebdo Mohamed cartoons, which led to outbreaks of vandalism and attacks on Jewish-owned or run property amid vain calls by Muslim community leaders asking people to remain calm. The Chief Rabbi in Lyon received death threats and elsewhere three Jewish men were attacked with a hammer and iron bars.

Front National leader Marine le Pen predictably joined in by foolishly falling into a cheap journalistc trap laid by a journalist from Le Monde and saying that kippas should be banned in public. This caused a furor for days. Also, October 4th marked the 10th anniversary of the murder of Sohane Benziane, a 17-year-old girl who was covered in petrol and burned alive in a storage room for rubbish bins in a high-rise building in Vitry-sur-Seine in affair involving family honour. This crime has become synonymous here with sexist attacks by men in immigrant communities and their perceived machism.

These and other stories have been given prominent press coverage for months and the culminating effect is very bad news for France, particularly given that the country has the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe. But what could possibly have led to this situation in a country which prides itself on its multiculturalism?

France's social fabric is defined and underpinned by its strong secular principles, called 'laïcité', the idea of which is to ensure that religion and religious considerations come second to the idea that, whatever one's origins, one is French first. The system arguably worked well while Catholicism was massively predominant, but that changed after the Algerian War when large-scale immigration from Algeria began and was increased in scope with the worldwide phenomena of increased immigration in general.

The result is that France now has a large and varied immigrant population, many of whom live in poorer areas on the outskirts of cities, where unemployment is rife. Racial tensions have been simmering for years and anti-immigrant racism has become commonplace. The post 9/11 era has exacerbated the situation, as have the Arab Spring conflicts, and Jews have become the scapegoat for the frustrations of a tiny minority of disaffected Muslims, more and more of whom have gone overseas for jihad training, inspired by terrorist attacks and a desire for revenge.

But the situation is much the same in Britain, which has its own problems with immigration and home-grown terrorists so the fact that France has these problems to deal with too does not in itself explain the country's current fever-pitch obsession with all things racial and terrorist.

This is because France is slowly waking up to the realisation that the principles of laïcité are becoming irrelevant, and fast. They were not designed with the current situation in mind, a situation which sees large populations of immigrants living together. They were designed as a colonialist 'we're all French together' sop to its overseas territories, including Algeria, and not as a means of social integration in France, which is why all efforts to apply it have ended in failure.

Nor was laïcité meant to help combat inequalities and societal problems, even more so given that it was precisely the idea of laïcité that contributed much to France's disastrous integration policies, which have led to the development of sprawling immigrant ghettos. These policies have led to the alienation of many young immigrants and the increase in what is erroneously termed 'Salafist' tendencies within their ranks. France now has 12,000 Salafists on its territory according to French intelligence agencies

Poverty, unemployment, a sentiment of abandon and a refusal based on the principle of laïcité to tackle head-on the problems facing individual immigrant communities ('we are all French so there is no racism and thus no problem to resolve') has created a major social crisis.

Those who commit Antisemitic acts and those intent on pursuing terrorism must be punished severely, but until France admits that it has serious social problems and begins to address them instead of hiding behind the fig-leaf of laïcité the situation will only get worse. France's problem is not one of racism and terrorism, it is the direct result of the country's failure to integrate its immigrants.

A time-bomb of hate and resentment is ticking away in France, and it's time France began to try and defuse it before it's too late.

Hollande and the French government's U-turn on the 'cumul des mandats'

So I lied. Waddya gonna do about it huh?

The French political system is a complex mix of institutional relationships which tie local government to national government and one of the most important cogs in the wheel is that of the 'cumul des mandats' - or multiple-office holding by politicians.

This practice means that parliamentary politicians may also hold local office at the same time, with over 80% of them doing so. They may be both mayors and senators, députés and general council presidents, EU parliament members and mayors and other combinations. It is possible in some circumstances to hold up to four different paid mandates at once. The widespread use of the cumul des mandats makes France unique in Europe given that in other countries the average number of 'cumulards' - politicians holding dual or even more office - is less than 10%.

Unsurprisingly, polls have consistently shown over the years that the vast majority of French citizens would like to see the system abolished, claiming that it results in a concentration of power in the hands of a small elite of politicians who control both local and national policy decisions, with the result that local political opposition is stifled by national interests as well as the personal interests of those politicians concerned.

Voters have long complained that their députés, mayors or other elected representatives are too often absent from their posts, leading to inefficiency, and that the opportunities that the system offers to those who would be tempted into corruption are rife. France is run by a relatively small group of notables who use their local influence to help their national careers and vice-versa, thus becoming a sort of permanent caste. Those députés serving as mayors in major cities and towns are very powerful people as they are able to pressurise their governments into more funding for projects for their cities as well as offering the party in power on a national level an unprecedented amount of financial support during election campaigns, which means that opposing candidates are unable to compete on equal terms.

The increase in voter discontent with the cumul des mandats over the years has led to several leading politicians on both left and right promising to have it abolished if they are elected, but once in power their promises are quickly forgotten, with the inevitable result that opposing parties cry the usual crocodile tears in public whilst being secretly happy that their dual mandates - along with their dual salaries and political influence - are safe.

Hopes were high therefore when François Hollande, supported by many senior members of the Socialist party, loudly promised during his election campaign that things would be different under him and that he would abolish the practice. Rank-and-file members were happy and so must have been many undecided voters. The socialists even issued a statement saying that whilst waiting for a law to be drawn up and voted the socialists would unilaterally divest themselves of excess mandates, adding that its parliamentary members had until yesterday, October 1, to resign from other mandates.

But it was not to be. Howls of protest began to be heard in lower parliamentary ranks as soon as the elections had ended and some députés, now safe in their seats although silent before they were elected, went on TV to express their opposition to the plan. And the 'resign-by' date? The official line is now that it was just a simple "appeal" and not an injunction. There was no cut-off date. It never existed.

The result is that out of 234 socialist députés who had more than one mandate at the beginning of September, only 11 resigned from their excess mandate. Also, out of the 577 députés from all parties who were elected in June 439 hold at least a double mandate, and 33 of them hold four.

François Hollande has quite simply done a U-turn on a key election promise and his cynical exploitation of popular opinion means that French politics on both a national and local level remains in the hands of a few.

The cumul des mandats system means that most French politicians and ministers cannot fully represent those who elected them at either local or government level and absenteeism from the National Assembly and town halls is widespread. The fact that 439 députés hold more than one mandate means that they have reserved hundreds of local mandates for themselves, thus excluding younger politicians and more women. This is stifling the renewal of the polical class whilst leaving ever more ageing politicians in power, to the point where more than half of all députés are now of pensionable age.

But perhaps the most unfair aspect of this system is that it is those very politicians who hold several mandates and who have every reason - political, financial, business and others - to want to maintain the status quo are the only people who could ever change it.

François Hollande may have been on a hiding to nothing in promising to abolish the cumul des mandates, but he knew that full well when he uttered his election promise. He deliberately misled the French people, who now have yet another good reason to believe that their politicians, including himself, are a self-serving elite.

Plus ça change....

Copé's shabby "anti-white racism" jibe

Copé opts for an insincere 'I'm a serious person' pose for the camera.

France has been feverishly debating leading UMP member Jean-François Copé's declaration that "anti-white racism" is a reality in France and that it is to be condemned just as anti-anyone-else racism is to be condemned. His remark was widely believed to target Muslims and blacks as he alleged that anti-white racism was common in 'les cités' - large council housing estates, mostly on the outskirts of French cities, which are heavily populated by Muslims and blacks.

He is right on the face of it of course. Anti-white sentiment does exist within those communities, even if it only concerns a small minority of their members, and I have experienced it myself as have many other white-skinned people. But Copé's declaration is highly misleading as it deliberately implies that whites suffer from the same racism as those of immigrant origin do.

Copé has obviously taken a leaf out of the far-right Front National's official policy handbook, which tries to minimise anti-immigrant racism by saying that it has its equivalent in the form of anti-white racism.

But who has ever heard of a white person who was refused a job interview because of his name or colour? When was a white person ever refused entry to a night club because he was white? Whoever refused to rent an apartment to a white person on grounds of racial origin? And I have never heard of houseowners refusing to sell their property to white people either. How many white people get stopped and searched by the police?

France has a population of around 6 million  immigrant-origin inhabitants - both legal and illegal - representing just under 10% of the total population. But they are almost non-existent in the French parliament, in boardrooms and management, in banks and finance, and they are highly unlikely to be found in the upper ranks of the police, the legal profession and many more.

The plain fact is that these population groups are far more likely to be poor and unemployed, or in badly-paid jobs, and many of them live in poor quality housing. Yet successive governments of both the right and left have done little to tackle anti-immigrant sentiment, let alone the endemic anti-immigrant discrimination which exists in many sections of French society and bars immigrants from many jobs and opportunities.

Jean-François Copé is a highly experienced politician, having served as a government spokesman under Jean-Pierre Raffarin and others before going on to do a stint as Budget minister and being the UMP's parliamentary spokesman. As such, he must have known that his slanted statement would make the headlines.

Most senior members of the UMP have, however, been very circumspect when asked for comment, and none has given him a clear thumbs-up, indicating that they consider that supporting Copé would lose them support amongst rank-and-file UMP members who shall shortly be asked to vote for their next president. The candidates are François Fillon and Copé himself, but his ill-advised anti-white racism comment may well turn out to be the nail that closed the coffin on any hopes he may have had of winning.

I think Copé seriously miscalulated the effect that his words would have on his near-term political future. All his declaration has done is to move his wing of the UMP further towards the extreme right, inflame public sentiment and throw oil on the fire of France's racial tensions. He shall surely, and quite deservedly, be made to pay for it.

The Sarkozy comeback: not if it will happen, but when?

"Shall I kill myself politically?" "NOOO!!" screamed his adoring fans

They began as wishful thinking by disappointed political allies of Nicolas Sarkozy after his defeat before slowly and cautiously creeping into the the inside pages of the press, but there can be no doubt left today that the rumours which began three months ago have now turned into a plausible scenario - that in which Sarkozy returns to politics to lead the French right into battle at the next presidential election.

Nicolas Sarkozy's defeat at the hands of François Hollande coupled with his decision to abandon politics led to much anguished hand-wringing within the ranks of the UMP, and a couple of opportunists even expressed their pleasure at his departure before declaring themselves as early candidates for the UMP's upcoming leadership battle on a platform along the lines of 'I'll put right what Sarkozy got wrong.'

Sarkozy's name was barely mentioned for a while unless it was used to express a desire to move on from the Sarkozy era, but his former Chief of Staff Claude Guéant, faithful as ever to his boss' cause, soon began to float the idea of a possible return. He was followed by several others, including - and oddly enough given that he was a fierce opponent of Sarkozy during his presidency - Dominique de Villepin. He declared on French TV in August that he believed Sarkozy would be back, adding that "Today, both the right and the left are writing a plausible and absolutely extraordinary scenario for him which is just incredible. The French are very fond of these situations."

Indeed they are, and it is perhaps this penchant for unlikely comebacks and underdog situations that could lead them to consider voting for Sarkozy in a few years, because there is now a lot of circumstantial and real evidence that although he is staying away from active politics at the moment his troops have placed him at the centre of the party's affairs.

My first-coffee-of-the-day tour of French news sites this morning turned up some interesting poll results which reveal that 44% of those polled think that presidential action would have been better if Nicolas Sarkozy had been elected, with only 26% supporting the work of François Hollande. This poll is one of several which ask the same kind of questions and come up with the same answers, and they show without a doubt that there is still a lot of public support for Sarkozy.

Discussion of the rumours of a Sarkozy resurrection are now an everyday occurence in the French press, and much of it is centred upon whether or not he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes of the current UMP leadership battle being fought between favourites François Fillon and Jean-François Copé, both of whom are faithful Sarkozysts. There is no proof of his implication but there is no doubt either that he is now an omnipresent factor in the fight to win the UMP's presidency, which will be decided on November 18, and several of the early candidates explained their retirement from the race by saying that they were doing so to help Sarkozy by leaving two of his most influential supporters to fight it out.

It is telling too that neither candidate is campaigning on a platform to take the party away from Sarkozy's policies. On the contrary, both of them make almost daily declarations of faith to Sarkozy in order to please the many Sarkozysts within the voting militants' ranks, and UMP heavyweight Christian Estrosi recently announced his backing for Fillon whilst at the same time declaring that Sarkozy is still the "natural leader" of the UMP and that if a presidential election were to be held now Sarkozy would win it.

Guéant agrees with this of course, and he told reporters on Sunday that Sarkozy could represent a good option for France. He went on to say that if Sarkozy were to become the UMP's presidential candidate he would have to be elected as party leader too and he even exhorted him to contest November's election, although he left the door wide open for him to refuse by pointedly adding that the vote in November was not about electing a presidential candidate.

But perhaps the most pointed and obvious clue to date as to how UMP members are thinking came today from Nadine Morano, who was Sarkozy's Minister for Apprenticeship and Professional Formation. She has declared that she will support Copé in November because "...he has publicly asserted that if Nicolas Sarkozy decided to get back into politics he would support him." The message couldn't be more clear, particularly as she added that it was by no means certain that the next leader of the UMP would be its presidential candidate.

And what does Sarkozy himself have to say about all this? The answer, of course, is nothing. He cannot be seen to be actively influencing the vote, but his silence on the many stories concerning his possible return are a clear sign that he is not denying them in order to keep those within the UMP who may criticise him in check from a distance via their fear of reprisals should he return.

He is also aware that none of this speculation is good news for François Hollande or his government. He had the lowest poll ratings of any president in the 5th Republic after three months in office, and the French are becoming increasingly impatient with what they see as his lack of action, notably on the economy. Unemployment has hit 3 million for the first ever time and there are several major layoffs in the pipeline in major industries and companies. This means that he is hardly in a position, so far, to be able to dismiss the possibility of the eventual return of Sarkozy with an absent wave of the hand by citing progress made under himself, of which there has as yet been precious little.

Despite his physical absence from political life, it is as if Sarkozy never left politics in the first place. Almost all of his former ministers have openly backed him recently, the future party leader may turn out to be no more than a caretaker, and he is being openly touted as a future presidential option after being out of office for only a few months. If Sarkozy has in fact secretly decided to make a political comeback, and as Valentin Spitz put it for Nouvelobs, "..he knows that the most urgent thing to do is wait in order to allow Fillon and Copé to rip each other to pieces and Hollande to mess things up."

Nicolas Sarkozy once said that his decision to run for president in 2007 (and win) was taken while he was taking a shave two years earlier, and although there are relatively few recent photos of him my money says that he is still shaving.....

French Language vs English Anglicisms

I see this abomination several times a week, merde!

The French language has always been held in very high esteem in France, and quite rightly so. It's an elegant and highly expressive language and it sounds like music to these English ears. French is considered to be part of the country's heritage and it has a fierce watchdog to protect it. It's name? L'Académie Française.

The Academy decides which words, spellings, grammatical structures and other elements of the language may or may not be used and how, although it is difficult to keep up with all of its rulings as there are so many of them.

Another of the Academy's responsibilities is that of keeping foreign words from 'polluting' French, which it considers to be a 'pure' language, and I have an image of the French language, at least as the Academy sees it, as being besieged by would-be foreign invaders, which is why it is surrounded by virtual barbed-wire fences, booby traps and hundreds of hidden French-protecting nests of heavy machine guns which fire bullets charged not with explosives but with French grammar and spelling edicts and diktats.

Words from many countries have entered the language over the years, and some of them have been officially endorsed, but two of the biggest threats to French today are the use of texting language, which purists see as a threat to the correct use of French, and the massive infiltration of Anglicisms, which is becoming a major menace to its beauty.

Anglicisms have existed in French for many years of course, with words like 'weekend' and 'parking' (car park) being universally employed with little or no opposition, and the use of English is common practice in this globalised business world, but the last 15-20 years have seen a veritable tidal wave of Anglicisms flood over French shores from Britain and America, and into everyday French.

Some of them are relatively innocuous, although I realise that deciding which Anglicisms are acceptable or not is a subjective process. The French, like Anglophones, use 'un must' to designate something that is a must-do/see/read etc, computer terms such as scanner and mail/email are common and French TV has 'prime time' viewing hours. Another one which sits easily with me is the term 'gore' to describe gory photos.

But who could possibly find the slightest shred of elegance in the answer given earlier this year by potential French presidential candidate Martine Aubry to a journalist who asked about her capacity to be a good president? "Je serai capable de faire le job" she blurted clumsily, and it was at that precise moment that I and many others decided that she most decidedly wouldn't. Nobody needs a prez who can't speak French correctly.

You would most surely find that phrase if you googled it, and on the subject of Google, one paper once referred to the Internet giant as "une gigantesque cash machine." The paper was right in its analysis of course, but its use of French was very wrong indeed. What's wrong with the perfectly apt French equivalent - 'machine à sous'?

France has a deserved-or-not reputation of being a country which goes on perpetual strike, so how is it that they haven't yet developed their own strike vocabulary? One report I read reported  a strike and and its "250 salariés lockoutés" whereas another paper quoted a factory manager as saying that there would be no discussion with his striking staff until they called off the strike "..et le sit-in."

Not that members of the French national football team cared, because sporting paper L'Equipe informed us that they had been given a "day off." Oh, so no 'journée de repos' then. Another profession which gets lots of days off is teaching. Teachers in France sometimes feel hard done by, and they once criticised a set of reform proposals by declaring that teachers were "..la génération crash-test."

Maybe you were hoping that international news about serious issues may be spared, but if you were, you were unfortunately mistaken. The damage done by the devastating 2004 tsunami, we were informed at the time, meant that "..le Tohoku risque de devenir un no man's land." Meanwhile, diplomats and NGO's concerned with the Ivory Coast troubles were desperately trying to create "..corridors humanitaires" to help people caught up in the fighting. Bernard Kouchner was also busy being a "go-between" in another conflict.

I hear and read Anglicisms every day, and most of them are downright ugly. Here are a few examples, overheard in cafés and bars. A lady who had trouble at work decided that she would "faire du low profile", two men on a terrace were joined by a third who announced that he had had a "power breakfast" at work that morning, and what of the teenage girl who told a friend that she was fed up with a friend who was forever going on about "her life." Yes, you guessed right, it means the perfectly fitting French word for word equivalent of 'sa vie.'

Flea market, le rush, être busy, trôp de work, faire du shopping, faire un brushing, make-up, porter des baskets, des jeans' (yup, with an apostrophe), bad, the ever-present cool, un life-saver, the list is long and it's getting longer every day.

The Academy is quite rightly outraged at the excessive use of Anglicisms, not only because the French language contains perfectly adequate equivalents in the vast majority of cases, but also because their use is ruining the sonority of the language.

That said, some of the more vociferous opponents of Anglicisms are quite wrong to blame the phenomenon on Anglophones. After all, nobody is holding a gun to French heads to insist that they use Anglicisms. On the contrary, almost all Anglophones I know who have connections with France and its language are just as unhappy with the situation as are the French themselves.

I blame fashion. Anglicisms are seen as hip and cool here, as is Anglo-Saxon culture as a whole (see this blog), and they are to be found in TV ads and on ad hoardings everywhere because marketing specialists know that they sell product, particularly to people under 40. T-shirts are full of English would-be witticisms ("I'm available, are you?") and fashion magazines are jam-packed with them. They are everywhere to be seen, even on municipal buildings, like the one here in Lyon in the photo above.

Perhaps the most important question concerns whether or not the tide can be turned. It unfortunately seems that the globalised world has had a major impact on the French language and that is to be regretted, but, at the end of the day, the only people who can do anything about the situation are...the French themselves.

Anglicisms are the gauntlet that English has thrown down, but if the French language is to survive as the beautiful language it has always been, France, the French and their language have no choice but to pick it up.

Psst...don't say anything, but London and Britain are much loved by the French

A brilliant photo of a boozer just behind Victoria station, taken by yours truly

How times change. Remember the Eighties and Nineties, when Ireland, and the Republic in particular, was all the rage among young French people? Quite the phenomenon it was, what with Irish pubs springing up all over France like four-leaved clovers and Guinness accounting for what must have been the majority of all liquid transported by ships plying the waters between Ireland and France.

Countless thousands of young French people made the almost obligatory pilgrimage to Ireland at that time, with most of them coming back to France carrying green 'Kiss Me I'm Irish' teddy bears and nursing massive hangovers to regale all and sundry with wide-eyed and breathy tales of how wonderful it was and how welcoming the Irish people were. Some of the praise was rather overly-gushing in my view, but I did manage to refrain from bursting their bubble with the rather more prosaic truth about the Irish, which is that, following the age-old principle of 'my enemy's enemies are my friends', the Irish love anyone with whom they can agree that Albion is a perfidious and treacherous kingdom.

All that seems rather quaint and long ago now though, and the number of young people visiting Ireland has withered and shrunk during the last decade, much like the Irish economy. Ireland? That's so passé dahlink, because today's must-visit destination is England, and London in particular.

Britain's appeal began during the monopoly money-driven boom of the Nineties, which saw Britain's economy outstrip that of France. It resembled a race between a rabbit and a snail, with a vibrant Britain creating jobs like there was no tomorrow whereas unemployment rates - particularly youth unemployment rates - soared to new highs in France. Students began to cross the Channel in ever-increasing numbers to find work in bars, hotels and restaurants, and they were welcomed by their British bosses because of their willingness to work hard and their knowledge of these sectors.

Sure, the contracts were (and still are) short term ones in the main, and it is much easier to sack an employee in Britain than in France, but that didn't and still doesn't deter them, seeing as a) it's all very well having solid work contracts in theory, but they mean nothing if there are no jobs to be had and, b), if it is easier to sack people in the UK, it is also easier to change jobs or find another one if laid off.

The Shard: it's big, it's pointy and it's shiny. (My pic)

At the same time French people began to believe that Britain is more dynamic than France. London is a very attractive option for younger people because it is much more exciting than French cities, which are more parochial in style and less exuberant in lifestyle. This is particularly true of Paris vis-à-vis London. Buildings spring up seemingly from one day to the next in British cities and it is by no means rare to find a black glass and steel structure next to, say, a church. France however does not work this way, and getting a permit to build even a garden shed, never mind a new office block, is almost impossible in Paris as well as some other places because of stringent planning laws designed to protect French historical culture and heritage.

One key element of Britain's appeal to French people is its social life, which young French people find to be very much more adapted to having fun and meeting new people than the rather more staid fare on offer in France. British pub and night life is renowned here for its animated and youth-oriented tendencies, which is why it is very favourably compared to the more reserved and restrained offer to be found in France. My French niece has just got back from a year in a college in London and she already misses the vivacity of life in England. She swears that she will go back to London next year to live, and for good. It's the same story for my god daughter, who has visited England twice this year alone and loved every minute of it. They both like the bustling streets, the cosmopolitan feel and, of course, British fashion and...boys.

As time went by word got around in France that Britain was the place to be for motivated young people who wanted to further their careers, and thus it was that the 'brain drain' of talented French traders, marketing personnel and others began, a trend that Nicolas Sarkozy once famously bemoaned as proving that France needed to buck up its economic ideas. It also became apparent that there was less racism in British business culture because of the idea that it isn't one's colour which is important, it's one's ability to do one's job. This explains why many talented people of Maghrebi and Arab origin got the message and left France for London, never to return. Did the economic crisis burst the bubble? No. On the contrary, it increased its size due to a very morose France which could not push home the potential advantage it had gained at the expense of Britain's monopoly-money services disaster after the effects of the sub-prime crisis reached European shores.

St Pancras welcomes me. Oh, and the rest of the world too

Then came the respective Olympics bids by Paris and London, and the whole process was a disaster for the image of France among its young people. Whereas Britain's campaign centered upon colour, energy, the future, youth and vitality, France's effort was more like a faded and almost sepia-coloured dusty old homage to past French glories and the Republic than anything else. This disastrous PR failure was largely relayed in the press, and many began to consider that France had now become passéist and 'vieux jeu' - old fashioned.

Finally, the last few years have seen a massive uptick in the numbers of French people buying houses and apartments in England, and more and more businesses are either domiciling themselves in the UK or basing their senior staff there, where salaries are appreciably higher.

The result is that the number of French people who have registered themselves with the French embassy in London and the many consulates in other cities has doubled since 2007, and London, with its 400,000-strong French population, is now the sixth-biggest city of France in terms of population. And there's even a cherry on the cake. French savoir-faire and expertise in sectors such as design, video, creative IT and many others are much sought-after, as is the appeal of the many French-style shops selling everything from croissants and baguettes made by French bakers to authentic-looking cafés, many of which have French owners.

Back here in France there are many blogs and articles in praise of what is being seen as British dynamism and its forward-looking approach, both of which are considered to be a welcome antithesis to a France which, by its own admission, seems to be afraid of the future and is tending towards an inward-looking mindset.

But it isn't all one-way traffic. So popular has Britain become with France's young that it is no longer possible to walk for 10 minutes in a city centre here without seeing at least a couple of examples of the Union Jack flag. Highly distinctive and brightly-coloured, it is to be seen on everything from T-shirts to jeans, earrings to handbags, mobile phone covers to diaries and everything in between. My local shopping centre recently organised what it called a 'British week', with a 'so British' slogan and British products were be seen everywhere. Food, clothes, accessories, you name it, if it's British it can be bought in France.

So there it is. The Brits are just as bad as the French when it comes to moaning about the state of their country, but the fact is that, for now at least, Britain has many fans here in France, and it can be safely assumed that after Bradley 'le gentleman' Wiggins' Tour de France win coupled with the successful London Olympics (that even the French press found praise for), their numbers shall increase and more shall cross the Channel.

This trend is to be encouraged in my view, if only because it means that I no longer have to ask friends and family to send me good old British bangers and quality cheddar by post. All I have to do these days is ask some French person I know to bring them back with them when they come home for their sun-drenched holidays in the sun, the one thing that Britain cannot offer them...