Political correctness gone mad

Good line from a Christopher Brookmyre book Jane is reading:

“And there it was, the line he’d known would be along soon enough: ‘Political correctness gone mad.’ [He] had referred to it in a column recently as ‘ the distress cry of the thwarted bigot.’ Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of ‘a victory for common sense’, which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the last ten thousand years evolving away from.”

Christopher Brookmyre, Be My Enemy

Collected Essays, by George Orwell (part48)

Orwell on Tolstoy’s hostility to Shakespeare:

“[As a puritan, Tolstoy] could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can’t you sit still like I do?” In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.”

and

“One docs not necessarily get rid of [a violent] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one’s native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.”

An evening in Paris

A wonderful evening with Jane in Paris this evening, while Liz sat the kids back at the hotel. Since 2003, every August, Paris has set up a beach environment on the right bank of the Seine, called Paris Plage. It’s a wonderful idea, particularly for this city, which half depopulates on 1 August, and Jane and I had a good beer in a beach cafe overlooking the Île de la Cité, before wandering on to the Pont des Arts. It was full of picnicking couples and families – not sure whether they’d been drawn there by Paris Plage – and we bought a couple of cold beers from a passing beer seller, and enjoyed the view down the river.

Finally, we headed for a glass of extraordinarily expensive, but wonderful, wine in the brasserie Le Pré aux Clercs at 30 Rue Bonaparte in the 6e, and the evening was rounded off with a crêpe complet at the stand outside the St. Germain des Prés metro stop.

Travel notes: Paris

More spots around Paris:

Eating:

Le Beaupré brasserie, av. de Suffren, near the Eiffel Tower: adequate bistro, with overfriendly staff a bit too ready to try English, German, Italian, etc. on foreign-looking visitors. Thanks, but we do speak French.
Chez Paul, Rue de Charonne, 11e.: Excellent and very traditional French bistro – with one (1) vegetarian option on a huge menu. Tom tried snails and steak tartare.

Shopping:

Galerie Kara, 24 Rue St. Louis en l’Isle: Lovely jewellers in the swish Île St. Louis, with some great necklaces. Email galeriekara at hotmail dot com.

Travel notes: Chambéry

One evening in Chambery, capital of Savoie, en route from Verona to Paris. It was quite a pleasant spot – our soulless but comfortable hotel, the Mercure, was right opposite the railway station. I got the feeling, wandering round in search of food, that there were a lot of people having fun somewhere, but just somewhere else. I found a ‘pub’ – complete with beer and signs, confusingly in English, and had a Savoyard speciality called (I think) a tartine, which was a sort of ham-cheese-potato concoction. Nice, but not very summery.

The rail journey down from Chambery to Lyon was just beautiful, through cloudy mountains and high meadows. Nearby is Evian-les-Bains, home of that water.