Les Kelloucq en voyage

A Franco-American photography blog with an interesting twist.

Deux photographes se répondent sur un blog commun, baptisé Même heure, quelque part ailleurs.

Today is the last day of school. The last few days have been a blur of school events, including the “kermesse”, the school fair, and various demonstrations or award ceremonies for after-school activities. We probably entered the school grounds more often in the last two weeks than in the rest of the year (and certainly sipped more glasses of wine there than we normally do!).

 

Today feels like a significant ending. Not only because we are leaving Paris for a while. Emmanuel is graduating from primary school and he is officially admitted into the first year of “college”, our version of junior high school, even though he will not be going of course. He had a great year with a wonderful, enthusiastic teacher and he steadly improved and matured during the past year, finishing his run at Jussienne with excellent grades. Gabriel’s teacher is retiring, another ending though it is more significant for her. Still it is an interesting feeling, at least for us as parents, to “retire” a teacher.

 

We are ready for a summer of activities, time in my hometown, a week in a horse-drawn carriage (roulotte), a quick visit to Germany and some packing and last-minute home improvement projects before we take off for California in mid-August.

Avez-vous entendu parler du Tour de France des détenus? Il s’est terminé le 19 juin sans fanfare. Il m’aurait complètement échappé si HiC, notre ami américain et francophile, ne m’avait mis la puce à l’oreille. C’est parfois étonnant ce que les média étrangers choisissent de raconter sur un pays. Cet événement sportif un peu particulier, neuf détenus et neuf surveillants à vélo pour 2 300 kilomètres pendant une quinzaine de jours, a été relativement passé sous silence.

 

Je ne suis pas la personne la mieux informée de France : je ne regarde jamais le JT, j’écoute peu la radio surtout depuis que RFI est en grève, je ne lis pas assez souvent la presse papier. Heureusement qu’il y a Internet où je picore à droite et à gauche. Mais en tout cas, je ne suis jamais tombée sur un reportage sur cette première où le peloton devait pourtant compter moins de gens utilisant des substances illicites que LE Tour de France. Certes, en cherchant, on trouve quelques articles, ici ou là. Mais le Tour de France des détenus n’a pas la Une. Et pourtant il est presque plus visible que le cyclisme féminin. C’est pour dire à quel point les femmes sont ignorées par la « petite reine » !

 

Bon, il n'est pas encore vraiment là, le summertime, malgré le calendrier. Ca caille un peu à Paris. Soleil, nuage, vent. Alors, on a encore plus besoin d'Ella Fitzgerald pour nous faire rêver à un été chaud et voluptueux. Dommage, mais il faudra cliquer sur ce lien pour que la vidéo s'affiche : www.youtube.com/watch

The other day, we went for a picnic at the Palais Royal with an American couple we had been introduced to over email by a friend in California (you know who you are). This was the second time in a short while we were sharing our beloved Palais Royal with an American family. It was market day at Saint-Eustache that day, so we picked up some olives, charcuterie, bread, cheese, fruit as well as some dessert at Stohrer for good measure. When we got there, all the chairs around the fountain as well as the benches in the small enclosed areas were taken. So we grabbed a bench under the lime trees and started spreading out our picnic. Gabriel was our spotter and started finding chairs as they became free. Soon enough, we had enough chairs for all of us to sit and one more to put down our stuff. We arranged them in the circle in the sun and were enjoying our picnic, chatting away without a care in the world.

 

Then a French woman came up to our group and asked us, in English, if she could have one of our chairs. We responded, in French, that we were using them all and that there were chairs becoming available all the time if she could just wait a few minutes. The exchange quickly became sour and she stormed off, threatening to get the guards. At the Palais Royal gardens, the guards are extremely discreet and rarely seen. But this woman clearly knew where to hunt them down because she came back a little while later with not one, not two, but three guards!

 

They gave us a lecture about sharing the chairs and about the fact that, technically, they were for sitting and not for use as tables. After a couple minutes of this conversation, I got up, cleared up the chair we were using at the table, cleaned it up a bit theatrically with a napkin (I guess I could not just give her my chair, that would have been too simple) and gave it to the woman. That was the end of that. I was a bit flustered, but our guests later said they enjoyed the evening, including the little episode with the woman. I guess French is so beautiful, even an argument still sounds good.

 

A couple minutes later, another woman who had been sitting close by came over to us. She told us that she had considered giving up her chair to the woman when she first asked us for one of ours because she was thinking of leaving. But she had actually decided to stay a little longer just because she felt the woman was being very aggressive and petty about the whole thing. That testimony made us feel a little better and comforted us in the idea that we had not acted that unreasonably and that the woman had indeed been a bit unreasonable herself. I sincerely hope that she enjoyed her time in the park even though, by the time she wrestled a chair out of us, the sun was getting low and it was about time people started leaving the gardens. The fact is that she could have enjoyed herself much longer if she had just waited a couple minutes for somebody to get up. But maybe part of the fun for her was making a fuss and getting all self-righteous about a silly chair.

Grande séance de thérapie de groupe hier soir sur Facebook pour les déçus de la grève chez Tests. Trois jours de grève et de mobilisation pour finalement pas grand-chose, surtout pour les pigistes qui se font encore malmener. La petite ironie est que, dans la journée, j’avais été contactée par une personne qui fait une émission pour BFM (en externe, parce que c’est super d’avoir pleins de prestataires et peu d’employés). Elle avait repéré mon billet sur la vie privée et voulait que je participe. Le hic est que BFM et Groupe Tests ont le même propriétaire. Refuser a fait un peu de bien à mon égo, même si c’est franchement comme de pisser dans un violon.

 

Mais, je ne veux pas être négative à 100%. EJ a joué du pinceau le week-end dernier et notre cuisine est toute jolie. Un peu de couleur dans cette ambiance noire-grise.

AG chez Tests ce matin, nouvelle manif, écriture de tracts et de slogans. Un peu de boulot dans l'après-midi, histoire de. Puis AG d'immeuble (ô, joie). Enfin soirée très sympa avec des collègues d'EJ. Une conclusion festive à une journée de tensions.

  I have been dropping hints (in French ? in English?) about my longest-running employer’s plans for a layoff. There are 38 jobs at stake as well as a drastic – and to us, unacceptable – way to reorganize how the newsrooms work in that publishing group. Since French law considers ongoing freelance reporters as regular employees, a company which wants to stop giving us work has to let us go with a severance package just as any employee. The severance package is obviously based on our revenues with that company and how long we have working there. In my case here, 12 years! Yes, it is about money and loss of revenue. But it is also about loyalty to people I have known for years and about respect for the work we do together.

 

In keeping with French tradition, the employees are putting up a stink about the planned layoffs and negotiating hard to change the rules announced by the owner. In the final days of the negotiation process, this has meant a strike and a demonstration this morning to put some pressure on the company’s negotiators. I know this will sound unbelievable to any American reader unfamiliar with French labor relations. In any case, as an elected representative of freelancers in that company for the past three years, I was pounding the pavement and waving my homemade sign this morning in the fine June rain. And I will be back there tomorrow morning for a general meeting where the employees will decide what steps to take next.