The French

I read Ian Wylie in the Saturday Guardian of 11th August. The Saturday Guardian is a wonderful institution in our house. It arrives early and I break the back of the Sport Guardian and Guide before getting up. The rest of the paper and supplements are then read more slowly over the rest of the weekend. The Travel Supplement has become very important to me (see previous blog) but I do enjoy the other supplements such as Work, which is where I found the article by Ian Wylie.

His opening paragraph caught my attention:"I'm a relatively simple bloke who prefers routine and finds summer holidays a little bit unsettling. July and August are hazy days of uncertainty..."

That certainly neatly sums up me as well. He goes on, though, to talk about life and holidays in France. Now the Best Beloved and I (with the two girls when they were younger) used to do annual camping pilgrimages to France. There was a time when I toyed with the idea of a holiday home or even moving to France to live - greatly encouraged by the example of our good friends, the Cattermoles. However, in the end, I decided I couldn't live without the Bench theatre, London theatre (and Chichester has much improved in recent years under Jonathan Church in particular) and the cinema. The Best Beloved said we could emigrate if we could take everyone we loved to live together in the same village.

Back to Ian Wylie's article, where he says (France has) "a civilised culture, which encourages people to work sensible hours, eat meals without haste and spend time with their families. The law forbids employees to work more than 35 hours a week. Overtime is flatly forbidden and French workers are guaranteed mandatory holidays of up to six weeks."

This "economic suicide" or resistance to globalisation is being demolished by the new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, who is much taken by the Tony Blair/George Bush look or approach.

However "a new study of working hours .........offers statistical evidence that working fewer hours makes the French happier, despite the loss of income."

It seems to me that we constantly harp on about the unhappy state of our society in this country and yet we go along with the dictats of global business which cares not a toss about the social fabric of our nation or any other. Our government(s) are weak and lily livered when it comes to action and spend too much time faffing around with the small detail rather than looking at the basic issue. Our leaders seek others to blame rather than real and lasting solutions.

Another Saturday Guardian article (this week's edition) was a plea by an IT professor for greater thought and care to be taken over the development and use of autonomous weapons or robot soldiers if you like. We are getting to the situation where these creations will be independent of a human operator. The professor says that these autonomous weapons are not bright enough to be even called stupid. I would love to have been able to use that in some of the reports I have had to write over the years - not bright enough to be called stupid. Yet these robot soldiers will be used in the not too distant future perhaps to ease the number of body bags coming out of situations like Iraq and Afghanistan - but what hearts and minds will be won in the besieged countries then?

Final thought for the moment on Afghanistan. Don't politicians or military leaders read history? The British Empire had more than one or two bloody encounters with the Afghans. The Empire was the technological heavy weight of its time but was unable to subdue that region. History proves that nothing has changed - and nothing has been learned!