The view from the train :: 05:52 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon My trip on the Thalys (and corresponding wait in the Brussels-Midi train station thanks to striking Belgian train workers) gave me time to think about my penchant for long train journeys.

I went to and from school by train every weekend for six years, Dumfries to Glasgow. My list of "50 things to do before I am 50" contains four train journeys: take the Trans-Siberian to Beijing from St Petersburg, take the Blue Train, cross the US by train, and take the Orient Express. I've always liked train stations, watching the countryside dashing past, alighting in a new city just as it gets dark and seeing the bums and the businessmen striding along side by side. Don't get that in airports. Nasty, soulless places.

The summer of 2003 I was travelling around Europe in ancient, unairconditioned trains because my Interrail ticket only allowed me on non high-speed services. I got sunstroke twice, flashed twice, mildly sexually harassed in a shower, and the best tan I've ever had. I also read "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time a book about motive power as represented by trains, and realised I was a libertarian. I was "researching" open-air theatre across Europe - which gave me an excuse to go and see Radiohead perform in the bull-ring in Madrid.

It was a busy summer for France. The Avignon festival had been cancelled due to the strikes by the intermittants. France had a policy whereby people who worked in entertainment over a certain number of hours in a year but who were not making a living wage were supported by the State. It was an expensive way of making sure that the entertainment industry was welcoming to newcomers. Waiting tables is a career here, unlike in the US, where it's a temporary occupation for high-schoolers and resting actors.

The government decided to scrap the statut des intermittants to bring themselves in line with Europe. Of course, the entire artistic establishment protested. The Avignon festival was cancelled, and every other performance I went to had workers stand onstage for a minute of silence in support before the show began. There were badges to wear, petitions to sign and billboards to write on in support of the workers. All this civil unrest turned my fluffy research project into something that seemed to have a little weight, so I was quite pleased.

It was also the summer of the killer heatwave. 15,000 extra deaths, mostly the elderly, were ascribed to the rise in temperature, aided and abetted by the dearth of health workers during the regular summer exodus to the coast and mountains.

Much more widely reported at the time was the fact that the heatwave was a boon for the vinters, as the increased temperature upped the sugar content of the grapes, meaning fewer additives needed for the fermenting process, meaning 2003 was predicted to be a super-vintage.

Well, the shit eventually hit the fan about the increased vulnerability of the elderly with adverse weather conditions. People were outraged. There was marching, petitions, demonstrations etc.

The French government promised that new funding would be made available for senior citizens, to stop this happening again.* Effective this year, they cancelled one of May's numerous jours feries in order to generate around two billion euros to be allocated to the elderly. This day of "free labor" has been spun as an annual "Day of Solidarity."

Tomorrow, Pentecost, or Whit Monday, is the day of that cancelled holiday. Most people in the private sector still get the day off, while public sector people are technically supposed to work. Never one to miss an opportunity for a good strike, however, the French public sector workers are mostly taking their bank holiday anyway. Schools, EDF, GDF, post offices, and public transportation will be at a bit of a standstill.

Here's my favourite ludicrous fun fact: SNCF, the national rail service, decreed that in order to keep the holiday while making the money for the elderly, their workers will work an extra "one minute and 52 seconds per day" for the rest of the year. Wheeee! Socialist planification! Almost like a chapter in an Ayn Rand book.

Who's betting such action will add fuel to the campaign against the EU Constitution fire, and that we'll see an upward swing in the "no" polls on Tuesday? I don't think a sane bookie would take that bet.

*I should like to point out at this juncture that the government has been characteristically vague ("new healthcare fund") as to how exactly it will do this. Of course, the switch late last-year from a perks-based, few cash-payments pension to a mostly cash payments pension, against which old people slowly, but doggedly marched, has nothing to do with this injection of cash. Nothing at all. Whatsoever. Honest.