Long distance empathy

No 1 son is not happy.
He has a long commute to work and is travelling up to 4 hours every day. Yesterday it all got too much and he msn'd me about it. He is a very resilient soul and he'll cope either by biting the bullet and continuing as he is or by getting another job.

I still feel that I should be able to solve all his problems and I've worried about him today but this evening I found out that he's at our home with his brother, playing football in the back garden and I feel relieved. Tomorrow he'll have a short ride to work with the Remote Gardener and the prospect of a long weekend ahead.
That's better!

Just outside the city boundary.

At Boulogne-Billancourt, a quick 6 minute metro ride away, you are no longer in Paris proper. You are in Japan.
Or rather, in the Japanese garden at Jardins Albert Kahn.
The park comprises an English, a French, an Orchard and a Prairie garden as well as an eerie blue conifer forest, which didn't photograph well as the eau-de-nil needles came out as dull grey.

Like all Paris parks, it is not very big and you can meander around it easily in well under an hour but it is green and a welcome break from the tarmac.

And no-one noticed .....

This was the end product of 6 hours spent fiddling about. I didn't see the impact but I heard it from our flat and stuck my head out of the window to catch sight of a puff of artificial smoke rising from the crash site.
Local traffic here is down to 10% its normal volume due to the holiday exodus so few cars were passing by and those that did, hardly gave a second glance to this "accident".

Bumps, scrapes and bashes are acceptable collateral damage in Paris, to such an extent that the frequent accidents around the fairground racetrack of the Arc de Triomphe are considered so humdrum and inarbitratable (This word should sooo exist - just like "explorativity". I bet there's even a book about that.) that Insurance companies have decided to split liability 50-50, whoever caused the accident.

p.s. The film is called "Fragile(s)". Ahhh, the wonderful subleties of grammar.

Action !!! Or a rough approximation.

We've been back to England for a three week respite holiday: from the noise and the bustle of Paris. Yes, we had a lovely time , thank you.
We saw family and REALLY OLD friends and in the final week, once normal cloudy weather conditions returned, we did lots of gardening. The earth was as hard as concrete and we had no rain to speak of during our stay but copious amounts of water from a watering can (we have a hosepipe ban) eventually softened the ground. Plants revived during our stay, unfurled new leaves and reached out delicate tendrils but The Remote Gardener is now in charge again and I fear for their wellbeing.



Back in Paris and straight away, it's all go ! In a very cool sort of way, that is.

They are making a film at the top of our street today, starring one of the blokes from Les Choristes, François Berléand. I hung around for half an hour and as you can see, tension was running high. It involved a car, lots of traffic cones and fiddling about but very little excitement. I might pop out this afternoon to see how things develop.