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mercredi 21 avril 2004
 

The first time I left the Factory tonight, late and in a rush, I had to go back for my copy of 'Les Inrockuptibles', fresh in this morning's post and scarcely started. The second time I ran down the steps on to the Métro platform, I realised I'd forgotten my shoulder-bag. And that was after a day there without the pills I'm supposed to take for the Condition, prepared as usual this morning and duly left at home.
In a day of absent-mindedness and bereft of the little chemical regulators that usually sort out my insides well enough, I did remember to visit several different loos in the building, rather than again running the visual gauntlet of the multi-media department whose denizens obviously find it entertaining when I go to the same one every hour or so.
I was followed.
And directly propositioned.

While people tell me that I look a lot younger than I am -- to which I reply that rather like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, I keep the portrait under wraps in the attic -- I've not been assiduously pursued by a man since 1970s evenings in the BBC Club across the road from Broadcasting House, which was then a favourite evening drinking hole of youthful actors. Several of them were gay and a few have gone on from the repertory theatre and fine radio plays of the time to become famous, including a handful who abandoned perfidious Albion for Hollywood.
I've long disliked the man who put certain ideas to me this afternoon, not because he's gay but because he seems to haunt a couple of the AFP "men's rooms" himself.
Even when I'm free of the Condition, which is most of the time now, he's in there so often when I need to go that I find it a little sordid, though he probably has the most frequently washed hands in the building.

This has been going on for years. He knows I don't share his sexual preferences because I've had to drop what I took to be very clear hints in the past, but this hasn't stopped him giving me the eye and trying again today.
The odd thing is that he's among the people in the place whom I greet every day without knowing their names and with no desire to find out, but if he hasn't now learned to take "No thanks" for an answer ... well, I certainly wouldn't publish his identity here since I strongly object in all but the rarest circumstances to "naming and shaming", but my response will embarrass him.

This minor annoyance is by no stretch of the imagination real "sexual harassment", much documented on the Web, but not always very well and still a surprisingly misunderstood concept, both in relationships and in law.
I've dealt with three instances of the real thing in my time as an union official at the Factory, none of needed to go all the way to court. However, it might be if the man were in a position of power over me. As it stands, I accept the authority of absolutely nobody at AFP, irrespective of their rank, unless I respect them as individuals. This outlook doesn't render me invulnerable, of course, but I've found that it makes for better relations with most people, whatever their position.

While I could do without that man's bizarre notion of flattery, it happened to come on the day I got a letter from the Paris branch of the National Union of Journalists. I took it to be a demand for money or notice of a meeting, but instead it was loaded with the kind of praise for my work during my 20 years of active union service that I'd frame and put on the wall if I believed it all or were an idiot. It was despatched by order of the last branch meeting I failed to attend, it would seem.
Well, it was nice of them and I suppose I must learn to accept compliments without looking for a curtain to hide behind. One last effort, then. The best and most succinct summary of what sexual harassment really is that I've read at Menstuff.
Normally, self-help books and Internet sites (apart from my own, which helps me a lot) turn me off almost as much as the bloke in the lavatory, but this one did get a four-star award from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and claims to have been hit 1,945,242 times last month.
That's 1,945,240 times more than anybody hit on me.


10:55:52 PM  link   your views? []

You've seen nothing here so far about the US presidential election for two main reasons.
First, it's the subject preoccupying a blogosphere already dominated by our trans-Atlantic cousins. There's no shortage of news, views and lies elsewhere. I try to think different.
Secondly, I prefer not to think about it too much. The very notion that those people over there could yet give George W. Bush another four years sends shivers down my spine and depresses me.
I say "over there" because it strikes me that there is an almost unfathomable gulf, not just an ocean, between what I read almost every day on some American blogs and in the country's media on the one hand and, on the other, what I hear from virtually all the expatriate US nationals I live and work with.

Rainer, however, has kindly mailed me this morning a little something which means making an exception to the rule.

"Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn’t had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the 'Axis of Weasel,' along with a reticent White House which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited."
Thing is, Kerry can chew gum, walk and make jokes in French all at once.
"Everything changed, though, when, in recent months, Republicans started intimating that Kerry was too Continental. Conservatives complained about his touting of endorsements from foreign leaders, and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans told reporters that Kerry “looks French'," Joshua Kurlantzick writes further into a piece for 'The New Yorker'.
"...Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. 'During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq,' de Chalvron recalled. 'He didn’t answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn’t want to take a question that was not in English.'"

That, along with the rest of Kurlantzick's article, is one of the other reasons I prefer not to comment on the election.
If the anecdote is any reflection on the insularity of their continent, then the least I could quite unrealistically ask of American leaders is to leave the rest of the world well alone. Almost four years of Dubya have been disastrous enough.


11:19:41 AM  link   your views? []


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