A decent snowfall in Paris looks just fine.
Unless you have to set foot outside, that is, before the sandman gets to streets where morning traffic is fast and murderous as ever while slippery slush means you dice with the rest of your life each time you have to cross the road.
This has become a winter where I fail to understand why the Métro authorities haven't opened the tube stations as shelters for the poor devils who have no indoors to stay warm in at night like they did in the mid-80s, the last time I can remember such gruesome weather.
I got mail from a mate whose (physical) balance is such that venturing outdoors can be risky even in more clement times:
"Did anybody notice how many times George Dubya used the word 'must' in his Brussels speech? I lost count," he informs me.
"If that is diplomacy, as my RSM would say, then my prick's a bloater.
"Cheers."
If you're a regular visitor to this erratic log, one guess who sent that succinct comment. Can't say I did notice. I've almost zero interest in the European visit keeping many colleagues busy, apart from an absurd and fleeting thought that maybe he's to be blamed for grotty skies and killer pavements along with everything else I tend to lay at the door of the White House when I give Bush any credit for anything.
But Heli's making the most of it. While this is no surprise, I reckon anybody who can still put so much heart into trying to keep track of such things the way they are deserves encouragement. She's decided a prime qualification for being a US president is "the willingness to bomb" ... to kingdom come ('Heaven and Hell').
I'm happier keeping tabs on what's going down in Nairobi, where Kenya's deputy environment minister Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel prize last year for planting trees and other wise exercises in saving the world rather than making it worse, has suggested her country "ban plastic bags" (BBC), an example set by Ireland and, I'm told, Taiwan.
Maathai was talking at a UN Environment Programme (Flash site) annual gathering which will -- "hope springs eternal"... -- mean that by the weekend the African cogs in the Factory machine may have something of lasting interest to report as good news.
Africa has begun the year buzzing with international forums aimed at making the planet a more sensible place to live. However, it takes some digging through the endless ephemera of year-in, year-out politics to see it's there, so it strikes me a good part of my editorial job right now involves handing out all encouragement I can to fellow journalists around the continent busy with the spades, keeping them in touch with one another.
What these people and all those they talk to are doing rarely makes headlines, that's for sure, but the long-term impact of their work will be remembered long after Bush is just another bore for almost anybody but historians.
At the weekend, someone who knows me well told me she reckons I've permanently switched on to "African time", as she put it. Maybe she's right at that; I do my best to keep it out of the daily business of meeting deadlines and giving tremendous importance to so-called "news events" I know perfectly well to be totally trivial. That, unfortunately, is the name of the game these days...
The Kid's mum is more excited about an exhibition about Inuit culture to be seen until March 27 at the Musée de l'Homme and she's right. A well illustrated page on Inuit shamanism (French only), part of the show at the national museum of humankind, tells me this is one event worth a closer look.
The point, said Catherine, is how an environment as hostile as the one people we once called "eskimos" live in hones people's relationship with the "natural world" and its seasons, bringing out a harmony we've all but lost in our cities. If forced to choose, I'd opt for a few years among the Navajo, being more inclined to take intense heat for a challenge, rather than the cold, but either way, the woman's right.
I've no more desire to go "back to nature" and renounce modern comforts than to throw away all the plastic bags thrust at me everywhere I go. One good reason for having a plastic bag is that in it, I can keep daily yoghurt supplies inside the other bag I use for reading material. This minimises the damage when one of the yoghurt pots blows its top in the Métro.
But while keeping my eyes and ears wide open for more signs of the "quiet revolution" that's now obviously -- to me, anyway -- the theme of my slowly evolving screenplay, the word "primitive" is one which has almost dropped out of my vocabulary.
Unless, of course, I take any more notice than absolutely necessary of our current guest from the other side of the Atlantic and the kind of "thinking" he doses out, to be turned into "urgents" and headline news by my less fortunate colleagues who have to make a fuss about him.
When it comes to a lack of harmony, the more I hear it, the more I believe the AFP "bell" for a news story somebody considers important was invented by a person whose talent for aural torture is -- well, almost -- on a par with that of former Nazis whose war crimes were quietly forgotten in exchange for the scientific knowledge put to new uses by the United States and other countries after World War II.
How it is in other newsrooms around the world, I'd rather not hear. Not that it matters. The man will be going home soon enough and life in the European cogs of the Factory will return to normal, whatever that means.
I must be getting old, if that's what comes of finding most of the important lessons for the future are to be found as long ago as anybody anywhere can remember any more.
While waiting as patiently as possible for the sun to come back out, here's keeping out the cold with Kathryn's kind of toast, an ancient one indeed, to life. Ever mindful, just slow down, she suggests, and drink about it.
12:04:56 AM link 
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