Free lunch man

As usual I spent nearly all week end working on my little company. Actually it’s now a little group with the welcome of a new Eurl. Yes that’s Entreprise unipersonelle de résponsabilité limitée. In this highly bureaucratic country you can set up a new company with 1 Euro capital, 1 shareholder, i.e. yourself, in half an hour. (well that’s a slight exaggeration let’s say a couple of days). Everybody is helpful and cooperative. The Chambre de Commerce explains exactly what you have to do and keeps all the different departments informed (greffe de commerce, fisc, and social security). I made a couple of mistakes, but of course they helped me to correct both of them with no trouble. The one thing that was a bit difficult was HSBC, that well known British bank, who acquired a marvellous French bank called CCF, changed the name, fired the employees and sent the service in a heavy southerly direction. So the only thing I don’t have is my cheque book. I ‘ve already partly left HSBC, I may well go further in the coming months.

It was a good weekend in many ways. First off, the company got a new customer. A French telecom manager who spends all his time working next to Paddington station!!! Goes to London for the week and comes back to Orléans weekends. He didn’t volunteer to speak English, enough is enough. The local vet did though, fed up with talking to horses.

Between making drawings, preparing quotes, making invoices, calculating a P&L I have been checking on the news. Of course a better weekend for rugby with France winning the 6 nations for the 4th time in six years. Maybe time for France to join up with the southern hemisphere, I fear we are not being sufficiently tested up north. Though I’m not too much in favour of excessive travel and the concomitant pollution. An alternative would be to convince the Germans to play the sport and fold the Brits into one team, rather than all these teeny peeny teams they come up with. The Italians are improving, so with the Germans, French and Italians we could look forward to some competition. The Brits could hold our track suits.

There were just three opinion polls on the Presidential election. Overall they showed Bayrou stalling just short of Ségo and Sarko gaining a slightly larger overall lead. We are now into the heavy slugging part of the election, with each team going for the others’ jugular. It’s nice watching.

Bayrou, like all our politicians has been around a long time without ever setting any houses alight. In fact his greatest achievement was writing a good book on Henry IV. (He was an important figure in our history since he closed out the wars of religion. It was bit like modern day Iraq before he came along.) Bayrou was education minister back in 93, 94 and didn’t do too well with reform. He got everybody into the street because he wanted local authorities to be free to put money into private schools as well as public schools. Bit like Windsor council pouring the rates into Eton (slight exaggeration there). Didn’t go down well and was withdrawn.

The line of attack against Bayrou, from left and right are ‘no programme’ and ‘will create a constitutional crisis”. The latter comment harks back to the fourth republique (1945 to 1958)in which the president had little power and the unstable governments were being continually made and broken. Not a very pleasing period in French history. I think the electorate is attracted to Bayrou simply because he is not one of the previous two governing parties. Both UMP and the Socialists are in fact talking in reasonably responsible tones and not promising too many handouts. So everybody hopes it will be UDF’s turn to come up with a free lunch.