The Lady (and Man) Vanishes

During the siege of Paris in 1870/1 the enterprising fellows at Thomas Cook created war holidays: for a few pounds a train and a boat, and then…see where those communards fell. These days the insurance premiums would be too high, though – if the war is old enough, as with WW1 - the tourists will come. Just as they come now to Bosnia and Croatia; though Serbia still lags a little.

Well, middle France isn’t a war zone, and its signs and signifiers not as complex as the English-heavy northern towns of France and the chic semiologies of Paris. However, it is one hell of a mystery zone, a battlefield of mis-readings. Buried beneath the “foreign” myths of the Loire, the French countryide, the tourist spins, the easy-observations (and frankly the stuff downloaded onto the famous memory stick in which I live) there is a subtle and complex community that does not give up its secrets with anything like the carelessness of those Knight Templar societies.

Perhaps Nevers with its friendly families was a clue to its true way, but in Moulins it can seem as though – like “The Lady Vanishes” – nobody is as they seem.

The tourist in the corner, is actually a headmistress, school ended, reading a biography of Garibaldi. She’s come to Moulins only recently. When her husband died. The gang in front of me, French students…are a few French students and a bunch of French-Canadians on exchange for a month (that none were smoking should have been a clue). Perhaps the late: “I’m not carrying a bunch of fucking coins,” from the eldest boy should have been another one.



There is one Parisian, definitely. Except that Alexandra and boyfriend are local, from just outside Moulins; she is the only Hipster in Town. She’s a freelance graphic designer: gets work in Clermont, it’s so-so. Sometimes she goes there, other times she emails designs. Their dog, Kiki, is the second hipster in town, wears a motif collar and nods to pass the time, indifferent to scrutiny. The pony-tail in Metallica shirt is a decorator. Franc. “A home, a drink, someone to love, what else?” he says. He renovates houses in the region for foreigners like me. But not today. Monday? “Rest day,” he says. “Is it Monday?”

Instead the four sit and watch the world. Trapped? “It is the question of a city person.”



City people by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier: not happy, I'd say

“Sun, and a drink,” Franc repeats. The storm breaks, inevitably. And so the Graphic Designer, the art teacher, the decorator and the silent minder – and Kiki – wander off in the rain, and I have as much idea of their lives as of the Paris Commune of 1870.

Actually I know more about the commune; the facts and figures, anyway.

And here: a web quickie, if they help.

This is more helpful: Vargas Llosa's book on Victor Hugo, but beware:

"...as Vargas Llosa admits, it is impossible to know this great author of the Romantic period - even after spending "two years totally immersed" in his books."

Moulins Roug-ish

And listening to Camille: try her. The best French singer around.

Camille - Ta Douleur

This is the "hit", but there is so much more.

Family, not work

The Economist's "Certain Ideas of Europe" blog, is good today on immigration. Go to the site to download a new report, sponsored by the Dutch temporary employment agency Randstad, "Mind the Gap."

"It makes some points that deserve to be better known: for example, it sets out data showing how family reunification, not the hunt for a new job, is the main cause of inward immigration in most European countries. Of the countries studied, only in Portugal and Denmark are a majority of new arrivals work related, it finds."

NEVERS ON A SUNDAY (morning)

all the news is here, and here.

Vive Les Mamans

Subway, St. Suplice

The Voyage (to Maxim du Camp)

"For children crazed with maps and prints and stamps –
The universe can sate their appetite.
How vast the world is by light of lamps,
But in the eyes of memory how slight!

One morning we set sail, with brains on fire,
And hearts swelled up with rancorous emotion,
Balancing, to the rhythm of its lyre,
Our infinite upon the finite ocean."

Charles Baudelaire





It starts like this, usually


It begins to become obvious in Breteuil and St. Leu; after Fontainebleu, in Montargis, Briare, Nevers and Moulins it is the norm. There are no women between 22 and 40 on the streets or in the cafés, eating in restaurants - who do not have a child.

Children.

Thus, bars are full of older school kids, a few students; most are already paired-off, they hold tight to what they’ve got. In Nevers this came to a head: for here is a busy country town where the ideas of Sartre or De Beauvoir count for diddly rien. At the Grand Café the day is full of family, which means a constant drifting of daughters and mothers, children and fathers. Eating, drinking; and inside there is no music – not any all evening, not even the crowd-pleasing Rebel Yells, of – yes, even Paris. Saturday Night’s All Right for Talking here.




"In solitary uplands far away
Betwixt the blossoms of a rosy spray
Dreaming upon the wonderful sweet face,
Of Nature, in a wild and pathless place"

Tennyson Sonnet



De Beauvoir loved walking on her own in the country; it was, after Sartre and writing, her great joy. Given Startre's sack-track record, it makes sense.

What is so interesting about these places is how the young, middle and old integrate. It is like watching a family – En Famille - from a distant planet where boredom, attention deficit disorder, obesity, and “bling” have all been eradicated. Perhaps these things are all on their way, coming with the wi-fi; waiting just around the corner to becalm the contentment of these towns. In Breteuil I stumbled on the Burgher Roi, but here – if they exist, which they must – they are just part of the life.



Schools seem thriving, and in the one I saw in Abbeville, incredibly well stocked. Lively, but not threatening. Happy even.

The main café in Nevers is a good example of community; I checked online and by phone with English and Americans: where are such “nodal” points in stolid, solid, Middle England or America? They don’t exist, we drive. We stay in our chateau. We watch the flatscreen.




It is sunny, there is another electrical storm; France play Ukraine in an important Euro 2008 qualifier (there is a flat screen inside, muted, and barely three people watching it. When, very late, 11pm, Nicolas Anelka scores the second goal, there is a quiet whoop from about four people.) There are drinks, meals, conversation and flirtation - with the young.



“I knew what had worked for me in France. It wasn’t just that I had had access to a slew of government-run-or-subsidised support services it was also that I’d had a whole unofficial network of people to help and support me – materially and emotionally – as I navigated the world of motherhood…”

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. Judith Warner



There are mothers everywhere, perhaps this is just the way of smaller towns, but it is the calm of it all that surprises after seeing “family” in any major city. There are streets to wander, pursuing a surrealist dream here – it is just that they come back to a centre, and at that centre there are people to meet and catch up with, grandmothers, fathers and kids. Being a stranger here isn’t a bad thing, there is no cowboy on the edge of town atmosphere, it is just that we are superfluous to the needs of anyone. Though our tourist revenues undoubtedly help.

“I was not naïve enough to think that, economically or politically, we could adapt (sic) the French system here [in the USA], but I did believe that we could learn much from its psychology: that if you support mothers materially, you support them emotionally, and this support translates into much lower lever of anxiety, and a much greater level of mental freedom. I knew there was a kind of existential safety to be derived from a world in which there were structures in place to help you take care of your children: Day-care centres that had guaranteed standards of quality. State schools whose early-education programmes were a source of national pride…reasonably prices…babysitters…And there was much inspiration to be gleaned from a culture in which the needs of a mother were considered every bit as central to family happiness as the needs of the child.”



At eleven, then midnight – as the café moves to the fun-fair across the square, families stay together, children aren’t crying. One does nurgle when Anelka scores, but – hell, why not? The centre stays – it doesn’t drive away.

When Judith Warner asked mothers in Washington about the idea of society helping they snarled “Do you want the federal government raising your children?”

I reckon the answer might just be yes – with the French Federal government. Now that would be interesting.



to be so continued...

From the "everywhere has somebody" theory: Bernadette - Saint of Lourdes (and Nevers)

Tom would have liked You Tube

France Vs Ukraine - 2nd June 2007 Anelka Goal

That Anelka goal, just because

Property Update

"Prices start from approximately £220,000. Mansoori-Dara says that the same apartments in London would be 'at least' triple the price. 'The property market in Paris is still hugely undervalued,' he adds.

According to foreign exchange specialist Currencies Direct, a three-bedroom apartment in the upmarket Le Marais area in the heart of Paris would cost £580,000. The price of a similar property in a comparably central area in London would be about £750,000."

The Observer today

Canality: the curse of choice

“How tempting to trespass in these Italian gardens
with their smirk ouches and sweet-smelling borders,
To lean on the low
Parapet of some pursive fountain
And drowse through the unctuous day.”

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety, 1947

Briare, mid-France now, doesn’t appear capable of surprises: another long walk from the station, and a small and sleepy centre with a big church and lunchtime men rubbing lotto cards in the bar/tabac with 10 cent pieces. No, there aren’t any rooms.

Two hundred metres away, hidden and only vaguely sign-posted is the longest canal bridge in the world, another one of Eiffel’s constructions. People don’t come here so much by rail or car but motor cruiser.

Ah, water.

Down below the bridge the Loire gets going seriously. Men fish it whilst veiled women wander by, indifferent. Here, unexpectedly, another form of travel, the four or five day watery meander up a famous river, dinner and drink somewhere – and often just cooked food onboard from the hypermarket. Jim and Pat from upstate New York didn’t do that, expecting the little villages to have some food – at least. In the end a Scottish “gentlemen” had to drive them to a supermarket, just for the basics of their five days motorboat up from Nevers. Pat gives me some political advice: “You have to know where all the bodies are buried, what the secrets are. That’s why Hilary will do well. There’s enough people been through her drawers.”



In the restaurant of the Auberge du Pont four older English people have been possessed by the spirit of Samuel Beckett. Perhaps it is in honour to the show at the Centre Pompidou.

Nice
Very nice
What shall we have?
Meat
White
Or red
White
Nice
And red
Both
White
Red
Lets have half and half
Red
Both
Menu
Fish
No, meat

There is such anxiety in each generation; we so easily forget the older tend to have less nonchalance when confronted by the random vagaries of the middle-French menu, or choice in general. We younger generations have it so damned easy, Google and Mastercard, language education and the sheer careless expectation of sorting things out with a wave of English bemusement. We celebrate choice; choosing makes us status heavy, for a while. Instead we worry about personal development.

Nice
Really nice
A good balance
White and red
Meat and fish

There are a few Vassarelly ceramics in the small museum by the railway station; the fishermen have their own too.

“I went from Montrgis about one of the clocke in the afternoone, and came to a town about sixe of the clocke, eighteen miles therehence, called Briare, where I lay the thirtieth day of May being Munday. About a mileor two before I came to Briare I first saw that noble River Ligeris, in French the Loire, which is a very goodly navigable river, and hath his beginning from a place about the confines of the territorie of the people Arverni: the River runneth by Orleance, Nevers, Bloys, Ambois, Tours, Samur, Nantes, and many other noble cities and townes: in some places it is above a mile broad, and hath certaine pretty islands full of trees and other commodities in divers places thereof: as in one place I saw three little islands, very neare together, whereof one had a fine grove of trees in it. Upon this river came a great multitude of Normanes into France, out of some part of the Cimbrical Chersonesus, which is otherwise called Denmarke, or (as others thinke) out of Norway, their originall countrey, in the time of the emperor Lotharius, and did much hurt in divers places of the countrey, till Carolus Calvus, then king of France gave them a greate summe of money to depart out of his territories….”

There is no cyber café, no wi-fi. Only Belmondo and Clooney on the television; another massive storm. The English have been abroad a lot since they retired.

Not half-board
Too controlling
Don’t want to be told
Sometimes though
Well, they met us
Italy
Nice
Wine
Like the wine
Red
White
Not Rosé

In “Loneliness & Time, British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century” Mark Cocker writes:

“In Protestant Britain, one encounters a society in which, for several centuries, religious pilgrimage has been of marginal significance…it is tempting to speculate whether the social processes which extinquished pilgrimage in Britain are perhaps implicated in the growth of later forms of travel and the development of its associated literature….in former times these individuals would have gravitated towards the non-productive, non-domestic patterns of life enjoyed by the wandering ascetic, or the monk, the nun and the hermit. Marooned however in a godless society whose national genius is most fully expressed in practical, political and scientific endeavour, this would-be religious community has felt redundant and has eventually been displaced, seeking spiritual fulfillment through journeys overseas…”

The motor caravans and cruisers fill by dusk, the storm thunders, my stomach comes out in sympathy: so much for my “choice”. In “Danube” Claudio Magris, the Italian intellectual, writes: “writing ought to be like those waters flowing through the grass – full of spontaneity, fresh and timid but inexhaustible….” I lie on the bed watching Belmondo take down the serial killer and wish those qualities might come back with the dark sunset. Outside in the forests lodge hotels are piping music, and choice is aplenty.



In the dedication to “Love and War in the Appenines” Eric Newby quotes Virginia Woolf:

The peasants are the last great sanctuary
Of sanity, the country the last stronghold
Of happiness. When they disappear
There is no hope for the race.

Belmondo gets his man in the end. He always does. Somewhere downstream there is a commune restaurant, Pat says. All the food comes from the region, the farmers communicate by internet, and all profits go back to pay for the village’s upkeep.

Where?
Didn’t see it, Pat says.



Clooney: only on Darfur tonight

Nouvelle Star - Julien - Lolita (Alizée)

Now this is Pop Idol but the French way - this guy is a cover star already. Imagine this in England or America. Wait for the big ending, Julien's "thing".

Christophe Mae on s'attache

Favourite new French song right now.

New China: New Tourism

When asked on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution his thoughts about its impact the Chinese leader, Zhou Enlai, said: “It is too early to make a decision". They play a long game in China. A long game in Montargis as well, where the ghosts of the Chinese Revolution are bringing a new generation of tourists to the town.



At the exit to Montargis station, a good mile and something from the centre is a tiny monument in French and Chinese: Montargis, a town of canals, rivers, bridges and riverside cafés, is not just the “Venice of the Gelatins,” it is also plays a tiny part in the story of the Chinese revolution.

In 1912 the Mayor of Montargis met with a Chinese businessman, Ll Shizeng. They discussed a project that became the “work-study movement”, (“diligent work and frugal study”) bringing Chinese students to the town to learn about western ideas. (Shizeng was a nutritionist; he studied at the Pasteur Institute where he worked on soybean products. In 1908 he financed and launched “Caséo-Sojaine” a soy-food manufacturing plant: all of the workers were Chinese, its location was Colombes. Shizeng was part of the elite of old China, but believed strongly in openness to other cultures).



The project was launched, and soon many Chinese were making the long sea journey to Europe. In the 1920s there were over 300 Chinese in Montargis. Zhou Enlai was in Paris, largely, but he came to Montargis often to recruit for what would become the Chinese Communist Party. Deng Xioping worked in the shoe manufacturing workshop – under the name Teng Hi Hien. In the Durzy gardens where now a “muscle gym” stands alongside the greenery, Cai Hesen and Xiang Jinya presented their ideas on “saving China and the World.” Some say this is the real starting point of the New China. “There’s not a museum yet, but it is significant,” they say at the tourist office.



A Long March to the Bakery

If the theory of travel (and tourist marketing) is that everywhere has “Someone” (Dover in Kent is already making claims on the 19 year old, Joss Stone), then Montargis is an interesting example of the shifts in “importance.” Around the town now, at the public baths, the main street, the park, the Durzy hotel now a museum, there is a trail for tourists and historians of China to follow.

When Tom came he saw the old town, high on the hill.

“At the towne Montargis ther is a very goodly Castle of the Duke of Guise strongly fortified, both by the nature of the place, and by art: it hath many faire turrets, and is situated in so eminent and conspicuous a part of the towne, that it might be seene a great way off in the countrey.

A little on this side Montargis I saw a very dolefull and lamentable spectacle: the bones and ragged fragments of clothes of a certaine murderer remaining on a wheele, whereon most murderers are executed: the bones were miserably broken asunder, and dispersed abroad upon the wheele in divers places. Of this torment I have made mention before…”

Now the eleventh century church and outbuildings are part of a private catholic school complete with sweet bilingual teenagers who sit chain-smoking and taking in the post-class sun. In the 1930s Jean Cocteau escaped here from the chaos of Paris to write a play, Les Familles Terribles, a sort of Long Day’s Journey into Death and Drug Addiction with your average French bourgeois family. Jude Law made his Broadway debut in a revival in the mid-nineties.

Hard as it is to imagine Coryat here, there is – high on the old ramparts – a sense of his seeing the countryside, his route, and following the course of the river south. How long to Lyon? You can hear him asking. It is far harder to imagine the Chinese revolutionaries doing business here, let alone at the same time as Cocteau was knocking off a play – in 48 hours as I remember.



Everywhere has “someone”. Well, Montargis has discovered it has not just a “someone” but the catalyst for a “revolution.” Travel guides in Chinese are being written as we speak.

After Royalty (II)

Fontainebleu is hardly a secret, but there have been better signs and symbols that a major tourist attraction exists. When Tom came this was one of the many residences of Henry IV, who would be assassinated two years later. He just marched in, perhaps because the guards were Scottish. He wouldn’t have had trouble navigating the numerous cake shops, and was mean enough probably not to have bought a pain aux raisin even if he’d seen one. Let him not eat cake.

“Their muskets ready charged and set on their restes…[they] “consisteth partly of French, partly of Scots, and partly of Switzers. Of the French Guarde there are three rankes: The First is the Regiment of the Gard…The second bee the Archers….the Gard of the body, whereof there are foure hundred, but one hundred of them be Scots…”

As I’ve written, Tom got quite heated about the Swiss soldiers’ codpieces, for me it was just trying to find space to look, among the crowds. This morning they are Romanian, Chinese, Japanese, French, Lancastrian…only Germans move in ones and twos.



Although the French royal family travelled, from one chateau to another palace, it is also true that they had the world right here. The size of the halls and the corridors (everything is big except the beds), the paintings, frescos, tapestries, libraries, all suggest the world (and God) is here. When at INSEAD I hear: “the world is small and all the same: four walls and a computer…” I am shocked, but there is a sense, here in this most grand of residences, that this is what we want, simply and safely: bring the world to our home and we don’t have to leave. Of course, with huge grounds with peacocks wandering, this is a very large “four walls”, and however detailed and all pervasive the art it is not “interactive”. And yet here in the forests of Fontainebleu is surely a theme: money enables us to shut out the world, not to connect with it. It is the sentiment of much of John Donne’s early poetry.

“The walkes about the gardens are many, whereof some are very long, and of convenient breadth, being fairly sanded, and kept very cleane….”

It is at the Chateau Fontainebleu that Tom meets an Irish Landowner whose “yearly revenues were two hundred thousand French crownes, which do make three score thousand pound starling.” According to the Convert Money website, this works out at about £7 million a year these days. Which is not bad: modern palaces can be mortgaged on earnings like that, even in the centre of an average city.

It was the railways, the “trains de Plasir” that changed Fontainebleu again, brought wealth not just to the Chateau but to the town which developed around it. In 1849 the rail link from Paris was established, and so too the idea of the “day trip”. Parisians, deep into their Romantic-Gothic love of nature, as long as it was safe, could visit at the weekends. So began another stage of Fontainebleu’s life.




As presented to us Napoleon’s use of the chateau is as important culturally as the royal family’s, although I think our era is more interested in the decadent royals again: that is why Sophie Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” is a good film: it shows a "Pimp My Ride" Fontainebleu. You could live here a long time without the tourists and never leave and see all of the shiny world.

After Royalty (I)

Outside the Basilica of St.Denis there’s a building site followed by a shopping mall, and in the hinterland betwixt young guys skateboard for most of the day. For centuries, from the 10th century until the French Revolution, this was where French Kings of France and their families were buried.

Thus it was a significant place for the “revolution”. In 1789 the royal tombs were opened by workers, the bodies removed and disposed of in two nearby pits. The deposed King at the time of the revolution, Louis XVI, and his wife Marie Antoniette weren’t buried there at all.

Jean is nineteen, his parents are from Senegal. They came to France in the 1980s. He wanted to be a footballer, was good, very good, had “matches” with a professional team, though he doesn’t say which. He comes here most days to the mall, his mother lives in one of the nearby blocks on the way to the university. His friends come here as well, there’s stuff to discuss.



After the revolution, and then Napoleon’s rule and his first exile to Elba, the French Royalty returned to power, for a while. Searches were made for the corpses of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: what was found was a few remains, a bones (pre DNA) that were possibly the king's, and some gray material, part of a lady's garter. All were added to the crypt at St Denis, and the bones of the old Kings brought back.
Jean wants to get on a course for IT, computers – he’s good at games. But its expensive, and he doesn’t have a job. There are ways to make money, but – you know – it’s difficult.

Viollet-Le-Duc the architect who was famous for his restoration work at Notre Dame also worked on the Basilica. These days it is still a tourist attraction, but for the specialist, not the generalist.

If he could Jean would like to live in America, not the centre of Paris. They don’t have the same problems with immigrants, he says. Walk two hundred metres from the Basilica and in the rows of housing blocks there are thousands like Jean, he says. They just want their chance.

Fontainebleu

Another View On Fontainebleu, why not: this is the You Tube World

Cod History

There is no sign of Kirsten Dunst or Sofia Coppola in the museum shop at Fontainebleu, the French don’t like the film Marie Antoinette: they booed during and after its debut at last year’s Cannes film festival. Coppola’s modern mis-en-scène, the punk music soundtrack, what some called “history for the MTV generation”, was thought superficial.




Here Tom caught the superficial bug: became interested in the cod-pieces of the Swiss Guards. In England the fashion was dying out, the Cod-piece merged into the peascod…

”because it is by that merrie French writer Rablais [On the Dignity of Codpieces] stiled the first and principall piece of Armour, the Switzers do weare it as a significant Symbole of the assured service they are to doe to the French King in his Warres…

the originall of their wearing of codpieces and partie-coloured clothes grew from this: it is not found that they wore any till Anno 1476 at what time the Switzers tooke their revenge upon Charles Duke of Burgundie, for taking from them a Towne called Granson with the Canton of Berne, whom after they had defeated, and shamefully put to flight, together with all his forces they found there great spoyles that the Duke left behind, to the valew of three millions, as it was said. But the Switzers being ignorant of the valew of the richest things, tore in pieces the most sumptuous Pavilions in the world, to make themselves coates and breeches; some of them sold silver dishes as cheape as Pewter, for two pence half-pennie a piece, and a great Pearle hanging in a jewel of the Dukes for twelve pence, in memorie of which insipid simplicite, Lewes, the eleventh King of France, who the next yeare after entertained them into his Pension, caused them to bee uncased of their rich clothes made of the Duke of Burgundies Pavilions, and ordained that should ever after weare Suites and Codpieces of those variegated colours of Red and Yellow. I observed that all these Switzers do weare Velvet Cappes with Feathers in them, and I noted many of them to be very clusterfisted lubbers. [a clumsy clownish fool]…”As for their attire, it is made so phantastically, that a novice newly come to the Court, who never saw any of them before, would halfe imagine, if he should see one of them alone without his weapon, hee were the Kings foole…”

Four Walls and a Computer

Walk for five minutes from Marie Antoinette’s bed-chamber in the chateau Fontainebleu and there’s another room, peopled by a crowd as international as those that roam the giant halls and tapestried royal corridors with their audio-feeds. Here too, down a leafy street, notches are made on the bedposts: in this case above the fertile silky sheets of global finance.¨

This is INSEAD, The Fontainbleu of business finishing schools; to the Versailles of Harvard.

“It’s a brilliant idea, cool. My father’s already into this in a big way in the States – it’s so big in the States. You’ve just got to build them where you are, gate them, for all those guys – you know – grew up in the 60s and 70s, want to retreat now, safely.” [That’s not me, then: Tom is talking about retirement homes for the over-rich, though he wouldn’t use that phrase].

This “Tom” grew up in England, France and America. His father is Swiss-Iranian, his mother French. He’s in America now, “somewhere”; his mother London. “So here I am, and in three days time: Dubai. I’ll be 14 hours from “anything.” I don’t like the States, it isn’t hot, but I’ll have to work there. There is a trade-off: money for that attitude.”




Tom is 23. He dresses in blue button down, jeans and loafers; none of the students here dress: it is like a technology convention. From behind me, in Australian, to an Indian woman: “14 inch? Hmm, I don’t think so, see how mine has the highest resolution, I’ve reprogrammed this to get to the optimum. You have to customize…have to.”

The canteen soundtrack is music to be re-programmed by as well: a droney atonal Chinese (and The Future) lament that lasts half an hour. Through a tall square glass window a squash court with two sweaty students hard at play is a visual offering if the screens or the wi-fi don’t entice. Coffee and the “Financial Times” are free. Everything else is expenses. This campus is very quiet.

The headline on the front page of today’s European edition of the “Financial Times” is “Hedge Fund Managers go short on marriage with ‘postnups’”. It explains how “postnups” - signed after a marriage - safeguard the fortunes of wealthy hedge fund executives. (Who appear to all be men).

“At least one US hedge fund is refusing to take on new partners until they sign a postnup barring their spouses from making any claim on the fund says Ken Burrows, a New York attorney…”

Why the “wives” accept this, Bern Clair, “prominent” American divorce lawyer explains: “is because they want to preserve their marriages and their lifestyles.”

“The marital relationship has traditionally been the secret close bond,” said a partner at Fox Rothchild. “Now it’s the business partners, the hedge fund world, the drinking buddies – and the spouse is one circle out.

Tom has the flat, declarative (European) transatlantic accent down with his corporate collars. “Yeah, Dubai. Four of us are going, Mo too – that’s Mustafa. We’re getting a place together, it’s going to be sick: party time.” He goes to Paris at the weekends, his mother’s apartment in St Germaine, but he’s ready for the move. “The weather’s good and it’s all tax-free. The world’s small and all the same: four walls, a computer, and business to do.”

“What did I get from INSEAD? Connections. Confidence? No, I was pretty confident already. Hey! Let’s catch up later, hun?”

In the facing block a three day conference is being held on “Emotional Capabilities in Organizations: the influence of Context and Culture.” On Wednesdays there is an evening class held by the INDEVOR society. One of the issues it addressed last week was: “What are the business rewards for companies with the resources and persistence to compete at the bottom of the World’s Pyramid?”

Tom is nowhere with the answer to this question – he’s gone to another four walls and a computer. And it doesn’t take a “Blue Ocean” thinker (of whom there are many here) to work out there are a few years of “party-time” before Tom’s “postnup” needs to be adressed.

He’s one circle out from that.