The daughter is in Venice this week with her History of Arts class. She phoned home on Tuesday in a state of feverish excitement to tell us not about the beauty of Venice, but about the hotel room she’s sharing with four of her friends. It’s right in the middle of Venice and it’s ‘like a palace’: the floors are made of marble and there’s a Jacuzzi in the bathroom.
Lucky girl. Even if a trip to Venice had been on the agenda, my parents would never have let me go. It would have involved air travel and my mother is Madame Paranoia herself. She once instructed me not to put a suitcase down on the tiled floor of their corridor in case it cracked it (the tile, not the suitcase). Pointing out that my body weighed more than the suitcase and that the weight was less well distributed failed to make an impression.
No, the only school trip I got to go on was a trip to the Ulster Folk Museum when I was a pupil at Downey House Primary School. It was quite interesting and reasonable fun, but I don’t think it really compares to a cultural trip to Venice.
Anyway, I hope the daughter will get over the Jacuzzi and open her eyes to the extraordinary charms of Venice out of season. The fact is, her year will be the last to undertake any cultural trips like this. Her school has a reputation for its arts options, but theatre and the history of arts are to be cut. Presumably her teachers will lose their jobs. Pupils may still be allowed to choose a cinema option, because the cinema is a modern art form and it still brings France international kudos.
Our diminutive president, you see, Monsieur Snarkozy, is the very model of a modern politician – which means that he will make funds available for maths and other scientific subjects, but will starve the arts into submission. Because what possible use are the arts in the cutthroat world of economic competition? Everyone knows that artists, playwrights and the like are left-leaning non-conformists, given to criticising the government of the day. So ‘ptui! I speet upon education and culture and grind them eento the trottoir with the elevated heel of my leedel pointed shoe.’
It seems the message is sinking in, though. Tilley is already in the minority, because she chose to do a literary baccalaureate. Parents ask why. Why didn’t we persuade her to do something sensible and useful? Well, like her parents, she is no earthly use at any subject that is vaguely scientific and she has this strange yearning to want to create something of artistic value.
In times of economic crises, the arts are easy targets. If anyone’s daft enough to follow a creative calling, they’ll do it whether or not there’s funding in place to help them do it. So if they starve in their garret as a result, tant pis. (Or ‘so much piss’ as I used to like to think it meant when I was a truculent teenager.)
Such philistinism seems particularly shocking in a country like France. After all, doesn’t its 19th and 20th century artistic legacy still count for rather more than its nuclear power stations and its (admittedly impressive) TGV network? If the country attracts more tourists than any other, then people come, don’t they, mainly for reasons of heritage and culture (if you grant that eating and drinking are cultural activities in this country)?
Philistinism is just another facet of the police state, which France – like so many countries in the 21st century – is rapidly turning into. My wife phoned me the other morning from Brive. She was still shaking after a dressing down from a gendarme for going through an amber light. On one hand, you might say that it’s healthy to fear and respect the law. On the other hand, however, my wife is so law-abiding that she once went back into a supermarket – as a student, mark you – when she realised she had been given too much change.
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| House with shutter lowered to keep out gendarmes |
You don’t get much change out of a French policeman. In Britain, I think, you can still reason with a custodian of the law. There’s a sense that there’s a human being under all that uniform. Here they’re like guards of the Kremlin: menacing and worryingly pea-brained.
The gendarmes have been known to go into schools to flush out illegal immigrants (particularly those of a darker hue). I wouldn’t put it past them to burst into my daughter’s school if they hear that culture is being taught behind closed doors.
Excuse me while I lower our security shutters.
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