Once again, having been back in england for less than 30 minutes and I’ve seen reasons why I feel like this country is going to the pits! Having left France from the magnificant Charles de Gaulle 2 airport, with its TGV station sat right in the centre, motorways circling and rapid transport links. Architecurely it is stunning. a mixture of simple concrete and glass but the whole structure is curved and each departure section is made completly of glass and extends gracefully from the main structure. So I arrive back in terminal 2 Heathrow to a cramped baggage hall with no windows, people wrestling to get their luggage as flights from Paris, Stockholm and Madrid are all allocated the same carousel and then I go into the toilet to find buckets and containers under the urinals.
Then when waiting to buy a bus ticket I have to endure a conversation between a confused Japenese person and an incredibly rude ticket seller who somehow expects this bloke to understand the intricuacies of the UK transport system after a 12 hour flight from Tokyo… Wherever he was going only cost him £64 pounds luckily…
On a literary note, I found an old book of short stories by Roald Dahl in a Marseille book shop yesterday entitled “Kiss Kiss“. If you can get your hands on it, read it (found on amazon). Incredibly well written stories which I read in a day – not kids stories – and the last one is called Champion Of The World – the precursor to the children’s classic. Rogue State by William Blum is an incredibly shocking insight into the world of US terrorism throughout the 21st century. Read it and your blood will boil and you will shake your head so many times when it becomes apparant what they undertook in the years after the second world war and how they actually instigated most of the problems we see today in Iraq and Afghansitan. As William Blum says “Perpectual war for perpectual peace.
I also bought two blind CD’s in FNAC (no, not Phil Collins) yesterday – solely on the basis of the media reviews on the cover : Cassius – Au Reve (dancey) and Salif Keita – Moffou (Acoustic African?). I have no idea about either so reviews to follow shortly.