Gay Rites And Second-hand Furniture

Gay Rites Surprises

Last Sunday several hundred thousand people took to the streets in Paris to demonstrate against the draft bill to legalise marriage between homosexual partners. Estimates of the number vary between 350-500 thousand but it was clearly a very large demonstration even by French standards (and the French do love a demonstration).

The high number surprised me. The extreme right wing and Catholic participants were to be expected, the Catholic (or any other) church getting it's knickers in a twist over a sexual matter being hardly surprising. But there were apparently large numbers of the less identifiable bourgeoisie also in attendance. Although moral issues are the province of the bourgeoisie (George Bernard Shaw once wrote that only the middle classes had morals because the rich didn't need them and the poor couldn't afford them) that doesn't fit well with the general laissez-faire attitude of the French towards sex. (More generally, the French don't mind much what you do in most activities as long as you do it with style and panache.) And all this was on top of the fact that Hollande had made this bill a specific, supposedly vote-winning plank of his election manifesto; it garnered the homosexual vote for what that was worth.

So how can the size of the demonstration be explained? My only thought is that it could be the French preoccupation with family life and the bill being seen as a threat to it. Family life is paramount in France. Even French income tax is based on families rather than individuals, the reason the draft bill to tax rich individuals was declared unconstitutional. So maybe that was the reason for the size of the demonstration.

The other surprise for me is that gays are apparently so keen to get married. We are in an era when co-habitation is as normal as marriage and common law conveys pretty much the same rights to couples whether married or not. I don't think political correctness, that haven for control freaks, comes into it, so why is there all the fuss? I have to confess that I don't really understand it.

Second-hand Furniture

Friend Jo had found a couple of really good, reasonably priced second-hand furniture shops and so took me for a browse last Friday. There were some beautiful pieces on offer and at low, low prices.

I bought some old wooden chairs for the kitchen for a song.

I have long held the view that second-hand furniture is often much better value for money than new furniture, both in England and France but particularly so in France. Solid wood furniture is especially good value; the wood is often beautiful in itself and the same item new would cost a fortune. Granite slabs also feature a lot and, again, would cost a bomb new. It occurred to me that any second-hand furniture dealer in England with a lorry could make a good business out of buying here and selling in England and it seems that does happen quite frequently. Some friends told me of dealers they know who do just that. I remember, back in the 1980s, when French wood stoves became fashionable in England, there was a very brisk trade with lorries from England buying up every wood stove on offer here.

One of the differences I noted in second-hand furniture here is how much of it is home-made. I know people in England must have made their own furniture in times past but I've never seen much of it on sale. Here it's quite common and often very well made. You can tell when a piece has been home made because it has quirks indicating it could never have come out of a factory. Friends Steve and Jo have a beautiful dresser that is very well made except that one of the carved wooden pillars supporting the top half must have been aimed a bit off-target for the holes it had to fit into and so makes a sudden twist to the right to get connected. It's the only blemish in the piece and in fact does nothing to detract from it but would never have passed any kind of quality control; a factory would simply have made another pillar but whoever made that dresser presumably didn't have another piece of suitable wood or just couldn't be bothered.

I suspect this may come from the French genius for throwing nothing away if some means can be found of making it useful. I've remarked on this before with respect to French food and suspect it applies to furniture too. Rural France has lots of wood and a typical French peasant attitude would be: if you've got wood and the tools to make furniture, why buy it?