Ersatz TLS discussion

Welcome to the new thread and here's hoping for plenty of good books!

Thanks again G. Hope you haven't been too badly affected by the rain. I just got bored with it!

I'm loving the endless rain falling and the absence of sun!

Thanks G as always

Current reading is:
The End of Czechoslovakia, a selection of essays on the Velvet Divorce, where the two constituent nations went their own ways
Adrift On the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz(1966)
Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhari and a collection of the later diaries of John Fowles

You might AB but two of my friend have had leaks - one through a broken tile in the roof leaking through into the bathroom, and another a leak pouring through where conservatory meets house!

We've had some rain, including this afternoon, but the worst is to come.
And I've got a very leaky roof 😬, which is well overdue being retiled, so I'm crossing my fingers. Joys of living in a copropriété, where one can't just decide by oneself to get things done.

Gpfr wrote: "We've had some rain, including this afternoon, but the worst is to come.
And I've got a very leaky roof 😬, which is well overdue being retiled, so I'm crossing my fingers. Joys of living in a copro..."


Guess that is like a freehold apartment block?

Gpfr wrote: "We've had some rain, including this afternoon, but the worst is to come.
And I've got a very leaky roof 😬, which is well overdue being retiled, so I'm crossing my fingers. Joys of living in a copro..."

Is that like an apartment block? Do you have freehold and leasehold?

giveusaclue wrote: "You might AB but two of my friend have had leaks - one through a broken tile in the roof leaking through into the bathroom, and another a leak pouring through where conservatory meets house!"

oh dear....i may get leaks too in fact, my roof can be iffy at times...

giveusaclue wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "We've had some rain, including this afternoon, but the worst is to come.
And I've got a very leaky roof 😬, which is well overdue being retiled, so I'm crossing my fingers. Joys of livi..."

Is that like an apartment block? Do you have freehold and leasehold?

Freehold and leasehold doesn't exist.

Where I live is quite small, it consists of 2 2-storey buildings either side of a small communal garden.

In a copropriété, anything like a roof obviously affects everyone in the building, so decisions have to be voted on. There is a syndic who collects money for communal charges and pays those bills, hires cleaners, deals with repairs etc. This can be a professional or not, it could be someone living in the building. We have a general assembly once a year to vote on anything that needs to be decided and can have "special" ones for urgent matters.

When there is work to be done, they get estimates, although we can refuse to use the companies they suggest and get other ones. In the case of our roof, the estimates they got are getting on for double the amount of the ones we then got on our side.

Thanks GP for the new thread.

Anything I write today will be affected by a lack of sleep, in part caused by a setback to my knee... I'm back on crutches - or a single crutch, to be exact. The scan I was supposed to have in the UK was offered to me only after I arrived in France, some 5 weeks after the injury. I've rearranged it for my return in October...

So I must express my sympathy and fellow-feeling for Robert... when I first injured myself, I had to sleep downstairs in a recliner for a fortnight. Stairs are unforgiving to those with knee injuries... here in France, everything (including the bedroom) is on one level of the longère so no stairs need to be climbed. (our place is a bit like that in the first picture in this article, though smaller:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long%C3....)

I am due to see the local GP this evening; madame thinks that physio might help (I need a prescription for that), but I"m not convinced. The way things look, I may need surgery - though I hope not. We'll see.

As for living on the third floor - that is certainly not great, Robert! I hope your problem gets sorted soon. We lived on the third floor in Paris, which was OK until we got our first baby - and we were young, then.

To Bill - I'm not sure that I've read whole books which were written with the express aim of satirising religion and in my diminished state I can't think of any off the top of my head. On the other hand, passages within books where religion is satirised are pretty common., though don't ask me to dig them out of my memory cells.

There are lists of books satirising religion online, though I haven't read the ones on the lists I looked at quickly - except for Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett, which I'm afraid was too broad and obvious for me. I couldn't get into it. Other books such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Scarlet Letter and Cat’s Cradle are regarded as religious satire by some Goodreads readers, though as I haven't read them I can't confirm if they justify this classification.

Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "We've had some rain, including this afternoon, but the worst is to come.
And I've got a very leaky roof 😬, which is well overdue being retiled, so I'm crossing my f..."

Thanks for the information G

scarletnoir wrote: "Thanks GP for the new thread.

Anything I write today will be affected by a lack of sleep, in part caused by a setback to my knee... I'm back on crutches - or a single crutch, to be exact. The scan..."

Sorry to hear this. Could you get the treatment in France if it is an op?

scarletnoir wrote: "Thanks GP for the new thread.

Anything I write today will be affected by a lack of sleep, in part caused by a setback to my knee... I'm back on crutches - or a single crutch, to be exact. The scan..."

oh dear scarlet, i hope you get some sleep and the knee improves

In the Mahfouz novel i am reading, all the action is set on a houseboat(or awamat in arabic) on the Nile in Cairo. I am interested in these buildings/boats but this BBC article from 2022 shows that many of these historic boats are under threat or have been removed, how sad

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-midd...

i will attach a houseboat photo in photo section too

AB76 wrote: "In the Mahfouz novel i am reading, all the action is set on a houseboat(or awamat in arabic) on the Nile in Cairo. I am interested in these buildings/boats but this BBC article from 2022 shows that..."

The photo reminds me of the houseboats in Kashmir (seen in Michael Palin's Himalaya).

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "In the Mahfouz novel i am reading, all the action is set on a houseboat(or awamat in arabic) on the Nile in Cairo. I am interested in these buildings/boats but this BBC article from 20..."

good spot....i actually had Rumer Godden's novel of Kashmir lined up and was googling photos but turned to Mahfouz instead

giveusaclue wrote: "Sorry to hear this. Could you get the treatment in France if it is an op?.."

Thanks to you and AB for your good wishes...

Yesterday evening was the first time a doctor has actually examined my knee since I originally injured it some six weeks ago... in the UK, a minion looked at it in A&E, then following a pointless X-ray 3 weeks later, a doctor told me I'd need an ultrasound scan...

The opinions I've heard since are that such a scan are unlikely to reveal much!

The GP here in France (I've been on his list for 30 years or so) looked at and manipulated the knee, and could feel things moving about... he had an idea of what was the matter, but reckoned an MRI was needed to be sure. So - he wrote me a prescription for that and for the physio... whether I can get either done before we return to the UK depends on availability, but we'll see.

The health care system in France is much better funded than in the UK, but even here there are problems. There are so-called 'medical deserts' where there are no GPs anywhere near. To solve this, the government offers cash incentives to GPs to move to these 'deserts'.
Sounds good? Well, there used to be two GPs in our village, but the other one moved to such a 'desert' for the cash - and is now set up some 20km (15 miles) away! Local rumour has it that he plays the system by moving every time his contract comes to an end...

In the meantime...

The Beasts of Paris by Stef Penney

This is quite a long book (480 pages or so) which deals with a number of characters at the time of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) and the siege of Paris, and also the short-lived Paris commune (1871) which was ruthlessly overthrown by the Versailles government. (This reminded me of the earlier June Rebellion in 1832, which features in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables... though here far more people were killed.)

There is quite a large cast of characters... a recovering female mental patient who gets work at the Paris menagerie - and her employers there; a couple who operate photographers and their staff which includes a gay Canadian; his lover - the surgeon nephew of the American ambassador; a photographic model and her husband... etc. etc. This allows the author to cover a great many angles on the events which took place - so from a historical novel perspective it is pretty successful - with the downside that I at least didn't feel fully committed to the fates of any of them (naturally, they don't all live to the end). I did learn quite a lot about the events, and was surprised by mention of the Geneva Convention - the first was drawn up in 1864, though I'd always assumed it was much more recent - totally ignored by the Versaillais as they executed surrendering communards.

The writing is pretty good by most standards... at times, I felt that obvious words had been chosen where with a bit more time and revision a more original choice may have been made, but that's tricky. If you choose the 'obvious' word, that verges on cliché; if you try too hard to select something outlandish, that reeks of pretentiousness... so where is the Goldilocks zone in all that? I have my own ideas and feelings, but it's so much easier to be a critic than an author!

This is the fourth book I've read by Stef Penney - I'd say they are all worthwhile, but my favourite two are The Tenderness of Wolves and Under a Pole Star, with this one and The Invisible Ones by Stef Penney a little bit weaker - IMO, of course. I'd definitely recommend the first two.

Now on (or back) to Percival Everett and The Trees, which has already made me laugh, despite a gruesome description of two dead bodies in the second chapter. Few authors can manage to find humour in that sort of thing, but Everett is exceptional - I do hope he wins this year's Booker, though TBH I haven't read the others on the short list so can't compare. He'd be my choice, anyway.

Posted over from the G, in case it inexplicably vanishes:

Alexandria was a real hotpot of cultures up till the Nasser years post 1952 In 1937, it was 13% foreign, with 23% non-Muslim population(a collection of Greeks, Italians,French, Maltese and Lebanese). Within a decade(1847) these numbers had fallen to 7% foreign and 17%. Greeks were always the most numerous "foreigners" with aincient roots to the city,(and Cairo) the Italians had been a key part too but after 1945, their presence faded accross eastern North Africa, as colonial occupation ended

For anyone interested in NE African cities(1930-1950s) Benghazi and Tunis were Alexandria's in minature and are covered by some interesting literature too. Alessendro Spina(a maronite christian libyan), wrote a large collection of works in Italian about Benghazi which i recommend and Albert Memmi was a Tunisian Jew who wrote about Tunis. An egyptian author i discovered but am yet to read, who wrote in french, is Albert Cossery.

scarletnoir wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Sorry to hear this. Could you get the treatment in France if it is an op?.."

Thanks to you and AB for your good wishes...

Yesterday evening was the first time a doctor has act..."

I hope you're able to get some help now! Would it be far to go for the MRI?
Even here in the Paris area, although I've never had any problems about waiting for appointments / treatment, there are difficulties. A lot of GPs, like mine, aren't accepting new patients. Though I don't know if that would apply to just getting an appointment, rather than signing on with them.
Actually there is one area where I've had problems come to think of it — dermatologists are very hard to get to see!

Gpfr wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Would it be far to go for the MRI?."

No, just the nearest town some 15km away. We are waiting to hear if they can fit me in before our return.

I forgot to say - for the local GP who moved, he took his 'list' with him, so his patients - who used to be able to see him in the village - now have to travel an extra 20 km or find someone nearer - I don't think our GP is, or can, take on any more patients.

So he got a bonus for making life harder for his local patients!

AB76 wrote: "...Alexandria's in miniature and are covered by some interesting literature too."

Of course, Alexandria itself is the location for Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, which I think you've read and liked (?)... I finished the four volumes, so they could not have been terrible, though my abiding memory from ages ago (50 years at least) is of a rather pretentious writer...

BTW - I guess there is a typo in your post...? Did you mean '1947' rather than '1847'?

Sorry to read about your knee Scarlet and hope things get sorted soon.

I wanted to put in a positive NHS comment - I have had some excellent treatment at times. Now I am in my 8th year of eye injections every few weeks which stop me going blind. The injection that I have costs hundred a time and I must have had well over 60 now.
My husband has had great treatment for skin cancer on his scalp. This is very common in older men who lost their hair and I cannot praise the ongoing care enough.
It’s not all bad.

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Alexandria's in miniature and are covered by some interesting literature too."

Of course, Alexandria itself is the location for Lawrence Durrell's [book:The Alexandria Quartet|1303..."

just got the last book to read, i liked Justine but disliked Balthazar(vol2) intensely,Mountolive(vol3) was brilliant. I can see the pretentious angle,

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Alexandria's in miniature and are covered by some interesting literature too."

Of course, Alexandria itself is the location for Lawrence Durrell's [book:The Alexandria Quartet|1303..."

yes...1947 not 1847

scarletnoir wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Sorry to hear this. Could you get the treatment in France if it is an op?.."

Thanks to you and AB for your good wishes...

Yesterday evening was the first time a doctor has act..."


Without wanting to get into politics, is the general concept of the health service in France better or worse than here? Is it a case of more effficient use of funds in France than here? Are people in France less likely to waste (if that is the right word?) health service
resources than here?

scarletnoir wrote: "Other books such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Scarlet Letter and Cat’s Cradle are regarded as religious satire by some Goodreads readers, though as I haven't read them I can't confirm if they justify this classification."

I’ve read two of those, but thanks to popular culture, feel fairly conversant with the premise of the one I haven’t read: The Handmaid’s Tale. I guess that is a sort of satire in the form of dystopia.

Cat's Cradle has the fictional religion of Bokononism, which I suppose is a kind of satire on religion in general rather than any specific sect or creed. SF authors often make up religions for their imaginary societies, which I think of more as part of the genre’s world-building process. Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune come to mind; L. Ron Hubbard is an SF author who made up a religion IRL.

Argh. The Scarlet Letter seemed more to me a study in religious psychology rather than a critique or satire. Even undertaking it as an adult reader, I found the book something of a slog. Assigning it to high school students, as was frequently done in the past, seems like a sure fire vaccine against ever wanting to read for pleasure.

Early this morning, in a state halfway between dream and waking, I imagined a re-telling of The Island of Dr. Moreau. A solitary man is found adrift at sea in a small boat and rescued by a cargo ship. He tells of being prisoner on an island where horrific medical experiments are being conducted by a monomaniacal physician. At the end of the story, it’s revealed that the castaway is RFK, Jr. and the medical experiments are the administration of vaccines against tropical diseases.

CCCubbon wrote: "Sorry to read about your knee Scarlet and hope things get sorted soon.

I wanted to put in a positive NHS comment - I have had some excellent treatment at times. Now I am in my 8th year of eye inje..."

It used to be better, but has been underfunded for years. I hope things will improve with the new government. Time will tell.
(Funding in France follows a mixed system - much state funding, and a good bit also from the 'mutuels' which are compulsory insurance policies (I think) for many businesses and occupations - the employer pays a part, and the employee the rest - a bit like NI, except it's private, I believe. You often pay for care (GP visits) and then claim it back in part from the social security and in part from your mutuel... I think that's it but some of that may not be 100% right. I'm no expert.)

giveusaclue wrote: "is the general concept of the health service in France better or worse than here?"

For how it works (I think) see above... It certainly leads to better funding. It can lead to inefficiencies - when I lived in France, over-prescription was rife, but the government has cracked down a lot on that. The mixed public-private model seems to work well on the whole, though no system is perfect. I wouldn't mind something similar in the UK but it would be an enormous upheaval.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/2...

A maily private system (as in the USA) seems to lead to high expense and poor outcomes:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publ...

I suspect one of the major 'inefficiencies' in the UK is the use of agency staff and locums at considerable expense, because there aren't enough people to fill the NHS vacancies, but I don't know.

scarletnoir wrote: "I suspect one of the major 'inefficiencies' in the UK is the use of agency staff and locums at considerable expense, because there aren't enough people to fill the NHS vacancies, but I don't know.."

I wonder too about layers of management and the ratio of management/admin/clinical.

giveusaclue wrote: "the general concept of the health service in France..."

As scarletnoir wrote above, funding is mixed.
e.g. when you visit a GP, 70% is paid by the state and if you have a mutuelle (health insurance), it covers the rest except for something like 2 euro which you have to pay. We have a smart card, the carte vitale, which gives all your information, and depending on the situation, you pay and it's reimbursed (pretty quickly), or you don't pay.

The mutuelle is not compulsory. Many people have one through their employer as scarlet said, and employer and employee each pay part. Being retired, I now have a private one. Things like dental care and glasses are expensive, so it can be wise to have insurance.

If people have a chronic or serious illness, or very low resources, costs are 100% covered.

In the past, you didn't sign up with a particular doctor. Some people would see umpteen different doctors including specialists, maybe unnecessarily, and of course, that cost. So some years ago, they introduced the system of signing up with a médecin traitant. This is normally a GP, but not necessarily, if one is followed long-term by a specialist, one could choose that doctor. It's not compulsory to do this, but if you don't see your médecin traitant or another doctor to whom he/she has sent you, it costs you more.

I think the system works pretty well on the whole.

scarletnoir wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "Sorry to read about your knee Scarlet and hope things get sorted soon.

I wanted to put in a positive NHS comment - I have had some excellent treatment at times. Now I am in my 8th..."

It was better under the Blair government. I was fortunate in that my major heart surgery and several other ops happened then but am grateful for the eye treatment and the pile of pills that I have to take daily.

The Fall of Scotland Yard (1977), an Oxfam find, is a brilliant detailed account of serious corruption in the Met between 1967-76.

Written by a trio of Times journalists(pre Murdoch), it inspired the BBC series Line of Duty and i'm enjoying its ability to shine a light on the dirty doings of a significant number of met detectives or CID men.

A two man Times team in the late 60s uncovered some dire failings in informant handling and passed the information to the Met. The Met were startled and so began a familiar tale of minimal police co-operation and maximum police non-co-operation in a passive way as Frank Williamson, former Chief Inspector of HM Constabulary) tried to investigate the claims.

Senior officers had fingers in many pies but they were found out later, in this stage of 1970, they are carefully making sure things can go no higher than lower ranks and objecting to any non-Met involvement.

I hope the book uncovers why these coppers were so bent, what drove them, they were part of a generation formed after WW2, but seem to represent the worst of that generation. I hope to track down a pattern in the lives of bent cops like Commander Wally Virgo, Commander Drury, DCS Moody and others.

The oddest case was a DS Symonds, who escaped most charges against him and became a Romeo Spy for the KGB! He was found out in the late 60s, one of the first bent cops named in the informant handling problem

Thanks for your replies Scarlet and G. Very informative.

Thanks for the new thread.

"The UN secretary general, António Guterres, told a UN security council meeting that “hell is breaking loose” in Lebanon." --News item. My, I wonder what tipped him off?

Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "the general concept of the health service in France..."

Having read about the difficulties sometimes (?) of getting a GP appointment, that's something I have no difficulty with.
For a lot of doctors now, appointments are made by internet. You see all the available times and choose one with a brief note of the reason for the consultation. My GP will also often squeeze people in when phoned if it's urgent, though this does mean she sometimes runs very late! She has her own site. There is a site used by many doctors which apparently some are now leaving because they find too many people sign up for an appointment and don't show up.

Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "the general concept of the health service in France..."

As scarletnoir wrote above, funding is mixed.
e.g. when you visit a GP, 70% is paid by the state and if you have a mutu..."

Thanks for those corrections/clarifications/updates!

AB76 wrote: "The Fall of Scotland Yard (1977), an Oxfam find, is a brilliant detailed account of serious corruption in the Met between 1967-76.

Written by a trio of Times journalists(pre Murdoch), it inspired ..."

No one who has been paying attention could be ignorant of the many and varied scandals surrounding the Met for many years. I'm a bit surprised that it still exists - why hasn't some government or other disbanded it and created a new system?

Gpfr wrote: "Having read about the difficulties sometimes (?) of getting a GP appointment (in the UK), that's something I have no di..."

Not sure if this is worse in England, or if I'm just lucky in my part of Wales - I don't have too much trouble with GP appointments, though you do need to 'phone early as soon as the surgery opens! Then you get asked by some unqualified receptionist for your reasons... this person may or may not be a dragon. It depends. But I don't remember actually failing to get an appointment on the day (if needed) or soon after (if it wasn't urgent).

Looking back, I might have done better to see the GP rather than go to A&E - but it was at the weekend and I was in agony, so I didn't have a choice, unfortunately. The GP, at least, would have examined the knee and formed an initial opinion...

Gpfr wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "the general concept of the health service in France..."

Having read about the difficulties sometimes (?) of getting a GP appointment, that's something I have no di..."

Robert wrote: "Thanks for the new thread.

"The UN secretary general, António Guterres, told a UN security council meeting that “hell is breaking loose” in Lebanon." --News item. My, I wonder what tipped him off?"


I am fortunate that I haven't had a problem getting an appointment. When I popped in the surgery yesterday to cancel a flu vaccine appointment because I had made other appointment there was one person waiting. Asked the receptionist "Have you killed them all?" She laughed and said yes.

A friend was a receptionist and was puzzled by how many had notes with DNA on them - Did not attend.

scarletnoir wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "Having read about the difficulties sometimes (?) of getting a GP appointment (in the UK), that's something I have no di..."

Not sure if this is worse in England, or if I'm just lucky ..."

But then he may have sent you to A&E!

Autumn quotes from the British Library (as I sit at my desk thinking I need a thicker jumper on):
https://www.instagram.com/p/DAWQZi-C-...

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The Fall of Scotland Yard (1977), an Oxfam find, is a brilliant detailed account of serious corruption in the Met between 1967-76.

Written by a trio of Times journalists(pre Murdoch),..."

i guess as the oldest and best funded police force, in the largest city in the UK, it has many elements of the "untouchable" about it.

they should look at the amount of work it does outside the beat, so to speak of Greater London (Excluding the City of London ofc) and maybe fund regional forces better to take on some of the work the Met does.

problem is, unlike most european countries there is no national police force, ithe UK is a messy bundle of amalgamated old county forces and city forces. I would create a national force and fund the police better, the met have been hit hard by austerity too, selling off police stations, decreasing the number of boroughs to police, reducing community policing etc and as a huge second push, look to improve internal investigations and the approach to women(suspects, victims and employees)

AB76 wrote: "unlike most european countries there is no national police force..."

Well, in France there is the "police nationale" under the ministry of the interior, but there's also the gendarmes under the ministry of defence and the "police municipale" under the authority of the mayor of the commune.

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "unlike most european countries there is no national police force..."

Well, in France there is the "police nationale" under the ministry of the interior, but there's also the gendarmes..."

i like the french system a lot and the spanish one. though am less a fan of the ethics of the CRS, formed in the Vichy days and known to be aggressive and hard headed riot police. In spain the Guardia Civil fill in as a national force and then it gets broken down into regional, district and urban

Yes there were some ‘bent’ coppers during that period but the majority of men were brave and hard working during troubled times.
In any organisation there will be those who do not follow proper procedures and I feel that you are condemning a force on the evidence of a book that I have never heard about. This smacks of the sort of conspiracy theories of social media on tiny evidence.

I am not saying all was good - it wasn’t by a long way but nothing like the assumptions that you are making.

CCCubbon wrote: "Yes there were some ‘bent’ coppers during that period but the majority of men were brave and hard working during troubled times.
In any organisation there will be those who do not follow proper pro..."

the book describes one of the first significant investigations of police corruption in the UK, which led to serious reforms and changes in the way the police worked. You may not have heard of the book but it describes a period which is a well known chapter in the post-war reforms of english policing. People were convicted, there was reams of evidence, not a conspiracy theory at all, well except for a conspiracy of silence in the Met from 1967-70

i am certainly not condemning the entire force but utterly condemn the senior officers who tried to smear and intimidate people to cover things up. To clarify, my interest in "those coppers who were bent" meant the 5 or 6 senior officers who went down

AB76 wrote: "I'm loving the endless rain falling and the absence of sun!

Thanks G as always

Current reading is:
The End of Czechoslovakia, a selection of essays on the Velvet Divorce, where the two constitue..."

Endless rainfall and the absence of sun? You ought to join us outside Seattle. The Washington Fall has begun.

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The Fall of Scotland Yard (1977), an Oxfam find, is a brilliant detailed account of serious corruption in the Met between 1967-76.

Written by a trio of Times journalists(pre Murdoch),..."

Weren't Met officers found guilty of planting explosives on suspected IRA members back in the 1970?