Did you know that France has about half the world’s roundabouts? It’s true. They have about 30,000 of the things, and build another 500 or so each year.
Now, if you aren’t a fan of roundabouts, you should be. They have prettier flowers than traffic lights. But they are also less expensive, cut congestion (because drivers don’t have to stop completely) and reduce crashes by a third (as well as reducing deaths by 90% due to fewer T-bone crashes).
Hamilton, in New Zealand, has a whopping 90 roundabouts, which might be the most convincing reason to live there I’ve ever heard. It’s a wonder roundabouts aren’t more popular than they are. The US, for example, didn’t have a single one until Nevada constructed the first in 1990. Even now it only has a nudge over 3000. It’s probably because they love freedom and we don’t.
Anyway, next time you coast up to a roundabout, spend a moment appreciating the soothing flow of traffic and the neatness of one of civilization’s powerful little ideas.
So, after crowbarring my roundabout facts into this email, I was standing on a tram platform in France in June. I had left Bilbao to go to see some football at the European Championships. I was standing in the sun and after ten minutes of glancing up and down the tram lines, examining people on the opposite platform play on their phones and waiting in the gathering crowd, the tram had still not come. I was beginning to get nervous. Croatia against the Czech Republic was going to kick-off in about an hour. My fellow commuters and I watched a steady stream of trams pass in the other direction. I felt a slow ripple of dissatisfaction pass over the crowd.
My god, I thought. This is how it starts. This is France. I looked at the young men perched on the railing, the mothers shifting from one foot to the other with their impatient children. A revolution is in the air. Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
I’ve never been in a revolution, I thought. In the heat of the afternoon I began to sweat. The coffee I had just had was making my heart beat faster. I thought of scaling the shelter, ripping down the filthy capitalist advertising and constructing a barricade. Who’s with me? I would scream, with bloodcurdling ferocity.
Before I could do this, however, the tram arrived and we all shuffled wordlessly on. I entertained my little revolutionary reverie all the way to the stadium. Disembarking the tram I walked down a long avenue filled with chanting fans in the red and white checks of Croatia and the red, blue and white of the Czech flag. After a security beefcake caressed my inner thighs to check for weapons (“None of the sort you’re looking for, officer! Ho ho ho!”) I found my way to my seat in the upper reaches of the stadium, above the stand of Croatian fans, just in time for the anthems.
Below me I could see Luka Modric, probably my favourite player of all time, as well as Ivan Rakitic, Mario Mandzukic, Tomas Rosicky and Petr Cech. I was watching the first truly elite football of my life (no offence, Wellington Phoenix). The players I had spent so much of the past decade watching on TV were so close that I could have thrown a flare at them. I decided not to.
But the Croatian fans did. I sat, grinning in ecstasy, for eighty minutes of demonstrated athletic prowess until I was shocked out of my trance with another side of the European football experience: fan violence. In the stands below me, with their team 2-0 up, some of the Croatian fans began to throw flares onto the pitch. The Croatian players came over to try and calm them down, but the stand dissolved into a sea of brawling football fans. It was all the more disconcerting that they looked like a mob of slobby, thuggish Where’s Wallys. Have a skip through this video I took.
I was shaken. Actually I don’t think I like revolutions that much.
From watching the game in Saint-Etienne I got a Blablacar the short distance to Lyon. On June 24th, the morning of Brexit, I was lying in my underwear on a fold out bed in an apartment in Lyon. Daniela, one of my angelic hosts, pattered in. “Have you seen the referendum result?” she asked.
I signed on to my computer to see that half of the United Kingdom had lost its mind. My social media sphere had blown up. It would be an economic catastrophe. The markets would implode, Scotland would leave the Union, expat Britons would be sent home, Ginger spice was leaving the Spice Girls. I got myself a glass of water and contemplated this news. I scratched my bottom. And then I went out for a walk around town.
I walked across the river away from the concrete heat of downtown Lyon to the old town. I wandered through the narrow squares with their big, shady trees and stalls selling overpriced gelato to waddling Americans. I found some steep steps that led to a zigzag up through a woody hillside to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière and a look-out over the city.
Inside the cathedral was cool and quiet and softly illuminated by candle bulbs. Marble pillars stretched to the roof. I read a small description of how, when Lyon was threatened with a cholera epidemic at the beginning of the 19th century (1832), the people rushed up here to pray. It apparently worked. I contemplated the towering history on the walls. These are the pulpits from which the clergy have emanated for centuries their messages of spiritual salvation, communion with Jesus and death to the Jews.
There were small groups of Chinese tourists taking pictures on their smart phones, blissfully ignoring the numerous signs of cameras struck through with red lines, requesting visitors not to take photos. I took a moment to appreciate the serenity and beauty of this marvellous structure then walked, slowly and thoughtfully, through their photographs, ruining as many as I could on my way out of the cathedral.
From Lyon I took a train across to Brive, a small nowhere town in French wine country. I had six hours to kill so found a little park with a circle of benches and ate my baguette and watched elderly French women come with their little dogs to sit in the sun and discuss incontinence pads (I assumed. I don’t speak French). I lay back on the bench and looked up at the sky. I did some downward dog on the grass. In the evening I walked down the hill into the town centre and bought a beer at the only pub I could find that was showing the football. I sat on the tables outside and watched Portugal knock Croatia out of the tournament on a big screen, rationing the sips of my beer to make it last as long as possible. By the second half of the game it was flat and tasteless.
My ride out of Brive was with Thea, a girl I met nine years on my gap year in England when I was a mop-haired, awkwardly dressed eighteen year old. I was going to stay with her and a collection of her friends, all of whom had just finished their Masters degrees at Oxford. I received word that they had broken down on the way. I found a bench near the cathedral and stood around next to my bag listening to podcasts, eying suspiciously the occasional groups of drunk teenagers on their way home from Saturday evening.
Thea and her gang eventually arrived, exhausted and terse after almost twenty hours of punctuated driving (“I don’t know what you lot are complaining about, I’ve had to listen to, like, ten podcasts today…”), and I went with them to stay in Thea’s family house in the Dordogne.
Over the course of the week I met some excellent people coloured with various shades of Leftism. Some were thoughtful and engaged and interesting and some wouldn’t have been out of place among the shock troops of Mao’s Red Guards. I toyed with the idea of posing as a Brexiteer or Trump voter for the week, but decided that it would be too risky. I couldn’t be sure what they would do to enemies of the revolution.
Above all, everyone was very sophisticated. They knew lots about cheese and wine and food. “Thea,” I asked, “How does everyone know so much shit about cheese?”
She laughed.
“New Zealand is the world’s biggest dairy exporter…” I offered. She didn’t know what I was talking about. The fact is that New Zealanders in their twenties don’t tend to know so much about cheese. Maybe that’s what they teach you at Oxford. That and the inevitability of class struggle.
Anyway, I learnt all sorts of things about how neoliberalism is ruining the world and how money has made us customers instead of citizens and, though I was the only one all week to do a cannonball into the pool, I had a very nice time with a lot of very thoughtful people from a lot of different parts of the world.
It was the start of July and I was in the south of France, a continent in front of me, and nothing to do until September.
References
- The Economist, ‘Circling the globe: Roundabouts have turned a corner’, Oct 5th 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/international/21587244-roundabouts-have-turned-corner-circling-globe
- Stuff, ‘City of Roundabouts a land of confusion’, April 29 2015, http://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/news/68133512/city-of-roundabouts-a-land-of-confusion
