In the can

Here I am in the recording studio in West Road in Cambridge last Thursday. Michael Copley and I were recording a new Sambuca CD (Dowland, Albeniz, Romanian panpipe music, Vivaldi, Jobim...). Doesn't it look glamorous with all those microphones and equipment! Actually it's hard work, with two implacable men in the control room scrutinising every note and telling us kindly but firmly to do it again. And again. Exhausting.

Thanks to Yuzuru Yamashiro, our guest second recorder player (and fellow member of the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet) for the photo.

Pushing it

The road from Castres up to La Caulié is busy, winding and unlit. Each evening, an old gent pushes his wheelbarrow, also unlit, down the road. I'm amazed he has survived this long. I have got used to watching out for the wheelbarrow hazard around the next bend. Fortunately the days are lengthening now, bringing him a little more safety.

Hot club

Last week was my jazz guitar concert debut. Here I am with Christian, the other guitarist. Out of shot are the rest of the band: Béatrice on vocals, Maurice on saxophone, Svetlana on piano, Josiane on bass and Bernard on drums.

Back to practising Sambuca repertoire now, before travelling to the UK next week to record a new CD with Michael.

Pigs

Mon Quotidien, our children's newspaper, carries a report this week that one million sangliers (wild boar) live in France. And that French hunters killed 500,000 of them in 2007.

Cause for alarm? Is the sanglier going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon, with extinction imminent? Not a bit of it. Without the gallant hunters, the sanglier population would explode, apparently. And they can cause damage if they get onto roads or into cities. So no worries about the slaughter.

The French government office responsible for such matters is the Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage. In that order. Motto: "Aimer la chasse, c'est avoir une autre passion : celle de la nature."

Digging for gold

The new Mrs Sarkozy is nearly ten times as rich as her husband, according to a report in yesterday's Figaro. Which has led to speculation about what sort of marriage contract they may have signed.

To explain: in France you can choose from a selection of financial regimes for your marriage. French tradition and law favours the bloodline over rapacious spouses. The default regime, the one that automatically applies unless you choose otherwise, is the communauté réduite aux acquêts. The spouses' revenues are equally shared but any inheritances, donations etc remain the property of each individual spouse and are kept by them in case of divorce.

The officiating maire at the wedding let slip that the Sarkozys have chosen otherwise. Possibly a communauté universelle? Unlikely, thinks the Figaro, since all existing assets, as well as revenues, go into the common pot and would be split equally in the event of a divorce. Carla wouldn't want to give away half her fortune like that.

Or there's the régime de la séparation des biens which keeps everything separate. Or indeed the régime de la participation réduite aux acquêts which keeps everything separate during the marriage but provides for an equal division on death or divorce of assets acquired during the marriage. The Figaro doesn't come to any conclusions about which régime they may have selected.

All of which is alien, even bewildering, to an English reader. Wealthy newlyweds may try to protect their fortunes with pre-nuptial agreements, but they're not binding, and it's only recently that courts have started giving them any consideration when dividing up the assets on a divorce.

300 decisions

Last July Nicolas Sarkozy asked Jacques Attali to investigate how to promote economic growth in France. The resonantly named Commission pour la libération de la Croissance française reported last week and and has been making waves. The report is wide-ranging, covering health, education, transport, deregulation, technology, tourism....

Attali was an interesting choice. He made his name as an economic adviser to the socialist president François Mitterrand before becoming head of the post-communist European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the early 90's, a useful apprenticeship for the equally challenging task of rebuilding France.

Attali rather hopefully said that his 316 measures were interconnected and must be implemented as a whole. The prime minister François Fillon has been letting him down gently, saying this this was 'maybe a little excessive'. But the government does so far appear to be taking the report seriously and intends to act on it promptly.

It's intriguing to see how often the UK is cited as an example of good practice to which France should aspire. Attali praises the UK's sustained engagement in reform of school and health systems, in markets and public services, and its financial services industry. Detailed recommendations where the UK leads the way include, for example:

US/UK model for university research funding (Decision no. 29)
Help research establishments to commercialise their discoveries (31)
Facilitate access by smaller companies to the Alternext market, cf AIM in London (40)
Open up the mobile phone market (61)
'Massive' development of preventative healthcare (66)
Construction of Ecotowns (91)
Harmonise financial services rules with those of the UK (97)
Massively develop teaching of business English (100)
Develop low-cost airlines (104)
Develop better paths for changing employment between private and public sectors (148)
Welcome more foreign workers (222)
Advance evaluation of new legislation (231)
Committee for Better Regulation (232)
Speed of enacting European directives (238)
Use of agencies for public administration (248)
Civil service employment contracts along private sector lines, not for life (256-7)
Performance indicators for local public services (265)

Many other recommendations are already well established in the UK, for example:
More autonomy for schools (4)
Schools inspections, results to be published (5)
Parents to be able to choose schools (6)
Deduct income tax at source (PAYE) (304)

Clearly the UK is a shining economic paradise.

Some of Attali's recommendations will run into trouble. I doubt whether the public services can cope with every secondary school child having to do half a day of civic service per week. And three weeks a year of work experience from age 13 upwards does not fit well with the high rate of youth unemployment in France (Attali says rather weakly that companies tempted to rely on work experience rather than offering real jobs to youngsters should be 'dissuaded'). And the most outrageous protected sectors attacked by Attali are outraged. The taxi drivers are threatening to take to the streets (!). But with the price of a second-hand taxi licence at Orly now running at 400,000 euros, there's something very wrong with the taxi market and he's right to address it.

My favourite Decision is number 213. There is a class of lawyers called Avoués près les cours d'appel. They have had no purpose since their monopoly was abolished in 2001 but there are still 444 of them drawing fees. Attali recommends that the position should be abolished.