Friday, 12 June 2020

Social distancing


[People queueing and drinking outside a bar in Paris last week. Customers are not allowed to stand in re-opened bars in France © AFP via Getty Images via the Financial Times]


[The version according to gmaps. For some reason I thought of Place des Vosges, then Google Image turned up a version of the picture which included the branch of Gucci next door, then Bing turned up a branch of Gucci in the Rue des Archives in the Marais. With the side road being called the Square Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie. Presumably for the people at reference 3. Not far from the Rue du Roi de Sicile which figures in at least one Maigret story]

Might just as well be the Goat in Stafford Street, just off Piccadilly, in the days when we used to go to the Royal Institution, with the last occasion being noticed at reference 1. Hard to see how you are going to stop this sort of thing in cramped old towns like London and Paris once you open the bars up.

Hard to see how the Royal Institution is going to manage with its famous but cramped main lecture theatre, snapped at reference 2, with its old fashioned tiers of seats. Not to mention the crush in the staircase afterwards.

All very difficult. And I continue to wonder whether Corbyn and his crew would have done any better than the bunch of newbies we have actually got. Their hearts might have been roughly in the right place, but did they have the necessary skills?

PS: no way of knowing whether this picture is a 'true and fair view' of the (gay) bar scene in Paris, to use a favoured phrase from the world of accountants. The well-paid people who failed to warn us that Carillion (for example) was going down. I suppose one just has to trust the Financial Times, that its correspondents and editors are doing their job properly. That is what I am paying them for.



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