Hydref yn yr Hafod 🍂

I've just started charging for my work!

https://sharkfishinginwales1.substack.com/

I never thought it would come to this but I have decided to join the Capitalist Rat Race. I have made the bold Alan Sugaresque decision to charge for my writing like what journalists and freelance writers do. They get paid for writing. 

I will still be writing here on Shark Fishing in Wales, my long established blog but I have now decided to branch out and see what other writing platforms have to offer and whether they pay anything.

I know it's going to be nickel and dime stuff. I know that Stripe will take their cut like Paypal take their cut but it feels better that anonymous digital financial institutions crunch the numbers rather than Jeff  Bezos keeping your profits to fund his rockets. I wish I understood how I only get 7 pence royalties per sale when somebody buys my work on Amazon KDP. 

For all my Anti-Capitalist rantings on twitter I have had to bite the bullet and 'rethink Capitalism.     

The Lavender Hill Louvre

 

The jewels wot ave been purloined from the Louvre in Paris have already been melted down and turned into statues of the Eiffel Tower. That is of course if the getaway gang were English. 

You cannot rule anything out these days! Would 'les Anglais' have the brazen front to do the heist on a Sunday morning at the moment the Museum was opening to the hordes of tourists?

I myself was casing the joint inadvertently I might add four weekends ago on a Sunday. I had walked along the Seine on the last weekend in September and after I had finished my spiel to camera in the video below

I ended up in the Jardin de Tuileries and was myself mugged for a Cafe au Lait for 4 Euros 50! I needed something wet to assist the passage of dry croissants wot I had purchased in the Bastille market not an hour previously. I walked towards the Louvre not actually knowing the gardens location in relation to the famous museum. Seeing the hordes of tourists queuing and realising where I was I made a sharp exit left into the equally crowded streets of Paris.  

If the Paris Police Prefecture were to contact Ken Frane, Last of the Cardiff Dock's Detectives he would tell them to conduct house to house enquiries in the 10th Arrondissement. His take would be that the booty has now left Paris either from the Gare du Nord (less likely) or the Gare de l'Est (more probable)

If it is not too anti-semitic to say so this heist also has all the hallmarks of Mossad.

France's heritage is going to be melted down to fund Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza just in case Trump pulls the plug.

Images from Paris that made me smile or chuckle

France is a very visual culture and it doesn't surprise me that it is the home of farce. Some of the faces of the Parisiens were straight out of films. Stereotypical haughty and high and mighty. On French television every night there are panel programmes talking about politics and the panelists are lawyers, journalists and philosophers. Opinion and debate are sacrosanct.

The sight of a head waiter and bar man arguing passionately and heatedly about the responsibility of keeping an eye out for new customers so that they don't have to wait too long to be seated and served. The volatility subsides with both shaking their heads and offering Gallic shrugs.

Here are four examples of the visual culture I'm talking about even though two of the examples involved the Japanese.

All these viewed through the lenses of my dark glasses

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A Japanese gentleman in his mid 70s making the sign of the heart hands emoji to his wife who was sat across a green square from him who when she saw it doubled up with laughter and a huge smile.

Again a coach load of Japanese tourists had been unloaded with a packed lunch on the Plas de la Concorde. They were all eating or trying to eat filled baguettes from a silver foil wrapping. The facial expressions of those eating and trying to eat was a picture. Sushi it certainly wasn't.

I only saw one cat in Paris and this was a Siamese kitten who was gamely fighting her owner for the food placed down in front of them on a cafe terrace.

Two elderly bald monks with dark grey vestments trying to work out how to use a photobooth in Gare Montparnasse at 10.30am on a Monday morning. 

“Vive la France”