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The eastern suburbs of Paris are not generally reputed for their beauty or their sehenswürdigkeit.  One exception is the town of Joinville-le-Pont, sitting astride the Marne river just on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes.

The town includes the Ile Fanac, a wooded island in the middle of the river, on which stand a number of fine fin-de-siècle homes.

The calm, regulated waters of the Marne make this area an ideal place for rowing, and Joinville-le-Pont has become something of a French Henley-on-Thames, with rowing clubs sprinkled along the riverbanks.

Joinville-le-Pont was an early centre of French film production, and just across the river you can still see the studios of Pathé Frères, regularly used by film-makers such as Jean Renoir and René Clair in the years before the Second World War.

Finally, a wander up the river and under the A4 autoroute brings you to Chez Gégène, one of the last guingettes still operating in the Paris region. These riverside restaurants and cabaret venues were originally set up outside the city walls to escape the taxes and prohibitions of Paris itself.

From the end of the 19th Century until the 1950s the guingettes were popular places for eating and dancing. But today, like the old brick Pathé studios, they stand as memorials to an earlier age of  entertainment…

It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.

Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.

Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.

The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.

Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.

I wrote last year about my chance meeting with Leanna Mills and her family in Montpellier. I was particularly moved by their story and have kept in touch with the family since.

With more surgery upcoming for Leanna and her sister Bethany, the family arrived back in France this week. They passed through Paris briefly on their way to Montpellier.

On Thursday evening I caught up with the girls and their father Nic for dinner. Afterwards we went down to the Eiffel Tower for some sightseeing. I’m still not much good at driving a wheelchair, and the evening crowds didn’t make it easier! Their little sister Olivia came with us, and had a lot of fun with the souvenir sellers…

Bethany, Nic, Leanna and Olivia in Paris

Bethany’s surgery is routine but still dramatic – she is getting the batteries replaced for the brain stimulator device that keeps her alive. The technology is slowly improving, and doctors  hope that her new batteries will last longer than two years. Bethany uses a wheelchair, but thanks to continuing surgery she remains fairly mobile and independent.

On the other hand, Leanna is facing a much grimmer challenge. In addition to her primary dystonia, she has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – terrible news for a 15 year-old girl.  Leanna now requires significant care, and the outlook does not look good for much improvement.

Mills Sisters Registered Charity

The Mills family currently need help raising funds to buy a block of land in Newcastle, Australia and to construct a disability-friendly home for the girls. They have a registered charity, and donations are accepted online at their MyCause page. These donations are tax-deductible in Australia.

In other developments, the sisters now have their own website. With permission of the family, I also have set up a Facebook page – so you can follow them if you’re on Facebook, and I hope to post regular updates there as I hear news…

The 14th of July (which NOBODY in France calls “Bastille Day”, by the way) dawned bright, promising a hot day with sun shining benignly down on the amassed weaponry parading down the Champs-Elysées. Shorts, sunglasses, sunscreen and digital cameras seemed the essential equipment to enjoy the day.

How wrong we were. As we took up our position in the roof garden of an office building just a block back from the Arc de Triomphe (friends with high places, naturally), and while snipers from the Gendarmerie stared at us through binoculars, clouds started moving in from the east, looming darkly over the Eiffel Tower.

The storm held off long enough for us to watch the French Air Force roar down the length of the Voie Triomphale, from La Défense to the Louvre. It was an impressive sight.

New Zealand’s airforce consists of a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters, a few transport planes that occasionally drop boxes of aid to cyclone-stricken Pacific islands and a part-time brass band. France has, er, a few more planes than we do:

And then, as soon as the jets got out of the way, the heavens opened. Paris was hit by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. We unsuccessfully dodged the showers and – strangely – found ourselves in a bar in time for lunch. We were wet, but seemed to be doing something right.

L’Ecluse specialise in the wines of Bordeaux. We ignored the bottle of 1979 St Pétrus on their wine list at €1227 and opted for a €25 Château Margaux instead. After drying out over a few glasses and an “Assortiment de cochonnailles” (a plate containing variations on pig), I sensed that the rain was easing and that I should make a dash for the métro.

My expectation of improving weather proved of course to be hilariously and liquidly wrong. As I reached the bottom of Avenue Georges V, another torrential downpour hit. By the time I took this video of a Leclerc tank rumbling onto the Pont de l’Alma, I was soaked to the skin.

The rest of the day was spent drying off, wandering around the Marais in the newly resurgent sunshine, and then heading up the tower of the American Cathedral (yes, more friends with high places) for a few drinks and to watch the fireworks over Trocadéro at 11pm. But that is another episode…

To complement our previous journey from south to north, yesterday we achieved the obvious second objective – to cross Paris from west to east, on foot. From Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes. It took us 6 hours, and we covered 14.2 kilometres.

We ignored the warnings of heatwave, and were surprised by lower-than-predicted temperatures.  A light rainstorm in the afternoon helped keep things manageable. The City of Paris, however, were taking no chances:  heatwave warnings were displayed everywhere on the public information screens.

The journey was documented in real-time via Twitter, but here are a few highlights in images:

Parc de Monceau, a welcome patch of greenery in the 8th arrondissement

Jeanne d’Arc defying the English outside Saint-Augustin (Paris 8e)

A very reasonably priced lunch at Bouillon Chartier

The Promenade Plantée offers a quiet green corridor for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the 12th arrondissement

As we reached journeys end at the périphérique on the eastern edge of Paris, the chimneys got more fanciful…

My blog is currently subtitled “A kiwi in Paris, sweating on the metro“, and this week I have fully lived up to this moniker. In celebration of the official heatwave in Paris, and faced with news it’s only going to get hotter, here’s a “really-can’t-be-arsed-writing-anything” post.

Have a play with this tone matrix (you’ll work it out), and think of all of us in Western Europe who are perspiring into the night.

I was busy as a bee in Brussels over the weekend. It was basically my Belgian baptism: beer, bandes dessinées and bilingualism. It was, to be blunt, bloody brilliant.

Saturday morning sun among the guildhalls in the Grote Market

Hanging out at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée…

…and finding parallels between Hergé and Breugel at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts

When in Rome…

Saturday night with the guys from Batucada Sound Machine…

Sunday morning confronting the colonial past at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale…

…before a Sunday afternoon lost among the glass towers of EU officialdom…

…all achieved in less than 48 hours!

Image: U.S. Army (Creative Commons)

I commend to you this interview with writer and historian William Dalrymple. A long-time observer of south Asia, (Born in Scotland, Dalrymple has lived in India for twenty years), he outlines concisely why western military intervention in Afghanistan is destined to failure, as has every foreign invasion of the country for at least 200 years.

The first half of the interview covers Dalrymple’s life story and his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. But the meat of the conversation is in the second half hour, where Dalrymple describes his latest trip to Afghanistan. Essentially in Dalrymple’s view, NATOs current strategy in the country is not working and will never work.

David Cameron in Afghanistan, June 10, 2010 (Downing Street: Creative Commons)

In our haste to liberate Afghanistan from the odious clutches of the Taleban, we tend to forget that the military strength and political clout of Islamic extremists in south Asia were largely creations of Western intelligence agencies in the 1980s in their clandestine war with the Soviets.

Many things that have happened since – mujahadeen fighting in Bosnia, years of violent theocratic rule in Afghanistan, terrorist training camps – are simply massive blowback for the meddling of years gone by.

Image: US Army (Creative Commons)

What is remarkable is how pessimistic Dalrymple is. He sees the only solution will be to negotiate with the Taleban, bringing them and more ethnic Pashtoun elements into the Afghan government. Without such a move he predicts the collapse of the Karzai régime within nine months. And if failure in Afghanistan leads to the collapse of nucelar-armed Pakistan, Dalrymple agrees with the recent prognosis of Salman Rushdie: “we’re all fucked.”