“April is the cruelest month” or so thought Lost Generation’s T.S. Eliot as he stated in his epic poem “The Wasteland” (1922) which, as avant-garde and visionary as he no doubt was, T.S. could never have imagined the waste problems us fashionable Parisians have been immersed in these last weeks. In short, the government wants everyone to work longer, in the hopes of beefing up the treasury of a supposed fragile pension system, and retire at the ripe old age of 64. Now, I’m not choosing sides but I will say that maybe Ringo had it right when he sang, Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four. The government proposal has not gone over so well with the French populace who can get very touchy when it comes to their sacred pension system and the grand leafy boulevards of this beautiful city where I live, lately have been mobbed with demonstrators who have been clashing with police, banging drums, chanting slogans, all of this with an accompanying side-bar of a monumental garbage strike. Which sounds strange because obviously the garbage itself, nor those whose trash it once was, are on strike but those who pick it up surely are … or were. And until that happened you have no idea how much crap we’re throwing out on a daily basis every evening with nary a thought of where it will all go as long as it’s not there in the morning when sleepy eyed Parisians march off to work.

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