Cutting the mustard

In my last column, I complained about the sheer number of people crowding the narrow streets of Annecy and how it made it seem like a living theme park, but the contrast with the next port of call on our summer holiday odyssey could not have been greater.

Once we had unpacked our bags and headed out into the late afternoon sun, the first thing that struck me about Dijon was the lack of people.

It seemed half-empty, blissfully so, and we had the dying hours of a flea market pretty much to ourselves, where I couldn’t help but take a glance at the music stalls. To the patent surprise of the stall-holder, I bought a cassette of songs by Georges Brassens, the French singer-songwriter and poet who has been on my mind on and off ever since I attended a conference at Porte de Versailles in Paris a few years ago and his music was played every time the tram came to the stop named after him.

Back to Dijon, which immediately won me over with its beautiful alleyways and eminently walkable streets, and its collection of churches and landmarks that would be the envy of any European city.

All of which made me come back to the same question again and again: where was everyone? Not that I was moaning, but why weren’t the streets rammed to the gills, as it were, with flocks and flocks of tourists, to mix my metaphors?

A genial waiter in a passable US-style sports pub explained that summer is the low season for Dijon, as all the inhabitants are on holiday either on the Côte d’Azur or in Bretagne, as are most of the tourists that come to France at that time of year.

Well, good for us, although the waiter we talked to was working at pretty much the only restaurant that was open on a Sunday evening, which is why we ate there rather than tried any of the numerous local restaurants (see below). Clearly there are some downsides to being off the beaten track.

Perhaps if they opened a mustard museum, Dijon would attract more tourists.

Talking of museums, we were only there for a couple of days before we headed on to Paris, but I managed to find a few hours to explore the city’s rather grand Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Located in the Palais des Ducs et des États de Bourgogne, it opened in 1787 and is apparently one of the oldest museums in France. It boasts a rich and varied collection stretching from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Renaissance and beyond, reaching into the 17th and even 21st century. As well as a vast number of European pieces, the museum houses African ceremonial masks, Chinese and Japanese porcelains, Korean stoneware, Tibetan and Indian sculptures and pre-Columbian ceramics, among others.

Consequently, there were, frankly, too many treasures to see in the time I had available. The room housing the tombs of Philippe le Hardi and Jean sans Peur was particularly memorable, however, and I was impressed by the abundance of finely wrought religious paintings, many of which I had never come across before and were in styles with which I was not at particular familiar.

As is my wont, my attention was drawn to the relatively small number still life paintings on display, but it was hard to get a handle on the museum as a whole. The collection was not organised in a way that particularly made sense to me, and the layout of the museum was confusing and labyrinthine.

But that is a small gripe. I would happily go back if we passed that way again, and once you have tired of art treasures from across the ages, you can do worse than to have a drink in the very agreeable square behind the museum, which is far quieter and more intimate (although less grand) than the Place de la Libération on the other side.

One blight on the whole trip, and an important contrast with Italy and the UK, was the notable lack of choice for people who do not want to eat meat for their evening meal, a situation that has changed little over the years that I have known France, a relationship that stretches back into the 1980s, when my father lived near Toulouse.

It’s not that the country hasn’t moved with the times, it’s rather that it has seen the times change but has steadfastly and obstinately refused to adapt to the expectations of a changing world. This can of course be charming or even laudable attitude, as long, I find, as it doesn’t impinge on one’s own life and choices.

After discussing with many, many locals over the past decade, I have the sense that the desire to eat a vegetarian or even vegan meal, even as a one-off, is seen as a foreign invasion, much like Americanisms in day-to-day language. I have even been told in no uncertain terms that one cannot consider oneself properly French unless one eats meat.

The result that every restaurant of any decent quality serving French food in both Annecy and Dijon had not one non-meat- or fish-based dish on the menu. Even in the Alps, where cheese is more the thing, we had to go across the Swiss border to Geneva to find a Savoyard restaurant that would serve a raclette or fondu without some kind of animal stuffed inside it.

It’s a shame, as it precludes a lot of vegetarian and vegan diners, or even those simply wanting a break from meat, from going to local French restaurants.

I have been told over and over again that meat is central to French cuisine. Indeed so, as it was everywhere in Europe, but restaurants in the vast majority of countries across the region have seen the changing tastes, heard the health advice on limiting meat intake and now offer modern takes on old classics.

What saddens me more is that there is a growing desire in France to eat a more diverse menu, but such culinary adventurers are being driven away from their home food culture by the obduracy of local restauranteurs.

In October 2018, I published a novella as a teaser for my then-upcoming collection No Way Home that addressed the potential (and highly extrapolated) dangers that could arise if the wellness movement continued with the notion that those who took care of their health were ‘good’, while those who did not, and therefore put themselves at risk of ill-health, were ‘bad'.

I wrote the story, which I called Deathcast, because I was extremely troubled by the link that self-righteous people who focused on their health made between someone who, for example, smoked cigarettes or ate sugary or highly processed foods and the burden that they might later place on society by becoming ill due to their poor habits and behaviour, which is a particularly sensitive topic in the UK due to the National Health Service.

At the time that I came up with the idea, the indoor workplace smoking ban had come into effect, and there was intense lobbying to put a tax on high-sugar food and drinks.

There were even calls in the press to accuse parents who gave their children fizzy drinks and sweets of child abuse, which seemed beyond excessive to me, even though I do not for a second question the science behind all of this, or the need to limit the amount of unhealthy food and drinks that children consume.

All well and good for the story, but why call it Deathcast?

I set the story a few generations into the future, when the idea that those who did not look after themselves were a burden to society was taken to an extreme, and people who repeatedly failed to protect their health were seen as criminals or even traitors.

The worst cases would be hunted down and be killed. But how?

In my vision of this future society, everyone is fitted with a Wellness Chip as a child, which monitors their health and health behaviours, and has the capability of terminating an individual who contravenes the Wellness Contract. This is an obligatory agreement signed at the time of having the Chip fitted that commits each citizen to pursuing optimal wellness at all times.

Anyone deemed to have contravened the Wellness Contract can consequently be killed by a flying drone, which sends a termination signal to the Chip, resulting in instant death.

For freedom fighters in my story (or terrorists, depending on your perspective) can use that signal to kill someone else via a special device they had built. As a character in the story explains:

”How it works is that you hold it next to your Wellness Chip and then you press this first button here.” The man picked up the device and held his thumb over the top button. “What that does is allow the beamer to hack into your Wellness Chip and tell it you’ve contravened the Wellness Contract. Then, that information is automatically sent to the nearest drone. But, before the drone can issue the kill order, you press the second button and you cast the signal to your target.” The man flicked his wrist as if he was throwing something in the direction of the man opposite.

“So…what?” The blond-haired man scratched his head. “The drone then kills whoever you want it to, whoever you’ve thrown the signal to, that is, rather than you?”

“Exactly. We use their system against them. Effectively, we issue a kill order against ourselves, and then we cast it to somebody else. So they die, instead of us.”

And that, folks, is what Deathcast means.

Learn more about the novella and get your copy of No Way Home.