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As Paris prepares for a long hot summer of pollution, roadworks and, possibly, rioting, I remind myself how glad I am I live in the capital and not, say, in St Macaire, an idyllic-looking mediaeval village just south of Bordeaux where I went to visit my friends Pascale and Michel.
Before we retired to bed, I was handed a pair of ear-plugs, which proved invaluable when techno music started pounding out of the village hall. It went on pounding for most of the night. "That's nothing," Pascale said the next morning. "You should have been here when they had the motorcross rally."
And I'm really, really glad I don't live in a village like Moulins-Engilbert, in Bourgogne, where not only do the elderly residents live in terror of a handful of rather pathetic-sounding teenagers who can't think of anything more exciting to do than
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There have been three murders in a year out of just 1,500 villagers
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hang around smoking joints in the supermarket car park, but there have been three murders in the past year. And that's in a population of less than 1,500.
Last year, a farmer was stabbed to death. In February this year, during a drunken quarrel, a septuagenarian handed his wife of 45 years a loaded shotgun and told her she wasn't capable of killing him. She promptly proved him wrong. This month, a 56-year-old man confessed to the rape and drowning of a four-year-old boy. Of the 230 people questioned during the investigation, ten had histories of rape or child molesting.
Ah, village life. Needless to say, Pascale and Michel are moving house. I'm staying in Paris. It's safer, and a lot more peaceful. 
FIRST POSTED MAY 24, 2006
 Last week: the Biblioteque quartier
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