Takbîr near the Medinathèque

I had just been to the Médiathèque to pay my first library fine. The offending item was a Camilleri potboiler, La strategia del ragno. Montalbano novels are entertaining in a shallow sort of way, but no competition for their avowed model, the Pepe Carvalho books by Vasquez Montalban. In an inversion of my own direct experience, even the gastronomy in the Spanish novels knocks spots off the Sicilian cuisine flaunted by Camilleri.

On the way out, I hesitated to cross the road at the suicidal first zebra crossing and opted for a brief stroll towards the next, marginally safer one. Cars rarely stop for pedestrians, even with traffic lights against them, and this crossing had the added complication of a blind bend just before it.

As I strolled towards the second crossing, shady side of the street, a car screeched around the blind corner, almost on two wheels: good job I hadn't obeyed the green man at the first crossing. The car had been souped up, and - in addition to a throaty, megadecibel exhaust - had an impressive, body-panel warping sound-system with sub-woofers producing regular mini-earthquakes. The two guys inside, sporting mean shades and shaved sides to their heads, turned the volume up (for the public's benefit as well as theirs): it was raï music at its most nasally insistent. Actually I quite liked it.

Various old ladies, with rather too much make-up, and each towed by a decrepit, off-white poodle with crap stains only too evident, remonstrated, using terms and facial expressions familiar to those who follow the fortunes of the Front National. But the wrinklies had unwittingly and predictably played into the hands of the two young beurs, who wound down their window, pressed a button on the dashboard of their motorcar, and leered as a grotesquely amplified, deafening divine formula from the Muslim call to prayer, allahu akbar, washed over the infidel hordes, shaking their permed blue rinses to the roots. The next moment they were gone, the raï back on the sound-system, leaving the women even more convinced that Le Pen ought to be president of the republic. Mind you, the young men in the car were categorically French, but of the new France, not the old.