Don’t let you take my kindness for weakness: the chorus line in English was being repeated over the Carrefour supermarket muzak channel just as the staff, with minimal personal protection, were handling the vegetables onto the display shelves. It’s from a 1972 song by the Soul Children: manufactured, commercial music from a distant, other era, one before Thatcher, before Reagan, long, long before Emmanuel Macron and his war on Covid-19.
Quite why all large French shops play Anglophone music at their customers must have something to do with the fact that the performance rights are now rock bottom. At least this one had a positive message for a moment of crisis, not the usual jumble of misogyny, violence and pap that floats above the heads of French shoppers as, thankfully, virtually no one can understand any of the lyrics.
Don’t let you take my kindness for weakness. The words kept repeating as I passed a window with a TV screen showing the news of the rush by a team of French journalists to get back to their base in Peking from a reporting trip in South Korea before China closed its borders. They were diverted away from the capital by Chinese border officials and into 14 days quarantine in a hotel room, three meals a day delivered to their doors by hotel staff, all the Chinese involved being filmed wearing more protective gear than all but the best equipped among France’s medical teams fighting the virus.
