Paris

I do love Paris, but the drive to the hotel at 7am looked more like America than Europe. Huge roadside adverts, anonymous office blocks and traffic, traffic, traffic.

Dave Randall (guitar) and Frank Byng (percussion) weren’t to arrive until about noon so there was definitely time to top up the four hours kip I’d had with a few more in a lovely soft bed, mmmmmmmm. It wasn’t until half twelve that I woke up and heard the phone. Carol, our Clarinet player and venue finder was calling to say she’d found a guitar amp for Dave and that the place we were going to record in had a priceless Steinway Grand Piano. The rest of the day was spent organising the session and greeting the guys as they arrived. I had another friend here, Andrew from Passion Pictures who made our ‘My Culture’ video for our last album and we were all very well met indeed.

I did have a weird end to the day though when I received a letter from our ‘fixer’ in New Orleans. She had a few points to raise and I felt the tone was a bit off, but paragraph 4. really disturbed me. You see, I have asked our fixers to help me find a local school for Indy to spend a day at in each country as an educational, cultural adventure, and an interesting thing for her to do. The fixer lady, who was actually English, wrote this:

‘N.O. is basically a third world city with an appalling educational system, unless you have money. It's hard to see what benefit a poverty-stricken school would receive from your daughter attending for a day, apart from possibly making the pupils feel uncomfortable.’

Maybe I over reacted but I thought that was a ridiculous thing to write and it made me not want to work with her any more. I wrote back thus:

‘I have to express to you that although I don't know you, and don't want to take your letter out of context, I found your point: " It's hard to see what benefit a poverty-stricken school would receive from your daughter attending for a day, apart from possibly making the pupils feel uncomfortable." - deeply disturbing. Do you really think that kids from different backgrounds should be kept away from each other? Indy, my 9 yr old, has hung out with kids in African villages who have literally nothing, and even when the kids are without a shared language, they all make it happen on whatever level they can, and it's a very mutually enriching time for all. I'm shocked that you think that just because she comes from a wealthier background that it's hard to see that the local kids could 'receive any benefit' from her presence. Kids from different countries/cultures meeting each other, playing, exchanging stories is precisely what breaks down the barriers of preconceived misconceptions - especially ones such as 'if your folks are richer than mine then we can't hang out'. To assume that the kids would be too uncomfortable and that therefore she would have nothing to offer them, or they her, might be worth re-examining I feel, because basically, in that statement of contrasting 'poverty-stricken' with 'you daughter' you are saying that you can't see her being anything beyond a 'rich kid', and that's a bit alarming.