French holiday "miracle baby" stories

Extra value in this end-of-year piece in that it's a "triple pack" if you will.

Three stories connected to each other only in the sense that they all happened in France over the past week and in each instance involved a baby or a young child.

In two of the cases, the child survived in circumstances that really didn't bode well - to say the very least.

In the third...well it's just an uplifting tale that's surely guaranteed to warm the heart and bring a smile to even the most curmudgeonly reader.

There's sadness in the tale of the first "miracle baby", a 20-month-old girl from the town of Harfleur in northern France.

Just a couple of days before Christmas her 26-year-old mother, who was going through a separation, made her way to the cliffs of the nearby coastal town of Étretat and jumped to her death, her daughter in her arms.

An alert had been raised earlier in the afternoon by the woman's husband who had reportedly 'phoned the emergency services to say that he was concerned about her mental state and the welfare of the child after they had left the family home in nearby Harfleur.

Helicopters were dispatched in the area and two bodies spotted at the foot of the cliffs.

"The mother gave no sign of life, but the girl blinked," Christopher Margrit, a spokesman for the emergency services said.

The girl was rushed to hospital with a head injury and several fractures, her survival attributed to the fact that her body had probably been cushioned by the body of her mother in the 70-metre fall.

On Monday a two-year-old boy also escaped death, this time unscathed, in the ski resort of Arêches-Beaufort in the French Alps.

He was buckled into the child seat as his parents were unloading the car when, in spite of the hand brake being on, the vehicle began sliding backwards.

Although his mother and aunt tried in vain to rescue him, they couldn't reach him in time and the car fell 70 metres into a ravine near where it had been parked, saved from overturning by coming to rest on a tree stump.

When the emergency services arrived on the scene they were able to free the child, who was apparently still ensconced in his seat and emerged without a scratch.

The only injury incurred in the incident was to the aunt who had a fallen into the ravine in her rescue attempt. She was hospitalised with a suspected broken leg.

And finally, as promised, that heart-warming tale, which involves life rather than death in the shape of Tyfène, a 12-year-old girl in the north-west of the country who acted as the midwife in the birth of her sister.

She has become a veritable heroine in France after her exploits on December 26.

When her mother, Stéphanie, went into labour early in the morning the day after Christmas, the father-to-be, Fabrice Raoult, proved to be less than up to the task of handling the situation, and it was Tyfène who took matters in hand.

She dispatched him into the garden "to get some fresh air", rang the emergency services to inform them that the contractions had begun, but was informed there would probably be some delay in their arrival because driving conditions were difficult with black ice covering the roads on the way to the hamlet of Couëdic where the family lived.

The 12-year-old (and it's probably worth repeating that) kept her cool though.

"After a moment of panic, I quickly came to my senses and realised I was the only one who could help," she confidently recounted after the event.

"The baby came out and I washed and placed her on mummy's tummy," she continued rather matter-of-factly in numerous interviews she has given since.

"I didn't dare cut the cord but five minutes later the emergency services arrived to do that," she added.

Just for the record, baby sister Maëlys weighed in at 3,380kg and she, along with mother and older sister are doing just fine.

So is the father apparently, who by all accounts is rightly proud of his 12-year-old step daughter.

EDF's seasonal electricity bill greeting overcharge

Electricity doesn't come cheap, even in a country where most of it is produced by nuclear power stations.

But in a couple of cases this past week two customers of the French utility company, Electricité de France (EDF) had rather a nasty Christmas surprise.

Perhaps the energy giant was peeved by the French telecommunications company, France Télécom - Orange (FT), hogging the national headlines for presenting some of its mobile 'phone customers with astronomical bills, and although the Yuletide "gifts" it sent its two users pale in comparison to the €159,000 FT charged one of its clients, EDF almost managed to put a dampener on festive spirits.

The first case involved a retired woman in the south-western town of Orthez, who just days before Christmas Eve received a letter from her bank informing her that a payment for her electricity bill of a whopping €10,000 (and 23 centimes to be exact) had been rejected because of "insufficient funds".

An understandable shock to the woman (who wished to remain anonymous) especially as she said that her "annual consumption amounted to around €650" and made all the more unpalatable by the fact that she pays her bills by direct debit.

"Luckily I was sitting down when I received the call (from the bank)," she said.

"I started shaking and was completely disoriented," she continued.

"It's the sort of thing you see on television happening to others and all I can say is that people check their bills," she said.

Sound advice without doubt, and even though EDF has admitted there was a "rare error" in its calculations guess what?

In the very same week another customer - again in the south-west of France, but in a different town, also made the headlines when he received a bill for... wait for it...just over €69,000.

It was an annual bill but one that nonetheless surprised Matthieu Moulierac, a pâtissier in the town of Saint-Émilion, who said he was used to paying far less.

"On average the annual bill is between two thousand and two thousand five hundred euros," he told French news, seemingly unworried at being massively overcharged as EDF had also enclosed a letter apologising for the mistake and informing him that he would shortly be receiving an amended bill for the right amount.

As far as Moulierac was concerned, the story should have ended there, except when he took a look at this bank statement, lo and behold the amount had already been deducted from his account.

He too pays his EDF bills by direct debit and the bank had apparently already authorised the payment.

A quick 'phone call rectified the error initially made by EDF and then compounded by the bank.

But although Moulierac's Christmas and New Year were not soured by the prospect of having to battle to correct a mistake that was in no way of his making, those words of wisdom from the woman at the centre of the first tale ring rather true - and not just at this time of the year.

Happy Holidays.

The French government's million-billion loan muddle

It's an easy enough mistake perhaps getting a few zeros confused especially when the amounts involved are to most of us pretty mind boggling.

But it's not really the sort of error you would expect from a government purportedly more adept at matters financial and charged with balancing the nation's books.

That however, is exactly what the French government has been up to recently, proudly outlining on its official site how the planned €35 billion loan, announced by the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, earlier in the month "to boost the country's competitiveness and fund the best universities in the world" would be spent.

On Christmas Eve it went online with a breakdown of how the money would be apportioned to each of the main sectors such as universities, small businesses, sustainable development and the digital economy that would spearhead Sarkozy's plan to ensure that France could "fully benefit from the recovery, so that it would be stronger, more competitive, and create more jobs."

Except someone clearly got in rather a muddle as to the number of zeros involved, or simply repeatedly hit the wrong letter on the keyboard (after all it can easily happen to those unfamiliar with the French AZERTY layout) because the 35 billion suddenly became a rather more modest 35 million.

And there the blunder remained for all to see until the afternoon of December 29 when the figures were corrected.




For those who might have missed what was - as the government's press service assured - "a mistake" - the national daily Le Figaro helpfully published a screen shot of the "million-billion" mix-up.

Perhaps it was the timing of the release that left the rather embarrassing miscalculation in the public domain for four days.

After all who in their right mind would take a break from the Christmas festivities to take a glance at what was on the government's website?

But of course it's not the first time the French government has had problems with the flow of information making it on to its own site.

Back in August it published the names of Frédéric Lefebvre, Axel Poniatowski and Paul Giaccobi as three new junior minister appointed to the government, before quickly taking them down again the same afternoon in what initially described as a "technical problem" and was later explained as "human error".