Number 1.25 - Metropole Paris - Monday, 12. August 1996:- I am hoping you will not feel shortchanged by having an issue that has not much Paris in it and has a fair account and a fair amount of Amsterdam instead.

As publishing on the Internet evolves, you will probably be able in the near future to take a coherent 'tour of Europe' anytime you want from wherever you happen to be in the world.

Nobody in the business can say today that you will want to be able to do this. So all I can do is do my part, by trying to think of what I might want to see and read if I were 12 years old and sitting in some small town at night in the winter, 753 kilometres from the nearest large city. There are lots of places like that in the world and there are lots of 12 year-olds with curiosity.

While I do my reports from Paris I think often of all the people I know who are scattered about the globe. Some of them live in exciting and lively cities. When I was 12, I always wanted to know what people did in those places; because this usually was not information you could get from school textbooks. Television takes stabs at it, but not on a sustained basis and the images move too fast, or are cut too fine, to give a really good look at anything.

The only time I really thought I was getting my money's worth from cable-TV was the time the Berlin Wall came down. For some reason TV-France had a crew at the Wall and a live feed from Berlin. When I switched to the German ZDF program, their man in Bonn was droning on about the crises of the East German refugees in the Embassy in Prague - seemingly unaware that this crises was being resolved at the very moment in Berlin.

I zapped between BBC1, RAI1, CNN and RTE from Madrid, and all of them were putting some kind of report on - some of them live like France-TV - that ran it like the non-stop late late show, having dumped all regular programming.

That was back in the antique days of 1989 and TV has become a much bigger business. My cable supplier has dumped ZDF, BBC1, RAI1 and RTE from the base-rate subscription - in exchange for 'Musik,' 'Eurosport,' and a half-dozen 'made-for-cable' channels like the BBC's World Service, or whatever its called. BBC1 had news from London; the new 'global' service has news 'about' the UK and a lot of ghastly sitcoms.

So here is Metropole from, and about Paris. It runs on a shoestring out of an apartment and it needs no double coffin to hold the present editorial staff. At the moment, there is no 'we' here and I want to change that as soon as I can, because I am aware of Metropole stories that are not getting covered.

This week's Metropole main and only feature is from Amsterdam, done by a lady who has lived there a long time after living in Paris a long time, which proceeded the time she lived in Hamburg. I hope it will be the first of many similar reports.

Unless, of course, enough of you care to vote against the idea. If you vote for it, then I'll try a little harder to get similar reports from Berlin as well - but no matter how many of these correspondents eventually join Metropole - Metropole is Paris. Read it here.

On account of summer: no 'au Bistro', no Coming Events and no new URLs. Your editor is being massaged by El Sol.