It’s taken me
a little while to come back from the limpid, lapping waters of the Aegean Sea
to the hot and dusty pavements of northern Paris, but I’m here now, although only
for a few more days, having a mainly Scottish summer in prospect.
Paris is
sweltering but the trees along the streets are glossier and thicker-leaved than
they ordinarily are by this time, perhaps because of the wet, cold spring which
held on tenaciously well into June.
I remember
writing in July last year about the onset of the sales and the sense of endings
and anticipation as people had their summer parties and got ready to set off to
country and seaside for the holidays. The signs are up again, ‘SOLDES’
everywhere, and today it’s Vigilance Rouge on the roads out of Paris. I think
of the thousands of bored children cooped up in cars, with the ‘clime’ (air
con), going full blast: frayed tempers in the front seats and arguments in the
back, no matter what technological aids there are to keep everyone occupied.
Better perhaps, to wait a day or two and drive on emptier roads, or even stick
around for longer and enjoy July in Paris as it empties out and settles again.
Many families
in the quartier I live in will stay here the whole holiday, the kids in ‘centres’
(childcare) - name tags hanging round small necks at the sandpits and swings -
their parents carrying on with the jobs they do every other month of the year. Lucky
for 18thand 19th arrondissements families, the canal de
l’Ourcq and le parc de la Villette are close by and will once again be turning
themselves into one of the Paris Plages sites, between mid-July and mid-August.
From 9 am. until midnight, 7 jours sur 7, there’ll be every kind of sporting
activity, all of them free, plus of course sand, sun-umbrellas, deck chairs, buvettes
and all sorts of entertainments.
In the
meantime life goes on much as it always does. Mangoes in the Indian shops,
nectarines, pêches blanches and jaunes, luscious black cherries and sweet
melons in the market and in the Turkish and Arab shops down the main street
piles of dates, prefiguring the start of Ramadan on Tuesday, a tough month this
year because of the length of the daylight hours.
I’m on my way
back from Louis Blanc when I see the demo, outside the Bouffes du Nord, one of
the great theatres of this theatre-rich city. I’d noticed the banners earlier
in the week, hanging out of windows high above the theatre: NON A LA SALLE DE
SHOOT. I cross over and get a leaflet and I learn that plans are well-advanced
to open a ‘une salle de consommation à moindre risque’, more
usually known as a ‘salle de shoot’, (roughly speaking a needle exchange and
safe drug centre) at 39 boulevard de la Chapelle This will be run by an
association (voluntary organisation),not by the city itself and will have no
direct link with the nearby hôpital Lariboisière. The leaflet is being
distributed by ‘le collectif apolitique des habitants quartiers la Chapelle’.
I discover in my researches later that the
proposed salle is to be run along lines very similar to those used with
considerable success by Quai 9 in Geneva where a needle exchange and safe injection
centre has been in operation for over a decade. I also note that it’s taken a
very long time for the residents of that area of Geneva to come to terms with
having the centre on their doorstep. In Geneva the drug-users now do a regular
daily patrol to collect used syringes and other kinds of drug-related rubbish.
Given how many drug-users hang about the gare du Nord and the nuisance they can
be, a safe-use centre seems like a sensible solution to me but I can understand
the anxieties of residents who feel the quartier already has more than its fair
share of social problems and misfits.
The
shopkeepers on the rue de la Goutte d’Or have taken their protests to the mairie. Matters
came to a head one early morning recently when two of them found themselves
unable to get into their shops to open up for business. The homeless encampment
under the arcade that I’ve written of several times, had grown so big that the
metal shutters were inaccessible behind mattresses full of sleeping bodies. The
police had to be called. The mattresses were removed. Not the men though.
There is
considerable dissent among the commerçants and the associations in that small
area : the commerçants protesting the degradation of the environment and
the potential health risks while the
associations insist on providing the men with food parcels, bedding and chairs.
Faced with an outright rebellion by their shop-keeping tenants (all the
property on the street is owned by the city) the mairie has promised to
dismantle the camp ‘permanently’ by mid-July.
If you’re
beginning to think the 18th is a hotbed of social unrest, peopled mainly by the
socially excluded, let me reassure you. It strains at times under the weight of
so many different needs but it remains one of the liveliest, most developing
parts of Paris not least in its commitment to ‘community engagement’ and the
imaginative use of public spaces.
This year the
park-keepers in the jardin d’Eole fenced off a large area of that garden and
sowed it with wild flower and grass seed. The pessimists said that it would be
no time at all before the fence was trampled down, the flowers picked by kids
and the grass squashed by daytime sleepers. Not a bit of it. There’s not a
single break in the fence and the grass is awash with cornflowers, marigolds,
poppies, daisies and clover. A joy to behold.
Hollyhocks and bulrushes in the jardin d'Eole
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