Paris bulletin 8 2013

At 3.30 on a bright afternoon with a chill wind keeping the clouds at bay, I set off for the Penguin wool shop near the métro Louis Blanc, to buy some more pink wool for the blanket I’m knitting for the Wool Against Weapons campaign (www.woolagainstweapons.co.uk – please join in if you can knit; if you’re sympathetic but not a knitter, pass the address onto someone who is).

The students have just poured out of the lycée Colbert on the rue Château Landon, filling the pavement. More than half of them are pulling out cigarette packets and lighting up. I cross over instead of trying to push through the crowd and nearly fall over two girls crouched down between a couple of parked cars. One of them is keeping a look-out while the other rolls a spliff. The girl on watch looks at me anxiously as I get by them but the one making the spliff doesn’t give me a glance. Her head’s bowed over the cigarette, protecting the whole lot from being blown into the gutter in a sudden gust of wind. I’d love to ask them what’s the difference, in their eyes, between smoking a joint and nipping into a cafe for a large glass of wine between classes. I can guess one possible answer (less rude than some) – the one’s ‘cool’ (a favourite French word at present), the other’s not. 

Half an hour later I’ve got some wool from the fin de série basket and I head on towards the canal. The big thing along the bassin de la Villette at present is tightrope walking. People string the elastic lines between the trees, high or low, depending how good they are, and up they go, some of them doing all sorts  of crazy jumps and turns, others taking a few wobbly steps then tipping off.

There are tightrope-walkers today but also, something new: a crowd has gathered to watch  a man and a woman spray painting a more than life size image of a geisha onto a huge sheet of cling-film. They’ve stretched yards of it between two trees, the plastic overlapping and wrapped tight so that it forms a single taut sheet about six feet high by ten feet long.

The bassin du canal has become more and more of a playground since I first started coming here. There are the old men sitting astride the benches and playing dominoes and chess. There are the pétanque players - woman as well as men these days - the joggers, the dog-walkers, the flâneurs, the picnickers, the fishermen, the frisbee throwers, the table tennis players, the children on their trottinettes and bikes. And alongside all this land-based activity, the moored barges with their cafes up on the decks and inside, music, dance, theatre and exhibitions. You can go to a mini-opera on one side of the canal and learn to tango on the other. More tends to happen on the quai de Seine side, but the quai de Loire has the children’s play area which is always busy, the canoes for hire at the end by the pont basculant and halfway along one of the biggest, best-stocked organic supermarkets in Paris, Canal Bio, part of the Coopbio network (www.canal-bio.net).

Both quais have their cinemas. Coming from the Quai de Seine side you can walk round over the canal St Martin bridge to the Quai de Loire or, if you’re there in the evening, chug across to your movie in the little tug that plies between the two.

I doubt if many of the thousands who use the canal for play and exercise are aware of the work the canal does for Paris as a whole. The city needs 380,000 cubic metres each day for cleaning the sewers, gutters, and parks. The Canal de l'Ourcq provides about half of that – every single day – another instance of us all benefitting from the work of 19^th century planners and engineers.

Even nearer to home than the canal is another, very recent, piece of visionary urban planning: the refurbished Halle Pajol with its eco-friendly youth hostel. With 330 beds and 103 bedrooms the Yves Robert auberge de jeunesse is the biggest youth hostel in Paris and certainly the most attractive/comfortable. If you’re planning a low-budget séjour in Paris this is the place to be. The hostel is pretty much state-of-the-art environmentally speaking – the roof of the halle Pajol is entirely covered in solar panels which, along with a heat pump and various other environmental innovations which I won’t bother you with, provide all the building needs in the way of hot water and heat.

 

The complex also boasts a good cafe with live music most weekends, a big library where kids can play video games for free if they have a Paris library card, a gym and a college. Soon there’ll be a boulangerie and more shops. It’s another great place to hang out and it’s à deux pas de chez moi. .

9.30 the same evening. I’m on my way back from a raja yoga class. The metro’s packed. Barbès station is shut, by order of the police. The World Cup qualifiers are on. France needs a 3-goal win against the Ukraine (and gets it) to go through but the only game that matters round here is the Algeria- Burkina Faso one.  By the time I get out of the train we know Algeria’s done it and, let me tell you, ça bouge dans le quartier! The street is going wild: horns klaxonning like the last trump, cars belting along with young men balanced precariously out of windows waving Algerian flags, motos the same. There’s nothing to beat a win at footie to brighten the faces of young men with no work and little prospect of any.