Paris bulletin 10 2015

In the four weeks since I sent out the last bulletin the COP21, the memorial service for the victims of le 13 novembre in the courtyard of les Invalides and the élections régionales have all been and gone. The flowers, messages and spent candles outside the cafés and the Bataclan and on the place de la Republique have been tidied away and people have been gradually turning their thoughts to Christmas and/or the holidays.

Most people know what COP21 produced: a great deal of hot air which was what it was supposed to be combating. Everyone signed up to the easy bit, the magic figure of 1.5 degs C. The rest - the firm and binding plan to make it happen - is like the tops of the skyscrapers in the smog of Beijing, no more than a hazy outline.

The elections didn’t produce the much-feared basculement of any region into the wide-open arms of the Front National but did produce some significant gains for them all over France, no longer only in the far north or the deep south. They also made right-winger Valérie Pécresse présidente of the Ile de France, at the heart of which lies the city of Paris. Hollande will battle on regardless, believing he can yet win a second term as president. Like the UK and other démocracies essoufflées, France is experiencing a wholesale loss of confidence in ‘la classe politique’.

I walked along the boulevard de la Chapelle on Wednesday to the Barbès branch of Joseph Gibert which is where the Virgin mega-store used to be. The food market was in full swing down the middle of the boulevard and, thinking I might find a cheese stall somewhere along the route, I plunged in among a seething mass of women, dragging their shopping trolleys behind them like reluctant children and all of us sliding and slithering over the mashed vegetable peelings and crushed orange skins underfoot. No sign of any cheese but two kilos of oranges for 2.90 euros, a bag of garlic for 1 euro and a whole sack of potatoes for 1.99. If you can stand the queuing, the shouting and pushing you can probably do the week’s shop for less than half what you would pay in any supermarket.

It being the week before Christmas I am drawn as in previous years, to find some quiet space in a church and what better church, I think, than l’église St Merri, right beside the fleshpots of les Halles – doors wide open and scarcely a soul in there? The visitor information leaflet tells you that hermit Medericus died there in 850 or thereabouts and that his bones are still held in the crypt. The church which has some fine paintings and some 16^th century stained glass, actively supports the arts and during COP21 had an exhibition of the work of six artists on the theme of ‘notre terre...’

The most striking of the installations is ‘le film noir de Lampedusa’. It is composed of objects Giacomo Sferiazzo collects on his outing along the shore-line, increasingly these days things that have belonged to migrants lost at sea. Some of those objects have been coated with black plastic by the artist Clay Apenouvon – the ‘film noir’ of the title - and are strewn in a spreading puddle of oil at the foot of the altar in the chapel of communion: ‘déchets pétroliers qui vous invitent à imaginer les hommes, femmes et enfants qui sont pris dans ce piège noir; inexorablement, ils sont ramenés au rang terrifiant de déchets de l’humanité.’ (in paraphrase, 'the waste from oil tankers like the waste of human lives, a black film on our planet and common humanity). This, not a nativity crib, is what is at the church entrance.

 

I stop for a moment on my way home to watch the didgeridoo player making her instrument growl for a toddler on the parvis at Beaubourg then I take a right onto the boulevard Sebastopol.

 

Ahead of me is a woman carrying a baby strapped to her back. He is fast asleep, his fists curled at his face while she moves like a sailing ship, slowly, serenely through the throbbing crowd.

As I end this last bulletin of 2015 - surely in Europe 'The year of the refugee and the dispossessed' - Gandhi 's words come to mind:

                     May I live simply that others may simply live.

Paris bulletin 9 2015

I’ve been thinking a lot about words since last Friday, about the words in the communiqué by Daesh to begin with, and thereafter, all the words spoken and written since by politicians, journalists, witnesses, bystanders... It is not my purpose here to comment on Hollande’s use of the word ‘guerre’ or the debates in the media about ‘la déradicalisation des jeunes’. It seems to me it is as much in how we act in the aftermath of an atrocity as in how we speak that we show ourselves in our true colours.

If so I would say that Parisians so far have disproved all the usual things that are said about Parisians: they are rude, pushy, arrogant. I have seen so much warmth, so much willingness to talk, and a complete rejection – at least among the people who have spoken to me and I include complete strangers on buses and sitting next to me in the metro – of the simplistic rhetoric of ‘send them back where they came from’ – of refugees; ‘bomb them all to kingdom come’ - of Daesh. There has been a restraint and a thoughtfulness in those conversations that makes you hope that other, better ways of tackling the splits and inequalities in the fabric of French society may yet be found. I wish I could say the same for the horrible web of geo-political challenges in the Middle East, (some of those relics of last century’s wars and colonialist adventures, others a direct result of our present alliances with some of the most unsavoury regimes on the planet, Saudi Arabia, to mention only one) – or the people we’ve mandated to deal with those on our behalf.

I have been to a concert, to an exhibition and to my drawing class at the Louvre since Friday. The concert was in the Bouffes du Nord, our local theatre, on Monday. The nation was still in mourning but the decision was taken by its ‘gérant,  Olivier Poubelle, who is also gérant of le Bataclan, to let it go ahead. An act of defiance which was warmly welcomed, judging by the crowded rows of the auditorium.

Two pianos, four pieces, the third, ‘Tourbillon’, a startling, whirlwind of a piece - the word is apt - written by Bruno Mantovani and played with extraordinary passion by Jean-Francois Heisser and Jean-Frederic Neuburger, to whom it is dedicated. Lots of small children in the audience, lots of emotion. ‘Un grand partage’ which did us all good.

And last night I went to my weekly drawing class at the Louvre. Caroline, one of our two teachers, took us to the cour Marly to draw ‘l’amour’ since, as she said, that felt like the right thing to do after last Friday.

So we spent a little over two hours drawing and painting three croquis of those putti-like figures in marble. Here is the one I like most: l’Amour et l’Amitié by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle

                                                    

And afterwards, crossing the empty hall beneath the pyramid, out into a dark, warm night. The beam from the Eiffel Tower swung round, the half moon rode high in a clear sky and under the arcade leading to the rue de Rivoli, a trumpet sang out like a clarion.  

Paris bulletin 8 2015

Paris is enjoying an exceptionally warm, dry autumn and the spikes in air pollution resulting from this have finally forced Minister of Ecology and the Environment, Ségolène Royal, to cede some of her powers to the Mairie de Paris and the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France. Next time there should be a quicker application of transport and speed limit restrictions, although, as always seems to be the case with climate change and pollution, it’s a pathetically small step. Asthma beats obesity in France, in the health concerns league tables. Meanwhile François Hollande has been jetting round the world trailing clouds of CO2 in his wake, chatting up the unwilling and the sceptical before COP21, the global conference on climate change which takes place here from 30 November – 11 December. If that’s not depressing evidence of the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach, I don’t know what is.

I walked back from Ménilmontant in the dark on Sunday, along the boulevard de Belleville and de la Villette and across to the canal St Martin, the latter gleaming oily black, smooth as glass under the street lights. The leaves of the plane trees were lying in rusty drifts on the central allées. The benches were full of old people. Children were racing around on their trottinettes. The café terrasses were packed out. No one wanted to go indoors. If it wasn’t for the fallen leaves you’d have thought it was an evening in late spring.

It was about 7 o’clock so the prostitutes, mostly Asian in that arrondissement, had just come out. They were standing around in pairs, chatting and smoking. Our local working girls hang around at the carrefour of rue Marx Dormoy from midday on and they all seem to be black, very young and overweight. I doubt if they earn in a week what the ones in the 16^th make in an evening. The women I passed on the avenue Kléber last week wouldn’t look out of place on a fashion catwalk: slim, shapely, glossy-haired, scantily but elegantly dressed.

There has been endless debate in France over the past two decades on the rights and wrongs of prostitution, on whether the ‘maisons closes’, or ‘maisons de tolérance’ as they used to be called – the officially regulated brothels – should be reopened (they were shut down in 1946).

There was a brief flurry of activity around a bill, brought in by the Socialists in 2011, to penalise the clients of prostitutes but it never made it into law. Similarly, despite occasional new calls for them, there are still no registered brothels. There are lots of vans however and a new type of maison close, brothels masquerading as massage parlours, hundreds of them in Paris alone. The vans are partly a result of Sarkozy’s infamous 2003 law (Loi pour la sécurité intérieure) which made ‘passive soliciting’ a criminal offence and forced a lot of the woman to work in the late hours of the night and in the back streets where they have less chance of being arrested but more of being attacked.

Sarkozy played his usual populist card, straightforwardly drawing a distinction between those he called France’s traditional ‘women of the night’, whom he described as ‘part of France’s cultural heritage’, and the women from eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, many of them illegally-trafficked migrants, who were out there earning for their pimps and their families. He wanted 'ces malheureuses filles étrangères’ (his exact words), picked up and sent back to where they’d come from, regardless of the circumstances that had led them to flee in the first place. You can still see sex vans parked up in the Bois and along some city side streets, grim, insanitary testimonies to the impact of the measures he introduced more than ten years ago.

                                 sex vans parked near the bois de Vincennes

Prostitution, libertinage, voyeurism – Paris has the lot. I don’t know if there are statistics showing the value to the city’s economy of the sex trade in all its multiple forms but it must be in the millions, probably only an infinitesimally small part of it ever reaching the taxman.

‘Splendeurs et misères, images de la prostitution, 1850 – 1910’ is the title of this autumn’s main exhibition at the musée d’Orsay. It ‘celebrates’ that nostalgic image of the Parisian prostitute, as painted, drawn and modelled by various, mainly nineteenth century, artists.

 

                                             Parisian prostitutes by Toulouse Lautrec

The city also has its musée de l’Erotisme on the boulevard de Clichy, as well as all the other clubs and entertainments Paris is known for: peep shows, high-end cabarets, like les Folies Bergères and Crazy Horse, strip-tease clubs like Pink Paradise and The Penthouse Club Paris. And then there are the swingers’ clubs, the most pretentious of which is probably Les Chandelles, (‘l’esprit glamour invite toujours aux charmes frivoles’ according to its website). Dress code there forbids flat shoes for women, short-sleeved shirts and white socks for men. A rival establishment, Le Mask, requires its clients to wear one but there doesn’t seem to be a prohibition on white socks.

 

                                                             Hotel de la Paiva

 

 

 

If your interests in libertinage are more historic and aesthetic than actual and practical, you can head to the l’Hôtel de la Païva, 25 Avenue des Champs Elysées, once the opulent residence of Thérèse Lachmann, alias la marquise de Païva, mid-nineteenth century Paris’s most (in)famous courtesan. (Check the website www.paris-capitale-historique.fr for available dates).

The hotel is a near-perfect illustration of Oscar Wilde’s bon mot: ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’

 

Paris bulletin 7 2015

A squad of men in white overalls, equipped with ladders and paint brushes, has gone into the hangar at the back of our yard today. They will be getting the space ready for Raf Simon’s collections next week, Paris Fashion Week.

 

Raf Simons looking nervy in our courtyard

Raf Simons, currently Creative Director at Christian Dior, has been using the warehouse at the back of our courtyard to promote his own label, for some years now. Next week you can practically guarantee the lights will be on all night, the air will be filled with throbbing music and the yard itself with stick-thin, black-clad, smoking youff. It may not stop the Turkish-owned food shop on the ground floor continuing to park great sacks of onions and potatoes in the same open space. That’s the only place they’ve got to unload their pallets into the shop itself.

The Kube is another high-end venue nearby, specifically right across the street from my flat, down a little cul de sac, le passage Ruelle, and discretely hidden behind a high wall. The hotel is a favourite stop-off for globe-trotting artistes because it combines relative closeness to the airport with the buzz of the city. It has recently opened an Ice bar, the first in Paris, I believe (Glasgow already has one...) 20 tonnes of carved ice, lit by LED multi-coloured lights. You get 25 minutes of chill, during which you are served cocktails, one of which ‘Finlandia’ is based on a Finnish vodka which the ‘pub’ tells us, is made from the purest ingredients nature can supply, using spring water flowing from glaciers which lie over 10,000 year-old moraine. A load of complete and utter bullshit you may (rightly) think, but it does the trick with the well-heeled lovelies and not-so lovelies looking for something new to stimulate their jaded palettes.

                                       the ice bar in the Kube, Paris

             That’s Shoreditch and la Chapelle for you, (and several other big-city hot-spots you could point to) – the haves rubbing shoulders with the have-nots, getting close, but never too close to the real-life grunge, the cardboard homes, of the streets.

Staying with ice for a moment, Nuit Blanche is about to happen again (on 3^rd October). This year, the central theme will be climate change, looking ahead to the global meeting due to take place here in December. One exhibit not to miss before it disappears will be ‘Ice Monument’ by Zhenchen Liu: an installation of 270 blocks of coloured ice symbolising the countries of the world, right there, in the heart of the city, on the parvis de l’Hotel de Ville. The blocks will gradually melt so by the end of the night they will form an immense lake of multi-coloured water. If there is any chance you might be in Paris next weekend, that’s one not to miss, but there is more, so much more, all round the city and this year in the suburbs too.

You are invited to place an ice figure on the steps in the square Aristide Cavaillie-Col and watch it melt. Installation by Nele Azevedo

Then there is the burning question of the diesel engine and its polluants, a big problem in France as a whole, but particularly acute in a city like Paris where most car journeys are short so the diesel emissions are that much higher because the engine doesn’t get time to warm up (that’s what I’ve understood anyway). What is the answer? It’s obviously not to institute a day of ‘no cars’ as happened on Sunday 27^th September – much publicised but in this part of town relatively little heeded. Some much bolder, better funded, initiative is needed to get people out of their cars and onto the buses, trams and underground. The problem is not the city-centre dwellers so much as the banlieusards who don’t like being crammed into over-crowded, dirty trains either at the beginning or the end of their working day. And who can blame them? Having done a few train journeys like that in the UK this summer – the London-Brighton run was ghastly, the Lockerbie-Edinburgh scarcely better - I can sympathise with anyone who decides to burn a little fuel and stay out of the scrum.

What is the answer? Some grand statement of intent like ‘rediscover our common humanity’? But how? Watch Human, the 3-volume portrayal by Yann Arthus Bertrand – free to view on YouTube? Great movie but it’s hardly going to change the way we live. Watching, anything or anyone isn’t going to make a jot of difference.

John McDonnell, the new shadow chancellor, had the temerity to mention Marx in his speech to the Labour Party conference. Perhaps the time has come to take a fresh look at Sartre too.

Paris bulletin 6 2015

I don’t believe I’ve ever written a bulletin in August before. I’m usually somewhere else by now, as I will be very soon, on a train to London and a few days later, to Scotland.

The things I want to tell about you before I go are as follows:

1.      the re-hung permanent collection at the Pompidou, which French people still call the Beaubourg - I always knew the musée was a treasure house of modern art but what a joy to rediscover those treasures in their new layout. It’s worth the price of the ticket to see the Matisse rooms alone but there is so much more, some of it stretching your – or my - understanding of what is meant by ‘art’ to breaking point, but with helpful notes to guide you everywhere.

                                           

                                                          

                                                                     

                                                           Balthus, Baselitz and Buffet

2.      Peter Brook is bringing his new play, , Battlefield, based on the Mahabharata (co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne), to les Bouffes du Nord, his erstwhile Paris theatrical home. Parisians and Paris visitors get to see it before anywhere else, from 15 September - 17 October (book on-line at www.bouffesdunord.com).

3.      My July ended on a high note. I saw Israel Galvan, enfant de la balle, fils de danseurs, gitan par sa mère, give an extraordinary solo performance in the garden of the musée Picasso two nights ago. Alone, with neither music nor lighting, he spun and stamped and wheeled and shimmied for a dust-raising, spell-binding 45 minutes as the sky turned pink beyond the roofs.  Galvan will be at le Théâtre de la Ville here, between 3 and 11 February next year.

                                                    
                                                                     Israel Galvan

4.      The migrants have gone from the esplanade Nathalie Sarraute. Not long after my last bulletin went out they were swept like so much rubbish and carried off in police vans to centres de rétention around the city. Now there are police on foot stationed at either end of the street that runs beside the esplanade and more in vans parked up on the esplanade itself. You have to state your business and sometimes show your ID to be allowed to traverse that public space. The jardin Rosa Luxembourg is locked. The cafés are empty. All that remains of all those people are bundles of cardboard waste. Where the cantine once stood, the powers-that-be – local or city hall I don’t know which – have installed a children’s carousel. It sits silent and inaccessible behind a high mesh fence, an ironic, even despairing, image of Europe’s handling of the migrant crisis.

 

 

These events have led me to look out a 1993 Scottish Child in which we featured an interview with Palestinian Rifat Kassis, many times imprisoned champion of displaced children. You can read more about him on Wikipedia. Here is a little of what he had to say when I talked to him twenty-two years ago.

“What we are faced with concerns the whole world. It is a problem of race, of racism of the poor of the world. The ‘rich’ world stays silent against what is happening in the poor parts of the world, at its own peril. Consider that now we have about twenty million refugees. In five years time there will be one billion of them – one hundred million people – and they will come to Europe... These refugees will knock on the doors of the people who today sit at home in front of their televisions and watch pictures of the starving in Somalia.  

I may say I felt utterly humiliated when I read in a quality newspaper an advert which said, ‘pay 50p and you will rescue one human being’. This is the cost of a human being, the price of a child’s life – in the Third World. Less than the price of one cup of coffee in a European cafe.”

And that led me  in turn, to the bookshelf to find William Blake:

'What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! It is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath - his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the  market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun,
And in the vintage, and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn:
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season,
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs;

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead;
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity—
Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.'

(from the Four Zoas)

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

Paris bulletin 5 2015

Once July comes, once the schools have closed and those who can, have set off for other greener, bluer spaces, the city takes on a different feel, not empty but slightly hollowed out. Needless to say not around la Chapelle metro where the pavements are as busy as ever and there are as many trays of coriander, mint and garlic as usual; the same for the displays of belts, shoes and things to plug in your ears so you can blot out the noise of the street with a noise you’ve chosen for yourself.

Silence is not the order of the day - or the night. You keep your windows open when it’s as hot as it has been throughout the month, so you come awake at two in the morning most nights and wonder why the Pompiers or the Urgences need to sound their sirens when the street are bare of traffic. And then you drift off again, having stood at the window for a little while to feel the breathless night air and see if there’s any sign of a star in the half-dark sky.

The days start with the manful brushing and spraying of the pavements by the valiant army of plastic brush- and, long-handled shovel-wielders in their green uniforms. Long before most people are out of bed they’ve made sure yesterday’s detritus has been swept up to leave space for today’s.

The sun comes up and the smells change in the heat. From around mid-morning until late at night you will be assailed by mini-bouffées of marijuana, the passing stench of piss where some man has peed into a corner, ignoring the toilettes publiques only twenty yards further on, the metallically wet smell of deep water in the canal, the occasional deliriously sweet waft of lime blossom from high overhead. And underneath this olfactory cocktail the ever-present oiliness of diesel and petrol fumes like a heavy base beat.

Catch a late metro and you can always be surprised by who and what comes out at night: a youth stoned out of his mind collapses through the door and is grabbed by his girl-friend just before he topples back out onto the platform and loses her for the remainder of the  night, if not forever. There are the bare-foot and the mildly mad, the tattooed and the badly burnt, the latter practically always speaking English – loudly - while casting anxious glances at the map of the stations over the door, as if they fear the train may hop the tracks and carry them off to who knows where.

And at the bassin de la Villette, all ages Paris is outside playing hard. From the 20 July till 23 August here in the north of the city, Paris Plages 2015 is inviting you to make sand-castles, ride the manège, pilot a boat, read a BD, play table football, lark about under a cooling spray or relax under an awning and enjoy a cool drink and a burger, and, if you have the nerve and are not too big and ungainly, climb the perpendicular ladder to the platforms 20-plus metres above the earth and launch yourself off on  the high zip wire that straddles the canal in both directions.

 

Paris Plages 2015

 

How does Paris at play look to the young men lying around on mattresses on the Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute or sitting  in small groups under the trees in the jardin d’Eole doing their daily French lessons? Unbelievable, in every way, I’d guess: riotously rich and privileged – and safe, despite the predations of les forces de l’ordre (which seem to have pulled back for now).

French lessons en plein air in le jardin d

 

washing and tents out on the line

 

mountains of mattresses, piled up while the cleaning lorry does a round

                                                    the library's new neighbours

The weather has been kind to anyone who has to sleep outside. July has been exceptionally dry so there have only been a couple of times when volunteers have rushed to cover bedding and mattress with tarpaulins. Clothes dry on the lines strung between the lamp-posts; the mattresses have been supplemented by old sofas and chairs; the canteen is well-provisioned and orderly and not all the immigration experts and lawyers have left to spend their summer in the country.

We know, and the migrants know even better, it’s not ‘for ever’ but what a pleasure, as one Sudanese boy said to me, in English, to sleep on a mattress with your own cover over you, stretched out your full length on a Paris pavement instead of curled in the corner of a stinking, airless, overheated, overloaded lorry.

When they go others will take their place, wave upon wave of them, young and old, men and women, some to stay and many more to go on northwards.

Le monde en mouvement. Like a vast pot being stirred, the slow and clumsy mixing and blending of populations. And every molecule of that mix a single, unique life.

Paris bulletin 4 2015

Tuesday 26 May, 8 pm. Concert in homage to Pierre Brossolette, Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Jean Zay.

The evening before the  ‘panthéonisation’ (the placing in the Pantheon) of these four figures of the Résistance, there was a concert in the quadrangle of the Sorbonne. At the front were seats for those most closely associated with the people being honoured. The rest of us stood or sat on the paving stones. The setting sun touched the dome of the Sorbonne, the soldiers stood smartly to attention behind the flag-draped coffins, the singing and the readings lifted your heart. This was a rare and precious opportunity to reflect on virtue, that word which the dictionary defines as ‘moral excellence’, whose roots are to be found in the Latin virtus, one meaning of which is ‘courage.

Saturday 6 June 10.30 am, Carrefour de la Chapelle: I am on my way to the gare du Nord, to book train tickets. The sun is high in a pure blue sky and the temperature is rising fast.

There are police everywhere, at the crossroads of la Chapelle, at the metro entrance, in the little parks beside the boulevards. I remember that this is the week the Mairie and Police have chosen to clear the tent village under the metro on the boulevard. The clean-out is evidently well underway.  

I am stuck in a queue at the station for nearly an hour. By the time I am on my way back there are more police than ever, as well as seven of those dark blue Gendarmerie vans, one behind the other at the traffic-lights.  In piles by the railings, there are also heaps of possessions: clothes, shoes, unidentified boxes and rolled-up sleeping bags. I walk up to where the camp was. The tents have gone. The lives of 360 people have been packed up and carted off and where they were has been hosed down, wiped clean. Order is restored. The area is now encased in a shroud of white netting, completely impenetrable unless you equip yourself with a pair of shears and slice your way through.

                                              the emptied space behind the gauze

                                         Life goes on, impromptu barber's shop under the trees             

The police with their truncheons and their guns aren’t actually doing anything. They don’t need to. Just by being there they are doing what’s needed: ‘keeping the lid on what might get explosive’ some might say, or from a different perspective, ‘intimidating by sheer force of numbers’. I ask one of them what’s happened to the people who were in the camp.

“Ils ont été relogés, madame.”

“Où ça? A Paris ou ailleurs?”

“A Paris, et ailleurs.”

Same day, 5.35 pm, Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute. Bob’s Bake Shop has acquired deck-chairs for its clientele. Most of them are in use. All the tables at les Petites Gouttes cafe are full. There’s a crowd round both of the table football games they’ve installed and music pumping out from indoors. There’s a happy, summer party atmosphere, helped along by more music from further down the street where one of the local associations is holding an afternoon fiesta of some kind.

This time I am on my way to the marché. As in the morning, there are clusters of police stationed up and down the esplanade, chatting, watching, waiting. I go up to a policewoman who happens to be standing on her own.

“Bonjour, Madame,” I say (because courtesy demands that you start with a bonjour), “Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire pourquoi la police est ici en si grand nombre?” 

She barely looks at me and moves away with her walky-talky going. I wait, assuming (in my naivety), that she will answer my question once she’s finished her call. But I am not in England where it would be unthinkable for a policeman asked a polite question by a member of the public, not to give you at least a semblance of a civil reply. It doesn’t work like that in France. In France the police are trained not to answer irritating people like me. So she doesn’t.

I go over to another group of policemen and I ask my question again, having first said that I have tried to get an answer from their colleague who has chosen not to reply. They look at me as if I’m something the dog’s brought in and eventually one of them says.

“Mais madame, vous savez très bien pourquoi nous sommes ici. La raison est là, derrière vous, sur le trottoir Les migrants. Ceux qui étaient à la Chapelle.”

And then I realise that the crowd he’s pointing to, lying and sitting on the pavement in the sunshine, or queuing up for sandwiches and drinks, isn’t just more people like those I’d passed enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon with friends over a beer at Bob’s Bake Shop or les Petites Gouttes. These are the homeless being fed sandwiches by kindly volunteers before the vans arrive to take them off to the centres de détention, to the airports and other exit points.

Where next?

I saw them in the end, and I spoke to some of them too. But what I took home with me - along with my shopping bag full of fresh fish, farm-reared, free-range chicken, cherries, artichokes and a botte de radis - was their invisibility.

So perhaps it is, when a cruise ship sails grandly on in the Mediterranean, passing a rubber dinghy full of Franz Fanon’s Damnés de la terre.

Sunday 7 June, 9.30 pm, rue Marx Dormoy. The street erupts in a frenzy of tooting cars and flag-waving. The lights change and more cars belt past, their bonnets plastered with the posters of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, HDP. They're coming in from the suburbs to the north of Paris, Turkish Kurds shouting their triumph, their joy, up and down the street: parliamentary representation for the first time ever (about 80 seats out of 550 is the tentative projection).

Live here in the north of Paris and you feel in your very bones, the porosity of the city, the restless searching for 'something better'.

 

Paris bulletin 3 2015

Since I left here in early April spring has sprung and the blackbirds are now rushing about feeding their babies in the bushes on the roof garden to the left of my kitchen window. I’m sure ‘rush’ is the right verb to use: buds to blossom, babies to fledglings, warmth to heat (the meteo predicts temperatures of 32 degrees down south today). But what hit me hardest on my return three days ago was a different kind of rush: the brutal, don’t-look-you-in-the-eye kind, and the noise and dirt that both bring with them. I am dismayed.  Has it got worse in the month I’ve been away? Is it because I’ve come from the peace of the countryside - not entirely litter-free it has to be said, but pristine compared to what stirs round my feet here when I go out?

There is a new poster on the billboards: ‘350 tonnes de mégots (cigarette butts) ramassées chaque année dans les rues de Paris’. It’s true that smokers treat the pavements like a giant ashtray but they aren’t the only culprits. I watched a group of young people waiting for a bus out at the Bois yesterday. They were passing a large bottle of Coca-Cola between them. When the bus came they tossed the empty bottle on the ground and got on. I said nothing to them and neither did anyone else. What should one do in such a situation?

The encampment of tents under the overhead metro line, mentioned in a previous bulletin, has got bigger. The numbers of men selling shoes and belts and ear phones and fresh, but wilting, coriander and mint, and ‘Marlborough, Marlborough, Marlborough’ cigarettes has spread like a rash down the street from the crossroads. Yesterday on my way back from the shops I saw a man sweep the litter carefully through the railings surrounding the metro-line encampment. The wind caught it and lifted it across to add to the heap against the railings on the far side of the street.

The city fathers would probably be outraged at this image of Paris as hardly better than a litter-strewn bidonville. After all they spend huge amounts every year clearing camps like the one on the boulevard, sending people back across the border to where they’ve come from (or anywhere as long as they’re ‘not here’), encouraging everyone to use the bins and the public toilets, and deploying a fleet of trucks to clear up the stuff we throw out.

Fortunately the Paris I am describing is not the image most tourists will take away from their stay, although they probably will remember the queues outside the main ‘attractions’ (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Invalides, Musée d’Orsay...) and the press of people in front of the iconic statues and paintings. But would be dishonest not to talk about what it’s like to live in one of the most impoverished, densely populated arrondissements. That’s why this is not a ‘where to buy the best baguette/croissant/olive oil... in Paris’ kind of blog. There are plenty like that on the web, most of them written by visiting Americans for whom Paris seems to figure largely as a shopping destination.

Thinking that I needed to retrouver mon équilibre, I decided to take the 43 bus across to Bagatelle yesterday afternoon. The bus takes you from the Gare du Nord via the Porte Maillot to Neuilly, ‘ville fleurie’ on the outskirts of the city. One metro-bus ticket, price approximately £1 at current exchange rates, gets you all the way. Public transport remains one of Paris’s great success stories, and is set to get even better with the new tramways.

The swathes of spring bulbs are long gone but the flowering shrubs are at their peak and the famous allée des pivoines (peonies) will be at its best in a fortnight I’d say. It’s worth a visit just to see that incredible border, every clump a different variety. Entry is free until early June.

 

My attachment to Bagatelle goes back to my earliest times in Paris, with my guide and mentor Madeleine Mezeix, English teacher at the time at the lycée Condorcet. Strange to think that had she been alive now she might have taught my grandson who was a student there until last year. Madeleine lived in a rented flat on the rue de Castellane, very close to the Printemps department store. While I was living here in the winter of my nineteenth year, I went every Tuesday evening to work on my French in that sixth-floor flat, with its gently sloping floors, its art-deco sofas and chairs. The evening started with a meal – always the same: endives au jambon, followed by pommes au four. Afterwards I laboured over a prose translation under the dim light of the reading lamp on her desk.

Autres temps, autres moeurs, you could say.

Spring is here but nothing nice is growing in the English political garden, or the French one for that matter. Parisians have been out on the streets once more while I was away, marching against ‘la loi sur le renseignement’, the French equivalent of what the newly unshackled Theresa May is going to introduce in the UK: the aptly-named Snooper’s Charter, which will bring about a massive increase in the state’s surveillance of our private lives.

On the suggestion of a dear friend I am re-reading Orwell’s 1984. It never felt more real, more relevant, than it does now.

 

Paris bulletin 2 2015

Tuesday 15 March: I am sitting on someone's gravestone in the heart of the Père Lachaise cemetery. The sun is beating down through a thin film of Paris pollution. It is very warm. There is no one else about, only the chirrup of birds getting on with life among the dead and decaying, the distant roar of a plane, the even duller hum of the city.

Somewhere not so far below me there must be coffins or the remnants of coffins, mouldering away to dust. Why I wonder would anyone want to be buried inside one of these vaults, under one of these weighty sépultures? Is it a comfort to know that even dead, you will still have a roof over your head? I scrape off the moss on the lettering and see I've been sitting on la Famille Plessil.

Elsewhere, but still intra muros, a different kind of gathering-in is in place. Where once there were mattresses, pushed out of sight during the day under the métro aérien on the boulevard de la Chapelle, now there is a village of tents. I am out with my camera in my bag one morning. I cross the road to speak to one of the ‘residents’.

 

“Vous parlez français?” he shakes his head. “anglais?” he shakes his head again and points to the camera. “No photos,” he says. I have already taken a couple of pictures from the other side of the road but I put the camera away and ask him who is providing the tents. “No, no,” he repeats, politely but firmly. A woman shouts across to me, pointing to herself. “Sri Lanka,” I hear her say. She is nursing a tiny baby.

No quiet alleyways here, no lasting testaments to long lives and prosperity. The traffic flows in fits and starts on either side of the encampment, the  metro rumbles overhead.

Friday 20 March. What we’ve learned to call a ‘spike in pollution’ (un pic en français) has thrown a grey film over us since the middle of the week. Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris, has asked the government to instruct the police to enforce ‘la circulation alternée’ and to let people travel for nothing on public transport for the duration of this particular episode. She doesn’t have the power to make this happen herself. So far central government, in the person of the Minister, Ségolène Royale, has refused her demands. Despite the fact that Hidalgo is responsible for overseeing the living conditions of the citizens of Paris, there is nothing she can do except put in place an hour of free autolibre, a day of free vélibre and free parking for residents. Just one more example of the deadening effect of France’s over-centralised, unresponsive state.

Saturday 21 March: Radio France is on strike for the third day. Yesterday 800 Radio France employees confronted their PDG, Mathieu Gallet, in the main hall of the newly renovated Radio France building. By all accounts it was a tense and disputatious meeting. Gallet threatened to walk out several times.

The salon du Livre is on at the Porte de Versailles. The Orsay reports huge numbers attending the Bonnard exhibition, the same goes for the recently re-opened musée Picasso, the David Bowie at the Philharmonie and les Bas-Fonds du Baroque at the Petit Palais. Spring is coming and Paris, Ville Lumière, Ville de la Révolution, is doing what it’s done for centuries – taking on (taking down?) the powerful while simultaneously flaunting its beauty, its wealth, its creativity and culture.  

Why then does it feel this time so precarious, so aléatoire? As if the polluting haze is not only physical but civilisational? When I’m out in the late afternoon the sun is ‘a wound, a boiling tropical eye’, as Hilary Mantel puts it in her novel, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, that novel which charts the beginning of the French Revolution but reads like a commentary on our current times. We are on the brink of the departmental elections. The spectre of Front National intolerance and crypto-fascism stalks the land.

 

Paris bulletin 1 2015

A bright morning in mid-February and I set out, up the hill from the flat to my branch of the Société Générale on the boulevard Barbès. I am hopeful that today I will manage to close my account there. Like the act itself, the verb I need is nothing so simple as fermer. I learn from the dark-suited, unsmiling  conseillère behind the desk that what I want to do is either  clôturer mon compte ou – mieux encore - le résilier. So there you have it. It’s taken me two visits so far. Third time lucky or, j’espère que la troisième fois sera la bonne, which is nothing like as neat a phrase in French as it is in English.

I’ve been back in Paris a matter of a few weeks since my long annual trip to California. And in between I’ve been in the air again, the second time to Andalucia where the vegetation and the architecture is so strongly reminiscent of southern California it’s positively disorientating. Except that you don’t have men shepherding flocks of goats over the hills in So Cal – or not that I’ve seen – and, like so much else in that rich state, the orange trees are privately owned, not planted by the municipality to shade the streets.

Now here I am on my own turf again, more than a month after the hideous, nation-shaking events of 7^th January. What has changed? In some ways superficially not much. There are many more armed soldiers patrolling the stations and standing outside ‘sensitive venues’ but the gare du Nord which is the station I go through most often, has always had its quota of camouflage-clad men carrying sub-machine guns.

Today I pass a posse of police at the square Léon. They’ve erupted from a car and are patting down a couple of black guys, arms raised against the wall. By the time I’ve got to the far end of the garden they’re back in their cars and the boys are free to go, though where to when you’ve got nothing to do and no money to do it with is another question altogether.

I see that the police station in the Goutte d’Or is now barricaded off, so pedestrians like me have to step out into the street to go by. The two women officers standing guard outside are armed with more than their customary pistols. So much for building closer links with the community – from the other side of a metal fence is all.

On the radio it’s a different matter. There the ‘issues’ raised by Charlie - la laïcité, l’exclusion sociale, l’antisémitisme, l’Islam intégriste – all those and more are constant and recurring points of debate and conversation. And when I go into the 19^th arrondissement where there is a sizeable Haredi Jewish community, I see pairs of soldiers, outside the kosher shops, some of the primary schools and, signalling by their presence, the unmarked entrances to synagogues.

There’s no one guarding the mosques round here though and not a sign of a uniform or a gun outside the Institut des Cultures d’Islam on the rue Stephenson. The door swings open freely to anyone who cares to enter. Once I’ve successfully closed my account that’s where I’m headed.

I want to have a look at the exhibition, ‘Cherchez l’Erreur’, a series of photographs by six women artists: Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Gohar Dashti, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Nermine Hammam, Raeda Saedeh - and a torrent of a poem, ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ by Rafeef Ziadah, shown on a small video screen on the second floor.

I am not disappointed and neither, I think, would you be if you could go. The exhibition is on until 19th April so try to see it if you are in Paris. Why? Because the photos are good in their own right, and because they tell a different story from the dominant one of the present. They tell a story women in the Middle East are perhaps best placed of all to tell: of the way in which war and displacement have wormed their way into the fabric of everyday life in that region of the world, of the distortions of the media accounts of these wars – because for now there are many, even though they may all merge into one, and show more and more signs of doing so.

There is irony, dark humour and a dogged determination to survive, to hold on, in the images. All the complexity of that region’s cultural, political, civilisational challenges is contained in a few frames: the situation of women, how one lives a meaningful  life in the desperate confinement of the ruins of Gaza,  the disastrous interventions of the US and its western allies, the failure of the so-called Arab springs and underpinning it all, and doing very nicely thank you, the death-delivering global arms industry.

Occupied Pleasures Tanya Habjouqa 

 

 

 

Penelope - Raeda Saadah

 

Nil Nil - Shadi Ghadrian (and below)

 

 

So where does 'Je suis Charlie' fit in all of this? In the fact of the exhibition itself - that these women can show their work in a publicly-funded building with no fear of the consequences for themselves or their families. A priceless asset in the times we live in.