Tuesday 19 December 2017

Paris bulletin 9 2017

I’d been at the exhibition ‘les Chrétiens d’Orient, deux mille ans d’histoire’ and decided to walk back from Institut du Monde Arabe along the quai de la Tournelle, Notre Dame rearing up magnificently solid behind the bare branches of the plane trees and a leaden sky offering a suitable backdrop for a cold December day.

Once upon a time I lived on this side of the river and I knew this part of Paris better: rue de la Clef right beside the Grande Mosquée de Paris and the Jardin des Plantes. But that was 20 years ago and I don’t often revisit these streets. Did I ever walk down the rue de la Bièvre? Probably. It’s a shortcut between the quai and la Place Maubert where there’s a metro station.

Rue de la Bièvre is a modest, domestic sort of road as this 19th century painting shows. 


What you won’t know, unless you are a historian or a lover of old maps, is that once upon a time there was a canal along it - you can see it in the painting in fact, hence the drying laundry. It took water from the Bièvre river to the nearby gardens of the abbey of Saint Victor and the street, its name unchanged, features on some of the oldest maps of the city dating back to the 13th century.

The Bièvre is the second largest river to traverse Paris, although the 21st century passer-by can have no idea it even exists. It was covered over in 1912 and remains entirely hidden from our view, another arm of Paris’s underground drainage and sewage system. But it is a river still and outside the city it looks like a river.



So to the street itself – a narrow thoroughfare, with one or two famous residents at one time and another - Dante for a little while, and more recently François Mitterand who had his private residence at no. 22 between 1972 and 1995. The little square halfway along was renamed after his wife in 2013.

square Danielle Mitterrand


Another day another wander through some more unfamiliar Paris streets, this time rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, named after the Communist militant and Resistant fighter one of 26 executed by the Germans on 22 October 1941 after the assassination of FeldKommandant Karl Hotz in Nantes.
Jean-Pierre Timbaud
Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud starts very modestly at the end near metro Couronnes on the boulevard de Belleville and gets progressively more gentrified as you descend it. It hasn’t entirely lost its radical edge however, having la Maison des Métallos partway along it, right opposite one of the many mosques in this part of the city.



 
This fine building started out in 1881 as a factory manufacturing the best brass instruments in the world, selling trumpets and trombones to America’s greatest jazzmen. In 1937 it was taken over by the Union Fraternelle des Métallurgistes, a branch of the CGT, with a mission to foster ‘social progress’. In this phase of its existence it was the base for a wide range of left-wing political movements, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil war, working with the Resistance, opposing the wars in Algeria and Vietnam and supporting other anti-fascist campaigns. In 1997 the Union was forced to put the building up for sale. Alarmed at the idea that this bastion of resistance and social progress might fall into the hands of private developers, the community came together in a Collecte Interassociatif and with the support of local councillors got the Mairie de Paris to buy the building. Which is how in 2007 la maison des Métallos opened as an établissement culturel de la ville de Paris. It now houses performance spaces, workshops and a café des Métallos. Well worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood. 

It seems appropriate to stay with the musical instrument theme in ending the last bulletin of this difficult year: the empty manger, the star hidden behind a stifling cloud of CO2 and the heavenly chorus drowned out by the noise of social media. 

Some verses therefore, from a poem for our times.

Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

The first day he cut rosewood for the back,
bent sycamore into ribs and made a belly
  of mahogany. Let us go early to the vineyards
  and see if the vines have budded.
The sky was blue over the Jezreel valley
  and the gilt dove shone
above the Church of the Annunciation.
The second day, he carved a camel-bone base
  for the fingerboard.
I sat down under his shadow with delight.


My beloved is a cluster of camphire
in the vineyards of Engedi
  and I watched him whittle an eagle-feather, a plectrum
  to celebrate the angel of improvisation
  who dwells in clefts on the Nazareth ridge
where love waits. And grows, if you give it time.
Set me as a seal upon your heart.
On the sixth day the soldiers came
  For his genetic code.
We have no record of what happened.

I was queuing at the checkpoint to Galilee.
I sought him and found him not.
  He’d have been at his open-air workshop –
  I called but he gave me no answer –
The self-same spot
  Where Jesus stood when He came from Capernaum
to teach in a synagogue, and townsfolk tried
to throw Him from the rocks. Until the day break
  and shadows flee away
I will get me to the mountain of myrrh.

The seventh day we set his wounded hands
Around the splinters. Come with me from Lebanon,
  my spouse, look from the top
of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens.

On the eighth day there were no more days.
I took a class in carpentry and put away the bridal rug.
We started over
With a child’s oud bought on eBay.
  He was a virtuoso of the oud
and his banner over me was love.


Ruth Padel

Monday 27 November 2017

Paris bulletin 8 2017

The great (in both meanings) exhibition space at the back of our courtyard is always booked by one house or another during the Paris Fashion Week. We’re used to entertaining clusters of emaciated young people all speaking English whatever their native language, cigarette in one hand, phone in the other. However these past weeks we’ve had a rather different clientele. The World Press Photo exhibition is on in there until 7 December, showing the work of the 2017 prizewinners – prints and screens exhibiting ‘the best photo journalism of the year’. We residents of the immeuble don’t often get to join in the jamborees inside this vast interior I look out on from my back room so this is an excellent chance to do so.

As you might imagine, given the state of the world and of planet Earth, there are few photos like this one below, taken by Australian Cameron Spencer, 2nd prize singles. It shows Gaël Monfils in his 4th round match against Andrei Kusnetsov. He needed medical aid after his flight across the court but went on to take the match.


There are others - a man watering flowers in the road, the roof of his house staved in behind him; little girl gymnasts in China flexing their toes. The majority though are scenes of butchery, whether of humans or the natural world: trashed woods, a de-horned dead rhino crumpled in a massive leathery heap in the bush, a turtle tangled up in a mesh of plastic netting; close-ups of frightened, hungry children; a long-distance shot of a man, arms trussed behind his back, hanging limp on the end of a rope, the corpse of a refugee floating in the vastness of the Mediterranean, pinned to the surface by his lifejacket…

And this, a Pietà for our century


Paula Bronstein USA, won 1st prize, Daily Life for this image of Najiba holding 2 year-old Shabir, her nephew, injured by the same bomb that killed his sister on her way to school.

Behind these pictures are the men and women who took them, often at huge risk to themselves. Bearing witness in a time of unprecedented violence and uncertainty.

Other images, other places – Paris is as usual offering more choice of what to see than ever. This month I’ve been to the Anders Zorn at the Petit Palais, a painter I knew nothing of before and whose watercolours are simply extraordinary (until 17 December) 




and the Derain 1904-1914 La décennie radicale at the Pompidou (until 29 January). Others you can see are the The Art of Pastel from Degas to Redon (until 8 April) also at the Petit Palais and Chrétiens d’Orient at the Institut du Monde Arabe (until 14 January) to name only two among dozens. So much - too much? - to see and do.

11 November – la collecte pour notre association. Numbers of us spend most of the day in the local Monoprix, handing out leaflets asking for donations of food for the refugee breakfasts and looking for signatures to a petition for more public toilets in the area – ‘oui, oui, et des douches aussi,’ says one of our supporters.

We gather in the gifts the shoppers leave us with – one huge box after another filled with long-life milk, (assuming we use between 6-9 litres every day we’ll have enough to last long into December), coffee, tea, sugar, jam and chocolate spread. There are a few opposants, one or two elderly people who stop off to tell us it’s deplorable, (that word again…) how we are aiding and abetting ‘la dégradation du quartier’. Mostly the response is positive and sometimes bouleversant in its generosity.

12 November – down on the RER to Port Royal to les Grands Voisins, a temporary experiment in community living and engagement at 82 avenue Denfert-Rochereau in the buildings and grounds of what was until 2012 the hôpital St-Vincent-de-Paul: www.lesgrandsvoisins.org.

Workshops on writing, origami, finding your way in Paris – migrant, visitor or long-time resident - music and noise.


The weather turns colder. The days shorten. One night of wind and the trees at the top of my road have given up their leaves. The public parks are full of chrysanthemums and cineraria.



We are soaked to the skin one morning at the refugee breakfasts. We buy materials and build a canopy for our new trolley – toile cirée, bamboo poles, Velcro. It’s not perfect  but it helps keep the bread dry while we make the sandwiches. One thermos is leaking again and one of the small trolleys has lost a wheel. We hold a bring-and-share AG-dînatoire marking one year of survival, one year of serving enough tea and coffee to fill a lake.  We are a pale reflection of the refugees in this: keeping going, waiting, more in hope than expectation, for better times.



Sunday 22 October 2017

Paris bulletin 7 2017

This time last year I was in southern California, under skies about as blue and soft as those we have been enjoying in Paris this last while. I recall marvelling at the expenditure of effort and money on all things Hallowe’en – front steps lined with pumpkin lanterns, cauldrons, black cats; witches and skeletons hanging off garage doors and basketball hoops; yards and yards of petro-chemical spider webbery wrapped shroudlike round bushes and hedges. And all those Hallowe’en pop-up shops selling tat, some of it, like the life-size programmable Cerberus dogs I saw in one, costing in the hundreds of dollars.
a typical front yard in a southern Californian home, week of 23 October 2016
There is stuff of that kind to buy in Paris too but the world does not turn orange and black as I felt last year and whenever I am back in the UK in late October. Le Jour des Morts, All Souls’ Day, 1st November is
an important day in the calendar though, the one day of the year when even the least inclined will visit cemeteries to pull weeds from a grave, fill a pot with flowers, leave some chrysanthemums.

Since my last bulletin the Paris Nuit Blanche has been and gone, new exhibitions have opened and one or two have closed again. Gaugin, l’Alchimiste opened at the Grand Palais on 11 October and will run right through almost to the end of January. Anders Zorn is on at the Petit Palais and if you get your skates on you can still just catch the Derain, Balthus and Giacometti, une amitié artistique at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (ends 29 October).
Giacometti

Derain

Balthus
As usual there’s more than enough for everyone with half an interest in any aspect of the plastic and painterly arts. Not to mention the musical ones, with the Cité de la Musique hosting a big exhibition on Barbara, (1930-1997), probably not a well kennt figure in the anglophone world but much loved and followed in France.

Seeing how fine the weather has been and that these days of golden leaves and pink sunsets will not last much longer I have been making it my business to get out of Paris at least one day a week, to explore the further reaches of the Ile de France on the transilien network. So far I have only done two of my planned routes. The first was to Meaux, better known to many for its cheese (brie de Meaux), than for its church. But the cathedral is very fine and so is the bishop’s palace adjacent to it. You take a train from the Gare de l’Est and before too long you follow the meanders of the river Marne. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627 – 1704) was bishop there for 23 years, Bossuet who believed in the divine right of kings and the wrongness of Protestantism and devoted much of his career to writing and preaching on those topics. He has a gi-normous statue inside the church and he’s buried there.
 
One of two huge Bossuet statues in the Cathédrale St-Etienne, Meaux 
My second outing was to Dourdan, at the far end of the line D of the RER, a longer and less interesting train-ride, although you do run along side the Orge, another tributary of the Seine, for a short while. The town is quaint, tidy and has an ancient château fort, a free-standing donjon which you can’t visit at present and another very large medieval church with a couple of non-matching spires, slightly reminiscent of Chartres in that respect.

partial view of the church through the inner keep of the château, Dourdan

October saw me make a start in a painting class run by the Mairie de Paris in the primary school on the rue Littré. To begin with it didn’t look promising. Our teacher had extraordinary difficulty with the registration process, leaving us to do 20-minute pencil sketches of a modèle as best we might. That phase is now past. The main external threat is the concierge who must be handled with extreme care. This means we don't leave the building until everyone’s bags are packed, we line up like school children in the yard and wait prayerfully for her to unlock the gate to the street.

Even closer to home the refugee numbers rise and fall like the tide, although this is a tide that never goes out completely. We are still serving food and drink every day to between 100 and 200 hungry men, most of whom have slept outside on the cold earth. There continue to be regular rafles (raids) by the police and far too many reports of their violent (and illegal) removal of people’s covers and other possessions. At that level things don’t look good at all.
Quartiers Solidaires brings up the rear of the demo, Saturday afternoon 21st October 
But at the micro-level of our small efforts it’s not so awful We get to know faces, names, and stories. Every day strangers hand over money, clothes and food. I want to celebrate the gratitude and helpfulness of the refugees and their friendliness, the good-humoured vibe of those doing the serving and the staunch support of a number of local shops and cafes that provide us with bread, hot water, unsold produce and storage space. Serving breakfasts mean you end up with les doigts poisseux and a pile of jam pots for recycling but you have a better day for having done it. You want more good news? Someone is building us a state-of-the-art, custom-made caddie, which judging by the description should be magnificent affair, with an awning. I hope to have a photo of it by the next bulletin.

After the wailing had already begun
along the walls, their ruin certain,
the Trojans fidgeted with bits of wood
in the three-ply doors, itsy-bitsy
pieces of wood, fussing with them.

And began to get their nerve back and feel hopeful.

Bertold Brecht



Wednesday 27 September 2017

Paris bulletin 6 2017

I arrive back in Paris in mid-September to find the plane trees are beginning to drop their leaves along the boulevards and the grass in the parks is bare in patches after a long hot summer. My first walk of the autumn takes me off the boulevard de Magenta, along the rue du Faubourg St Martin and onto the rue St Martin. I’m going vaguely in the direction of the Centre Pompidou but without any urgency. L’air doux et les rues vides invitent à la flânerie, which no single word in English can adequately translate. 

I pass the enormous mairie du 10ème, a 19th century statement in stone, whose construction costs were enormous – far greater than for any other of the town halls in Paris. Let your eye travel over its contours monumentaux and you can why. Not there aren’t some almost as imposing in other arrondissements. Draped across its façade is a banner inviting votes for the budget participatif



Voting is on now until 1 October. You can vote for 5 projects in your local area and 5 for the city as a whole. I do so a few days after this Sunday afternoon walk, at one of the mobile voting booths in a square nearby. It’s manned by a young man who is keen to practise his English and tell me all about his recent trip to London and Bristol. I give double stars – whether that’s allowed or not – to better facilities for migrants and refugees. Despite the Mairie’s efforts to make the process more people-friendly the budget participatif doesn’t feel very participatory, or not to this voter. Most of the projects which have got through the selection process seem to be about beautifying the city or making it more eco-friendly. Laudable objectives, although looking around, I can’t help thinking they’re making the icing before they’ve baked the cake. 

Back to my walk and I’m wandering on past le Splendid, the little theatre where Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett first performed and home of la troupe du Splendid in the 1970/80s. A few steps on at 325 rue St Martin there's the elaborate wrought-iron frontage of Jean Paul Gaultier's HQ. 




musée des Arts et Métiers
Next is the musée des Arts et Métiers, which has nothing to do with art as in painting, theatre etc and everything to do with mechanical engineering, inventions and applied science generally. The biggest exhibits are held in what was once l’église de St Martin des Champs (‘des champs’ because at that time the area was beyond the city boundary). Among its thousands of treasures, the museum has the original model of the Statue of Liberty by Auguste Bartholi and various versions of Blaise Pascal’s ‘Pascaline’ – the first mechanical calculator. (Closed on Mondays; entry fee 8 euros).

looking down on the esplanade, le centre Pompidou

On Monday life resumes. The streets fill up with people and vehicles and I get myself round the corner to give a hand with the refugee and migrant breakfasts. Like the men we serve we have no permanent home, nothing even as fixed as an awning overhead. At present we set up three camping tables at the rear of the Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute from where we dispense ready-sugared tea and coffee to between 200 – 300 people. 
petits déjeuners, Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute, 
Anything from 4 to 6 volunteers turn scores of baguettes into chocolate spread and jam sandwiches; there are viennoiseries and les invendus from local shops. We have found storage space in the back quarters of the local youth hostel and local café managers willing to fill our giant thermoses with boiling water. The atmosphere is good, grounded, helpful. We move between English, French, a few words of Arabic, Italian and Farsi. You want active community participation? Look no further.


Tuesday 27 June 2017

Paris bulletin 5 2017

On one side of the bridge traversing the canal they are building Paris’s latest open-air swimming pool, to be ready by mid-July, free to all, with three bassins and water from the canal monitored daily for its cleanliness. 


On the other is a gang of small boys, too hot to wait. They climb over the parapet, hold onto the stone thirty feet above the grey waters, like a line of chirruping sparrows. And then they drop, one by one, like fruit from a tree, plouuff! Down, down they go, then up again and swim like fury for the iron ladder.








‘C’est du jamais vu,’ says a nice lady with her Iphone out, snapping their antics like I am.

Water I thought, ought to be the theme of this June bulletin, seeing as we need more of it to keep the grass from fading too soon to brown. I take some photos of fountains because it’s nice to stand in their spray on these too hot and humid days. 

Fountain, Palais Royal

Fountains, la Rotonde de  la Villette
I was surprised how reticent Parisians seem to be about dabbling their feet. That was before I saw those little boys throw themselves into the canal.

It’s wash day every day in the jardin d’Eole. The clothes and trainers are dripping over the fences while the migrants soap themselves at the taps. 



Where else can you do it when you have no money, no electricity and no washing machine? Meanwhile the mairie de Paris is forking out millions in an effort to bring the Olympic Games 2024 to Paris – a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The pont Alexandre III groans beneath the weight of tourists and their cameras trained on the crazy Olympic race track stretching down the middle of the Seine while gangs of armed police and uniformed soldiers continue to stroll in threes and fours amongst the jollity. The military are not so much in evidence in our quartier but we have the CRS in droves, one result being that the vendeurs à la sauvette who used to spread their wares at the Chapelle crossroads, are gradually retreating up the street. I expect they’ll be camped outside the main door of our building by the time I come back in September.

I go to the Cézanne Portraits exhibition at the musée d’Orsay. I’m there early and the rooms are half empty. It is cool. The light is low and the tableaux, from all over the world, give a very thorough account of his portrait work – plenty of the man himself and any number of his long-suffering wife. 






The exhibition is up on the 5th floor with, in addition to the works themselves, stunning views across Paris. (on until 23 September)



I’m back at the canal again. It’s one of my favourite places round here – the light on the water, the slack liners, picnics, music, fishermen, teams of boule players, tai chi practitioners.  There are barriers up round the building that used to house the administrative offices of the canals of Paris, now being turned into a hub for sustainable development projects (blessed by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamad Yunus.) See les_canaux.com pour l’économie solidaire et innovante.

In all sorts of ways the 18th arrondissement is leading the way on these questions – la Louve cooperative supermarket (https://public.cooplalouve.fr), les Canaux, our refugee breakfasts (hot water currently supplied daily by Bob’s Bake House; bread by a couple of local boulangeries; les invendus  - yoghurts, cheese etc - supplied by our local Carrefour) and now the city’s first frigo solidaire at la Cantine du 18, 46 rue Ramey. 

I stop at the table tennis tables where Sajjad plays. Sajjad is the young Pakistani asylum-seeker I gave some French lessons to before I left for Scotland in April. There’s  no sign of him but as I turn to climb the steps to the bridge I see his partner.
            Où est Sajjad?’
            ‘Parti. Ils l’ont renvoyé en Italie.’ Sajjad has been as the expression goes, ‘dubliné’.  (from the Dublin Convention on Asylum Applications). It’s what happens to refugees when they are sent back to the country they first entered Europe by. In Sajjad’s case this was Italy.
Poor Sajjad. He was so afraid of being sent back over the border.
            ‘If I go they (Afghans, of whom he was more afraid than he was of the French police) kill me this time. They try to kill me then, but Allah was watching over me.’ He told me this story many times, always thrusting his hand between his left arm and his rib cage. ‘The knife goes here but it does not strike me. Allah is good. He watches over me.’


France has its new Bonaparte at the Elysée, the young hope of Europe, the deputés take their seats in the Assemblée Générale today 27th June; those who may pose a threat to the good order of the nascent administration - for the most part Modem allies still only under initial investigation but no chances are being taken - have been removed to make way for others it is hoped won't be found to have dipped the public purse; he's kept to his pledge of 50% women in his cabinet; Ramadan is over; a promenade urbaine is planned for the barricaded area under line 2 of the metro. All things considered it could be worse… except that the centres de rétention are full and the planes stand ready at Roissy for their cargoes of refoulés. And Sajjad, like hundreds of others, is once again the wrong side of the wire.

Wednesday 31 May 2017

Paris bulletin 4 2017

The Brasserie Barbès on the corner of boulevard Barbès and boulevard de la Chapelle sits like a small island of gentrified comfort in the midst of the whirling, noisy mess of that carrefour.  I am upstairs, today on the side of the restaurant that is open to the skies. It is hot and humid and the place is still almost empty. At a nearby table a woman about my age is bent over a magazine: bright-red lipstick, silky sleeveless top over black joggers. She has a tiny dragon tattooed on the soft dimpled skin of her upper right arm, two necklaces, a bracelet on one arm, a watch on the other, sunglasses pushed up on ash-white hair; can’t see her shoes. Trainers? Cork-soled sandals? Flip-flops? Her top slips off her shoulder to reveal a lacy bra strap in vivid lilac. The restaurant begins to fill. Her steak tartare arrives. She’s not waiting for anyone after all.

The neo-Ancient Egyptian building of the cinema Louxor is right across the street from the brasserie. 




For only 31.50 euros you can buy a 5-place season ticket, which lasts six months from the first time you use it. Even better value at 53 euros is one with 10 places, valid for a whole year. And it runs most of the films I want to see, most recently ‘I am not your negro’ , ‘Après la tempête’ and ‘Les fantômes d’Ismaël’, which, not being a cinéphile, I couldn’t make head nor tail of.  They’ve begun running a programme of virtual reality films on Saturdays and Sundays too. Each session costs 11 euros, is 30 minutes long and there are 15 places per session.

The Louxor is a less than ten-minute walk along the boulevard from my flat. If I go on a Thursday afternoon I know I’ll have to step into the road by the square Jessaint because there’s a brocante of clothes, shoes and bric-a-brac all along that stretch, milling with buyers and probably a fair few pickpockets too. By the time I come back there’ll be nothing left but some bits of flattened cardboard, one or two odd shoes in the gutter and the usual flocks of pigeons pecking about.

The square Jessaint itself is a small patch of greenery which used to be open to everyone but for some time now has been managed by Emmaüs Solidarité, who were contracted in 2016 by the Mairie de Paris to deliver a ‘programme de réinsertion’ for homeless people (all men as far as I’ve been able to ascertain) who are paid the minimum wage for 9 hours of carpentry and gardening per week. The construction phase of the project is now complete. The raised beds made from recycled pallets are stocked with plants and Emmaüs has begun opening the garden to the public on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons. The saddest part of this well-intentioned project is that the garden now feels permanently locked, even when it’s open.
The square Jessaint, empty on a hot summer's day

There is only one other green space in the immediate vicinity: le square Louise de Marillac (died in 1660, canonized in 1920). It too is padlocked at present, ostensibly for ‘dératisation’.

The real reason for the locks, wire fences and concrete barriers in our quartier is not rats, but the tides of people I have written about often in these bulletins: cigarette sellers, hawkers, dealers, passeurs, idle, ill-educated young men with nothing better to do than gossip among themselves and annoy passers-by – and of course migrants (rarely referred to as refugees these days, even less often as asylum-seekers).  It’s largely to deter the latter from settling that the authorities have gradually cordoned and barricaded off so much public space – anywhere where people might put a mattress or a sleeping bag. All that’s now left are the overflowing pavements and quite often you get the impression they’d clear those too if they could.

padlocks on the gates
There isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s just past midday and very hot. I’m on my way back from the post office. Ahead of me an elderly woman - long dress, headscarf - is walking slowly, carrying what looks like a bag full of bottles of water.  She gets to the shade of the square Louise de Marillac sets the bag down and goes to sit on the low wall surrounding the garden. Her bottom has hardly connected with the stone before two policemen are standing over her. As I walk past I hear one of them say, ‘Allez, madame. Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.’ 

As for the recent claims of harcèlement des femmes (harassment of women) by others than the ubiquitous police, I won’t repeat the arguments and commentaries that have been featured in all parts of the media in recent days (including, unsurprisingly, The Daily Mail). médiapart.fr, theconversation.com and bondyblog.fr have interesting and thoughtful contributions. 
one of the posters women have put up in the neighborhood

Life goes on.  I go to the country for the long holiday weekend, stopping in Tours on the way where I discover Olivier Debray's Norwegian paintings.





We plant courgettes, tomatoes, aubergines, peas, beans and flower seeds. I swim in the river at Lésigny.

I am at the Théâtre du Chaillot to see Malandain Ballet Biarritz  performing Thierry Malandain’s Noé, to the music of Rossini’s Messa di Gloria. Two glowering eyes tattooed on the nape of a young woman’s neck stare up at me from the row below. There’s much flapping of programmes in the warm air. At 20.25 precisely, the usherettes begin escorting people higher up behind me to empty spaces in the better seats: one more reason to love the national theatres of France.