The snow fell
steadily over the weekend and for twenty-four hours everything was light and white
and pretty. There were two very unsteady skiers wobbling down the road opposite
the flat for part of Sunday afternoon, and plenty of cars slithering about on
the hard- packed snow. Now all that remains are piles of grey slush and grit
and puddles.
On Monday a few
wet flakes were drifting down as I went to ‘le comptoir des artisans’ to get my
hair cut. The shop is run by Sarah Cappelle who shares the space with a number
of craftswomen and a carpenter. In one
corner is a sewing machine, in another a pile of timber, in another a stack of
paintings (her father is an artist). As in so many of the little enterprises
round here, there’s usually at least one customer just in for a chat. (The
street I take to go to my Arabic class has five tiny clothing sweat-shops, open
all the hours of the day and night and always crowded out with hangers-on shouting
and laughing over the whirr of the sewing machines.)
Opposite
Sarah’s shop there is an arcade which provides a semblance of shelter for the
dozen or so homeless men who have taken it over. I have written about this
before but am returning to it, having seen the way in which this encampment is
growing and changing as the weeks go by. The men have done what they can, to
block out the driving wet and snow, by propping old mattresses and bits of
plywood sheeting on the pillars of the arcade. As well as the heaps of grotty
bedding, there are several chairs and stools. There is a poste de police about
400 yards away and the police clear the camp from time to time. But it’s like a
kind of endlessly repeated sarabande: the men are back with their mattresses within
days.
They men are
a multi-faceted problem for Sarah who sees herself as an open-minded, ‘inclusive’
sort of woman. They can be foul-mouthed
and threatening, especially when drunk, and their left-over food and rubbish attracts
rats. They won’t use the night shelters provided through the winter months by
the Mairie de Paris, because of the ‘no alcohol/drugs’ rule in those
centres. It’s a familiar enough big-city
scenario but that’s not much comfort to a young single woman like Sarah who’s
often alone when shutting up her shop at 8 o’clock at night.
The classic
profile of the SDF (sans domicile fixe = homeless) is gradually changing as
poverty and la précarité (economic insecurity), worm their way into the previously
solid ranks of the working classes. We’ve heard plenty this past while about
the ‘in-work poor’ in the UK because of the latest Tory assault on benefits.
It’s no surprise to learn that, even in Socialist-run France, the situation is
much the same.
This week France
Culture interviewed a number of men using the ‘soupe de Saint Eustache’ – St
Eustache, one of the big churches in the centre of Paris. The manager of the
soup kitchen recalled how when he first opened in 1984 he had 13 regular users.
Now he provides 250 meals a night to every sort of person, to whole families,
even to children who frequently turn up unaccompanied and famished. Two of the
users agreed to be interviewed by France Culture: a man living in a hotel and
currently retraining as a hospital porter after a lifetime of work as a
gardener,(with, as a commentator remarked, no real likelihood of finding work
once he completes his training, given the current financial constraints on
hospitals), the other a retired man with a very small pension, who has taken to
living in a tent outside Paris because he is an ardent opera lover and the only
way he can get enough money together to pay for his tickets is by paring his
living expenses to the bone. Neither of these men have anything in common with
the guys using the arcade opposite Sarah’s shop but increasingly they are melding
together to make one vast army of the underfed and cold.
There is
magic in a snowfall. It transforms our grey surroundings, deepens the landscape.
During the recent white-out the UK news websites were full of pictures of
children sledging and building snowmen. We’ve had more snow too but from the first
day a thin layer fell all the parks nearby were declared out of bounds, and
padlocked to prove it. A missed opportunity for a bit of innocent fun.
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