Paris bulletin 12 2009

I thought I was going to write a bulletin at the weekend but when Algeria lost to Egypt in Cairo in their second game in the World Cup I decided I’d hang on until the run-off in Khartoum. I was right to wait. Algeria got through on a one-nil victory. It was that, not France’s game, which had the street outside in uproar last night. I was glad of my double-glazing. What with the constant tooting of horns and the you-yous of the women, rue Marx Dormoy was a noisy place to be.

The mood was good-humoured in this quartier although less so in the ructious banlieues of Lyon where 30 vehicles were set alight and a supermarket trashed. The main media focus was on the north of Paris though, and Marseille with its very large Algerian population. Things went off well enough in the vieux port by all accounts, only 13 people spent the night in the cells because of échauffourées of one sort and another. This morning the sports commentators went back to Marseille for a comment on France’s lousy qualifying goal for the South African final. Didier Deschamps, manager at Marseille OM, said there was nothing to celebrate, beyond the fact that France are through. ‘Les Irlandais étaient meilleurs que nous. Ils ont été volés’. (Ireland was better than us. They were robbed) There you have it, from the mouth of an expert.

It was interesting to observe the behaviour of the riot police at the weekend when I was coming back from Barbès. The Cairo match was due to start in a couple of hours and the street was a solid mass of flag-waving, trumpeting men. Down a side road but visible from the main drag they were burning an Egyptian flag. The fuzz didn’t move a muscle. I felt like asking them how they’d feel if it was a French flag going up in smoke but they were a grim-looking bunch so I thought better of it.

You get used to seeing armed men patrolling the gare du Nord, and the files of vans full of police, parked near demos. In Paris the police seem to travel in posses. You never see a couple of ‘bobbies on the beat’. Community policing either has a different meaning in France or they don’t believe in it.

Take what I saw at the canal de l’Ourq on my way to see the film, ‘A l’Origine’ last week. There’s a semi-permanent encampment of sans papiers underneath an overhang at the end of the canal. Every time I’ve gone by recently something more has been added to the homestead. First they had sheets of cardboard, then mattresses. Then someone got a chair and someone else a table. Then they started to close themselves in. They got hold of several of those solid crowd-control barriers and made some walls. The latest addition I saw last week was a drooping yucca plant outside a ‘front door’! Perhaps next time there’ll be a door mat with WELCOME on it.

The police were there in numbers that afternoon, watching a terrific barney between a very drunk woman and one of the men sitting ‘inside’. She was reaching over, trying to belt him one, not with the bottle however and she was barely able to stand upright so he wasn’t in any danger. What would happen in the UK? A good community policeman might also stand back and ‘do nothing’, judging that by being there he did enough. That wasn’t what I thought though, looking at that mass of blue-black uniforms. It was as if they were a bunch of amused spectators standing watching some kind of show. They eventually jumped back into their van and tootled off without exchanging so much as a word with the residents.

The branches are nearly bare now. The last walk I took along it, the canal St Martin was a study in gold and brown under the trees. As you walk down towards the chic end of the canal – where the arty boutiques begin - you go through a long pedestrianised stretch. On a Sunday afternoon it’s full of parents propping small children up on wobbly two-wheelers and little boys crashing into the pavement edge on ‘leurs rollers’. It’s a glorious walk, plenty of nice eateries and drinkeries, including a great Irish-French pub on the left hand side heading south. I recommend it.

La grippe A continues to close classrooms and a few schools – the government has decreed that if there are three or more children in a class with flu-like symptoms the class has to shut. Can you imagine the knots parents are tying themselves in to find solutions to the childcare problems caused by this directive? What’s more despite the publicity campaign, les gens boudent le vaccin (which means they’re staying away from the centres de vaccination). Dose after dose gets washed down the sink each day at a stupendous cost to the public purse – in the country of Louis Pasteur!

Returning, as I tend to, to theme of the homeless one last time, Emmaus have just released the results of a survey they carried out in collaboration with the Institut CSA. It shows that in 2009 three times as many French people as in 2007 think it ‘very likely’ that they will one day be homeless – (12% of those surveyed as opposed to 4% in 2007). Think what it’d be like if they could put out a vaccin contre la précarité – the queues would be round the block.