The
French health system doesn’t do home-based midwife visits in the days after a
birth. To begin with if you want to, you can take your baby back to the
hospital to be weighed. But thereafter
you use the system of local PMI (paediatric) centres for any questions you
have, or any difficulties. These centres are staffed full-time by nurses and doctors
and apparently don’t require you to make an appointment in advance. I have yet
to discover what tactics are deployed for babies who leave hospital with a
question mark over their welfare or their healthiness.
‘Tu
as quoi comme appartement?’ (what’s your flat like?) I asked
On my
way back from Alicia’s school I met a young black woman leaving the classroom
with her new baby. He was invisible under a blanket which was draped loosely across
his mother’s front.
‘That’s
Howa’s little brother,’ Alicia told me. ‘He’s just been born.’
I
know who Howa is because she was holding the hand that wasn’t holding Alicia’s
when I helped with the latest cinema expedition this week. She’s a jigger, a
bouncer, a nice little girl who I can see from how Nellie, the teacher spoke to
her, is constantly being checked. She pointed out the hotel they live in as we
went on our way to the cinema.
‘C’est
là où j’habite.’ (that’s where I
live)
‘On a
une chambre comme tout le monde.’ (we’ve got one room like everyone else) She
said.
So,
one room for mum, the jigging, bouncing Howa, her little brother Suleiman and
this new baby (and Dad too one supposes since I don’t think we’re talking here
about a virgin birth). Suleiman’s 3,
Howa’s 4, the baby’s less than a month… No wonder she jigs.
I’ve
been at the muse du Quai Branly this afternoon
- a must I’d say for visitors to Paris. I’m told it’s been much
criticised but to me it’s a treasure trove of native art, masks and totem poles
and other stuff from the far flung parts of Oceania. Having spent the early
part of this year reading loads of stuff by the Roumanian scholar Mircea Eliade
I’m well up on homo religiosus and I found myself thinking we’ve lost a lot by
embracing science so completely.
I
walked back along the right bank of the Seine, past the houseboats and the
bateaux mouches to Concorde. Tourists à gogo but no sign any longer
of those piles of tributes to Diana at the pont de l’Alma. Then up towards Etoile, along clean but lifeless streets, past shuttered windows and ornate portes cocheres. Les repaires de la haute bourgeoisie.
Door knocker in the 16th arrondissement
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