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.