Paris bulletin 7 2016

I've been in Paris for nearly a week now and the soft light of south-west Scotland, its green fields and wide open moors already feel quite remote. The sun has been shining out of a cloudless sky, although no longer producing the soaring, energy-sapping temperatures that made Paris so unbearable this summer. I was gone before Paris Plages was fully set up and the sand, deckchair and buvettes have long since been dismantled. This weekend has been la Fête des Jardins however, so there have been other entertainments and attractions in all the public gardens.

Our local park, le jardin d’Eole, had a collection of domestic animals in enclosures, a mini city farm I suppose you could say (bearing, it must be admitted, little or no resemblance to the way we really manage the care of the animals whose meat, milk, eggs and skins we consume. I think of my local farm in Scotland where the cows never go outside from one month to the next, or the chickens we eat, allowed at best 10 weeks of life …).

   Sign of the times? New burger bar on the Champs-Elysées. 250,000 ways of eating a burger - just don't ask how the beef was raised, killed and transported, i.e. welcome to consumer choice in the 21st century. 

There were a couple of very large geese cackling about, some sheep in pens and rabbits in hutches and sundry bales of straw to lend an air of authenticity. All that was missing to complete this picture of bucolic harmony was a yokel with a hat on the back of his head and a straw poking out of his mouth. Nice for the kids though, a lot of whom probably thought the geese were just big ducks and couldn’t have told you beforehand how to tell a sheep from a goat.

On the second day I got back I saw for the first time ever a young refugee stripped down to his underpants having a ‘full-body’ wash in the canal that runs along the length of the garden. It hardly merits the word canal being only five feet wide and less than two feet deep and full of bulrushes, reeds and other water-loving plants. However its waters are constantly replenished so it’s not a bad place to get clean if you haven’t access to the public baths. I didn’t know then that the organisers were planning on bringing in animals for the Fête but I was already thinking about the difference in how the wealthy West views its garden spaces and how someone from a low-rainfall, dusty country might view them, or the animals and birds that inhabit them. We have lots of ducks on that little canal. I haven’t heard of any dead ducks being roasted over a camp fire yet but the time may come.

It was a busy weekend for the Mairie de Paris since Sunday was also Paris’s annual car-free day. It looked from my window as if the edict had had more impact this year but it was hard to be sure since the street is generally quieter on a Sunday. I decided to check out one of the pedestrian hot-spots and took the metro to the Champs-Elysées in the afternoon. There I joined the thousands on foot and bike who had sole use of the 10-lane highway for something like 7 hours from 11 am – 6 pm.

                            The Champs-Elysées at 3 pm on Sunday 25 September 2016

The purely pedestrianised part of the road stopped at the rond-point where there was a heavily armed police presence (you were also frisked at the barriers at both ends). Outside the pedestrian limits the only traffic was buses and taxis and those bicycle taxis you see more and more in that part of town. Concorde was a vast expanse of emptiness. It was so safe hundreds of small children were also out on their bikes. It was a joy to see, most of them cycling merrily along - some very little ones wobbling precariously - all the way across the place de la Concorde and up the rue Royale!

                                                     Place de la Concorde, same day

Long shadows on the places, fountains playing, the asters and the begonias still in full bloom; outside my open window I can hear the voices of the women sitting out in the courtyard next door, the rippling notes of a flute, the distant blare of a siren. That’s Paris on a warm September day.

Blue skies and butterflies - the sun also shines in Scotland!