Paris bulletin 8 2017

The great (in both meanings) exhibition space at the back of our courtyard is always booked by one house or another during the Paris Fashion Week. We’re used to entertaining clusters of emaciated young people all speaking English whatever their native language, cigarette in one hand, phone in the other. However these past weeks we’ve had a rather different clientele. The World Press Photo exhibition is on in there until 7 December, showing the work of the 2017 prizewinners – prints and screens exhibiting ‘the best photo journalism of the year’. We residents of the immeuble don’t often get to join in the jamborees inside this vast interior I look out on from my back room so this is an excellent chance to do so.

As you might imagine, given the state of the world and of planet Earth, there are few photos like this one below, taken by Australian Cameron Spencer, 2nd prize singles. It shows Gaël Monfils in his 4th round match against Andrei Kusnetsov. He needed medical aid after his flight across the court but went on to take the match.

There are others - a man watering flowers in the road, the roof of his house staved in behind him; little girl gymnasts in China flexing their toes. The majority though are scenes of butchery, whether of humans or the natural world: trashed woods, a de-horned dead rhino crumpled in a massive leathery heap in the bush, a turtle tangled up in a mesh of plastic netting; close-ups of frightened, hungry children; a long-distance shot of a man, arms trussed behind his back, hanging limp on the end of a rope, the corpse of a refugee floating in the vastness of the Mediterranean, pinned to the surface by his lifejacket…

And this, a Pietà for our century

Paula Bronstein USA, won 1st prize, Daily Life for this image of Najiba holding 2 year-old Shabir, her nephew, injured by the same bomb that killed his sister on her way to school.

Behind these pictures are the men and women who took them, often at huge risk to themselves. Bearing witness in a time of unprecedented violence and uncertainty.

Other images, other places – Paris is as usual offering more choice of what to see than ever. This month I’ve been to the Anders Zorn at the Petit Palais, a painter I knew nothing of before and whose watercolours are simply extraordinary (until 17 December) 

and the Derain 1904-1914 La décennie radicale at the Pompidou (until 29 January). Others you can see are the The Art of Pastel from Degas to Redon (until 8 April) also at the Petit Palais and Chrétiens d’Orient at the Institut du Monde Arabe (until 14 January) to name only two among dozens. So much - too much? - to see and do.

11 November – la collecte pour notre association. Numbers of us spend most of the day in the local Monoprix, handing out leaflets asking for donations of food for the refugee breakfasts and looking for signatures to a petition for more public toilets in the area – ‘oui, oui, et des douches aussi,’ says one of our supporters.

We gather in the gifts the shoppers leave us with – one huge box after another filled with long-life milk, (assuming we use between 6-9 litres every day we’ll have enough to last long into December), coffee, tea, sugar, jam and chocolate spread. There are a few opposants, one or two elderly people who stop off to tell us it’s deplorable, (that word again…) how we are aiding and abetting ‘la dégradation du quartier’. Mostly the response is positive and sometimes bouleversant in its generosity.

12 November – down on the RER to Port Royal to les Grands Voisins, a temporary experiment in community living and engagement at 82 avenue Denfert-Rochereau in the buildings and grounds of what was until 2012 the hôpital St-Vincent-de-Paul: www.lesgrandsvoisins.org.

Workshops on writing, origami, finding your way in Paris – migrant, visitor or long-time resident - music and noise.

The weather turns colder. The days shorten. One night of wind and the trees at the top of my road have given up their leaves. The public parks are full of chrysanthemums and cineraria.

We are soaked to the skin one morning at the refugee breakfasts. We buy materials and build a canopy for our new trolley – toile cirée, bamboo poles, Velcro. It’s not perfect  but it helps keep the bread dry while we make the sandwiches. One thermos is leaking again and one of the small trolleys has lost a wheel. We hold a bring-and-share AG-dînatoire marking one year of survival, one year of serving enough tea and coffee to fill a lake.  We are a pale reflection of the refugees in this: keeping going, waiting, more in hope than expectation, for better times.