Saturday 21 June 2014

Paris bulletin 4 2014


It’s not what you expect in Paris in the first week of June: rain like an Indian monsoon, pedestrians scuttling along under open umbrellas as if they had stepped straight out of a Hiroshige painting. That’s what we had the first full day I was back. Temps pourri, et froid en plus. But that was Tuesday and today, Friday 6 June, the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in Normandy, the sky is a perfect blue and it is HOT. Perhaps we are finally going to have some proper summer weather.
On Day One of being back I had to go down to the Forum des Halles, the biggest shopping mall of central Paris. It’s never an enjoyable outing. I wander round and round this horrible subterranean maze like a lost soul, - comme une âme en peine might describe it more accurately . I seem to lose all sense of direction once I’m inside and I wonder sometimes if it’s me, or if others are similarly bamboozled by the signage. It’s particularly disorienting at present because of the immense travaux going on in the superstructure and the complete redoing of the garden areas. Paris is always a bit of a building site, in this neighbourhood especially.  They are still demolishing old slum property, turning what were cramped living quarters into more spacious dwellings for the great mass of the unhoused and poorly house. In the process, of course, displacing quite a number of people because of the reduction in the total amount of living space available in the quartier.

 
 
After six weeks in the peace and quiet of south-west Scotland it takes me a day or so to adjust to the rhythm and routine of city life. I get myself up to the market to replenish the larder. Lunch is Bleu des Causses cheese, Camembert, salad and pain aux 6 céréales – there’s a huge variety of bread made in boulangeries these days - dark cherries and a nectarine to finish. I begin chopping up the cheese-rind after my lunch then remember I have no bird table to put it on, and certainly no robins and woodpeckers to eat it.
I am absorbed every time I step out into the street by the flood of multi-coloured, struggling humanity: the men standing guard over their little pile of sunglasses, socks and belts laid out for sale on sheets of cardboard on the pavement, (they have to be ready to scarper in an instant if the flics appear. If they’re aren’t quick enough they’ll lose the lot and end up in the local cop shop), the Roma mothers pushing their buggies with one hand and holding out a begging bowl with the other, the various derelicts slumped asleep, dog in tow. The street’s a jumble as well as a jungle. It can be disturbing too, but it is very alive with all those people jinking about to make enough to see them through the day. If Scotland does vote for independence in September perhaps it will import some of them and add them to its home-grown cohorts of the poor and unemployed. It would be good for them and for Scotland, although very unsettling: as challenging as any question of shared currency, NATO/European membership, or where to park those nuclear white elephants that are currently slumbering out their last days in the Holy Loch.
Thinking about our wild-life at Burn House led me to investigate what the website of the Mairie de Paris has to say about ‘le recyclage’ and specifically about composting in the city. After all, seeing how much fresh fruit and veg is sold, every household must generate stacks of good organic rubbish. As you might expect, the website’s got something for everyone, from how to dispose of your old fridge, to the latest attempt by the Mairie to get composting established in the thousands of Parisian immeubles.  There’s quite a push to increase the numbers of households doing ‘lambricompostage’ - composting of organic waste by the use of red worms. That has the virtue of being more apartment-friendly than the traditional ‘wait while it all rots down’ method.
It’s not all worms and struggle here in Paris. The sun is shining brighter than ever as I come to the end of this bulletin. Despite the rumblings of discontent and the real possibility of strikes by les intermittents de spectacle (the people who are employed intermittently in the arts and entertainment industry), there seem to be more festivals than ever, more exhibitions and events, all clamouring for one’s time and attention. This evening for me, it will be Emmanuelle Riva in Duras’ Savannah Bay at the Theatre de l’Atelier in Montmartre. Riva, born 1927 won both the BAFTA and the César Awards for her role in Michael Haneke's Amour in 2012. If you haven’t seen that yet, I suggest you do. It is one of the most moving depictions of love I have ever seen.

 

Paris bulletin 3 2014


Having successfully brought The Twisted Yarn out,

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something with the bulletins of previous years - they go back to January 2008. That has meant re-reading them and what I’ve found is that whatever else they deal with, the weather and the seasons are constants. There’s scarcely a bulletin that doesn’t make reference to either or both, to spring especially.
Well, here we are again. Spring. It has come in a rush, sap spiralling up the veins of trees and along the leaf paths, buds rushing into blossom and falling as fast. Grassy spaces in public parks, which are supposed to be ‘au repos’ until mid-April, have been looking like scenes for a modern-day déjeuner sur l’herbe, so crowded have they been with picnickers and slumbering forms.
 
 
In the middle of this meteorological largesse we have had LA POLLUTION. So much pollution that for several days a week or so ago, la Mairie de Paris decreed that all public transport, all vélibres and autos libres too, should be free. And then because the traffic density was still too high, they briefly instituted des jours alternés for private cars: even number plates one day, odds the next, at which point one of the big motoring organisations reported a 30% drop in traffic on the périphérique (the motorway which encircles Paris).
There are those who see in this sudden concern for the quality of air breathed by Parisians nothing more than political gesturing and it is true that a couple of days of such restrictions on car usage does nothing for the long-term problem which is already bad and liable to get worse.
I am not going to take space here to say how this plays out in the current round of élections municipales, which had their first stage this weekend and which show the Front National making some sizeable gains in various large towns but the Ecologistes also performing better than expected. France is no different from most other countries in trying to square the environmental circle – have increased growth, continue to drive, travel, eat, buy the same as usual or maybe just slightly more ‘responsibly’ while hoping that the world won’t get too much hotter, wetter and wilder than it has so far.
If you take a look at the report published recently by a team headed by Safa Motesharri at the University of Maryland, and well-covered in all the major UK broadsheets, you might be forgiven for thinking that western civilisation is already doomed to collapse, as a consequence of which we might just as well go right on and party till the bitter end. Because, judging from what we are told, the end will indeed be bitter.

But we are not going to do that are we? We won’t because humans are resourceful, inventive and ultimately more concerned for each other than the dominant rhetoric of today suggests. We have children and grandchildren and we do not want them to inherit a wasteland of our making.
So I like to think, but with some difficulty when for example, I’m in a bus stuck in traffic outside the Gare du Nord and I have more time than I might like to observe the antics and tensions in that heaving crowd, or when I’m on a pavement full of litter, cigarette butts, empty bottles and cans. The Mairie regularly runs poster campaigns about litter, reminding people that the cleaning squads cannot do the impossible and that there is a rubbish bin within 30 feet of you anywhere in Paris. Hard to believe by the end of a warm weekend if you’re in one of the many tourist hot-spots where there’s been lots of outdoor eating and drinking going on.
On Saturday evening I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Pompidou. It was marked as ‘affluence moyenne’, rising to ‘forte’ on their website. In the event there was no queue at all.
It is a huge exhibition – over 500 works – and I felt my senses a bit dulled by the end. I found the early photographs when he was closely involved with the Surréalistes the most interesting – and fresh. Cartier-Bresson died aged 96 in 2004, but he more or less stopped taking pictures in the 1970s. He began to draw again and particularly to draw himself, so there are several pen and pencil self-portraits in the very last part of the exhibition, as though as he aged he was less concerned with the world around him and more interested finally in turning the lens of his own eye back on himself.

                                                    

There has been a flurry of comment this morning about the emergence of a new kind of ‘selfie’, taken by mostly young people in the voting booth: ‘le selfisoloir’. At the risk of boring you with a lengthy piece of secondary reporting, here is what Xavier de la Porte had to say about this phenomenon:
L’isoloir est conçu par la logique républicaine comme le lieu où le citoyen, dans la solitude du vote, est censé rejoindre l’universel de l’intérêt général. C’est donc, théoriquement, un lieu de l’oubli de soi, un moment où le moi particulier laisse place au citoyen de la République. Et là tout à coup, avec ces photos, ce sont des individus qui apparaissent avec leur tête en gros plan, leurs nez grossi par l’angle…. Ces photos incarnent la citoyenneté dans ce lieu où la citoyenneté est censée ne plus avoir de corps… « Exhibitionnisme » disent certains. Oui, c’est vrai, j’ajouterai même qu’il y a un côté coquin dans tout ça…
         Certains ont vu là un signe ultime de dépolitisation, un effet de désacralisation de l’acte de voter …Eh bien moi, ce sacrilège, je le trouve intéressant. Parce qu’il dit une vérité de ce qu’est le vote. Le vote n’est pas l’acte politique par excellence. Réfléchir, lire, donner son avis (sur un blog, dans un réseau social), discuter avec ses parents, ses voisins, essayer de les convaincre, militer, manifester, passer du temps dans une association, et parfois même ne pas voter, sont des actes politiques aussi forts, voire plus engageants, qu’aller glisser un bulletin dans une urne. Et, d’une certaine manière, toutes ces photos d’isoloir ramènent le vote à ce qu’il est : un acte minimal et profane. « Eh oui, disent ces photos, voter ça n’est que ça... La politique c’est aussi tout ce qui se passe avant et après. La politique, c’est plus grand que ça. »  Et j’avoue que ça m’a ragaillardi.

In summary what de la Porte says,  is that rather than throwing our hands up in horror at the impiety - the bare-faced cheek - of taking a picture of yourself in the booth, le selfisoloir strips the vote of its unjustified symbolic importance. Voting turns out to be just one small act among many  other possible  - necessary even – political acts  (informing oneself, debating, joining a voluntary organisation, getting out on a demo etc etc). Politics, he says, is about what you do before you go into that booth and after you come out.

Which brings us neatly enough back to the litter, the traffic and even to Cartier-Bresson’s self-portraits.

 

Paris bulletin 2 2014


As I have said in earlier bulletins, it is quite possible for anyone who’s  reasonably fit to walk all the way  from the 18th arrondissement in the north of Paris to the far end of the 6th in less than a couple of hours, even allowing for the slow pace of the Parisian flâneur. On the second day of March, a mild afternoon with a real promise of spring in the air, that was the walk I took.
I’d set out thinking I would go and see the recently opened exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson which is on at the Pompidou – (from now till July, open every day, except Tuesdays, until 23.00 hours).  One look at the queue and I saw I’d be standing about for hours before I got in. So I listened for a bit to the young woman who plays the didgeridoo on the parvis and then set off again, across the rue de Rivoli and over the brimming Seine onto the île de la Cité, whose riverside walkways were half-submerged by the relentless grey-brown flow. France has been wet too, although not as wet as southern England.

It was Sunday so the marché aux fleurs on the place Louis Lépine was shut but the marché aux oiseaux was in full chirrup, birds of every hue and size fluttering about in their tiny cages, some of the plumage so bright I wondered if they’d been dipped in dye like they do flowers these days, turning them horrible electric blues and greens as if the colours they come in are no longer vivid enough. They weren’t the only oddities. There was one cage containing a freakish rabbit with a face and ears like a cat but hopping about as a rabbit would do.
From there I make my way up the boulevard St Michel, and into rue Champollion – more queues, this time outside the cinemas in that little street. Out onto the place de la Sorbonne where I see that the hotel I occasionally used, way back in the 70s when working on the Collins-Robert dictionary, has risen from modest 2-star to 4-star. The boulevard is very different too, from what it was in those days. Apart from Joseph Gibert, it’s mainly cheap and not so cheap clothing and phone shops. Still, if you get away from the boulevard itself you can still find plenty of curiosities in this quartier, plenty  to conjure up ‘le vieux Paris’. You can side-step the main street by going through the garden at the side of the musée de Cluny and out into place Paul Painlevé. The garden is laid out à la médiévale, in chequered beds and has information panels in French and English explaining the religious, alimentary, medicinal purpose and significance of the flowers, vegetables and herbs being grown.
 
I’m about to head back down the rue St Jacques from the rue Soufflot but I see the dome of the Panthéon is encased in a carapace of scaffolding, wrapped around with bandages. Evidently this monument to France’s great men is being given a face-lift.
The Panthéon is one of a number of public buildings I’ve never set foot inside, perhaps partly because of what it proclaims in capitals over the main door – ‘aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante’. With the sole exception of Marie Curie, no Frenchwoman has been judged worthy of a place in there.  There was the beginnings of a debate in 2008 when various woman’s names were displayed on banners outside – Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand among them – but there has been nothing since and no-one seems much exercised by the fact, which is disconcerting - not to say disappointing if you think such honours matter - in a country which has égalité as one of its core republican values.
Anyway, as you might expect on a Parisian Sunday at the end of the half-term holiday, what’s going on outside the building is much more interesting than any number of caskets of the illustrious dead inside. The place du Panthéon is alive with flapping yellow and blue flags. A very large crowd of Ukrainians has gathered to protest at what is happening in Kiev and the Crimea. There’s lots of chanting, lots of speeches and cheering and a rousing performance of Ukraine’s national anthem. I look around, wondering which of the faces is the face of a spy, the face even of an agent provocateur. In the light of Putin’s response there must be some of that going on.
 
A little later, I’m heading homewards on the no. 38 bus when I see that the Palais de Justice is also decked out in blue and yellow. But it’s no Ukrainian flag this time. A gigantic ad for Apple’s latest gadget is stretched right across the whole of the Seine side of the building and in small print at the bottom:  ‘This advert is helping to finance the restoration of this building’.
So there you have it - the Panthéon and what it stands for is history, the building itself an empty hulk, a pile of stones holding a few old bones. The technocratic age has given us French politicians and bureaucrats in thrall to Big Money, indifferent to the image of an IPhone looming huge and ugly over the Seine in the heart of the city, apparently unconcerned about the use of private finance to help restore the fabric of the courts of justice, and, perhaps most chillingly, apparently incapable of understanding that explaining why it’s there doesn’t ‘make it right’.

 

Paris bulletin 1 2014


When I am out and about in the streets of Paris around lunchtime, I can’t help but wonder just how many pigs – let alone chickens, bullocks and turkeys – are eaten here every day. You only have to look at the piles of ham and gruyère baguettes, the tempting terrines of pâté in the traiteur shop windows, the heaps of jambon fumé and charcuterie, to realise that this city must get through hundreds of herds of swine every working day of the week.
So that leads me to wonder where exactly are all these poor beasts being cut down, eviscerated and bled, before being turned into sausages, hams and pâtés? By no means all of them in Paris. Those with a ‘produit du terroir’ label on them will have gone under the cosh somewhere else in France and arrived in the city already altered beyond all recognition from the four-legged beasts they were.
Once upon a time livestock killed inside the Paris boundaries would have met their end in the grand abattoir of la Villette but that has long since shed its gory image, ‘relooked’ itself as a temple of culture and modernity. Maybe I think, the abattoirs have been pushed even further out to the periphery of the city: ‘out of sight, out of mind’, until you sink your teeth into one of those delicious, well-filled baguettes that Paris still does better than most other capitals.
It turns out that this is not quite the case. The 18th and 19th arrondissements do indeed have more than their fair share: four in all, but some of the others are in what are usually thought of as the more bourgeois arrondissements: the 8th for example (99 rue du Faubourg St Honoré), the 11th (91 rue de la Roquette) and the 6th (31 avenue du Maine).
The French have always been a nation of carnivores and it’s rare to find people gripped by the kind of sentimentality about the animal world that is so common in the UK. Still, reading about the methods employed by these abattoirs to do away with ‘les porcins’, to strip them of their bristles (in what are called échaudoirs, which as the name suggests, are vats full of hot water. 62 degs C is required – hotter than that and the skin tears, colder and the bristles stay in) and render them ‘fit for human consumption’, you really do wonder how any of us continue to eat meat at all. And that’s before you tangle with the horrors of slit throats and the slow bleeding to death required by the Islamic and Orthodox Jewish methods of slaughter.
Paris is like all capital cities these days – you want any kind of food from any part of the globe, any plant or creature of the natural (or unnatural) world, and you can find it. Being conservative as well as carnivorous however, it’s taking a while for the ordinary French man and woman to make the leap to insect-eating. New York may have its retail outlets selling locusts, crickets and meal worms by the kilo for immediate human consumption but there isn’t yet an equivalent in Paris. What the city does have – within walking distance of my own flat – is a restaurant which specialises in entomophagy, the fancy word for eating insects. If you decide to give it a try you’ll need to leave aside your ‘I’m OK with fish if it doesn’t look like fish’ wimpishness – these insects arrive at your table complete with feelers, eyes and brittle – oh so brittle! – legs. They sit proudly atop your lettuce leaves and your slice of foie gras as if they are about to pounce.
                                              
               
                                             

The name of the restaurant is ‘le Festin Nu’, the French title of William Burroughs’ cult novel ‘Naked Lunch’, published for the first time in Paris in 1959, and famous for its experimental, hallucinatory style (he wrote it while doing every kind of known drug at the time), and its scatological content. Eat there and you will be eating in ‘l’enfant terrible’ of the restaurant world – at least that’s what I assume the name is supposed to convey. (10 rue de la Fontaine du But, Paris 18ème).
Generally speaking we are a long way yet in France from the extraordinary fetishization of food that UK viewers suffer (or enjoy) almost nightly on British television but, leaving the insects to one side, there are worrying signs that France is beginning to follow a similar trend.
Le snacking, le lunch, le fast food – they’ve become familiar concepts to the ordinary punter. They were joined a little while back, for the higher end of the eating public by le Fooding, a movement with its own widely-read publication which, in the words of one of its proponents (or do I mean prophets?), aims to
“liberate cuisine from the traditional codes and conventions that confine it and give contemporary eaters a true taste of the times. Through opening this “freer channel in the gastronomic universe” le Fooding emphasizes “the appetite for novelty and quality, rejection of boredom, love of fun, the ordinary, the sincere....”
A true taste of the times? If you ask a few of the people I see rummaging in the bins round here, one or two of the woman queuing up for free groceries from the relais du coeur on the rue du Département, they’d probably tell you that the taste of the times for their families is two-day old bread, last week’s mince and past-their-sell-by-date yoghurts. 

 

Paris bulletin 9 2013


This time last year I wrote a bulletin about the church organs of Paris. There’s something about the month of December, the dark nights and the cold air – possibly even the advent of Christmas, although there’s little enough left of the ‘holy’ in the Christmases we celebrate now – that leads me back to churches, to their dim interiors, makes me want to fill my nose with the scents of incense and candle wax.
It’s the bells of Notre Dame I’m thinking of just now. These past seven weeks I’ve been hearing them every Wednesday evening as I come up from the RER metro and make my way across the parvis de Notre Dame and over to Shakespeare & Co, the bookshop in whose upstairs library a weekly writing workshop has been taking place.
First the great bell, Emmanuel the ‘bourdon’ bell, rings out a few seconds ahead of the rest and then the pealing begins and although the traffic noise is not drowned out, the bells rise above it, melodic and formidably insistent in the night air.
                                            
                                                      Emmanuel
Last week I was early for my class so, instead of just crossing the bridge I went round to the church entrance and seeing it was still open, went inside. Mass was being sung but few enough of the visitors were there to hear it. Perhaps thirty or so were standing with the priest, the rest were like me, tip-toeing about, unengaged in the central purpose of the building although probably not completely indifferent to the atmosphere of prayer and calm.
You can’t explore inside any of the Russian or Greek Orthodox churches as those tourists were exploring Notre Dame. The churches are locked except during the hours of formal worship. I know because I’ve tried them. Like mosques, they are spaces apart, sacred ground for their fidèles. I love the open accessibility of the Catholic churches but I also admire the insistence on the ‘awe-fulness’ of the divine that is implied by those shut doors with their notices in Greek, Aramaic or Russian that make no concessions to casual passers-by.
The first phase of the new Institut des Cultures d’Islam was completed a couple of weeks ago and the great and the good of Paris came to celebrate the opening of the new building on the rue Doudeauville. It is a splendid space on three floors, with a hamman in the basement which will open in January. I and several hundred others were lined up outside on the afternoon of Thursday 28 November, expecting to get in since we’d been invited. The main door is on the rue Stephenson. Within minutes the queue was overflowing onto the narrow street, blocking the traffic. The noise of angry drivers thumping their car horns rapidly became as deafening as it was pointless.
It was raining slightly and in the close-pressed crowd tempers began to rise. We waited and waited while the security men kept pushing us back. Tempers rose higher. An old man on my right leaning on a stick began berating a young woman with a child who was trying to wriggle her way forward to the front. Other people, just as hemmed in and uncomfortable, began cursing him for his intolerance. Considering the occasion, it was a bad beginning.
Then - quite how it happened I’m still not sure - all of a sudden I and 7 others were pulled forward and told we could go in, not to hear the speeches (which I didn’t care about anyway since they’d no doubt be as predictable as such speeches always are on these occasions) but to go straight upstairs to the first and second floors.
Thus it is that I can report that the first floor is wholly taken up by ‘la salle de prière’. A man was handing out elasticated blue plastic bags at the entrance so that people didn’t have to remove their shoes. What was there to see? A carpeted empty room, some lights hanging low, the mihrab in the corner and diagonally across the space, a curtain behind which the women worship – about one third of the whole area.  Nothing remarkable you might think, except that the fact that it is there at all is quite remarkable. The cultural centre has been funded by the Mairie de Paris so in theory there should be no religious activity within the building - the law of 1905 prohibits the state from funding buildings which will be used for religious purposes.  It has required money from la Grande Mosquée de Paris plus some careful manoeuvring on the part of Daniel Vaillant (mayor of the 18th arrondissement) and Delanoe’s team in the town hall, to bring the secular and the holy together under one roof.
Interesting and challenging times we live in – perhaps no more so than any other time but noisier and more invasive in every way than they used to be. We may not want ‘les rituels du culte’ but truly we do need the silence of churches.

Paris bulletin 7 2013


There can be few nicer walks in the centre of Paris than the one that takes you along the right bank of the Seine, opposite the île St Louis. If you do it in the morning, say before 11 o’clock, you’ll probably have the pavements and walkways entirely to yourself - just the occasional old lady with her toutou and a sac à caca at the ready–these days Parisians are much better at cleaning up after their dogs.
The Seine on an autumn morning is a greenish-grey with oily highlights. What combination of paints, you might wonder, would convey that colour, that aqueous energy? The steady swirl of water is chopped up from time to time by bateaux mouches and small craft driven by men in uniform. The trees on both sides are a blend of gold and green. The air is soft, the colours are soft, even the smells are soft. It is good to be out.
I’ve started the day by visiting the exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville. It’s showing the artwork of over 160 ‘mentally ill and psychotic’ individuals. The exhibition’s title is l’Art Excentrique, a reference not so much to eccentricity in the way it’s normally understood but to the fact that, no matter how good these paintings, drawings, ceramics are, no matter how exuberant, original and strong, they are ‘ex-centre’ – i.e. they are outside the exclusive sphere of ‘art by real artists’. If you’re in Paris before the 9th November this is one not to miss.
I’ve not come down at the Seine just for art and autumn colours. I’m also hoping to get some information from Batostar (‘we run the only electrically-powered leisure craft on the Seine’), about a boat booking but their office is shut so I retrace my steps and cross the river at the pont d’Arcole.  The bridge is jammed with tourists listening to the Buddy D band. Beyond it the hôpital Hôtel Dieu rears up, festooned with banners: ‘NON A LA FERMETURE DES URGENCES’ and similar messages. The senior management of AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris), is forging ahead with its plans to change how emergency healthcare services are delivered in central Paris. There have been sit-ins and petitions of course, but the beds are being emptied regardless. The man on the reception desk in the hospital tells me there are rumours that the building – a magnificent piece of 19th century architecture with a vast inner courtyard, fine flower beds and colonnades which, by the way, anyone can visit – has already been eyed covetously by ‘some rich Qataris’. True or not, that’s what people believe these days.

                                                    
                                                            inner courtyard Hotel Dieu

A day or two ago I went  to see Agelastos Petra, la Pierre Triste, a film made by Filippos Koutsaftis who spent 12 years documenting the changes in the town of Eleusis  and recording the reminiscences of some of its older inhabitants. Eleusis used to be known for the Eleusisian Mysteries, dating back thousands of years. It was where Demeter, mother of Persephone, bade farewell to her daughter each year, Persephone’s descent into Hades coinciding with the onset of the dark, cold months of the year. Beneath the town lies layer upon layer of ancient history – graves, walls, whole streets, urns containing the bones of unidentified men and women, babies and soldiers. The bulldozers are indifferent to all that. They thrust through the earth, break apart walls built more than two thousand years ago, fill in wells that have watered orchards and olive groves for countless generations, smash sarcophagi that have lain quietly for centuries. The ancient ruins of Eleusis are being crushed and reburied, to make space for the god oil and its derivatives. Over the town hangs a pall of refinery smoke and dust and the sunsets are blood-red and lowering.
I know what is happening in Eleusis isn’t like what will happen at the Hôtel Dieu. No-one’s going to demolish the hospital any more than they’re going to demolish the église de Notre Dame. But there are other ways of destroying the past and if the Hôtel Dieu hospital does close it will be the first time since 652 that there is nothing of its kind in this part of Paris. A hospital is not a sacred space like a church, even though more lives have been saved by the people working in it than were ever saved by the intervention of the Virgin Mary in her cathedral across the way. What’s at issue here is not a dispute about the need for change in medical care but the suspicion that behind this change, as behind the raging diggers of Eleusis, is that other great god of the 21st century: private profit, Mammon – call it what you like.
But there is a possibility of something better. L’exception française isn’t an empty figure. I think of how the city facilitated the change in use of the building at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in my quartier, turning the HQ of the municipal pompes funèbres into one of the most exciting, effervescing art centres Paris has ever had. What they must do, I think as I make my way to the no. 38 bus, is turn all or part of the building into a ‘musée de la science médicale’. There it would be, right in the heart of tourist Paris, an ever-changing testimony to France’s role in the development of that science and a fitting counterpoint to another kind of tradition embodied in the great church only yards from its door.

Paris bulletin 8 2013


At 3.30 on a bright afternoon with a chill wind keeping the clouds at bay, I set off for the Penguin wool shop near the métro Louis Blanc, to buy some more pink wool for the blanket I’m knitting for the Wool Against Weapons campaign (www.woolagainstweapons.co.ukplease join in if you can knit; if you’re sympathetic but not a knitter, pass the address onto someone who is).
The students have just poured out of the lycée Colbert on the rue Château Landon, filling the pavement. More than half of them are pulling out cigarette packets and lighting up. I cross over instead of trying to push through the crowd and nearly fall over two girls crouched down between a couple of parked cars. One of them is keeping a look-out while the other rolls a spliff. The girl on watch looks at me anxiously as I get by them but the one making the spliff doesn’t give me a glance. Her head’s bowed over the cigarette, protecting the whole lot from being blown into the gutter in a sudden gust of wind. I’d love to ask them what’s the difference, in their eyes, between smoking a joint and nipping into a cafe for a large glass of wine between classes. I can guess one possible answer (less rude than some) – the one’s ‘cool’ (a favourite French word at present), the other’s not. 
Half an hour later I’ve got some wool from the fin de série basket and I head on towards the canal. The big thing along the bassin de la Villette at present is tightrope walking. People string the elastic lines between the trees, high or low, depending how good they are, and up they go, some of them doing all sorts  of crazy jumps and turns, others taking a few wobbly steps then tipping off.
There are tightrope-walkers today but also, something new: a crowd has gathered to watch  a man and a woman spray painting a more than life size image of a geisha onto a huge sheet of cling-film. They’ve stretched yards of it between two trees, the plastic overlapping and wrapped tight so that it forms a single taut sheet about six feet high by ten feet long.
The bassin du canal has become more and more of a playground since I first started coming here. There are the old men sitting astride the benches and playing dominoes and chess. There are the pétanque players - woman as well as men these days - the joggers, the dog-walkers, the flâneurs, the picnickers, the fishermen, the frisbee throwers, the table tennis players, the children on their trottinettes and bikes. And alongside all this land-based activity, the moored barges with their cafes up on the decks and inside, music, dance, theatre and exhibitions. You can go to a mini-opera on one side of the canal and learn to tango on the other. More tends to happen on the quai de Seine side, but the quai de Loire has the children’s play area which is always busy, the canoes for hire at the end by the pont basculant and halfway along one of the biggest, best-stocked organic supermarkets in Paris, Canal Bio, part of the Coopbio network (www.canal-bio.net).
Both quais have their cinemas. Coming from the Quai de Seine side you can walk round over the canal St Martin bridge to the Quai de Loire or, if you’re there in the evening, chug across to your movie in the little tug that plies between the two.
I doubt if many of the thousands who use the canal for play and exercise are aware of the work the canal does for Paris as a whole. The city needs 380,000 cubic metres each day for cleaning the sewers, gutters, and parks. The Canal de l'Ourcq provides about half of that – every single day – another instance of us all benefitting from the work of 19th century planners and engineers.
Even nearer to home than the canal is another, very recent, piece of visionary urban planning: the refurbished Halle Pajol with its eco-friendly youth hostel. With 330 beds and 103 bedrooms the Yves Robert auberge de jeunesse is the biggest youth hostel in Paris and certainly the most attractive/comfortable. If you’re planning a low-budget séjour in Paris this is the place to be. The hostel is pretty much state-of-the-art environmentally speaking – the roof of the halle Pajol is entirely covered in solar panels which, along with a heat pump and various other environmental innovations which I won’t bother you with, provide all the building needs in the way of hot water and heat.
 



The complex also boasts a good cafe with live music most weekends, a big library where kids can play video games for free if they have a Paris library card, a gym and a college. Soon there’ll be a boulangerie and more shops. It’s another great place to hang out and it’s à deux pas de chez moi. .
9.30 the same evening. I’m on my way back from a raja yoga class. The metro’s packed. Barbès station is shut, by order of the police. The World Cup qualifiers are on. France needs a 3-goal win against the Ukraine (and gets it) to go through but the only game that matters round here is the Algeria- Burkina Faso one.  By the time I get out of the train we know Algeria’s done it and, let me tell you, ça bouge dans le quartier! The street is going wild: horns klaxonning like the last trump, cars belting along with young men balanced precariously out of windows waving Algerian flags, motos the same. There’s nothing to beat a win at footie to brighten the faces of young men with no work and little prospect of any.

 

Paris bulletin 6 2013


To go to a conference or a concert in Louvre of an evening is to add something special to the event itself: coming out afterwards into the empty, half-dark space beneath the glass and metal pyramid, the night sky in patches above your head. Only you and a trickle of concert-goers, drifting like leaves across the polished floor. So you go, sedately up the escalator, past the gardiens, the guard dogs lying at their feet, and out onto the concourse where the water spills endlessly from flat surfaces back underground.
Both evenings I did that since I came back a week ago, a trumpet was echoing round the archway that takes you to the rue de Rivoli, a solitary busker making the stones ring out.  Not the ‘Paris by night’ of the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergères, something more elusive and dreamlike altogether.
The occasion for these evening sorties was the festival des Ecrivains du Monde, an event hosted by the University of Columbia and taking place in a number of venues throughout the city, including la maison de la Poésie, the Théâtre des Abbesses, the BNF and the garden of the musée Jacquemart-André. The idea of spreading things around the city was a good one although it did limit how many sessions you could get to in the space of an afternoon. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing – eating more simply and savouring one’s food by chewing slowly makes for a healthier digestion.
You could really have a cultural crise de foie any week in Paris, so rich is the table laid before you, and so inviting. As fast as one festival passes by the next one is upon us. Now it’s the Festival d’Automne which goes right through to the end of December, is an annual event and encompasses all the arts, particularly what’s new and ground-breaking wherever it was conceived.
Here’s an apercu of what’s on offer – just three out of over forty of the performances/installations in the first half of the autumn:
Hope Hippo at the musée national de l’Histoire Naturelle, from 13 September – 11 November. One for the children as well as the grown-ups, the hippo is the main image on the Festival d’Automne official website (www.festival-automne.com).
Sphincterography – missed this one unfortunately, (finished this weekend). Steve Cohen, a South African artist of Lithuanian origin, looking at issues of ‘displacement’ – topical enough for the tumultuous times we live in. There are other South African offerings in the pipeline.
Eternity Dress: Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton at the cole des Beaux Arts on rue Bonaparte, from 20 – 24 November, (Saillard is the director of the Palais Galliéra). Here is what the blurb says about this event , en un anglais qui ne reproduit en rien l’élégance de son sujet:
“Opposing the profusion of fashion collections, Eternity Dress follows the design of one dress – made on Tilda Swinton’s body –, from the measuring up to the creation of the pattern, from the cut to the sewing together. Inspired by a 1950s method found in the museum’s collections, the dress resonates with the history of fashion and initiates an archeology (sic) of the craft.”
And before I draw a line on all these richesses, I must mention one of the main events of the autumn which has nothing to do with the Festival itself but everything to do with Paris’s history: the reopening of the musée Galliéra which has been shut for refurbishment for over a year. Saillard has chosen to mark the reopening with an exhibition of seventy of the creations of the couturier Azzedine Alaïa, there and in the salle Matisse du Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Whether you’re a fashionista or not, this is one to put in the diary.
                                                      
               
                                                      
                                                          
It’s worth mentioning another key event coming up in the not too distant future: the élections municipales in March 2014, which will also include the election of a new mayor for Paris, since Bertrand Delanoë won’t be standing for a third term. For the first time the position of mayor will be contested by two women:  Anne Hidalgo, age 54, Delanoë’s depute on the Left, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, age 40, who has something of a reputation as a ‘blue ecologist, on the Right. Hidalgo of Spanish descent, Kosciusko-Morizet of Polish.
One of the key challenges facing whichever of these two women gets in will be the question of Paris’s growing population of homeless people. It is estimated that the number of homeless in France has almost doubled in the last decade – and shows no sign of dropping any time soon. We need some of the creative people I mentioned earlier to bring the question to the forefront of everyone’s minds. Cultural evenings at the Louvre, haute couture and hippos are all very well if you’ve got a home to go back to, and food in the cupboard.