Paris is weird. Perhaps not the first words you’d see in a travel guide about the city of love.
Although it’s the third most visited city in the world, most people experience Paris in three days—taking in the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc du Triomphe, a croque-madame and some snails.
Living here, you soon see what’s going on beneath the surface (and no, it’s not that scene in Tarantino’s Killing Zoe where they all take heroin under the catacombs.) This is a city whose raison d’être is historicism and whose environment is a firm resistance to moving forwards. Indeed, it would rather move backwards.
Paris is a bit like those old French people who kept francs under their beds for years after the currency switched to euros, just in case the government brought back the old currency—which had, by the way, existed since 1360—and shredded all the euro notes and melted down the coins. In 2012 the Banque de France set a date by which anybody still hoarding Francs had to bring them in to change them. Ten years since they had ceased being legal tender, the bank estimated that 50 million francs were still in circulation (around $TT4.3bn.)
The French resistance to modernity is to be admired: the traditional cooking, baking, winemaking, striking, taking the full month of August off and allegedly bathing once a week.
But in Paris the resistance is less attitudinal and more structural. Here we have a city with a young population, but a subway system that feels like it’s descending into the 1920s; a communications network which lacks fundamental things like fibre optics; and bureaucracy that requires paperwork—where most countries have moved online.
All very charming, but does it make for comfortable living? Non, monsieur. Where places like Britain and Trinidad try to make life easier, the French are keeping it hard.
Republic Bank FedEx’d me a bank card from Chaguanas to Paris within three days. Our French bank took ten days to do the same.
But some old-fashioned things are attitudinal too, and they will never change. Parisians smoke like chimneys, for example. They smoke in cars, outside cafes, over babies’ pushchairs and whilst pumping petrol… It’s simply a way of life.
“France is 50 years behind England,” Rashid my neighbour told me in the courtyard of our building, “I have to go outside of my apartment to get a signal on my phone.”
“When will the building get fibre optics?” I asked, despairingly.
“Oh maybe in one year,” he chuckled.
“Britain began rolled out fibre optics in 1998!” I held back the urge to cry out, and ran inside out of the rain.
When I was 15 I read George Orwell’s Down And Out In Paris And London. It was a strange time in my life: a rebellious phase of epic proportions. I had taken mind-expanding drugs and embraced anarchism, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and the Beatles.
I had stopped going to my grammar school, which my mother had pushed so hard for me to get into, and had given up the piano and trumpet lessons and creative writing that had won me competitions, grades and positions in youth orchestras.
I was completely off the rails, wore clothes to shock (women’s fur coats, jeans covered in marker-pen graffiti, erratically bleached hair, spectacle frames with no lenses in them) and I was, loosely put, a stoner.
One thing I hadn’t given up on was books. I read Down And Out in one weekend, staying up late at night and waking early the next morning to finish it. The dirt, despair, hopelessness and the hollowed out existence of poverty spoke to me. My mother gave me no money anymore, obviously, so I took poorly paid boring jobs with long hours to buy things like cigarettes. Orwell’s imagery of sauna-hot restaurant kitchens and freezing cobbled streets are perhaps the rawest portrayal of human existence I have ever read.
Now I have come to live in this city—a place I’ve visited since the age of five when my auntie was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge—it feels like a daydream.
Degas (my favourite artist) is buried in the Cimetiere Montmartre nearby. Last week I found his final resting place: a family tomb with the words “FAMILLE de GAS,” a small artistic rendition of the artist’s face, and the years “1834—1917” written on it.
The next day, I received a request from an artist of the modern British kind, my friend and neighbour in Cascade, Al Braithwaite, now returned to London.
“Grab me a handful of street soil/dust from 10 Rue Nicolas Appert if you’re passing the 11th Arrondissement in the next couple of weeks,” he emailed.
Rue Nicolas Appert turned out to be the street of the Charlie Hebdo building: scene of the killings in January. Braithwaite intends to use it in an artwork and I’m excited to facilitate its creation and at the same time scared of being shot. Paris has been visibly patrolled by soldiers carrying enormous assault rifles since the attacks.
Next week I’ll tell you about the cosmopolitanism of the city and how—contrary to popular belief—the Parisians are nice people: more open and engaging than Londoners, and less neurotic than New Yorkers.
But for now I’ll leave you with the French word for fart, picked up from the eight-year-old girl my girlfriend is babysitting. It’s “un pet”. As in “je pète,” “tu pètes,” “nous pétons,” “vous pétez.”
Easy to remember, particularly when the child keeps petting like a trooper.