Mellow yellow: in which we leave the city for a garden
One of the most exciting things to happen this week is that the toilet has finally been fixed in the flat. Over are the days of pushing fingers into the cistern water to force a flush. The new button is shiny silver – at odds with the peeling stickers, plastic bag of sleeping pills hanging from the window handle, and the dusty, broken medicine cabinet.
Elsewhere on the list of the week’s excitements: the heat has finally arrived in Paris. I burnt my feet sitting by the Seine in the early evening, and now it’s dark but balmy, the shutters all bust open on the windows, television noise and voices hanging in the airless inner courtyard.
The sun put in a brief appearance last weekend before being drenched out in the early week. I caught a train from Saint Lazare with my mother on Friday evening to the little town of Vernon somewhere out to the west of Paris, and we arrived with her wheely bag into quite empty streets. Our hotel room was entirely fitted in lemon yellow, the excessively large curtains, the sheets, the chairs, all the same – the pale pastel of cheap summer t-shirts. We ate dinner in the restaurant downstairs which was filled with old Americans and Englishmen, mangling the menu with their accents, their doughy skin glowing in ambient lighting. We drank Kir Royales and were the last left sitting by a long way – eventually we noticed the weary face of the hotelier and left. The next morning we walked to Giverny along the banks of the Seine, through fields that must burst with poppies at some point of the year. We saw no one on the way apart from a family of happy cyclists, but once we reached the village the tourists began to conglomerate until we arrived at the critical mass accumulated outside Monet’s house. His gardens are large and sloped, and at the moment are filled with irises, purple, white, and a deep wine, with thick fleshy petals beside frothy bunches of orange stock and the hard pink buds of peonies. We saw his yellow dining room, which outdid our hotel room by miles; his walls, cupboards, sideboards, lampshades, and chairs have all been painted sherbet yellow, trimmed in buttercream. The rest of the house is mostly blue, displaying the same mania for painting the furniture like the walls, so that the grandfather clock and wardrobe match. As you shuffle through each door with the hoards of people, you have the strange impression of being in a doll’s house, each room kept carefully clean and over-bright, as though the curators could take the lid off to see the whole thing at a distance, and make sure nobody is taking photos. The lily pond was a relief. No lilies out on the pads yet, but the bushes and trees round the edges lush and dense, with birds nests and benches in the shade. I just wanted to get rid of everybody else, because the place would have been paradise empty.
In the shop I bought postcards of Monet instead of his garden, because the guy was a dude; in almost every sepia image he’s wearing shades, or smoking a cigarette the size of a spliff, hands stuffed into suit pockets and paunch thrust out in a pre-echo of gangster photo shoots, just chilling beside his plants.
We ate overpriced salad for lunch as the clouds came in, and wrote a postcard to my 85 year-old Nan who has just got herself a new boyfriend after around thirty years of widowhood spent country-dancing, drinking tea on Prince’s Street, and doing the crossword with Betty on Saturday mornings. She has been posing the same way in photographs her entire life – heels together and hands clasped - and writes down the day’s principle events in little flowery agendas that, placed end to end, would probably wrap twice around Monet’s gardens and increase the crop by tenfold. My mother is the sort of person who has never owned a flowery agenda in her life. But they both love Monet’s water lilies; testament to the transcendent power of art.
We ate ice cream and caught the bus back to Vernon, then the train to Paris. On Monday night I went to the Opera, and channelled the spirit of Nan by dancing into the early hours.
I am not a bad person
I am no longer the only intern in my department; at the beginning of May, Beth joined our gang on the second floor. I sort of thought this might make me the head intern, and for the first few days I showed her important things like how to use the photocopiers, where to pick up the post and which counters serve the best food in the canteen, but she has quickly mastered the basics and outstripped me in the intern stakes. When I roll up at the office a little late, she has already been there for half an hour, diligently working; while I trawl painstakingly through proofs looking for misplaced commas, she whizzes through them and finds the most subtle and terrible errors. But while dreams of being Intern Number 1 are slowly fading, my descent is perked up by how nice she is, and our little English chats across the open space. Recently we have been discussing religion.
Last Monday I stirred myself from my lunchtime stupor to argue with a table of interns about gay marriage and adoption (both still illegal in France). I mustered up as much of my GCSE arguing vocabulary as I could, and sprinkled it with some choice slang picked up in Paris, and overall felt it had gone quite well, except that in the process I discovered that my fellow interns were mostly opposed to all the things I was in favour of, and my illusions of being among progressive young liberal publishers were brutally squashed. For unknown and perverse reasons, I moved the conversation on to immigration, and whether it would really be so awful for French culture if local swimming pools in predominantly Muslim areas had different times for men and women, or if schools served Halal meat (this is the horrifying future Sarkozy laid out in one of his FN-pandering comments during the presidential debate). An intern who had remained silent up to that point joined in, and I found myself confronted with an entire table of riled French Catholics. I decided to shut up, finish my chips, and not to talk politics again. Later that day, on talking over the debate, I discovered that Beth is also Christian, though of the Anglican kind. Since then I have been finding out more about her faith and how it works, and things like prayer, marriage, and everyday life. On Wednesday, the issue of hell came up. Beth believes in hell, and that all non-Christians are going there. Not the fire-and-brimstone kind of hell, but still, hell. I am going to hell.
It’s a bit strange when you find out that the smiling blond woman who sits behind you everyday thinks that you are bound for eternal damnation. She was very nice about it, but it’s the sort of thing that unsettles you. Makes you reassess your life a bit. “I’m not a bad person!” I wanted to say, which is exactly what Patrick said to me on Tuesday, and another friend last week. It’s not a new thing, I’ve heard it before. It seems that a lot of people want the opportunity to say this to someone, and to receive in exchange an affirmation of their essential goodness, however flawed. At the moment, my life in Paris is unravelling just a little; the emails I haven’t replied to, the books I haven’t read, the exhibitions I haven’t seen and the exercise I’m not doing are piling up behind me, and when I wake up at 2 in the afternoon yet again, or find myself scrolling through Feminist Ryan Gosling instead of writing that article, my opinion of my own moral worth takes another dip. It’s not so much hell that worries me, as the limbo that looms at the end of June, the in-between space of next year when all the character flaws and moral failings I am picking up now will somehow determine the rest of my life.
But I am in Paris to be in Paris, not to spend my evenings on Jstor. Last Sunday I spent three hours rollerblading through the north-eastern streets with hundreds of other people, squinting in the sun as we sped from Bastille to Nation to Republique to Gare du Nord to Parc de la Villette to La Chapelle to the Seine. I didn’t think about potential masters, Proust, or late nineteenth century French literature’s possible influence on Joyce. I thought mostly about the sun in my eyes and how much pain my thighs were in, and whether I could steal more of Roxanne’s water. Everything was very beautiful, especially the peeling white shutters on the apartment buildings; Sacre Coeur glimpsed through the slip-gaps between houses; the old Arab men sitting in a row by the metro, with leathered faces, folded arms and tea; the tousled couple leaning out of their balcony by the Gare du Nord, smoking; the trees lining the boulevard up to the park; and the bouquinistes painted yellow offering cellophane-wrapped old paperbacks of Jean Cocteau and Zazie dans le metro. These were all the quartiers I know, the ones I have spent the past seven months walking, cycling, and window shopping my way through; Sunday on rollerblades I watched my city played out like a movie montage, saturated, sound-tracked, 24 frames a second.
Today I read Proust in a café for an hour, because I am not a bad person, really.
Why I am tired
On Tuesday I watched the sun rise pink over the canal St Martin, Stalingrad white at our backs, the buildings around us bleaching out of the night. We were five, sobering in the sunlight, leaning out over the dirty water and discussing the merits of jumping in. The boats we’d climbed on earlier slowly gained bulk and dirt, and early risers jogged past. We whooped encouragement. Then, when the pink was gone, and the buildings about as grey as the sky, and the metro by now very much up and running, we decided it was time to leave. Luckily for those going to bed at eight in the morning, Tuesday was a bank holiday.
I began Monday night by saying that I was not going to drink. This is how Monday nights often begin for me, because weekends can be long, generally end in hangovers, and last weekend was longer than most. On Sunday night my Eurostar arrived at midnight in the Gare du Nord and I caught the line 5 with Julia towards Bastille. I would, I thought, just stick my head above ground to see what the celebrations were like, and then I’d still be able to get the last train back to Nation. We emerged to something like a riot – people had climbed onto bus stops, up lampposts and on top of newspaper stands, they dripped from balconies and leant from windows, and below them the pavement and road were filled with a shifting, yelling mob studded with the green glow of cameras and phones and the red glow of cigarettes. Around the column at the centre of the square, people had surged upwards, found ledges, and waved flags like drowning drunkards. Francois Hollande had won the elections, and people were celebrating. Julia and I were a bit laden with bags, but we pressed into the crowd anyway, breathing in the smoke and fighting to hold our course amid the jostling, shifting mass. Then through the heads I saw Patrick’s face. Patrick is a teetotaller Irishman who once suggested I turn to foot fetishists as the answer to all my monetary problems. He is one of the kindest people in Paris, and at Bastille he was surrounded by the other people I often see on Monday or Saturday nights; Kate the published poet, Lizzie the redhead, Alberto whose obscenities are forgiven because of his wonderful hats, Sid of the witty flashcards, bearded and bespectacled English Chris, and Lucy who does a truly incredible version of ‘I Will Survive’ that involves a scarf, Italian accent and no small amount of poise. I had, by this point, already missed the last metro home, and so I joined the international crowd. A man approached us, hands outstretched, a huge pile of skunk filling his cupped palms: “Pour Hollande!” he cried, but we declined. At a bar round the corner, we acquired an Afghani man named John, and Margot who appeared in jean jacket and woolly hat like she had just finished corrupting someone’s daughter and trashing his car. I was high on sleeplessness, and shaking. I wore a rose of socialism in my hair, and Patrick and Sid walked me almost all the way home, Patrick carrying my bag (which was particularly heavy because of the Union Jack striped bottle of Pimms in it). Bed at 3 and work in the morning.
Go back a day and I am sitting on the floor of James’ room in Oxford, still wearing my tuxedo but sans heels, talking to a supine Alex about the meaning of modern love at 6am. The ball had ended in bloodied toes and bruised knees, and somehow in all the confusion I’d missed the survivors’ photo but managed to make it back to the finalists’ accommodation where Alex and I take over James’ room like kids whose parents are away – Alex has a nest of pillows and a sleeping bag on the floor. He is still wearing a bright blue bow tie, talks with his hands, and talks too much. So do I. 4:30am the night before I was doing the same thing, but everyone was far more upright, and we were drinking tea and discussing French politics, celebrity, and the similarities between mathematics and language. James and I left Sam to work in the early hours, and he was already up when we blearily awoke the next morning.
On Tuesday evening, with all these mornings backed up behind me, I went to the cinema and tried not to fall asleep. Afterwards, we walked from the Hotel de Ville to St Germain, and paused on the bridge across the Seine. The sun was setting and the river was orange – the buildings along the banks were chiaroscuro facades, boats lent a pale glow to the underside of bridges. The whole city seemed condensed, and that’s what is so wonderful about Paris compared to other cities where the buildings are so tall and so dense that you can never find a horizon, pause there, and say, “this is it, this is where I am”.
“It’s not so beautiful, you know. Of course, it is beautiful…But it’s the life of Paris; that’s the thing. Ah, there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement…”
…
Little Chandler looked at his friend enviously.
“Everything in Paris is gay,” said Ignatius Gallaher. “They believe in enjoying life – and don’t you think they’re right? If you want to enjoy yourself properly you must go to Paris. And, mind you, they’ve a great feeling for the Irish. When they heard I was Irish, they were ready to eat me, man.” Little Chandler took four or five sips from his glass.
“Tell me,” he said, “is it true that Paris is so…immoral as they say?”
Ignatius Gallaher made a Catholic gesture with his right arm.
“Every place is immoral,” he said.
- James Joyce, The Dubliners 1914
Le changement, c’est la semaine prochaine
Today I went to Francois Hollande’s rally at the Palais Omnisport at Bercy. Late last week I had passed the stadium twice, once before a rock metal concert and then just before a wrestling match. Goth-eyed kids and hulking men with ornate belt buckles milled around the metro entrance and proceeded slowly up the stairs towards the entrance. Space enough to walk, calm enough to conduct a conversation without yelling. Today the smell of frying onions hit me before I had even reached the stairs – I emerged from the metro to find the square packed with people, stalls dotted everywhere selling hotdogs, kebabs, and canned drinks. The sky was crowded out with frantically waving flags, and there was a group of young business people selling hard hats with nodding Francois Hollande dolls stuck to each side. We pressed ourselves into the crowd and waiting patiently as we were squeezed through the barriers. Inside, the stadium was filled to the ceiling, heaving. For two hours we listened as different bands played music, covering indie, reggae, country, pop(ish), and as the presenters pointed out all the famous actors and politicians in the audience, from Eva Joly to Jane Birkin. Finally, Francois arrived, his body guards pushing a way through the crowd in the pit until he reached the stage and walked down the catwalk, arms in the air like a rock star. The crowd literally went wild – everyone in the stands stood, balloons were thrown down, people stamped their feet, screamed, started chanting (Fran-cois Pre-si-dent, Fran-cois Pre-si-dent) and the flags became blurs. Bob Dylan played the venue back in October and I missed it, but I somehow can’t imagine that he received a better welcome onstage than this paunchy politician. Apparently there were 22 000 of us in the audience, and the presidential candidate talked to us like we were his neighbours – making little jokes and leaning casually on the podium. He spoke much better than I expected, covering, bullet-point style, all the issues that are in the air at the moment in France, from retirement age to youth unemployment, women’s equality, abortion, education, and the hot new topic of extending the vote to residential foreigners. But though the issues were serious, I couldn’t shake the feeling of spectacle, the performance of the whole thing: whenever Sarkozy was mentioned, the crowd booed like they were at a pantomime. The campaign video that preceded Hollande’s arrival added another element to the proceedings; the voice-over narrating a rousing speech, a guy getting ‘C’est maintenant’ shaved into the back of his head, a young guy rushing into a room full of louche teenagers and saying ‘C’est pas maintenant!… Non, je deconne, c’est maintenant’. It was like a trailer for a rather surreal film. Another of Hollande’s campaign videos shows him giving a rally in the banlieues, filled with shots of him fist pumping, the local residents going wild, close ups of young and old of every race and gender, the whole thing backed by the carefully chosen song ‘Niggers in Paris’. Really Francois?
A huge French flag of parachute material was given to the people in the pit to pass along over their heads so that it snaked in one long ribbon across the crowd; perfect for some aerial shots. On the subject of flags: I saw Francois Hollande flags, French flags, Socialist party flags, but also peace flags, gay flags, Irish flags, British flags, all waving to the same rhythm. A strange mix of nationalities and points of view, all putting their voices together for one person. The abundance of European Union flags was also striking to the British eye; they were everywhere, and joined the French flag onstage. The idea of being part of Europe is central almost to the idea of the French nation now, and there is very little of the grumbling anti-EU rhetoric you find in British politics.
Because I hadn’t been prepared for the length of his warm-up act, I had to leave before Francois was finished, and emerged into the daylight to find the square fuller than before, the outdoor audience watching the spectacle on a big screen, the people on the terrace of the café sipping coffee with eyes searching for a space between the heads to watch the proceedings. I left them all to it and went to look at a letterpress printing workshop instead.
We’ve all heard of April showers, but this is really taking the piss. It has not stopped raining in Paris since the beginning of April, and this third week of rain has soaked the pavements and the spirits of even the most optimistic Parisians. People talk two things: elections and rain. And most often, it’s rain. We clock in our weather obsessions hourly at the office. BBC weather, meteo Paris and whatever comes up first on google are now my most visited sites and I hold on to them like gurus – hoping the screen will tell me what the windows won’t. At this point I just want the sun to come out so the conversations can change. Whoever invented the cliché that the Engligh care most about the weather, didn’t live in Paris.
