Louis XIV, dear friend and reigning Monarch of the 17th Arrondissement, recently visited me in London for a wonderful weekend of food, fun and frolic. He likes to visit London, eat all my Number 5 Waitrose Mature Cheddar and then return home to take advantage of the comparatively free French healthcare and have his arteries unclogged. When he took a short reprieve from cheddar munching during our dinner at the recently opened Mondrian Hotel at Sea Containers, Louis said something that has since been etched on my conscience.
‘Paris is like a museum. It is beautiful, but it hasn’t changed for 100 years’
As a former resident and a lifelong obsessive of the City of Lights, this phrase struck me as perhaps the most pertinent words of truth I’ve heard emanate from Louis’s non-cheddar filled mouth. He, French but not Parisian, is a little less in love with Paris these days. Museums, walls lined with objéts d’art are places one visits for a few hours, maybe even a day, but they aren’t places where one resides. All artifice, all dust cloths and glass display cases, one can’t actually live one’s life with vigour and energy and passion and errant limbs and life-force...one doesn’t live in a museum.
Since I left Paris in March of this year, I’ve been back just three times; a work trip for less than 72 hours and twice more for pleasure, on each occasion having been invited to a friend’s party. In total, I’ve spent 6 nights in a city I called home for well over 6 years. It should actually have been seven nights, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t because ancient things in museums are worth a lot of money and people steal them. Ancient things like the copper in the cables over the train lines between Calais and Paris.
Have you ever spent 6 hours in a train that only moved for 2? Have you ever wondered how much piss and shizzle can be poured into a train toilet before it starts to bubble and froth and stench and…well anyway, the answer is about two hours worth. Have you ever wondered how long a French person will sit in a closed space without the right to light up a cigarette? Less time than it takes to block a toilet. #bridgetalmostbarfed
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been stranded on a Eurostar because an opportunistic thief had cut the cables over Lille. The little buggers pinch the copper out of electrically charged train lines. Evidently the copper is even more valuable than, I don’t know, a beating heart?
As I mentioned, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. The copper gets pinched all the time, the lines aren’t fenced in, lying out in the Normand sun, poaching with the sunflowers, the canola and the bones of a billion dead boys. On this particular occasion, 8 trains were affected and we’re all getting free return tickets. That is 8 angry crowds of 750 people and at an average of £150 per ticket, Eurostar will be shelling out a million pounds; money that will be reimbursed by the SNCF who are responsible for maintaining the lines.
How much do you think it would cost to build fences to prevent people cutting out the copper? Call me crazy, but if French politicians spent as much time maintaining infrastructure as they do maintaining wives, mistresses and high-class sex-workers, the French might want to stay in France? Or maybe they don’t like razor wire fences drawing harsh lines across the bellevues of Normandy?
After a few choice remarks for the unfortunate folk who work for Eurostar and a decent morning’s sleep, it was time to reacquaint myself with the boulevards, the baguettes and the Beaujolais. #bridgetbythebrasserie
Paris, the only city in Europe that remained intact after the Second World War eviscerated the others, is really very, very beautiful. If you’ve seen a movie featuring Paris, you’ll be familiar with the twinkling lights along the Champs Elysees*, the glass domed, tricolore spiked roof of the Grand Palais, the long boats floating up and down the Seine and my personal favourite, the white domes of Sacré Coeur up on the hill. Apart from a handful of notable exceptions^, the entire place was built a century ago. All the buildings are the same design, built from the same stone and only a few are over 6 stories. Wrap around balconies are reserved for the 1st and 5th floors.
The symmetry, the uniformity and the muted colour palette make for a beautiful canvas upon which to daub the long brown hair and oversized scarves of the parisiennes… and the black smog of a trillion scooters. The canvas, much like the unsmiling face of Mona at the Louvre, is static. In France, still, static, inert, unchanging, classic...they are all euphemisms for beautiful.
Think of the most famous French designers and you’ll get my point.
Gaultier has been churning out a version of the mariniére for three decades. Don’t believe me? Go check out the exhibition in Melbourne where an entire room is dedicated to blue and white striped remixes of the same original T-shirt. A T-shirt that the French Navy has been wearing since the little man led them into battle against Wellington. (Did you know, the original had 27 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories…Wellington would just need one gigantic stripe, more is not always more Nappy man!)
Coco Chanel wore a black dress every day for about 50 years and we’ve been wearing them ever since. Black dresses, bouclé suits, camellias and velvet-strung-pearls have been the staples of Chanel since the thirties. White collared, pony-tailed and gloved, the house of Coco’s current chief, Herr Lagerfeld, has been wearing a version of the same Dandy suit for almost as long.
LV monogrammed cases, Hermés retina-searing tangerine totes and Moncler’s vile v-covered valises are all stuck in a time when people paid other people to carry their luggage. A time when they were placed in dedicated wooden luggage racks, not hurled into the undercarriage of an aircraft. They are emblems of an era that, like La Belle Epoque, has gone the way of the Dodo. Unless one of the Grand Maisons is making a 4-wheel drive roll-on case, that ways less than a tube of toothpaste, most people aren’t interested.
And thus begins the lament of the today’s Frenchman.
The hustle and bustle of modern times is leading to the gradual extinction of artisanal trades and entrepreneurs. In a few years there will be no one to hand-cobble shoes, no one to whittle your clothespins and no one to French your lamb shanks; it will all have been outsourced to Slovakia just like Renault, Citroen and Peugeot. #quellehorreur
People the world over visit Paris for a few days to gape and gawp at her inert beauty. They meander through the corridors of castles and galleries and avenues in awe. But the tourists don’t live there, they take their photos and then they all go home…just as I did today.
I’m going home to London where St Paul’s Dome and The Tower’s Turrets compete for skyline supremacy with The Gherkin and The Cheese-Grater. I’m going home to London where I have a choice between hand sliced cheese at the market or the convenience of home-delivered whatever I feel like. I’m going home to London where taxi drivers invented their own app, twice, to compete with the onslaught of Über. I’m going home to a city that is moving forward; where there’s enough space for me to move around without breaking the porcelain. A city where we all looked at the Poppies, we remembered why they were there, but then they were taken away to make space for new memories.
London isn’t perfect, far from it. London is overcrowded and over-polluted and overstuffed with crappy clothes from Swedish chain stores. But it is moving. Like ballet, and ballroom and running dogs and babies learning to walk; moving is my kind of beautiful.
*Did you know that means Elysian Fields…as in, heaven for ancient Romans? Well now you do.
^Each built by a recent president, you can identify the phallic column of Valery Giscard-D’Estaing’s Tour Montparnasse, George Pompidou’s ridiculous Gallery, Mitterrand’s Pyramid at the Louvre and Chirac’s giant pot-plant, the Quai Branly Museum
Brilliant writing, and so very true!
Posted by: Craig Thomas | 11/23/2014 at 08:29 PM
........to make space for new memories.
Nice turn of phrase.
Not exactly starving in a garret M but you're till turning out great works of art using words to paint the pictures.
Posted by: Tony Bullant | 11/24/2014 at 05:35 PM