week one Mandela in the metro

First impressions...

Paris is a shabby place, it has to be admitted. But lovely still because the buildings are old and beautiful and the place is always buzzing, always awake, even at 3am. There is no silent time. Streets are always busy with cars and people. London is different, more modern with swanky new buildings everywhere and areas that have been renovated - Brick Lane, the dockland areas, the London Bridge area and so on. Yet Paris seems hardly to have changed in the last 30 years. Which is nice, in a way, as that is part of its charm. 

Very little has changed since I last lived here for three months in the summer of 1985, when I worked in Burger King on the Champs-Elysées and camped in the Bois de Boulogne to save money. The Rue Mouffetard looks identical and still has cheap restaurants. You can get a decent four-course meal for 12 euros. A pichet of wine extra. It is still packed with studenty, backpacking types, and cheap trinkets and souvenirs. Every other street in Paris is cobbled stone. The grands boulevards with their beautiful old style apartments with wooden shutters, wrought iron balconies and old fashioned shiny mahogany elevators, the parks where you can't sit on the grass, the bouquinistes selling their wares (fewer books, more trashy souvenirs) out of green wooden boxes along the Seine, the Place Charles de Gaulle - relatively easy to cycle around despite the nightmare of traffic - all seem the same. The familiar boulangeries, bouchers, quincailleries, tabacs, cafés - what makes France French - are still thankfully thriving, as they aren't back home.

But... Prisunic has changed its name to Monoprix! The Champs-Elysées is now up-market, full of ostentatious designer shops, packed with smart cars, smart people laden with designer bags, and arrogant chauffeurs blocking pedestrian crossings. Everything is of course in euros although every receipt still, 13 years on, gives you the equivalent in francs. And there seem to be far more people living rough than I remember and far more than in London. I wonder why this is the case.

It is shocking. Under some of the arches over the Seine there are mini-villages - huge groups of sans-abris with cardboard shelters, not much bigger than coffins, surrounded by their meager belongings, mostly warm clothes and bedding, plastic coverings etc. They build fires to keep warm, I've even heard a generator running in two different places.

Near where I'm now staying, Porte de la Chappelle, on the periferique, I came across another mini cardboard village - at least 100 people, each with a demarcated area, made with any materials they'd been able to find - wood, cardboard, plastic. Their little community lined either a disused railway line or one which had yet to open. Again, small fires on the tracks and the sound of a generator. Everywhere you go people are sleeping rough - many in the middle of the pavement, often over a warm grill. One big lady, surrounded by all her possessions near the smart Galléries Lafayette, off the Boulevard Haussmann, lay in her bed, sheltered from the rain by a large umbrella, reading a book. Another gentleman always sleeps in the same place near Parc Montsouris, surrounded by his numerous plastic bags, under a big van. He would read Le Monde, do the crossword, chat to passers-by - sounding well-educated, well-spoken. What happened, I wonder? Local residents are angry, however. They don't want riff-raff on their doorsteps. Several impasses (dead-end streets lined with attractive houses) have recently erected digicode-controlled electronic gates to keep them out.

In London, are there more hostels where people can get a bed? Is that why you don't see so many people sleeping rough - at least not as many as I remember from my student days, when I would cycle from the city centre back to college in New Cross or home to Forest Hill, Lewisham, or Brockley, when I sometimes helped with soup kitchens. In Paris you see several people sleeping rough every day, everywhere you go.  

I've so far stayed in four different flats, four different parts of the city, cycling to and from work so I have a good idea! First the 6th arrondissement, round the corner from Les Deux Magots (where Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and others used to hang out), which is far smarter than I remember - apparently now one of the most expensive areas in the city. Very Parisian. Lovely buildings, old narrow streets leading down the river, trendy cafes. Very chic. Good for window shopping - beautiful things costing a fortune.  Then I stayed near the river, across from Boulogne Billancourt in Issy-les Moulineaux, in a sweet little flat belonging to a friend (whose parents have a Domain in Provence) of a friend (from San Francisco). Next stop was Parc Montsouris in the 14th. Now I'm in the 18th - the far side of Montmartre, away from the sightseers, near the huge marché des puces de Saint-Ouen, with friendly people, good music in the bars, tempting food shops and restaurants run by Moroccans and Algerians and others hailing perhaps from France’s ‘départements et territoires d'outre-mer’, or DOM-TOM in everyday parlance.

I've already happened upon two street demonstrations - one against bull fighting in France and the other against austerity measures - out of solidarity with Spain and Greece. 'A bas L'austérité'. Streets cordonned off, police everywhere - controlling the protesters,  redirecting traffic, at least 20 police vans full of officers. Françoise, a colleague, reckons France has to cut its debt but that any president who does so will lose power. But that there's more chance of it succeeding coming from a socialist than from the UMP (Sarkozy's Union for  Popular Movement – yes Sarkozy has gone, but as I write, they still haven't settled on a new leader after weeks of political posturing and wrangling, including a vote) - because there would be, in her opinion, a  revolution. Has François Hollande got the guts?