With the foresight that led their revolutionary forefathers and mothers to rename October “fog month”, the French state is going about the serious business of preparing for next year’s global festival of running, jumping, gurning and weeping, which is to be held in La Ville-Lumières for the first time in a century.
First off: eliminate the homelessness problem, which is regarded as a festering sore on the derrière of belle Paris. (According to Voltaire, Cardinal Richelieu’s nickname was cul pourri: “rotten bottom”.) Each and every civilisation is built on a steaming heap of its own cloaca – but that being noted, there is something particularly deranging about seeing, as I have, in the citron pressé-light of a perfectly urbane morning, a man sprawled across the pavement, outside the Franprix convenience store near the gilded facade of St Francis Xavier, his filthy trousers and underpants pulled down about his shitty loins, and more excreta liberally spread about the place and his person.
You don’t have to know that Francis Xavier was the revered co-founder of the Jesuit order, but it helps. A Spanish aristo who was particularly revered for bigging up the evangel to the heathen, the French connection is the vow of poverty and chastity, which he took almost 500 years before Franprix was founded, although not far from where this particular branch now stands.
Which is also not far from the Gare du Nord – a terminus that’s beginning to look slightly unreal, shorn as it is of its usual ex officio staff: beggars, junkies, clochards, and hustlers of all stripes. Where have they disappeared to? Out beyond the Périphérique, of course; either, if on the run, gone to ground in one of the numerous bidonvilles strung out around the metropolis; or, if detained, banged up in one of the centres used to process migrants.
There’s a certain niceness to this, granted: it’s all about the right sort of people doing the right sort of jumping – and certainly not having to hop or skip over the supine and immiserated en route to this or that expensive new stadium, but there’s a polyglot feel to this penal policy that’s surely in keeping with the Olympic spirit.
Apropos: not only spirits, but liquors and beers are also proving a problem for traditionally lax Parisians to buy. Booze sales will, of course, be restricted in and around the Olympic venues, but at least three Paris arrondissements have, um, jumped the gun, by banning off-sales after 5pm for some – but not all – retailers in some – but not all – quartiers.
One such is our neighbourhood; the aforementioned Franprix is our corner shop. Which found out, when the law was enforced, that not only would it henceforth have its hours of off-sales curtailed, but its manager had never had a licence to sell alcohol in the first place – licenses being granted to individuals, not premises.
Whether this applies to the managers of all of the convenience chain’s 624 outlets, only the half of those that are on the Ile de France, or just this one in the 10th arrondissement, I’ve no idea. Although since my informant is the disgruntled proprietor of a hipster organic grocery store that’s going to have to permanently shut as a result of the self-same dereliction, a degree of wishful thinking may be bound up in all this.
Anyway, while the big rentrée, or return from playing M and Mme Hulot at the seaside was underway, the Franprix remained banged up in the cell of its own shuttered premises. The penalty was nine days’ closure, but while the hipsters are going to the whitewashed wall, Franprix clearly isn’t going anywhere. It all seems a far cry from the French drinking culture once so praised and emulated on this side of the Channel; the hope being that the British would stop behaving around booze like bout-drinker berserker Nords, and start gently tippling 24/7 like the civilised French.
Which is all well and good, and I for one don’t regret the benighted and parched years before the Blair government’s substantial liberalisation of the licensing laws. Nevertheless, whatever we may choose to believe about culture, the correlation between the availability of alcohol and its abuse remains fairly clear. And abuse there most certainly is, was and always will be – damn it all, didn’t the fountains of Versailles flow with wine? A French doctor friend once put it to me this way: “We don’t have any alcoholics here – we just have to detox every adult male and female who comes into the hospital…”
