For my latest column in The Connexion, a monthly newspaper for English speakers in France, it was agreed I should write about the competing virtues of London and Paris. I had no doubt which city I preferred but found it a tall order to make out a conclusive argument based on factual comparison alone. It must be an affair of the heart. Here, more or less, is the column ...
The modern tale of two cities has fierce rivalry, mutual admiration, contradictory statistics and a pair of plausible winners.
Paris versus London. Think back to the brouhaha over London being chosen to stage the 2012 Olympics. Paris had long considered the result a foregone conclusion; victory for perfidious Anglo-Saxons produced a pile of French sour grapes at city hall.
Ahead of her election as mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, mischievously portrayed London as an inferior “suburb of Paris” with more crime, fewer entrepreneurial business start-ups and fewer foreign visitors. She magnanimously allowed that London had less dog mess on its pavements and kinder inhabitants.
Only the other week, London’s mayor Boris Johnson tweeted damning faint praise: “… one of the few areas where we need to catch up with Paris - they turn their sewage into electricity.”
On each side of the Channel, there are stats to back up claims to ascendancy, making it difficult to be entirely sure which city attracts more visitors. So we are left with personal preferences.
Living bang in the centre of Paris for two years, I was tear-gassed outside the Sorbonne, threatened by would-be muggers on the Champs-Élysées (luckily, a broadside of English profanity saw them off) and crestfallen when told by Françoise Hardy she loathed Tous Les Garçons et les Filles, a song that enhanced my boyhood.
But my heart belongs to the City of Romance and Light. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner. For all its vibrancy, cosmopolitan culture and swagger, the city simply does less for me than Paris.
With its handsome boulevards, wide-open spaces around key buildings and monuments and breathtaking night views of the illuminated riverside, Paris would surely win any pageant. Beauty may only be skin deep but I have also had many more amiable encounters with Parisians, even harassed waiters, than seriously off-putting ones.
Theatreland is more scattered and less comprehensive than the West End, quality and value have dipped at mid-market Parisian restaurants and top-level football is confined to one club, a charm-free one at that, not the six London boasts.
Yet there is ample compensation in walks along the Seine beneath those glorious bridges, nights of sublime jazz, blues and boogie-woogie on the Left Bank and the gastronomic treasures that have resisted dumbing-down and corner-cutting. You can have Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath but leave me the Bois de Boulogne, Buttes-Chaumont and Jardin du Luxembourg.
Not everyone will agree; Madame Salut is adamant she's a French Londoner. We could, of course, settle for London and Paris being equally great capitals with differing charms, but that would be less fun. Ernest Hemingway was grateful to have lived in Paris as a young man; I did not, but share his view, having lived there at all, that it lingers for the rest of your life, “for Paris is a moveable feast”.
****
[and now that the peak holiday season is over ...]
What is it about aoûtiens, the French who insist on taking holidays in August? Raise the question in popular tourist areas and you’ll invariably be told they are ruder, louder, more aggressive and more likely to be loutish.
A wild, stereotypical character assassination, I thought. Yes, more people drive the wrong way round the Intermarché car park, but that’s because there are more people so more roadhogs. And is the tourism industry not complaining there are not enough aoûtiens this summer in any case?
But our mild-mannered GP is in no doubt. Confronted by unruly patients, on holiday without appointments but insisting on quicker attention that two pairs of medical hands could offer, he finally called the police. “They arrive stressed,” he sighed. “They stress when here and they go home stressed.”
Recent Comments