Au Revoir Paris...

Today, after a break during which I spent some time in the UK and some in Spain, I find myself enjoying a coffee at the almost ubiquitous Starbucks. Normally, I am not a great fan of this particular multi-national, but being in central Paris, and finding the cafes in the Avenue Champs Elysee itself wanting to charge seven euros fifty for a tiny cup of coffee, I chose to put my normal objections on hold and enjoy a long Americano in their outlet in the Arcade Champs Elysee. Truth be told, this place has a rather impressively grandiose interior, with ionic columns in marble supporting a mock vaulted roof. For me, it evokes images of the original flaneurs who would have haunted these very halls well over a century ago now.
This is my first visit to Paris for around 20 years or so. The demographic changes in that time are stark indeed. It is almost as if the centre of this once great metropolis has been all but abandoned to another culture, one that has little sympathy for, or understanding of, the history of this fantastic city.

Before arriving in Paris, the previous few days had been spent deep in the Normandy countryside in a tiny, one bedroom gite just to the west of Falaise. The contrast between rural, small town France which barely seems to have changed at all, and the capital, is huge. The borgoisie seem more discretely charming than ever in the villages, towns and smaller cities such as Caen, Falaise, Flers and Bayeaux. Life seems relatively slow, relaxed and polite in such places. Paris, however, is completely different; fast paced, frenetic, distinctly rude and often more than a little dangerous.
Much the same difference can be seen in Britain where London seems to be in the process of becoming a distant satellite of the UK in general, as are some of the other larger cities. The distance in politics, philosophy and outlook is vast and ever widening. Witness such occurrences as last year’s EU referendum – the people away from the larger urban conurbations voted emphatically for leave, those within them just as emphatically for remain.
Twenty years ago one espied the odd armed gendarme as one wandered along the boulevards of Paris. Now armed police, and even soldiers, are to be seen everywhere. Just recently, two policemen were attacked by a machete wielding fanatic on the Champs Elysee itself, not far from this very spot. Reading the BBC news today, a similar incident occurred in Brussels last night where fortunately the terrorist was promptly dispatched, though not before injuring two policemen, and a further incident was reported to have occurred just outside Buckingham Palace.
And so it goes on. Small incidents, followed by larger incidents, random sacrifices made to a random god. It speaks ill of man’s credulity that so many can still believe in the vacuous nonsense that inspired these attacks in the 21st century. For this rather liberal flaneur though, what is really unforgivable is the wish supporters of this particular superstition have to forcibly impose such a palpably illogical, unscientific and, in all honesty, ignorant view of the world on others.

The philosopher Karl Popper once pointed out the paradox of tolerance. If you extend that tolerance too far you end up tolerating the intolerant, thereby killing tolerance itself. We seem, through a mixture of pesonal, moral and political cowardice, to have gone a long way down that particular road now, each concession to the intolerant leading to the demand for yet more concessions.

Fortunately, there are still parts of Paris that retain much the same charm as ever. Strolling around Montmartre one still comes across the artists, the writers, the bon viveurs and the simply joyous, although admittedly the hordes of tourists are beginning to erode the authenticity of the place, but such is modern life. For now, at least, Montmartre’s charm still attracts enough of the creatives, the eccentrics and the downright weird to make life interesting.
It is now nearly ten p.m., and a pleasant young man has informed me that Starbucks will be closing in ten minutes. I quickly finish off my coffee and swallow the last of the customary glass of water that I like to accompany it with. I wonder if this will be my last evening in Paris. I have spent quite a few here in the past but...that was a Paris that has slithered slowly into history now. The city of the Enlightenment, of the birth of liberal democracy, of the Revolution, of Bonaparte, of Jean Paul Sartre, of Simone de Beauvoir, of Jean Jacques Rousseau, of the dadaists, of the surrealists, of Ernest Hemingway, Gertude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Josephine Baker, Anias Nin and HenryMiller, home of the flaneur, of the intellectually daring and the avant garde, the city that encapsulated the notion of joie de vivre, is all but abandoned to another culture now, a culture that cares little for joy and even less for life.

Au revoir Paris, it was good to know you...

Much Pride, but not too much Sense...

Since my early summer trip to Madrid, this particular nomadic flaneur has not been anything like as nomadic as he would like to be. This is about to be remedied with trips to Zuhai, Dongguan, Saana and Hangzhou planned in the next three months, plus perhaps a jaunt over to Phnom Penh in the new year. Norfolk, where I currently find myself, has proven to be a not unattractive place to spend the English summer though. Huge forests, varied coastlines and an English quaintness which, at times at least, can be quite charming.
The largest city in this area is Norwich, with a staggeringly tiny population of 213,000, a figure that would barely qualify it as a town in China. I have to admit though, that parts of the city are really rather lovely and hark back to previous times of economic influence and a long history as a prosperous, if somewhat diminutive, metropolis. I personally spent several pleasant and interesting days there in the summer and even sampled, as is so often my wont, a variety of the coffee serving hostelries on offer.
On one visit in late July I happened across an interesting phenomenon, quite jolly at one level, quite sinister at another. As I wandered through the market in the centre of the city I became aware of a disproportionate number of outlandishly attired folk of indeterminate gender, wandering around that particular part of town. Hair coloured lime green or purple seemed to be the order of the day, make-up de rigeur (at least if you were male, perhaps not so much on the females) and all manner of sartorial choices the only theme of which seemed to be to engender an ambiguity in relation to gender.

I also noticed that many folk were sporting badges along the lines of 'Gays against Orlando'. A few weeks prior to this mass demonstration there had been a very unpleasant incident in Orlando, Florida where a muslim man of troubled sexuality had burst into a gay night club in the city armed to the teeth with a variety of automatic weapons and proceeded to mow down all and sundry simply because they were likely to be gay in such an establishment. A truly awful incident that seemed, at first glance at least, to speak volumes about America's problems with gun control and more or less the whole planet's problem with radical Islam.
I wandered further up to hill to the street just in front of the town hall. There various speakers were regaling the jolly throng of demonstrators with words of encouragement and support, outrage at the act itself and bemoaning the disrespect of society for the human rights of gay individuals. Most of these words chimed with my own fairly liberal views on such things. As a general rule I believe in the notion of live and let live, as long as said process doesn't unduly impose on another against their will. 

At this point though, I did notice a rather strange phenomenon. Many of the protesters either wore badges or carried placards stating 'Refugees Welcome Here', many of these provided in the yellow and red of the Socialist Workers Party. Generally speaking, the country I currently find myself in (the UK) has a long and distinguished record in its attitude to refugees, something that speaks well for its general tolerance and ability to accommodate all manner of attitudes. The refugees in this particular case though were specifically the wave of Islamic migrants that, due to a very misguided policy, had been flooding into Europe over the course of the previous 18 months. 

 

The idea of supporting an influx of people who shared the very same belief system as the person who perpetuated the awful act in Orlando, and who used it as the justification for said act, seemed to this flaneur to be oddly inconsistent, if not downright contradictory. Here we had a group of people, gay to be precise, urging the mass importation of very significant amounts of people whose belief system very explicitly expresses the notion that all homosexuals should be put to death. There is no ambiguity in this view, no doubt, no room for maneuver, just a crystal clear tenet of the admittedly rather bizarre belief system that is Islam.
Perhaps it is me, but demonstrating to allow a group of people into the country who hate you, who despise everything you stand for and who want you dead seemed to your correspondent to be just a tad, how can I put it, illogical? It was bad enough that the banners mostly originated from the Socialist Workers Party which, when I last checked, was an avowedly atheist party, but the fact that they were being carried by people whose lifestyle is the very antithesis of everything that Islam stands for seemed to be stretching credulity just a bit too far.

I reflected back on the events of that awful night in Orlando. The shooter, one Omar Mateen, was a 29 year old Muslim who, in case their was the slightest doubt, rung 911 three times to inform them that he was carrying out the atrocity in the name of Islam and ISIL. As he carried out his terrible crime he was heard to shout out 'Alluha Akbar' numerous times. His father, as it turned out, had also been something of an apologist for the Taliban and had previously been under surveillance by the American security services, as had Omar Mateen himself.
There seems a strange form of denial occurring in what used to be called the 'liberal media', an almost magical form or reframing events in such a way as to avoid the all too obvious cause and instead pontificate endlessly on about anything else other than the blatantly obvious. The Washington Post indeed, in an article devoted to the Orlando shooting, somehow managed to construct a multi-column piece and not mention the words 'Islam' or 'Muslim' once. One must admire their creativity, if not necessarily their intellectual honesty.

As I watched this oddly deluded demonstration taking place, particularly as I listened to the various speakers on the steps of the town hall, the urge to point out these glaring inconsistencies rose up within me but....given I was but one voice in a crowd that seemed convinced of a contrary view, and given that almost any utterance in such a situation can so easily be defined as a 'hate crime' (the police seem very keen on that particular type of felony in these days of post-referendum Britain), I held my counsel and simply looked on with a somewhat bemused expression on my face.
There are, as some wag once put it, none so blind as those who will not see...

Daydream Believer....

This week the flaneurial lifestyle has taken me far from my urban roots to the tiny village of St. Tudy, which is to be found hugging the western edge of the heathland of Bodmin Moor. The contrast with recent locales could not be greater. At times it is profoundly quiet here, the only sounds that disturb the calm are the cackling of the rather demonstrative Canada Geese and the honking of the ducks (although, from here, it is hard to decide which is doing the cackling and which the honking...). There is a road which runs about 30 metres from my door. One is alerted to its presence by the noise of a passing car about once every 30 minutes. The constant busy-ness of small motorcycles buzzing up and down the streets of Kanchanaburi seems like a distant dream from here; almost as if one had somehow wandered into some kind of alternative reality.

I am assured by various friends that the weather is really rather good, especially in comparison with what came before. Still, for me at present, being exposed to temperatures hovering around the giddy heights of fifteen degrees has left me quivering and quaking, shivering and shaking. One gets used to the high thirties; coming back to the UK after three months of such warmth I have becomes aware of the sheer constancy of the cold and damp in this sceptred, but rather chilly, isle.

The English spring remains wonderfully refreshing though and, if fortune favours the nomadic traveller, one may even have some degree of sunshine as well. In such circumstances, it can be pleasant indeed. The variety of wild food on offer is also something to be indulged in. I made the mistake of purchasing some incredibly dull iceberg lettuce from a supermarket in Exeter only to find a huge variety of tasty and nutritious salad leaves on offer in the fields and forest surrounding me here in depths of the East Cornish countryside. Sorrel, dock, dandelions and even wild garlic are abundantly available and give any salad a wonderful variety of unique and interesting flavours. Added to this, the knowledge that they are also high in micro-nutrients and other such goodies makes it not only a pleasure but a very healthy option as well.

I am sharing this little foray with an old friend, Chinese in origin, who spent many years struggling to survive in the UK and escaping the less than savoury elements who had organised her escape from China. For convenience, we shall call her Angela. These days, after several years of coping with the fear of being sent back, Angela has become a bona fide UK passport holder. This actually occurred in the past six months during the time I was happily conducting my flaneurial activities in China and Thailand. With but one brief exception in January, we had not met during that period. The difference in her, having had the ever-present threat of expulsion lifted, is remarkable indeed. Where there was tension there is now peace, where there was anxiety there now is a degree of certainty, where there were frowns there are now smiles!

I have known this lass for some years now and have even played some part in the changes she has gone through. Now she finds herself in her early to mid thirties and wanting to settle down with an appropriate 'other'. With us in St. Tudy is another Chinese gentlemen from the fair city of Cardiff. His English is not the best but he seems to be a thoroughly decent chap. So much so in fact that he seems to want to pay every bill every time and one has to restrain his philanthropic activities with a degree of insistence bordering on the violent. My part in this rather strange set up is to act as something of a chaperone. These somewhat quaint arrangements have a degree of awkwardness at times but, in general, have led to a thoroughly pleasant few days spent together deep in the heart of the Cornish countryside.

The changes in my friend are not merely confined to the release of stress either. In the time I have been away she seems to have discovered religion; more specifically, Christianity.

Personally, my own experience with this offshoot of Judaism has not been particularly positive. As a child I was exposed to much proselytising which left its mark. For some years in my adult life I was once more tempted back into the fold but, as is my wont, I could not help but examine the historical basis for many of the claims. These I found severely wanting – in fact, it seemed that there was scarcely any evidence whatsoever barring a brief mention by the Jewish historian Josephus and even this had subsequently been 'doctored' (in)appropriately by those wishing to add a degree of authenticity which the reality sadly lacked.

Having said that, the changes in my friend were clear and really quite positive. The feeling that she now had a medium through which she could make sense of life and her part in it was clearly of great value in and of itself. True as it was that her way of understanding would seem to many to be really quite naïve on many levels but... clearly it was working for her and giving her a sense of certainty that had been lacking in her life for many, many years previously.

Whilst chatting with Angela one evening thoughts of a previous occasion drifted into my mind. Several years ago, whilst on a sojourn in the land of Israel, I had visited the fascinating city of Jerusalem. If you, dear reader, ever have the chance to spend some time in that troubled land, I would urge you to do so and, in particular, if you have the chance to visit Jerusalem itself you should, by all means, do so. It is truly a fantastic city where one is not only exposed to a metropolis with a long and deep history but also to an eclectic mix of eccentric characters, many representing the main mono-theistic religions, but also a surprisingly large number with no religious outlook at all. Jerusalem seems to be a magnet for the weird and the wonderful, the unconventional and the downright quirky.

As ever in Israel, and particularly in Jerusalem, these were times of turmoil. Ultra orthodox Jews in the Mea She'arim district had recently stoned a young western tourist when she had inadvertently wandered into their area wearing shorts. Tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians were also evident, in the previous weeks there had been two incidents involving bombs on buses in which many people had lost their lives. Tensions between secular and religious Jews were also much in evidence, mainly due to resentment on the part of those who had to go and fight for the state of Israel whilst the most strident orthodox Jews, who seemed very keen to urge on the military from the sidelines, were much less inclined to actually take any part in any fighting. Conveniently, their religious rules meant that they were banned from bearing arms. Oddly, this pacifism did not seem to extend to their verbal pronouncements. Understandably, this situation often somewhat annoyed those who were obliged to actually do the fighting.

At the start of my sojourn I had found myself staying for the first few days in an Orthodox Jewish hostel in the proximity of the King David Hotel, where I managed to rather clumsily fall foul of the strict kosher dietary rules. Although the problem was dealt with politely, I felt that a move to another hostel might prove sagacious. So it was that I found myself, a few days later, residing in a Christian hostel in the proximity of Jaffa gate, just inside the old city walls.

For several days my evenings were spent surrounded by a group of the most earnest Christians who had travelled to Jerusalem from all corners of the world, each and every one of them convinced of the rightness and righteousness of their world view. I would listen to sincere debates as to the nature of the trinity, how the theory of evolution was a ridiculous assumption as the bible proved the world to be only a few thousand years old and how to bring the majesty of Christ into your day to day existence. Many of the assumptions in these debates seemed, to me at least, to be deeply flawed, often lacking any basis in reality at all but... one could not help but notice how the beliefs themselves, the fact of having a clear set of beliefs, was a cornerstone of these people's reality. It gave them a sense of purpose, a sense of understanding, almost a mission in life. Without it, their lives would likely have felt the poorer.

I found myself torn between the desire to inject a little realism into the discussion and the thought that, if I did, it may cause someone to begin to doubt their world view. This I was reluctant to do, after all, who was I to presume to know the answers? In some ways, I quite admired their certainties, their lack of doubt, the seeming clarity of their view. At the same time I knew it was not for me. Unlike for many Christians, faith for me is not enough. I have a preference for a more gnostic view of existence.

Back in our cabin in Cornwall, as I listened to Angela waxing lyrically about how God had a role for me and that's why he had cared for me through the difficulties and challenges of the last decade, these memories came flooding back. Although I strongly disagreed with so many of the assumptions that were being made, again the thought surfaced: what would it profit me to express such doubts? I could see the changes in Angela and how these were working to her benefit. To be honest, I would even have to admit to a slight sense of envy on my part. An envy of the certainties that such a world view gives, an envy of the sense of having the answers, even as I was equally  well aware of how deeply flawed these answers are.

Each and every one of us makes sense of our world in our own ways. Some choose religion, be they Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Some choose politics, whether they be of the right or the left. Some choose pre-packaged philosophies such as Humanism or Stoicism. Some of us even try to make sense of it in our own ways, gleaning sagacity from our own experiences and what we learn of the experiences of others. In my view, this last path is fundamentally more difficult than the others as there is no one, universally agreed, source of wisdom, no place one can always go to look up the answers. We have no Bible, no Koran, we cannot automatically reference the writings of a Karl Marx or those of a Marcus Aurelius. We quite literally have more questions than answers. What we do have though is an open mind and the humility to know that our answers might be simply that, our answers, and therefore not applicable to everyone. 
As I finish this blog for another week these musings are once more interrupted by the somewhat cacophonous bird life as it busily go about its business. For them such conjectures are meaningless. Religion, politics and metaphysics are all of profound insignificance to such fauna. Sometimes, I quite envy them too...