A time for Solidarity.

  

This has to be one of my favourite photos - Paris in April 2014 from the top of Montmartre. I was thinking about it only this week.

And now we have to give solidarity twice;


                 

Solidarity to the people of Paris - the image is by Jean Jullien.

The attack on 'The City of Light' is an attack on all of us.......  
.........and solidarity to the refugees in 'The Jungle' in Calais.

Last night as the horrific news of the terrible attack on Paris came through, some racist idiots set fire to the refugee camp, burning down some 80+ tents.



Luckily no one was killed.

I'm not the first one to point out that the refugees in 'The Jungle' are not the people who did this thing.

They are running away from the kind of people who carried out the massacre in Paris.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)

Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

My Soho.

Sunday - we went up to town again! We were going up to catch some music but because I couldn't face the tube and as it was a Sunday I drove up.

It worked out well, I found somewhere to park in Fitzrovia;

 

 And we were there far too early, so I forced Robyn to let me take her for a walk round Soho and Chinatown, some of my old haunts.

 

Who can resist Ronnies?

 

 

Well, these days I can. Ronnie Scott is long gone as is his business partner who sold up a few years ago. It was never cheap but it had integrity and great sounds.

Now it's a little too expensive and a little too showbiz for me.

They redecorated for goodness sake!

May be I'll pop in again if I can ever get tickets to something good.

We walked by Soho square and up and down the three streets of Soho. It's a very respectable place now - gone is that definite hint of menace the old place had.

I tried to work out where 'The Marquee' had been on Wardour Street. That was where I saw 'The Jam' and a host of Punk bands and where, if it was a good night, the sweat condensed on the ceiling and dripped back down on the audience.

It was always a good night with 'The Jam'.

Gone too are the Soho characters - not that they were all that nice, most of them.

Here's 'The Coach and Horses', lovingly called 'Norman's' by the new owners.

Nobody ever loved 'Norman' who was the landlord for many years and was titled 'The Rudest Landlord in London' by the satirical magazine 'Private Eye', which is written just a little further along Greek Street.

The pub was for many years the spiritual home of Jeffrey Bernard who was a journalist rather prone to drinking too much and who adopted as the name of his column the apology that had so often taken the place of his usual articles; 'Jeffrey Bernard is unwell'.

That was never my scene although next door is though. That's my kind of place, what you could call 'history on a plate';

'Maison Bertaux' is a family owned French Patisserie and tea rooms and rather proudly states that it was established in 1871.

Soho was always the home of refugees and revolutionaries - Karl Marx lived here after he escaped from persecution in his native Germany.

As the French were defeated in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the workers of Paris refused to surrender, even after the French Army and government had ran away.

They defended Paris against the Germans in a long siege, during which time they set up a primitive socialist system in the city.

This alarmed the German government as much as the French and they co-operated to put down the rising.

Over 30,000 Communards were brutally murdered or transported to penal colonies for the cheek of wanting democracy.

Over 70,000 came to Britain as refugees, many settling in Soho. They are responsible for its slightly riskeé, slightly bohemian atmosphere.

The Coach and Horses which was built in 1850, was never known as 'Norman's' but always as 'The French', because like many Soho businesses it had had a French landlord for many years.

'Maison Berteaux' is now the last remaining link to the escaping Communards.

We were there the day after 'Pride', the Gay festival and carnival, which had a special meaning this year after the U.S. Supreme court upheld the right to have 'same sex' marriages anywhere in America.

It's a huge victory and a really big deal because other countries will follow on as well.

There must have been some big, big celebrations the night before.

The flags were still out;

And rainbow banners and balloons everywhere.

These days Pride is huge and it has respectable sponsors.

Everyone wants to be associated with it - banks, shops, even brands.

It wasn't always like that - in the 1970's Pride wasn't a carnival - it was a protest march and it took real courage to come out and take part.

Sometimes the march would be attacked, it always faced hostility from the authorities and the police.

I attended three times from 1978 to 1980 - appeals had gone out for people to join the march and face off attackers and I was happy to do that.

Now I am really proud that I did, not because Gay people ever really needed any physical protection, they were always able to look after themselves but in the 1970's they needed a bit of moral support.

As I said, they were making a very courageous stand back then and I share their pride in what they achieved; they changed the world just a little.

It hasn't been an easy road, this is 'The Admiral Duncan' pub.



In the 1980's, as a prominent Gay pub, it was part of a long struggle with conservative Westminster council who declared that the rainbow flag was 'advertising' and required planning permission before it could be flown.

Legal battles and demonstrations followed and with the backing of Ken Livingstone's radical Labour Greater London Council, the Tories of Westminster council eventually had to give in.

So strange to see Tory politicians like Boris Johnson falling over themselves to court the pink vote these days.

'The Admiral Duncan' is even more important to Soho - in 1999 a crazed right wing nutter (it's official - he's in Broadmoor hospital with the criminally insane now) launched a bombing campaign in London, targeting Black, Asian and Gay targets.

The Admiral Duncan was blown up killing three people and injuring 70.

They've won the right to fly their flag many times over.

Following that atrocity, the Metropolitan Police who had persecuted the gay community for many years, set up a mobile incident room outside the pub to take witness statements and staffed only by gay and lesbian officers.

Change comes!

And so today you see little signs like this one outside the Firestation;

 

 

 

Which just goes to show how you can change the world....if you want to.

 

Music review tomorrow!

 

 

Neil Harris

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

Home:  helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

 

Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

 





Last minutes in Paris.

After we failed to get into the Municipal Modern Art gallery (Boo!) we walked to the Arc de Triumph and then the length of the Champs Elyseé, before heading down to the river Seine where we collapsed on seats over looking the islands and Notre Dame.
Then for the evening we headed back up to Ménilmontant to my favourite restaurant, Le Miyanis. Actually I got lost, big time on the way, drawn unconsciously back to Belleville, which I love.

We did make it in the end;

It's Algerian food - Couscous which I had there back in April.
But I didn't try the Algerian Patisserie bouffet back then!

We did this time!

And fabulous mint tea, hot and sweet, sat on the pavement tables as the first leaves of autumn drifted past and the Saturday evening strollers slowly paraded through their part of town.



I could have stayed all night......there was a coach to catch of course.

We headed back to the Place de la Concorde and stood until the very last minute watching the Eiffel Tower lit up and dreaming of never coming back from beautiful Paris.

 

 

 

Neil Harris

 

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

Home:   helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

 

Contact me:  neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

 

 

Parisien graffiti.

Last April when I went to Paris I paid a special visit to Belleville to take pictures of the graffiti there - there was some fabulous art there, take a look.

This time my visit was a lot more conventional but I still took the opportunity to take a few pictures of the street art I came across;

 

This is a cobblestone, decorated by an anonymous artist, while this is a plaque on a wall in Montmartre; 

  

 

 



Just like in April, I came across a lot of cut-out graffiti; pre-prepared pieces (often photocopies) which are simply pasted up on a wall. This dancing girl is something special;

I liked this one, he's a character from Tin-Tin (but with a different body), I can't remember his name (is it Captain Bloater?);

 

 

And I couldn't resist some more traditional spray can work. 

 

 

 

 I saw his work last April in Belleville - he's busy on vans in the area (they must hate him!).

 

Then there is photocopier art;

 

Nicely subversive;

 

 

 



 

 

 

Here's another use of traditional streetlights and walls for subversive purposes;

 

 

 

 

 

And I couldn't resist another cobblestone, this one came from Montmartre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neil Harris

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

Home:  helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

 

Contact me:  neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

 

 

 

Un Américain a Paris.

After my little bit of bad luck at Charing Cross Hospital on Tuesday, I was so glad I did this; just after midnight on Friday me and Robyn caught an Impact Tours Coach for Paris!

It's cheap, there's no security, you don't have to struggle to central London or to an airport and quite frankly it's quite exciting (even to someone as old as me).

Our coach raced across London through the middle of the night - we got a quick glimpse of the Houses of Parliament and the Millenium Wheel on the Thames and then like Harry Potter's magic bus we were off through the dark night to The Port of Dover to catch a romantic ferry across the Channel.

We got to the Place de la Concorde by 11-00am (French Time) and bought our Carnet of Metro tickets.....we were off.

I'm not going to apologise for doing the whole tourist thing - it was Robyn's first visit to Paris and I did some more unusual things back in April when I went on my own - why don't you take a look?

We went to Pigalle to buy lunch in Carrefour and then struggled up the many steps to The Butte at the top of Montmartre.

I don't care if it's a tourist cliché - I love it there. The Paris of Picasso and Impressionism, the Paris of the film 'Le Flic', the Paris of 'Un Américain a Paris' too;

 

 

It's a joy to see, even if you have to fight through a crowd to get there.  

Of course, as with anywhere in Paris, there are secrets and tales to tell. The fairytale church at the top was actually built by public subscription amongst the opponents of The Paris Commune. It was a memorial but not to the fallen Communards or those imprisoned and deported but to those who fired the guns.

However, just beneath Sacré Coeur, is Place Louise Michel, a little square commemorating the great female Communard who became such a symbol of those inspiring days of revolution.

A just revenge.

Whatever your views, who could not love these narrow streets of picture book Paris;
 

Or a vista like this - my favourite view; the Eiffel Tower across the rooftops of Paris;

I took a different view back in April, my favourite shot of my favourite view.

There's street art (I'll do a special posting of graffiti as I usually do) and advertisements for businesses, full of charm like this one;

This is the water fountain at the Rue Azais, where I filled my bottle again like I did in April and which I used to create my exhibit for 'The Museum of Water'. That gets a couple of posts in June.

But I had a proper date at Rue Azais, we went back to have lunch at the best restaurant in Paris;

I wasn't allowed my usual lager - Robyn selected a rather fine Chardonnay (a Millegrand 2013) and it was a good choice.

We liked the Comté cheese which we hadn't tried before.

Aaaah!

But we had another reason to be up there, apart from the view and the food;

 

 

This place means so much to us both that this was the spot we chose to leave our padlock (R loves N), on the fence in the little square overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

 

Where we hope it will survive just a little while, to commemorate what that trip meant to us both.

 

Neil Harris

 

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

More tomorrow!

 

Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

 

Contact me:  neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

 



Remembering Clément Meric.

Last June, I did a little commemoration for Clément Meric, an anti-racist campaigner who was murdered by racist thugs in Paris. You can see my posting about him here;

 Clément Meric

When I was in Belleville it was good to see that Clément is not forgotten;

 

These posters are a common sight around the streets.

Meanwhile up in Belleville, artists have reclaimed some of the empty shopfronts and have used the boxes that used to hold the shop blinds as a place to make artworks, like memory boxes;

 

Here there is a photo of Édith Piaf as well as ‘Touche pas a mon pote’ (Don’t touch my Friend), which was the title of a Working Week song and the slogan of a massive antiracist campaign in France in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s.

Like I said, good ghosts.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

Belleville, Paris.

Belleville

What normally happens to me in Paris is that I end up having a series of arguments with waiters who don’t want to serve me and then I don’t get to eat. Given that I don’t have much French this is impressive and often quite creative. I’m not an attractive prospect to a Bistro – single, old and looking a little careworn/frayed at the edges and they usually make this clear to me. In turn I know how to return an insult.

This time it was all going to be different.

I took my aches and my blistered feet to Belleville in the 20^th Arrondissement.

If you think of any of the French revolutions – they all started here. If you think of any of the revolutions that failed – Belleville is where the French army went to execute the revolutionaries.

Belleville is where the Communards made their last heroic stand at the Barricades of 1871 and Pére Lachaise at the bottom of the hill was where the firing squads were. There are good ghosts here; my kind of people.

Belleville is where the workers live and it’s where Édith Piaf was born under a lamp post on the Rue de Belleville. The way she sang – the hard nasal throaty sound; that’s the old accent of the Bellevillois, the equivalent of London’s cockneys. Little Édith Gassion at 4 ft. 8inches tall was given the nickname of ‘sparrow’ which is where the Piaf comes from.

The nature of the district has changed over the years – fewer French and more immigrants but the spirit is the same. There is always rebellion in the air.

Come out of the Metro and it all hits you straight away; poverty and trouble, the prostitutes, the pimps (Oh how I hate a pimp), and in the background shadows are lurking the gangsters that the pimps have to pay off.

And never to be seen in Belleville? Le Flic; the hated police who take a tax from everyone.

The police are so hated in Paris that it is accepted that when someone is in distress or suicidal no one calls the police – the fire brigade come out and they deal with many more social problems than fires as a result.

The fuel that keeps this economy going? Drugs and it would be so easy to just close down this whole sordid thing if anyone wanted to.

So, when I’ve negotiated all that I take a look at the new Chinatown and then walk up the hill along the Rue de Belleville. Right at the top is a park with a beautiful view over Paris but not for me today, I’ve been up enough hills.

What I really came to see was the art that is all around, because after the Algerians and the other North Africans, the Chinese and Vietnamese settlers, now there is another wave of immigrants; the street artists and they cover everything they can with the most amazing graffiti and sometimes real live artworks. I only scratched the surface….

Here’s a lorry that got a respray overnight;
 

 

 

 

These amazing pictures come from an alley way off the Rue de Belleville;

 

You'll want to click on that one to get the fine detail - you get a slideshow (spot the Piaf reference). 

 

 

Do you see the little homages to Piaf? They are everywhere. These are only some of the pictures I took. I’ve been sending them out to friends since I got back and I’ll look for excuses to post them here in the next few weeks.

By now I’m really tired, need to eat and have the little matter of an injection to sort out. Hey, this is the heroin capital of the city – it can’t be a problem.

I headed down the hill, on a hunt. What I was looking for was where all the Algerians go to drink tea – and here it is, ‘Le Myanis’ in Ménilmontant;

 

 

This was when I left but when I arrived there was a whole community of tea drinkers passing the afternoon away.

Here’s my meal;

 

It’s Couscous, the staple of North Africa. I’ve never had it before but it was delicious, filling, cheap and the staff were very patient at my ignorance and lack of French. Then again if you are from Algeria or Tunisia French is the language of the colonisers and not so popular.

I had a great meal and finished it off with a tiny coffee (arab style) but with none of the gravel at the bottom of the cup that I associate with the lebanese version.

So, full of new life, I headed down the hill to Pére Lachaise, always shut whenever I get there and then back up to turn down the Oberkamp – this is the street where Gangster meets Gangsta – it’s where all the music is.

Unfortunately I was far too early – so no music reviews today but this is where the affordable clubs and bars are and where the ‘BOBOS’ hang out. They are the ‘Bohemian Bourgeoisie’, similar to our ‘Yuppies’ but more interesting and more adventurous. They follow the artists and the music.

 

These two are great….

 

…. the artist was repairing them but ran away when I started taking pictures….

They aren’t graffiti they are paper collages, stuck on the wall.

In the end I gave up and overcome with nostalgia headed back to the tourist trap of Montmartre for my last hour. This time I had to admit defeat and pay for a ride up the funicular – what a wuss. This is just for tourists but it looks the part.

I was there for something you can’t take a picture of after dark (not with my pawn shop camera) when the Eiffel Tower is lit up and its giant searchlight turns achingly slowly like a lighthouse, round and round over Paris. Everyone is drawn to it – hypnotised as every part of the city watches it turn and turn again.

I have a Stella Artois.

Merdes! Oh, Merdes!!

I’m late! I can hardly walk now but the coach leaves at 1030! Somehow I stagger down all those damn steps, down to the metro at Pigalle where it all started for me this morning and onto the platform. On the train and change – I’ve gone wrong. Go back. Made it. That would have been an expensive day trip if I’d missed the coach.

I got back too late for the best part – when the Eiffel Tower goes sparkly at 1000pm. If you’ve never seen it, you should; tingly spine and everything.

And then we got held up – we finally left late at 11 00pm, just as the tower went sparkly again for me.

Gulp!

It didn’t help that I was playing ‘Le Départ’ and ‘Paris Match’ from The Style Council ep ‘Á Paris’ on my MP3.

Gulp!

The very best moment? Well it’s not a very good picture but how do you capture a moment of magic?
 

 

 Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

None of this could ever have happened without Gurdeep, Sharon and of course Dr Feelgood of Charing Cross Hospital to whom I am deeply grateful.

Paris; a Tale of Two Cities.

PARISr

Metropolitaine

It’s midnight, Friday night in Brentford. It’s a town I love, where I lived and worked for many years, where I knew all the villains and all the good people too…everyone knew my name.

Now, as I walk round some of my old haunts I keep meeting people being sick after a long Friday night. I feel a bit strange - I don't have my usual walking stick with me. This time I have a steel one. I wonder where I might be going where I might need an edge like that?

My night is just starting and I can see Mars bright red and high in the night sky.

The coach is early, waiting for me when I arrive – off to Paris!

To save miles we head through an empty city – Earls Court then the Chelsea Embankment and then along the river, up through Peckham, New Cross, Lewisham and out through the dark countryside to Dover – bright lights and bustle.

There is nothing on earth like a journey that starts at midnight, except perhaps for sailing out of Dover at dawn. Too early for that today, this time its dawn at Calais:

 

We fight through the Pas de Calais (the North country) dark and depressed, all mines and flooded farms like Belgium. This was where Van Gogh was at his maddest when he came to preach to the miners who didn’t listen but gave him plates of potatoes instead.

On through Picardie and the endless farms and graveyards of the first world war.

We hit Paris, through the suburbs, past the Stade de France and onto the Peripherique - best road in the world.

11-00am here’s the Place de la Concorde:

 

And I’m straight onto the Metro, to Pigalle for the Carrefour to get a baguette hot from the oven, a lager and some cheeses:

I walk through the Red Light district and into the tourist quartier;

And then make the long struggle up to the Butte and Montmartre;

 

This is what I’m looking for;

 

The best view in Paris – the rooftops and the Eiffel Tower.
I didn't have any of these;

Because I had a reservation at the best restaurant in Paris - with good company too:

 

Then I headed off to this;

 

The Pompidou centre – as unfortunately the Picasso museum still hasn’t reopened.

I couldn’t get to grips with the Pompidou – queuing for tickets, not allowed in until I put my bag in the cloakroom so queuing again. Queuing for the toilets. Then my Camera batteries go so its back down and queuing for my bag all over again. The contemporary galleries were shut as were some of the others.

The Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition queue was never less than an hour long – not enough time for that. So I got grumpy but I did enjoy the Brancusi workshop in a separate museum on the plaza outside.

From there I walked to Les Halles, having a chat with some campaigning Kurdish exiles outside and then down to the river Seine - I walked across several bridges taking pictures of padlocks and Bateaux Mouches, past Notre Dame and back to the right bank.

By then I was footsore and tired of rich parisiennes and tourists. Where did I go next?   

I said it was a tale of two cities - the other half tomorrow.

Click on any photo for a slideshow and better quality .

Neil Harris

(a don't stop till you drop production)

Home:   helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

Contact: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com