In many urban areas, distinctive neighborhoods have an alternate character and the individuals who live in them can create tribal loyalties - once in a while even a bombastic scorn for some different parts of town. In London the River Thames shapes a characteristic and mental limit isolating southerners from northerners, and it's the same in Paris with the Seine, as the BBC's Hugh Schofield clarifies.
For different reasons, for the most recent year or somewhere in the vicinity, my social life has taken me out of my ordinary living space, and over the waterway… up north. Not that it's any hardship. The bicycle ride leads up the back of the Mont Saint Genevieve, the old cobbled roads around the Pantheon, then downhill past where Hemingway used to live, down to the Pont de Sully toward the end of the Ile Saint Louis - then on to Bastille and past.
As a southerner, I need to say - entre nous - that the genuine highbrow snots are the general population from the north
It's a treat of an excursion, particularly on a spring morning, however as I cross the scaffold and touch base on the further shore, I generally get the same niggling (yet not upsetting) vibe that by one means or another I've deserted the well known. Some way or another, by intersection the Seine, I've moved into outsider region.
Crossing into the alien north... of Paris
Senseless, would it say it isn't? That is to say, it's all the one city. North, south, left, right: what difference does it make? Life whirls on in any case. In any case, really obviously, we're all always drawing subliminal mental maps of where we live, nursing our loyalty to the bit we've risked to settle in.
Each city has its opponent quarters, each quarter has its virtuoso loci - its soul of spot - and here in Paris, there's a major silly yet unavoidable isolating line: you're either a north-of-the-waterway individual, or… well, the inverse.
Me, as you'll have construed, I'm an ingrained southerner, 20 years in the fifteenth and fourteenth arrondissements and never prouder. In the event that there was a group, Paris-Sud, I'd have a season ticket.
What's more, as a southerner, I need to say - entre nous - that the genuine highbrow snots (with regards to neighborhoods) are the general population from the north. Southerners as far as I can tell are glad to visit the other side - viz my bicycle rides.
Crossing into the alien north... of Paris
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However, northerners are so sniffy with regards to the south!
Ask somebody who lives up in Belleville or what they now call SoPi - that is South Pigalle, the ultra-stylish piece of the ninth arrondissement underneath Montmartre - inquire as to whether they could ever consider moving to the Left Bank (the south bank), and you'll be chuckled to disdain. "What, moi?! Live with each one of those status-cognizant middle class mummies and daddies? Abandon my late-night bistros and the coarseness and buzz of the genuine city?!! As Brian Ferry once sang - Jamais, Jamais, Jamais!!!"
Crossing into the alien north... of Paris
It's distraught. Since what, all things considered, has the north got the chance to be so glad about?
What many people say in regards to the Right Bank is valid. There's very little space - everything is packed together and claustrophobic. There's a lack of parks, just Parc Monceau for the toffs and their babysitters close to the Arc de Triomphe, and at the other, poorer, end of town the Buttes de Chaumont - its picture not precisely helped by the way that it loaned its name to a pack of jihadis, some of whom went ahead to complete the Charlie Hebdo assaults. The folks used to go running there.
The northerners believe we're exhausting - indeed we're simply ordinary
What's more, that is the other thing about the north. It's so political. Basically one portion of the north is conservative and the other half is left-wing. Everything backtracks to history. In 1789, it was workers from the average workers Faubourg Saint-Antoine who raged the Bastille and cut off heads in City Hall. After eighty years, in the brief common war that was the Paris Commune, the two sides struggled it out again in ridiculous design
What's more, still today north-of-the-waterway wears its governmental issues on its sleeve, or rather its road.
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