101. Getting things done

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been entertained, indeed entranced, by a couple of demonstrations of Parisian workmanship. Outside our door, on rue Manuel, the local council is having a bike stand installed. I’m not sure quite how long the process has taken – it was underway when we arrived on 15 June – but it’s certainly not finished yet. First a team of three or so workmen (it seems to vary) erected a fence around their bit of street. Then they prised up a heap of cobblestones. Then they brought along a heap of slightly battered-looking bike stands and left them there for a while, presumably to consider how best to arrange them. Their first attempt set four of the six in place, immensely wide-spaced. The other two were chucked in a corner of the fenced-off area. A few days later, the four in place were prised up again. The next day, all six had been stuck in, this time all bunched up together, so close together that it would be impossible actually to get a bike in there, and with an absurd amount of space on either side of the group. They considered this for a while. Then they pulled them all up again. The stands were by now looking very battered. The next day, a compromise seemed to have been reached: five of the six were reinstated, at a slightly more reasonable distance apart, though still really too close to get a bike on either side of them, which was presumably the intention. And thus they seem to be staying. They are not remotely parallel, but I suspect that would be asking too much. The cobblestones have been replaced, and the gravel currently sitting on top of them prevents me from seeing whether they’ve managed to follow the curved patterns of the rest of the street (I have my doubts about this). And thus they have stayed, for nearly a week now. The gravel hasn’t been cleared from the replaced paving stones and the fence hasn’t been removed, so the area is also fast becoming the neighbourhood rubbish dump. This evening we emerged from the building and encountered two of our neighbours. The four of us stood in a row, leaning over the fence, and discussed the situation gravely.

Meanwhile, the lightwell of our building is being resurfaced. Apparently this is also proving a more difficult task than foreseen: ‘most of the wooden beams up the top seem to be rotten’, our first-floor neighbour told us, ‘ça coutera très cher…’. It certainly seems to be a laborious process. Great showers of plaster and various other unidentified objects routinely come cascading down past our bathroom window. And the other day I got quite worried when, whilst I was getting lunch ready, I heard the most appalling sounds coming from just outside our door (we’re on the ground floor, just next to the entrance to the lightwell). It sounded like someone in severe distress, making great, wet-sounding rasping gulps. We thought of all that plaster and who-knows-what-else falling down and opened the door to see what was going on. The workman was stretched full-length across the entrance-way of the building. Roy went up to him and asked if he was ok. No response. Roy leant down and touched his shoulder and the man jerked awake. It was his break-time, he explained, and he was just taking a nap. It was his snores that we were hearing. Personally, I think the man needs to get himself to a sleep apnoea specialist fast. In any case, in the past few days we’ve become accustomed to coming into the building and stepping over the sleeping, snoring builder. Why he has to stretch himself across the entrance-way instead of along the wall I don’t quite know.

Best English translation for the week, on a restaurant menu: ‘Main curses’.

Advertisement