How I learned a profound lesson by revisiting my old Paris haunts 30 years on
We sometimes assume the past was better and everything is broken, but the reality is rather different, says Stephen Jardine
They say the past is a foreign country and, in my case, that’s literally true. For two years I lived and worked in Paris. It was quite an adventure. My French was transformed and I learned so much about everything.
We didn’t have the internet and instead relied on a French system called Minitel, which was a bit like hopping a marathon instead of running it but, apart from that, life was great. We were experiencing one of the great cultural capitals of the world surrounded by style, fashion, food and drink.
It’s true there were challenges. Like the constant cacophony of blaring car horns. And the fact that everyone everywhere still seemed to smoke. Plus the strikes and demonstrations that made every day a battle against the odds. And of course the general disdain for vegans, teetotallers and anyone not lucky enough to have been born in La Belle France.
A great cultural blossoming
However as humans, we have a knack of making the best of any situation. I know that now because, 30 years on, I’ve just been back to revisit some old haunts and the improvement has been remarkable.
Our old neighbourhood has been spruced up, with car horns replaced by bird song. When I lived there, getting on a bike would have been a suicide mission. Now Paris is on course to become one of the world’s most cycle-friendly cities with 250 million euros being spent on infrastructure. The traffic-choked streets have given way to bike lanes everywhere and scooters careering down pavements are now a thing of the past.
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A great cultural blossoming has also taken place. Back in the Nineties, the Bourse de Commerce was closed to the public and the Bibliotheque National was just for university intellectuals. Now both have been transformed into amazing spaces championing art and literature, open to the public day and night. And then there’s the restored Grand Palais and the nearby Petit Palais.
Many of the improvements have taken place in the last decade under Anne Hidalgo, the first woman to be Mayor of Paris. Over 100,000 trees have been planted and the Seine riverbanks are no longer high-speed roads but instead pedestrian-friendly areas with parks and walkways and cultural spaces.
Swimming in the Seine
Thirty years ago, falling in the great river running through Paris would have been a death sentence. Hidalgo has made it swimmable.
Like any metropolis, there are problems. Crime and drug abuse are up and Parisians think cleanliness is down, although to most UK visitors, the daily street-sweeping regime leaves it looking pretty spotless.
But there is a bigger lesson here. So often we assume the past was better. That our age is just a race to the bottom, that everything is broken.
The reality is rather different. We are living longer, safer lives with opportunities to travel and explore that previous generations could only dream about. Air quality has improved, food is better and you can make a bank transaction without queuing for 15 minutes. Technology is opening up our world and we are the pioneers exploring what it has to offer us.
That brings its own challenges but it’s time to put away our rose-tinted view of the past. As Paris proved to me last weekend, the best time to be alive is right now.
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