Beelzebub takes the bus

London buses, Paris hotels, Victorian books, finding the words

Dear Friend,

I hope you’ve had a good week or two.

Please excuse my not writing for a little while. I was in London last weekend meeting my brand-new niece, a little ball of squishy delight! While I was holding her, my brother made the rather startling observation that for his daughter, the Spice Girls will be as far in the past as The Beatles were for us growing up. Cruel of him to point out!

When I was a child in the Nineties, I famously (in my family) asked my mother: “Mum, did they have TV when you were alive?”, a statement as true in feeling as it was inaccurate in detail. I now must accept that, for my niece, the three-decade chunk before her birth, but within the lifetime of her elders, will be similarly shrouded in retro mystery. ‘Did we have the internet when we were alive?’, she might wonder.

Sketches at Waterloo Station (with colour added later)

And indeed living away from the place that I grew up gives me some of the premature sensibility of an older person, constantly thinking: ‘it didn’t used to be like this’. Each time I go back, there are little changes that indicate the advance of technology and time. Electric-vehicle charging points, Amazon supermarkets, Amazon delivery lockers, Lime bikes, new Lidls and Aldis, the Elizabeth Line, new bus routes, new ‘aspirational’ retail parks. Not all of these developments strike me as positive, but London always manages to warm my heart with its irrepressible London-ness. I arrived in the UK on the Saturday night before Halloween and the city centre was dotted with incongruous costumed characters — a sumo wrestler waiting for his friend on the corner, a devil on the bus!

Beelzebub takes the bus

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Hotel rooms and immigration bills

Back in Paris, I had a staycation on the Left Bank at Hotel des Grands Voyageurs, a brand-new hotel I reviewed for The Telegraph. It was very nice. I described it in the following terms:

“Saint-Germain meets New York meets Rome at this Italian-designed slinky address on the Left Bank, just outside the tourist throng but well placed for exploring. The restaurant, styled as a 'transatlantic brasserie', serves seriously good food while the two bars are chic spots for late-night cocktails.” 

Here are a few photos I took below of: the bar, the room, the art, the food.

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Hotels have also been making headlines in unlikely places in France this week, in the context of a new immigration bill. The interior minister, the rather unpopular Gérald Darmanin, has tried to frame the bill as ‘équilibré' or balanced. On one hand, it proposes easier deportation of undocumented foreigners with less recourse to appeal, a rather populist measure which will allay right-wing anxieties around immigration. It also reintroduces a rather nebulously worded law that would enable the deportation of non-French people who do not comply with ‘the principles of the Republic’.

On the other hand, and to the dismay of the centre-right and far right, it proposes that a one-year residence permit be created for workers in ‘métiers en tension’ — or professions under pressure — that is working in sectors that are having difficulty recruiting since the pandemic, notably hotels and restaurants. The proposal, which has generally been welcomed by small-business owners in the sector, would allow workers currently without documents to get the permit subject to certain strict criteria. 

In a typical play of the Macron government (he was famously elected on a ‘neither right nor left’ platform), this bill aims to throw some bones to progressives, some to reactionaries, and ultimately ends up angering both. A few months ago, Gérald Darmanin described the bill’s credo with the staggering tautology: “méchant avec les méchants et gentil avec les gentils” — or ‘mean with the meanies and nice with the nice people.’! . Well, who can argue with that? 

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Thirty-second book club

I finished The Fraud by Zadie Smith, the British writer’s first historical novel, set in Victorian England. Being as I am a reader of Smith’s essays and follower of her interviews, I recognised in the story of the book’s protagonist Eliza Touchet, a cipher for some of the author’s most pressing preoccupations, including but not limited to: family, the passage of time, what it is to be a woman, what it is to be a woman getting older, hypocrisy, what it is to be a writer, England’s history at home and abroad, silliness, the mob, populism, wilful ignorance, self-deprecation. I heard Smith, who has moved back to London after living in New York, say in an interview (I’m paraphrasing) that she moved away in order to avoid being another ageing English author writing a Victorian novel, and yet she has now by her own admission done just that. But The Fraud is a revisiting of the Victorian novel. Set in both England and Jamaica, it tells the story of the implied other side of the prosperous families we might meet in Austen or Dickens — the exploitative colonial project. In fact, Dickens features as a character in the novel, depicted as a brilliant person but also a bit of a charmer with a tiresome tendency to moralise. Overall, it’s an unusual and interesting read and I really enjoyed it. 

George Eliot’s Middlemarch also features in The Fraud. The long character study, subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life’, was written in the 1870s by an unconventional and brilliant author, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, and who like Smith looked at her own era with a satirical and thoughtful eye. I was meant to have read it in my last year at university, but never managed to finish it. Back then, I was around the same age as the main characters Dorothea and Celia, today I am more than a decade older — a salutary lesson if ever there was one to sow your literary oats before time catches up with you! I was prompted to pick up this book again in part because Cristina, a friend of mine who is Spanish, recently read it and said: “I wouldn’t have thought I would have cared about the bad marriages of Victorian England, but it turns out I really do!” — and I quite know what she means.

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Finding the words about finding the words

Another reason I have taken a little longer than usual to write is that I am still thinking quite a lot about the unfolding catastrophe in Israel and Gaza, and the shockwaves of horror, anger, revulsion and deep-seated and ancient suspicions and hatreds that have been unleashed by the image of them. 

One of the reasons I started writing this letter was that I was unsatisfied with the means of expression that social media platforms afford. The format favours the pithy and the brief, the hot-take over the discursive. Letter-writing necessarily involves some reflection. In the Victorian novels I’ve been reading, the characters sit down at their writing desk to reflect upon and write correspondence. The nature of platforms like Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X) and Instagram is commercial and extractive, which I think necessarily warps the ensuing communications; the medium we’re using/consuming is closer to a pinball machine than a blank piece of paper.

My belief is that the nature of the medium necessarily leads to an inaccurate, sometimes reckless, use of language and an inevitable impulse to ‘take a side’, in this case producing a perverse zero-sum logic. In the end, in the case of the heart-wrenching conflict in Israel and Gaza, there is no neat equation and there are no winners to be had — (except perhaps the strong-men despots in the region and beyond) — least of all Palestinians and Jews. Sometimes it seems that both these groups, along with their present and historic suffering, must carry the additional burden of being the crucible for projections of the deepest lurking psychodramas in others, in particular Europeans. 

I have been re-reading a short book called How to Cure a Fanatic written by Israeli author Amos Oz, who died in 2018. He was a lifetime campaigner for a two-state political peace solution. I wrote down this extract:

“One of the things which makes this conflict particularly hard is the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian, the Israeli-Arab conflict, is essentially a conflict between two victims. Two victims of the same oppressor. Europe, which colonised the Arab world, exploited it, humiliated it, trampled upon its culture, controlled it and used it as an imperialistic playground, is the same Europe which discriminated against the Jews, persecuted them, harassed them, and finally, mass-murdered them in an unprecedented crime of genocide.”

From my reading about my Iraqi-Jewish heritage, I also know that many of the British officers running the colonial protectorate in Iraq at the start of the 20th century considered it their job to strategise on how they might divide up and move around the country’s millennia-old ethnoreligious communities, like chess pieces. As we know from recent history, this was far from the UK Government’s last intervention in the region.

Today’s real present nightmare perches on the tip of years, decades, centuries even of global-scale geopolitical machinations and person-scale suffering. In this context, I believe that language should be used with great care, and that we should all give each other the grace to believe that nobody (except maybe the strong-man leaders) wants children to die.

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Et voilà. That will do for today.

I hope you have a lovely week and thank you very much for being my Pen Friend.

Yours, 

Hannah