Where Do the Children Play?
Friday, 14 March
Aside from the US President, who in fit of pique recently dangling the possibility of World War III, what better reminder to take seriously the threat of war today than a remnant of war yesterday?
Last Friday morning I rode the métro to the Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar for London and the celebration of my granddaughter Mira’s fourth birthday. Underground the train station seemed eerily quiet for rush hour. Upstairs I discovered why:
During some routine repair work, a World War II bomb had been discovered near the rails a couple kilometres to the north (very close to the porte de la Chapelle, whence my last blog posting!). A one metre (three foot) 500kg (1100lb) English bomb that could have caused a lot of damage, killed many people. All trains in and out of the station were cancelled, at first for several hours and eventually all day.
The Gare du Nord is the busiest train station in Europe, with an average of 685,000 passengers per day, 250 million per year. That's a lot of people to inconvenience, though fewer than there would be at the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, the busiest in the world, with 3.5 million passengers a day, 1.27 billion per year. Nevertheless, given the grumpy, impatient nature of the average Paris commuter, it was astonishingly calm that morning, as if people were already or once again resigned to the presence of war in their lives.
Having lived in Berlin for almost seven years, I was certainly unruffled. World War II bombs were unearthed there all the time, even close to home, such as the one below discovered at a construction site next to our local supermarket in Alt-Treptow in 2016.
In looking for that Berlin photo, I came across these…
…of Soviet soldiers immortalised at the at the Soviet Second World War Memorial in Treptower Park....
Never mind that the Russians were on the right side for most of that War. The effect of the bas-relief and the spooky memorial on me this morning was haute-tension.
Last Friday, however, the stress came not so much from the remembrance of things past as the scramble to change my ticket for the next day, but I managed to get to London Saturday morning.
Maybe it was the bomb and the travel troubles (or possibly a semi-conscious focus these days on four-year cycles), but during the birthday weekend I thought a lot about David's and my five-week stay in London when Mira was born. Then Covid was raging and the obstacles we faced getting across the Channel were less lethal than the bomb but much more cumbersome logistically.
Covid was a scary time when we were made aware of life-threatening events beyond our control. It was also a time for lots of talk about how lockdowns were slowing us down, making us better, deeper, more soulful human beings, in tune with life's intangibles (travel, you may remember, seemed so yesterday).
Today we find ourselves with perhaps another life-threatening event beyond our control, a war on our doorstep. It seems possible that it will move closer because bullies around the world are gaining ground while our better angels take flight.
During the birthday celebrations, I was thinking about something else that has changed in the past four years. Then and until quite recently, I liberally posted photos of Mira's joyful face in this essay. But today I hesitate. Social and other media seem too menacing, children more vulnerable than ever. It's not just the pervs and the bots and the bullies out there. It’s also all too easy to imagine a future AI world where past images could be perverted and used against you.
Of course, I'm hoping President Trump is wrong (again) about World War III, that the Paris bomb signified nothing, that for Mira's sake future events will take a more positive turn.
Fortunately her radiant face and bountiful energy inspire hope. And I can still post as many photos as I like of my muse Tasha, seen here next to Louise Bourgeois' Welcoming Hands, with the place de la Concorde in the background.
