Out in Paris and London
With regard to Carole Cadwalladr’s article Paris? Give me London any day (18 September), which views Paris as “an ersatz play city laid on for the rich and deluded” compared with London, based on a visit from Clichy-sous-Bois to central Paris.
I’ve lived in the Paris region for many years and there is far more diversity than her article makes out. Take a walk down the Avenue de Clichy or Avenue de Saint-Ouen where I live. It is certainly not a rich area, and a large percentage of the population is Arabic, yet there are all the facilities you need from bakers and markets to African barbers or Arab-run bazaar shops selling useful things such as pegs or saucepans.
Or look around Barbès, which neighbours the tourist trap of Montmartre, but feels a world apart. Or visit La Villette where the new Philharmonie de Paris has opened, on top of a bunch of other cultural venues, in this working-class, ethnically diverse area.
Of course there are still the well-known tourist areas only the rich can afford, such as Le Marais or St Germain cited, just like much of London. And the problems of the outer suburbs are still far from going away. But there is a lot more than that and at least in Paris it is still possible to live on a humble administrative salary, something I see as very unlikely in London.
Daniel Garley
Paris, France
• As a British-born four-decade Languedocian with dual French-English nationality, I simply do not see the point of Carole Cadwalladr’s simplistic and, frankly, puerile piece striving to make the point: “London is better than Paris”.
Both our societies are intrinsically imperfect, and more or less inhabitable, and will remain skewed as long as caste and class rules remain unchallenged (public schools and Oxbridge versus les grandes écoles). One does not judge London by Brixton any more than one judges it by Mayfair; ditto Paris, the 5ème arrondissement/Belleville. Rather one relishes the vive la différence. If you prefer London, Carole, so be it!
Simon Pleasance
Ribaute, France
• Having visited Tottenham recently for the first time in a long while, Carole Cadwalladr’s article struck a chord. There is almost no part of London that doesn’t feel not just safe but exhilarating to walk around. But we shouldn’t be blind to some less benign influences that have contributed to this: the explosion in property prices that has pushed a generation of young professionals out into the suburbs; the sale of council housing that has engineered a new social mix on estates across London. Gentrification creates losers as well as winners. I live in Cockfosters, where we don’t have a McDonald’s, let alone a fried chicken shop.
Paul Probyn
London, UK
Monarchy’s lasting appeal
Polly Toynbee (11 September) quite misses the point about the monarchy – but Lisa Appignanesi in her review of Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa (4 September) gets it.
Appignanesi says: “Is there an antidote to all this [decline in political and cultural spheres] in the values that stem from religion? Do the people need their opium – not only the solace of an afterlife, but the illusion of a higher authority to impose a sense of moral value?” She is right. The monarchy – for all the faults and flaws Toynbee outlined, illusion though it may be – stands in place of that higher authority.
As a fifth-generation Kiwi, I still feel the value not necessarily of this queen, but of the monarchy. This feeling, while often not understood, is still common in New Zealand – as illustrated by the majority rejection of a new flag for this country.
As scouts and guides, soldiers and citizens, we saluted our flag and it has become something to look to as the village, the church and the family lose their cohesive strength.
Any society needs an identifying icon that endures; an icon assuring them of who they were and are. Imperfect though the individuals may be, the place the monarchy holds in society is more complicated and important than Toynbee seems prepared to understand.
Mike Scott
Takaka, New Zealand
• Polly Toynbee’s article, published at the time the Queen became our longest reigning monarch, is deeply offensive. Who is she to say that the Queen is “past-mistress of nothingness”, along with other snide remarks about her implied lack of “knowingness and intelligence”? Toynbee knows nothing about either, and fails to understand Elizabeth’s wisdom and discretion which enable her to relate to all echelons of society. Happily the majority of the British population do appreciate her sense of duty and service; we understand how fortunate this country is to still have such a monarchy.
The Queen herself made little of the milestone but went about her business as usual. There has been no “avalanche of adulation”, as far as I am aware. In my view this article is not worthy of the Guardian.
Sheila M Henwood
Old Coulsdon, UK
The value of urban trees
Not only do trees improve our health and our neighbourhoods, to say nothing of our quality of life (How street trees can save our cities, 18 September), but just adding more of the colour green to our environment can improve our happiness quotient. In another article in your same issue (‘Your world may actually brighten up when you do’) reference is made to the pleasure-inducing brain chemical dopamine and how it is activated (via our retinas) by colours, such as green and yellow. This suggests to me that those ill-informed “local authorities” who are determined to eliminate trees from their cities are sadly colour blind as well.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• It’s not that I doubt the health value (and charm) of greenery, but correlational studies of this nature are famously ambiguous. As an 85-year-old “silvertail” residing in a tree-lined street I have to point out that people like myself have many other causes for their good health and longevity.
Peter van Sommers
Gladesville, NSW, Australia
Ageing and nature
I read Ian Sample’s article Fighting ageing with a fresh infusion of ideas (21 August) with growing alarm. As a 60-year-old I perfectly understand the appeal of reversing the tawdry process of ageing. But as a psychologist I have grave reservations.
First, if any of these treatments actually work, then what? There is no way you could restrict such an intervention to “improve[ing] wound healing in older people”. How could anyone bear to stop taking them; or providing them? They would most certainly be used to make (rich) 90-year-olds younger and to extend life, until …?
Second, Sample’s dismissal of “backstreet operators” as “worst-case scenarios” is astoundingly naive. A significant number of people will cause any damage to others to further their own financial advantage: child pornography, sex trafficking and slavery on fishing ships are just for starters. Nightmare scenarios for ensuring supplies of young plasma are only too plausible.
I suspect we are not psychologically equipped to cope with immortality, and what is ageing other than Nature’s way of ensuring death? I suspect death actually provides structure and meaning to life; punctuates it in fact. And death is necessary to make way for the genetic kaleidoscope that hedges against unpredictable environmental changes. Without ageing, how many of us would choose to die? And with what consequences for the planet and for life itself?
Penelope Sender
Auckland, New Zealand
Briefly
• Re your leader column Orbán the awful (11 September). I clearly remember from the 1950s family and friends frantically knitting blankets for Hungarian refugees. (As a child, I thought – probably correctly – they were “hungry” refugees.) I wonder how many of those then fleeing Soviet repression, or their descendants, are now erecting fences against the new wave of equally desperate people?
Stella Martin
Cairns, Queensland, Australia
• David Marr’s masterly analysis of former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott’s rise and fall (Abbott flawed by his fear of the unseen enemy, 25 September) was fair and balanced. Even so, it explains why most Australians are happy to have bidden Abbott a hearty good riddance.
Lawrie Bradly
Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
• In Steven Pinker’s back-page article (18 September), he asserts that all forms of violence are decreasing. I think Pinker more correctly should state that reported figures within all overall classifications of violence are falling. It is clear that some forms of violence are on the increase, for example, gruesome beheadings, though the overall category including other kinds of killings are falling.
Stephen Banks
Birmingham, UK
• Is there a more succinct phrase that encapsulates Richard Nisbett’s article (The misjudgment we all make … and the test to prove it, 4 September), extended to the societal level, than Marx’s dictum: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”?
Prof Vassilis Droucopoulos
Athens, Greece
• The article about Norwegians volunteering to spend their sentences in facilities in the Netherlands because of shortage of jails in their home country (Shortcuts, 11 September), makes one wonder if Dutch courage was necessary to influence them to make that decision.
Anthony Walter
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
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