Eurostar Departures, Paris Gare du Nord

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve taken the Eurostar now, or indeed, how many times I’ve crossed between Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord on the Métro. It amuses me that someone whose first language is Polish and second language is English — that’s me — has less trouble navigating the French user-interface of the Paris Métro ticket machines than the locals seem to have.

• “Buy tickets”
• “Métro ticket”
• “1 of”
• Insert one Euro and three twenty-cent coins
• Take ticket
• Approach barrier
• Insert ticket
• Take ticket and walk through barrier
• Follow signs for Ligne D
• Board VOPA
• Do not get off at Châtelet des Halles
• Do get off at Gare du Nord
• Do not cross the périphérique thus avoiding accidental encounters with a banlieu

One of the things I find myself doing as I approach the Eurostar is rearranging all my personal possessions. My mobile phone, keys and cash all move from my trousers to my coat. My watch and belt also went into a coat pocket which makes going through the metal-and-interesting-object-detector at the security checkpoint much smoother. The way I rationalise it: my ski jacket needs to go through the x-ray machine so I might as well do my bit to stop a frisking-queue building up.

The crossing of Paris was so smooth and rapid that I arrived over an hour early for check-in for my Eurostar back to London. I decided now would be a good opportunity to eat something — anything! — since my last meal was a vegetarian pizza in Morzine with Chris and Holly.

“Excuse me,” I say to the gentleman sitting next to me, “in the interests of not sparking an international incident, would you mind looking after my bags while I buy a chocolate, please?”

The gentleman very kindly obliges, and sits next to my bags. I offer to return with something for him or his partner from the shop, but he says that they already been there and have all they need as he pats the seat next to him. I return with chocolate and orange juice and offer some. Again he says he has all he needs: the European edition of a British newspaper.

The conversation then turns from the usual small-talk pleasantries of what each of us has been doing in France — I’ve been mostly skiing for a month in Morzine and he has been in Paris for a week with his partner — to far more interesting topics.

Momentary digression: I find that as a society we are all too good at “small talk”. The time I most noticed this was my foray into Internet dating in the middle of 2008, where small-talk ruled and interesting conversation was scarce. In our day-to-day lives we talk about our work (“it’s just a job”, only in my case it’s not), our top five favourite things, where we go on holiday, the music we listen to… but it seems that engaging in an exchange where a difference of opinion may be expressed, or where one conversationalist is passionate about the subject and so emotions may run high, is to be avoided in our polite society. I find this to be a most horrible state of affairs. When did this nonsense begin to happen? I’m told that one of the main reasons Sjek decided we should remain friends after our initial meeting was that, unlike other people she’d spoken to, I was prepared to have a no-holds-barred dialogue, delving as deep or as weird as we liked. I strongly agree: what is this world’s fascination with trivial niceties? Has the protocol of asking, “Hello, how’re things?” — with the expectation of some pleasantries and the question returned — made us so unconcerned and skin-deep in our correspondence with other humans that we might as well be replaced with simple automata?

Back to the interesting topics discussed at Eurostar Departures:

• how awesome the Internet is as a source of information
• how useful sites like Wikipedia are as a source of sources of information (I happen to agree very strongly with him: Wikipedia itself is not a source, and that scientific and journalistic values should still apply)
• censorship of the media and on the Internet: the IWF censorship of Wikipedia in relation to The Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer
• the media and politics
• how we get hold of the news (much like myself, he uses aggregation services, but also complements Internet news with “dead tree” papers)
• how the “dead tree” format news publishers are cutting their own throats by firing all their best journalists
• openDemocracy and how this is an amazing source of news commentary and discussion; its superb coverage of the “credit crunch”; and how it is financially struggling at the moment
• the Convention on Modern Liberties
• the Miner’s Strike and an event in Leeds he’ll be appearing at to see how the political landscape lies (and perhaps stir things up a little!) on the twenty-fifth anniversary; and how the anniversary is likely to make the Conservatives feel uneasy and open up rifts within the Labour Party once more
• the regeneration of some of Manchester’s most desolate areas since the 1970s
• Cornerhouse (I was slightly surprised at this!)

Julian Petley, professor at Brunel University, I’m sure that our paths shall cross again.