In a move that has sobered up precisely nobody of importance, the city of Paris has declared war on the open-air tipple. Yes, the very streets that gave us the Hemingwayesque romance of a pastis at a zinc bar, the existentialist clink of a Beaujolais on a cobbled corner, are now to be cleansed of public inebriation. The heatwave, you see, has driven the mercury to levels that would make a lizard weep. It has demanded sacrifices. And the French, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the first lamb to the slaughter is the street drinker.
But why, you ask, why now? Because the relentless, bastard sun has shifted its furnace eastward, abandoning the City of Light for the plains of Hungary and the spires of Prague. And in its wake, it has left a Paris that is, apparently, too hot for the casual act of drinking a cheap lager on a pavement. The enforcement, naturally, will be draconian. Fines will be levelled. Bottles will be confiscated. The gendarmerie will patrol with the solemn duty of men who have been asked to guard the last bottle of Evian in a drought.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, the United Kingdom is basking in a smugness that only comes from a grid that hasn't yet capitulated to the first wave of sweating commuters. The British power network, that glorious patchwork of Victorian cable and wishful thinking, is holding firm. For now. The National Grid has issued a statement so blandly confident it could have been written by a civil servant on beta-blockers. 'Our infrastructure remains resilient,' they said, as if daring the sun to try harder. It is the kind of defiant optimism that usually precedes a national crisis, a sort of meteorological Micawberism that promises everything will turn up if we just boil another kettle.
But let us not forget the absurdity of the situation. Here we are, in the throes of a climate emergency that scientists have been hollering about for decades, and our response is to ban street drinking in Paris and congratulate ourselves for not yet having a blackout. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship, while the band plays a jaunty tune about the resilience of the hull.
The heatwave itself is a beast of biblical proportions. It has curdled milk in Poland. It has melted tarmac in Romania. In the Czech Republic, they are likely considering building a wall of beer to keep the heat at bay. And still, the British remain committed to the grand tradition of ignoring the problem until it is literally at their doorstep, clutching a radiator and demanding to be let in.
What of the Parisian street drinker, you ask? He will migrate, like the swallows of old, to the nearest public fountain or the dubious shade of a tree in the Tuileries. He will find a way. He always does. For the spirit of public intoxication is not so easily quashed. It is a tradition that predates the guillotine, that survived the Nazis, that weathered the ban on smoking. It will outlast this heatwave, and this edict, and probably the grid itself.
But for now, the news cycle demands our attention. Paris bans street drinking. The UK grid remains resilient. And somewhere, a man in a flat cap is opening a can of warm bitter on a park bench, oblivious to the impending doom. As long as the gin still flows and the satire has a pulse, your correspondent will be here to report from the edge of sanity. Cheers.
