Space and Hedgehogs

The downstairs neighbours, from whom we were subletting, have gone home to the Continent. Now we are renting directly from the owners, and we have emerged from our room. The New Town flat in which we have slept, washed, eaten and quarrelled for a over a month actually comprises two stories--and perhaps 2,000 square feet--of what was once a six storey townhouse, built before 1840. Now we are the sole inhabitants and can sit downstairs.

There is a garden, too, with a pile of sticks and leaves that may contain hedgehogs. I have been reading gardening books, and one was very enthusiastic about creating these hedgehog-friendly dens. 

I have moved my centre of morning operations to the kitchen. It is directly under the room of our refuge, and it has a twelve-light window looking into the street stairwell (the flat is "lower ground floor") with a cushioned window seat.  It is much more comfortable to study here than to study on the floor between the window and the drawn curtains in our room, which I did for weeks, as B.A. slept on. 

We used to say, when we lived in the Historical House, that we would never live anywhere so grand or comfortable again. This turned out not to be true, exactly, as now--thanks to our friends, the owners--we are living in a delightful two storey flat in the New Town. Temporarily. If a surveyor finds nothing seriously wrong with the New Flat, we will move there next Monday. 

Meanwhile, we live a New Town life, and I am too frightened to look at our bank account. B.A. bought two bottles of £10 wine at Margiotta's yesterday. What was he thinking?

"It was on sale," he said breezily, and as my parents are in town, and like good wine, I just repeated my stricture that once we move into the New Flat the party ends.  

The New Flat is in a much less exclusive neighbourhood, to put it mildly. It is in a row house built for such working-class Edinburgh people whose city centre slum was about to be knocked down. At the time, the river outside the row house was dirty, the ground was brown, and the air was full of noise.  Ninety years later, there is no more heavy industry in that part of town, and so the environment is actually liveable. But it is neither the Historical Estate nor the New Town, so I will have a very difficult time maintaining my delusions of grandeur. 

Comfort comes, however, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary (translated into English by Alison Anderson), which is about a Parisian building superintendent, or concierge, who secretly lives for art, philosophy and fine food. She goes to extreme lengths not to allow anyone in her building--one of the most chic and luxurious apartment buildings in Paris--to find out she isn't the stereotypical Paris concierge: surly, uneducated, uncultured and dumb.   

I was not aware that there was a stereotype for Paris concierges. My friend the Economist lives in a new build in Krakow, and the management employs women to watch the door. One seemed very nice, and one seemed suspicious of my presence, much to the Economist's masculine joy. As I am 17 years older than the Economist, it seems unlikely that I could disturb the chaste soul of a Krakow concierge, but then you never know.  I am more familiar with the elderly Polish women who maintain the public loos, collecting coins in a little dish while (allegedly) listening to Radio Maria. 

But I digress. My point was that this concierge, while striving to live down to an awful stereotype, manages to have a rich interior life involving philosophy,  Russian literature (in translation) Japanese films (also in translation), and really delicious cheese and pastries. (I was concerned that she was not sharing her considerable gifts with anyone, but that is where character development came in.) 

So, although Madame Michel is an atheist French intellectual who gives phenomenology a good kicking,  The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a very inspiring book.  Madame M may tend to an architecturally and culturally snazzy building, but she herself lives in three pokey rooms.

Update: One critic pointed out that the central characters are rather nasty about others in the book. I noticed that. However, they are not nasty to these people, and personally I do not mind if incredibly rich left-wingers are trounced in fiction. I also enjoyed how the Catholic reactionaries are shown to be decent in times of crisis. I suspect many lefty French intellectuals enjoy freaking out other lefty French intellectuals by admiring (or pretending to admire) Catholic reactionaries. Look at Houellebecq.