Down and Out In Paris and London

We read this book together, my mom and I, when I was a teenager.

It was another classic example of "aiming for the heart, hitting the stomach". We were obsessed. My parents were comfortable middle-class people who back in those days enjoyed a family meal out every week (Friday noon- I just had a flashback- my younger brother went through a period of hating the favourite family restaurant, refusing to enter, and being left in the car for over an hour every Friday while the rest of us were at the restaurant- oh god what is wrong with families?) and they probably dined out more than that.

Orwell put an effective stop to all that for all of, I wanna say two months? with his graphic descriptions of how the chefs handled the plates, the greasy thumbprints "the chef is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness" ughghghg. "do you think it's still that bad?" I remember asking my dad, who didn't read it, but had to suffer the consequences along with my mom and me. "Probably worse" he answered gloomily. He loved eating out.

Homelessness.

I've read a lot about it before and after (and have been "precariously housed" myself as a lone parent with two kids more than once- years and years after the family meals out with my parents). There was another one, not as famous as Orwell, about a poor French family befriending an even poorer gentleman who lived under a bridge over the Seine -I think it might have actually been called "The Gentleman Under the Bridge"– and they spent Christmas together. They had a Yule log to eat which I had no idea what that was, and it sounded amazing. Mom cut his hair and shaved his beard, and he was also amazed.

Orwell described how the homeless men in London leaned against a rope to sleep overnight. In the morning, some official would cut the rope and they all fell down and woke up. My mom thought Orwell was just pretending to be homeless, to write the book, but I thought he actually was. I didn't argue with her though. I assumed she knew more about homelessness than I did, although now I know that I was wrong, I know much more.

"The Children Who Lived in Barn" – another good one. So charming! So quaint! A family of English children lose their parents in an air crash, and live in a local barn, helped by kind neighbours to prepare meals. One of them showed them how to make a "straw box"- kind of like a slow-cooker but without electricity. At the end of the book, their parents miraculously return, and they miraculously have a beautiful house to live in again. They are no longer the children who live in a barn. It was kind of sad.

A woman died in a tent in our city this week.