Anybody there?

Paris or any big city has something tremendously cruel about the life one ends up leading in the pursuit of cosmopolitan open-mindedness and exciting kultural life.

We've had a relative of mine over this week and they were supposed to go back home tonight. They left it too late and ended up arriving at the airport after check-in had closed. So now they're on their way back, the reason why I'm still up at 20 past midnight. Not that I fear turning into a pumpkin, no, but I want to be asleep after being up for 19 hours.

Another, secondary reason why I'm still not asleep -- and wouldn't have been even if the relative in question had managed to board his flight -- is due to one of my next door neighbours (NDNs).

About 3 hours ago I heard a really loud knock on a door and thought it was my cousin at my door, so I went and opened it. It turned out to have been the 4th floor neighbour knocking frantically at my NDN's door because the radio or television or god-knows-what had been left on really loud for the last 24 hrs. I hadn't noticed it at all, but that might have something to do with the fact I've been listening to my iPod really loud for a week, even when I'm in the flat, so I've been a bit disconnected from the world.

Anyway - my point is... How sad that someone can be dead in his flat for days and if he doesn't have the impoliteness to leave the music/tele on really loud no one notices. I don't know his first name. We've exchanged a few words on occasion (rarely) and I know he's a researcher at some appalling (but necessary) bureaucracy; I know he wears glasses and lives in Bordeaux with his family, and only spends a few nights in Paris per month, hence the 9 sq-metre garçonnière.

The 4th floor neighbour finally called the police. They showed up and knocked and knocked and still no answer. I half-expected (and could almost see it in my mind's eye) them to shout "little pig little pig let me in" but they didn't. The 2nd door neighbour, a cheerful but deeply unpleasant woman in her 60s-- perhaps the only specimen that shows this particular combination of traits--, giggled when one of the police officers asked us to be quiet so she could hear the noise coming from inside the flat, and at that very moment of suspense her partner's radio went off.

They called the fire department. So at 11PM on a Thursday evening, already in my pyjamas, I go out onto the landing and see several (necessarily) good looking firemen going up a ladder trying to peek into this poor man's flat. They all interview us tiresomely (we said the exact same thing to all of them and yet they kept asking the same questions) and when I notice this is going to go on forever I decide to come back inside where at least it's warm(er).

All's well that ends well. He wasn't in. He'd left his radio on. It wasn't even playing music, it was a dull talk radio.

I had this image in my mind for a few hours that this poor man was going to be found in his cold flat, listening to mediocre talk radio and then... the horror... I remembered I listen to it, too, most mornings. The shame. The fatal shame!

How sad...

No one would have known anything about him and his dreams or where exactly he worked, apart from his family back in Bordeaux, but why would they care to inform us, his unknown neighbours, about it? We didn't even bother to find out his name.

He didn't bother to find out our names either.

City cruelty.

I'm going to buy him a cake next time I see him, and ask him about his family and his job. He will think I've gone bonkers and might end up getting a restraining order against me.

City irony.