Our Man in Paris: Divided by proximity

A French television company once had the bright idea to make a version of the Australian soap Neighbours, set in Paris. They had to abandon the idea. No one could imagine any realistic dialogue between Parisian neighbours.

Like all apocryphal stories, that story tells a story. Paris is a city of apartments in which people live divided – often bitterly divided – by thin walls and sound-echoing parquet floors. In five years in our apartment, we have had constant warfare with the neighbours immediately above and below us, mostly about noise and water.

We have also had, I should add, a wonderfully friendly relationship with the chic 70-something woman who shares our floor. She has twice rescued us from temporary homelessness when we have mislaid our keys.

The people above us are a retired couple, a manic man with a depressive wife. The children call them Monsieur Fish and Madame Fish. For our first two years in the building, they did not talk to us. Then my wife took up the piano.

Madame Fish accosted Margaret outside the lift one day. "Is it you who plays the piano?" she asked. Margaret said that it was. "You are making no progress," she said, and walked away.

Parisian plumbing is as chaotic as Parisian parking. Those elegant-fronted stone buildings are constantly springing internal leaks. We were flooded by a leak from chez the Fishes and they never apologised.

Then Margaret accidentally (I think) watered Monsieur Fish one evening when she was tending her balcony geraniums as he was entering the building. He immediately came up to protest that he had been "seriously inundated".

Soon afterwards our flat began to sprinkle the people below us, through no fault of ours. We did what we could to help. Then the Monsieur from below, a rather fussy, over-perfumed man (M Stinky to the kids) came up aggressively to complain about yet another minor leak. Margaret told to him in English – not knowing that he spoke excellent English – what he might consider doing with his latest leak. He told her that she had a "pauvré education", which is certainly not true.

And so it has gone on. According to a friend who is a lawyer in Paris, litigation between neighbours, often over the most trivial things, is the single biggest growth area in Parisian civil courts.

We were surprised and alarmed the other day, therefore, to find a circular from the town hall of our arrondissement, declaring a "neighbours' day" or "party in your building".

The "objective of the operation", the town hall declared, is to "recreate conviviality in your quartier, to strengthen social bonds".

"Do not hesitate to go and meet your neighbours over a glass, in the hall, or in the courtyard of your building, or in their home, or in the street..."

This was the third annual event of its kind. It is supposed to happen all over Paris, not just in our arrondissement (the 17th). I cannot speak for what may have happened in other, less bourgeois and less uptight areas. In our quartier, no conviviality was created and no bonds strengthened. In short, nothing happened, neither in the hall, nor in the courtyards, nor in people's homes. We all remained barricaded behind our thin walls.

The town hall set a good example. In the parliamentary elections, the mayor and the sitting MP for the arrondissement, both members of President Jacques Chirac's party, are running against one another. There is neighbourliness for you.

We are still looking for ways to pay back "Monsieur below". Our daughters' ballet school is being forced out of its rather grand home (and thereby hangs another very Parisian tale, for another week). Maybe, we should invite the 60 or so little darlings to come and practise on the parquet in our front room.

The blunder man strikes again

Thierry Roland, the best-known football commentator in France for 40 years, is causing almost as much controversy, and making as many blunders, as the under-performing French World Cup squad. Mr Roland, 65, has a long history of making unfortunate remarks, verging on the racist, and has long been suspected of having sympathies for the far-right National Front. He denies it.

He once gave an interview, however, for a National Front publication in which he said that Algeria should have remained French (an exclusively far-right viewpoint for many years now).

After the famous "hand of God" incident when Diego Maradona handled the ball into the England goal in 1986, and got away with it, Mr Roland said on air to his long-time number two, Jean-Michel Larqué : "Honestly, Jean-Michel, you'd think they could find something better than a Tunisian to referee a game of this importance."

The latest "Rolandisme" was just before the friendly match between France and South Korea. "There is nothing that looks like a Korean, more than another Korean," he said. "Especially when they are all dressed in the same football kit and they are all 1.70 metres tall, apart from the goalie." In fact, it was pointed out, almost all the South Korea team are considerably more than 1.70 metres tall.

Mr Roland is proud of never preparing for games and never leaving his hotel room on foreign trips, except to go to the match. He makes constant factual blunders. When France was playing its opening World Cup match against Senegal, he referred to the opposition as Cameroon.

When he commentates on Champions' League matches at my beloved Old Trafford, he always shows off his knowledge of the geography of England by telling French TV viewers that Manchester is in "Les Midlands".

That's what comes of never leaving your hotel, Mr Roland. Had you ever ventured out to the Trafford Centre and admired the motorway bridge over the Ship Canal, against the majestic background of Winter Hill, you might have known that you were oop north.

Double fault

The French first lady, Bernadette Chirac, has been rushing around the country supporting her husband's party's election campaign.

Security staff at the French Openwere surprised, then, when she turned up unannounced to watch a match the other day. The usual helmet of blonde hair; the usual one megaton hand-bag; the usual bodyguards.

As she took her seat in the presidential box, a policeman who had served at the Elysées Palace decided that this could not be Bernadette Chirac. She was thrown out on her ear. Luckily for the policeman, he had made the right line call. The fake Bernadette was a double, sent on a hoax by a TV programme.