Neighbours' Day happens every May across France. It is a time for people to make peace with the people next door. But in the apartment blocks of Paris, bitterness and hostility are thriving.
The people upstairs are having breakfast. I know because there is a particular scraping of chairs and the blunt thud of slippered feet crossing to and fro from kitchen to dining room. He talks, she hums. A pause. They must be pouring the coffee.
Our apartment building, like many in Paris, dates from the late 19th Century. The floors are echoing, antique parquet and there is absolutely no sound insulation.
A sneeze on the fourth floor can be heard on the second.
My neighbour, Madame Joliot, an unabashed television addict, is bemused.
"It is strange," she says. "In all those American soaps, the neighbours are lovely. Helpful, chatty, kind, romantic. But when I watch Nos Chers Voisins - well, that's France!"
Madame Joliot and several million other French tune in each evening to watch Our Dear Neighbours, the cult TV comedy series of everyday life in a fictional apartment block.
It gives the perfect "front-door spy hole" view of what goes on amongst the neighbours.
Brief encounters in the hallway, conversations in the lift, little incidents in the courtyard - all the tensions, intrigues, scheming rivalries and absurd pettiness of communal French living are revealed
Neighbours' Day happens every May across France. It is a time for people to make peace with the people next door. But in the apartment blocks of Paris, bitterness and hostility are thriving.
The people upstairs are having breakfast. I know because there is a particular scraping of chairs and the blunt thud of slippered feet crossing to and fro from kitchen to dining room. He talks, she hums. A pause. They must be pouring the coffee.
Our apartment building, like many in Paris, dates from the late 19th Century. The floors are echoing, antique parquet and there is absolutely no sound insulation.
A sneeze on the fourth floor can be heard on the second.
My neighbour, Madame Joliot, an unabashed television addict, is bemused.
"It is strange," she says. "In all those American soaps, the neighbours are lovely. Helpful, chatty, kind, romantic. But when I watch Nos Chers Voisins - well, that's France!"
Madame Joliot and several million other French tune in each evening to watch Our Dear Neighbours, the cult TV comedy series of everyday life in a fictional apartment block.
It gives the perfect "front-door spy hole" view of what goes on amongst the neighbours.
Brief encounters in the hallway, conversations in the lift, little incidents in the courtyard - all the tensions, intrigues, scheming rivalries and absurd pettiness of communal French living are revealed
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