Pendulum Man

Jonathan Meades on France

This man has pretty much become my hero over the last few years, and last weeks’ episode, ‘A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries’, is pretty much as good as anything he’s ever done.

“People are defined by the religious, ethnic or linguistic group they are born into. Identity is determined by community, rather than by the individual. Cultural diversity inhibits social mobility. It stalls economic improvement, it fractures society. It’s a barrier to self-invention. It sets the status quo in stone - ‘You know your place’. You’re conscious of your roots, your precious roots; but roots are for vegetables. The British seem unable to understand that a human’s roots are actually a human’s shackles.”

As I gibbered to a fellow devotee, it reads like one big scroll of someone else perfectly articulating things in my head that I can’t even hope to explain properly myself. It’s - even for Jonathan - an astonishingly concerted attack on the credulous and the pious, and a torrent against the vile side effects of cosy, pigeon-hole nationalism, and the inevitable demeaning of the self that it breeds.

Incredible. Just, just incredible.

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