Marius Holtan begins a series of interviews with newcomers to East London. His first new arrival hails from France.
I meet Jonathan Eveno in a café near the All Saints store where we both work. I fumble when we greet, but he gets right on with it. ‘We kiss both cheeks in France,’ he says – so that’s how it’s to be done, obviously.
Minus the beret, Jonathan is a French cliché on legs (elegantly long and beautifully formed legs): he is tall, with sleek, dark hair and a well-kept moustache. His accent is more moist than most croissants, and his outfits are always on point.
How French – how Parisian, is that?
Just a few weeks ago 22-year-old Jonathan moved here from Paris. Within only a few weeks in London under his fashionably French belt, he landed a job as a stylist. But there’s nowhere more stylish than the city he left behind – so why come here?
‘First of all I moved to London to improve my English,’ explains Jonathan. ‘But I also had an urge to meet new people and see new things.’
He says he would like to do an MA at the London College of Fashion. Again, I look puzzled. Why not study fashion in Paris? London is more international and laid back, comes the prompt reply.
Jonathan goes on to describe London as ‘cosy’, ‘green’, and ‘a collection of small towns’. It dawns on me this is someone accustomed to a metropolis that is smoother and more polished than London Town. For him, London is not parochial – it’s far too international for that. But it is a bit scuzzy; not quite up to the high standards he is used to.
Then he tells me he was born in the country – so far out of the city he gives up on the attempt to explain where. I get it now: Jonathan is Parisian by adoption – a convert to metropolitan manners (and the all the more strict as a result), who is allowing himself a couple of years of dressing down time in edgy old London.
I try to get some London-Paris rivalry going; but he’s not having it. Instead, he insists on describing Londoners as ‘friendly’, ‘very helpful’ and ‘polite’.
Either he has encountered a whole different bunch of Londoners, or politeness just became a competition – and Jonathan is winning by a mile.
But there are still some things he can’t bring himself to be entirely polite about.
‘I miss the red wine, cheese and bread. British people only eat Cheddar cheese! And the wine here is awful. The screw caps are not very charming — it makes it look like vinegar!’
Probably ‘the worst part’ of living in London’, he says.
And where are the French people who live in London? Not Chelsea and South Kensington, as rumour has it. Unless you are a well-to-family with oodles of Euros, it’s more likely to be in Hackney, Jonathan reports.
He further insists that British people are ‘nationalistic’, and ‘we don’t have that in France’. He also says that London’s best feature is its diversity, which surely entails tolerance of a wide range of nationalities.
I decide not to pursue these inconsistencies. I might have insisted on logical argument if we had been sitting in a post-war Parisian café with Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. But in laid-back London, round the corner from Spitalfields, it does not seem the right thing to do.
Jonathan has come to London for its tolerance – or so it seems. And who am I to argue with that?