Clichy is one of those odd little urban areas you don't know if it's going up or down. Recently it switched from Communist to Socialist, while next-door Levallois went fully right. Our flat overlooks the rue Henri Barbusse, a narrow, straight strip lying on the grid that stretches from the Boulevard Peripherique to the river, cut across at right angles by even narrower side-streets. Since they opened the new motorway about five kilometres away, Barbusse has become a main through-road, and international heavy trucks roll past our bedroom both day and night, while over-tuned bikes crash the red-lights with a shattering roar. No zen.

Just down beneath the window is P's little shop. First time I went in, was about ten o'clock in the evening, searching for a cool beer after a summer's day spent moving in the furniture. I asked P what time he closed and he laughed - hey, I close when there's no more customers. It's true ; most nights you can, if given to insomnia, see one of the local drunks stagger into the store at three or four in the morning, and stagger out again clutching a tube of cold beer.

In a radius which you could mark out with a tennis ball and a good arm there are some four or five small groceries, most run by North Africans and staffed by their families. We don't use P's very much ; he charges rather whimsically after ten o'clock, one of his assistants regularly tries to short-change you, and I keep finding foreign coins or super-market caddy tokens in my pocket after buying a can of soup. The little shop with the Sidi Brahim sign is more our cup of tea and Marie gets on well with the shop-keeper, an amiable fellow, but very business-like. He'll do you a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau for just over 20 francs, which competes quite well with the nearest supermarket.

Which is Leclerc's, about ten minutes walk away. To get in, you have to go through a very slowly revolving door ; while you're hopping from foot to foot, one of the security guards looks you over. Like about ninety percent of supermarket security in the Parisian region, he's likely to be a large black fellow; I don't know how it is, but they seem to have carved themselves an ecological niche there. The Beur kiddies pull faces and spit at them behind their backs. Clichy is all flats and floors, and few elevators, so a lot of people do their shopping with back-packs ; Leclerc's won't let you take yours inside the shopping area, and I find this irritating if comprehensible. Often the lines at the check-out points are long, and the cashiers are living on their nerves. One day one of them exploded just as I arrived at her desk ; an adolescent male - white - had decided that she had not paid him enough respect, and had spat over her face. Often the women keep their heads down, throwing a fleeting glance at you just the time to say 'Bonjour' and then back to the till.

Casino, a chain of small 'superettes' is about to open a store just opposite P's. I don't suppose they'll be open til five in the morning, but P. will have to adapt, lower his prices a little, and raise them even more late at night. Eventually, he will probably go out of business. But perhaps the shop will have given him the time to shepherd a first generation of young french men and women through school, and perhaps some of them will be able to find jobs. At Leclerc's, I suppose, heads down at the cash registers, or pushing boxes out in the warehouse.

Comments to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com.