An Irishman's Diary

I SPENT the last two nights in a place called "Mama Shelter", a converted former multi-storey car-park in the gritty 20th arrondissementof Paris: the city's Arab quarter.

It sounds like a doss-house, or a commune. But au contraire. Mama Shelter is, in fact, one of the city's hippest new hotels. Its conversion from a car-park was by architect Roland Castro, who specialises in reclaiming urban wasteland, and its interior furnishings are courtesy of Philippe Starck, who specialises in making hotels look painfully cool. The latter's theme is information overload. His ceilings are covered in graffiti. His lifts are covered in random factoids, such as "only humans and dolphins enjoy recreational sex" or "horse and rats cannot vomit". A long bar counter has TV screens beaming constant news feeds up at you, including, yesterday, endless replays of Thierry Henry's dastardly handball.

Even in your bedroom there is no escape. The carpet is packed with information, too, including airline schedules. Maybe this all seemed a good idea when the hotel opened last year. But already it looks like another example of a French phenomenon identified by writer Edmund White: designs that go from futuristic to passé, without ever belonging in the present.

For an off-duty journalist trying to relax, at least, the design is a nightmare. After two days, I felt the same way about my bedroom carpet as Oscar Wilde did about his hotel wallpaper. One of us had to go. Luckily for the carpet, I checked out an hour ago.

Among the upsides of the hotel’s unfashionable location are the room charges. Mine cost a competitive €89 a night. But apparently Castro and his partners have also identified a new market for “extreme urban tourism”. This appeals to the hip, young, edgy traveller (that’s me in a nutshell) who prefers to avoid the touristy areas, while saving money.

When a friend from the second arrondissementheard where I was staying, he warned: "Be careful: It's a bad area." And certainly, from what I've seen, it can be dangerous to be a Velib (the Parisian free-rental bicycle) in these parts. Among two severely vandalised bikes at the local station, one has its three-inch tubular frame snapped in two, God knows how.

In some ways, the area hardly feels like Paris at all. Although it was the third Thursday in November yesterday, the Beaujolais nouveau n'est pas arrivéehere yet and I suspect it's not coming. Alternative attractions include the glass-fronted chichalounge, where men smoke middle-eastern herbal concoctions through water-filtered pipes. Not that you'd need a pipe. There's so much smoke in the air you could get your fill by just going in and asking directions to the Metro.

But as for it being a bad area, I never felt threatened, even at night. During two days in Paris I was mugged only once, and that was by Thierry Henry. So feeling cool and edgy yesterday, I lectured my second arrondissementfriend that he and his fellow "Bobos" ("bohemian bourgeoisie" as we call them) needed to get out and visit the real Paris more often.

There is one big tourist attraction in the 20th, of course. I refer to the vast Père Lachaise cemetery, final resting place of Wilde, Proust, Piaf, Jim Morrison and a Who's Whoof the famous dead. I spent the afternoon before the match strolling its tree-lined streets and avenues. And between the cobblestones and the hills, and the fact that you had to memorise locations from the map at the gate, with no other directions, it was hard work.

But I found Wilde’s grave, eventually: covered with pink-lipstick kisses, even on the intimate parts (or what’s left of them) of Jacob Epstein’s sculpted angel. And I also found a grave, almost equally famous, that made me wonder about the origins of a phrase – “the rub of the green” – that would come back to haunt us that evening.

The expression has nothing to do with the luck of the Irish, as you might think. It derives instead from lawn bowling. But the grave in question – of the pseudonymous “Victor Noir”, a young French journalist shot dead by Prince Napoleon in 1870 and ever since a hero of the French left – gives it new meaning.

The grave is capped by a horizontal life-sized bronze sculpture of the journalist as he lay dead: his top hat by his side and the waist button of his trousers opened, as if to help him breathe. The sculpture’s naturalistic style extends even to a protuberance – not exaggerated, but nonetheless noticeable – in his groin area.

Over the years this has become the focus of a latter-day fertility cult. Women hoping to become pregnant, or find a husband, are said to improve their chances by placing flowers in the figure’s hat or outstretched hands. But to maximise their luck, they must also touch the statue in a personal way. And such is the accumulated effect of the touching that, on a sculpture otherwise green from oxidisation, only the young hero’s crotch is now visible in its original bronze.

This is not what the “rub of the green” means, I know. And there is no suggestion that the statue’s luck-enhancing powers extend to sports events. Even so, being superstitious, like all football fans, I am not entirely convinced now that if I hadn’t had a discreet rub on Wednesday, just for a laugh, it might have prevented a more egregious ball-handling incident later that night.