Time Observer

 The children have already been living "under a pandemic" for almost two years. A class of CM2 tells us how she manages with this strange daily life. A Malabar pink dawn flatters the sleeping horses on the Sacré-Coeur carousel when the CM2A enter their class, nestled on the top floor of the Foyatier school, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Old-fashioned blackboards, creaking parquet floors, latched windows on the slate roofs… Cliché oblige, we watch for the smell of Cleopatra glue when the cases unzip. But no, nothing. Under a mask, you feel nothing at all. Can the mini-noses sticking out here and there still smell anything else? You should do a test! In this class, since last month, there have been two “competitions”: the reading rally and the Covid test rally.  Who is the swab champion?  The fingers rise with the rest of the body: 28 tests on my left… 33 in the second row!  “33 tests, all negative”, boasts behind his mask and his pair of glasses Samuel, slightl...

The Minister of Health announced it yesterday: if the decline in the epidemic follows its course, this would signify the end of the mask indoors from the spring. A controversial announcement. Soon a life without a mask inside? “If the epidemic follows its course with a drop in Omicron, it will be in the spring”, declared Olivier Véran on Wednesday February 2 on BFM TV, outlining the timetable for the lifting of certain restrictions such as the reduction or the abolition of the pass. vaccinated by this summer. "The worst is behind us and we have done the hardest," added the minister, who recalled that since February 1, wearing a mask outside is no longer compulsory.   But the news that caused a lot of reaction concerns the possibility of removing the mask indoors within a few weeks.  While we have been living with it for almost two years now, how do the French envisage the end of this habit well anchored in our daily lives? Lin, 26, is "really looking forward" to bei...

As the presidential election approaches, SHE sets out to meet women for our series “Elles font la France”.  In the Fives district of Lille, a solidarity café, 100% female, is trying to hold on, despite the Covid and the end of subsidies.  Here, the philosophy is: “local feminism” and “citizen politics”.   “Well, I don't think Fatma will come… She's having trouble getting up at the moment.  Ratiba tries to keep smiling as she pours coffee at the table.  It's 10 a.m. and on this Thursday morning in January, Dorianne, Maï and Catherine are frowning: their "second home" is threatened with closure for lack of subsidies.  "I may have aimed too high in my ambitions for this place...", sighs Ratiba.  When she opened Chez Djouheur (named after her mother) in 2018, she wanted to "make room for women in society".  Or at least, in Lille Fives, her neighborhood, which she considers plagued by poverty, religious extremism and drugs.  Because far from the T...