On Being Alone In Paris

The prize for running my first marathon, from me to me, was a handful of days in Paris to wander as I pleased. I like wandering alone in strange cities. It's my idea of freedom. I tend to dig myself into a trench of daily routine when at home, which I both love and loathe. But in a new town, with no trenches dug, I am a free agent. I can see the horizon. I wake up every morning with the sketchiest of plans and am welcome to break the date with myself and follow the whims that blow in through the window. Such winds were generally blowing in the direction of the Left Bank, where I discovered the delights of the famous Cafe des Flores and Les Deux Magots (overpriced coffee, exquisite sugar packets, disdainful waiters, sensational people-watching) and spent happy hours scribbling and imagining who all the fascinating people around me might be. One of the greatest pleasures of traveling through a culture whose language you don't fully understand is that you are spared the banalities of other people's conversations. How often are you privy to witty banter or illuminating insights on the Tube? Inner city life, tragically, far more regularly serves up a stew of the petty gripes, veiled hypocrisies, and grisly health concerns of my fellow man. The most disturbing part of all this is how often I see my own ignorances paraded before me. In France, all that human noise is on mute and I can watch, enthralled, and allow my imagination free rein.

When I did need some contact with deeper thought, I found it in a poetry reading at Shakespeare & Co. This is a little rabbit hole of an English bookshop on the Seine where the original proprietor, Sylvia Beach, was a friend to Hemingway et al and the shop still allows travellers in need to sleep amongst the books at night in return for their labour as shop-assistants during waking hours. This is my idea of Heaven! Besides Left Bank American intelligentsia, the place attracts a steady stream of tourists, like me, who were milling happily through the book-lined rooms, past the piano available should your fingers feel the itch, and up the stairs where a quote on the wall bids you be kind to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. A closet of a room was readied with rows of tiny folding chairs and the air buzzed with expectant American chat. Sean O'Brien, our poet, read us some juicy pieces about death and water, standing before a window open to cherry blossoms and humming traffic. He is from Hull, and speaks of the austere landscape in that pocket of North East England and its wearing on the soul. He read with weight and gravitas, mopping sweat from his brow, but thinly veiled is a little boy blowing raspberries. Afterwards I fell into conversation with a fascinating English expat who moved to Paris to undergo and study psychoanalysis after giving up a career as a painter. The Spring evening sunshine moulded his face and I read fascinating lines on it, although I am sure I saw a story entirely of my own devising.

On the back of his urging, the next day I went to the Louvre, anticipating happy hours among great paintings. The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. So I took advantage of the Velib scheme instead, and roamed through Parisian traffic. This a brilliant idea; you find one of the stations sprinkled liberally about the city, get a code from the console which costs you 5 euros a week, unlock the bike from its docking station and every first half hour is free. Its a cheap sliding scale for every hour thereafter, which is debited from your card. It works well, although I had some initial difficulties releasing my chosen bike from the lock. Once I discovered that a little violent persuasion was all that was required, it was plain sailing. Violent persuasion where appliances are concerned is one of my notable talents, to my husband's despair... I ended up in the Marais, a district to the East of the city, where you will find meandering cobbled streets stuffed with medieval churches, bijoux boutiques and Jewish bakeries. Happily, I am a fan of all three. I didn't brave the queue of American tourists waiting for their falafels from the Falafel King, endorsed by Lenny Kravitz as the best in the world, but I did wind up in a shop that sells ribbons, buttons and bindings in every permutation a girl could dream of, and cursed my meagre budget. I plunged my hand into the jumble basket in a vintage shop instead and came up with the reward of two exquisite silk scarves for 3 euros apiece, which eased the pain somewhat. I bore them home to wash, wondering who made Lenny Kravitz the Michelin judge of all things falafel as I did so, before hanging them out to dry in the soft breeze that wafted sultry jazz through the apartment from the kitchen radio. I have been seduced by the charms of DSF, a station which keeps a girl supplied with a steady stream of good jazz and delicious French. Dominika and I would have it on as we cooked and ate simple, delicious meals of pasta or fish with vegetables in her sweet kitchen while the tuberose candle flickered. These are memories I treasure even more than the nights we ate out at lovely bistros in the spring evenings. It is a sweet surprise to meet a friend again after eleven years apart, and to find her so unchanged from the graceful, brilliant, gentle girl I first met at school. Although she confessed that she finds herself less thirsty for knowledge than she once was, and I deplore the way growing older can deplete curiosity. We had a good laugh about the hideous brown shoes and regulation knickers that Roedean made us sport as twelve year olds. A particularly great evening in was comprised of some tuna steaks fresh from the fishmonger/showman downstairs on rue Montorgeuil, a bottle of white and the three hour epic of the first show of Nouvelle Star, which is the French version of Pop Idol. The French have fairly catastrophic taste in pop music, but their contestants are terribly pretty. Popular culture in someone else's culture is always charming and funny, and nothing like the grating presence it is in my own reality.

I made a fresh attempt on the Louvre the next morning, one made atmospheric by rain, and was brought up short by the snake of tourists slithering around the Pyramid and out the courtyard. In a huff, I took the Metro to Montmartre. I climbed the slippery staircase, still feeling gloomy and hating tourists everywhere, up to Sacre-Coeur, that silly white eruption of ecclesiastic fantasy, and was gratified to see a large sign pointing around the corner to the dome and crypt, which didn't seem to be luring a single tourist. Triumphantly, I bought a ticket and went through a turnstile. Immediately, I was in a spiral staircase circulating ever upwards in a cylinder of stone. I was suddenly aware of being entirely alone, as the tiny windows offered watery light and I heard ghosts cooing and weeping in the walls. Vertigo suggested itself as I climbed higher and higher and I was afraid of not being able to go either up or down. My thighs begged for rest, so I fumbled for a seed bar secreted in my purse for just such an emergency. I am amazed at how quickly my equanimity returns with a bit of sugar, and the ghosts in the walls became just sighing winds. I continued on, to suddenly find I was at an iron door that let on to a spectacular view of the city spread below me. The wind was lashing and the place was deserted. The view was all mine. I walked around the entire circumference of the dome and relished feeling cold and wet and young and alone and alive in the silvery day. Down the whirling staircase again, I went into the church itself and sat, awed and humbled by the staggering display of wealth and time and talent that manifested such fantastic ambition. It is magnificent. I lit a candle, watching it jig and sway in the sea of its fellows, and prayed for a while.

That evening, I raced to the Theatre De L'Atelier to meet Dominika for a production of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll, translated into French, which is nominated for several French drama awards and features a rising star, Melanie Thierry, in the eponymous role. She plays with an eager, bold freshness that is adorable in any language, and the show was good entertainment, but I confess to finding it a mystery as to why it is such a success. This is not a culture starved of good drama, and why they decide to rave about something so American and hardly topical is beyond my uncertain grasp. Clearly there is much I do not understand about these people. But I want to learn...

I find the male French attitude to the feminine extremely interesting, in particular. I hadn't expected them to be so Latin. I discovered that the wearing of a skirt and/or heels, as I saw many French women doing, was to invite conversations to be initiated and proposals of marriage to be offered. This latter I assumed to be a rather extreme way, on the behalf of the fishmonger kneeling at my feet, to flog his wares, until an amused passer-by translated that the man was offering me a lifetime of all the fish I could eat. I gave up on heels entirely after an incident in one of the pretty alleys in St Germain which nearly required the pressing into service of my handbag as a weapon, and I was glad that I was close enough to seek refuge in a gorgeous flower shop. In flat pumps and long skirts I became invisible, and could wander through the city unmolested. Dominika remarked that she grew tired of the attention long ago and only wears skirts below the knee. Around the reserved British male, skirts are free to retire upwards, it would appear.

Travelling back on the Eurostar, accompanied by French Vogue, I was heartsick to leave such a beautiful place. I have only dipped my toe in its fountain, and I am thirsty for more. But I have memories of my final run, on the day of my departure, that took me around the Louvre and the Paris Opera, through the Tuileries where two girls in traditional kimonos tripped along on their wooden clogs, and down the rue de Rivoli, to sustain me. As I arrived back at Dominika's front door on rue Montorgeuil, another day of commerce was beginning to the tune of a thousand sizzling Gauloises, fresh baked baguettes and the holler of the fishmonger. Its my kind of place. Hemingway hit it when he called it A Moveable Feast.