Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 15/02/25-16/02/25

Notes for the confused reader: Gabriel (Gabe) is a dog, not a child. This is a collection of pieces from my notebook, typed up; as such, some is written in real-time, some with the benefit of hindsight. It is fragmentary, but so is my mind. If something says (FA) in brackets, read: French Accent.

Paris has a way of filling you up. It fills me; all of me throbs like somehow it knows it’s alive. I adore it.

I like who I am here; it is so easy to be unknown in a city I don’t yet know very well myself. When you’re unknown, you can be exactly the version of yourself you choose to be. I have a ‘City-me’, whom I inhabit in London too; she thinks she’s glamorous, she wears far trendier clothes than she ever would in the wilds of Oxfordshire, and she is unrecognisably confident (not only in crossing the road, which I do boldly in the hope that cars might stop. For Gabe, at least, they do). This City-me seems to think she’s kinda cool, and wears sunglasses in Paris in February like she’s just wandered off the slopes in Méribel. (She then promptly trips over her puppy, who is so eager to eat the remnants of some drunk soul’s dinner – seen in reverse splattered artistically on a Parisian pavement – that he conveniently forgets that legs are, in fact, static. It looks like a Jackon Pollock, but I am grimacing as I drag him away). She quickly remembers that she is not a chic femme du monde, and that in fact she hails from the countryside of central England (where at least it is mud, rather than Jackon Pollock look-alikes, which the puppy eats off the pavement). Her puppy, at least, is wearing a Louis Vuitton jumper, and could not look more ‘mignon’ (it’s fake, but who needs to know?).

I have just had quite the most delicious pâtisserie of my life, which at 7 euros a pop is rather a relief. I was havering “entre deux” (not a euphemism, as Miranda would say) – noisette ou pistache – so the man in the shop (with a questionable jet-black goatee) chose for me; he chose well. The pistachio crème pât was so perfect it clung to the pastry like a ship-wreck survivor, never once dropping off onto the plate. Perhaps I’ll go back for dinner. @copains.paris, you can be my new best friend anytime.

I am sitting with my notebook on my knees, perched on the arm of my sofa, so that I can look out of the window as I write. It is just past 10 (am) on a Sunday, and Paris remains asleep. (Gabriel is eating the curtains; he has just polished off the crumbs of my divine breakfast – I looked it up, and a few stray pistachios apparently won’t harm the pup. Besides, he’s clearly hungry; the curtains make for an excellent meal I’m told). In less than I day I feel there’s so much to catch up on. Gabriel and I took a promenade along the Seine yesterday afternoon, which is easier said than done, since Gabe is either eating rubbish from the gutter, chasing pigeons, or being clicked and cooed at by passing tourists. (We are not tourists. I don’t feel like one. We live here; we just admire the city through visitor’s eyes, afresh, each dawn). One of the funny people who sell posters of Audrey Hepburn blowing blue bubblegum in front of the Eiffel Tower for 3 euros out of little boxes along the pavement made Gabriel jump up onto a bench opposite the Palais des Beaux-Arts and SIT (‘Sit down‘ (FA)). He then offered him some of his biscuits (FA), which he was eating by the dozen out of a packet, and which I noticed too late had raisins in. Considering the pup had already devoured one biscuit (FA) and was well tucked into his second there wasn’t much I could do except prevent the man from giving him anymore with a modest wave of my hand. (It is now nearly 24-hours after the event, and far from having any ill-effects, Gabriel is currently applying himself seriously to the willful murder of the curtains. Paris appears to suit him. I shall never get my deposit for this apartment back).

The man was wearing three coats, and had five yellowing teeth which all faced inwards like a piranha (even if not factually correct, you get the idea). He asked me what I did, and I said, for the first time, that I am a writer. He had once been a philosophy professor in Marseilles, but he chose to spend his retirement selling posters to tourists along the banks of the Seine. Music and writing are the only two important things in life, he told me, in great earnest (I nodded, and made French-sounding murmurs of agreement while studiously trying to ignore the crumbling biscuits which were struggling to be chewed by the five teeth inside his mouth). They are what humanity live — and die — for. I was a “Créative”, he could see, (how I have no idea, since I was bundled almost to invisibility in a blue hat and long grey felt coat), so he picked up one of his postcards and wrote the name of a bar for me to visit, where all the other “créatifs” of Paris apparently go. He thinks a lack of creativity is the malady of modernity. Where once philosophy was the exit route from theology, now anthropology is an exit route from philosophy. What humanity forgets is that it doesn’t need to study itself; all our purest forms of expression are released in music and poetry (I made a case for art, which he accepted as if with a great effort). He swallowed some biscuit (poorly chewed; some of it reappeared when he opened his mouth again), and added some musicians to the postcard for me to listen to and learn from. Then, saying he’d see us again since we live nearby and he’s there almost every afternoon – and gabbling something about a wife who plays the lute on a bridge not far away (I keep this in to remind you that this entire conversation took place in French, so really I have no idea if I understood his philosophy or not; it hardly matters. Creativity is the heart of humanity. That much I did understand), he waved us on our way.

I looked out at the Seine; up at the towers of Notre Dame (unburnt); back at the Seine again. I felt as though I’d been in some intense sort of lecture; either that, or in a film scene from the Nouvelle Vague which was trying to make a serious point about society which no one quite understands. All I remember for certain is that he likes Nietzsche; and Kant.

I wake often in the middle of the night and lie for what seems like hours, smiling dumbly at the beams on my bedroom ceiling, listening to the sirens. There is not a moment of panic; no fear at not being able to sleep. Just a dim note in my sleepy brain which plays repeatedly ‘this is my life, this is my life, this is my life’. The smile never seems to go away.