Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 28/02/25–01/03/25

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.

28/02/25:

It is nearly 10 o’clock in the morning, and I am sipping a Blue Latte (whatever that may be) outside Shakespeare and Co Cafe, in the cold morning sunshine on a Friday. The bookshop is not yet open. I can see Notre-Dame, and I am watching the shadows play hide and seek in each of her changing crevices. There is a queue for the bookshop already, so I am not sure I’ll go in. There are worse views for breakfast. I feel very settled, very heels-dug-in. A part of me feels like this could be my life. I don’t know if it’s only fleeting; I can’t tell.

Gabriel is trying to pull me and the table over, much to the amusement of the American couple on the table next door (they speak in heavy American accents, but I have a feeling they are in fact Spanish and possibly Italian; English must be their common language, even when badly pronounced). Gabe has forgotten (or chosen not to care) that he is attached to the lead wrapped around my thigh, and he is dead-set on chasing the pigeons which flutter on and off the pavement in front of us (they too are enjoying the game). I tell the dog off – because the more he pulls the more the circulation through my legs is cut off – and wonder what Shakespeare would have thought of it all. Not much, I don’t suppose: it lacks booze and it’s overrun by people; more a gentle bookish place than a theatre. I wonder how many people really come here to buy books; for how many that underrated past-time provides temporary solace as a key for entry into another world, often more real than the one I sit in now, watching tourists and pigeons (each as annoying as the other), and letting my fingers grow white with cold as I write in my pink notebook on a wooden bench outside a famous cafe in Paris’ 5ème, with Notre-Dame for a view and the sun dipping too early behind a cloud.

The bookshop has opened; they enter two-by-two like animals on the Ark. A voyage of discovery. I will go in.

01/03/25:

It is freezing, literally, and it feels weird to be in a city with no frost. The people eat baguettes stuffed with ham and cheese at all hours of the day and night, and the tourists wear Prada sunglasses as they sit on a wall having their photo taken in front of the Seine on a Saturday morning, swinging their legs. It would take one hand to push them in; one shove. The thought is only passing through; I won’t push them, of course, but it seemed suddenly very tempting. The city is ours, Gabriel and mine’s as we walk, him in his little Louis Vuitton jumper, with everybody smiling at him, everybody loving it, just the way we do; except not quite the way we do, because that is very, very much our own.

I feel full again (it is the first of March). Full of Paris and happy. My lungs feel like they’re so full they might explode (and I have not even been smoking). Subconsciously, I have been missing this feeling for the last few days. I am so glad it is back; I have St Geneviève to thank, since I went to put a note in her tomb in St-Étienne-du-Mont yesterday afternoon; it is supposed to bring you love in Paris. I am in love with Paris, and that is enough. It is St David’s Day today, so I think of daffodils and my grandmothers, and I cry just a little. I would like them to be proud of me, so I am going to Church. (I have returned; some of the service was in Welsh, and it has never felt so incongruous. Hardly a simple language at the best of times, when mixed with French and English at midi off the Champs-Élysée, it sounds like poetry spoken by a toddler; beautiful and stilted, the charm more in the act of it being spoken than in its delivery. Regardless, I wore a daffodil in my heart, the way my great-grandmother always said we must; there, just off the Champs-Élysée, the daffodils grow).

I bought an Eiffel Tower key-ring for 50 cents, and it swings off the zip at the end of my handbag. It is rose gold, and shines in the morning light, and I feel like a child again at school, whose bag is so weighted down by key-rings that it no longer shuts. (When I was little, the only key-ring it was remotely ‘cool’ to have was one of those Kipling gorillas, who sucked his thumb). I feel like a very gown-up child; one who lives her own life, and drinks coffee in the morning as she sits in her own flat, alone. She paid for the flat herself; the coffee she buys she earned. The flat has twisted stairs up to her bedroom, and there is a puppy at her feet. There is no one else around; I like it that way.

(Observing the French). She wears thigh-high sparkly silver boots, and a hot-pink coat the same colour as her thin-framed glasses. Her hair is white and short; she must be 60, and looks like a young Prue Leith, but very French. He is thin, and wears an overcoat so large it could have eaten the 80s for breakfast. He watches the Seine as he walks. He might be a detective: his nose is hooked.

We have found a Saturday-morning market, and I have bought more cheese, although I have a 26 month old Comte sitting in my fridge (and never has anything tasted so salty-sweet, hard-soft delicious). I asked the man how long it would last; he said 10 years if I wanted it to. If only everything were so durable.

I am taking the bus to church because it is a sunny day and I think I will see more of the city. I tried to look up whether you had to buy a Bus Pass online, but all I found was that the bus drivers don’t care and are generally rude. Whoever wrote the reviews has clearly never taken the 73 towards Charlebourg on a Saturday late-morning, because my bus driver (he was almost personal; there were three of us on the bus) was nothing but charmant: I got on the bus and told him it was ma première fois (like he couldn’t tell) and could I please have a return. He told me I could either pay in cash or I had to text some number which made it complicated. I handed over a 5 euro note (which I had happened to find in the street last week, and which was rejected twice when I tried to put it into one of those automatic-cash machines in the boulangerie, but he doesn’t need to know that) and went to sit in the disabled seats half way down the bus so that I could look forward and backwards and see Paris rumbling by in the sunshine. (Our route went through the Place de Concorde and past the Grand Palais: it was very beautiful). Then I got up again twenty seconds later and told him I had another stupid question, and please could he tell me which bus to take on my way home? He laughed at me and explained everything: the pavement system around the Arc de Triomphe, the enormous width of the boulevard up the Champs-Élysée (which I was to cross, but carefully, when their were no cars. Am I 5?, I wondered. No, but I am foreign, and sometimes that equates to the same thing), and, en effet, prend le 73 madame, toujours, toujours, le 73.