Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 03/03/25-04/03/25

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.

03/03/35:

I have walked Gabriel up to Saint-Chapelle. It is quiet, early on a Monday. We saw a woman panting as she cycled her crêpe trolley past the Musées de Beaux-Arts. We saw the French Gendarmerie (in uniform) on their motorbike training, lining the pavement opposite Saint-Chapelle with a neat queue of blue bodies and berets. This made two long, neat queues on either side of the street, which frustrated the traffic since it looked like they were driving down a crowded airplane runway. Each of the policemen wore a number 13 pasted to his back (they were all male), which seemed to me to be setting them up to fail. Perhaps the French pay no attention to superstition. Either that or they’re all massive Taylor Swift fans. They were perched on top of their Police-issue motorbikes looking scared and proud all at once, like children who have climbed to the highest branch in a tree and suddenly realised with that sick-in-mouth nervous horror that they don’t know how to get down.

We seem to have timed Gabriel’s loo-trips perfectly with the cigarette breaks of the dark haired girl from the gallery opposite. We each emerge from our respective buildings promptly two and a half hours after we returned to them. We said “Good morning” when the light was streaming in a half-waking haze down the street, but now that the sun sets her rosy glow onto the mirrors in the gallery window, we have got to the point of merely exchanging the briefest of smiles. It is as though we have some secret understanding; her – the need for nicotine; me – the need to not clean up dog mess inside my flat. We are the unspoken realities of the Rue de Lille. Our language is our facial expressions, and there is no more complicated code than that. She cannot be more than 25. She smokes at least four times a day, alone.

Gabriel and I stopped again by the book sellers along the Seine. I told the young one with curly hair that I used to read ‘Martine’ in order to learn French, as I thought he must think it strange that a 21-year-old was happily flicking through the children’s section of his little green painted stall with a self-indulgent smile on her face. I took a photograph of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ to send to my father. I didn’t think my French was quite up to it, it having taken me all summer to get through the novel in English (736 pages, give or take none). The book seller and I got onto a deeply serious philosophical discussion of Mann’s personal ethics (I do not know what it is about men who sell books along the Seine, but they appear to take a keen interest in Philosophy. I am blaming the rays of the sun reflecting off the water of the river and playing with their heads. The river is deep grey like an elephant’s back, and does not look appealing to swim in, even to me). He asked whether I liked the pointless goal of the book, and we discussed the difficulties of translating things from German to French to English. I got lost somewhere around Mann’s proposed reasons for the existence of humanity, and the man looked slightly saddened by the inability to continue what must have been an extremely interesting line of thought for him, since he had lit up at our conversation. I wonder why they don’t talk to each other. They might start a Seine-side book-sellers version of The Inklings. He resigned himself to his fate (a Monday morning stretching before him without further philosophical pursuit), and said he’d seen us walking past before – Gabriel and I – and that whether we bought the book or not at the very least he was sure to see us again. I did not buy the book, not ‘Martine’ nor ‘La Montage Magique’. We left, happy. He gave Gabriel a parting kiss, like doing bisous with a dog.

04/05/25:

I sit in a café along the Boulevard Saint-Germain and watch Shrove Tuesday pass me by. I drink a yellow mango latte and I eat cake. It is 10 o’clock in the morning. I think of flipping pancakes and yellow chicks and white lambs. I try to convince myself that I will not miss Spring, by being in Paris. My spring will simply taste of petrol fumes and filtered sunlight. (My cake is green, and filled with cream and strawberries. If Spring were to taste like this, it would be snowdrops and lawnmower cuttings. Some kind of heaven). I am about to extend the lease on my flat by eight days. I cannot tell if it will be enough to appease my longing for Paris, but it might feed the beast enough to temporarily satisfy. (If I am the beast whose hunger must be quelled, that makes eight more Boulangerie breakfasts). It means, too, that I will be home for the real Spring, and for the hot-cross buns which I’m never sure if I actually like, but I know I like the way the butter melts over them and drips in a salty pool the colour of the stigma of a daffodil down the insides of my fingers and onto the plate, and I’ll be back for the Easter Eggs and for the lambs growing up, and for the first fresh rays of warm sunshine that feels like an unexpected kiss because it is, really is, for the first time, truly warm. It feels like a baby wrapping their fist around your finger, or like a puppy licking your cheek. Raindrops on roses.

I am spearing mango from the bottom of my glass. I don’t think it had any coffee in it, but it was sweet and frothy with milk. My cake was extremely expensive, and mostly cream. Perhaps it means I will never have to go to Korea. There is a sugar-tasting corner of it on the Rue des Bernerdains, 5me.

It makes me feel very much as though I belong, walking down the street with a bag of dog food. It is like my very first night. It feels like a lifetime ago; I have been in Paris for One Bag of Dog Food. You can see a lot, learn a lot, feel a lot in the space of time it takes to get through One Bag of Dog Food. Whole nations can practically go to war. Lives can be changed. Now I walk down my street with a bag of dog food and say “Bonne soirée” to the man who sold me oysters, and hold the gate open for the boy who lives down the corridor. I blink and close my eyes in the sunshine, pausing as I close the gate to look up at my flat. I picture Gabriel asleep on the sofa. I wonder how I could ever leave before the Spring but then I wonder how I could ever miss the first sprig of apple blossom in England. I am torn between two worlds. If I stay just one more week, have just three more overpriced drinks in cafés, and eat just eight more pains au chocolat, maybe the decision will simply make itself.

If it is a dream, why not live in it’s unreality for just a little longer?