From Paris, With Love
Call me a hack. Call me narrow-minded. Call me anything you want to call me or better yet, don’t call me at all…
The fact is, when I travel, I like to do so in clichés.
In Paris, I want to walk past that forty year old, trench-coat wearing ex-model on the corner who is actually closer to thirty, but she’s been smoking twenty a day for the last fifteen years so you’d never guess it.
I want to see the guy in his striped white and navy shirt playing Le Vie En Rose on an accordion with garlic hanging around his neck like Pepe-fucking-LePew.
I want wine, I want bread, I want cheese, I want coffee, I want pastries, I want a professional level of nonchalance and I want it now…
Paris though, Paris has never given deux tosses about what I wanted.
It has always just carried on being itself. Unabashedly. Not buckling under the weight of mine, or anybody else’s, expectations.
Some call it confidence, others call it arrogance.
Whatever you call it, you either get it or you don’t.
And I’m not afraid to say that I never really got Paris.
Until…
My train gets in on one of those spring afternoons you only find in 50’s movies.
This is Paris two drinks in at an all day Wedding.
This is Paris straightening its spine after a thirteen hour flight.
If there’s ever a time to fall in love with a person, or a place, it’s right here and right now.
The entire city is bathed in a biblical golden light and the atmosphere outside Gare du Nord is as thick with cigarette smoke as it is with pick-pockets.
Cigarette smoke always reminds me of my Grandmother and pick-pockets are just the charming Disney rogues of the criminal underworld.
It’s quite the sensory cocktail.
Those ornate black-iron balconies sit above the traffic with their dirty windows flung open. Old ladies watching the world pass by beneath them chasing skin cancer with a smile.
(You’d be smiling too if you’d been making a mockery of lung cancer since ‘93.)
Cyclists pour through the streets. Old men with baskets stuffed full of baguettes and flowers freshly bought from Le Market.
Young couples zip down Le Alleyway headed off to some secret place they ain’t gonna tell you about.
It’s electric here.
I’d only ever seen the run down Renaults before now. The bad graffiti. Rows upon rows of cyber-cafés plastered with sun-bleached posters for a French TV show I’d never see unless some privately educated wank at Channel 4 deemed it worthy enough for British consumption.
All that stuff is still here, of course… but it feels different today.
At first I think it must be a trick of the light.
Like the sun has pulled down an Instagram filter over the city, giving it bigger eyelashes and a tan.
But then it hits me in Le Face and I’m all like shit, maybe it’s me?
Maybe I’ve changed.
Maybe Paris, the two-thousand year old city that she is, has patiently been waiting for me to grow up and appreciate her.
See, I only recently moved to a big city myself.
The shock of the noise, the sting of the bad air and that crazy fucker on the corner over there picking a fight with a pigeon for Le French Fry, they just don’t cut like they used to.
After all, a midnight siren is just a lullaby in London.
Either I’ve grown up and learned to stop looking for the postcard view of the world, or Brexit has made me come over all nostalgic-like for a Europe I never really thought about until I was no longer a part of it…
Or it’s, y’know, the wine…
Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. I understand it was me, Paris, this whole time it was me, not you.
How about you let me buy you Le Drink to make up for it?
Maybe we can take a moonlit stroll down the Seine and maybe look for that accordion player and maybe he’ll just be there because maybe he actually does exist?
Because some clichés you just gotta embrace, non?
You think we actually use those red telephone boxes?
M.G
