I spent this Easter weekend with my darling in Paris.



I’ve been to Paris with my parents and with friends from work, both of which were fun, but this was my first time there with a love, and that was sweet. I have to admit, though, that it's a relief to be home, 'cause visiting with friends of Craig's, interacting with people in public, even going to a play involved a lot of French, and my French is caveman-bad. I felt so rude and inadequate.

Thank God Craig is so good with languages. He thought he was doing terribly, but he could actually understand people speaking at full speed with us and respond in kind. He's a wonder!

Of course, in my defence, I haven't studied French since school, and even then we were taught it in the most technical, non-practical way. The difference between conjugating verbs and speaking fluently is like the difference between looking at a veterinary textbook images of a dog’s innards and playing with a real dog. Plus I’ve been spending the intervening years since school learning to do lots of things other than speak French, and doing them fairly well, I feel, so it’s not like I’m an idiot.

But I felt like an idiot. A willful idiot.

Oh, and apparently there’s something wrong with the economy: the exchange on our British pounds to Euros was about 1:1. That meant dinner each night cost something like 30, 40, or even 50 quid. I’ve never paid that much for a meal in my life before, and I’ve had some pretty good meals. So this trip was one of those times when you have to just suck up a deep breath and figure it’ll all work out in the end.

I made a book for the trip, which we filled out with all the various things we did and saw, and made a note of the people we visited with.



That’ll suffice as our chronicle, and I’ve posted pictures on Facebook. It’s of no use to list all of what we did here, ‘cause there’s something about “We went to Paris” that sounds insufferable. Even worse is throwing out place-names with casual familiarity, but for me to do that would be a lie: By the end, my tongue was tripping on every word like its shoelaces were tied together. This was not my place nor my language, just a nice escape for a weekend.

On our last night, we ate take-away food on the banks of the Seine near Notre Dame, then had a long walk that ended with us looking up at the Eiffel Tower from underneath (struggling to avoid the endless crap-merchants with their lit-up whirligigs and Tour-Eiffel keychains), then we crossed over to Trocadéro to look back at it all. I found a picture that shows the view; we stood in the spot where this guy, his pretty boyfriend, and his chauffeur are standing.


Then, as we got on the Métro to go home, I realised I’d lost a little patch of my peripheral vision: A migraine was on its way. I hadn’t had one in a long time and was glad of it, but sure enough, I had one in a few hours. It felt like my head was a gun and my right eye was the bullet, suspended at the point of impact throughout the night. I was well cared-for, though, so by the time we headed out for our flight yesterday, I just had that bruisey old feeling in my skull.

I used to be unsympathetic about migraines, thinking of them as hypochondriacal excuses, but now that I’ve experienced several through the years, I have great empathy for people who suffer with them, and don’t know how they manage.

And I finally got to the Louvre. On our first try, we lined up with a majillion other people: it was the first Sunday of the month, when it’s free to get in. A museum official held up a card saying the wait from that point in the line was four hours, so we left and came back the next day, and got in right away.

We did a whistlestop tour of the place, and I kept thinking of my parents: They joke about our tendency to visit places and just walk around, taking in the street-level life of them but missing the headline tourist sights you’re supposed to see. (While travelling to and from Paris this time, I read about psychogeography and the image of the wandering flâneur, which resonated with the members of my family seem to enjoy travelling most.)


But walking around the museum for several hours, I felt fairly disconnected from the things I saw. All the cherubs and overly flattering portraits, the melodramatically posed mythical figures... These classical commissions to the unimaginably wealthy left me cold. I was more interested in the live people sitting with pensive expressions on their faces or clambering for whatever reason to record their interaction with these iconic pieces of art. I guess I’m not a classical art guy; I remember the Musée d’Orsay feeling much more alive.

~

So now I’m back, sitting in the coffeeshop, wearing my red trainers instead of my big boots, which were torturing my feet by the end of the weekend. (What are heels for — especially when you’re already a tall man? It’s like wearing a block of wood on the back of your feet, and gets horribly uncomfortable pretty quickly on a long trip.)

I just had a great chat with one of the nice staff-members here. She’s studying architecture, here from the States with her husband. I love that moment of spark that happens in a conversation with other creative folk, when you both get all lit up because you’re inspired by something the other says or because you can relate to their journey.

The talk started with her asking about the move. This is what’s next: figuring out how to move my stuff. Then I can think about our trip to Turkey later this month. Then the move itself.

It’s a busy time. But good.

I was asked at short notice to do a reading yesterday for an arts fair called Hidden Door — a maze-like, multi-floor affair that was pretty darned cool. I decided to read from Finitude, since that's the thing I figure I should still be actively promoting.
I didn't want to just drone away, though, reading a teaser from my book then asking people to buy it. So I decided to make a game of it.
In one section of the book, the characters are faced with something called "Last Flights Day": The International Climate Coalition Government has declared that air travel is too damaging to the environment (which, in the book's world, is already very precarious) and that a particular day will be the last opportunity for long-distance travel. On Last Flights Day, you have to choose: Where will you go, once and for all?
I handed out fake airline tickets I'd made, each stamped with a unique number, and asked the audience members to tell me where they'd choose to go and why, and I did a draw later, giving out a blank book I'd made and a copy of Finitude.

The whole thing became a lot more fun — on both sides, I think, as the audience was personally engaged with the central idea in the chapter I was about to read, plus we were playing back and forth, dismantling some of that "I am up here and you are listening to me" hierarchy.
People's responses surprised me: I thought they're be about family, but a lot of them were about place, where they'd want to spend the rest of their days.
Here's what they said:
#591088: New Zealand
Because you can only sensibly get there by flying; although apparently when you get there it looks just like Scotland and the weather's just as bad.
#591080: France
To live happily ever after in a château.
#591081: London
To find myself and make the films I love.
#591089: Moscow
To walk home through a tropical North Europe.
#591085: Boulder, Colorado
It is beautiful, liberal, and has great summers + winters.
#591086: Sydney
Then I'd be home, & to be stuck there would be 'no bad thing'.
#591091: Home
It's where I want to be and stay.
#591098: Australia
Fun & sun & surfing.
#591094: Sedona, Arizona
Sitting on top of a red rock mountain — place I was totally content. Could go every day!
#591092: Abu Dhabi
My birthplace, which I have no memory of. To see an oil state, post-oil. To race my girlfriend back to Scotland on foot.
#591100: New Zealand
To be present to people and place. To learn to love.
#591093: Wick
To be with my beloved in our nest. [Hmm. Who was that now?]
I should create some kind of open bulletin board, 'cause I'd love to read lots more of these! Feel free to send me your Last Flights Day destination.

A little something I did at my folks' kitchen table at the thought of another trans-Atlantic flight. (Click to enlarge.)