It's true. Could she get hold of me? Could I make contact with her? Was she muttering as many imprecations/m2 as I was?
The mark of a true friendship is that you afford the other the same privileges, rights & ability to make random fuckups as you hope they're extending in your direction. Thus all is even - when she didn't turn up I reckoned I hadn't turned up either so we were both big girls & would wander off & do our own things til we got hungry & tired & would then meet at the hostel. Which is what happened.
In the meantime reread the bit about hunger, tiredness & an all too human need to wee turning humans towards home.
I have a theory that life is organised backwards & I had ample time to revisit this idea whilst trapped in the Paris Metro. It wasn't a good time for philosophy & there were no loos. My idea is Why should it be hardest at the start? By the time we were heading for the airport we were on familiar terms with the lady in the ticket office & could assure her truly avec some nonchalance that we were au fait, fine in fact, with how to work it. God is a git. And we're going to have to go back in order to use all this otherwise arcane knowledge.
There now follow some random images of Paris.
The one above is from a fruit & veg shop in le Marais whence emanates the Platonic Idea of strawberries. Arguably the best 5 bloody quid I ever spent in terms of sheer pleasure. The display also featured Veritable Asperge.
Don't French asparagus growers have a syndrome named after them?
This one on the right isn't very likely but then a lot of things aren't & at least these poor cows can't read.
Were you to take a step back from this bucolic image you would be off le trottoir & in the gutter, looking at a small photo in an amusing little shop somewhere in Clichy, round the back of the local Communist HQ
... ...& a garage with fabulous doors.
Clichy is not that big a blob on the tourist map apart from the fact that it has an auberge de jeunesse, whence flow fleets of busses full of screaming children with inordinately huge suitcases.
Don't French YHA people share their job title with eggplants?
Credit where it's due - which is the working caption of the photo below, of not only the architect's but also the entrepreneur's names on a building, spotted initially by la Grande Pamplemousse soi-meme & thereafter by us both all over the place.
Good on them.Some of Paris is quite posh & nearly all of it is named after war & battles & the Yanks that saved the place in WW2. When a full bladder is threatening its owner with incipient renal failure & the attendant grumpiness, this & the culpable lack of public loos strike one as about as absurd as London statues, which are mainly of seriously wild eyed men on fat arsed oats-fed horses. I think there's a case for statues of nearly anything else, to redress the balance; although the one in the Louvre does seem to be the Before part of a campaign for buttons, zips & velcro on outdoor clothing..
'Damn these blankets..'It did not escape our attention, having gazed in awe at the roller bladers outside, that most of the statues in the courtyard of the Louvre are also of men & that the only ones of women are those with their tits out, inadequately disguised as goddesses, presumably so men could legitimise looking at ladies with their kit at least partially off by claiming it was Art or Culture or summat their wives would think was OK.
Have you ever watched a dog secretly hiding a stolen bone, then nipped out, dug it up & reburied it, and observed the dog's strangulated attempts to appear casual when you ask it, sweetly, 'Everything alright dear? Have you lost something? You look stressed. Can I help?' Imagine the Mona Lisa ... Lol, comme on dit. We thought the Louvre was one big erection. You couldn't get round it in a day, that's for sure.
There was a fabulous piece of Modern Performance Art happening in one corner;
a street cleaning machine-like monster, with tentacles & grabbers apparently having a stand-off with a fish sliding down a lamp post. Like I say, stranger things have happened & it seemed about as likely as a king riding off to war clad only in blankets, on a horse with no reins & later being commemorated as having done so in bronze.
Didn't Neil Young write a song about the dangers of bolting straight through the pudding like this? 'I came through the dessert on a horse with no reins..' ? Maybe he just missed the silver. Heigh Ho ... away ... lucky, really.
'Mon Dieu,' thought Jill pensively, 'I think I'm getting a chip on my shoulder.'
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