A kindly Parisian explained to us that we didn’t need to put any more Euros in the parking ticket machine for our camper van by the Gare du Nord last night.He explained that the machine said that you should, but in actuality nobody would come round and check again until Monday.
This was handy information, for which we were very grateful, and which confirmed my opinion that Parisians are an ace race of people. We watched them all hurtling along the Paris roads, at the same time texting and chatting on the phone and kissing one another and shouting abuse at everybody else, and I liked them enormously. We were amazed that there were so many of them, actually, because crossing the road is a bit like being a machine gunner at the WW1 front line, with an average life expectancy of about three weeks, it must serve as a sort of natural cull of the incompetent.
We had Chinese rice for dinner, and Pineau, which is a sort of French compromise between wine and brandy, and which we like very much, and then settled down to sleep amid the noise of the trains and the sirens, which I thought was wonderfully comforting, how marvellous to be right in the middle of one of the most exciting cities on the planet.
In the end I slept utterly soundly, like a small child in the days when desperate parents used to give them laudanum, the passing of which I greatly regretted when mine were little, and we woke up at about nine o’ clock to discover that Parisians are not early risers, and the city was peaceful, if astonishingly messy. We bought some milk because we needed it, and some joss sticks, because they smelled nice, from an Indian shop on the roadside next to the camper, which had an enormous friendly ginger cat curled up on the top of a sack of rice next to the counter, and set off into Paris.
We caught the Metro despite terrifying incident, to Oliver’s relief, and then got on a Batobus from Notre Dame to La Tour. We walked a way down the banks of the Seine, looking at the art work. This made us feel a bit provincial, because it included a pile of broken computers and some pictures of naked transvestites, ie, with their makeup and hair done but nothing else except one or two surprising piercings,and which took some explaining to Oliver. Then we wandered along for a while deciding which boat we would buy in our other life when we go and live in a barge, and then stood in a long queue to go up to Le Sommet.
The queueing was hard work, because only the English and the Germans were doing it. The French were pretending not to notice it, the Arabs actually didn’t notice it, and the Chinese stood in a bemused huddle at the end, where presumably they still are, and a blonde American lady with a facelift spent the whole time trying to be near as many people as possible so that she could talk loudly about being flown over in her company’s private jet, which made us laugh. We had lunch in the queue, which was a baguette and a mysterious pizza, whose topping turned out to be broccoli, much to Oliver’s vocal revulsion. He wisely chose a bag of popcorn for his lunch, which we all helped him to finish off once the broccoli had vanished. He was not pleased at the unfairness of this, and tried his best to eat the rest unobserved, whilst entirely zipped underneath his jersey, which was ultimately unsuccessful and a bit sticky.
The Tower, however, was splendid. Tall. You go up for a long way. It is scary at the top. You realise that Paris covers almost all of France, because it is all that there is, from horizon to horizon. We all had a glass of champagne at the top, except Oliver who thought it was revolting, but we thought we deserved it by then.
We were tempted to buy a small model of the tower made out of gold painted tin, which I liked, but they were ten Euros and Mark was already remarking that the pickpockets they were telling you to be cautious about were not in the queue but in the ticket office, and then suddenly we were quite, quite exhausted, and walked down from the second floor and caught a bateau and a train back again.
We collapsed into the camper van and headed away from Paris, that is, headed away in a confused round and round in circles sort of manner which is what happens when you follow French road signs, and is probably why there are so many people in Paris, because so many of them have just given up trying to find the way out and settled down there for ever.
We are in the car park for our visit to Mickey Mouse tomorrow, and Oliver is beside himself with the excitement of it. We have just had a phone call informing us that Number One Daughter won her competition at the weekend and is now officially the fittest woman in Europe. We were very pleased about this, and had some celebratory wine, on her behalf.
It has been a very splendid sort of day: and there is another one to come tomorrow.
Holidays are ace.
