Chapter 2 Paris
I always wake before everyone else and have got very used to creeping about the gaff, any gaff, while others are still sleeping.
This morning I can’t help but notice the empty bottle of Diplomatico sitting on the table. I don’t need to ask “where’s all the rum gone?” The pain in my skull provides all the evidence I need. My mind flashes back to a largely fun night of drinking in the apartment and then a cool bar in the 3rd arrondissement. Two incidents stand out.
In the first I’m suddenly on my knees in the Place de la Republic crying. Somehow I’ve managed to hit the mental brakes and taken myself from happy to sad instantly. I lived round the corner from Republic in the 90s with my, then, tiny children and my drunken mind had become set on revisiting those streets. The poem1 of the square’s re-designer’s namesake comes to mind as I realise I’m looking for some “happy highways where I went and cannot come again” but that by itself was not enough to pour “into my heart an air that kills”. All the stresses of the past few days caught up with me in that one brief moment. Luckily good friends were there to pick me up and cheer me up.
The second incident occurs later, when returning to our hosts flat, having previously been warned that his flatmate might not acknowledge our presence, I am pleased to catch said flatmate’s eye as we drunkenly stumble in. Later I poured the last of the, by now completely unnecessary, rum into 4 shot glasses, instead of 3, leaving one by the flat mate who is busily focussed on his monitor. This morning the glass is empty. Sometimes the little interactions are all you need.
Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
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The squares redesigner was Baron Haussmann. The poet is A. E. Housman. The poem is “A Shropshire Lad” and the releven verses are shown above.↩