fluctuat nec mergitur

Je suis content maintenant, donc je peux faire mon blog. Everyone is forever getting it on in this city. It really is all passionate embraces on bridges and street corners and in crowded restaurants and in the queue at the ticket office for long-distance trains. The museums offer no escape--even the statues are in eternal pash-offs. It's not a good place to be love-lorn. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed myself, especially the last couple of days.

These are some of the things I've seen: the coffin of Paris' patron, Sainte Genevieve, in a glass case into which someone had insinuated a little hand-written note (all I could decipher of it was donner-moi, which is the way of it for dead saints, I guess) and a seperate little casket for her finger--under what circumstances it was detached, I don't know. Another lobster, at the Musée Picasso, in the hand of a little boy in a painting. Many streets of gorgeous shops. All the waifs of Shakespeare's Books returning like a flock of sparrows to the shop at a quarter to midnight in a flurry of flirtation, socialist blague and tweed coats. One million ads for creme minceur--apparently a normal woman rubs this gunk into her thighs and becomes sixteen, stick-thin and decidedly photoshopped. Beaucoup de places that Hemingway lived, wrote, drank and inspected F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis. The apartment where Joyce edited Ulysses (this required some satisfying naughtiness, ducking into a key-operated gate just behind a resident, only to spend some anxious minutes working out how to get out again). Chateau de Fontainbleau, where Napoleon abdicated and where I was extravagantly sad in the garden watching all the promenading couples--it was all very Last Year at Marienbad. Many nice bars. A fantastic bookfair of small publishers, with gems like famous letters of history printed looseleaf and sold seperately in envelopes and little books of quirky cartoons--I was admiring one book, an illustration of Sinbad's adventures without any text, and the girl behind the counter told me the artist was the guy sitting at the bar. And, randomly enough, many people who look like Nick Tapper or Tegan Bennett. Are you two following me around?

I've met lots of nice people at the Mije hostel. My favourite is the hilarious Brazilian girl I walked around with this morning. She spoke no English, only Portuguese and French, and given that I can still enquire after a hairdryer by saying "Is there a hot wind for the horse inside this eggplant?" you can imagine the time we had. Still, we compared the women of Switzerland, France, Australia and Brazil, decided that the French need less creme minceur and more raw food in their diet, bought umbrellas, fruit and phone cards while she complained about her lazy friends in Paris who wouldn't collect her in their cars, and I bragged about mon chou, le plus résolu et intelligent metteur en scene. Not a bad effort.

Like everything in Paris, this post is costing me a big shiny stack of euros, so I'll go soon. Keep posting comments, you guys are great. I had a funny experience while I was backpack-pruning this morning. You know that scene at the end of Labyrinth where all the puppets turn up in Sarah's bedroom mirror and then they all have a little reunion? I hope you do. Anyway, it was like all of your faces flashed through my mind's eye in a slideshow of appreciation. I wasn't even homesick or anything. I leave for the south of France on Monday, where an ex-student of mine is full-on organising a week of amusement for me. I hope to meet up with Matt Douglas (of MHS fame) in Spain after that. I have a mobile number for France now: 0675 313 012.

Cést tout pour ce moment. Get back to work.