non, je ne comprendre rien--and I can't spell either

Oh, man, I live for my blog comments! Poets all, my lovely buddies. Some announcements:
1) Love youse all
2) My new email is (removed for privacy reasons, sorry. -ed.) but I'll keep checking the old 'un for a while yet
3) My UK mobile doesn't work here; I am sans mobile for now (that was French, right there)

And now I'm in Paris. I am staying at a lovely hostel called Mije in the Marais district. I emerged from the metro onto an oversized traffic island supporting a carousel, some trees with twittering birds and a magazine stand. I bought gum and asked the shop guy Est-ce que je peux prendre un taxi ici? and was very proud of myself. He replied, blah blah blagh emphatic gestures something something beaucoup, which neatly demonstrated the limitations of my French, and then I turned around and saw the taxi stand.

The cab driver was very angry because he didn’t know the street I wanted to go to, and then he yelled a lot through his window at another cab driver, including many improper suggestions and cuss words I was pleased to recognize, while I found the street in his street directory (presumably he keeps one around for ornamental value, or good luck). Then he was very angry again because the street was ten or fifteen metres away, but subsided into crabby magnanimity after a few repetitions of je suis desolee, vraiment, which probably isn’t even a sentence. It was a tremendously enlivening introduction to Paris. Then Macgregor, my Sydney expat mate, cooked me a yummy omelette and took me to see on a surprise mission—the best possible thing for one’s first night in a city—to see the Eiffel Tower at night. It really was romantic and gorgeous and, you know, big. It was decorated with huge candles, for the feast of the ascension, or the assumption, or whatever it was yesterday. I thought it looked like a glamorous oil rig—or, as Mac put it, “Oilrig: the musical”.

Yesterday I walked around with a girl from Boston called Lisa, who is also twenty-five and traveling alone. We went to Shakespeare’s books but got there too early, so instead ogled the façade of Notre Dame and wondered about the lobster that was among the religious symbols carved into the left hand door frame. Theologians? What’s with that? First credible answer wins an all I got was this lousy t-shirt t-shirt. Then we walked to Montmartre and ate quiche and patted people’s dogs and asked directions a lot. Then we found Sacre Coeur, as one does if one walks around in Montmartre, and it was beautiful. The mosaics inside are like none I’ve ever seen, in books or anywhere. I don’t know anything about Sacre Coeur, but I gather it was built quite recently, or at least the mosaics were done recently—late nineteenth, I think. They were so luscious and expressive. My favourite was the dome above the altar. It has a big Jesus, blessing with arms outstretched a crowd of saints and other figures. He curves to fit the inside of the dome, and with his calm, blissed-out face and his forward tilt, he looks ready to launch into some crowd-surfing among the congregation—and he resembles you a bit too, Nick.

I’m not sure what I’m going to see in Paris. I don’t feel very attracted to the art museums right now. I like Kerry’s suggestion of going to see where Colette lived—and, why not, Hemingway and Miller and Nin and Pound and Eliot and so on. And I might go and see the street where Modigliani used to live, which is also the street where Godard shot the last scene of A bout de soufflé.

Hello to all you beautiful Londoners, including the ones who didn’t make it into the blog. Thanks for being troupers and farewelling me on a school night. I’ll be back to visit. I know I’ll meet lots of nice people in my travels, but they won’t be you.

Had a fantastic last week in England. Pete and Lily played their first “real” gig, if you don’t count the open mic where they were also great. The open mic was held in the upstairs room of a pub, while Chelsea played Liverpool on the big TVs downstairs. Every now and then a sulky poet would be interrupted halfway through some tortured jeremiad with bird-of-prey metaphors, as the crowd below rumbled out that most soccer of sounds—the noises of building anticipation, and then the collective groan as the ball misses the goal. Anyway, the proper gig was in a red room underground in Islington, and they played wonderfully, and I had to drink a lot to calm their nerves. Even after they’d finished. I also went to see The Lion King with my sister Jenn, to celebrate her birthday. It was exotic, dazzling and spectacular, in the fullest Barthesian sense. The puppetty costumey things were cool.

And of course I went to Bath, and claimed I’d write about it later. Well—the symmetry of it defied my sketching hand. I can do jumbles of chimney pots and listing Jacobean hovels with humorous signs out the front, but those perfect, sweeping crescents slid out of my grip. I went to a museum at the end of the Royal Crescent, which was a fully restored Georgian interior. As with the exteriors of such buildings, every line was placed in such a way that I couldn’t imagine it being put anywhere else. Words like “gracious” and “dignified” arise inevitably in the mind. I think I understood Plato’s ideal forms better in Bath than ever before. And as a writer’s pilgrimage it was surprising un-naff. It was illuminating to see the spaces that Jane Austen’s characters poured tea in, and promenaded and danced and embroidered in. It seems utterly scandalous that anyone could be surrounded by such an aesthetic of calm restraint and still behave like a Mr Wickham or a Mrs Elton.

Lasting memories of London: the clocks chiming out their truncated tunes on the quarter hours, like an absent-minded friends who forgets to finish their sentences; public toilets with a few gold sequins on the floor and ashtrays fixed to the cubicle walls; a band with its own dancer, Happy Mondays-style, who wore an outfit made of rubber gloves; the gorgeous, gorgeous Londoners I met through Lily… stay in touch.