so,qnystuff

I spent my last night in Paris at an exquisite open mic night in a hole in the ground. The place oughtn’t to have held fifty people but somehow it did. There was a compact, intense woman from New York playing flamenco ukulele, and a band that was sort-of Velvet Underground does Queen (and who wouldn’t pay to see that?). They even had their own Nico, with big flat vowels and one of those bowlcut-mullet hybrid dos that all the cool kids are wearing these days. There was also a French guy who couldn’t speak a sentence of English but who managed a creditable cover of Hotel Yorba.

Paris was crabby and out of sorts the day I left. The story, as best I can make it out, is: Parisians all leave Paris for the month of August. While they were away last summer, a massive heatwave killed a lot of neglected old people, and they weren’t discovered for weeks because everyone except the neglected old people was in St Tropez. So the government decided they needed lots of funds to help lonely old people, and planned to generate these funds by asking people to give up one of their scheduled public holidays. That is, everyone would work that day; and donate their pay to the aged. Some French people are behind the plan, but many of them are unimpressed—in a display of spectacular bad taste, one group of concerned citizens wrote to the UN claiming it was forced labour and a breach of the Humqn Rights convention. Anyway, Monday was the day in question, and nobody knew if they were on holiday or not, and shops were unexpectedly open or shut, or half-open and half-shut—at the post office a woman stood behind the couter all day telling people she couldn’t serve them. Bon. I bought a Bulgakov novella from Shakespeare’s, met Mac for a coffee and got the hell out of town.

The train journey crossed most of France and was luscious of course. The best bit was a strange, spindly mountain range about half way down, which I can’t identify on my map. An old student of mine met me at the train station in Narbonne. I used to tutor her in Business English, if you can imagine. In two years of high school commerce I never once balanced a budget, and I passed torts at uni with 51%, so we did a lot of designing interiors for department stores and ‘networking’ conversation skills. I’ve seen a little of Narbonne these last two days. There’s a gargoyle-riddled gothic cathedral and a pretty canal with L’Atalante barges. There’s also more bad architecture than I saw in the big cities, but it’s festively bad, in the way of small towns in warm places. It looks like a composite of a chi-chi watercolour of Languedoc and a Greetings from Sunny Kyama postcard. In short: adorable.

In other news, I got a hep shot for free. The doctor turned the syringe over in his hands as if he’d never seen one before, read the instruction leaflet at pensive length, and then drove the needle home. When I went to pay, he found my galaxy of credit and debit cards unacceptable and refused to let me go and withdraw cash. ‘C’est un cadeau,’ he said, and settled for a handshake.

I’ll have more photos up soon, and hopefully I’ll find a normal keyboard. Sorry if this entry doesn’t scan for shit; I know I shouldn’t let my writing implements get the better of me, but I’d rather go ten rounds with a mugwamp than deql zith this biwqrre qnd unfqtho,qble keyboqrd; see zhqt I hqve to put up zith?