We could die this weekend - let's use all the cheese

Published on Tue 29 Apr 2008

Sod it, I'm moving to Paris. Obviously I'm not, because I never actually do anything, but I just had a really nice weekend there visiting Jason. More of that later, but first the news you've all been waiting for - my CDs came! 1065 of them! They take up more room than you would think. Or maybe it's as much room as you would think. Either way it's a lot of room. For various reasons I'm not going to release it "officially" (whatever that even means) until the autumn now but I have them at least. I'm really, really pleased with the way they look. I've been too scared to listen to one, but I've been told from a few sources that they sound ok.

So, yeah, Paris. I left on Friday morning, somewhat confused to find that someone had come all the way into my (reasonably big) front garden, presumably at some point the previous night, to leave a Leffe glass delicately balanced on my windowsill.

As I continued towards the gate I noticed another one in the flowerbed.

Does this stuff happen to everyone or do I happen to be round about drinking up time away from a poncy bar? I got to London in plenty of time and stopped off for brunch at McDonalds, hoping to get some more Monopoly cards, but the Kings Cross ones have run out. I'll have to find a new hobby I guess. I'd not been on the Channel Tunnel on one of the passenger trains before (only on a car one) and I've got to say I was impressed - it's really smoooth and hardly takes any time at all. It's pretty convenient that they go from St Pancras too, because it means if you're coming from Cambridge you don't even need toget the tube. The plan was to meet Jason (who's staying in Paris for a while) at Gare du Nord. I was a little concerned because he's not got a phone, so if it had gone wrong then I'd have been a bit stuck, though I reckon I could've found somewhere to stay by waving my arms and going "'otel? 'otel?". I have an odd relationship with the French language - I know loads and loads of words, but I'm completely incapable of actually saying them. It works both ways though - I remember when I was doing my PhD there was a French guy in the lab who could only understand what I said in English if I put on a ludicrous 'Allo 'Allo style accent. Anyway, Jason found me fine, and I found, to my surprise, 100 Euros that had been sitting in my wallet since I was in Munich last year. I obviously did an overenthusiastic cash machine run very late on.

We went for a quick couple of beers in an Irish pub (it was happy hour, so they were only really, really expensive) then back to his apartment. The building it's in is brilliant - the paint is coming off the walls all the way up the bare wooden stairs, and there are loads of wires showing.

Apartments in Paris seem to be pretty small but there's something really romantic about living in a tiny place on the 5th floor of a run down building. I might not think that if I was doing it I suppose.

After dropping off my stuff and recovering from the stairs we went to Séverine's for dinner on the way to a gig. She has the best bonsai tree I've ever seen. I said I wouldn't put the picture I took of it up here, so I won't, but it is a thing of great beauty. Looks kind of like a chicken with leaves. We had pasta with feta and garlic and then went off to see this guy playing songs in a very thin pub on the bank of the river. He was good, and had a more convincingly English singing voice than a lot of English people do. To be honest, things get a bit hazy fairly soon in, but I'm pretty sure I had a grat time, and the evening ended with me and Jason being driven round Paris in a taxi at 3am on a (successful) quest for kebabs.

We were both suffering slightly the next morning, but the coffee was good and we were right as rain soon. The plumbing in the apartment is interesting. The kitchen sink, bathroom sink, toilet and shower are all connected together (and, crucially, the shower is higher than the toilet). This means that if things go slightly awry and you have a shower while the system isn't quite draining properly, the shower slowly empties itself into the toilet, which then overflows onto the floor. You think you're being clever by bailing it out into the sink, but that just drains straight into the toilet again. It turns out. If you're ever in this situation, what you have to do is put the plug in the kitchen sink, bail the toilet out into that, flush the toilet a few times until the water drains from the shower, then disinfect everything. I should imagine.

When the panic was over, there was a bit of a wait for the Metro, so I took a picture of Jason looking brooding and artistic.

And he took one of me looking fat and ugly.

Which was to become a bit of a theme throughout the weekend.

This all meant that we were kind of late meeting Séverine for a day's sight-seeing, but we did eventually, and went to St Sulpice, which features in The Da Vinci Code (it's the one with the "Rose Line" running across it, though the line offends me slightly by not being completely flush with the orientation of the church).

There's a fairly weird sculpture in there too.

For some reason there was a Finnish Festival on the square outside. After that we went to get Krystèle (Jason's girlfriend) who lives near the Pantheon

and went to Notre Dame.

It was about then that I started going a bit crazy with the camera. I've ended up with 170 odd pictures from the weekend. I'm going to put the less bad ones on Flickr, but it's "upgrade to pro account" function is buggered (Yahoo! Really! Are! Crap! At! Everything!), so a lot of them will have to wait until that starts working. Anyway, I kept spotting things that I thought would make funny depressing album covers, and here is the first.

I find it difficult to judge the bigness of buildings once you get past really big, but Notre Dame is really big. Looking round really big churches is one of my favourite things to do I think.

For the rest of the afternoon we walked around the city taking things in, mostly near the river at first, then through the gardens by The Louvre. A picture paints 1000 words etc etc:

I know it's not the same shop and is just a tourist thing, but I'm a big Hemingway fan, so still think it's pretty cool

How many flying buttresses does a single church need?

It was good inside - they had a cartoony model of a fruit market, and a crazy organ whose console had 5 manuals and was on wheels so they could put it anywhere

I'm pretty sure this tunnel featured a few times in the classic era of the Highlander TV series when Duncan was living on a barge on the Seine

Here's the second of my suggested album covers

I know I've used the word already, but the city feels so romantic. In the hugely unlikely event that I ever manage to find a girlfriend again, it has to be pretty high on the list of good places to go together.

There's a bit of modern art just by the Place de la Concorde  that's two great big bits of brown metal. Lots of people had put their footprints on it, so I joined them. That was wrong though we got told after. Dunno what it all means.

After making it most of the way up the Champs Elysee we got some pizzas and wine and went to Stephanie's house to eat, drink, listen to music, and take blurry pictures. Here's Séverine:

And Stephanie and Jason

Right I've wittered on for long enough for today, and run out of space on Flickr for this month. Here are a few things that I noticed about Paris that made me smile.

• They have to have poles along the edge of the pavements to stop people driving on them.
• At any given time about 30% of streets have a torrent of water flowing along the gutter, even, it seems, on sunny days. I'm not sure where it starts and ends or if it's all the same torrent or multiple ones.
• Nobody can see anything funny in the phrase "Crousty Vap"