Wish We Were Here: Paris
I’m getting on and I’ve been around a bit – though not recently, more’s the pity. People sometimes say to me, would you not like to go back to Rio, or up the Amazon again, or to India or Australia. What about America, where I lived for 14 years, or Amsterdam, or Brussels, or Tel Aviv? Or Belfast where I grew up, or Dublin where I started work, or London, where I spent 19 years and where my son lives with his family?
All these have a claim on my memory. John Lennon wasn’t wrong about places and events, which can co-exist in the mind in odd ways, so that I flit from eating a bratwurst in the marketplace in Bonn to watching a monk lift my son into his arms in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; to smiling as a posh friend of mine puts on his Eton tie before interviewing a provincial police officer in the Brazilian jungle.
Family and friends and loved ones: these are the ones I’d like to see again, in the places where they lived their lives or shared theirs with mine. But I can always do that in my head, whether lying in bed or while cutting the hedges in our garden here in Brittany.
As to actual change, I’d like to be sitting outside a brasserie in Paris on a quiet day in early September with my wife Louisa and our family, enjoying a glass of wine or a cup of coffee with croissants, watching the waiters in their black waistcoats and white aprons as they glide from table to table. I’d have a copy of Le Figaro on my lap that I’d been meaning to read. Eden – that’s my grandson – would be laughing and calling me Old Grandpa (to distinguish me from the other, younger version). Then Louisa, who’s American, would suddenly announce that we were lazy Brits and we should go for a walk along the Seine before finding somewhere decent, but not too expensive, to have lunch – a real steak-frites, with charred beef and chips as thin as matchwood.
Speed the day!
Things to do:
Parisian-spot in the Parc Monceau
Just off the Boulevard Courcelles (Metro line 2, stop Monceau), you will find the Parc Monceau. Filled with superb trees, manicured lawns, real Parisians showing off and enclosed by the most fantastic, gilded gates giving onto the Avenue Van Dyck. It is far better than the Luxembourg Gardens and just a 15-minute walk to the Arc de Triomphe.
Venture down the Rue de la Gaité
This is one of the everyday joys of Paris, especially at night, when its bars and restaurants, as well as its alternative theatre, explode into life. All ages and types co-mingle here. It is handy for Montparnasse cemetery, where after paying homage at the tomb of Serge Gainsbourg, you can see where, bizarrely, the executed Vichy leader Pierre Laval finds himself resting next door to the shades of several of his Jewish fellow countrymen.
Discover the historic Hotel de Clermont
North of the Rue Lepic, with its array of specialist food shops, are all sorts of wonders, including Montmartre. A little way along the dingy Rue Véron, one street down from the Rue des Abbesses, is the Hotel de Clermont, housing one of Paris’s few remaining spit and sawdust bars. This is where you would have gone for a snort of absinthe in Degas’s day.
