Mr. David goes to Paris.

Perhaps the most chilling prediction which was made when they were building the Channel Tunnel was not that it might collapse and sweep thousands of daytrippers to a watery doom, but instead that if we built a tunnel to France then sooner or later the French were bound to notice it and want to use it to come here. However, we seem to have successfully kept it pretty quiet so far and so I decided to make use of it the other weekend and sneak to Paris.
People have often eulogised Paris to me. “David”, they say to me. “You should go. It is the capital of culture and romance.” I haven’t a clue why people think this description might attract me. Maybe they don’t know me very well. People who do know me well ask me a question instead. “David”, they ask. “Why would you go to France? Rumour has it that it is full of French people”. True enough, I reply, but at least by going there I dilute the concentration for a while. And anyway, despite people thinking me insular I’ve actually spent a lot of time trying to get into France. I mean, it must have taken me at least two or three hours just to get up Omaha Beach on Medal of Honour.

Still, I’m always open to trying new things and the first new thing I did on Saturday morning was get up at 5am in order to get to the station on time. Having now tried it, I can confidently report that as new things go getting up at 5am utterly sucks. I hopped blearily staggered into a cab and shortly after was decanted out into a drizzly dawn at St Pancras where I picked up my tickets for the Eurostar and headed for a replica French Boulangerie on the concourse for a pick-me-up where I queued for more than twenty minutes for a coffee.
“Well”, I observed to the man standing next to me in the queue as we both stared at the surly assistant who appeared to be on go-slow. “At least they’ve got the French service right”.
In return he fixed me with a look of gallic loathing before unleashing a stream of Francophone outrage to his companion. Mortified, my toes curled up so much that my feet halved in length. After queuing for a further fifteen minutes I finally got my coffee and made my way to Passport control, where I was informed that I wasn’t allowed to take liquids any further and I’d have to put my drink in the bin.

As an experience, the Eurostar to Paris is actually remarkably painless. You get on the train, buzz along for a while, go through a tunnel or two, and eventually end up in a country where everyone talks a foreign language. It’s like going to Cardiff, only quicker. Being as I’m from Yorkshire and my knowledge of geography comes from my dad’s 1932 edition The Empire Book for Boys, I was raised to believe that the jungle begins at Calais (or maybe Watford. Possibly even Chesterfield) so as the train shot out of the tunnel on the far side of the channel I was half expecting to see leafy rainforest greenery, the scampering fauna of the veldt, and maybe groups of hungry-looking Frenchmen hanging around cooking pots. As it was the countryside looked almost exactly like, say, Kent, and the only hungry-looking people hanging about appeared to come from Romania, Bulgaria, or maybe one of the other countries named after the Wombles.
Anyway, I arrived at Gare du Nord without further incident and found myself in France with nothing but a cheerful demeanor, a handful of Euros, and a willingness to make jokes about absolutely anything to get me through.

The first thing the traveller needs to know about continental Europe is that things like traffic lights and zebra crossings are more of a guideline than a rule. You get the idea fairly quickly when you realise that the red man and the green man aren’t pictured as standing and walking, but praying and sprinting. Once you’ve got that figured out, you’ll be fine. Failing that there’s always the Paris Metro, which is reminiscent of the Clockwork Orange in Glasgow, or maybe Squirrel Nutty’s ride at Alton Towers.
However you choose to get around, though, you’re actually in for something of a treat because provided you aren’t squashed flat by an uncaring driver it turns out that Paris is crammed to the gills with frankly spectacular stuff to see and do.

Being a tourist the first place I went was Notre Dame, which is actually a lot smaller than I expected and, frankly, a bit of a disappointment. Although I’m aware that it is a masterpiece of early Gothic and the work is remarkable, it is also a bit titchy and crammed with tourists. On the plus side, you don’t have to pay to get in. On the minus side, St Pauls is worth the entry fee. I was in and out in under twenty minutes which left me feeling a bit cheated. As a result I just took off into the streets to find something else and was amply rewarded with first the church of St Severin and then the Musee Carnavalet, both of which are much more deserving of your time.
St Severin is a delightful church reminiscent of St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London, built of a clean white stone and decorated with a small amount of impressively worked trompe l’oiel and as empty of gabbling tourists as Notre Dame was filled with them. A cool, airy edifice, it has a quiet majesty for all its relative smallness and I sat for some time taking in the atmosphere. It was lovely. If I go back to Paris, I’ll go back there.
The Musee Carnavalet, a few streets away, is a museum of the city of Paris built into the former town residence of some noble who was on the receiving end of the tumbrill treatment in 1789 and, once again, it was entirely lovely. Exhibits range from portraits of Catherine de Medici (who it turns out looked uncannily like Nursey out of Blackadder) and Henri IV to a recreation of Marcel Proust’s bedroom (which you can just tell didn’t see much action) to some quite fantastic painted rooms where I made decor notes for Stately David Manor. It was a charming little museum of the sort you find in the back streets of imperial cities, and so wasn’t crammed with tourists. Instead it felt more like a place where the locals went to learn about their own history, and was the nicer for it. At the other end of that scale is the Louvre, which squats in the itinerary of any visitor to Paris. You have to go, but the place is so damn whopping that it’s offputting as well. I decided to put it off until Sunday.

The day was wearing on so the she-David and I retired to our hotel (she’d booked the accommodation which normally means we end up sleeping under a bridge, but this time she hadn’t done too badly), got changed, went for dinner, took a stroll to Sacre Coeur for the view over the city, and went to bed. I’d got up at 5am. I was tired.

***

If it’s Sunday, it must be the Louvre.
I woke up late. Later, perhaps, than someone who only has one day to get through the Louvre ought, and so after a hasty breakfast of crepes and waffles and ice-cream and a couple of coffees and a chocolate or two we set off at a brisk stroll though a grey and drizzly Parisian morning to what used to be the city pad of the French Kings.
The Louvre makes it pretty clear that it must have been absolutely fantastic being an absolute monarch right up until that head-cutting-off business. If you ask me it’s a bit overly restrained and could have done with a bit more ostentation, but I later learned they more than make up for that at Versailles. Still, as palaces go I suppose the Louvre made do as somewhere for Louis XIV to take the girls he picked up at the Moulin Rouge. Joking aside, the place is massive and it’s pretty much impossible – in fact, it’s utterly impossible – to see everything in it after a large breakfast with only five hours until your train goes, so I didn’t try. Instead I made a beeline for the big-ticket exhibits like the Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa* which were surrounded by tourists some twenty deep in places. After making sure I’d seen ‘em I went off to the Egyptology and Ancient world sections which were much less crowded with people and all the more pleasurable for it. In passing I went through several rooms full of portraiture where I noticed, apropos of nothing, that Catherine de Medici really, really looked like nursey out of Blackadder.

I had been hoping that the crowds would thin out in the afternoon, as it’s well known that in many Euorpean countries there’s a time after lunch when people knock off and go home for a sleep and a drink – in Spain they call it the siesta, in France they call it Industrial Action – but it wasn’t to be. Instead it just got more and more crowded until the crush of people became oppressive and I had to stop looking at exhibits and go for a stiff drink instead.

And that was about it for me in Paris. The strangest thing about it perhaps was the feeling of being able to get onto a train and arrive in another country entirely – I’m so used to doing my international travel by air that the culture shock was a little greater for it and I felt strangely out of place in a way I don’t normally do when I’m abroad. Perhaps the nicest thing was that all the tales on unfriendly French people objecting at British inability to speak their language turned out to be pretty much false. Thanks to me being taught French for five years in a rather sorry comprehensive school my command of French is pretty much limited to asking people where the station is and whether it will rain on Wednesday, which – shock news to educational experts everywhere – is no use whatsoever. However, whenever I attempted to make myself understood in their language, the French plainly found it charmingly comic and we all had a good laugh at my inability to ask useful things like where the toilet is and whether I could have some butter (sometimes in the same sentence).

So, yeah. Gay Paree. I’d probably go back.

^{*Note: Nobody except me found it funny when I walked up to the Mona Lisa with my camera out and saying loudly “Come on love, give us a smile” .}