A trip to Paris

The Lapin Agile - a long-ago night spot, now looking very tiny

We went away to celebrate our 30th Wedding anniversary. To Paris! We stayed in Montmartre behind the Sacre Coeur, so on our first day we climbed up the hilly streets behind our hotel and approached the lovely white church. I had intended to go to Mass there because it was Palm Sunday but there was a massive queue to go in and we never did. We just admired the view, and went down the hill on the other side and up again. There were masses of people for whom a sunny Sunday is wasted if you don't spend it on Montmartre admiring the view. They take picnics and rugs. We walked a lot that day. It was a shame we didn't have a guide to the streets because I have read Gertrude Stein on the great days of Paris and I would have loved to see where all her arty friends had their ataliers and their adventures. I came home and couldn't find my copy of "The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. But ah! now I have found it.

Outside the Sacre Coeur, with the view from Montmartre

The next day we were going to go to the Musee d'Orsay but that was closed, and we were going to go to the Louvre but the queues were so long we couldn't bear it, and so we went to the Pompidou Centre. There was a queue but we found it was to be searched. We found the same thing on Eurostar. There are very long queues but these are to be frisked and have your bag searched. The fourth floor was closed but that was OK because we spent a very long time on the fifth floor. We had an interesting time.

Inside the Pompidou Centre

 The next day I was completely resigned to the fact that we would have to queue to get into the Musee d'Orsay and it did take an hour of queueing and I generated a lot of hate for queue jumpers, which was uncomfortable. However, when we got our bearings and started to look around I really enjoyed it. We started with the impressionists and I was bowled over to see so many really important and such beautiful paintings, but having finished that we went to see the symbolists and I enjoyed them too, because they were trying to say something. I think we spent the whole day at the musee, apart from dinner.



This picture is by Degas. It is so tempting to think it's by Toulouse Lautrec.

I think the next day we did  the Galeries Lafayette, which is a big shop with a pink and gold dome inside, have you seen it? I wanted to buy souvenirs, but couldn't find anything my loved ones might want in the souvenir shop, which was on the top floor, and having got up there, we saw signs to a roof terrace, so we went out there and had our packed lunch on the sunny roof with all the students and young people who seem to know that it is a great place to hang out without having to pay anything. Then we went to see Notre Dame. Then we sat in the Jardins de Luxembourg.

The dome inside the Galeries Lafayette

The next day we did something in the morning that I can't remember and then did a walking tour, which took in the Left bank and Latin quarter, which was great, as it was led by a student who was very communicative with lots of little stories about the history of Paris and also helpful and told us about a cheap, atmospheric little place to have dinner. We found it difficult to find good places like that.

And finally on the last day on a recommendation we went to the crematorium of Montparnasse, which was pretty and I liked it but Ashley decided that graveyards are not his thing, and then we took a tour of the Seine on a vedette, which we found interesting and good value. Again, it was quite hot. I really wanted to go into Shakespeare & Company's bookshop which is close to the Seine on the Left bank, but I felt shy ! and I didn't go in. I sort of wanted to buy a book there, but I knew they would be far, far cheaper at home.

So we had a very good few days in Paris. At home we were just gearing up for the Council elections,  when Theresa May announced there would be a general election, in the name of stability, which is a laugh, and so the country is in a muddle again. There is information about tactical voting being passed around, but Jeremy Corbyn doesn't let go of his dreams that he will wake up one day and find that the whole country has turned socialist overnight, and voted that way, so he will never enter into election pacts with other parties even though the aim of all the non-Tory parties is to bring in a system of Proportional Representation, which should keep the Tories out forever, so is well worth sacrificing a few seats for. But his dreams...!

And in Paris, we heard something very interesting. A Parisian told us the UK was right to vote for Brexit and a lot of French people want the same thing. I would say "racist" only he was a Algerian Parisian. So we said, will Marine le Pen get in and take you out of the EU? No, he said, because if France left the EU the EU would fall apart. So Mme le Pen, according to him, has taken a huge bribe from high places to back pedal on that one, and not to take France out of the EU. Well, if all that happens, you heard it here first.

Too many books

Yesterday I felt ill. 2 sleepless  nights, pouring rain, upset stomach, and the feeling that the day was meant to be fun and productive, and that I was failing myself by wasting my time. Also, the news from Paris was too much to take in, and yet I felt I should work to take it in and feel something about it.

But today I did feel tearful about Paris, as the sound of young people singing French songs from Trafalgar Square got to me. The victims of the attacks were mainly young people who generally feel no animosity to others on the grounds of their origins, whose creed is that of John Lennon's Imagine. "No religion... the brotherhood of man..." All their suppositions about the world are crawling away after a massacre. (I was reminded of this song because some French guy played it on a piano in Paris as a response to the killings.)

I would like to do something in my lessons this week to mark our feelings at this massacre, and I don't know what.

I have too many books on the go. One of the books is very embarrassing, a collection of Art Spiegelman "comix" drawn after the 9/11 atrocities. I had to pay quite a bit for them (2nd hand of course) and I haven't looked at them properly yet, but ended up hiding them under F's bed as it seemed that they were Old Hat and what's more a luxurious Old Hat. But now it seems to me that this event is part of the same thing as the 9/11 enormity, and the horror of City Terrorism is, maybe, only just starting.

(The trouble with John Lennon's Imagine, is his casual waving away of religion - "no religion too"..."no god above us". If you truly depend on the thought of your God being there for you and your being a part of God's being, then John's dreams, and his words, are horrific. Like saying: "imagine you are only a gorilla, or a pig". You need to be religious to understand why it's not a positive idea. John dreams of one world on his own terms, which are essentially communist. Daesh dreams of one world on terms that are the polar opposite. John's words seem wise to our young people but they are actually incendiary.)