It’s my page and I’ll ramble if I want to — the Paris edition
I’ve started writing three different pieces tonight and got a couple of hundreds of words into each and suddenly thought ‘bleuch’ and deleted what I’ve written.
That’s a rare experience for me these days. Not so much the feeling of disgust at the writing but the fact that I delete things. I’ve become used to trusting the process and just starting to write and then letting the page lead me where it wants to.
Not tonight. (Until now, that is.) I suspect there is a connection with the fact that I’ve come down with some bronchial thing. Last night I spent coughing and spluttering through the night, so I woke more tired than I was when I went to bed and with that fuzzy head and general lethargy that accompanies any breathing-centred sickness.
The timing could be better. Not only with Christmas approaching but because I’m working flat out on the book to get the draft finished for the end of December. It also coincides with some client deadlines that mean I’m also working this weekend to get something crucial out for Monday.
Poor me. (Another symptom of any sort of man-flu, of course, is the overwhelming self-pity associated with it.)
To cheer me up I’m thinking of Paris and to help me with that I have Chet Baker’s Chet in Paris Volume 2 playing on the CD player. When I’m writing on the iMac I prefer not to have Spotify blasting the music my way from the same machine. Weird, I know, but having the music somewhere else in the room makes it easier to concentrate on the writing and, at the same time, enjoy the music better. Maybe it’s my imagination but it seems to work for me and, hey, it’s my imagination so I can do with it what I want.
And why Paris? Paris is where I let my head go when I want to fantasise about being a writer or an intellectual or a lover or a thinker or simply someone who chooses to live among beauty. Other cities are available but for me Paris has long been the imaginary destination of the soul of the man I once hoped I might be. The Paris of Joyce and Pound, of Miller and Hemingway, of Sartre and Camus, of Beckett, of Satie, of Baudelaire, of the Paris Commune, of even Malcolm McLaren. McLaren’s album Paris is another one to listen to for a sense of the city in its possibly final years of pomp.
And the best thing about Paris? Its mysterious charms survive a visit. Its lure survives living there in poverty. It endures even after crossing from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyons by RER carrying heavy bags.
That Paris is so close is possibly one of the few worthwhile things about living in the UK any more.
