17 | July | 2024 | The Book of Barnabas

When I’m on the road, I have a real complex about fitting in. It must be a side-effect of being a linguist, but I cannot stand the idea that I might stand out as a foreigner, if I can help it. Usually it’s simply a question of dressing appropriately, but it also makes me think very hard about my accent when I speak. This has had some brilliantly cringeworthy outcomes, such as getting into a blazing row with a taxi driver in a French that has never been as fluent since, and defaulting to a makeshift (albeit stateless) American accent while riding the Amtrak train two weeks ago… The worst has to be that two-hour drive in a Luton van with a dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman in my university days, where I was so self-conscious about my southern accent that I feigned a northern accent so as not to come across too posh… My housemate, a Wensley lass herself, took an exceptionally dim view of the whole affair. In her own words, my accent had only made it as far as Sheffield.

Fortunately, I’m in France, not Sheffield, and with just over a week to go until the Olympic Games begin, the city is so full of tourists that it’s probably easier to blend in as one of them than to ape any Parisian. So I caved and bought myself an Olympic T-shirt, since it’s unlikely to come back here in my lifetime.

I only have the one full day in Paris, so I decided to make the most of it and go supertouriste for the day. With Nôtre-Dame still under heavy repairs after the fire of 2019, and the Louvre fully-booked up for days, that left the Eiffel Tower, l’Arche de la Triomphe and the Château de Versailles. I didn’t really set out with a specific itinerary in mind this morning – I rarely do when I’m traveling solo – and the decision to join the queue for tickets up the Eiffel Tower was very much a spur-of-the-moment one. After all, the website said that all the summit tickets were sold out, and while the views from the second floor are good, who’d make the climb and not go all the way up?

Turns out the website doesn’t know jack. The queue was about half an hour long, but when I did get there the ticket seller simply raised an eyebrow when I inquired about the availability of summit tickets and said “bien sûr”. So if you’ve considered seeing the tower on your trip to Paris and you haven’t made any reservations, fret not – they always keep some to sell on the day.

Preparations are well underway for the Olympic Games here in Paris. The Olympic torch has completed its relay of the various départements, including far-flung Outremer, and is now circling the city in an ever-shrinking spiral. All around the city, cyclists are coming and going with pink signs in their panniers, pointing visitors in the direction of this or that event. Stadiums and stands have sprung into being like enormous steel mushrooms, and the avenue that stretches from Trocadero to the École Militaire now hosts a giant show ground, which looks like a building site from the ground but a lot more like a Roman circus from above.

It’s also impressive just how big the Bois de Boulogne is. Hyde Park may be a green lung for the heavy London air, but it pales in comparison to the dark forest that has clung on in Paris’ northern district, as though threatening to break the encirclement and rejoin its sister Meudon in the west, given the opportunity.

The summit of the Eiffel Tower really is quite something. Photos don’t really do it justice. There’s any number of skyscrapers that have now beaten its giddying record, but none so old, so charming, so immediately recognisable. It’s quite something to perch high above the City of Light, pigeon-like, and join the ranks of historical characters who have stood in the same spot: kings, shahs and statesmen, warmongers, tribal chiefs and Buffalo Bill. You’re more likely to be elbowed out of the way by an errant child angling for a better view or jostle for space with a Brazilian family taking every possible angle of each other than you are to meet any of the former, of course, but who knows? With the Olympics converging on the city, now’s as good a time as any to go stargazing up the Eiffel Tower.

I’ve been a bit reckless with the traveling this summer. I’d like to argue that this latest venture is purely tactical, with French being a very valuable commodity where I’m going, but it’s also methodical: it’s a very good way of keeping busy in the yawning maw of the summer holidays, which can go on and then some if you don’t find some way to keep busy. At the moment, one wedding after another plasters my social media feed as old friends tie the knot. It should make me smile, but on one level it always reminds me just how cut off my career has left me. That’s just one of many reasons I’m moving to a new job and a new part of the country this summer. It’s high time I hit the reset button and started from scratch.

But until then, I have the joys of the open road. Perhaps it’s my way of justifying my existence in these long, empty stretches we call holidays. I might have missed the boat festival in Brest by a matter of days, but I’m really quite excited to explore Britanny. After all – it’s supposedly the location of the indomitable Gaulish village of Astérix and Obélix. Between those two comic rascals and St-Malo’s long history of piracy, I should be in for a treat! BB x

I started learning French when I was around five or six years old. A lady used to come to my primary school and ran a French class as an after-school club. I remember it so distinctly because the teacher always brought those strawberry-favoured biscuits that I used to devour. I think they’re called Lulu « barquettes », but ever since one of my school-friends described them as “vagina biscuits”, the unfortunate moniker has kind of stuck.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been studying French for twenty-five years of the thirty I’ve been alive. Perhaps that’s why I burned out at university.

I’m on the road again, and this time it’s Paris. I’m very much aware that it’s been years since I had to speak French outside of a classroom setting, so I have come out here to put that right. I also have another quest in hand: I have to kindle the fires of a slow-burning romance with France and the French. Unlike Spanish, which had me at hola, I have never been as besotted by my third language.

There are good reasons for this: I have strong family ties to Spain, the landscape and wildlife were just that much more exotic in my early days as a kid naturalist, and I never had the chance to lose interest due to starting over with the same textbook three times at three different schools like I had to with Encore Tricolore (two more encores than I cared for). It was easy to fall for Spain: she was the new girl on the block and she lit the path to finding my long-lost grandfather once again. But there was a time, and not all that long ago, when I was genuinely considering splitting my year abroad between France and Spain. I know I was at my most intrigued in my sixth form years, thanks primarily to an iron-willed teacher (who scared the living daylights out of us all) and an immensely encouraging language assistant, who never failed to find an angle for me to explore in her lessons. So it’s not like I’m starting from scratch. The attraction has always been there, albeit buried deep.

And that’s what I’m here to do. I had a thing for France once. It might have fizzled out over the years, but I know it’s still there. I just have to find the spark. And where better to start than Paris – the city of light?

I haven’t been to Paris since I was eleven, and the last time I was here I climbed up the winding steps of Montmartre to the domed towers of Sacré-Cœur, so I figured that would be as good a place as any to start. The gendarmerie were out in force: the Paris Olympics are now only days away, and security in the city seems to be tightening up and fast. That didn’t stop the locals from having a good time, blasting music from the steps of the church, waving off the Indian lovelock vendors and generally having a good time.

Paris really is a beautiful city, even for the solo traveller, though I feel it’s absolutely a destination best enjoyed with a partner. I got much the same impression in Venice a couple years ago. Everywhere you look there’s a couple sharing a kiss, taking a selfie, holding hands at a café. It makes a welcome change from the awkward coolness of the British. We could learn a lot from these masters of the art.

Let’s play this like a dating profile. Let’s get serious. Monogamy is out of the question since I’m not about to be unfaithful to Spanish, so I’m hoping French is willing to share. Distance doesn’t bother me – Paris is only half an hour away by plane – and twenty-five and over would count for every one of those years I have spent grinding French. I am open to a short-term relationship with this language, but a long-term would be preferable (especially as I may well need French as my sledgehammer to get into the Spanish education system someday). Words of affirmation are 100% my love language, so I’m hoping I can find a warm spark within the infamous chilly disposition of the Parisians. And while my music tastes aren’t likely to be all that compatible, I was a major Stromae fan in my university days, and I’ve always had a thing for Afro-French artists, like Baloji. Between that and the unsurpassable bandes dessinées of my childhood (Astérix, Tintin et al.), we might just about have enough in common to have a go at it. So – how about a café date, to mettre la machine en marche?

I should find a café and make it my own while I’m here. That’s a plan for breakfast tomorrow, I think. You can’t really get an eye for Paris unless you spend some time in a café, after all. A bientôt, mes amis. BB x