Badaude

Paris Roller

I missed this year's Nuit Blanche earlier in October.

But, crossing the rue des Ecoles late last Friday, I had an equally surreal nocturnal experience...

TAGS: PARIS ROLLER, NUIT BLANCHE, CARDINAL LEMOINE, ROLLER-RANDO

Coupe du monde

Saturday 20th October .

I'm on the 6.34am eurostar with a load of England fans travelling to the Rugby World cup final. They're precariously well-behaved, like tipsy Quakers.

I'm staying in a tiny studio near the Odeon, the size and shape of a double bed, which is convenient as it's carpeted with one.I work in bed. I can reach everything from it. If I want check your appearance before I go out, I have to stand between the bed and the mirror, which means I can only see a close-up of my nose. Or I could stand on the bed, which means I can't see my head.

When I shower, the extraction fan wheezes like an asthma patient.

On the wall there's a photo of Marlene Dietrich. Some borrowed glamour. She's off duty - between takes? - wearing a bathrobe and an elasticated sunhat, pulling on a cigarette, still having to drag that dramatic, Kabuki face round with her even at her most informal moments.

I have an invite from artist, Matthew Rose - with whom I'm hoping to collaborate on a project - to watch the rugby in the 14e but, as I don't have my computer set up yet, I miss the email. I'm exhausted anyway, from getting up so early.

I go to Polidor, nearby, to eat some overcooked kidneys.

Polidor is yellow inside and decorated with old tin signs and foxed mirrors. It looks exactly like a British pub, but with communal trestle tables set down the middle and sides of the room. If the British were more interested in eating rather than drinking, our estaminets might look more like this.

At 10pm, a stream of families arrive. The fathers carry their babies in prams and pushchairs over the heads of the diners through clouds of cigarette smoke.

A beautiful student sits down at the next table and takes, from a plastic bag, a Ratatouille hand-puppet, then a bicycle seat. Ouais, Ouais, she says, like something wet and flapping.

Sitting opposite her are the first properly obese French girls I have ever seen.

One of the ageing waitreses comes in and says,

Les Boks ont gagne!

Everyone cheers. I guess they have reason to after last week.

As I walk back, I'm hit on by a man at least 10 years younger than me.

Do you have a light?

(Can anyone use that as a chat-up line in the UK any more?)

Do you like Paris? I like London better

Is this your first time here?

The offal, the flirting, the cigarettes... I'm back in Paris.

Search terms: Coupe du monde, World cup, England, France, South Africa, Boks, Paris, Polidor, Eating, Drinking, Ratatouille, Family, Babies, Smoking, Dietrich, Odeon.

x=mc2?

After finding fashion-stalking was a common experience last week, I really felt I had to carry out some more extensive research. What is is about Parisiennes? Do they really have something other women don't? A sort of Je Ne Sais Quoi?

Does this J-N-S-Q really exist? And can we describe it? Bottle it? Find a mathematical formula?

I asked some of the regulars at the Cafe de La Mairie.

Fashion week stalker...

It's early October. I know it's Fashion Week because the mornings are a little colder and the low sun hits the top of the buildings on the boulevard Port Royal and slices in long golden streaks between the shadow-canyon streets, and because I've already found myself stalking Parisiennes.

There's a girl on the tube in front of me. I make my way down the carriage so I can study the way her hair falls, half tucked into the collars of her leather jacket. I cross the road to follow another down the Rue Jacob. I'm sitting in Cafe de la Mairie and I try to angle my chair to see whether the front of that woman with the white-blonde bob and the embroidered coat lives up to her fascinating back. Tough luck . The chairs on the cafe's terrasse are chained together.

I'm only half-seeing them. I see backs, shoulders; the fit of a coat; the movement of an arm in a layered sleeve; the swing of a bag. It's about clothes, yes. But more about how they're combined, and how they combine with the wearer - the way she moves, a certain place and time of day.

It's about the girl, as much as the clothes.

Does that make me a girl-on-girl stalker?

Liberté, Fraternité, Quartier!

My street has such high self-esteem, it's always celebrating itself and breaking out en fête.

It's not enough to have the Yves Klein festival in June, where lots of people roll around naked in blue paint, but last weekend there was another fête just for the Enfer of it...

A sense of 'fun' isn't something Parisians are necessarily renowned for, but that was ok because this festival involved lots of activities which only required you to sit around looking cool.

I guess the street has a lot of history to celebrate, not least Jean-Paul Belmondo's final moments as he races down the one way street at the end of Godard's A Bout du Souffle.

It's not Belmondo who's still hanging round the quartier but his co-star, Jean Seberg.  From over the road at the Cimetiere Montparnasse, she would have just about been able to hear the party from where she's buried, so sadly near the mise-en-scene of her greatest success.