Badaude

...part two, and...

So what happened at the wedding. Well after getting over a lost voice, two weeks later I'm ready to tell you.

So, two weeks ago...

(Double-click on the illustration to open it in a large window: hovver your mouse over the bottom right corner and click to see it bigger)

This was when I began to seriously lose my voice.

Finally the wedding next week...

TAGS: MARX, HIGHGATE  CEMETARY, CATHOLIC, EUROSTAR, WAXING, PHILOSOPHY, EHTICS, ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, ARMPIT HAIR, CHANGING, CASHMERE, GOTHIC, NIGELLA LAWSON, HENRY VIII, REFORMATION, INDUSTRIAL ESTATE.

An alternative Noël...

To be honest I'm only posting today because of the defi value, sneaking out between foie gras and TV sessions, but any US readers who have nothing better to do than read my blog on Christmas day could also think about going to the preview of the movie of Marjane Satrapi's Persopolis which is released in the USA today.

In the New York Times, Marjane Satrapi, author and illustrator of Persopolis, writes:

People either like to write or they like to draw. And we like to do both. We’re like the bisexuals of the culture. People don’t have any problem if you are a homosexual or if you are a heterosexual, but if you are a bisexual, they have more of a problem with you.

Salut, Ms Satrapi! Between cultures. Between media (what? I've had too much to drink at lunch)...

Happy holidays, everyone...

xBadaude

a wedding

I have a wedding to go to. An old friend, who I haven't seen for some time. There's a week to go and there’s a beatiful dress in Vanessa Bruno’s window. Strapless; a double layer of silk chiffon, engineered so that the skirt puffs out then curves round to the knee-length hem.

I want to wear it. I want to wear it to the wedding.

It’s expensive.

Also, it’s black.

Can I wear a black dress to a wedding?

To an my ex-best-friend's wedding?

I enter through the handle-less swing door which always makes the shop look closed.

Cette robe la, Madame? Voudriez-vous l’essayer?

When I come out of the cabine, magically, there is a mirror image of me waiting.

She is tanned: I’m is pale. She has short hair in the shade the French call blonde Venetian and we call strawberry blonde: mine is dark. She’s wearing exactly the same dress as me. Hers is white. Mine is black.

There’s a moment of shock, of recognition.

It’s as big as the contrast with my old friend, who is tall and curly and tanned, whereas I am small and pale.

I met Juliette when I was seven. Really I fell in love with her whole family: her single mother (a rarity in the village where my parents lived) with cropped bleached hair who dared to continue her work as a sculptor rather than getting a sensible secretarial job to support her children. Then with the two sisters, Viola and Juliette: tall, brown, exotically half-Czech and terrifyingly well-educated.

I would go round to their house where Juliette kept a collection of mannequins draped in 1930s clothing and Viola, who always wore plain, round-necked sweaters with a little gold chain yet, amazingly, avoided looking prim, stacked her solid, white, mathematically aligned, 5' column of French Vogues.

Juliette said, Did you see the Degas exhibition.

Viola said, Degas, Degas, degeulasse...

They seemed to think it was funny.

I didn't speak French then and was at a loss over word she had just pronounced. I tried it over and over on my tongue. I looked it up but, being unable to spell it (degolas? diguless?) could find no meaning. So it existed with me for years as a sort of mantra. It had no formal meaning, but it spelt the glamour of quick-witted , bohemian intellect. The glamour of the Novotny family.

Juliette isn't my best friend any more. When did we stop? I've never met the man she's going to marry. I only know that when I called up her liste de mariage, I was offered the last minute choice of buying her a set of towels or a sauce-boat stand which cost £56.

Who is Juliette? And when did she turn into a girl who needs a £56 sauce-boat stand.

(When it comes to that, what actually is a sauceboat stand?)

You can change. You can change your dress. I wonder what she will be wearing.

Back at Vanessa Bruno, the girl and I pose in front of the mirror. 

Catwalking is essentially a solitary experience – that’s why then send the models out in a defile, each walking behind the other, never together. And that’s why the girls posing in magazines are so often alone in cafes, alone in parks, with animals, with cars and in a hundred other situations but almost never with each other.

But the girl and I cannot quite ignore each other. The contrast is too great. We put each other into context.

Like best friends.

I feel impelled to say

Cela vous va bien. (it’s true, her short hair and long boots rock this dress in a way that makes my flats and loose long hair seem little-girlish).

C’est pour un mariage?

She melts

Oui – le mienne. 

She is getting married in four months.

Wouldn't you know it. The woman on the sofa, helping her choose, is her childhood best friend.

Il faut que vous l’achetez!

Does she? I never know. I leave her still deciding.

I'm still thinking about the black and the price and the sauce-boat stand when suddenly I’m downstairs handing over my carte blue, feeling that roller-coaster dip in my stomach. The sort you feel, maybe, when you’re about to get married. You see, in Paris they don’t really do refunds. They expect you to be grown-up enough to actually know what suits you, to commit to your purchase, and not to change your mind.

It’s a bit like marriage, before the divorce option.

Is it true that in France, you have to bring more commitment to your wardrobe than your relationships?

Next week: more wedding...

a little bit of Paris...

I was coming out of La Grande Epicerie, loaded down with Christmas shopping when a little bit of Paris got in my eye.

It must have been a speck, tiny as the Snow Queen's sliver of ice, and it hurt just as much, cutting right accross my eyeball.

I blinked a bit. It would go away. Specks always did.

But it didn't. So I held my hand over my closed eye, pressing against my eyeball. That felt better, but it probably wasn't doing anything useful.

I tried pulling my eyelid down over my eye, as a certain man had done in a similar situation. He stood very close to me, stretching my eyelid uncomfortably over my bottom lashes and holding it there so that, after a while, I began to wonder whether the discomfort was worth the erotic charge.

After he'd finished, I could see again. But I hadn't seen him for some time.

The trick had worked before but now - nothing. I tipped my head to one side and shook it so that whatever it was could fall into that little red resevoir in the inner corner of the eye which I sometimes use to check how hungover I am (the redder the more so).

I needed advice. I needed one of those know-all people who come up to you and say, It's easy. All you have to do is... And then everything's OK.

I was still standing on the pavement on the corner of the rue de Sèvres. People were milling past me. Then I realised that, in the Christmas shopping rush, NO-ONE was going to help. NO-ONE had EVEN NOTICED ME.

My eye still hurt. But I was going to have to start moving.

* (Snow? What snow?)

(click on the picture to enlarge, then click on the bottom right hand corner to enlarge further)

Maybe if I looked more pitiable? I walked slowly and unsteadily with one hand over my eye. No effect. But, wait a minute, this really did hurt. What if something really was wrong? I'm an illustrator. Illustrators don't like strange things happening to their eyes. Particularly when they have no insurance.

I went from pretending to be worried to really starting to worry; from pretending not to be able to see exactly where I was going to realising that, actually, I really couldn't. Where does hypochondria stop and real pain begin? I did a quick mental and physical check. It definitely hurt, but the one state didn't seem to inhibit the other. I could do both simultaneously.

So I sat down on the pavement for maximum effect.

I was despairing of humankind when a solidly built mamie stopped in front of me. She looked just like the sort of person who'd know all about everything.

You have hurt your eye? Let me look (gratifying ocular examination). But you are touching it. You shouldn't touch it. If you want the truc to come out, you should leave it alone!

Then she was gone, leaving her conflicting advice. So much for mamie knows best.

I got to the bus stop on the Boulevard Raspail with tears rolling out of one eye and down my face. I tried to take the mamie's advice. I got on, composted my ticket and stood swaying down towards Alesia, trying to make out my stop through a blur. I staggered out at the crossroads with the late-night chemist. Maybe they would be able to fix it. The pharmacie was bright with yellow lights reflecting off glass and white surfaces and big fake jars of coloured medicine. There was a blonde woman in a dazzling white coat. She didn't look in my eye. But we have something that will help.

She went into the back room for about 5 minutes or so and came back with a largeish cardboard box about the size of a Persona machine. It was full of little plastic vials.

For contact lenses, she said. 35 Euros.

I may be a hypochondriac, but I'm also spectacularly mean.

I just want you to have a look at it and tell me what's wrong! Don't you have some cotton wool or something?

A French shrug.

I decide to go to see my friend Sarah who lives round the corner. I'm almost certain she wears contacts. She's married to a French man and has a 2-year-old son, so I'm pretty sure she has cotton wool too.

When I get there, she's putting Albert to bed. She looks into my eye as he streaks naked around the apartment (Albert is her son, not her husband). 

I'm a maman, so I'm used to this kind of thing. And I can tell you that if there was something still in your eye, it would be all red and puffed up by now. Whatever it is has come out and left a cut. Yes, I do have some saline solution. Try it.

The saline solution stings and doesn't seem to improve things much. But I feel better. Finally the reassurance I really needed. If Sarah says it's ok, it must be...

Her husband arrives and, after an Franglish apero of kirs and salt-and-vinegar Hula Hoops, Sarah and I go out to dinner. I wonder about French men and French women.

I don't see French women going out together for dinner like this, without men. More often I see French men alone together. Do you think French women have close female friendships like British women?.

No.

Then late at night, with my eye still weeping, I'm catching the last metro when another mamie on the platform catches me by the arm. What does she want? I don't know whether I can stand any more advice.

Pleure pas! Ce salopard! Il ne vaut pas la peine!

Sarah is wrong! Here is an example of French female solidarity.

(Don't cry - the bastard's not worth it!)

But maybe he is.

So I call his mobile number. The man who'd taught me the eyelid trick.

What is it?  I'm asleep. Who is it?

It's me. It's nothing. It's just my eye hurts. I'd just got out of La Grande-

-Did you try pulling your eyelid down over-

-Yes, but it didn't do any good... Wait a minute. Oh Sorry. You're in Japan. I'd forgotten... It must be 4am there.

Something like that.

That night, I go to sleep lying on my back with a bag of ice balanced on my face.

The next day, as Sarah predicted, I'm fine. It was a cut, not a blockage. It hadn't been an actual problem. Just the residue of one.

And he called me back.

So has it gone? What was it?

Oh, nothing, I said. Just a little bit of Paris.

* It was actually rain/sleet, but snow just looked better. I have an artistic licence and I'm going to use it.

TAGS: Le Bon Marché, La Grande Epicerie, Mince Pies, Christmas, Bûche de Noël, Late-night Opening, Marmite, Petits Fours, Bonbons.

Salon de Livre

Laurel Zuckerman emailed me about the Salon de Livre which takes place this Saturday at the Mairie du 5e in Paris. She thought you'd enjoy it, and who am I to argue?

She'll also be signing copies of her own books, Sorbonne Confidential, from 15h - 17h.