Right.
Push on through and
start this.
So we pull up in
Paris at about 1 a.m., suddenly all too aware that we have nowhere to
stay. I'd been up since five – never wanting my 'room-mate' to be
up and getting ready for work while I lay about in bed, using my
'career' as an excuse – and the two drivers had about seven hours
of driving in their pockets. Jeb is Jeb, so he was tired, and Seryn
was exhausted from the comparative over-stimulation of having left
the house.
Do we kip in the
van, blanketed-up against the cold streets of Paris, or do we
check-in to the first hostel we see? Perhaps we should have planned
ahead. We back and forth on this, eating from a pallet that we'd
filled with food before leaving the house. Muffins and slices and
pasties and out-of-date crisps and the things that we lived on over
the course of the trip.
Never more pastry
than in these few days.
What do we do?
Jeb can be
proactive when seeking slumber, so he was the first to volunteer to
run over the square in which we'd parked and speak to our first
French person outside of a service station.
It was costly.
Twice the price than if we'd booked online. This was the extent of
our research.
But we were much as
I am now: a passenger in a poltergeist. We had all reached that point
where your brain convinces you that fuel is to be found in frowning.
No more of this. No
more. None.
Worry about it
tomorrow.
Credit card, and
lifts that act like a puzzle from The Crystal Maze.
Take
the stairs.
We were split
across rooms on the fifth floor.
It all looked so
fine from outside. All glass and lights and 'modern traveller'.
Into the sweaty,
humid black. Bunks were assigned but already filled by others, so
find your own. It was a wild west of foam mattresses as thick as DVD
cases and what felt like alien fingers crawling across you as you
slept. I thought the room was full, but torchlight in my bunk at 4
a.m. told me otherwise. Another intrepid traveller, attempting to
take what had been allocated. Sorry, Sir, but when the authorities'
backs are turned, we have our own game going on. You'll have to
figure out these rules on your own, just as I did.
I eventually got an
hour or two of rest after laying awake in the dark for hours,
sniggering at my imaginings of how the others were getting along in
their respective rooms.
It was a joy, then,
after being awoken by the 7 a.m. refitting of the next-door bathroom,
to arrive at a riverside breakfast greeted by four other frog-eyed
men whose arms were as limp and lame as the stale cereal they were
each lumping into their mouths. Jeb chewed on the milk and took a sip
of sawdust coffee, before giving me a look.
'This is shit,
isn't it.'
Nobody slept as
soundly as the spiders that spin around the van.
So we moved in
confusion and caffeine, driving around to get the kind of view of
these cities we so often get; mainly from the window of a rumbling
van. Tin can safari.
We did hop out to
get a few selfies out by the Eiffel tower, though. Despite our state,
our smell, and our brains slowly calcifying, we were still classified
as humans; still strangers to one of the most iconic cities in the
world.
It's all a blur,
from then until our checking in to the hotel we'd been afforded for
this night by the promoter. This was a first. Our first hotel.
Riverside. In we go, our chests puffed up with pride.
Name?...breakfast...Check
out...rooms...keys...yes, yes, yes. Mmmhmmm.
'...and it's all
been paid for.'
This put a
particular kind of smile on our faces.
Showers, naps.
Games.
Knock on Grandad
Jeb's door and run away. He will always open it, and always grumble.
Meanwhile, I'm
peering out from behind the vending machines down the way, and
giggling, and wondering why no-one else will play with me.
But we're clean and
hydrated and heading to the gig, in a cool little place called the
Trabendo, just off the beaten track, as part of the Fireworks
festival.
Thanks to the crew
and staff and promoter, you were all fantastic.
And hello to the
awesome Sylvan Esso and Fickle Friends, with whom we had the honour
of sharing the stage.
And thanks to all
the people who turned up. The room was absolutely fantastic. There
was a feeling in the air that I haven't felt in a long time. Out
front, and backstage, the party was a constant force to be reckoned
with, and everyone was a part of it. Smiles and energy and good
feeling and smooth running. No hiccups, just good people and good
times and grins and sweat and beer and bourbon.
Those are a few of
my favourite things.
And then we pack up
and ditch the van and head out, surfing on the buzz that only a great
gig in a strange city and no sleep can provide.
We were ably guided
by a local friend of a friend – the International Phoria Network
runs deep – and after watching the barriers of the metro fall like
crumbling mountains beneath our flying feet, we travelled through the
wormhole to go...where? We did not know.
'Do you have any
idea where we are?' Jeb asked.
'Nope!' I said,
with a grin on my face.
Suddenly a bar, and
I'm hanging off the end of it like a villain at the end of some
action movie, the city trying to pry my fingers off and make me fall.
There are people
inside, and there are people outside. We're talking and proudly
letting our Englishness fall out of us like farmyard buckets spilling
over with freshly produced, certified organic effluence. We're
outside, bragging and joking. We're inside, leading the loud party
and the music gets bigger and little pockets that once sat around in
stone start ordering more and breaking out in dance, and we claw into
the wood, making more beer and getting thicker and letting Paris
channel us wherever it wishes.
And then we get a
taste of it.
And I'm looking at
my phone, trying to GPS it back to the hotel with everyone in tow,
and I look up and the world has gone dark. The lights have gone out.
I'm only reading shadows. I'm in the street and there is no colour
anywhere.
I call the others
and there is no answer. But I have the route to the hotel.
I find Jeb, like a
lamppost in the wind, swaying on some corner with a little gaggle
that had joined us out of the bar.
And I'm getting a
call from one of the gang I've lost, my phone beaming at me through
the darkness.
They've been locked
inside a shop. Their eyes were bigger than their bellies could afford
and now we are stuck and they are locked in behind
blind black steel
shutters and we are broke. We are stony broke, and the manager wants
one Euro.
One
Euro.
Oh,
and before this bit, just as
I have found myself in the darkness,
I am caught in the centre of the underground workings of the city,
for a brief moment, and it is only after the tires scream away behind
me that I realise, alone and newly
unlit as I was, that it was perhaps only a little joke in French
about my personal 'intake'
habits that may have gotten
me out of more trouble than any steel shutter will give you. Everyone
here is spring heeled.
Listen,
in GCSE French, children.
But
this man
was sniffing, as it were, around the shop where my
friends are shuttered. What's
linked, here?
And
a man appears out of the darkness, his bright white eyes gleaming.
Also our Parisian
guide has come to help, appearing
from nowhere. She
and the man are now
arguing.
I
must leave her and find one Euro.
So
Jeb is still with
his friends on a distant
corner and they have
something strange going on, and while he leans against the wind he
chats to one or two of them
who have
craning necks and meerkat
insincts, and
who I know I have seen
before; who ignored me on the
other side of the road, and
now they are surrounding
us and circling us like
jackals.
And
one man speaks to one girl who wants to take us clubbing on the
Champs Ellysees,
and from what I hear he wants something from her more than the
cigarettes
that she offers, and in
between the laughter and the heads of lager and fizz and pop there is
a cats cradle being weaved and my mind takes an ugly turn.
On
the other side of the street, they are still arguing. She is strong
and that is good, but his eyes are fierce and there are more mopeds
than only his, all with
their engines running and
heads turned uniformly, watching their friend.
And
I break in to the conversation behind Jeb that I have been
monitoring, because these party animals are smaller and the men who
have caught them are not
well, and I must have one Euro. My friends are locked in. But he
doesn't care. And I have a Rizla raised in my hand that's out in
front of me and I am ready because I have interrupted his
cold-call sales pitch,
so the thin roll of paper is held up like a fool's talisman and
rests, powering the hand that protects me with mere drunken innocence
and I keep my wits about me and I bag a coin from the girl once she
has put the man to rest and he leaves and she returns to some of her
friends who have appeared. And Jeb sways and I tell him to come with
me, because we have raised more than our fair share of anything
for one evening.
And
the moped gang takes
one measly
Euro and slides
off to whatever deliveries they may make, while the gang reunites and
laughs and courts the last, strange thirty-minutes in confusion and
relief and we walk a moment and the light returns to the city and
turns everything gold and we smile, and Trewin
says we need something to remember what happened and I say don't
worry, I'll be writing about
it.
So
we say goodbye to our guide and our friend and we waltz through the
roads, staring down taxis, and I'm wondering where we will go next,
and what possible route we will be taken on to get to whatever
resting place we might be heading to tonight, because we do not know
if it will be wood or stone
at our heads. A night rarely
lets you go once you've been thrown to the dogs. You have to get out
before they put the reigns on you, else you're not getting out at
all.
And
then I am sure he was an angel.
Patient
and kind, to four strange and loud men, in our first night in Paris.
He spoke no English, so I did my best, again – sat in the front
seat with my phone held out in front of me, showing him the same
route that I'd tried to get us on so much earlier in the evening. And
he followed it and let me speak in broken French and smiled and
nodded. He did know one phrase, actually. So I would speak badly and
apologise and he would say 'It's OK. No problem.' It happened enough
times that we were laughing about it.
And
we got out at the hotel and he was a good man and we tipped him well
and we stood outside the hotel and smoked in silliness and brushed
into the lobby to say hello to the night staff, with smiles on our
faces and brains that had been well thorned by the rose of Paris.
One
man can work the bar, but he has no power. The hotel shuts the
pumps down and
locks the cabinets. I can buy
him a drink. No?
We still have something left in us, Trewin and I. We sit and drink
water and we learn the man's politics and how he is a good man. We
mean him well. It is short but he is courteous,
and I hope he found us respectful.
How
else would we be?
And
suddenly we swallow night-time like a pill and it is morning and I
don't know how I've slept, but I have. I am in bed. And the mirror
shows that I am on television, being filmed on a handi-cam, and the
mirror turns sideways and bumps itself on my head.
And
we all pour down the lift-shafts and again just throw the breakfast
at ourselves.
And
we go, swimming through the
air with light heads to wherever we parked the van.
Ed is well rested. He will
drive.
And
Paris says goodbye to us and we wonder what the
hell just happened.
These
cities have their ways. We'll be doing more of them as we go. We'll
be back in Germany in May, and we're looking forward to our first gig
in Norway at some point later this year. Zurich, too, next month. And
Brussels.
And
until then we'll be getting the album done, as we have been doing so
diligently. We're in a good spot. We're doing well.
Come
and see us, if you're about. Check everything out for where we are.
It ain't right here.
Because,
for now, I am trying to piece this all together.
Thanks,
Paris, and all who helped us along the way. We'll be back.
And
we'll carry an extra Euro, now that we know.
Just
in case.
Because
these things can happen.
Over
One Euro.
Hope
you enjoyed it.
Tim
