Lockdown in Paris : Day Three
9am - Actually woke up to my alarm today. Reassuring. I was getting a bit unnerved by all that Getting Up Early malarkey. Blazing sunshine. A vitamin D kinda day.
9h58 - Video call with friends in the south of France. Always thought video calls were a modern marvel but never really thought of them as an indispensable lifeline until this week. Seeing people’s familiar faces makes things feel much more normal when they’re the furthest from normal they’ve ever been.
11h14 - Was sitting on the balcony with coffee, bullet journal and new book when I suddenly decided to tidy it up a bit. The balcony is about 1 metre by...well sod it we’re not exactly strapped for time are we, let’s measure it.
11h19 : It’s 108cm x 83cm. I feel like it’s been designed to perfection if the designer’s goal was to put you in just the slightest state of permanent discomfort. It slopes downwards, and I’ve never felt so weirdly confused about where to put my feet. Sitting out there I always get the impression that I look completely ridiculous. I just sit there, feeling like my knees and feet are somehow too close to my body. I don’t know, it’s weird. Anyway, over the edge of the balcony is the abyss - five floors straight down to the courtyard. Depending on your relationship with heights, you might look over and feel the bones in your lower body melt a bit. It’s high. Visiting the flat for the first time, my friend Howard looked over and said, “Well. At least you’d reach terminal velocity before you hit the bins.”
11h43 : I have this outdoor table that folds up. The paint has peeled off, it’s rusty, and once it’s unfolded it takes up most of the balcony - which, as we now know, is 89cm2. (Thank you GCSE maths.) Basically, it’s neither use nor ornament, so I spent the last 15 minutes wrestling it into a cupboard. Didn’t think it could possibly fit, but I’ve got time to make sure. I’ve got all the time in the world. Crawled into the under-roof space and pulled out two USB keyboards, a ukulele case, a bag of climbing gear I’ve never used in eight years of being here, a swimming float used twice in eight years of being here, five thousand Bags for Life, an electric fan and a yoga mat. Once I’d emptied all that, I origamied the table into the cupboard and filled the gaps with this random assortment of stuff - which is essentially a record of all my botched fitness attempts. So it was a quick-win wrapped in long-term failure.
11h45 : Bloody coffee is cold now.
12h24 : Read The Woman on the Landing for a bit, which is starting to really freak me out. Leave a comment below if you’ve read it - it’s nice to spend a bit of time in the wild Scottish highlands while you’re stuck in a tiny Paris flat, but something tells me it’s not going to end well. Might finally unpack that suitcase. If only to stop me tripping over it 23 times a day.
12h28 : That took a disappointingly short amount of time.
13h27 : Cleaned the cupboard above my oven. I should really say “oven” given that it’s smaller than a microwave. Actually a lot of things in my flat come in quotation marks. “Oven.” “Bathroom.” “Lounge.” “Kitchen.” “Flat.” Anyway this little cupboard above the oven has always been jammed full of nonsense I’ve ignored. I find an old kettle (Ha! As if there’s space for a kettle, there’s barely space for a sink) a spare hotplate, and some hoover bags that were the wrong size and have been the wrong size since I bought them 3 years ago. They go in the bin. The rest is removed to stash somewhere else (maybe in the Cupboard of Failed Fitness?) I clean the cupboard and neatly place two boxes of Yorkshire Tea in there. Think I might clean the tiny oven. Open it. Peer inside. Close it again. No rush.
14h11 : Got the hoover out. Not plugged it in yet. Small part of me thinks that once I’ve hoovered I’ll be running out of things to do so I’m not sure I’m ready.
15h : Ok I’ll hoover. In my flat this is a two-step process. One does not simply whip out the vacuum cleaner, sweep it around and have done with it, no no. Apparently my carpet is an early prototype of Industrial Velcro, so I’d need a hoover powered by a Boeing 737 to suck anything up off it. I actually have to get down on the floor and sort of swoosh my hands (ideally damp) over the carpet before coming at it with the hoover. This Cinderella bit has the charming effect of 1) rolling so much hair into tumbleweeds that I have no idea how I’m not bald and 2) creating lovely bundles of grey stuff. Only then can I hoover.
17h41 : Uh oh. I’m a bit bored. I couldn’t even tell you what I’ve done for the past nearly-two-hours. There was some reading on the balcony. Oh there was half a pizza! That was a highlight. Quite a lot of mindless scrolling. The BBC News site was in there somewhere and at some point there was a great deal of rage aimed at the guy over the courtyard playing terrible music in an obnoxiously loud manner. I fear confinement may bring with it irrational amounts of wrath. I rearranged some coats. I ironed a shirt. Maybe time is melting.
18h30 : Spent a long time composing a text message to my landlady asking about (what I decided to call) “the rent situation.” My goal was casual but not too casual, desperate but not too desperate. Got caught in that terrible British place of pretending it’s totally finnneeee I can pay the rent (I can’t) it’ll be absolutely grand (it won’t) so I won’t be that most dreaded of all things - a bother. Have a fruit tea while waiting for reply.
18h57 : Plot-twist. Landlady says she thinks her son has it and so they’re all going to get it. Suddenly rent seems like a very annoying thing to be asking about, so obviously catapult myself into guilt and hand-wringing. Landlady is lovely about the rent and says we’ll discuss how to get through it.
19h11 : Finding myself thinking “Oh good, evening” as I mark the time going by. After last night’s fight to the death with technology I’ve decided tonight is just cooking eating watching and sleeping. Big day tomorrow: I’m going to wash my hair.
20h : Standing in the “kitchen” cooking while watching a movie on my laptop when I hear a confusing noise. Pause the movie. It’s applause. The building is showing up for its first 8pm standing ovation for the doctors and nurses working us through this mess. It’s happening all over Paris, and will happen every night. I go out onto the balcony and clap, and wave at my neighbour across the courtyard, and clap and clap, and after a minute we go back inside.
