Lockdown in Paris : Day Fourteen
Monday 30 March
10am : Woke up to my alarm, which at the moment is the woman next door who likes to make very shout-y calls around the time I should be getting up.
11h : There’s no going out on the balcony today, despite the blazing sunshine. The minute I opened the windows an arctic blast went straight for my bones. I clamped the doors shut again and retreated to the safety of my chair. It’s snowing elsewhere; Polly in Berlin sent me a photo.
11h25 : Did the washing up and took as long as I possibly could over it, knowing it would probably be my one great achievement of the day. I even dried everything and put it away. Unheard of.
13h : Had lunch with Estelle, who had dhal inspired by this here very blog and whose recipe I requested, since mine was sub-par and is currently my least favourite option in the fridge. I will try again. I delayed lunch and had a cup of tea instead, because I’d accidentally eaten half a giant bag of Maltesers during the course of the morning. As I’ve said before of my relationship with treats : they were there, so I ate them.
14h10 : Couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do except eat a boiled egg and some toast, so I did that.
15h : I swear, doing nothing - and I mean nothing - is the most addictive drug on the planet. My tolerance of it knows no overdose. I did nothing on Saturday (as you know), I did nothing yesterday, and today completes the hat-trick. Actually yesterday I did manage to get to the shop to buy that bottle of gin. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me from that particular errand.
16h57 : At the minute there are only two activities I can fully commit myself to. Either I’m talking to the characters on the TV (I enjoy making facetious remarks about the terrible decisions they’re making or the stupid things they’re saying), or delivering melodramatic renditions of whatever music I’m listening to. Just now we did a very theatrical rendition of the entire soundtrack of The Greatest Showman. I don’t know who ‘we’ is. That’s a bit worrying.
17h21 : The clocks going forward this time has really thrown me for a loop. Everything’s off kilter. I don’t understand why it’s after 5pm when I just got up. I haven’t even decided what I should fail to do today and it’s already over. How can I possibly be expected to fit all the nothing I have to do into the time I have to do it? None of this makes sense. At least the washing up’s done.
Given the current state of play, I decided on Sunday that, much like my Map of the Flat introduced you to the physical layout of my humble abode, each day of the blog I will be henceforth be introducing you to the archaeology of it. By which I mean, I will pick an object or item of furniture, and tell you the story of its existence, as far as I know it. Granted, this might sound like the most boring thing a human could inflict on another human, but I spent a good fifteen minutes today thinking about polishing a dusty mirror and not actually doing it once those fifteen minutes were through, so I think when it comes to boredom I have set a suitably low bar.
My Chair
I think logically we should start with the item of furniture upon which I spend the majority of time when I’m home: My Chair. To the untrained eye this is just what it appears to be : a nondescript, black-ish, boxy armchair, of the genus IKEA. If it was a person, people might say things along the lines of, “Well, he’s not going to set the world on fire, but I’ll say this of him - he’s reliable.” My Chair would make someone a good, unimaginative husband. Five minutes early for everything. Slippers by the bed. After the party, people can’t quite remember if he was there or not.
Size-wise, my chair doesn’t have the self-confidence to call itself a sofa and yet has ambitions beyond that of an armchair. Crippled by self-doubt, it thus hesitates on the fringes of each. This indecision completely defines the chair’s personality.
A couple of examples. While watching TV, you may manage to fall asleep, but that sleep will be shot through with vague discomfort and frustration. Your lower limbs are condemned to fruitless searching - there’s nowhere for them. All that shuffling only gets you edges and air. The chair is almost large enough for two people to sit side-by-side. But heaven forbid those people try and look at each other. Gads. Should they make the terrible mistake of turning their heads, Unbearable Social Discomfort will immediately burst into the room. Their noses almost touching, they’ll go cross-eyed trying to focus ‘casually’ on each other’s faces.
But My Chair does have a little trick up its sleeve. This chair is also a bed. Ho ho! Says the chair. You thought you had me all figured out. Yes, the double-folded seat of this armchair pulls out in a zig-zag to become a floor bed - and a comfy one at that. I know this because I have to sleep on it for roughly two months of the year.
Don’t you just love summer? Picnics and sandals and shorts and sun-kissed skin and suffocating to death in your top-floor apartment under a metal roof? I love summer. Oh no that’s right, summer in Paris is hell on earth.
Parisian summers regularly reach 40+. The last one went the whole hog and smashed a few records and just thinking about it makes me queasy. As you can imagine, during the hottest months of the year sleeping with my face a foot from a ceiling being baked by the sun from 5am onwards becomes even less appealing than usual. Since sleeping in my teenage bunk bed would result in either delirium or death, My Chair becomes My Bed throughout July and August. During these months I find it particularly important not to contemplate my life choices: the balcony is high, and at least there’d be a breeze on the way down.
But it’s not summer yet, and my chair is still my chair. My best friend in the apartment. He does his best for me under the spatial and seasonal circumstances, bless him. He’s a stoic.
18h51 : At this juncture my mother would say, “Well, the sun is over the yardarm,” which means, “Wart, bring me a sherry.” She has awarded me many nicknames, and the more insulting they are the more we like them. Wart is my own particular one, which is a shortened version of my full title, Wart on the Face of Humanity, although by far her favourite variation on that theme is Warty Daughty. Then there’s Face Ache, Vile Child (my personal favourite) and Repellent Creature, to name just a choice few. Anyway, the sun is over the yardarm and in the absence of sherry and my mother, there will be gin.
21h21 : Watched Midway, and honestly I’m amazed I got beyond that point in the film. Still. It was something to do. Sort of. Tomorrow I must do something. I probably won’t, but I must.
