I miss the Marais

It was over dinner in the Forbury a few weeks back that Kelly and I made an important decision about holidays. We’re going back to Paris later in the year.

We went last September and spent a fantastic week staying in an apartment in the Marais. Everyone has their favourite part of the city and this area, north of Notre Dame and east of the Centre Pompidou is mine. The narrow streets are full of tiny cool boutiques selling books, art, clothes and wine. They are lined with cafes, bars and falafel joints. By day it’s quiet, almost eerily so, but by night the people spill out onto the street and the whole area comes to glorious life. It doesn’t feel like Paris for tourists but for locals. You can sit on the rue Vielle de Temple, nursing a carafe of something rich and red, and just watch the parade of Parisiens mooching or cycling past on their way somewhere.


To have their life (only a better version where you don’t have to worry about money, or go to work) for even a week is an incredible privilege and I would take it over a week in an anonymous villa or rapidly frying by a swimming pool by the Mediterranean every single time.

The sights of the Marais are just something else. The queue of builders at the corner bakery, patiently waiting to pick up a golden sheaf of baguettes and carry them back to their work. The tall, imposing buildings lining every street with ever so faded majesty. There's none of your Cool Britannia nonsense here. They are class and old money compared to London's brash nouveau desperation to please. I don't feel judged for being English, maybe it's because the people can tell I love it here. Maybe it's because I never stop trying with my fumbling French, so different now from the diffident 18 year old who came here and was too frightened even to ask for an ice cream. Maybe they hate me and I'm too insensitive to work that out. As long as I never do, that will be fine.


Then there are the sounds. I don't like kids. Never have, never will. They set my teeth on edge in every way. And I can't abide choral music, its appeal has always been lost on me. But on the way to anywhere from our apartment last year you had to walk past a school, slap bang in the middle of the Marais. An inner city school in London would be intimidating, but this was a very different matter. The sound of all the kids at play was amazing. Somehow all those reedy voices merge into an incredible murmuring single sound like a river of force and vitality rushing across the schoolyard, the sound rising up into the air and being lost amid the church bells. You feel like this could only happen here, in this place.

Paris is a city of grandness, of course it is. No place can have the incredible view down from the Sacre Coeur across the whole city, the span of the Seine dotted with bridges and quays and islands, without being so.



But it's not just about the bigger picture, about the vistas. That's the other thing I love about it. I can't stand back and see everything at once, my mind just doesn't work that way. For me, it's all about the small details, the things that stick out in your mind and jump out of that bigger picture. I'm far too interested in that specific knot on the trunk of that particular tree to see the wood it patently forms part of. Sometimes that power to fixate brings me incredible joy, sometimes it stops me seeing past things that really shouldn't be important.

I take photographs like I write blogs. I don't have a whizzy zoom lens or tons of fancy kit. I walk around with a camera with a simple prime lens on it and my camera works the same way as my mind - packed full of what some people call quirks, some people call design features. Paris is a perfect city for somebody cursed or blessed the way I am. Little things scream for attention at every turn. Gnomes crouch enigmatically above shop windows:


Nothing is quite as it seems. A bicycle lock on an anonymous velo chained up on the rue des Archives resembles nothing so much as a dangerous snake:


Or the binoculars on the parapet of the viewing post at Montmartre, bright yellow and shaped like some 1920s space rocket from the machine age, ready to take passengers effortlessly from yesterday to tomorrow at supersonic speed without ever stopping at today:


I could go on about Paris between now and the time that I get on the Eurostar in October and I wouldn't run out of things to say. The streets of the Left Bank. The stunning beauty of Sainte-Chapelle. Wandering through the flower market on the Ile de la Cite. The way it looks at dusk, and in the early morning sun. Sitting on the Metro as it crosses the river by Bir-Hakeim and shoots out of the tunnels and over a bridge leaving all its passengers blinking in sunshine sudden and unexpected, like a kindly smile from a grumpy looking cashier.

I haven't even started on the food, the markets and the cheese. Maybe another time. I have done quite enough work for their tourist board and all I have left to say is two things. First of all, go! Go now. Go tomorrow. If you can go, go there. And let me know you're going and I will tell you all my favourite places. Take plenty of photos and write a blog post better than this and make me jealous. You're all easily capable of that.

And second, last of all, take someone beautiful if you can. Because I am telling you now, however beautiful they are, however beautiful you find them, follow this simple advice. Take them to Notre Dame late in the evening. Because when they stand there outside the cathedral round about midnight, lit by the lamps, they will look even more beautiful than you ever thought possible.