The year, 1994. The month, April.
Or at least I remember it as being around April as it wasn't winter and it wasn't summer and the weather was very changeable. The year I'm a little more sure on, but trying to affirm either led to disagreements with and between the parentals and so...
it was '94, it was April. I was thirteen. A moody teen, and a still quite new vegetarian. My older brother, the dog, had died that January, and so this was my first European foray if you exclude the Channel Isles. Prior to that it had mostly been dog-friendly staycations (though the phrase itself hadn't been coined then). We didn't fly, we went by Eurostar. Off the back of an exotic (and it was exotic then) late booked holiday in February to Tunisia during Ramadan.
Paris, then, had a lot to live up to, though I knew little, other than it was meant to be a romantic city, or at least that's the marketing my thirteen year old mind had picked up on, and I was determined at that time not to like romance. Or boys, unless they were older and cooler. I was equally determined, therefore, not to be impressed, and so I wasn't. I really wasn't.
In 1994 this was not a city to be a vegetarian tourist in; it was all cheese baguettes and omelettes and overpriced pastries which my brain and body didn't thank me for and it became rather a bore to eat, as well as the cause of some fierce arguments.
Culture fared a little better, but only a little. At thirteen I wasn't all that interested. And yet it's amazing what stays with you: going up, not all the way, the Eiffel Tower on a windy day (it might have been raining also), my mother, with her vertigo, staying put on firmer ground; the crazy driving round the Arc de Triomphe; the exterior of the Notre-Dame, I don't recall seeing its inside; queuing for the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre; the smoky cafe atmosphere; and the chic women, walking little dogs, and the pretentious men, though I wouldn't have known that word then, just that these men were careful to exude a certain air.
On the whole I felt Parisians were rude and rather disdainful of the English tourist, but then I had un petit peu French at that time (I don't have a whole lot more now), my mother was the fluent one, so to me it was all sights, sounds and smells. It was all, for want of a better word, foreign. And made me feel, at thirteen, ugly; uglier even than the ugly duckling, and hungry too for the beauty I had been promised and hadn't found. Where was it? Paris, aided by the weather, seemed so gloomy. I couldn't for the life of me understand, all thirteen years and four months of it, why it was so raved about. And I've never (once grown) returned to find out, at least not in person and not to modern Paris.
The Paris I have been enthralled by and revisited on more than one occasion is the Paris of the 1920s. The Paris Hemingway wrote about in A Moveable Feast. That is still there, you'll say, but I have very little appetite now for real travel as opposed to that from a comfortable chair. No; I prefer reading of the Parisian atmosphere, for I think, much like van Gogh, I'm more of a small town and country person. At thirteen, I wasn't, I was for the bright lights but Paris didn't hit the mark.
A year later we went with extended family to Normandy, which is mostly memorable as the house we stayed in was full of medieval artefacts like something out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. There were country roadside walks too to the market, in single or double file, with most of the bread bought being eaten on the walk back. The year after that (and the one following too) we went to Euro Disney (we watched Princess Diana's funeral on the train), but that I don't think you can say is France. It's American French, or French American. It is not France, just as Las Vegas isn't America. It's a playground.
No, the real France, the one I was too young to appreciate, though I had already been introduced to drinking a little wine with meals, is grown up. Paris especially is for adults only.
Picture credit: The Roofs of Paris, 1886, Vincent van Gogh (source: WikiArt).
Written July 2020.
