The Week of the Wanderer

I’ve been reading Andrew Marr’s short history of British Journalism called ‘My Trade’. I once considered an alternative career as a journalist, but not very hard and if Marr’s descriptions of the trade are anything to go by I don’t drink enough by half and I don’t seem to have the nose for hard news. I would probably write the ‘Strangely Enough’ stories because those are the ones that interest me: the Japanese man on a motorcycle who hit the central reservation and drove on for a while missing the lower half of his leg without realising, or the other motorcyclist who popped in to see his girlfriend for five minutes and came out two hours later to discover that his prosthetic hand that he had left attached to the bike had been stolen.

Or maybe I would write a diary column, but not about the rich and famous, but the everyday and mundane such as the guy whose sense of dress was so poor that he fully distracted me from reading anymore of ‘My Trade’. There I was clutching onto the bar to stop myself staggering all over the train when over the top of it I espied a melange of colours that surely should never be seen together: dark blue with orange pinstripes. It was so shocking that I soon realised that it was responsible for the fact that I kept losing my place on the page. I kept the book there so I could hide the fact that my jaw was falling lower and lower, but he must have seen my eyes grow to saucers when I spotted the vertically striped shirt in varying shades of pink and grey. The silver tie that lay on top of it was yet another colour to add to the bizarre palette. I wondered if I should say something, but thankfully tact intervened and told me that a mere foreigner should never give a French man fashion tips, even if his wardrobe is visually disturbing, his ego may never recover.

And the Scottish fans arrived. Although I somehow missed them and in fact had no idea that there was a French/Scotland Euro 2008 qualifying match, I have carefully reconstructed this story from eyewitness accounts. My contact on Tuesday’s Eurostar confirms that the fans were as pissed as farts even as they travelled over to Paris and the bar of said Eurostar was impossible to enter unless you were wearing a kilt. By Wednesday, the bekilted ones had all congregated on the Champ de Mars (behind the Eiffel Tower) along with bagpipes, kegs of Heineken, boxes of wine and various other liquids. While thousands imbibed drink there, many choose to drive Wang (he of the local after work bar) mad by drinking vast quantities there. Then at 6 o’clock, as one, the fans began to move. The parade was made up of bagpipers leading the way – which woke up the Scot who had fallen asleep in Wang’s, one hand clasping his pint, his other thumb still on his mobile phone in the middle of typing a text message. Behind the pipers came the general rowdy loud mouths who provided rousing renditions of popular Scottish songs. Behind them came the pissheads who generally pissed, puked or passed out along the way to the Parc de Princes. Locals remarked that they had never seen so much pee in Paris and this is the city where men frequently do their business in very public places. Next in the Parade were the first clean up squad, those friendly CRS officers decked out in riot gear picked up the fallen and piled them into a huge meat wagon. And lastly came the Paris street cleaners, so that by the time the fans were all safely in the stadium the chicest quartier of Paris began to think that the Tartan Army had been merely a dream; until they all piled out triumphant having beaten France 1-0 two hours later and partied till it was time to go home.

Lastly was the England v South Africa Match. Obviously having no interest in Rugby myself I chose to go for happy hour drinks on DiscoBlue. It’s very blue and I leave before the disco starts. I’ll digress a little hear to talk about my very lovely ‘come hither’ shoes. I own three pairs of shoes with a heel, and I very rarely wear them and for some reason the rather gorgeous peeped toe pair caught my attention last night and I thought to myself: Why do I never wear these? The answer being the rather lovely different shades of ties that attach them to my feet always come undone and they are bloody uncomfortable. So on form we all trouped off to go to a Lebanese restaurant before the disco started; we being a friend, her husband that I met for the first time and her in-laws that I was also meeting for the FIRST time. The restaurant was not close, in fact it seemed to be halfway across Paris, a long enough walk for those beautiful ties to all slip undone and tangle themselves up around my feet as I rabbited on unaware until I did something resembling a remarkable flying rugby tackle along a Paris pavement. Had I been on the field at Stade de France I may have done better than the England squad who got trounced 36-0. And maybe I wouldn’t have been so bloody mortified as I was escorted to a taxi at the end of the evening with the beautiful shoes in my handbag.