Blessé this Messé

I was going to have some fun with the newsletter this week until the French authorities – who, for official purposes, I love and adore – sprung the steel trap of bureaucracy on my bliss and visited upon it a great injury.

So the fun has been cancelled. Instead, today, we are in therapy.

There had been warnings.

A Frenchman I met shortly after I arrived here foreshadowed a great coming danger that would not, at first, be visible to the eyes of mere mortals or, in my case, un étranger. It would arrive as a darkness, all at once, he said, and the world would turn to ash and melt in my throat as I struggle for breath. And I said, ha ha, whatever Tolkien. Alas, he spoke truth.

Chaos has many banner-riders. Mine was a nameless French official from the interior ministry whom I shall call Clement [Cleh-MOHn]. Clement is everyone. Clement is France. Clement is an idea. Clement is a spiteful little fellow, who has aggrieved me so.

An explanation.

This requires a tiny bit of admin but if I have to do it then, I'm sorry, so do you.

Regular readers of this august publication may recall that I applied for a long-stay French visa under the Passeport Talent program. In order to be granted that visa I had to supply all manner of documents that proved to the authorities that a.) I was a person of note in my home country b.) I had enough money saved and/or income and credit cards to support myself in France to the equivalent of the minimum wage here for a year or two or four and c.) a letter explaining the literary work I intended to create while in France. This whole dossier, including my physical passport, were sent to the French consulate in Sydney where it was assessed.

The visa was granted. I was as surprised as anyone. And then, within two months of arrival in France, I had to apply for a residence permit under the auspices of the long-stay visa I had just received. This process, done online but presumably overseen by the Puck-ish agent of misery Clement, required me to submit the same documents and some additional proof of accommodation and address.

Fine, not a huge impost. I've been doing some self-renovation over the past year and one of the home-repair jobs in my brain has been to occasionally do some personal admin in advance of it becoming an existential threat. Like many home repair jobs, I possessed neither the skills nor the budget to do it properly and have ended up with the soft skills equivalent of an Ikea kitchen installed by a former line cook still suffering from PTSD after an encounter with Gordon Ramsey.

After waiting a few weeks, I received a response to my permit application from the French authorities, via an online portal for which I had to register. The response, abbreviated here, was:

'Thanks so much for sending all these documents through, they're great, but we need them translated from English into French by a translator approved by the Court of Appeal'.

This was the first time – the very first time – at any stage in this elongated process where Clement thought to mention that the documents I had provided once before to the approval of his authorities were insufficient, or at least insufficiently French. A quarter of the documents are just statements from a savings account and a pay slip. They're numbers! Nay, they're numerals.

I'm about to pay 100 real Australian dollars per page to translate numerals.

All this from the people who overthrew monarchy for reason! Clement and his colleagues are the descendants of the very society that dug up Voltaire and Rousseau so they could be buried at the Pantheon where the revolutionaries wanted them to belong; a remarkably irrational tribute to the authors of enlightenment thinking but a tribute nonetheless.

I would have the privilege of paying the eye-watering translation fee only if I could find a court approved translator. The list is not that long and I had been given this new quest just as the city of Paris was emptying of the majority of its working professionals and families either leaving for the summer or about to. A journalist friend back home thought it amusing during the heatwave here a few weeks ago (la canicule) when he was trying to get comment about something unrelated from a European academic and the academic replied that he simply could not respond because it was 'too hot'. This is a view for which I have some sympathy, now that I understand the nation's complete ambivalence to air-conditioning and the fact it lost the space race for the achievement of the ceiling fan.

Well the French, being as they are, might not be inclined to work too hard at email on a hot day and they most certainly are not going to break their precious summer escape to attend to the surprise demands of their own government on an unsuspecting foreigner. This is a summer so entrenched that they have competing tribes: those who take their chunk in July before the summer is out, and those who take it in August at its peak. These are otherwise known as les juillettistes or les aoǔtiens and it's a whole thing. At the junction of these two groups, who often cause traffic jams and chaos as the overlap between coming and going hits at the end of July or start of August, is what is known as le chassé-croisé.

It was here, at this criss-cross, that I met my true struggle: Everyone was away.

Making my way through the approved list, emailing first one and then two translators at a time, I was rejected again and again. One of them asked for at least until the end of August and I said, in late July, that the government had given me 30 days and that was a week earlier. Then I started emailing five translators at a time, in a race against the clock.

I emailed the English to French translators in English, by the way, because I figured they were the best translators going around, it seemed acceptable and also I do not know French to the standard required to ask. All bar one wrote back in discursive, voluminous French. It is hard to make this observation without sounding like I'm the kind of person who demands everyone speak to me in my preferred language, because that would be gauche, but it did strike me as mildly fun. It was like asking for directions on a hike and then having someone throw a compass into a ravine to help.

One translator has offered to help, in 10 business days, for $700 very real Australian dollars and I am so grateful to them for saying yes even as I sob quietly into my pillow at night over the price tag.

It's OK, I tell myself, when I am at my most unconvincing. A key strand of the novel I'm writing is bureaucratic satire. This is all just material for the book. And then I remember I am doing all of this instead of writing the book. And would I be so happy if I was writing a book about being attacked by dangerous animals and then I was kicked to death by a cassowary? No, I don't think I would. I would be upset. And dead. But mostly upset.

What keeps one going, in this instance, is that the cassowary will show no mercy. Or merci. Or clemency, Clement. But there is the faint hope, somewhere beyond the next institutional kick to the shins, that the French republic will tell me my last hoop has been cleared.

I'll never believe them, for there is always hoop.

Addenda

Moved Into My New Apartment Though!

I flew here with two suitcases and a backpack and I moved house after almost exactly two months with two suitcases, a backpack, five tightly packed shoulder bags, a repurposed cardboard shopping bag and a heavier-than-it-looks desk fan.

I was only moving to the otherwise of the Butte (heheh) thankfully because three Metro stops was enough and it just so happened that my new closest one is the deepest in all of Paris at 36m which sounds kind of like a lot, I suppose, but feels like an eternity even just going down the spiral stairs. Thankfully, they have a troop carrier elevator that does most but not all of the stairs on the way up.

My new apartment complex also has an elevator, somewhat uncommon in the French capital, but this is an elevator of distinction. The distinction being that it is the size of a thimble. Made for, and possibly designed by, an enclave of forest sprites who, having wings, will never have need of it.

If it had become stuck at any point I could quite imagine chewing through a wall until my teeth were stubs just to free of the thing.

Thankfully, I only had to use it that one time. I moved everything else in another 1.5 trips, using it as an excuse to miss gym for the day: metro with luggage, walk the 25 minutes back to my old place, next trip via metro, walk back. I grabbed the last bag and my emergency heatwave ventilateur – purchased after the one in the short-term accommodation just... stopped working one day. It sort of just gave up. I had to respect the move, frankly. You, too, buddy? – after several wines with a globetrotting friend from Australia.

It was getting dark, about 10pm, and so humid but I was making the last walk to my new home for the next year. And it really does feel like a home, furnished by people who actually live in it and will be returning to it.

Might get some work done here.

Post Script

I was finishing writing this newsletter in a cafe not far from my new place when I heard a man of uncertain confidence attempt to order before saying: Je suis Anglais.

And the woman serving him switched to English immediately and said 'that's OK, I forgive you'.

I will come here every day.

Some Animals I Have Seen Lately

One does not need an excuse to post photos of Parisien pets / neighbourhood animals. In fact, they demand it. Animal magnetism. Here are some recent encounters which have left me thrilled to the very core.

1. Biggie

Biggie is the number one customer at a bistro called Le Sardignac in the Bonne Nouvelle-ish area between the 9th and 10th Arrondissements. We met him as he was entering, like some old monarch with his courtiers on a loose sortie into the city to see the common folk. Biggie was almost impossible to photograph. Energy of a hummingbird with none of the core control. Five stars.

2. Plush Puppy

Why is the dog in a pram? Why does he have eyes that go all the way to God? What does he see from the heights of his lonely power?

3. Railway Cat

We meet Railway Cat at a very cool bar running alongside a disused railway in the upper 18th, right before you cross the Périphérique that encircles all of the central city and separates it from the [gasp] suburbs, or the banlieue. The bar is called La Recyclerie and is actually an urban farm, centre of markets and home of recycling and repair workshops – a very big thing in France, certainly, possibly Europe but I am not sure – and it seems to come with this cat. Whence the cat? A name, perhaps? Mysteries, all. He was just lazing around and when I patted him he very shortly thereafter left. Three stars.

4. Shoulder Cat!

We love shoulder cat. She is the Mayor of Abbesses. This man doesn't even own her, he is in her employ. Shoulder cat has no backstory and no need of one. She arrives fully formed, on the collar bone of time itself. She experiences the past, present and future all at once and attempts to know her are thus entirely futile. Five stars.

5. Three Stages of Grief

Anticlockwise from top left we have Acceptance, Bargaining and Depression. Denial couldn't make it. Anger is inside destroying the nice ice creamery. We hurt the things we love. I love everything about this picture. He walked past while I was, surprise, having a chardonnay at a bistro and I didn't think I could get a photo away in time and then he came back and sat down. Fantastic art direction from the universe. A galaxy of stars.

A Quick Note on These Subscriber Buttons ^^^

I will never regret moving my newsletter off Substack to host it here on Ghost, especially after Substack just gets even more nakedly pro-Nazi with the worst investors in the world and push notifications promoting literal Nazi ideology.

One small problem is that I don't know how to create more organic or normal sounding subscriber prompts for those who are thinking about signing up at all, or becoming a paid subscriber. As such, the buttons that are offered as standard link to a few options such as becoming paid or leaving tips but precious few other ways to mix it up without having to create 10 of the damned things.

And, fine, I'm a professional but it all sounds a little bit needy and for that I apologise. Still, we're a needy bunch us writers. Otherwise I'd just keep it all to myself.

Love x

Rick