Down the Barrel of a Vin

Despite appearances, I am not much given to writing about my personal life.

Acres of print about my family, my moods, my eternal and meandering self-reflections have been produced. There is also the very fact of this newsletter, I suppose, but not so much about boys and various, or invariable, love interests.

This is in some sense purely mathematical. To write about that would be akin to launching a zoological study in the vacuum of empty space. In another sense, it's just not that interesting to me. Perhaps this is why I have spent 99.97 per cent of my life single, memorising dinosaur names.

It is necessary today, however, to venture into some of this long absent detail and I do so only in service of a narrative sensibility. There are two moments from the weekend before last that simply cannot be rendered without this context and I bring them to you now, thus rendered.

On the Friday night I braved one of the trendiest (and most expensive) restaurants in Paris, the famously-difficult-to-reserve Septime for dinner with my two friends Claire and Maddie. The occasion was to celebrate Maddie's ability to hit the refresh button on the booking website faster than most everyone else. We opted for the accord mets et vins, or wine pairing, which came with a handsome sommelier who, we established early on through questionable methods of deduction, is gay.

During the meal the sommelier explained one of the matches was from an Italian vineyard where he both lived and worked – with his husband – producing varieties of wine that relied on the grape being covered every night on account of the wild boars. During 1996, 1997 and 1998, however, the workers got so drunk during the season they forgot do that part and the entire vintage was lost to the snoots of rampaging swine. That was long before his watch had started, naturally.

When he left us to enjoy that course, Maddie turned to me with an eye to a different kind of match and said: 'He's chaotic enough to live in a vineyard but responsible enough to protect the grapes from the boars.'

A tremendous sell but, alas, his husband likes to take photos of the sommelier when the light is perfect and perhaps more importantly is still his husband. And besides, I said, I wasn't looking for a partner. And I would have let the pigs in.

The following night we were celebrating a mutual friend's birthday at a drag show in a brewery by the Canal Saint-Martin. There were lots of new people to meet and I was doing what I always do in such circumstances: talking a lot, and fast, to leave people with an incorrect conception of who I am. There was a German boy there, who I will call Sebastien, and he lives in France and was surrounded by, frankly, too many Australians and a handful of French people. All of this required an impressive level of real-time translation on his behalf.

At one point, during a conversation among four of us, he turned to me and said: 'Wow, you are a lot.' It was observational, not necessarily accusatory, but baffling nonetheless.

And I said: 'What have I done?'

'The jokes, they just keep coming, there is no break,' he said, clutching his head and laughing.

'Oh,' I said. I was unsure of what he meant because I didn't think I was telling jokes so much as engaging in the cut-and-thrust of conversation at a brewery.

'I'm a people pleaser,' I said eventually.

'I can tell,' he said.

When I went back to my friends at the main table I said to them: 'I can't decide if Sebastien hates me or is just really German.' We all laughed and kept drinking, as the occasion required.

Many hours later, closer to midnight, we moved like one of Napoleon's foraging grand armies to our favourite Paris bar – site of my as yet unspeakable inaugural pétanque club hijinks – and Sebastien was still with us, his reservations notwithstanding. The bar manager Craig told us an enormous birthday party of 40 people had just vacated the space and we descended on the leftover cheese platters with the stolen valour afforded to those who cannot, or will not, remember history.

I made a self-deprecating joke in front of Sebastien, who continued to express dismay at my entire worldview, and he said with some alarm: 'You just... you should never talk about yourself that way! Why are you like this?'

At length, I explained to him the particular neuroses of the Australian continent: that its settlers have developed a sprawling yet opaque mythology of egalitarianism and that this often runs perpendicular to reality; that this seems to arise from the crime of settlement itself, an elemental awareness of it even when denied – forked tongue of the colony – and that enforcement of this moral astrology is a task taken on with fervent stupour; not by the police or even a semi-organised militia but by the people themselves whose conception of equality is somehow never endangered by the mining barons, or the newspaper moguls or even the clamouring of the middle class – for clamour, they must! – but only ever imperilled by the keening pitch of the wind that blows around the heads of those who have dared raise their heads above the cultural waterline.

'We call it Tall Poppy Syndrome,' I said, 'and the way to guard against that is that everyone is expected to engage in a certain kind of effacement, an ongoing performance of self-deprecation and levelling so that nobody can be considered better than anybody else.'

I paused for a moment while I watched this insanity register and then added: 'And the thing you must understand about me, Sebastien, is that I am the very best at it.'

It was then that he leaned forward and kissed me. Passionately. Vigorously, even. And we kept kissing. In between, he said to me: 'You are the weirdest person I have ever met.' I took this as a compliment.

The bar 'closed' and the roller shutters came down. Craig brought up a karaoke app on the iPad and we took turns choosing songs. I popped on Elton John's Sacrifice and then he made a selection that brought the whole room together, in both song and, for the French, confusion.

And that is how I came to be in my favourite bar in all of Paris macking on with a German boy in front of a Scottish bar manager surrounded by my Australian friends belting out John Farnham's You're The Voice. If ever there was a moment to confirm my sneaking suspicion that this gap year in France is something of a mid-life crisis, this was it. I'm not complaining, of course, and as I told a reader of this very tribune: at least I didn't divorce my wife and buy a motorbike.

We change by degrees, though. As the morning marched on, Sebastien asked me if I wanted to go home with him. I did. But I could not. I had been commissioned to write a comment piece a full five days earlier and had not written so much as a syllable and it was already [redacted] o'clock in the morning on the last day I had left to start and finish it.

'I can't,' I said. We were pressed against each other as Farnham's anthem was given the wild-boars-in-an-Italian-vineyard treatment. I looked Sebastien in the whites of his eyes and, very seriously, continued: 'I have to write an oped about the Australian government's freedom of information law amendments and the use of a scandal called robodebt as cover for the descent into secrecy.'

And he said: 'You're allowed to say no.'

Not too long after this conversation on the same morning, at the far more reasonable French hour of 9.30am, thieves climbed up a very long ladder to a balcony at the louvre and used power tools to break through a window into the Gallery of Apollo before making off with priceless imperial jewels on the back of two scooters.

I could have had an alibi!

As it turns out, both Mum and her friend Helen 'would have won Waterloo' T messaged to reassure me that they knew I couldn't possibly have been involved because I don't know how to use an angle grinder.

Addenda

Grapes of Maths

In the elevated commune where I live, Montmartre, the vineyards on the side of the hill in the shadow of the Sacre Cœur, maintain a special place in the local psyche as the oldest in all of Paris. Depending on who you listen to, they are also the last remaining vineyards in the city of Paris itself and this particular one has been in operation since 1933. Of course, before Paris moved outwards, Montmartre was its own separate village and vineyard life there goes back to the 10th Century and might have stuck around if the wine was, uh, any good. Turns out the northern aspect and comparatively less sun never produced wine of the best quality. Do we care? Absolutely not!

Every year in Montmartre the Fête des Vendages is held in October to mark the harvest and it is iconic, silly, serious and tremendous fun. I didn't bother going to the actual event at the basilica where there are food and wine stalls everywhere and more people than seems possible to fit into those narrow cobblestone streets but I didn't need to; the whole suburb was brilliant and alive. I saw no fewer than three different brass bands just wandering about and playing, as if a truck carrying brass bands had turned over on a nearby boulevard and animal control were still trying to round them up.

The local shops were selling takeaway wine and the sky was that perfect cold blue so I just wandered the streets with my little cup of vin blanc and sipped, and flâneured. I popped back home periodically for naps and then ventured out again, a system of exploration I've modelled on the Roomba vacuum.

At night, after my fifth or sixth outing, I walked home along my street only to find it had been turned into an outdoor party with yet another brass band. I can't produce the working to prove it, but I feel like life is better whenever there is a surprise brass band. We should deploy brass bands like SEAL Team Six. This is now my official platform.

Grand Designs

Every year in the other (still) radical commune of Montreuil – just over the city border to the east of Bastille – the local artists throw open their studio and workspace doors to the public. There are hundreds of them, all plotted on a map, and you can just walk until you find balloons on a doorway and... go inside their home to see their art, talk to them about their practice and generally have a snoop. As my local guide and friend Meg told me, half the fun (?) is looking at homes we could never afford and the other half is seeing how people interpret the world.

Take this woman, for instance.

She was sitting in the middle of a massive, open top floor apartment with light washing in from all angles. Long grey hair, arms folded in front of her, completely silent. And her art! I found it fascinating. Meg found it so creepy she had to leave. An entire wall was dedicated to baby doll heads stitched to the stylised bodies of animals and insects, like spiders and crabs. Yeah, I know! You can see one if you zoom in on the picture above, to the bottom right of the starfish. There was a thickness of death about the work, but equally something playful in the way she imagined these nightmarish beings. And also she obviously really likes cats.

We met a dozen or so artists in the few hours we had traipsing around, and all of them had a different thing going on. One guy had an IV drip bag filled with bleach attached to a large fabric printer that created bee-like images of flowers by dripping the fluid in intricate dots that discoloured the fabric, all done automatically according to some set of instructions I didn't quite catch. But I am very on board with all things bees, so there you go.

He also had a little printing array that took real time satellite data from the earth and slowly printed receipts in case we need to return it or something.

And Finally

Readers may remember I told the story last update about how I made a friend at my regular cafe here in Paris and that he is the lead singer in a band called Mandelbro. Well, they played a big gig at a legendary venue here in the dix-huitieme called La Boule Noire on Thursday night just gone. I was planning on taking some friends but they were cowards who abandoned me so I went on my own which, for those who know me well, is just not something I do. That said, I knew two of the baristas from the cafe were going to support and, as it turns out, a whole cast of regulars. Cafe as supportive family! It was so sweet, and the performance itself was electrifying. Doing all the of the things I didn't know I missed in my 20s is a rush.