I Quit My Job

A couple of weeks ago now I resigned from The Saturday Paper, a decision I've felt coming for some time but had resisted for about as long.

I'm unsure what to say about it other than to make the observation that it can take me many epochs to make up my mind about something but, once I do, it becomes the strongest substance in the universe. Unflinching; immovable.

Part of the issue for me, as ever, has been the extremely practical but also deeply psychological need to have a full-time job. The things I regret having done for a full-time job. The things I regret not having done.

Anyway, I went to Versailles about it. That symbol of restraint and stability!

In 1789 the fishwives of Paris marched the 18km or so to the palace to demand the return of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the city as starvation gripped the population. The Bastille had been stormed and destroyed months earlier, in July, but this represented a new front in the exertion of people power against an absolute monarchy that was absolutely out of touch. Indeed, the Queen was almost killed that night but for a fine display of theatrics and the highwire act played by Lafayette in both attempting to dampen the taste for gore and for pushing the royal family to accede to the crowd's demands.

Wednesday before last, I caught the RER C train to the palace to seek an audience with myself. In this respect I was both fish wife and monarch, oppressed and oppressor; Lafayette and Lafayette.

What counsel did I have to give?

Nothing wise, certainly. But the sun was out after 35 consecutive days of rain in Paris, the longest stretch since those particular records began in 1959, and it reached 20C. Also, and somewhat weirdly after my double bike crash from earlier in February following a drunken night out along the canals, I had experienced a real hankering to get on a bike again. Just not within cooee of a street in the capital.

The Seine was in full flood and seemed to be surging more than a bit into the subterranean station at the Musée D'Orsay where I caught the train out to Versailles. Water leaked through the walls and from the ceiling and staff had assembled apparently every bucket in their arsenal to little effect. Felt like I was back with the plumber again.

You will not be surprised to learn that I did not come to any profound conclusions about my role in the world at the palace of excess (although what better place to do some self-reflection than the Hall of Mirrors)? In any event, no answers were forthcoming about whether I am making a mistake with my life or otherwise witnessing the dying days of my reign with nought but the faintest perception that this fate has already been set in train.

In truth, though, I just needed to clear my head. And to see something batshit and ill-advised that wasn't my own face.

For an off-season sojourn, Versailles was of course still busy. The 221-odd statues in the gardens remained wrapped to protect them against the depths of winter but this was a proto-spring day and the crowds, like me, were drawn to this 800ha retreat to cast off the shackles of a long winter. (I walked past a man on the street the other day, standing in a thin wedge of sunlight. His eyes were closed and his face tilted to the sun, utterly motionless, like a lizard or this lemur I saw on Instagram).

The grand canal in he palace gardens, in the shape of a cross 1.7km long and 1km wide at the beam, was flecked with people sitting in the sun and eating baguettes and cheese and patisseries. Lovers kissed by the waterline, children played on the grass and 20-somethings attempted to hoon around in the world's slowest golf carts. I wore a t-shirt all day long. It was gorgeous. My friend Meg Clement of the 'Seine also Rises' joke texted me and said: 'I actually think the sun has cured me.'

I hired an electric bike and took off. It reminded me of the time, as a child on the cattle station, when my brother and I were given a PeeWee 50 by Santa for Christmas. My brother Toby was the qualified individual who knew how to ride a motorbike. He was a daredevil but, importantly, he was a capable one. I was more like the joker.

During my earliest attempts at riding the motorbike I accelerated with reckless abandon and drove straight between two trees that were almost – but importantly not quite – set wider apart than the handlebars of the bike itself. It's the closest I've come to flying, although it was more of a violent, horizontal lunge.

Around the gardens of Versailles I rediscovered my zest for an open throttle. If the fish wives had one of these bikes they would have made it to Marie Antoinette's bed chamber before she and her help could barricade the doors and make a break to the king's room where they knocked desperately to be heard over the din and were eventually let in.

On my bike, I zoomed on up to Le Grand Trianon, the French Baroque château on the grounds of Versailles that the Sun King Louis XIV built to 'escape the excessive luxury' of the palace he is single-handedly responsible for engorging, following his father's decision to build a fairly simple hunting lodge there in the 1600s. I find this very funny. Escaping to a large château from your even larger château sounds like something that woman from the Pulp song would do.

I mean, Louis did move everyone to Versailles. Like, the entire court and the assembly. The palace was freezing cold during winter, far from everyone's actual homes and they hated it. But here their penchant for chicanery could be better managed. At its peak, there were about 5000 people living in the palace and its associated wings. This is twice the population of my home town, Boonah and when the gossip in the latter got too much you didn't move to a castle down the road you just went on Facebook.

Napoleon and the 'citizen king' Louis-Philippe also lived at the Trianon, only 15 years and two intervening kings apart. Honestly I was not prepared before I arrived here, having never properly studied French history and thinking I knew just about the guts of it, for the fact the nation went through 10 different forms of government in 50 years and pinballed from absolute monarchy to republic via national convention, republic via directory, republic via consulate, empire under Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration under King Louis XVIII, the return of Napoleon for a hundred days, the second restoration and then the July revolution which deposed Charles X for the more liberal citizen king above, he who reigned for 17.5 years before they went briefly back to a republic and then back to a fucking empire again for just a smidge longer than 17.5 years, ending only when the Prussians had surrounded Paris, the interior minister Léon Gambetta escaping by balloon to get help.

Same, France, same. We're all figuring stuff out. In its own way, my home district was also surrounded by Germans, although they all ended up moving in which is why everyone I went to school with was a Freiberg or a Muller or a Wimmer or a Fritz or a Stumer or a Goetz or a... you get the picture.

I avoided the Petit Trianon – another, yet smaller, Trianon gifted to Marie Antoinette to complete the set of nesting doll châteaux – and whooshed along a still half-mud track called L'allée du Rendez-Vous, behind the life-sized little village that Marie Antoinette also kept as a sort of plaything and behind the gardener's house and then hooked left to follow L'allée des Hâ-Hâ (ha!) all the way until it crossed L'allée de Fontenay which I took, jutting off diagonally to the right again into the farthest reaches of the gardens, eventually making it just beyond the tumescence of the grand canal gleaming all the way back to the palace in the distance.

Not a single thought went through my head the entire time. It was wonderful. You know how you can hold a shell up to your ear and hear the 'ocean'? It was like that except my head was the shell.

I tried to film myself while I was riding around and a French woman got angry at me. She wagged her finger and yelled at me and my wobbly handle-bars; I simply said merci, madame as I rolled by. After, I wondered whether she had even been real, so perfectly French was she. It was like a fish wife had stepped out of history to chase me through the palatial corridors of my mind on the way to the king's apartments.

And what a similar ending me and the old royals had. Marched back to Paris in the fog of uncertainty, the weight of our decisions apparent though not yet fully defined.

PS: I always put the little subscribe button here and so many of you have been so kind in your support. I couldn't be more grateful. It is increasingly becoming the way I am able to carve out time to write and explore, away from the demands of daily journalism. As I head into a strictly freelance phase for the first time in my life, this support will mean even more. Thank you.

Addenda

Speaking of Excess

Here's the rest of my Versailles photos because I am tired and like taking photos and it's easier than writing sometimes.

Skalman is Now My Entire Personality

Recently, I was hanging out at the cafe I go to every morning for precisely two hours before starting my day, comme d'hab, and the barista Ella told me that I reminded her of a children's cartoon character called Skalman from her native Sweden.

'He's super chill, he really likes his routine and carries around a clock that tells him when it's nap time and when it's time to eat,' she said.

From the Wikipedia page for the comic from which he appears (Bamse: the World's Strongest Bear) is this wonderful, earnest description: 'Skalman seems to be a polyphasic sleeper, and according to himself, his best invention is the food-and-sleep clock, whose calls he follows slavishly, even at times when sleep seems highly inappropriate.'

I love him. He is perfect.

World is Fukt

I don't have the wits about me to say what needs to be said about Iran and the Israel-US joint endeavour to blow up the Middle East except to note that suddenly (I wonder if it has anything to do with Israel's efforts in Gaza) the conservative war-mongers are complaining that the international rules based order has failed because it allowed the gruesome Ayatollah to rule for as long as he did. And look, international law is certainly a figleaf but perhaps not in the way Janet Albrechtsen characterises it. Or perhaps not only in the way she characterises it. She's talking about Iran here, among others, but if there was any internal consistency in the logic, an accusation that could never be levelled at our friends in The Oz, you might imagine she was being honest about some other major players in this ever-widening conflict.

But here is the rub. International law is not really law at all because it lacks any effective enforcement mechanism. So, the bad guys ignore it except when they can use it to complain about any effort to control their wickedness.

Indeed.

Pétanque Season is Back Babes

As the weather turns, so do our minds. To everything there is a season. A time to build up, a time to break down; a time to dance, a time to mourn; time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together. Or, in our case, to toss boules in an ancient Roman amphitheatre built in the middle of what was then Lutetia (Paris) sometime during the first century of the Common Era or, as my Catholic upbringing taught me, anno domini.

The appeal of playing a pleasant game of pétanque in an arena that once hosted actual gladiators and vicious battles with wild beasts was too much to pass up. I brought strawberries and grapes, d'Affinois cheese, a baguette and a bottle of chardonnay but no bottle opener which was a tremendous oversight. It was, I imagine, very similar to how they would throw a gladiator into the fight without a weapon except instead of a sword I needed to find a tire-bouchon for the cork. I just ducked round the corner and bought one, though. Champion!

Halfway through our first-to-13 match a little French kid wandered through our pitch, picked up the cochonnet (piglet, or what we might call the 'jack') and just... moved it somewhere else. Didn't say a word. Looked at us dead in the eyes as he did, the little bastard, and then kept walking to the next team of players and did the same thing there.

We could but admire the wee guy, Caligula of the boulodrome.

For the record, Dan and I won.