Makes The Heart Go Wander

I was the first person at my coffee shop one morning this week and there I found a lovely young French man with a pencil moustache who looked lost and alone, as if he had broken into the place and then decided on a whim to try and run it.

He was opening doors and fridges to see where things were. He studied one of the coffee machines like he'd found it in a field near Area 51. Because that's what the interstellar aliens have been keeping from us; a superior brew. I know the baristas at this place now, having lived on the street for a month, and had never seen him before. I asked if he worked at one of the sister cafes across town and his eyes bulged a little and, in broken English with an adorable French accent he explained that he was not really even a barista but just some guy who had received a message to help out at the last minute, in a place he'd never been to before.

The sheer idea of it almost skittled my brain from stress.

One thing this cafe does with every cup of milk coffee is a little bit of harmless latte art. It's a cool spot but we all have our weaknesses. Usually the art is just a little imago, a geometric shape even, nothing taxing.

When the scared young fellow brought me my flat white, he pointed to the foam art impression of the beating organ in our chest and said, in what seemed a particularly French register of resignation: 'As you will see, I made a mistake with my heart.'

Oh pal, oh buddy, haven't we all.

That it happened in the same week as a disastrous and eventually abortive date on Hinge is almost too neat. So neat, in fact, that one must resist the urge to write about it because the set-up lacks verity. I will say, however, that I am stone again. And stone I shall stay.

When I went back for my second coffee later the same day the bambi barista seemed more confident and relaxed. He ferried my flat white over and said with some pride: 'My art is now better.'

I looked at the cup and it seemed to be some kind of fern leaf, or perhaps even a harp if the artist had never seen a harp.

'It's great,' I told him, 'but what is it?'

From halfway across the room he looked back and said: 'I don't know. A flower, maybe.'

And he sort of shrugged.

Addenda

Pétanque Returns

After the blowout that came of the inaugural Paris Pétanque Club, we met again on the second last weekend of the European summer to battle cochonnet, each other and the demons from the first round.

With new guests, we were a few boules short so at short notice I ran 2.5km to a sporting goods store to purchase a set. Mine have a salamander etched into them.

Salamander are well known for regenerating limbs and tails but some can also re-grow vital internal organs including the heart which means – unique in all the animal kingdom – salamanders have never invented country and western music. Also, most salamanders do not have a voice, as such, or lungs. One can make a hissing noise by sucking its eyeballs into its head, expelling air through the mouth, which is also how I play pétanque.

I discovered, since last we spoke of this, that the French call the Pétanque playing fields found everywhere in Paris and around the country boulodromes which makes sense to me now that I know the word for bicycle is velo. Such grandeur in it, a real sense of occasion. As if we needed it.

Here's what I wore to the boulodrome we played at in the underrated gem of the 13th Arrondissement, the Square Henri Rousselle in the Buttes aux Cailles quartier:

Like I said, this is a civilised sport and we treat it as such.

We ended the night at a bar down the road called La Folie en Tête where I saw several dinosaurs stuck in what I believe was a tuba.

Château de Fontainebleau

One Friday recently I caught the train from Gare de Lyon for not even an hour and stepped off at the station Fountainebleau-Avon before walking 20 minutes through the loveliest little town to meet my friend, the writer and journalist Meg Clement.

Together, we were off on a hike of sorts through the grounds of the palace at Fontainebleau which has been there in some form or another (first as royal hunting lodge and then as castle) since the 1100s. Most of the real palatial work began in the renaissance style in the middle 1500s by François I whose royal emblem was, you'll never guess, a salamander surrounded by fire.

Anyway, I've not yet been to Versaille so this was my entree, so to speak, to French castledom and let me just say: I can understand why everyone started revolting. It's revolting. In the most mesmerising way. Walking through the castle itself – with its 1500+ rooms – is like being in an episode of Better Homes and Gardens if the show went for 900 seasons and was hosted by a couple driven increasingly psychotic by generations of eye-popping, unearned wealth. The craft person is the same as the one on the Australian show, however. That hasn't changed. I once watched her make the most hideous denim pot plant covers. She made jorts for pot plants. On national television. And told us it was good. And then you realise that Kanye was singing a song as old as time when he said 'I'm just young, rich and tasteless'.

I said to Meg after I'd toured the galleries and apartments of the château – having already seen, and detested, it she waited for me outside – that while I am happy the monarchy was overthrown, part of me is maybe glad it existed once and was resumed by the state for the people so that we could all enjoy these beautiful and grotesque and sordid things and pop museums into them. I have a simple brain, however, and it is possible I have not thought this through properly.

In the event, I found it passing funny that I was wearing an Adidas shirt and a sensible shoe for the day because the contrast was exceptional. I tried to take a photo in front of every reflective surface I found. Here are some:

After the castle we took to the grounds again, which themselves are properly enormous and contain a 1.2km long grand canal built six decades before the Sun King Louis XIV took the concept to Versailles. Then, we crossed a busy road and entered the kingswood or Forêt de Fontainebleau which is truly breathtaking, and 250 square kilometres in size.

Back in the day the king used to have the sole preserve of hunting in the parts he owned and then after the military school was established the infantrymen and cavalry riders would get drunk deep in the forest and carve their names and loves and putdowns in literal stone and rock. We ventured a fair way in, walking for hours over fallen pine needles, scrambling over boulders and across logs in the late afternoon light. I imagined the centuries winding backward as we walked so that eventually we pushed through the 1560s as if we were pushing through walls of oak, chestnut and juniper. Time and space, always together but never more apparent as a single entity than here.

We became lost ever so briefly, righted ourselves, and then ventured down the other side of the panorama and popped back into Avon what felt like 20km away but which was closer to 8km all up. Looked at from the map, we covered the tiniest sliver of the tiniest fraction of the forest.

Maybe some lost king is still in there, running from the revolution.