Meow Father Who Art in Heaven

No one made me go to the pet cemetery. I stumbled across it while idly zooming around on a map of Paris, the better to acquaint myself with its features outside of the famous centre. On the Seine, just a little outside the périphérique that encloses that celebrated middle, the words 'pet cemetery' caught my attention. I think perhaps there is something wrong with me. What fun, I thought, when I saw one of the photos of a little dog that had been posted by a visitor whose sculpted face seemed to suggest the poor thing left this mortal plane immediately after being told by an aide about an attack on the World Trade Centre.

The loose plan was to pop by and collect my favourite monuments and pet names in Le Cimetière des Chiens and take advantage of a break in the rolling series of rainy and cloudy days for a little excursion. Of course, being Paris, I could have gone to the Louvre or the Musée D'Orsay or any number of hyper-specific little nests of art and history in any quartier of the city that I have yet to set foot inside. But I wanted to be outdoors. And besides, I could handle the dull ache of death's void, I grew up on a cattle station. Everything died all the time!

Well, I cried at the first tombstone I encountered.

It was for a horse, a white one, called Gribouille – quite a few Gribouille names in the graveyard, which as near as I can tell refer to an old French way of calling someone a silly fool – that was owned by the pioneering feminist Madame Marguerite Durand who established the pet cemetery I was now standing in, the first one in the whole world.

[Editor's note, also me: I told Mum this on the phone and without even pausing she said 'we had our own at Church Street'].

'He was at my service 25 years,' Durand records on the gravestone. 'I mourn him as one should mourn a good servant, a friend.' It was the simple addition of the comma before the final clause, un ami, that did me in. Suddenly, all the animal friends I'd ever had appeared somewhere in my mind and mewled for attention. In hindsight, I think I was a little bit down. Not quite depressed but unmoored; fighting several converging realities in my brain that demanded a maturity from me I could not offer. It wasn't significant in any way except that this is the first time I recall feeling even remotely this way since I moved to Paris eight months ago. Wherever you go, there you are, ad infinitum.

Still, once I'd come to terms with the unspeakable sadness of wandering this river-side temple of devotion, there were indeed some gems to be found. We start, as one must, with the enormous statue underneath which our horse friend Gribouille is commemorated. The statue is not of him but of Barry the Saint Bernard with a child on his back. Barry, the most famous of the breed in the world, is also among the first. In fact, he is a pre-Saint Bernard, but is credited with forging out into the fatal blizzards and agonising colds of the Saint Barnard Pass through the western alps of Switzerland and Italy to save the lives of 40 people. These snow-going dogs were kept at the Great Saint Bernard Hospice for travellers on the pass and were trained to go out with their human keepers and even sans-keepers in groups of two or three to perform rescues. These dogs performed some 2000 rescues over 200 years, the last of which was in 1897 when a young boy was found freezing and close to death in a cave. The dogs were trained to lick their charges to keep them awake and even sit on them, to keep them warm, while another hound would race home and alert their handlers.

Napolean as First-Consul of the French Republic marched 40,000 men and artillery through this same pass in the late spring of 1800, a time of year said to be impossible for such endeavours, and managed t0 sneak up on the Austrians who had laid siege to Genoa. This was the first leg of his career-making Italian campaign. Not a single man died, in part, because of the dogs at the hospice. Barry, of statue fame, is said to have been killed by his 41st potential rescue after being mistaken for a wolf but this is just a strange rumour. In fact, he retired happily in Switzerland and ever since the hospice has named at least one of their dogs Barry in his honour.

In no particular order, I present to you some of my favourite names, plots and inscriptions which feature here because I found them moving or funny or, more commonly, some mixture of the two.

Meet Putsik, for example.

Tender and soft. Excellent name. Sounds vaguely cat-like. Lovely ornament on the headstone. Well done, Putsik.

But we are in France, a nation of social ornament. There are bigger, bolder names to be found.

Like Vasco de Portzmoguer.

Possibly a descendant of the Renaissance era Breton navy officer and part-time pirate Hervé de Portzmoguer although I cannot confirm this.

It's a muscular name, I'll grant, but doesn't quite rise to the Germanic aggressiveness of Sultan Galant Vom Hatzfeld, presumably from the Alsace, who gave his family 'all his strength and tenderness'. Now, they say, he is off: 'To your paradise, where heaven is radiant, may your eternity receive a caress.'

Excuse me while I have a little moment to compose myself.

Not far from Sultan is a memorial to a cat whose name is Darius de Longchamp who I believe once played as a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

There is also a dog called Voltaire who defended to his death the speech of man. Another dog is called Lick, perfect, and then we have Fury.

Was his name really Fury, or was this a misspelling of the English 'furry'? One must take it at face value, I suppose, which gives us the spectacular dissonance of face and Fury. The only thing this little guy has ever raged at is bedtime.

Mind you, far more believable nominative determinism is the plot belonging to an animal (I'm going to assume a cat) called Malice. Malice! No photo, no over the top adornment and no inscription. One gets the impression that Malice was plonked here by way of insurance and not entirely out of love; perhaps as a hedge against potential haunting.

To counteract Malice, as we are wont to do, one must then visit the grave of Champion Gay George.

Alas, poor Gay George, I knew him well!

Again, no imagery or grand design on this plot. Ordinarily I'd say that is a shame but shortly after visiting Gay George I came across the resting place of a little Bibi that was fixed with a relief of same that frankly should have been left as a single chunk of stone to protect our delicate sensibilities.

Absolutely terrifying. This is like whatever the opposite of staring directly at the face of God would be, though equally destructive to mind and body. Sorry Bibi, you most likely deserved better but your chiselled stone eyes have delivered unto me one of the great misfortunes of my existence.

As a palate cleanser, I implore you all to say hello to Kenzo, grand amateur de fromage. Big cheese lover.

He dines eternal on the aged comté of Elysium.

I have always been fascinated by resting places. They tell us a lot about life, I find, even as life meets its terminus there. The dog cemetery – which also features a monkey called Kiki and all manner of other munchkins – is often called the Père-Lachaise of animals. When I first arrived in Paris I ended up in the cemetery at Montparnasse within weeks and then visited the big one at Montmartre where I became lost and couldn't find an open gate to leave, effectively turning my efforts into a sort of bipedal metaphor for the bardo of lost souls between life and death.

I haven't yet done Père-Lachaise, that sprawling maze of glory now home to greats like George Enescu, Max Ernst, the writer Colette, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein, but have loved few things more than Honoré de Balzac's writing on the subject.

So the cemetery-keeper is a concierge who has risen to the status of a civil servant, and dissolution cannot dissolve him. Moreover his post is no sinecure. He allows nobody to be buried without licence. He has to keep account of his dead. He marks out in this vast graveyard the six square feet into which you shall one day sink everything you love, everything you hate: a mistress? a cousin? Know this in fact: all kinds of sentiment in Paris reach his lodge in the end and there they are administrationalized! This man has his registers in which to lay his dead to rest: they lie both in their tombs and in his filing cases. He has under-keepers, gardeners, gravediggers and their assistants at his command. Weeping relations cannot speak with him directly. He only puts in an appearance in serious cases: one dead person confused with another, one who has been murdered, an exhumation, a resuscitation. The reigning king's bust stands in his hall, and perhaps he keeps older busts - royal, imperial, quasi-royal- in some cupboard, a sort of Père-Lachaise for fallen régimes. Lastly, he's a public man, an excellent man, a kind father and good husband, no matter what the epitaphs say. But so many diverse sentiments have filed along before him in the guise of a funeral procession; he has seen so many tears, true or false; he has gazed on grief in so many aspects and putting on so many faces; he has taken stock of millions of expressions of eternal grief! For him, grief means nothing more than a tomb-stone one inch thick, four feet high and two feet wide.

Fitting, then, that Balzac was so 'administrationalised' on his death and also interred at Père-Lachaise.

After paying my final respects to Ugo:

'Beautiful, loyal, intelligent, confident pranksters and almost a man'. And then to boring old Gary:

And finally to this absolute goddamned angel whose photo broke my heart:

I caught the metro back home and attempted to rejoin the world of the living. My reprieve, such as it was, did not last long. At the local bar, having downed two chardonnays while filing a story for Crikey, I received a message from K, one of the baristas at the cafe I haunt every morning.

'Hey! If this intrigues you, there will be four fiddlers, a shit tonne of clowns all in town for their clown master's funeral and me at the Cork and Cavan tonight,' she wrote. 'It's gonna be SOMETHING.'

Context.

K had previously told me about her friend who is a clown and mentioned, offhand, that he 'is friends with another clown' and, giddy, I asked: 'Do they all arrive in a tiny car?'

And she said: 'Well, they might actually, because their clown teacher died and there are going to be six or seven of them at his funeral'.

What I didn't know then was that the 'clown teacher' was possibly the world's most famous (up to that point) living clown, Philippe Gaulier whose students included Sacha Baron Cohen and Emma Thompson and whose school outside Paris is the place for clownery. Also I did not know that I would potentially get an invite to this funeral so when she texted me on Tuesday evening inviting me to the clown drinks there was not a single picosecond in which I prevaricated over whether I should hike across town.

I mean, obviously I was going to go.

However, earlier that day, I had cancelled on drinks with another friend after I told her I needed to get some work done (which was true) but which I had finished the moment the above invite came through. So I messaged her and explained the situation and she understood the assignment.

'Rick,' she wrote. 'Are you inviting me to a clown funeral!?'

'Technically I think it's a wake,' I replied.

'Clown wake sounds incredible,' she said.

And it was.

I wish I could remember all the intricacies of the evening – alas, it was an Irish bar in Paris along the canal, which is to say we had all drunk rather a lot – but I remember the night ended with a vibrant performance by Jasper who had been carrying around seven tins of Heinz baked beans in his jacket hood and each pocket all night, to replace the beans he had allowed a friend to eat from his room-mate's supply.

It was a masterpiece of tomfoolery – his now deceased clown master Gaulier specialised in the sub-genre of bouffon – that made my face hurt.

Afterwards, I was told to just come to the next day's funeral after all.

Gaulier was being buried at Père-Lachaise, as befit his stature.

1pm, be there. I said I would.

As we prepared to leave in the early morning hours, the metro having shut down for the night, I suggested to my friend Lil that we share a cab back to our quartier. And she, bless her, said: why don't we just ride some eBikes home?

I had vowed to never ride a bike in Paris. In fact, I haven't ridden a bike since I used to steal my brother's Mongoose on the days he was away from school as an apprentice carpenter, roughly 24-years-ago now. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and I gotta stay the fuck off bikes until the day that I die. I know my limits. God did not grant me gifts in this domain and I've no wish to spite Her. And besides, everyone raves about the expansive cycleways in Paris while ignoring the fact it is neither other cyclists nor the cars, strictly speaking, of which I am afraid.

It is me. I am afraid of me. If I was Steve McQueen in The Great Escape I'd have written that motorbike right into a woodchipper.

Still, as per previous citation, we were very drunk. And so when Lil suggested we hire eBikes to ride home along the streets of Paris at 2am in the rain I didn't say 'aw gee, I dunno' I said 'what a tremendous idea'.

For a moment, I felt like Rose on the bow of the Titanic. My tote bag was in the bike basket, my phone strapped to the frame and I was flying along these grand, abandoned bike paths as drops of freezing rain fell. I have a very vivid memory of one particular stretch, like a negative of sensuous film in my mind, in which I raced through a blur of moving cars and Haussmanian facades. It was electric! The bike was electric. I was electric. This was the closest I'd felt to genuine ecstasy since doing ecstasy. Everybody else was a fool for walking or being home in bed. I was in Elysium eating comté with Kenzo.

Lil, who has never stacked a bike in Paris and rides everywhere all the time, was the first to fall off. She was cackling the entire time and I think, perhaps, I was still laughing some time later which gave me the speed wobbles so then I fell off as well. It was more of a gentle tumble as I attempted to brake and then sort of just plonked over on my side. I was shrieking with laughter.

On the second crash, however, I almost stunned myself sober. For no discernable reason at all, I became surprised by the acceleration power of my electric bike. I was a pedal hog. A big greedy bouffon for the power of the pedal. I went too far, veered left and glanced a pole on the side of the cycle path before over-correcting and shooting right, crashing spectacularly on to the side of the street. Lil was ahead of me and stopped, yelling back in genuine concern: 'Oh my God, Rick, are you OK?'

'Oh I'm totally fine,' I said, not entirely sure. And then I showed her my finger, which I could no longer bend.

It wasn't broken, near as I could tell, but the rest of me should have been. My precious meniscus, by some miracle, was unbothered. Bruises appeared along my right side of my body. At the intersection of two giant boulevards Lil had the presence of mind to stop and say, almost meekly: 'I think we should walk from here'.

The following morning, heads on fire, we agreed we probably shouldn't have ridden bikes home.

Moreover, having spent enough company in the presence of death, I did not go to the clown master's funeral at Père-Lachaise.

Addenda

Free Socks. Never Worn.

Well, there really is a theme here this week. A few months ago now my Mum's brother died. It was sad but we were not especially surprised, nor grief-stricken, because he was a complicated fellow who did not really engage with the world. To be honest, we were surprised he lasted as long as he did before his drinking helped bring about the end.

What was truly upsetting for Mum, however, was that he died alone in hospital and nobody called his next of kin. It's a long and sad story, but the upshot is that I've been helping her with some freedom of information / right to information requests about how it came to be that he was in hospital expiring for almost a month and his family didn't know. Like with most difficult things in our life, however, we are not constrained by genre. As Gaulier the clown master observed about his own training, he had attempted to be educated in the dramatic arts but later said everyone kept laughing at him when he was trying to do tragedies. We hear ya, pal!

Mum phoned me the other day and, as she needs to, vented a little about the ongoing administrationalisation of her brother's death. 'Just like Balzac said,' I whispered to myself. And she said 'what'. And I said, nevermind, go on. She proceeded to explain, again, that the first call they'd got from the hospital was to tell her to come and get his clothes.

'And what if they hadn't even done that,' she asked, somewhat rhetorically. 'His clothes would have gone straight into the bin!'

'Hang on, what are you going to do with his clothes,' I said.

She paused.

'Well they'll go into the garbage,' she said.

I knew it!

Mum then mounted a defence which was less a defence and more an admission of grave-robbery.

'Well, not everything! He had a brand new pair of hospital socks, Rick. Really good ones with the non-slip padding. So I'm keeping those.'

'You're keeping his hospital socks!'

'Yes! They're perfectly good socks. They're orange. Oh, and don't forget the packet of Arnott's spicy fruit rolls. They weren't even open!'

As the French say, et voila.

Robodebt Where Are They Now

Here's the piece I filed for Crikey, by the way.

Scott Britton designed and built Robodebt. The Royal Commission found that he was advised by the Department of Social Services that it was unlawful. It also found that nevertheless he and colleagues removed all references about this from the New Policy Proposal that went to Scott Morrison. Although the Commissioner 'could not conclude' that Britton intended to mislead Cabinet when he did this, the fact he stayed on in the job overseeing the program until later in 2016 when there were internal five-alarm fires ringing about the mathematical fiction that was this illegal scheme is hardly a ringing endorsement of his capacity as a governance and risk senior bureaucrat. But never fear! He still has a job in the APS, working for the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions. As a branch manager in charge of... governance and risk. I wonder whether Scott Britton has to put his own name on the risk registers he maintains for this critical agency? I wonder so many things.

Vale, Jon Kudelka

I worked with Jon at two newspapers for the better part of 15 years. He was the best. I loved his work dearly and delighted in the interactions we shared over the years.

This was, in my esteem, his best cartoon. Others were more politically powerful (the ALP light on the hill in the lighthouse that had to be extinguished because it was 'attracting the boats' comes to mind) but this was vintage Jon. Absurd. Pitch-perfect. Just altogether so ticklish.

I will forever cherish this little sketch he did of me having a smoke in the Parliament House courtyard:

And, of course, hold a grudge until we meet again for drawing me as one of his French girls like I asked:

Please, in his honour, never visit Tasmania.