Thirst du Soleil

Spring, naturally, has some false starts.

In the middle-ish northern hemisphere, I'm learning, these are many. There have been some sunny days in Paris since March, even some relatively warm ones, but on the whole the weeks have been cool and gray, like an emotionally unavailable grandparent. And the days have been more or less wet, like an emotionally unavailable grandparent who has ridden a mobility scooter through a car wash.

Still, the flowers have arrived. Cherry blossoms, magnolias and wisteria have erupted in shocks of pink, purple and crimson throughout the city. On dim days the floral arrangements take on the air of baroque party guests who have turned up a day early to the wrong venue. I've been strolling around the city, as is my wont, singing Future Islands' Seasons (Waiting on You), one rendition of which happens to be one of the great live music performances of all time, in my humble opinion.

As it breaks, the summer will warm / But the winter will crave what has gone
/ Will crave what has all / Gone away.

What lead singer Samuel T. Herring doesn't countenance in his guttural calendar of sensation is that the coming summer introduces its own kind of craving for what came before: stability. By which I mean the stability of a weather-worn spirit, inured to the bleaker elements, who manages to balance hibernation with the occasional flurry of fun. In Australia, where I have lived all my life until this past year, the sun doesn't ever really go away and so I never learned to miss it. I'm not sure I ever craved it.

That was then.

On the precipice of a new week in Paris in early April, a sort of collective mania developed in its people, not for the first time in history, as we all checked the weather forecast. What we saw was a full week of back-to-back sunny days with temperatures climbing from tops of 19C to a run of 23C days and, finally, a whopping 25C. And what we felt, unlike the fleeting joy of a single warm-ish day here and there, was endless possibility.

I know this must sound like hyperbole but there's no other way to describe it. Hedonism was in the air. It approached like a lightning storm, all crackle and frisson. For the first time in my life I understood what all the pagans were on about; how miserably they lived for practically five months of the year and how ready they were to dance naked in the sun with urns of wine when the harsher elements had been banished.

Who are modern humans to deny ourselves similar pleasures? To forfeit the hard-won gains of circadian rhythms in the spring? No amount of internal heating can conjure the sun. The perfect cashmere sock has thus far failed, in services to the foot, to provide comfort comparable to any regular, lovely day.

On April 1, as is now custom since Covid measures to boost the service industry, bars and bistros across Paris began constructing their additional outdoor terrasse spaces. Even those who always have outdoor seating manage to expand on to the streets, reclaiming car and motorcycle parking spaces for the greater good (drinking in the sun). I arrived last year when these pine, semi-permanent additions to the city had already been built for the season and watching them be dismantled on November 1 felt like like witnessing an entire city inhale; shrinking itself for the winter ahead. Now, I can see the phenomenon in reverse.

A great urban sigh of relief has caused the city to swell in size with visual markers of the coming summer.

And so, when the sun came out a week later and the temperatures climbed, an entire city lost its fucken mind. I've never seen anything like it. I saw people fighting over a sunbeam. I heard animal growls. Not of animals, but from people. There were collective gasps of survival that jostled the spring flowers. And we drank. We drank every day and every night for a week. Longer, I'm not proud to say. The eyes rolled back in my skull like a shark's before lunging at a seal. Reason vanished. Wine appeared. Obligations were avoided.

Through this arrangement – or more accurately, this total disregard for ordinary programming – I formalised what had been the slow, steady accretion of friendships via the local cafe where I spend every morning of my life. The director, the managers, the other baristas and other regulars graduated in my mind from friends to social ballast. I needed them. I think they needed me, too. We saw each other on a Friday night and the Saturday and then, as the temperature climbed to 23C, we arranged to spend an evening and night by the Canal Saint Martin along with what appeared to be most of everyone who lives on the right bank of the Seine.

Daylight saving has kicked in and the sun sets ever later. I brought a baguette, comté – some cheese that was similar to but not actually a d'Affinois because the fromagerie did not have it – and some truly rotund strawberries that burst on first bite into rivulets of red that ran down arms, legs and into the jade green waters of the canal. A family of ducks idled below. It was warm and bright and perfect.

I met another of the cafe regulars, Alec, for the first time and assumed he must have been going to one of the other locations in Paris (there are three in different arrondissements) until someone mentioned that he went to the same one I go to most days.

'But that's impossible,' I said, with a hint of territorial pride, 'that's my cafe!'

And Hannah, the OG-regular, explained: 'No, he's an afternoon regular.'

Ah, of course. The cafe in the afternoon is an overwhelming place and I cannot be there after midday unless it's on a Friday for the DJ sets that have started up. As such, there are two distinct groups of regulars who are each governed by diurnal clocks that seem especially finely tuned in Europe. I met an Italian sculptor recently who was regaling me with stories of his nation's appetite for naps (respect) which are, naturally, particularly fierce in the south and especially during the high heat of summer. I forget the name for this precise summer-time-nap-dead-zone but he said to me: 'If you get sick, you will die, because we say not even the hospitals are open'.

The irony here, of course, is that our week of almost-summer like vibes left my body clock in tatters. We stayed at the canal until close to midnight, talking absolute nonsense in one of those restorative ways. Later, we all bought ice cream cones and watched slack-jawed as Alec managed to somehow hoover the entirety of the dessert out of the cone before launching a final attack on the hollow shell with one enormous chomp that shattered the thing.

Presumably because people want me to be happy, one of the photos that were taken that day sparked a text message accusation from a friend after he saw my post on Instagram: 'Did you just hard launch a boyfriend?' I woke up to this message, slightly foggy-headed, so at first I genuinely worried I had done something in my sleep. When I learned German Mum often told me I would sprechen Deutstch in my sleep. During high school I was properly terrified that I would reveal I was gay via the medium of sleep talking which, in hindsight, is the gayest possible way for that information to be revealed. But the fear was real. So it was when I woke up. Until I realised my friend was only talking about this photo:

That's cafe director J, by the way, a fairly heterosexual man from America's south who has been living in Paris for a decade. He is also not my boyfriend, although the photo seemed to confuse more than just my friend when I posted about the first reaction. 'Well we did wonder,' someone else wrote. Five other people were of a similar mind. And to be fair, if I ever have a boyfriend I promise you I will be the last to know.

At any rate, we love J and a few days later we moved from the canal to the Jardins du Luxembourg as the temperature was due to hit a whopping 25C. Cafe manager V rode her eBike to find a spot and I caught the M12 line. Ella joined us shortly after her shift had finished although she caught the bus, a mode of transport I will never understand or endorse. I brought supplies, again.

And Victoria brought a familiar book.

You know, it's about time the French were introduced to some real literature. Molière had some things going for him and Alexandre Dumas might have a metro station in his name but do they have the story of Deb Morton in front of the palace built for Marie de' Medici, another woman who acted as regent for her son until he came of age? Didn't think so.

Thursday was one of those hazy, hot days that carry the threat of fun but we were restrained and only spent four hours in the gardens, limiting ourselves to just two bottles of crisp white wine in the sun between five people. Given the week, it was positively monk-like. But perhaps we knew there were greater shenanigans to come at the weekend. Certainly, my stamina was starting to fade. I'm 39 now and however much Paris makes me feel like I'm in my 20s again (for better and worse) my principal goal in life has always been sleep.

Friday I had a lunch booked with an Australian friend JuJu who works in Paris and his friend Polly, who was visiting, and although the former had threatened a long and liquidated afternoon I had decided, incorrectly it turns out, to genuflect at the altar of moderation. Lunch turned into a nine-hour affair: nice wine, cheap wine and then campari spritzes. Perhaps it was the residual warmth of the week but I was quickly convinced that now, finally, I could take myself and my friends to a bistro called Le Mansart in the 9th arrondissement which I walk by every day on the way to the gym. And every day I walk by Le Mansart the outdoor terrasse is filled with the most impossibly beautiful and eclectic mix of people. Models, chic elder parisians, influencers and people of indeterminate age and indeterminate means. They are dressed, collectively and apart, in fashions ranging from street grunge to high-art and the outdoor tables catch the afternoon sun and a passing parade of yet more terrifically appointed locals. In a city more or less built on the organising principle of social observation I truly believe there are few better places to do it than on this delightful corner of the ninth. And, finally, it was my turn, emboldened by a Jura chardonnay and the bravado of my friends.

We watched. We judged. Playfully, of course. We detected more than a few men who looked like they walked off the live-action remake of Ratatouille. There were masterful and only occasionally bewildering applications of leather, sunglasses the size of dinner plates and a guy with a vape hung around his neck like a pendant. Could have stayed there for hours. And we did, before setting off on an adventure, drawn Lord of the Rings inside cover map style by Polly after the fact, across town to a bar in an old fire station.

The following day, Saturday, I regrouped with the cafe crew ventured out to an urban farm in the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers – where one of the Louvre bandits was from! – for a DJ set with our friend Callum (also a barista at another one of the cafe locations). While I think of it, as people often ask me: how do you make friends in your late 30s in a foreign city? The answer, as near as I can tell, is to sit very still in the same place for an extended period of time like you're wearing some kind of urban ghillie suit. This is how I c ̶a ̶t ̶c ̶h ̶ make my friends. You could attempt the odd mimicked call, as per a hunter or twitcher, but usually I just let them come to me and hope I don't startle anyone. Before you know it, a great southern tit or whatever has appeared on your shoulder.

The system works!

By Saturday, the weather had finally turned and it was surprisingly very cold. Gloves on hands cold. Already the sparkle of the warm week was beginning to fade and this DJ event felt like a coda to a shared psychosis. The conditions of our reverie had lifted, a frigid and misting rain fell, but we were listening to Donna Summers remixes in a community garden with €4 verres à vin blanc. We danced, assigned Dungeons & Dragons characters for a hypothetical game that none of us have ever played and stayed up late into the night sharing secrets and philosophies.

At some point between the climbing wall, the toddler's unicorn toy and Bart appearing in an impromptu Wes Anderson still life, it occurred to me that I didn't just enjoy hanging out with these folks. I love them. I love them a great deal, and feel lucky to have stayed still long enough to get them to talk to me.

As the week fades out, I keep returning to one conversation I had with J, the cafe director, at the canal. My sister is getting married in September and my current lease on my Paris apartment is up at the end of June, I explained, which means I am going home for a couple of months to take advantage of not having to pay rent here and a mortgage in Australia.

I kept saying I had to go home and J looked at me, very gently, and said: "No, you're going back to Australia. And then you're coming home."

Whatever else might get in the way of my long term plans, I believed him then when he said it.

Addenda

Fallibility of the Dope

I can't believe these goobers are going to make me defend the Catholic Church. But defend it I must! You probably know what I'm talking about. Trump is angry at Leo the 'weak Pope' for being Catholic. There's more than a bit of Catholicism in me. I find it's like lead, or mercury, or whatever it is; after a certain exposure point you can still find traces of it in your teeth for centuries. But it's not all bad and, after an entirely insufferable period in my very early 20s, I am not anti-religious quite so much as I am simply agnostic and agreeable where matters of faith are concerned. I am fond of the Catholic faith, as distinct from the Church, and especially fond of the broad modern consensus in many religions that you shouldn't go around killing people just because you can and you sure as heck (see, still got it) shouldn't go around murdering innocent civilians in unjust wars. Frankly, after their efforts during World War II this is the least the Catholic Church could do. Turns out neutrality really does mean you side with the oppressors and Pope Leo, bless him, is refusing to be neutral. Trump, as per, took the whole thing about as well as one of his cognitive tests and started posting like a livestock auctioneer going through a divorce.

Jean-Yves, J'arrive

I finally did it, team. I booked a French tutor. His name is Jean-Yves and he came to my house to teach me French and after an hour he said 'wow, you're so good you don't need me anymore' and I said, Jean-Yves, please, and he said 'no, really'. Or at least that's what I assume he said because I don't speak French and I really need this.

Our first lesson was an hour long and constitutes the longest unbroken period of attempting to converse in French I've ever had in my life. Afterwards I was so discombobulated and angry at myself for not being good enough that I started harassing the Pope on Truth Social. It hurt my head. I think this is why I have been putting off the actual lessons. That and the Piscean magical-thinking that maybe, just maybe, I would learn the entire language via osmosis like the root system of a desert mulga shrub but if it was being watered and learning Spanish.

By our second lesson, still conducted entirely in French (except when I break down and apologise profusely or plead for validation) JY and moi had moved on from est-ce-que and qu'est ce que to why all the wines from Bordeaux, in his opinion, are over-rated and you're better off going with the Bourgogne region. Then we moved on to various cheeses and then French writers and the source of true authoritarian power and I was just tickled pink that precisely none of this conversation was prompted by me.

You know, as much as I suck at speaking the language it did surprise me how much of JY I actually understood, especially as he dived into some pretty higher-order thinking about literature and the work of certain writers. It was weirdly confidence building, until I deigned to reply and went full Tony 'you're not saying anything' Abbott for the better part of a minute.

Still, always nice to feel something I suppose.

Huggorm

Ella, my friend who also happens to be a barista at the cafe, told me that her home country of Sweden has a single venomous snake and it is called the huggorm which roughly translates to 'bite worm'.

If the Lord had struck me down in that moment, I'd have died the happiest man on the planet.

Three Line Housekeeping

I know I've been gone for almost a month and feel very bad about it. There are also many things I wanted to write that have simply passed me by in my temporary departure from planet Earth. If you have any burning questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments!