It's Raining

Variations on a theme...

In a minute it'll be Ella, the incomparable. The lady is a tramp. How apt.

I was going to have an Italian brandy but on a whim poured Armangac instead. Indulgent perhaps, but why not? Maybe it's an Armagnac evening. It's been a cold day in July yet still summer: the rain that's falling now has been for some time and so gently, quietly that the roads were glistening in the last of the day's light before I noticed it'd even started. Not a breath of wind to bring it in the windows that are all still wide open. Gentle summer rains. A sky silently weeping.

Aha! Hear comes Ella... I missed the Beaux Arts Ball... Didn't we all dear. It's very fancy on Old Delancy Street you know. The great big city's a wondrous toy, just made for a girl and boy. Oh, well maybe that's a discordant note but the sentiment rings true. Or one rather hopes that it will, some day.

Somehow the rain fits my mood. Or maybe triggered it, I don't know. No more hoopy-doo songs (what does that mean?). Slightly depressed, not drunk but rather feeling that one should be. The nice thing about being depressed when you know that it's just a passing mood rather than a clinical diagnosis is that you can enjoy it. Be melancholy with the comfortable anticipation of a sunnier disposition tomorrow. Even if there are not sunnier skies.

I was a stranger in the city. Out of town were the people I knew. I had that feeling of self pity. What to do? What to do? What to do? The outlook was decidedly blue. But not a foggy day: wrong season. Maybe in a month or two.

Twice I've been a stranger in a city real time. First moving to Newcastle and then thence to London (somehow the aloneness of a tourist doesn't count). In a few months it'll be seven years that I've lived in London. How glad the many millions of Timothys and Williams would be to capture me. Okay, that was the light entertainment. I might switch to Piaf; A quoi ça sert l'amour?

When I was young... Oh my gawd, I rally wrote that! When I was young I didn't believe that I could live in London. Wonderful to visit, to spend a day or two on business each week. But to live permanently? A few weeks of trying it convinced me that it wasn't a good idea. Strange then that when I got a job offer bringing me here I didn't think twice. And now it's my city. Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom when the jungle shadows fall. Night and day. Knowing the several sensible (and more than several less than sensible) ways of getting to there from here. Home to West Central. Office to Borders. Which restaurants offer palatable meals while still being affordable. Where the concerts are, even if one rarely goes. And which tube for the Wigmore Hall. It's a Barnham and Baily world, just as phoney as it can be.

My broker called today. I was in the bath.

This was significant.

The broker, not the bath. Say it's only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea.

Though the bath has its significance too. But that's not pertinent. Liar! It's very pertinent. But I'm not ready to go into that just now. Fighting vainly the old enuie. Birds in the trees sing their days full of song, why shouldn't we sing along?

The broker. Lovely woman, Lyn. Got me my mortgage. Well, almost, It also requires some action on my part and that's the stumbling block. I've always sought permanence. Mother had a book that related oriental and occidental astrologies. I'm taurean and a cat (sometimes rabbit). Of this combination the book said that a gold plated cattle prod would be required to shift such an animal from its comfortable hearth rug. Never a truer word... But I don't believe in that sort of crap. The description still fits. When (is your figure less than Greek, asks Ella) I moved to Newcastle to be an indolent student I didn't just take up residence as a student but leaving, very permanently, my lover moved self and effects to my first independent home. What did I request for my thirtieth birthday? A dining table. Moving to London took so long to arrange because there was so much of accumulated me to move. Looking around what could I possibly do without?

That's Ella done. Couldn't face Piaf not regretting things all over the place. A little Juliette; moi, j'me tâche.

Ce jour-là le pavé qu'avaient lavé les averse luisait.

Soudain au détour d'une rue anonyme... Suddenly turning down an unknown street is what I feel like. I want to buy this house; find in bricks and mortar, tables and linen, cutlery and crystal, security and permanence. I don't want to buy this house, to be tied down (quietly with those fnarrs at the back). What I really want... so many things. This last ten days I've been telling myself (and everyone else) that what I really want is to live and work in Paris. At a certain level it's true. But do I want it enough? Upheaval scares me, always has. Je me noie sous deux gouttes d'eau.

Why?

Autant de patronymes exotique et bizarres. Perhaps. The fading days of '85 I found myself there, entirely alone in the city for the first time. That is in the city. I'd passed through before, but this time although I was notionally on my way home I was in the city, without pressing need to leave. I found the Piano Zinc, discovered that it wasn't serving meals over the holiday so ended up in a restaurant a few doors up the street. It didn't matter, I was still surrounded by gays, mostly in couples. The pair next to me - in that crowded way of French restaurants at busy times there was barely an inch gap delimiting their table and mine - this pair were pretty, blonde and brown haired, my age, sweetly polite and welcoming but too caught up in each other to pay serious attention to a foreigner's stumbling attempts at conversation. Later I made a first: my first pick-up of a complete stranger. At the age of 22. So in that respect I was a late starter - prior to that everyone I'd slept with I'd known before hand (if only for an hour or two) - and still far from being my forté. But this time it was an operation with but one end in vue and nothing obscuring it. Memory plays strange tricks. I've long believed that my hôtel for that occasion was on the Bastille; but if it was I didn't recognize it on the several occasions I walked through the place last weekend. So can memory be trusted? I remember curly hair and what he wore and my own excitement. But I can't remember his name, or even if I knew it at the time although I expect that I did. Names and faces. Porn images without faces lack eroticism and fantasy objects without names the same. Names and faces I can recall from two decades ago even if I don't dream of them any more. Sometimes I have a photograph. Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you. But I'm not playing Simon and Garfunkle so that was cheating.

Before then I'd climbed the Eiffel Tower, and ascended again in the lift. I'd been to Montmartre, seen the painters in the small squares and walked down the terraces in front of the Sacre Coeur both in sunlight and at night. Since I've walked from l'Etoile to the Nation for something to do, from the Gare du Nord to Montparnasse on my way to Perigord. Got lost trying to make the Gare de Lyon and missed the connection. Trolled the Marais enough to begin to find my way about without the map. And driven the perifèrique; once in a thunderstorm nose to tail with the other traffic and terrified myself on noticing the speedometer showing 60 mph. I'm on my third Michelin Plan de Paris. I must have gone through a dozen London A-Z's.

Jaques Brel. Ces gens-là. Si c'est pas sûre, c'est comme même un peut-être. I've even had more sex there. Both lovers and casual partners. And they turn and they dance and they laugh and they lust... in the port of Amsterdam they've promised their love to a thousand other men.

Of course it could be as simple as the crème brûlées calling. If you go away on this summer's day. If one day I should become a singer with a Spanish bum who sings to women of great virtue. Authentic queers and phoney virgins. Brel is just too depressing. I'm tempted by Albinoni, but there are no lyrics to play with. Tina? Maybe. What sort of queen am I to have no Bassey when I need it?

It's the seven year itch, or maybe a mid-life crisis come precipitately. Oh God! Do these women know nothing but love songs?

On the kitchen table there's a scrap of paper on which is scrawled an e-mail address. A headhunter. So should I update the CV and mail it off? Should I specify a preference for Paris? Incidentally, these questions are rhetorical. There should be a song about being beset with doubts, certainly there is but I can't think of one right now. Tina doesn't cut it. try Barbara instead (and I'm not talking Streisand here). Not a lyric but from the sleeve notes: "Il est important d'être un homme ou une femme en colère; le jour où nous quitte la colère, ou le desire, c'est cuit." It is, she says, important to be an angry man or woman. When we forget anger or desire the show's over.

Part of the melancholy might be the suspicion that I'm not angry any more. Or not enough. Or too infrequently. Never one to suffer fools gladly I'd now far rather suffer them not at all. What very small reserves of patience I was gifted with have long been exhausted. Far easier avoid them. Most of the time. Avoid being angry. Au coeur de la nuit, une nuit de la silence...

It's still raining; silently in the night.

Oh well, it's good for the garden.

Matthew