4th Installement

A foreward warning

Dear Reader,

For those of you who read this account of our travels for the ever diminishing shred of relevance it has to our holiday please heed this warning, Michael’s sun bent mind has entered a state of psychosis, when he is not emailing innocent young Swedish ladies to try and form relationships with them in an attempt get closer to  their uncle Yngwie J Malmsteen (to whom they have no relation at all) he is wandering the streets of Pondicherry firmly believing he is in Paris in 1939 and meeting with Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. The following installment may be an enjoyable read, but be aware that by reading it you are feeding his psychosis.

enjoy

Parisienne Walkways (RIP Gary Moore)

I remember Paris in 39

The Champs Ellysee

Saint Michelle and old Beaujolais wine

oh I recall those Parisienne days   Phil Lynott.

Mercurial rivulets of time pass through a young man's fingers more quickly than I care to remember. Indeed it was more than three score years and ten to where my mind drifted as I cycled through the remnants of French colonial rule in Pondicherry. Street names and signs hung as latent reminders of what once was, adorning the grid of boulevards running north to south and east to west. The French Quarter was constructed as an asphalt tableau to the height of rational enlightenment thinking.

The humidity of my surrounds lent an almost dreamlike quality to that day, collapsing the usual dichotomy between warm interiority and cool exteriority. Perfume and cigarette smoke stagnantly draped the air. My heart hastened as my mind took flight catching glimpses of lovers no more. Graciously I traversed the Indian traffic which seemed so out of sorts in this all too Gallic mise en scene. Then, amidsts the fumes and fractured images of coital embrace, the boulangerie erupted emitting sweet essences of French loaves and croissant. Francophiles amongst you will recognize the potency of this scent and its ability to transpose the inhaler to times gone by. There I was in Pondicherry, there I was in gay Paris. There I was in Pondicherry, there I was hurtling down the cobbled streets of the Parisienne embankment snagging my sky blue woolen slacks in the bicycle chain. Out of breath having just extinguished my pipe, sweat jarred from my brow. The Seine flashed and danced in the sunlight as its turgid, sepia breadth stretched out ahead of me. My bell sounded as I struck the cobbles with gusto sending my French loaf and copy of Being and Nothingness asunder in the front mounted basket. For it was he whom I was here to meet.

I shall never forget that warm summer of 1939 when Hitler's goose stepping jackboots marched across the Maginot Line pressing ever closer to our beloved Paris. In the days before their arrival the wind ceased and the suns glare intensified. It was my old friend Albert Camus who had arranged the meeting shortly before the German occupation. A sense of urgency charged with anxiety rattled through a population all to aware that the ruts which they had furrowed and made comfortable would soon be ruled over by the iron will of fascism. Society became uneasy with itself as we wondered how our futures would be carved up. Who would collaborate, who would resist? History reveals that Satre himself struggled between his loyalty to his ailing mother and his commitment to fight fascism. Relationships were strained. Satre intent on promiscuity, Simone de Beauvoir ever loyal. 

As I arrived at the Cafe Saint Germain already unnerved by the monumental philosophical monolith I was to meet, I immediately sensed the awkward toing and froing of biting conversation. de Beauvoir shot a glance straight over to me as she tapped a gold lighter against the marble coffee table. My friend Albert seethed as Satre berated him for having never read Hegel. And then it happened. Police sirens wailed as the commissar came over the tannoy requesting that people continue about their daily business as the first German collumns had entered our city. 

Then I came to, crashing into the present, an old man in Pondicherry. Although that memory marks the beginning of the catastrophic events in French, indeed world history, it was a serene vista of three people who I would never see again. A memory I had forgotten forgetting about all those years ago. For surely I am a different man today, almost all of me corrupted by time and yet a fragment of me remains in that warm summer of 1939. For reminding me of that shard of myself submerged in the sediment of time I shall always love you Pondicherry.