Gare Du Nord.

Petit canard in the chaos of the North.

Night thoughts.

I have become accustomed, even fond of the long early morning walk across Paris, from wherever the evenings events may have carried me, back to my roof-top nook on the 4th floor above Rue Quincampoix.There is part of me that has come to see the late night, early morning Paris streets as being more obviously and honestly Parisien than any other.

After the waves of tourists have broken and receded.
After the flurried interchange between restaurants and bars.
... Even after the metro.

All thats left is the quiet hum, of dim-lit streets and alleys traversed by the very occasional interloper wandering and wondering. The streets become the property of Paris ... and the scattered homeless that sleep in them. 
Those, like myself, passing though seem to share a knowing momentary familiarity with each other... last night a perfect example. Crossing the Canal St.Martin, a pause to take a picture or two in the eery, empty lamp-lit sheen of the rain-slicked cobbles.
A passerby stops.
A disarming smile and a request to see what I took.
Appreciation. Can I have it? Phone number taken, and the picture wings its emailed way.
A little thing but not insignificant.

But we are truly just the interlopers, those who pass through on our way back to wherever we comfortably huddle out the witching hours.
The homeless own the streets of Paris, and they inhabit them more totally and more nonchalantly than anywhere else Ive ever seen.
The family of 4 squeezed into a wide stone doorway as though it was a bed in a Roald Dahl book...
The pair of friends that sipped from a bottle, huddled beneath a plastic sheet strung between two park benches and the comforting glow of the lamp above...
In the wet, every doorstep and stoop is a bedroom.
In the dry, they sleep as surely and as soundly as they do randomly... in the middle of a path, square. In such a way you are inclined to question yourself, and feel that perhaps it is you who has suddenly lost your grip upon the reality and normality of things.

Paris by night. Wonderfully strange streets.

Night.

Cooling mist on slick black 4am streets. Empty strange.

tourists.

there is nothing more amusing than other people

Hemmingway would have hated me... but I reckon I could 've taken him.

... and then I realise my talent really lies in drinkin.

Okay, I am aware of the inherrant danger of siitting in my window on a balmy summer Paris evening, gazing out over darkening water-colour rooftops... downing martinis and watching 'midnight in Paris' (yes it is possible to do all these things with your feet swinging out over the gutter 5 stories below. The wide-eyed neighbours across the lane are my witnesses)... I am absolutely certain that i stand at the creative equivalent of the event horizon, about to disappear into the singularity of my own self-eating romantic obsession.

... but fuck. I dont care.

I made a decision today to spend the rest of my life in a perpetual state of summer.
Momentary it may have been, sprung from the sun, seine and a bottle of wine.
But who is to say that, in the absence of a life purpose with meaning and depth, we cannot embrace that which we can grip for the moment our outstretched hand can grab it.
Fuck it, I want summer.
I want the childish, innocent abandon.
I want smiles.
I want adolescent love in public.
... cold drinks, sun, blue, green, amber and as little clothing as anyone around will allow.
The belle epoch?
Why cant it be all the time...
somebody tell Marion Cotillard my address.

Somewhere under all of Paris' cliche is a moaning reality that even the most casual of walking idiots can hear.
You'll have to excuse me, I have a window to sit in... a martini to drink... and the muffled moans of Paris to listen to.

just walking.

The sun shines, and you dont feel it... walk it off, One side of Paris to the other...