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Returning from a rather pleasant informal brunch yesterday, in the 19th arrondissement, a companion and I were entering the métro on rue de Belleville, heading towards Chatelet. I made the quite unconscious remark that we were “going back into Paris“. Which is a ridiculous statement, because we had never left Paris.

This is one of the paradoxes of a city like Paris: when you live near the centre, a journey of 20 minutes to the 19th arrondissment can feel like you’re heading into the countryside. Every part of town, despite being readily accessible by métro, feels distinct and somehow independent from every other district. Living and working here means that you might traverse several of these parallel universes every day.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, Paris is geographically a very small city,  you can walk the length and breadth of the city in around 4 hours. But unless you’re a taxi driver, most Paris residents have never visited the whole of their city.

As a relatively new arrival, I probably know less about Paris than most. But after 18 months, my Paris consists of a number distinct brightly-lit zones centred on metro stations and friends’ apartments,  some fuzzy grey bits in between, and some completely dark areas, which remain utterly unexplored and unknowable.

As most guidebooks will tell you, Paris revolves around neighbourhoods -  quartiers – of which there are an infinite number, because everyone will have a different sense of their own little neighbourhood.  My amateur definition of a quartier is a part of Paris within which you know where all the boulangeries are located: just in case your favourite one is closed, another has run out of baguettes tradition, and your third choice has a queue 20 metres long outside the door.

By this definition,  my own quartier stretches along the Left Bank from the Musée d’Orsay in the west to the far end of rue de Buci in the east, and as far south as Boulevard St Germain. South of Boulevard St Germain is also familiar territory, but I wouldn’t know where to buy bread: so it’s not my quartier.

Similarly, there are other parts of Paris I’ve come to know quite well: the eastern section of the 10th arrondissement, from Place de la République to the Canal St Martin; the streets of the Marais around métro St Paul and Place des Vosges;  rue Clerc in the western part of the 7th;  and a few avenues north of Etoile, heading towards Parc Monceau.  In these parts of town, I know where to find shops and certain cafés.

Additionally, I can also get myself to Fnac Montparnasse to buy bandes dessinées and find my way to Leroy-Merlin at Beaubourg to buy screwdrivers, lightbulbs and glue. But this hardly counts as an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city.

Place de Clichy and most of the 17th arrondissement, the métro 3bis, the towers of les Olympiades in the 13th… all these parts of Paris – only 20 minutes from my front door – remain as mysterious to me as Moscow or Seoul.

This sense of compartmentalisation is reflected in the way the city is administered – surely, only the French could take a small city of 2 million people, and divide it among 20 separate mayors . One mayor for each arrondissement.  Of course there is a SuperMayor of all of Paris, (our friend Plastic Bertrand), but I wonder whether the arrondissement system – created in the rationalist afterglow of revolution in 1795 – remains truly effective today.

Certainly the arrondissements emphasise the sense of separation between different parts of the city, each with its own “typical” resident profile. The 7th, (where I happen to live), is derided as being bourgeois, expensive, full of government ministries and overall, rather boring.  If you have Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry, the stereotype dictates that you must live in the 13th. The 11th is the place to be if you’re a young bobo media entrepreneur. For African groceries, head to the 10th around Gare du Nord and the parts of the 18th around Tati. And the 4th is where you hang out if you’re, well,  gay or Jewish.

Somehow all of these little districts fuse together – with varying degrees of success – to create a conglomerate whole which is a city called “Paris”. Figuring out how it all works (or doesn’t) is one of my constant fascinations.

I feel a little sorry for the tourists who jet in for a week of plastic Eiffel Towers, photos on the parvis du Notre Dame, and takeaway portraits sketched by the artists on Place du Tertre. I’m sure they all have a wonderful time, and tick all their boxes, but they haven’t really seen much. If anything, the problem about Paris is that there’s too much to see, and nobody can agree on what it is that you’re supposed to see, or why it looks that particular way.

Please excuse me, I’ve got to leave now. It’s Sunday, and I’m going to visit Paris  for the afternoon.

There is no mystery regarding the fate of the main character in Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies. Skippy (Daniel Juster to his parents), is a 14 year-old dreamer, MMRPG addict and boarder at Seabrook College for Boys, a private Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Inside the first 5 pages of the book, Skippy, er, dies.

Having first described (in lurid, technicolor detail) the death scene of the young teenager, the rest of Skippy Dies is structured around the back-story and consequences of Skippy’s spectacular demise.

For a 600+ page post-modern comic novel, which leaps between multiple narrators and encompasses multiverse theory, early 20th century esotericism, video games, the Decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland, teenage love, the 2008 financial crisis and the poetry of Robert Graves, Skippy Dies hangs together remarkably well.

I found it, by moments, deeply funny, and despite the disjointed narrative, you grow to deeply care for the characters.

Ruprecht van Doren, for example, is a true 21st Century original: Skippy’s obese room-mate and Seabrook’s resident genius, he spends his days munching through doughnuts, building devices in the school basement for multi-dimensional travel and dreaming of the day when he will be taken up unto Stanford to work alongside the World-Famous Physicist Hideo Tamashi.

Father Green, the school’s French teacher, is in search of some kind of redemption for past sins – despite his formidable classroom reputation – while Howard, (the principal adult voice in the novel), is a failed stockbroker who tries to teach history to uninterested adolescents while struggling with his own twentysomething mid-life crisis.

Paul Murray deserves particular respect for finding authentic voices for his teenage characters. He manages to illustrate their worldview – distracted, hormonal and video-and-internet-infused – without ever slipping up. The dialogue is never overwritten. His teenagers are by turns cruel, confused and cocksure, and never sound fake.

Likewise, the occasional transition into second-person narrative – a risky device at the best of times – feels natural and unforced, and works well to expresses that certain self-centredness that is perhaps a necessary part of adolescence.

Skippy Dies is Irish, ironic, immensely good fun, and contains the Best High School Halloween Disco Scene in the History of Literature. A novel on this scale could have easily choked on its own pink frosting, but this book works well. Really, really well.

Highly recommended are Edward Champion’s two podcast interviews with Paul Murray on the Bat Segundo Show:

Paul Murray Part I

Paul Murray Part II

I managed to get stuck in England this weekend – and once again was able to enjoy snow in Oxford… despite the fact that it took me 10 hours to get back to Paris on Sunday, Saturday was a most enjoyable day to be a weather refugee. Snowmen constructed, snowballs were thrown, and port and mince pies were served in the Middle Common Room at Teddy Hall.

Sonny Rollins Quintet
Barbican, London
20th November 2010
Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Kobie Watkins, drums; Russell Malone, guitar; Sammy Figueroa, percussion

Age has not wearied Sonny Rollins, but it has reduced his gait to a slow, cautious waddle. Draped in a generous red silk shirt, crowned with a halo of grey frizz that recalled Arthur Rubenstein, Sonny Rollins emerged from behind a black curtain and swayed his way slowly to the front of the stage and the Barbican Theatre gave the man and his band a warm, heartfelt welcome.

Here, in front of us, stood a true mythic figure of music, one of the last men left standing from that famous generation of American musicians who defined modern jazz.  And this guy was going to play. For us. The expectation in the room was almost overwhelming.

Sonny Rollins – North Sea Jazz Festival, July 2010 – Evert-Jan (Creative Commons)

Despite the rapturous ovation that greeted the band, the gig started slowly. The quintet, slightly adrift on the wide Barbican stage, searched in vain for its mojo.  The opening tune, an 8-bar two chord vamp, had all the charm of a raucous soundcheck, and it took fully three songs, (half an hour), for the engineers to find a proper balance, allowing Bob Cranshaw’s bass and Russell Malone’s guitar to finally emerge from the murk.

Riding over the top of the band was Mr Rollin’s enormous, vocalised tenor saxophone. Sonny Rollins may no longer be able to outrun an advancing wall of lava, but his sound is still volcanic: broad, rough-hewn, scratchy as scoria.

His solos reminded me of a saxophone-playing friend of mine, who once commented to me “The best thing about Sonny Rollins is he doesn’t have any licks you can copy.” Even if the first third of the concert lacked inspiration, you got the impression that Rollins and his collaborators never gave up searching, grasping for the moment when everything would come together.

The “click” finally happened on the fourth tune: an unnamed funk groove, Russell Malone laying out an unexpected line worthy of a James Brown rhythm section. Watkin and Cranshaw obliged by accelerating the tempo ever-so-slightly, and finally the taper was lit.

Rollins waddled along the line of footlights, pouring out notes, quoting show-tunes and Pop Goes the Weasel, stopping in front of audience members to dedicate a phrase or two to each, before moving on, his saxophone swaying like a cradle in the storm, waiting for the bough to break. The gig was on.

Sonny Rollins – New York, September 2010 – Mr Mystery (Creative Commons)

As the evening progressed, the man’s purpose become clear – he was here to play music, and to play as much music as he could.  Only a musician of Rollins’ stature could flick off a rendition of Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood without ever bothering to play the melody. The climax came on the penultimate tune: a swinging version of Why Was I Born? where Rollins paced the width of the stage while engineering a solo of uncommon beauty.

There were some unusual choices of settings for his sidemen to take the spotlight: a slow, early-set ballad was the moment for Mr Rollins to trade fours with Sammy Figueroa’s congas, while the 3/4 tempo of Some Day I’ll Find You provided the frame for Kobie Watkins to let loose on drums. Russell Malone’s guitar was consistently tasteful, and occasionally audacious – he even permitted himself an extended reconstruction of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on a middle chorus.

The gig closed with a few words of wisdom from the man himself, who recalled with humility his younger days gigging in London with Ronnie Scott and friends.  The band stretched out for a rollicking calypso finale on Don’t Stop the Carnival, and the groove bounced in our heads all the way home along the Northern Line and through the foggy streets of Islington.

This was a gig that, if only momentarily transcendant, was all the more special for those rare, precious minutes when Sonny Rollins – stately, majestic and deliberate in his ninth decade – made the stage positively glow.

Image: Evert-Jan (Creative Commons)

EDIT: 22/11/2010 Corrected name of guitarist (Russell Malone) and spelling of Sammy Figueroa

Travelling for business is a curious activity. Not only do you do a full week’s work, but it must be carried out in 15 different places: trains, airports, taxis, hotel rooms, aircraft and conference hall lobbies. Last week it was Spain. This week it was Germany and Norway. Next week it’s England.

Somewhere along the line, summer has turned to autumn, European daylight saving has ended, and some Chilean miners have been rescued, but this is all just low-level background noise compared to the constant paranoia of missing flights or leaving your passport on the back seat of a taxi.

The paranoia doesn’t quite stop when you get home either… on Saturday morning, I woke up wondering what time my flight was, and asking myself why there were people speaking French in the street outside my window. It took me fully ten seconds for my half-asleep brain to realise I was in my apartment in Paris, and I the furthest I would have to travel that day was down the street to the supermarket.

There are compensations, however. Even travelling within Europe, one does get to see an inordinate number of sunrises and sunsets from plane windows.

Sunrise over Norway, this week.

The camaraderie of the office is replaced by endless games of “phone tag” as colleagues chase your voicemail messages across the continent, always returning your messages while you’re in the air or in a meeting. Finding internet access and synchronising email becomes an almost monastic ritual.

The more I travel, the fussier I get. On planes, I prefer window seats: people won’t be pushing past me to go to the bathroom, and that aisle seat only offers marginally faster exit times at the end of the flight. And besides, the view out the window offers at least some kind of distraction if the document I’m reviewing becomes too boring.

Hotel rooms too, become objects of obsession: for me, ease of internet connection and the availability of an ironing board in the room are current criteria for judging the excellence of a hotel. I’m sure in a few months time, this will change: perhaps breakfast will be my next bugbear: German and Norwegian hotels do well, but Spanish and Greek hotel breakfasts are just weird. I mean, ice cream and chocolate cake? For breakfast?

Sunset over Barcelona, last week.

So if my blog posts seem few and far between at the moment, be assured it’s not for lack of will, but simply lack of time. For the next few months at least, I’m more likely to be 30,000 feet over the North Sea, munching on a Lufthansa cheese sandwich, or dialling in to conference calls from a hotel in Birmingham, or mangling my limited Spanish into a phrase to ask a Barcelona taxi driver for a receipt.

One of the best Brian Sewell clips, ever. It’s from his documentary series Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour.

As a follow up to the previous post, and by popular demand, here is the engraving of St Etienne de Caen and the photo I took of it – almost 200 years and 5 generations separate these two images!

Even under heavy cloud and drifting rain, Trondheim gives the impression of being a pleasant and friendly small city. I passed through here in 2001 when heading to the Arctic Circle by train, but the light and the weather was so bad that I left my SLR in my bag and took no photos.

Last week however, I had an hour spare in between meetings and a digital camera, so with a little post-trip Photoshop magic I managed to get some reasonable images of the place: mostly taken during a rather damp and cold walk along the Nidelva, where old port warehouses line both banks.

The city was also the capital of Norway in the Middle Ages, and Nidaros Cathedral is the largest mediaeval cathedral in Scandanavia. Unfortunately it was late afternoon by the time I visited, and so the building was closed, and I walked back to my hotel in the gathering darkness.

I only had a couple of hours to see a small bit of Rome on Wednesday, but I took a few photos. To say the least, the place merits a return trip when I’m not travelling on business… so much to see, and the ochre, pink and yellow facades make for a much more colourful cityscape than Paris.

The Colosseum (72 AD) at sunset

Santa Maria Maggiore

The Arch of Constantine (315 AD)