Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Paris
I returned to England and waited for winter to go. I spent an absurd amount of time shopping for things
for the trip - a travel clock, a Swiss Army knife, a bright green and yellow rucksack, which my wife assured
me would be just the thing if I decided to do any gay camping - and spent a day crawling around the attic
searching for my beloved Kmmerly and Frey maps. I bought nearly the whole European set in 1972 and it
was one of the few intelligent investments of my younger years. What am I saying? It was
the
intelligent
investment of my younger years.
Printed in Switzerland, with all the obsessive precision and expense that that implies, each Kmmerly
and Frey map covered one or two countries within its smart blue and yellow folders. Unfolded, they were
vast and crisp and beautifully printed on quality paper. Best of all, the explanatory notes were in German and
French only, which gave them an exotic ring that appealed to me in 1972 and appeals to me still. There is
just something inherently more earnest and worldly about a traveller who carries maps with titles like
'Jugoslawien 1:1 Mio' and 'Schwarzwald 1: 250 000'. It tells the world, Don't fuck with me. I'm a guy who
knows his maps.
With a stack of K&Fs and the latest Thomas Cook European Timetable, I spent long, absorbed
evenings trying to draw up an itinerary that was both comprehensive and achievable, and failed repeatedly
on both counts. Europe isn't easy to systematize. You can't go from coast to coast. There are few
topographical features that suggest a natural beginning and end, and those that do - the Alps, the Rhine,
the Danube - were either physically beyond me or had been done a thousand times. And besides, it's just
too big, too packed with things to see. There isn't any place that's not worth going.
In the end, I decided on a fairly random approach. I would return to Oslo to pick up the trail where I had
left off and go wherever the fancy took me. Then, a week or so before I was due to fly out, I suddenly had the
cold realization that Oslo was the last place I wanted to be. It was still winter in Oslo. I had been there only
two months before. A voice that seemed not to be my own said, 'Hell, Bill, go to Paris.' So I did.
The girl at my travel agency in Yorkshire, whose grasp of the geography of the world south of Leeds is
a trifle hazy (I once asked her to book me a plane ticket to Brussels and she phoned back ten minutes later
to say, 'Would that be the Brussels in Belgium, Mr Bryson?'), had booked me into a hotel in the 742nd
arrondissement, a charmless neighbourhood somewhere on the outskirts of Calais. The hotel was opposite
a spanking new sports complex, which had been built to look vaguely like a hill: it had short-cropped grass
growing up its sides. Quite what the idea of this was I couldn't say, because the walls sloped so sharply that
you couldn't walk on the grass or sit on it, so it had no function. Its only real purpose was to enable the
architect to say, 'Look at this, everybody. I've designed a building with grass growing on it. Aren't I
something?' This, as we shall see again, is the great failing of Paris architects.
The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a BUPA
advertisement, but at least it didn't have those curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel
hallways in France. These were a revelation to me when I first arrived from America. All the light switches in
the hallways were timed to switch off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This
wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in
Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong
in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with
the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose. Occasionally your groping
fingers would alight on something soft and hairy, which you would recognize after a moment as another
person, and if he spoke English you could exchange tips.
You soon learned to have your key out and to sprint like billy-o for your room. But the trouble was that
when eventually you re-emerged it was to total blackness once more and to a complete and - mark this -
intentional
absence of light switches, and there was nothing you could do but stumble straight-armed
through the darkness, like Boris Karloff in
The Mummy,
and hope that you weren't about to blunder into a
stairwell. From this I learned one very important lesson: the French do not like us.
That's OK, because of course nobody likes them much either. It so happens I had just seen a survey in
