On holiday for a few days, in Paris.

5 days and so I have 5 novels. This feels about right. Fewer than five makes me anxious. These are holiday reads, nothing long or challenging, and I am quite a fast reader – although of course the significant thing is that having nothing to read prompts such an emotion. More than five might suggest I have a problem, a book-habit. Just five, then. Although I did pack my Kindle.

Reading, especially fiction, allows me to step out. Out from the moment. Out from a stressful day. Out from worries and apprehension.  The cover of the book is a door. In I step and away I go.

Stepping in: into a different world and into someone else’s mind. Fiction enables us to experience empathy as perhaps nothing else can. I wonder if acting teaches it above all but most of us do not have the skills to be actors.

I do not step very far: because I am in Paris I brought books set in Paris. These are, mainly, the small gentle perfection of Georges Simenon. Also I have what turns out to be a most weakly-written novel, picked at random from the library shelf for its title. I will not shame it by naming. So I step out and I also step in: fictive Paris enriches my awareness of the real one and tests the meaning of the word “literally” to its limit.

I’m not a seasoned traveller and I’m late to discovering its pleasures, or rather my peculiar pleasures. The opportunity to see famous things thrills occasionally: the Monet Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie were beyond words.  Most of my enjoyment, however, comes from engaging with the day to day: watching others and learning just a little how to do it myself. Use the Metro. Order a coffee. Go to the supermarket. My scale is small and domestic. Human-sized. Coffee and a glass of wine in a small side-street bar gives me pleasure in a way lunch in a fancy restaurant would not. I lean towards calling this ‘pretending to live here’ but it has been pointed out to me that ‘pretend’ has unshakeable associations with falsity and deception. Imagine is part of it, but too strong, too serious for what I manage to do, and too internal. It lacks the outward action. So I choose the word ‘play’. Femina Ludens. 

I play at being une Parisienne. Trying on being French, like a child in a dressing up space.

My French is mostly learned-long-ago ‘O’ level but, when offered with a smile and apology from me, it is met with helpfulness, patience and indulgence. It suffices to connect on a human level. For me, for whom using my own language is so intense and pleasurable, there is a surprising freedom and fresh delight in getting by with so little, in a different language and using words which form hesitantly in my mouth, yet still I can connect with my fellow human beings.

Paul Bloom writes how we have evolved to find others – those not of our tribe, those who look different from us or behave differently, those who are unfamiliar – frightening. It is natural to respond with suspicion or hostility. He also says that, as rational beings who can engage in self-reflection and choose to alter our behaviour, we have the advantage of being able to overcome these instincts. Travel enables me to see, for a moment, bifocally. I am myself and also, through play, I have a moment of being someone else. Stepping out from myself and becoming more like the people around me. So they are no longer strangers.  

Five days and they have been packed full of encounters and friendship: waiters and fellow passengers and the woman with the pushchair who needed help down the stairs and more waiters, who taught me to ask for a café allongé and showed me how to text to buy a bus ticket, and shopkeepers who would pretend my French was good and then laugh in agreement when I said it was terrible. The shop who had not seen our hipster guidebook, in which they featured, and whom we have promised to send a copy. Many smiles, many many mercis and Messieurs and au revoirs and mercis again. Micro-friendships throughout my visit like – I have just discovered this term – melee diamonds. Scattered round the city and glinting brightly in the memory.