Paris, je t'aime

I spent my thirtieth birthday in Paris. Ever since our holiday there last year I had been vaguely pining to return, saying every now and then how much I would like to go back, but knowing that the prospect was fairly remote. The purchase of the flat and the general day-to-day business of life seemed to prevent it from happening in the near future. Then my wonderful boyfriend surprised me with a weekend trip. He was doubly seduced - by me (nearly ten years ago now) and by some very tempting Eurostar offers that emerged when the new St. Pancras and Ebbsfleet stations opened.

Thus we returned to the same little apartment where we had stayed the previous March, on Rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement. From the moment we took a walk down the street to sip a chocolat chaud in my favourite little cafe (Le Petit Cardinal, just opposite the Cardinal Lemoine metro station) we slipped effortlessly back into Parisian life. I'm not really a city person. London is okay but I have no great affection for it. I have a romantic attachment to Paris, though, that draws on all kinds of disparate threads, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. Take, for example, this thought that struck me whilst rumbling through the metro: French women are not yet subject to the tyranny of the hair straighteners. I see kindred heads everywhere in Paris - long, flowing locks left to wave and kink to their hearts content, unconstrained by product or pin. Sometimes in England I feel positively baroque because of my untamed tresses, violently doing their own thing amidst acres of plastic barbie hair, flat-ironed to within an inch of existence. La Belle Femme in Paris seems to know there's more to life than a hair-do. It's the same with shoes. Battered old Converse baseball boots are common on Parisian streets, even with skirts and smartish dress. As such women in the French capital seem to stride out lustfully, going forth into the day with vigour. In London the streets are full of English women tottering and limping through life in shoes with daft heels and pointy toes. I like comfy shoes. Paris is my kind of place.

There's a genuine sense of being oneself that fills the air in Paris. Even the practicalities seem geared up to letting people live their own lives with ease. The shops open late. The post offices are open until seven in the evening, so you can do all your necessaries on your way home from your daily perambulations. Walking home at 2a.m. on the morning after my birthday, several cafes were still open, merrily serving coffee, chocolate and warm milk with vanilla. The cafe culture as a whole is a marvel and so far removed from the British model that it's probably the thing I miss most when I come home. I can sit down with a hot chocolate, the boyfriend can have a beer, a nice waiter brings it to the table and we can watch the world go by while we drink it (at Le Petit Cardinal, the view includes a fire station, patisserie and a pedestrian crossing that cyclists/moped riders often ignore - a people watchers' paradise!) Starbucks just isn't the same.

It shouldn't be forgotten, too, that Paris is a breathtakingly beautiful place. Each day we were there this time we walked by the Seine. From the towers of Notre Dame to the shining golden dome of Les Invalides, and of course everything else besides, the views are amazing. The parks, especially the Jardin de Luxembourg with its ardent chess players, and the Tuilleries, with the Louise Bourgeois statues of hands, and all of the iconic sights like the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur (but maybe not the Tour Montparnasse - nowhere is perfect) provide a backdrop for a current of culture that I've not felt anywhere else. The art galleries, the concerts in churches and the fierce debate in cafes, the free public bicycles for hire and the entire feel of the city just draws me in every time. I honestly just love the place and I hope to go back again and again.