56/11 - Monday, Monday

Monday 9th August.
Time to get our act together and get “up and attem” or we will wind up seeing and doing nothing. Not that it would be a tragedy if we didn’t - but there are still places we haven’t seen and sights and sounds we haven’t experienced. We get up early, full of good intentions. Yummy….Tony gets fresh croissants and the coffee is good. We feel so content we promptly fall back into bed and sleep for another 2 hours. By now it’s almost lunchtime…so much for our good intentions!
The street we are in, Rue Francois Miron, is home to the oldest remaining house in Paris. Its foundations date to the 13th c and the current house was completed in the 15th c. It’s currently still occupied - as a singles club! Middle aged men and women give a knock and a little grate opens and asks for their membership number. I love the incongruity of that - a historical artefact as a sex club! Ca c’est Paris. I watch out of the window as people read first the historical facts on the plaque - and then the opening hours for the singles club. The look of confusion on some faces is hilarious.
Today we buy postcards and vow to make them out and post them quickly so they won’t end up sitting in a bag for weeks ( we have still never posted the cards from Oxford). We walk across to the Ile St Louis which is so close to us. There’s an accordion player sitting on the pavement playing “under Paris Skies” - it seems to be an obligatory song for buskers. WE put 50 cents into his case. Further on there is a beggar with lifeless eyes. Cradled in his arms on his lap are two puppies - they look identical and are probably from the same litter. Their eyes are lifeless too. All three are silent, unmoving, without hope. Tony tugs at my hand. He wants me to walk past and a part of me knows he’s right….but I just can’t do it. I stroke the puppies, who still don’t move, and then I put 2 Euros in the man’s cup. I can scarcely hear his whispered Merci as we walk away.
We check to see if the little Auberge restaurant we loved so much 5 years ago is still there. It is, but it isn’t open tonight. So I fix a light dinner and we walk down the few blocks to where the jazz clubs are. The largest and best known - the Duc des Lombards - is closed for it’s summer holiday but the street has several other jazz clubs and Le Baiser Sale has a septet playing and then a jam session. Even better - there’s free entry. So we go upstairs into this tiny room where around 80 people are crammed. We fight our way through to two empty seats and then pick up the drinks menu. A notice on the meno says there’s a 7 Euro increase on the price of the first drink? Is it just a bad translation? Do they mean a minimum charge of 7 Euros, which would be acceptable? No….they mean an increase on the price - 7 Euros extra. But surely that is a cover charge? No says the waiter. But you advertise free entry I counter. You entered free, he tells me. No cover charge….just a 7 euro increase on the first drink. Bizarre! So our free night with two beers costs us 30 Euros. But the band are starting…and it’s a 7 piece line-up - so maybe it will be worth the money. It Wasn’t! But we did hear an amazing jazz French horn player and couldn’t help wondering what the hell he was doing with the rest of the bunch. He was a much finer musician and deserved to be somewhere better. I guess, like most jazz musos these days, he was grateful to be earning a living. We left at 11.30 after the first set and walked slowly home. The cafes in the jazz district, and the pubs, were still full of revellers….mostly young. A few of them looked at us holding hands and chuckled or passed remarks to each other but we didn’t care. It was a lovely moonlight night and even though it wasn’t a great evening we enjoyed being out together. Once we hit the Rue de Rivoli the traffic all but disappeared. Even for a Monday night it was incredibly quiet. Back in our little nest…which Tony has nicknamed the Tardis… we were still in bed by midnight.