One thought leads to another

Mr Beastly was saying yesterday how he, too, had once been to Paris for lunch, and how marvellous it was, although the lunch was rather more than the train fare, and it turned out to be an expensive sort of a day on account of his having to buy supper when he got back to London. But that's the thing - you can just go, inject yourself into another culture. Totally mind-boggling, at least to my simple, provincial mind. I am (regular readers can turn away now as I rehearse cross old lady impersonation) nearly 45, yet experienced a sort of boyish, even pre-pubescent, excitement over Wednesday's little adventure. Never was so much fun packed in to six hours. I now have in mind a course of self-improvement, at least at French, and will be turning to the BBC website, which offers coaching for dullards. Further trips planned, apartment websites bookmarked, recommendations to see the Opera House and such and such and such and such a place all duly noted. I think that's enough gabbling.

But one thought leads to another, and in the train back the other night, in that half asleep, half dead fatigue, all stoked up by the carriage lights being left on and the air conditioning blowing not quite cold enough to be really refreshing, even the contents of one's iPod starts to lose its lime zinginess. A reliable fillup can generally be found by flicking the dial around until R for Rezillos pops up, and it proved to the case this time, too. I loved the Rezillos, especially Faye Fife, who belted out lines like: "Call the Army and the United Nations/alert the police and Air Force stations/Tell everybody to run and hide because the end is near at hand" (Flying Saucer Attack, 1978) in a voice so dark, sonorous and booming that it was almost mannish. Whatever happened to her, I wonder?

Because one thought leads to another, Barbara, Mistress of the Hand-sewn Pelmets, who flexed her design degree from Napier to blag a job at Pull Yerself Together, the very posh curtain shop in the very poshest bit of Wire Town, came unbidden from the deep unconcsious. She, in fact, had run off with Faye's voice, and foghorned demurely as we sat together in the evening art class we both happened to have signed up to, although she could actually paint whereas I was and am a talentless dauber. Unlike Faye, Barbara favoured Pre-Raphaelite cables of chestnut hair, horn-rimmed granny glasses over her deepset eyes and a Dexy's-type ensemble of plaid and dungerees, plus being shod in DMs. She had come to Wire Town because her boyfriend, Cruikshank McBeardy, had a job fiddling with the Government's sub atomic particles at a nearby research facility, though in every other respect he seemed not to know his ceiling light and his synchrotron, whatever that is.

Now, since one thought leads to another, I am reminded that apart from running off with Faye's voice, Barbara also ran off with Dave, who made her eyes damn near pop out, or at least bulge nearly as much as his routinely did, when he joined the art class a few weeks later. He was an interesting fellow, and I'd seen him around, especially when he zoomed past me on the M62 in the mornings while going to his work counselling psychiatric alcoholics. Corkscrew hair he had, and stripey shirts and espadrilles, and Barbara was so all over him that she stopped sitting on the same table as me and moved to his. Pretty soon, she moved to his house, too, exchanging Dr McBeardy's terraced dinge for the stone-built gatehouse at the back of the local crematorium. It's all true, folks, every golden word.

However, one thought leads to another, and Dave had a hobby, which he engaged in of a Friday and a Sunday night, and it was to play drums with the Last Blues Band at the Lion in Bridge St, Wire Town's avenue of pleasure, vomit, piss-stinking doorways and a thousand watering holes. And while Dave sat at the back chopping away and sometimes singing, Mick, formerly of Post Office Counters, Snatch and the Poontangs and born in Latchford, 19 and 51, caressed and addressed the microphone and made his harmonicas scream and cry and dance in his hands. Mick, from lowly beginnings, had made something of himself and lectured in media studies at some former college of bricklaying in the Midlands, driving down from Wire Town early on a Monday and bobbing up at the end of the week just in time to go straight out to the Lion and the adulation of his cronies and ale-spattered, sing-a-long patrons. Mrs Mick put up with this for some years but eventually put her Born Again faith, and her other accoutrements, into the hands of a man who was around a bit more. It meant that Mick was home even less and therefore saw even less of my old colleague Uncle Fester, who lived in the villa adjacent and whose younger daughter managed to kill Mick's youngest daughter's rabbit, to the chagrin of all parties, while she was supposed to be looking after it.

You know the next bit, and Uncle Fester, who engendered my liking for Swedish and German cars and told me that I should go to work in London, once ruptured his achilles tendon and got me to convey him to the office for a few weeks while it healed, during which commuterly interludes he regaled me with stories of his time as a wannabe student leader at the LSE in 1967 and '68 and how his boz-eyed, though curiously attractive (for that very reason?), first wife, a Liverpool girl, had had an exchange with a manager at the BBC while she was temping there along the lines of: "I'm going to have to give in my notice unless I get a pay rise, I can't afford the fares." "Oh really? I didn't know young ladies still wore them."

Anyway, let's cut to the chase. Fester had been in Paris during the student riots, which is very strange, because the oddest thing that happened in my six hours was when around 30 mini-buses packed with hard-looking police went convoying by with their lights going and plainly with no intention of giving out parking tickets. All of which proves how circular life is and how all roads, or trains of thought, lead to whatever is on your mind at a particular time.