cutriver

'Oh buccaneer
Can you help me put my truck in gear?'

(Blondie, 'Island of Lost Souls')

When I stepped off the plane in Paris, the heat practically knocked me over. Fucking finally...

My friend K took me out to an enjoyably over-friendly African restaurant, then we went on to a largely empty bar on rue Montmartre presided over by a supermodel where we sipped generous gin and tonics into the small hours with Hans, K's 'misogynist' Belgian womanising friend, who has promised to get me laid before I leave Paris.
Like many people who are identified as 'misogynists' (my friend HD being another case in point), Hans actually loves women and is merely contemptuous of the games they play (games, I stress, that make them no happier than they do us: those women on Sex and the City, you think that's happiness?). Also present were a guy called Eugene who sang R Kelly refrains all night, and Hans's beautiful, blonde, Swedish girlfriend, who was understandably a little testy faced with our ribaldry.

But, ah, it's strange and wonderful to be back in Paris. Some things never change: the haughty old women still walk their damn-fool dogs on the boulevards; the drivers still show the highest disregard for even thr most basic Highway Code; the diners still linger for hours over their food; and the bourgeois housewives still seem to think that having a short haircut somehow guarantees their liberal credentials for life...

But the dazzling mtissage of colours and races on the streets of Paris is a sight for sore eyes. It's only when I return (eg in Paris or London) to the kind of irreversibly multinational, multiethnic, multicultural society that is the only possible form of social organisation for the 21st century, that I realise how much I've missed it in the monotonous and oppressive whiteness of Newcastle.

As Roger Moore once said in one of his dafter James Bond movies, with a smirk on his lips and a glint in his eye, 'Je suis arriv'.