GIUCHIE, GIUCHIE, YA YA DADA

I walk down Rue De Clichy on my way to pick up Emma from the train station and find myself passing the Moulin Rouge as a busload of senior citizens is whisked past the queues and into the famously saucy nightspot. I think that perhaps the entertainment on offer is not as cutting edge as it once was. Or possibly it’s just that the old folks back home get a raw deal. The last day trip my Grandma went on involved a visit to a jam factory. It’s really not the same thing.

A few hundred metres down the road I pass a building called the Sexodrome and try to imagine a less sexy name. Can’t. It seems decidedly un-French. I think on it a while and decide the proprietor must be German.

A little further down the Rue I start getting propositioned for sex. A lot. This is a novel experience but I start to worry that I have the look of a man who either wants or needs to pay for sex. I’m not sure which is worse.

The arrival board at Gare du Nord lists Emma’s train as “retarded”. I consider this an unnecessary slight on a perfectly operational, if slightly delayed train.

Later that night as we leave a packed wine bar a young lad gives Emma the once over and raises a brow. I catch his eye and throw him an upward nod just to register that he’s been clocked. He smirks in reply and as we pass in the doorway I am told to “enjoy”. Later that night I tell Emma. She says she’s not sure whether to be flattered or offended. I take that to mean she’s flattered.

The ogling continues at the next establishment, although we’re both in the petri dish this time around, even if we are slow to recognise it. Questions fly in about our relationship from a man who looks, or so we are told, like Robert De Niro. He doesn’t, but that’s not really the point. It’s the set-piece opening in his amour gambit. The conversation is well advanced by the time we realise that our new friend assumes Emma and I to be a couple, his questions designed to gauge the boundaries of our relationship. This explains why he becomes wide eyed with encouragement when I mention that while away in South America my friend Leigh will be moving in. And thus, an innocent scenario involving flatmates becomes, in the mind of Mr De Niro, a wildly liberated piece of sexual generosity. Fortunately, a middle aged French lady – a Juliet Binoche look-alike perhaps – makes a timely intervention and we make good our escape.

It is only later we discover that we had inadvertently stumbled into an orchestrated monthly social mixer for dateless middle-aged Parisians. On reflection I feel somehow cheated by this, assuming as I do that contrived romantic settings are too banal for the French. Beneath their dignity even. For them, conquests are supposed to be effortless, spontaneous… elegant. It’s disappointing to find them resorting to such mechanical socialising in order to find love. It’s a bit like going to Ireland and accidentally going to a meeting of the temperance society. It may go on but you’d prefer not to know about it.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson