Easy Like a Sunday Morning

Totally free days with no commitments are like gold dust, so imagine when a free weekend comes along. Keen not to waste these 48 hours, they require careful planning – hours of sweet nothing carefully scheduled in a mix of trips into Paris etc. So yesterday was an excellent day, the sort of day I look forward to in the depths of 6 sets of Soulevé Terre (deadlift to you and me). There is a sense that these free weekends are things that I earn, using the thought of them in the week to propel me through training. Work hard, get your rewards – those rewards are normally a win but when there’s no match then the rewards become freedom.

So I ‘pottered’ around the flat, acting the domesticated creature I have become before heading into Paris just after lunch. I got off at St Michel, glanced at Notre Dame not looking her best in the driech weather and walked the 500 yards to Shakespeare’s bookshop. I bought a couple that could just about fit in my pocket and headed back out into the drizzle. Down the Boulevard St Michel, right turn onto the Boulevard Saint Germain and walk along until the cinemas appear on opposite sides of the street. These are the real Boulevards of Paris, the Champs-Elysées doesn’t come close with its international chain stores and soul-less atmosphere. The 5^th and 6^th arrondissements are where it’s at. ‘The King’s Speech’ or ‘Le Discours d’un Roi’ was on at 4.30 so I bought my ticket and headed off to do something for a couple of hours.

It’s easy to feel bad that I ended up in the world’s most famous coffee chain with a hot chocolate and a muffin when I could have been in any one of the numerous cafés that flank the Boulevard. But, when I think about it, everyone around me in the coffee shop was French and I have a sneaking suspicion that many of those sitting outside under the heated parasol things smoking and watching the world go by won’t have been French. Hard to tell, and it’s obviously less the case in February, but it’s just a suspicion.

I also found myself in a couple (okay 3) male fashion shops. They’re quite a nice way to while away a warm 10 minutes, nodding politely and smiling awkwardly to the effeminate man who comes bounding up to you like a puppy explaining where the new collections are situated and where you can find last season’s stuff (the cheap stuff is what they should say). So I plot a course towards the cheap stuff, not wanting to walk straight there looking like the scaff I am, if he hasn’t noticed this already by my clothes. After taking one look at a price tag in the new collection I say ‘sod this’ and march directly to the cheap(er) stuff. Having noticed that this is also too expensive I take a feel of the material on a jumper, make sure he can see me and turn my nose up at the material. I then walk out, dignity intact onto the next shop where the same routine is inevitably played out.

‘The King’s Speech’, despite the slightly off subtitles (use of Angleterre when not strictly correct) left me even more of a monarchist than I was when I walked in. I felt a strange separation between me, upstanding member of the realm, and the bunch of revolutionaries I was watching it with, thinking, with a completely simplistic view of history, ‘You had a King but you ruined it. Unlucky’.