London & Paris diary: part I

Bakeries, bookshops, galleries, etc.

I recently traveled to London and Paris for two weeks with my cousin and best friend of 24 years, Paige. We visited friends and explored the cities. For the first time in my life, I successfully managed to keep a diary recording what we did each day, albeit briefly. I’ll be sharing a transcription of these notes over two parts in newsletters to come.

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Saturday the 25th: Delays occupy most of our first day in London, so we get in around 6pm local time for a shower and outfit change at the hotel before meeting our friend Rachel for dinner at Ciao Bella in Bloomsbury. We have red wine and pasta and the staff call us “ragazze.” We walk past my old building, my old grocery store, Coram’s Fields, etc. Sleep comes fast.

Sunday the 26th: We start with brunch in Exmouth market on a perfect sunny morning. We sit outside, bikes going by, between two Spanish girls sharing a cigarette and a couple with a very new baby. We catch the tube to Little Venice to admire the house boats and go down the canal by barge. Onto Primrose Hill for tea and admiring the view between spits of rain. Back to the canal as we venture along to King’s Cross to find a market stall for dinner. We eat tacos on the grass next to a cool monk wearing Doc Martens. We visit Word on the Water where jazz musicians—Henry and Mister Emmanuel—have set up on the deck. I buy Carson McCullers and Nikki Giovanni; Paige buys me Deborah Levy’s August Blue in paperback as a birthday present. We walk back to the hotel through Bloomsbury and then get Tinseltown milkshakes—my weird but undeniable favourite—and drink them in front of the gates to a 14th-century charter house where Katherine Parr once lived (I am reminded constantly that London is not Toronto!). It is still light out and so after Rachel departs for home, Paige and I go back to Exmouth market for a glass of wine. The server recommends some white that he imported personally from Italy—it is fresh and smooth like the spring night.

Monday the 27th: I have not slept well but today may be full so I spring up to get ready. I have a dirty chai and banana bread at Moustail Coffee, then we catch the bus to Green Park to see Buckingham Palace. Paige takes photos on her old digital camera from when we were children and I’ve brought my Polaroid. We walk past Westminster and Big Ben, over the bridge, along the South Bank. There is time to stop and indulge in a carousel ride and eat at the market (pad thai with fat rice noodles, warm veg, and chillis). We meet Rachel here and jaunt to the Tate, but the curation in the free galleries feels boring and arbitrary, with few hallmark pieces and vague wall texts that miss important details. My feet are tired and I want to rest but also to see more, to see everything! We pick up food for our picnic and then catch a bus to Clissold Park to meet my friends Hannah and Emma. There are men who set up a football pitch right beside our blankets and so the line between our picnic and the game is often uncertain, but we enjoy the company, some fruit, some olives, some pudding. We leave when it gets cold and miss the bus twice at the stop. When we get back to the room to pack for Paris, the weather report has shifted and it is now meant to be cold and furiously rainy. We don’t know what to take with us! But things can change and rain can be sweet. We will see.

Tuesday the 28th: Arriving in Paris is always a marvel—so many gilded buildings and so many bodies moving in all directions. They don’t seem to have adopted a coherent system of sticking to the left or right. My French is faulty but enthusiastic. I think I’ve stayed in this same room before, maybe. Rimbaud is on the key. We walk to the Eiffel Tower along the Seine but the cobblestone is cockeyed and slippery so we turn back up to the street level after pausing below a beautiful willow that has arced over the side of the path. A bouquiniste is selling David Shrigley prints. The sun comes out just as we take the stairs to the first level of the tower. The Champs de Mars is closed for Olympic preparation; they’ve landscaped a garden on the other side instead where we take photos. Paige agrees that it seems bigger, more astounding in person even though we’ve both heard otherwise—I wonder what it is like to live with the will to not be impressed by anything. Many buses are on diversion but we find our way back and have gallettes by the Panthéon. Good people watching from here: French girls are wearing great vintage leather jackets, lots of well-cut but loose denim, boots with a little heel (black, brown, or wine-coloured), and curly bangs. They move like the street is for them (it is, I am sure. I am agog, envious).

Wednesday the 29th: Everything is beautiful but also soggy and tired. We go to an old boulangerie for petit déjeuner and eat in the Jardins du Luxembourg but must stand because there are pools of water in all of the seats. The grey makes everything seem quiet, like the statues are still asleep. We turn the corner and happen upon Saint Sulpice, which yawns open with unexpected scale and ornamentation. I like seeing all of the chapels, some with their vibrant paintings newly restored and others waiting, fogged by time, dirt, breath. Down the road, the Musée d’Orsay is crowded and our feet are tired again. I look at lots of hands sculpted into poses of prayer and anguish, propped on a hip or chin, tearing at flesh in fury or lust. There are Rodin’s epic doors to hell. 

On the way back, we stop for onion soup and then at the bouquiniste from yesterday to get the Shrigley prints (2 for 10 euro)--to our luck, she is the only one who is open in all of this rain. We want to see the gargoyles spitting at Notre Dame, but it doesn’t seem to be flowing hard enough now. FREE GAZA is sprayed on the barricades and on the bases of an imperious-looking statue. It does not make sense to be on vacation, to know how many bombs have been dropped on Rafah in the past 48 hours alone (60, estimated at the time of writing). Here I am in the heart of empire, where the spoils of historic wars are glorified eternally. It is never not on my mind, these violent contradictions, the pain that all of this beauty distracts from, covers over, coexists with.

I look for Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian at Shakespeare & Co. (renovated, busy, unclear about its desire to be a museum or a bookshop), but don’t find it and get Another Country instead. We both have headaches and need a nap. We won’t make it to Montmartre this late in the day, so we spontaneously book a nighttime bus tour that will take us through. We have warm noodles and wait by the Louvre in the driving rain—suddenly, the whole courtyard clears and we huddle in the arcades, then run through puddles and take photos under our umbrella with no one around. The bus is slow, clotted by traffic even at 10pm, and we mostly circle pretentious shops on the Champs Elysées. We are cold, tired, feel sick, and want to be asleep. We make the final public bus of the night at 11:42 and crash, praying for rest.

Thursday the 30th: We have been refreshed! A croissant and latte to-go from our local Japanese café takes us to Gare Saint Lazare where we buy tickets for the Normandy train and speed off to Giverny. There is thunder in the air at Monet’s garden but the rain has coaxed out all of the earthy smells and made each corner of this little sanctuary more fragrant. How could one have any troubles living in this place? The house is enchanting—pink on the outside, and when we step into the yellow kitchen, we both have to catch our breath. Colour is everywhere. Checkerboard floors, too. Yellow gives way to another kitchen, blue, with great copper pots and gingham curtains, and then spits us back into the rose garden. We immediately loop through the house again, then the garden once more, and go back to the train via a road where earlier, I befriended a sweet russet Cocker Spaniel sticking his nose out from behind a gate—Monsieur Doggy! I miss him. We take the train back, then have crêpes on bustling Rue Mouffetard, and wine at a café across from the fountain. They serve it with a small cup of popcorn. So many people are gathering here, of all generations. In North America, cities are more like places to work than to gather. I love this culture of being in squares or sitting out late, talking and watching everything and being next to one another. We return to the bridge for sunset and gossiping. Sleep. 

Friday the 31st: My meeting at Ciné-Tamaris (Agnès Varda’s company, lodged in her former home) has been canceled, to no one’s surprise. This whole correspondence has been so confusing and so we walk to Rue Daguerre anyways, just in case. No one answers the bell but the mail slot is stuck open and I can see a little patio in the back with colourful folding chairs—I imagine this is where Agnès sat in all of those great portraits with her cats. The house isn’t so pink anymore though and I wonder if they have been selling off parts of it. I buy purple daisies and leave them on her grave in Cimetiere Montparnasse—it is clearly the most loved as it is haloed in vines and flowers, constellated with bisous and little rocks or shells. A tiny heart-like potato rests there too. I am so moved by all of this love for her. Her gravestone is smooth and cold under my lips as I add my own kiss to the collection. I think of her dancing next to us. On our way out, we also stop by Susan Sontag and Simone de Beauvoir—I am communing with all the girls! We do some shopping (I say no to my own French girl vintage leather jacket, at a whopping 150 euros), and then we charge our phones and change shoes. On the way to Palais de Tokyo, my knee locks up and hurts unbelievably with each step. It is also pouring out and so we are relieved to meet Akosua in the lobby. The three of us have tickets to the Loewe Craft Exhibition—we all like the final object the most, which at first looks like a pillow but on the opposite side is hollow with tiny threads of copper, forming a network of organs or stems or maybe fungi. We have iced tea and buy tickets to the rest of the museum. First we see a show on the connections between psychiatry, art, and social justice, which introduces me to many radical arts-based therapy groups from the 60s-90s, and then a show on exhibitions in exile, especially Third World solidarity with Palestinian liberation and cultural preservation, as well as movements against South African apartheid, and other anti-imperialist art collectives across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the diaspora. We have more crêpes for dinner on Mouffetard and I ice my knee with a can of peace iced tea. Then there is packing and waving good-bye to our familiar streets.

Saturday the 1st: We went to our usual coffee shop on Rue Victor Cousin and then headed to Gare du Nord. The Eurostar queue was less of a line, more of a clump. At St. Pancras, we rushed to catch the bus and drop our things at the hotel, then looked for cold meds for Paige and Tiger Balm for my knee. We made it to Hampstead in time for our tour of the 1930s modernist home at 2 Willow Road, designed and lived in by architect Erno Goldfinger and his family. I like this era or style of modernism because it is very earthy—lots of wood and ceramics, things that have a sense of touch rather than striving to look pure, rarefied, or futuristic. Goldfinger colour-coded structural elements and made the walls collapsable so that they could have an open plan for parties. He constructed the dining room and table at the perfect height so that when you sit down, you can see only the Heath, not the road or pavement before it, and passersby cannot look back in and see you sitting there either. I love the ingenuity of a thoughtful, custom home, designed to be lived in and not for excess. We took the tube to Angel and then walked back to the hotel, set up our new room, got milkshakes for dessert, and slept soundly in our new King bed.

Sunday the 2nd: We take our collection of postcards to the patio at the bakery and sip coffee and tea, writing in the sun over honey cakes. We see lots of characters: I meet two affectionate Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and Paige watches a demanding, dolled-up mother make her adult son serve her drinks between hits of her massive vape. We are invested in this scene, imitating it even as we get to Borough Market to meet Rachel and explore. I get a lavender and honey lemonade, a belper knole, and end with some chaat for lunch. We meet Rachel’s friend and we all go to South London Gallery in Peckham, which is free, very accessible, and has a terrific feminist photography show on. I raid the bookshop (buying Sharpe and Lippard) while the girls have coffee in the back garden. We travel to Rachel’s and have strawberries in her backyard, then eat, drink, and chat at the local pizzeria until it is late. I love my friends and I love the spring!

Monday the 3rd: On her last morning here, I take Paige through Bloomsbury and over to Miel Bakery (they do not have my beloved basil focaccia or cardamom buns, but I get a large wedge of banana bread that has chunks of chocolate and a surprising ribbon of ginger). In Marleybone, we go to Daunt and notice that all of the books in the Palestine section have been turned around or moved and when I tell an employee, she says this happens everyday. I have fixed the books but it is a brutal and chilling thing that someone could rail so hard against knowledge and liberty. I buy a Janet Malcolm memoir about photography and something else for my dad. We eat our treats in Regent’s Park beside a curious and sharp-beaked heron and watch baby geese learning to waddle and swim. In the rose garden, we discover that Belmont roses smell like candy and we find a velvety and deep red variety that a vampire might bring to a dinner party, I imagine, and tuck behind their ear or offer mysteriously to the host. We drop our things back at the hotel, I wash my hair, and we get back on the bus to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Francesca Woodman x Julia Margaret Cameron show—my two dreamy ladies! I love Cameron's scenes and costumes and Woodman’s unexpected gestures and props. It is remarkable that she did all of this before the age of 22. We walk to Covent Garden and admire some antique rings, then freshen up for dinner in Angel. We walk there along the canal, lined with graffiti and wisteria. Dinner is indulgent pub food, ending with sticky toffee pudding and green apple sorbet. We leave in the dark and Paige and Rachel say good-bye. Paige packs, I mourn!

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Part II coming soon.