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Friday: sports. Saturday: sightseeing. Sunday: skulls. Monday: shops.

A top weekend, in spite of the impossibly early start on Friday morning. Oh, and the 40 minute delay on even leaving Chelmsford station, which should really have been expected. Nothing could be entirely trouble-free; not on this side of the Channel. Anyhow, once they’d got the broken-down train reversed back into the platform, released the trapped passengers and then cleared away some of the crowds, we were on our way and, an hour later, rolling on south towards France.

It was the first time I’d used the new high-speed bit of Eurostar track, in spite of the fact this was my sixth time through the tunnel in the last five weeks. For some reason they felt the need to announce when we’d reached it, and point out that we were going fast, probably because the concept is so alien to UK rail passengers.

After queueing for 27 minutes in a line of just 10 people it soon became obvious the concept of speed was pretty alien to the woman in the buffet car, too. All I wanted was some tea.

So anyway, we arrived in Paris and dumped our bags in the hotel then headed off into the city for a while. We mooched around the shops waiting for some of the others to arrive, and then I headed on up to Abesses to scout out the scenes from Amelie. I kind of wish I hadn’t now.

Amelie is the most perfect film, and I’d always known that the image of Paris it portrays is idealised, but when you go actively looking for the streets in which it is set you see all the little tweaks that have been made to get it looking that way.

For starters, there is no photo booth on the platform at Abbesses, which means she’d never have come across cute Nino in the first place. Then there are no phone boxes at the foot of Sacre Coeur, so the whole running-up-the-steps scene could never have happened.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, was the Deux Moulins, the cafe in which she worked. I found it, almost by accident, on a corner on Rue Lepic, just up from the Moulin Rouge. I stood on the corner dithering for a while, then decided to go in and have a coffee, taking a table roughly where the obsessive Joseph sits with his tape recorder.

But I couldn’t be quite sure I’d got it right. You see, in real life it doesn’t have the booth seating that it does in the film. And it doesn’t even have the Tabac stall in the corner, which is another pivotal aspect of the story. The sex-scene toilets are in the same place, the clock is the same, but the floor is dirty, the mirrors around the pillars by the bar are cracked and the whole place feels… faded.

Such a shame.

Fortunately Mr Collignon’s vegetable stall was more like the one in the film, and there was even a sign above the door with his name on it. Rather than have someone stand behind it to serve the customers, though, the door was thrown wide open for you to walk right in, and from the outside it looked as though it sold more than just veg.

Facing it, from the bottom of a building opposite, was a grille that opened out onto the pavement. Just like in the film.

So, pretty mixed results.

Oh, and Margeurite, the Canadian tourist who jumps off the top of Notre Dame and kills Amelie’s mother… was her name inspired by the Brasserie Margeurite just across the river from there?

It was about six by now, and dad, Leo and Emma all called to say they’d arrived, so of each other, so we took an RER out towards the east and watch Le Trot.

Le Trot is a bizarre French institution. At heart it’s horse racing, and it takes place on a big, smart race at Vincennes, but the key thing is that the horses are not actually allowed to run - just walk very quickly - and to make sure nobody cheats a band of officials ride sideways in a van that follows the pack so they can watch the various hooves. Had we followed the tip we’d been given by the guy at the station we’d have won, but as it was the only money we spent was on entry and eating, and we left the betting to the regulars who seemed to know what they were up to.

Saturday morning started at a leisurely pace with coffee in a cafe in Bastille then a walk across the Marais to the Hotel de Ville and on to Notre Dame. Trevor and Jon had arrived late on Friday night just before we’d set out for the races, so it was the first we’d seen of them. The five of us (me, dad, Paul, Trevor, Jon) were soon joined by Sal and Dan, so we all jumped on a boat for a typically touristic trip up and down the river. It was surprisingly warm.

The commentator had such a heavy accent we couldn’t tell a word he was saying and I got by better listening to his French and picking out the words I understood than trying to decypher the English equivalents.

It lasted an hour or so, giving us loads of time to head off and relax before Emma and Leo joined us for dinner, back in Bastille, at a restaurant where the main dish turned out to be rather glamorous toasted sandwiches, complete with the grooves from the lid of the toaster. Quite strange, and not entirely what I remembered from eating there a couple of years ago, but nice nonetheless.

We decamped to a way-too-expensive bar for drinks and huddled in tight little knots under the heaters, then shuffled off to bed on the last metro trains of the night.

We’d arranged to meet at 11 the following morning at the top of the steps in Montmartre, just in front of Sacre Coeur. It was predictably busy with every tourist in Europe doing the traditional Sunday morning climb, and the portrait painters out in force, prowling the streets with their clipboards at the ready.

We passed them all by and had a few abortive attempts to find anywhere that served food to suit each of our picky requirements, then gave up and bought baguettes at a stall by the roadside so we could eat them on the hoof.

Up and down, up and down, we tramped the streets of Montmartre, always on either cobbles or steps. Deep streams of water gushed down the gulleys on either side of the road, washing away the debris of the night before and making the streets sprakle in the late morning sunshine.

We rode the metro across town to the Eiffel Tower, delayed on the way when a man collapsed in the carriage ahead and the Sapeurs Pompiers had to be called, then split and went our separate ways: Sal and Dan to watch the rugby; Paul and Jon for a drink in the Marais; Dad, Trevor and myself south to the catacombes.

The catacobes are a series of mines, 1.7km in length, that hold the bones of 6,000,000 deceased French people. They are deep below the ground and, unless you knew where to find them you’d probably never come across them by chance as the entrance is just a small door on the side of the road.

Once inside, though, you go down for 100 or so steps on a narror spiral staircase, then walk through dimly-lit coridoors cut through the limestone that was extracted to build the beautiful buildings of the city above.

In places the roof leaks, and murky puddles form on the floor. Everything you touch feels clammy and wet. Including the bones.

You just can’t imagine how many of them there are down there. Millions of them, all neatly stacked up on top of one another, with eyeless skulls arranged within them to make patterns in some macarbre imitation of art. It wasn’t always like that, apparently. For decades they were thrown in randomly in ugly messy piles until someone had the bright idea of arranging them into a more organised manner. What a terrible job.

Every now and then you come across an altar built into the stacks of legs and arms, or a sign carved into the wall giving the name of the street above your head.

It is difficult to think that these were all once people, and that each one had hopes and fears and dreams. The one thing it does do, though, is make you think seriously about your vulnerabilities. All of us, no matter what we do, will soon be nothing more than these people are now: a pile of bones, each one weighing almost nothing. No facial features. No distinguishing marks. Nothing more to those who might see us than a curiosity to touch, prod or photograph.

We spent an hour walking through those quiet coridoors, many of which (including the one in the picture above) had walls made of nothing more than hundreds of thousands of neatly stacked bones, piled two metres high and two, three, four or five metres deep, then returned to Bastille to meet with the others and share a final pot of tea.

Sal, Dan and dad left that evening; Sal and Dan returning to London, dad going back down to Provence. Leo and Emma had departed mid-afternoon, and so Trevor, Jon, Paul and myself ate dinner in a smoky pizzeria in the Marais and had drinks until once again we had to run for the last metro home.

Which brings us to today, a day spent in the shops. I only bought edible and drinkable stuff - I didn’t want to have too much to carry on the crowded trains.

It was a perfect trip home, though. The Eurostar left on time and arrived in London precisely when it should. The tube behaved itself, and even the leg from London to Chelmsford posed no problems. Had it not been for the paranoid ubiquitous passport checking it would almost have felt like the UK was part of a unified transport system.

But then it’s too parochial - and its networks too delapidated - for that ever to happen.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2003 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.