for the last few years i’ve been regularly travelling to paris in january (accompanying someone who has work with paris fashion week). i’ve always enjoyed these visits, despite the sometimes freezing, usually miserable and grey, weather. the weather usually doesn’t trouble me too much. i wrap up warm and carry my little fujifilm x100f so i don’t need to worry about protecting my bulky nikon with its multiple lenses from the vagaries of the winter rain and wind, there was even snow one year.

this little annual ritual is nice because i can spend some of the darkest days of winter in a city that i love, of which i never seem to tire, and put a distance between myself and the the enforced jollity of yuletide excesses. my usual strategy is walking, invoking that now somewhat tired stereotype: the parisian flâneur. perhaps visiting a couple of the smaller museums, but mostly visiting, on foot, the narrow streets, alleys, closes and of course the passages and galeries fancifully summoning the companionship of those literary figures and artists who went before; baudelaire, mallarmé, walter benjamin taking notes for his great opus on the gallerys, left unfinished at his premature death, fleeing nazis on the spanish border. then the spirits of existentialism; sartre, de beauvoir, and camus, and finally the pinball cafés and hissing espresso machines, always for me in the monochrome of 16mm nouvelle vague films of godard, truffaut, chabrol and the rest.

this year was different…

somehow bleaker, and even darker in the aftermath of the american presidential elections late last year, accompanied by the growing realisation of just what the present labour party in government has really become, i was nevertheless determined not to let it interfere with this visit. i won’t go into the more revolting details of my physical condition. i started sneezing on the eurostar on the first morning. at first i put it down to allergy, then ‘caught a cold’, then a week later, finding an old testing pack on my return to london; i tested positive for covid 19. so i spent most of the visit in a state of abjection, restaurants cancelled, barely venturing out from my hotel room, not even for coffee and tartine in the nearby cafes of montorgueil. finally feeling too ill to even be bothered to be miserable. on the one or two occasions i did go for a short wander, i did take my camera, more out of a sense of duty to myself than anything else, and these are the rather melancholy results. but you may find something in them.