I finally went abroad last week. It was a wrench to leave my silent monastic cell of a home office, with my blanket nest and laptop stand arranged just so, but a trip to Paris trumped all that. I’ve been bleating about it for months, pining like a Chekhov character, imagining café terraces and stalking Parisian pastry accounts on Instagram. My sister, who lives there, bought a flat recently, which sharpened my urge to go and cast a hard sibling eye over her soft furnishings, gossip about her neighbours and rate her local bakery.
That was January; it took me until March to stop dithering and get on a train. I started regretting it around Doncaster when the man across the aisle began watching a medley of Premiership goals without headphones, while the one in front of me was vigorously phlegm clearing. Following an hour queueing at passport control behind people astonished they needed to show their passports, I squeezed on to the Eurostar next to a group of large adult sons, loud, maskless and crumb-coated. “PEOPLE,” I messaged a friend, because tutting felt like an inadequate outlet. “PEOPLE,” she messaged back, sympathetically.
People. Lots of them are travelling again, taking advantage of the new freedom from Day 2 tests and PLFs. I know, because I am “people”, and I am doing it. But I’m apprehensive and ready to anger, as if a nasty, coiled-up part of me expects the world to be enraging and is sourly satisfied when it is. People: they don’t wear masks (as is their right); they talk loudly (permitted); manspread (should be illegal, but isn’t); shriek as they open cans of 9am cocktail and make video calls in the “quieter” coach. (Incidentally, it feels ominous that the quiet coach has been downgraded to the quieter coach, as if our behaviour has so deteriorated, quiet is no longer a realistic expectation.) People: they stare at you balefully as if they are the train police, sighing theatrically if you so much as sip your water (OK, this is me).
Was it always like this? Yes, probably. But I think some of us have also lost the habit of other people, the look and sound of them, the affront of their marginally different choices. Like unsocialised pandemic toddlers, we’re either blithely doing whatever the hell we like in public, because we’ve forgotten it’s not home, or sulking because not everyone behaves exactly as we would like. It feels stressful – should I just give up and never go anywhere again? Is it worth the aggravation?
It was totally worth it. I saw my sister, at last, and we walked for miles and sat on those cane chairs on a Seine-front terrace. There was so much to see: influencers changing outfits under flowering magnolias; shops selling one impossibly complex garment, or seven million antique pipes; dogs, all the dogs, from handbag- to horse-sized. I queued for a cake from superstar pâtissier Cédric Grolet that looked like a wizened prehistoric phallus (OK, vanilla pod) and gaped at Marie Antoinette’s tiny slipper and Marat’s jawbone.
I also went to the new blockbuster Proust exhibition (surely only in Paris could this command overflow queues, literary fanboys and girls kettled in anticipation). One of the relics attracting a crowd was a panel of the cork used to soundproof his room. I have long empathised with Proust’s acute noise sensitivity: a book of letters to his neighbour is basically a more elegantly expressed version of the angry notes you find pinned to apartment block walls. But here, another exhibit held me rapt. It’s a handwritten list of the street calls of 1919 Paris, drawn up for Proust by a Monsieur Charmel, a concierge he asked to investigate on his behalf. That jerky, accelerated black and white footage we have of early 1900s street scenes is silent, but the list made me realise how loud it would have been. Charmel describes a cacophony of traders, loudly hawking cheese, “good, fresh mussels”, “green and tender” beans, artichokes or peas; there’s an upholsterer with a trumpet, a knife sharpener with a bell and someone playing the harmonica. He’s sorry, Charmel concludes, he can’t convey their “inimitable melody or intonation”. Quietly tucked away in his sickbed (he died three years later), Proust was hungry for news of noise, for proof of life.
That’s why you leave your safe, cork-lined room. For people: the sight, and yes, the “inimitable melody or intonation” of them, the delicious pick ’n’ mix of their eccentricities. I am trying hard to recalibrate my instinctive response and remind myself that noise is life, that people are often what makes places special. When I managed, there were wonders in the soundscape: fashion gossip, presidential election talk, old friends squabbling over who should pay for lunch and a man negotiating refinancing for his hotel group in the Congo in the passport queue. It’s easier on holiday, of course, and even then, it’s not always a delight. But the drunk, singing Italian couple on the way back at least united my train carriage in eye-rolling frustration. People are entertaining, inspiring, enraging, too much and absolutely essential. I want more.
Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling
