The nineteenth ecstasy

When you can’t have something you want it all the more. When you can’t go somewhere you want to go there all the more. Well, you know how it is. So I’ve been journeying in my imagination.

I’d recently been watching a lot of Michael Portillo before “all this” started. He’s a man who does a lot of real journeying, seemingly without luggage, hassle, or crowds; he’s a well known enthusiast for multicolourturalism, at least in matters sartorial, a believer that acid green, phthalo blue and strip club pink can live together happily, in varied permutations, side by side, in the form of jackets, shirts and strides. Not a bad role model. Probably better than fluorescent mauve, pillarbox red, and dayglo custard. Anyway, now I’m imagining that tiresomely repetitive moment at the beginning of his Great Continental Railway Journeys when he announces “I’m embarking …” and I shout at the telly, “No, you’re not in Barking, you’re at St Pancras”.

And off we go on the Eurostar. Whining up the steep curve past the gasholder-clad apartments, the deep rumble of the bridge-tunnel across the ECML, speeding up, the vertical concrete cavern of Stratford International that would make a fitting location for a Baconian screaming pope, more acceleration, thrust back into one’s seat, container terminals, low cloud over Dagenham, pylons, the Medway Bridge, the upwards thrust from the flyover over Ashford International, very kinaesthetic this, the imaginary Eurostar experience, and then that long unique sound, that distinctive urgent frequency, deep under the sea for 21 minutes or so. Out the other side, sunnier, Calais-Fréthun, a sense of being high up, looking back towards the coast, white buildings, extra-bright, Gravelines or Dunkerque perhaps, think briefly of England, onwards past neat copses, isolated churches, armies of pylons looking simultaneously French and feline, on and on, decelerating close to CDG, the Sacré-Coeur on its summit, almost erotic in its fabulous foreignness, and then slowing right down, right down, surrounded by dark tenements and double decker trains, and into the Gare du Nord. Clonk.

Quickly through the dodgy crowds and out again, probing into the streets of the tenth arrondissement. Down to the Boulevard de Magenta, stretching ahead endlessly, unforgiving in the fierce late morning sun. It goes on for ever, so I’ll stroll just as far as the crossroads with the rue La Fayette. To the right, another long view, it goes for miles, dead straight to the Opéra and the centre of things. Exhausting just to look at. I think I’ll turn the other way. That’s dead straight too, but with some sort of end in sight. Across the big skew girder bridge spanning the tracks out of the Gare de l’Est; thoughts of Strasbourg, Basel, Germany – everything is so close once you’re across the Channel. On, crossing awkward junctions, urban density like it should be.

Suddenly the surrounding dark buildings give way and I’m at Stalingrad, the complex intersection commemorating the battle, beneath which the Canal St Martin segues invisibly with the Bassin de la Villette. At this point the tenth arrondissement becomes the nineteenth. At this precise moment mere imaginary travel, mere journeying in the head, vanishes and my whole body explodes into a painful ecstasy of longing, of yearning, of desire, of some unexpected kind of reality, of desperately needing to be there in the eternal city. Now, this instant.

Line 2 Metro trains rattle overhead along the wibbly-wobbly viaduct, in and out of Jaurès station. I cross over the busy road, the Blvd de la Villette, a kind of inner ring road popular with homicidal lorries, and I head up the slow hill of the Avenue Secrétan, a sense of being out of the central city now, newer buildings, very civilised, urbane, progressive. Past the stairwell leading down into Bolivar station. Someone – actually, Tim Moore in his 2001 “Continental Drifter” - once said that the Metro smells like a combination of popcorn and farts; today it doesn’t, it just smells ecstatically of Paris, of life. To the top, and into the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in all its surreal quarried loveliness. A perfect spot for a picnic. I make a mental note – for real life - just as soon as “all this” is all over.