To Paris to meet up with friends and take a proper look inside the restored Notre-Dame Cathedral. It was worth the trip for that alone.
The queues were long – not surprising, with almost 40,000 people visiting daily – but very well organised, so we were in within 15 minutes; the mood inside was respectful – as befits a church in which half a dozen masses take place each day, and where the confessional is always open – but also relaxed, and the splendour and the beauty were off the scale.
It’s free too, though there are bank card machines to tap a voluntary donation if you light a candle, and for €12 you can access the side chapel where some of the French Catholic Church’s more valuable treasures and historical artefacts are displayed.
On the day Notre-Dame reopened in December, French TV broadcast a superb fly-on-the-wall documentary showing the sheer scale of the operation to restore it to its former glory. I had been especially struck by the care and professionalism involved in recreating the stained-glass windows, and the organ.
I learned that in the main the stained-glass windows had been undamaged by the fire. However, they were filthy, the original bright colours covered in crud and soot that had built up over the years. One by one, the windows were taken apart, cleaned, then restored and returned. The effect is a cacophony of light and colour.
The music-lover in me was especially drawn to the great organ, 12 metres high and dating back to the 18th century. The whole thing had to be taken apart, and its six keyboards, 19 windchests and 7,952 pipes repaired and restored in workshops around France.
As a bagpiper who knows how hard it can be to get three drones tuned in unison, never mind 7,952, I was awed by the story of how the restorers and organ experts took several months, once the organ parts were re-installed, to tune it all, pipe by pipe.
The restoration took less than six years from fire to re-opening; that is especially impressive when you learn that Notre-Dame’s original construction began in 1163, and was more or less done by 1260. Vive la France, vive l’Europe, à bas JD Vance!
Apologies for allowing Donald Trump’s Number 2 to intrude there, into a piece about beauty and sanctuary, and getting greatness out of things that go wrong. But let’s be honest, it is not easy to get away from Trump and Co. If the US president has a genius for anything, it is global media dominance.
At breakfast the following morning, I picked up the two papers laid out by the hotel, Le Figaro and the New York Times. Several days into Tariff Mayhem, Trump was still dominant on the front pages, so I settled down with my coffee and began to rage, first silently and then, as our friends arrived, volubly.
Especially piquing my ire was a piece in Le Figaro speculating that Europe would need to build a new military alliance because US leadership of Nato could no longer be guaranteed.
These really are remarkable times we are living through in which three -isms that US presidents of my lifetime have led the world in resisting – isolationism, protectionism and nativism – are now essentially the main pillars of Trumpism, with weird To Russia With Love-ness thrown in for good measure.
To my left I became aware of someone leaning in towards us to get our attention. “I’m so sorry,” said a woman roughly my age, who was sitting having breakfast with her husband. “I’m so, so sorry,” she repeated. Americans in Paris.
They were from St Louis, Missouri, which voted roughly 60-40 in favour of Trump. They had voted for the Democrats and their demeanour reminded me of how I felt, and probably looked, in the immediate aftermath of Brexit, when people overseas offered their sympathies over what felt to them like a self-inflicted catastrophe upon a country for which they had a certain fondness and respect.
The St Louis couple told us of friendships lost, families divided, communities now so polarised that normal political debate was virtually impossible. But they were also a reminder that, for all that Donald Trump may dominate the debate all over the world right now, he is not America.
“Sickening” was how they described the backing by their president, vice-president, and Twitterer-in-Chief of Marine Le Pen, and the conspiracy theory that she had been somehow fitted up by a French establishment desperate to prevent her from standing in an election this American hard right troika has decided she should win.
Our breakfast apologisers were nice, decent people who are every bit as aware as you and I that what is happening in the States right now is weird, dangerous, and wrong. Her husband admitted they felt powerless, but I took a little hope from his wife’s immediate response to that … “for now”.
Roll on the mid-term elections. Last-chance-saloon time.
Oh, a stat for you… at the time of writing, nine of the 10 biggest single-day drops in the history of the US stock market happened under the presidency of that self-styled great businessman and genius dealmaker, Donald Trump. By the time you read this, he will have the whole top 10.
Accidental reads are sometimes the best. I’ve been reading so much nonfiction of late that I thought I needed to get myself a decent novel. I liked the title, The Secret Painter, and the cover, which I guessed was an imagined painting by the novel’s hero. The blurb was interesting enough – I love books about the creative process – so I bought it, got on the train, started to read, and was hooked from the first couple of pages.
Only a fair chunk in did I realise it was not a novel at all, but the true story of a nephew’s exploration of his uncle’s life, the nephew being Joe Tucker, his uncle being Eric who, on his death, was discovered to have left behind hundreds of rather splendid paintings done by his fair hand. It is a lovely read.
Having finished it on Monday night, on Tuesday morning I was in the queue at the lido for my morning swim, where one of the staff told me “someone has left a book for you”. I get sent tons of books by publishers and authors and read only a fraction of them. This one was accompanied by a very personal handwritten note by the author, Seana Smith, a Scot now living in Australia who is into swimming, who had popped into the lido on a trip back to the UK and, on learning that I was a regular, had decided I might enjoy her book. I did.
Going Under is her life story, of growing up in a dysfunctional family with an often cruel, alcoholic father, and descending into alcoholism herself. It is a tough subject, but handled tenderly and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Maybe it was the addict in me … once you start you can’t stop!
Whatever it was, it was an at times difficult but ultimately inspiring read and I can add the receipt and reading of Seana’s book to the long list of benefits of my addiction to cold-water swimming.
