Darkness eats away at the lamplight. It’s the time of morning when everything should be still. St. Pancras glows orange and looks like a gateway to somewhere warmer and brighter.

I love the Eurostar. I love the way it feels to be moving at that speed on a pre-determined route. But I sleep the whole way because we were up so late packing and then we had to get a midnight bus to London.

We don’t have much stuff. I mostly spend the weekend in the same outfit–a bright skirt, a blouse, a pair of sandals, making the most of the August heat–except one time when I think it’s going to rain so I don a pair of leather riding boots and then it turns out to be the hottest most glorious day of the whole trip. That is the day we walk to the top of Montmartre and have lunch at a little restaurant whose name I forget. We order salads–with meat, boiled egg, avocado, beetroot–and a carafe of wine and though we’ve spent most of the day’s allotted budget on the meal there is a happiness that comes over us. We finish the wine slowly, watching a girl in a red dress and heels alight from a vespa scooter. I don’t remember coming down from Montmarte particularly though I do remember that as we do we pass a painting of a donkey on a wall and also the Lapin Agile, which reminds me of the high school production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile I once saw. (It turns out I misremember this because when I go through my photos I discover that the painting is actually of a horse, and there’s a man on the horse, riding bareback)

I remember sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment. The mattress is torn and dirty, like something you’d find in a streetside skip. There’s a refrigerator in the middle of the room where we put our juice and our cheese. The shower head is collapsing and the bath stained with rust and other unimaginable things and I avoid washing for the whole weekend, making do with splashing my face and scrubbing under my armpits with water from the sink. That’s a nice way to be, for a time.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

But you see them together and you think that some sort of game is being played, surely.  That the girls fumbling with purses on the street corners are deliberately emulating the hookers of bigger cities; that the blokes, staggering in zig-zag patterns, letting their English voices loose upon the town, are deliberately ignoring every siren call until the last, choosing not to look up a zebra-patterned skirt or at the way a pair of rubber legs is crossed.  Each human his (or her) own, complete, exhibit.  And each exhibiting for an invisible audience.  Not for the disdainful eyes of you or me, or of the girl in jeans holding her boyfriend’s hand.  No, not for us do they strut and pose.

People watching is almost invariably more pleasurable when the weather is good.  This is not just because there are, inevitably, more people out, and dressed a little more brightly, but also because of the way the sunlight affects them, and makes them look, and the way that a woman standing with a dog next to a spring green tree sprouting small leaves is suddenly poetic in a way she wouldn’t be if there was a drizzle over the city or a monochrome grey in the sky.  Shadows do more interesting things like this.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm–you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

“Is this your first presentation?” the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend’s crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress–cheese, paté, wine–when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it’s long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: “You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food”. Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” So there’s that, and it’s a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; “the flaneur,” White writes, “is…in search of a private moment, not a lesson.” And, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone.”

We had a kir each at Sartre’s café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I’m tired. We’ve been on the road for most of August, it seems. We’ve been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I’m uploading photos and going to have a nap. It’s September, and part of me doesn’t know how this came to be, even though I’ve seen it happen so many times before.

Reminded me of the story my parents love to tell: me, four years old, at dinner. My mom—as she does, sometimes—reaching across the table to steal some of my food. “Mommy, you’re a P-I-G!” I spelled, dissolving the entire table into laughter. Think it shows more about my attachment to victuals than my precociousness, myself, but my family, bless them, tends to disagree.

Lovely day today: clear, sunny, windy, warm, smelling like the cusp of a real fall day. Walked all around the city. Have yet to really feel fall, but it’s coming. Dare I say we may be more or less done with this sticky Indian summer business?

Worked last night—and thought I was doing a great job when one of the men at my table said: “You’re doing a great job!” An hour later he sidled up to me and said, “Heeeeeelllo Sunshine,” and I realized I could probably spill icewater down the backs of everyone’s shirt and they’d still think I was fantastic—they were that boozed up. The large man with the tux and the potbelly wanted to dance with me. I kept telling him I wasn’t allowed. He kept telling me I was killing him. All I could really think about was how hungry I was, and how thirsty, and how lucky they were that they had me refilling their water glasses every ten seconds, because I’d been yelled at by a senior staff member for deigning to try to take a cup over to the water cooler.

“Oi!” she yelped at me, her skin going all splotchy. “Don’t you dare touch those!”
“What?” I said. Someone had told me to take a cup earlier.
“That’s my coffee station,” she said. Her eyes burned crimson with rage. “Don’t you dare touch it. Jesus Christ. You people.”
“I was just really hoping for some water,” I said, trying the pathetic-little-me track.
“There’s a water cooler over there.” She pointed a pudgy, stubby little finger. I was almost hungry enough to try biting it and see if it tasted like sausage.
“I know,” I whined back. Officious people bring out the absolute worst in me. “I’ll still need a cup, won’t I?”

She just glowered at me until I skulked off. I wanted to find something really rude to say, but I’m pretty good, at this point, with minding my language.