This is what we came for, really. Not the big attraction for the younger traveller. (Ssh. Don’t tell.)
More a bit of wandering, watching, and soaking it up. The things that parents struggle for and, sometimes, the child permits.
Paris, I mean. You would hope so. I thought about A is for atmosphere, and decided on ambiance instead. Why not? This level of people watching feels a bit more rarified –
I’ll stretch for the less-everyday word.
The gift here is the discovery together: not just for us parents who daydream about the possibility of dawdling, but all of us, together. The mixture, not just of what we expect for atmosphere (though that too), but also what we find along the way.
The bridges where both sides are covered in padlocks. Padlocks with initials, with dates.
One even specially crafted, it seemed, to celebrate thirty years of marriage, destined for that bridge, that tiny space in the bristling metal jungle.
The pavement artist, genuinely preparing paper, taping it down, bothering to smile at my young companion who wanted to see what would appear.
The twentysomethings picnicking by the Eiffel Tower, Evian bottle and yards of baguette to hand. Shoes discarded beside them. Their world completely their own, unbothered by the figures with clipboards going from group to group on the grass, begging for money.
The familiar straw seats of Parisian cafes – there, set on a pavement below the tower, guarded round with plexiglass, little more than a box with tables and chairs inside. Yet still, the woven straw of French cafe chairs. (That was the closest we got to a pavement cafe moment. The pommes frites did make up for it though.)
The sudden fanning out of the skyline, below the Sacre Coeur. The first glimpse of that skyline – and mine of our junior traveller, in glimpsing it. The moving away from the crowds to hunt for the view that includes the Eiffel Tower. And more: the larger-than-life sticking plaster, somehow part of a wall in the buildings below us.
The moving up the Metro escalator, the catching of the breath to emerge and see central Paris really there, in front of you.
Where does observation stop and ambiance begin? I think it may be in how what we see touches our hearts. How it seems crafted for us, minted in the minute.
We had this before. Long ago, it seems, in the days of being a couple travelling. Sitting in a cafe, watching sparrows tumbling over each other in a flowerbed. Listening to the sea, and the regularity of the swell.
Somehow, these moments have lodged themselves inside me. They were tiny moments, there for the noticing, rather than the act of observing.
I can observe people, write about it even, and remember what I’ve written. But ambiance?
It is the shafts of sunlight still inside me, the way the scene steals back round me as I recall it.
If a found item is a work of art, as I started off this series thinking about, these moments seem the best example, really. I don’t choose to find them, or work hard to notice them.
I don’t even have to perform gymnastics to line up their opening letter.
Sometimes I choose to go to a place which I hope will repay the expectation. Sometimes I find it much closer to home.
Something tells me that there are far more of these moments than I realise.