Paris: Ghost Town

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Paris is one of my favourite cities of all time: imposing, seductive and constantly surprising. I love the way that the second you alight from the train there you know you are. The haussmanian facades of the building, the rich ladies from the 16th in fur coats, the apron-wearing waiters bustling round with glasses of kir and the shop windows filled with everything from food so expensive it seems slightly obscene to glittering mountains of costume jewellery.

This said, Paris has its downsides. The raving derelicts in the metro, the endless piles of dog poo, placed like anti-Kurt Geiger landmines all over the pavements – where there are pavements – and the traffic. The neverending stream of loud, honking, smelly traffic, which is almost entirely driven by people so angry they’re one step away from violence, and composed mostly of buzzing mopeds, unserviced delivery vans with no road tax, and taxis driven with gay abandon (I once had a taxi ride where the driver played the flute for us, driving with his knees. At the traffic lights on Boulevard Saint-Germain he reached for the guitar but luckily Becca and I talked him out of it).

So Paris without traffic is a pretty attractive proposition, but one which is never, ever going to happen (and let’s be honest, it would be attractive until you needed a taxi coming out of les Etages at 4am, a time when you need a taxi more than food, air or water). But I did get a sneaky glimpse of what it would look like one evening last July…

I had been watching France play Italy in the World Cup final. The mood was euphoric. Cars had been driving round with tricolores waving out of sunroofs since 3 in the afternoon and the entire city was ready for a victory party on the Champs-Elysees, with Zinedine Zidance the elevated to the status of ‘legend’ amongst the glittering stars of the French soccer firmament. Nick and I drank our beers in ‘La Ville de Paris’, cheering on Les Bleus, on a balmy summer evening, and all was bien dans le monde.

Then it went to extra time. It was about then I began to realise it could all still end in tears and getting the last train back to Brussels might not be such a bad idea.

But when I left the bar a few minutes later, the enthusiasm was still there: they could turn it around, Zizou would score, there’d be time for sparklers and sparkling by the Arc De Triomphe, wouldn’t there?

Having decided the last train back to Brussels was the only sensible choice, I realised a taxi was the best way to get there. And after I got one in record time, it then got me from metro Grands Boulevards to Gare du Nord in a little over three minutes, and without any Claude Lelouche-style driving. There was nothing else on the roads so I took a video – sorry for the amateurish, handheld quality: but look at rue Lafayette sans voitures – it’s the utterly familiar transformed into another place entirely devoid of life as twilight settles. Another little surprise from this beautiful beguiling, bustling city.

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