Lost time

and the caves of Paris.

Graffiti on a wall in Paris.

Do you have a cave?

If you live in Paris, you might.

In that case, you will pronounce it like what a whale does when it gives birth. Or what Bostonians do to a turkey at Thanksgiving.

Cahhhhve.

It’s kind of a basement but French people will tell you, actually, a basement is a “sous-sol” (literally: under-sun), a place that can also serve as living quarters.

La cave is something else entirely. It’s the cellar, the larder, the storage place. It’s where you keep your extra bits and pieces, dry goods, wine bottles perhaps.

In Paris, my sister says, the caves must be full of treasures. Ski boots and escalade equipment from early attempts up Mont Blanc, maybe. Ancient film reels from the ’30s, rows of dusty vintages. Perhaps a lost Manet, or two.

It’s where people keep all the forgotten, lost bits of themselves.

If you want to go in search of lost time in Paris, you could do worse than starting in a cave.

My sister’s building has a cave, shared by the building’s occupants. You descend into the cave via a coffin-size lift with a folding accordion door.

It’s pretty creepy down there, especially when you have to go alone. A cave full of lost time is a scary thing.

I’ve just come back from Paris. Actually, I’ve been twice this month and stayed with my sister both times.

My sister is my artistic bellwether. I can generally tell my latest piece is a stinker if I don’t hear from her the morning it goes out.

Usually: silence. She’s a busy woman and much, much cooler than me (she has tats and, as I say, lives in Paris).

But I know I’m onto a winner if I get a message with a one-liner quote from the latest piece, a "lol” or (every once in awhile): “loved it”.

Those good ones have usually been fermenting in drafts and notes for awhile. Sometimes, they just need time to acquire the right flavour and come together.

In fact, the Notes app on my phone is like my own personal little cave. It’s where I keep the lost, forgotten bits of myself. It’s full of treasures, and plenty of stinkers too. Many of the recent ones are Paris-flavoured, so it makes sense to share them here.

They may impart the flavour of the thing, but not the real time in Paris.

I’ve never read Proust (time is short and À la recherche du temps perdu is long) but I’m familiar with the key bits: the flavour of the tea-dipped madeleine as an entrée to memory; his bed-bound boyhood illness; the sea of images, swimming on the walls of his bedroom cave.

If I had to come up with a Proustian equivalent childhood-memory taste-trigger, it would be cheese Doritos and an ice-cold orange soda. Perhaps we were less discerning in upstate New York in the 1990s than Paris in the 1880s.

But I digress.

If you think about the past, light falls on certain images in the memory cave and the rest floats in shadow.

I’ve written this before, even (especially?) in Paris. Writers are lamplighters, the lampiers, shining little cones of brightness in the depthless black.

If art is a lamp-lit cone into the past, the disconnected images can never be more than a simulacrum of lost times.

And of course, the only way to experience Paris is to … experience Paris.

—

In Paris, I suddenly feel certain I am a person who might wear floaty skirts and little strappy sandals in day-to-day life, completely forgetting that I live in the UK.

My sister buys me delicious breads and cheeses that cloud the senses. She takes me to brocantes—that’s flea markets, to you—that only the locals know. I browse rows of impossibly chic cast-off clothes and imagine I might be the kind of woman who wears orange palazzo pants, with thigh-high slits, or hand-embroidered Italian loafers. For just a second, I toy with the new Jill who smokes a Gauloise (or is it a Gitanes?) and gazes disdainfully at my clown self from behind chic, dark glasses.

A slang word for “junk” in French, I learn, is “bazaar”.

My son finds a mini-crossbow that he must have. It fires bottle corks. My sister gives me a wink, wanders off and presents it to him as we’re leaving.

They try it out and she accidentally shoots it across the brocante.

“I lost one of the corks.”

“That’s ok.” He is sanguine. “You guys get through a lot of wine.”

—

Speaking of clowns, we went to an actual circus in Paris. It was kind of by accident, in a kids’ amusement park.

The first act was a male juggler, in tight trousers. Not several degrees removed from “dishy”.

I raised eyebrows at my sister.

“One for the mums.”

Next up was a pole dancer. You think I’m joking but I’m not. She wore a smoking hot bikini and looked strong enough to rip me limb from pathetic non-pole-dancing limb. She pulled splits and planks, Superwomaning and shimmying up and down the pole in nought but glitter and a smile.

I turned wordlessly to my sister.

“One for the dads.” She nodded, sagely.

—

We ate lunch in a perfect brasserie, the kind with one or two daily specials, where you can get a great steak at lunchtime and a lengthy wine menu.

We ordered a café gourmand (literally: ‘greedy coffee’), which is basically the greatest contribution ever made to the world of desserts: an espresso and a selection of doll-house versions of many desserts. Tiny creme brûlée, diminutive brownie, pocket-sized rice pudding.

“What’s this?” I poked one of the offerings.

“It’s compost.” That’s my son. He’s just been given a tour of the dessert menu by my sister.

“I think you mean compôte.”

The older gentleman at the next table folded his paper and whistled for his dog, which had been cavorting happily on the other side of the restaurant while its owner dined.

The man got up with a nod to the waitress.

She held up his half-finished bottle of wine as he turned to exit, and a cork.

“À demain?”

“À demain.”

He must live nearby, in an apartment above this narrow street. This is his living room, and his dining room combined.

—

Books are more interesting than people.

No, that’s not what I mean.

Books are like the best bits of people. You get all the insights without the annoying habits of the real world. You develop fondness for inhabitants of the written world who would, in real life, get right up your nose.

Just think about Proust. He was insufferable and all about self-promotion, writing up his own reviews and paying for their publication, via third parties. If he was on Substack today, you know he’d be the one shamelessly self-promoting and paying a Substack luminary to get featured in their latest round-up.

Another reason I haven’t bothered to read Proust yet.

Also, that guy in the restaurant with the dog? Probably an entitled swine.

And me? You might imagine from the above snapshots that I’m likeable. I’m not, trust me. I have a strong tendency towards prickly suspicion. It’s not endearing. It would take very little to tip me over from awkward-defensive to completely-detestable.

There was a girl at school who picked up on this once.

It was the night we finished exams. At a bonfire party on the beach in south Dublin, she cornered me, with another girl.

Now, context: both of these girls intentionally cultivated ‘misfit’. I wasn’t in their gang, nor was I one of the vapid, popular pretties.

I was a bit… hard to place.

Well, this girl cornered me, with a pal and, bolstered by a few drinks, annihilated me.

“Why are you such a bitch?”

“Wh-what?” I was a bit shit-faced and half-smiling, thinking she might be joking.

She was not joking. Her eyes were cold, blue. Her nostrils flared slightly, scenting blood.

“No, really.” Mock scientific interest. “Like, it’s a really interesting question. Why are you such a complete and total bitch? Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s something in you or what?”

I was 17.

—

Getting the train back from Paris, I had an awkward encounter as we were waiting to board.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, everyone stands to one side of the departures lounge in the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord, even if the train hasn’t been called yet. What this means is you can join the line but not be quite sure it is a line for the right train. You can’t be sure that you won’t, given a momentary lapse in attention, be swept away to the wrong train.

“I’m not sure if this is for the 11:12 train,” I muttered to my son.

“It is.” Said the woman behind me, authoritatively.

I turned to thank her and was dumbstruck. I knew her.

“Thanks… er… I know you.” Brain-mouth instant connection. Why am I like this.

She looked at me without any cognition, zero expression. It was definitely her.

Now that I’d started, I had to finish.

“…Is your name Jennifer?”

Well, it was her: the terrifying female partner from the law firm where I trained, now the head of the whole department.

Speaking of intelligent women, perceived as fearsome and detestable.

When we were trainees, everyone knew that the seat with Jennifer was the seat to avoid. You would be worked all night and well into the next day. You would be tasked with keeping track of endless documents. You would be the one in the office on Sundays.

There were rumours she once stapled a trainee’s tie to his folder, threw a book at another’s head.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that she had for breakfast each day one lightly-roasted and totally exhausted trainee lawyer.

When I qualified, I was seated with her associate, a woman a few years older than I, who had just returned from maternity leave. She had a neat bob, a perpetual sniffle and an absolutely relentless capacity to absorb work and churn out lawyerly copy at 3am.

A career as Jennifer’s lieutenant had turned her into an automaton—with a crappy immune system.

We had a mild exchange of pleasantries—what a funny coincidence this was, updates on the team and do please give my best to so-and-so.

She was nice. It was a pleasant moment. She’s not an irredeemable bitch: she’s just smart as hell, and ruthless at succeeding in her arena.

She wanted to do it. So she did.

I was left to ponder having escaped her team. I, it turns out, did not want it.

Now, all I can think of is the lost time: the hours, and days, and years of my life spent churning out pointless, forgotten documents for pointless, forgotten deals.

Thinking about, resenting all that lost time, makes me feel small, angry and mean.

When I left that firm it felt like escaping a dark cave.

—

In the lift at work, there’s a screen that rotates “interesting facts of the day”.

Once it said that there were 319.6 billion emails sent every day in 2021.

Almost 320 billion a day. Imagine that. 40 emails for every person on the planet.

Imagine all the treasures in those emails, and the stinkers.

Imagine all those crowded, empty hours and the empty, forgotten words, slipping soundlessly into the past.

Sometimes, sitting with my headphones on a call in the office, I imagine the building undergoing some calamity, not hearing the pop-pop of machine gun fire, still talking at the top of my lungs about interest rates or some such nonsense.

Like the proverbial toad in the pot, warming slowly, until I’m sludge.

Slowly forgetting everything that I’ve forgotten.

—

The past is crowded with lost hours. I have this sense of the world filling up behind me with wasted time, people I knew, things once familiar—but ultimately without any substance.

It’s a kind of claustrophobia. Like the kind you might get underground, in a cave.

Heading home, it feels incredible to flee from a crowded past into a quiet, unknown future.

—

No one gets more annoyed at your failure to be fulfilled by your job than other people who have allowed their dreams to lapse.

People acquire the capacity for careless evil when they stop caring, when the art in them dies.

Nobody is as angry as someone who let their dreams die—when faced with someone who hasn’t.

It’s because they turn to contemplate the riches of their own caves, and find there’s nothing much there—except bile, old emails and lost time.

I don’t want to become one of those quiet, angry people.