Hazy Days

I've been trying to choose a memory to write something for some memory share project the BBC is starting up, but how do you? Pick one I mean? There are just so many memories to choose from. My earliest is as a child of four – recently moved to Australia and my parents are viewing the house that they were eventually to buy and which became my family home for the next ten years. I remember that it was hot and I was bored, so I sat on a low brick wall. Like one of Roald Dahl's cautionary tales I should've looked before I did so, as I'd plonked my small bottom right on an ants nest. Having the proverbial ants-in-your-pants is singularly unpleasant, the memory of which I imagine, will stick in my mind forever.

But I didn't write that one. Instead I wrote a rubbish account of my first meeting with my ex all those years ago, as follows:

The tail end of October, 1987. Paris, France.

I was only passing through – treating myself to a weekend in Paris after having spent four weeks picking grapes south of Dijon and then in Switzerland. I'd found a cheap hostel, bought a tourist map, got my bearings and was heading off for a day of sight-seeing round the city.

The external escalator tubes of the Pompidieu Centre made it look like some kind of giant gerbil cage, but the art inside was dull and one of the security guards told me off for using flash-photography. So I rode up and down the moving staircases for a while instead – taking in the view; watching the beautiful people. Down below, the street entertainers were starting to pull the lunchtime crowds.

There was this bald guy with a handlebar moustache and an enormous bare belly – scarred and pitted with the marks of his trade – who reminded me of Obelisk, the brawny character in the Asterix comics. He was even wearing the same kind of stripy trousers. I joined the ring of spectators to gawp open-mouthed as he ate glass, went through a bed-of-nails Fakir routine, and finally finished off by asking a hapless member of the audience to throw darts at his tortured tum. There was no bullseye as such, but they stuck into his pale skin at weird, droopy angles – a human version of a Matador's skewered el Toro.

Higher up the sloped cobbles – past the juggler, past the accordionist belting out Edith Piaff numbers, and just beyond a cluster of portrait artists – two guys were sat with a small but appreciative audience of street riff-raff, strumming battered guitars and singing acoustic standards. Snatches of English lyrics carried across and caught my ear. I stood shyly, hovering at the edge – not wishing to intrude on what seemed a private moment; a select performance. But I was spotted and drawn into the bedraggled circle of gypsies, tramps and thieves who were hospitably passing 2-litre plastic bottles of cheap red wine back and forth. It would've been rude of me to decline.

Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was a confidence born of the anonymity of being a stranger in a strange place, but I soon found the harmonies for a third voice in Knocking on Heaven's Door. They smiled, nodding their approval, so I carried on singing. Come busk the cinema queues with us they said, and I guess I didn't have a good enough reason not to. Besides, it was his eyes (the taller of the two; the one with the ponytail and a cheeky-chappy grin) they pulled me in. A blue the colour of April skies, they had a dark, distinct rim like Siamese cats' eyes. Sharp, piercing – not the kind of eyes you'd ever forget in a hurry.

So I never did get to see the Eiffel Tower. Or the Louvre. Or go back home to Oz.

We hung around in Paris for a week or so, sleeping in derelict houses or sometimes – after a good day of playing the queues, or the Metro, or the terraces on the Rive Gauche – in a ½ star sleaze-pit of a hotel. And later, we jumped the trains south – all the way down to the south of Spain and the Costa del Sol.

~

We're no longer together, and a badly busted arm means that he no longer plays guitar. And to think that that chance meeting happened nearly twenty years ago? We had some amazing times together and some tough ones, but the last few years were grim – wouldn't ever want to go through that with anyone, ever again.

But it was definitely worth it, because I'm the proud mother of four beautiful children. Four big(ish) teenagers. And all four of them have his drop-dead-gorgeous, dark-rimmed blue eyes.