Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

I'll be up at 5.30 a.m. tomorrow to catch an early flight to Paris with my friend Sandra, we are staying until Friday evening. I found a 3 star hotel on the Rue des Ecoles, in Saint Germain, just across the Seine from Notre-Dame. It may not be luxury but, by gum, it's slap bang in the centre. I have an enormous list of things I want to see and S. has the same - but we may just cope with the heat by quite a lot of table sitting at pavement cafes and wandering in the evenings. I haven't been for twenty-five years, so there will be massive changes - whole areas developed, like Le Marais for example.

I have been musing about my very first visit when I was sixteen which has coloured my view of Paris ever after; Mum was somehow persuaded to let me go on my own because I stayed at one of my school's twin convents in the Rue de Vaugirard with its virtues of cheapness and safety. That was quite a big thing for a teenager to be allowed then. I had a wonderful time - totally innocent and dead lucky. The convent was deserted for the holidays, I had a whole dormitory to myself; there was a huge quiet garden - with a swing - right in the centre of town. I used to take my tartine and chocolat outside and swing in the cool morning air, happy, with the whole day ahead. The only downside was that the nuns economised by cutting last term's school exercise books into squares for the lavatory - very rough and the ink used to run disastrously.

I had a series of magic days. I suppose I must have been quite appealing then, pretending I was Juliette Greco, in black, with my ballet slipper shoes, long pony tail and carrying a Mauriac novel or somesuch, just for effect. Poseuse intellectuelle, how ridiculous now. Anyway, people would talk to me. Sitting in the Tuileries gardens I struck up a conversation with a South African and his small son. We looked round the Louvre together and he invited me for dinner at - wait for it - the Tour D'Argent, steak au poivre and wine. It turned out that he was a rich farmer (no troubling conscience arose back then), in Paris to deliver the boy to stay with his ex-wife. He behaved perfectly and I had an extraordinary evening.

On other days I met two sisters who took me shopping for (their) expensive clothes; a gallery owner gave me a miniscule Picasso etching of a dove; the nuns made a special goodbye dinner, escalope, in their refectory - with wine. My Lord, it was hard to come back to earth when the week was over. I guess I won't repeat the atmosphere this trip, youth is a great enhancer of cities. But I'll take a run at it for old times' sake.

I took this rather engaging photo of beach-hut folk at Mudeford, Dorset, it says something of English eccentricity. You might also have noticed a few photos on my Flickr site taken last week-end when we walked along the prom past the beach huts in Southwold. Attractive and desirable as both they and the resort are, this outlay on a bid for one of them seems a tad expensive. They do command amazingly high prices - Keith Richards bought one at West Wittering, Sussex for sixty grand a few years ago to the consternation of other tenants who foresaw, I seem to remember, some inappropriate behaviour.

Then there was a famous one that illustrated the folly of trendiness; 'When Charles Saatchi, the multi-millionaire champion of Britart, paid £75,000 for Tracey Emin's beach hut in 2000, the beach-front structures officially became art. Emin had bought her hut eight years earlier with the artist Sarah Lucas, at a fraction of Saatchi's price. The badly weathered blue hut was entitled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here and was removed from its seafront home to become a permanent part of the Saatchi collection. Its disappearance came as a surprise to the owner of the hut next door who, in a neighbourly gesture, had shored up the building with a plank as it looked to be in danger of falling down. It vanished forever in 2004 when it was destroyed in a fire at an art warehouse......... Emin was distraught when she heard her work had gone. She said: "When I heard the beach hut had been destroyed I was like, my cosy little hut! I can't replace them."' (The Independent)

British huts are a small world on their own and have a dedicated website where I came across one for hire up on the North Norfolk coast that is rather tempting for a weekend; 'Table and chairs, parasol, deckchairs, windbreak, picnic basket and a good wine selection (Wines price listed) with cooler bag are all available when hiring.' Might think of a dayful of that.

I guess their appeal is something the same as that of the garden shed, an intimate space within a wider environment, totally dedicated to personal preference and convenience.

Sometimes a voice stops you dead; from the first moment you hear it you are hooked. The cause might be timbre, phrasing, mannerism, sweetness or roughness; whatever the quality, it fits the template of your emotional taste. It becomes a voice immediately recognizable among a hundred others. My special ones have been ridiculously diverse; Schwarzkopf, Aznavour, Scott Walker, Tom McRae, Tracy Chapman, Andreas Scholl, Matt Monro, Blossom Dearie, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Judy Collins, Bjork and Stipe. And Nick Drake, a lost boy, a withdrawn depressive, who died at the age of twenty-six in 1974. I have played to death seven songs of his that a friend recorded for me many years ago and I have just acquired several more. The voice was gentle, mellow, sometimes husky, he was a fine guitarist.

I became absorbed by a five part documentary about him on YouTube - "A Skin Too Few". It's journalism - the well-known actress sister, the classic upper middle class family returned from India, large country house, a beautiful, talented mother, privilege, Cambridge University, eccentricity, drugs, pain, overdose and, finally, the steady journey to a quiet post mortem fame.

It happens to me now, at start of spring,
As April's birthday counts the seasons of my life,
A new refraction makes my eye more keen,
Intensifying greeness to a greener green.

I touch the tissue leaves, moist from their buds,
Hanging like filo or small scarves of silk.
Their infancy is precious as their beauty's brief,
I marvel at the lemon light of each new leaf.

So spring becomes a gift, all springs distilled
Into an essence that informs pure joy.
I glimpse, through greeness and the filtered sun,
Impermanence, and strong desire to see another one.