It Ends, Sort Of

Five years ago today, a battered and dusty pair of blue sneakers, attached, incidentally, to my feet, walked a gangplank from a nippy little catamaran onto the end of a long pier which stretched for half a mile over rippled sands.

I had come home from two and a half months of travelling around Europe; as documented this summer over at The Gap Year Diaries.

I set out, in publishing that journal to show how the daily jottings and descriptions of our journeys and the sights we saw changed my writing style - from two line bare-boned entries when we first arrived in Paris in May, through to the reflections on the trip as we sat in the same gardens in August, after travelling thousands of miles, meeting hundreds of people, eating new foods, learning new things, walking in new lands.

That was the change I liked to see in the writing - that was the change I like to remember in myself. Now I think nothing in life is worth doing if it doesn't change you, somehow.

I arrived home five years ago, but the real end of the trip happened five years and one day ago, sitting on a wall on a bank of the River Seine, watching the sun go down...

1930hrs: Banks of the Seine, facing the Eiffel Tower and the bridge between Avenue Winston Churchill and La Palais des Invalides with the huge winged golden horses.

I thought I’d liked Paris as much as I could last time. I was wrong. This is more a case of love at second sight. The sun is still quite high in the sky, but it feels like sunset. the shadows are long and the light is golden.

Paris seems to welcome us like an old friend, one that remembers us well. It is good to see somewhere that is known to me from this trip, so that it is familiar, but familiar in a personal way. This Paris belongs to me. When I get home tomorrow everything will be familiar, which, oxymoronically, will seem strange. It won’t be personal familiarity – it’s shared by my family and the people I know, so for this personal quality I silently thank Paris.

I can see now one of the differences between Paris and other European cities. The stark differences between the two Tuileries – the Tuileries of May, and the Tuileries of August, depressed me, but Paris has an enduring quality. Whereas other cities are swamped and weighed down by the feet of the multitudinous tourists, they break over Paris like a wave, present only for a time before flowing away...Afterwards, underneath, is still Paris. It cannot be changed by tourism. It caters for it, but it a few more weeks of high season and the fair will be dismantled and the dust will settle.

Rome was vibrant and steeped in history, it was alive and thriving. Athens was a maze of thundering traffic, with all the culture and identity it needed poised gracefully on a rock against the sky for all to see. Madrid sweltered, but it is justifiably its nation's capital – there wasn’t one single identifiable mark of the evolution of a global culture (over and above the usual McDonald's and 'Coke' adverts). You could crush Madrid and it would bleed Spain. It is Spain through and through. Rabat was a meeting of two cultures, a melting pot that challenged the senses and intrigued my mind.

Paris seems to know that all it needs to do is to be Paris, and everything can only be well. it is the most self-assured and confident city that I've been to. It doesn't threaten – if you are here, then you are a part of Paris. There are no peddlers, no aggressive beggars and no real malevolence – nothing to cultivate a 'them and us mentality on either the visitors' or the Parisian’s side. It rests easy on the mind.

Perhaps you see in each city how you feel at the time, perhaps a mass of humanity only reflects what you are, so you leave with your memories of the city with how it made you feel as one whole. That would say a lot for my second impression of Paris, and how I have changed in the last few months.

There is only one other city I've been to which made me feel the same way, and I'm moving there.