Yesterday morning, I was walking in Montparnasse. There are very glamorous looking women all over Paris (I was working with some of them!) and there is also a good quotient of crazies, shoplifters and drunks to keep the mind distracted – when not window licking music and furniture stores…
Sorry, i digress…
I heard some children singing and followed the sound to find a march in progress. Long lines of little French people, handsome and healthy, singing their little hearts out. Some were dressed in uniform and some held crosses. I was enjoying their singing so much that I was, for once, inclined to ignore the adults that shepherded them towards the gutter and coaxed them into singing louder than the other troupes in the march.
I figured that the song was lost forever when I allowed them to march off out of sight, but no more than thirty minutes later I was in a toy store playing with some little clockwork music boxes and I found the song; 5kms a pied
The rest of the day was a soul crushing string of traffic jams, airport queues, delayed departures and rude and vulgar officials placing arbitrary restrictions on travelers as I tried to get back home to Scotland – but the little song is still stays with me, as do the golden limbs and white smiles of those little hearts as their guardians pushed them smilingly into the gutter, into competition, and into the catholic love of the cross.
