Colour - Paris

The plan was a good one.   We’d get half of what we needed to do done yesterday, leaving this morning to do the rest and this afternoon to get out and about.  The flaw in that of course is that the amount of work left to do is inversely proportional to the time left to do it, and when the time came to be finished, we weren’t.

So we washed and cleaned and generally managed to have things ship-shape by mid afternoon, well enough we were sure to give Cheryl and Ian the impression that we live as models of tidiness.  

We had been so busy that we hadn’t noticed the growing cacophony of sound generally from the direction of the Bastille where hundreds of thousands (although I would have guessed a lot more) people were taking part in some sort of parade on closed streets under clear blue skies.    

Had we known that the annual Gay Pride parade (or any other parade for that matter) would be happening in the afternoon, we may have bought bread earlier, but we hadn’t which is why when the time came to do so, I found myself peering over a sea of moving heads, with little prospect of getting from point A (where I was) to point B (where the bread was).

It might work, I thought if I slipped sideways into the parade, and sort of crab-walked across it to the other side.  The getting in part went well enough, and I soon found myself in the glare of the world’s press, walking between someone dressed as a North American First Nations Person (it was so much easier to type when they were called Red Indians), and a muscle bound chap dressed as a construction worker.

I can’t say that I “get” these iconic gay stereotypes, but I can say that if the next costume symbolising personal freedom turn out to be an older bloke in a Panama hat carrying a baguette, we all know how that came to be.