Europe Road Trip Day 1: Down and Out in Paris and London

If I have one piece of travel advice (oddly enough, no one ever asks), it’s that you shouldn’t expect to enjoy it a lot of the time. Maybe more than half the time. Certainly you will almost always be one of the following: tired, hot, cold, ill, sweaty, dirty, confused, lost, or missing home. Learning to persevere anyway, and maybe even revel in some of it, is a big part of the experience.

Sometimes, though, things are just shit. I’m not sure I’ve ever written about a shit travel day on this blog, but rest assured we are righting that wrong here and now. My road trip to Chiusi, Italy, for my friend’s wedding got off to an inauspicious start.

Part of what I’m talking about with the Don’t Expect to Enjoy It thing is expectation management, and that was my first failure. My plan seemed deceptively cushy: get the train up to London, take the Eurostar over to Paris, pick up a hire car there, spend the next four days sightseeing through idyllic French towns and villages, show up to a Gatsby-style three-day wedding in Italy, then head back (now with Eden) to Paris through Northern Italy and Switzerland. These are affluent countries with good roads and familiar languages and beautiful sights and culinary obsessions so rich that they border on the sociopathic. What was there to do but enjoy myself?

A lot, actually. Mum was kind enough to give me a lift to the station, and I noticed she didn’t even tell me not to do anything dangerous while I’m away, which means (a) I’m getting very old or (b) she’s given up. I decided to get the early train into London so I could spend some time visiting Housmans, a radical bookshop I’d like to emulate in Bristol some day, but for some reason I allocated roughly 6 hours for this experience, and Housman’s turned out to be 2 minutes’ walk from St Pancras Station. I looked at every nook and cranny of that shop, as if I might memorise all 30,000 titles for when I set up my own shop (it’s going to be called Page Against The Machine, if you cringed don’t tell me, I don’t want to know). But even this could only last an hour or so. I bought Tribune and Granta and three PS4 shooting games from the £1 trolley, thus proving and destroying my left-wing credentials in one foul swoop.

Then I sat in London for five hours. It was during these hours that a mouth ulcer came onto the scene. Rather like Chappell Roan, this ulcer had been quietly doing its own thing for a while, largely unnoticed, until suddenly it exploded into the limelight. It is incredibly fucking painful. The sensation is almost exactly like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut, continuously, with an extra squeeze whenever I speak or move. I have lasted nearly 29 years of life without experiencing anything like this, and as the pain woke me up once again at 2 in the morning, I was just about ready to call it a day before the 29 milestone.

So, as I fulfilled my childhood dream of going on the Eurostar at long last, I was in the early stages of an almighty grump. The train itself was reasonably snazzy, but it got dark before I could see much out of the window, and when the trolley of delicious treats came past, I couldn’t even do a Harry Potter “I’ll take the lot” because WikiHow says the way to treat ulcers is to avoid anything spicy, sour, or salty.

EVERYTHING GOOD IS SPICY, SOUR OR SALTY. AND I’VE LITERALLY JUST LEFT TO GO ON HOLIDAY.

That’s right — I’ll probably spend the next week and a half gazing longingly at some of mankind’s greatest food achievements only to watch someone else eating them, while I enjoy a nice pear. Or how about my third plain cheese sandwich of the day?

I know this is perhaps the ultimate first world problem, but as I fought my way across Paris, through torrential rain, walking past hundreds of smug tourists eating endless delicacies, it was torture. And the rain soaked right through my shoe soles because I’m a child who refuses to buy new shoes until they literally fall off, so the rainwater turned my socks into a reenactment of Shrek’s swamp, worsening the state of my feet after the last dumb impulsive thing I did, running a half marathon with no practice last week, and then when I got to the reception of the cheapest hostel in south Paris, I said Si instead of Oui to the concierge. Three fucking times.

To his credit, that concierge is a truly lovely man, and he even showed me through a few miles of bleak corridors to my room. These corridors need to be seen to be believed — I am a very thin man, and my shoulders almost touch both walls. My room is a white box with a bunk bed and a basin in. The toilet down the hall has no sink, and there are no showers in sight.

It was 10:30pm by the time I had mustered the will to go outside and look for food. Paris, being the lovely city it is, was full of bars and cafes and restaurants and cinemas which seem to stay open until the early hours, but the rain kept falling and I felt too miserable and pained and shy about my French to try any of the experiences on offer. Wanting only plain, familiar food, I went to a McDonald’s. Burger, no salty fries, no acidic drink, just plain water. The woman came to put my order down (they do that in France) and looked at me like I was the stupidest man live. And I was, because of course that didn’t fill me up, so I then got a Subway, except my French was so poor that I couldn’t order the basic bitch sandwich I wanted and ended up getting something which only put my ulcer into more pain.

I traipsed dejectedly back to my bunk bed. I decided to do what I often do when I’m looking to sulk — I had a shower. But when I changed into my swimming trunks, I walked around endless windowless corridors, finding nothing but other lost wanderers. I wondered, as we flattened ourselves to the walls to pass one another, if some of them had been there for decades, wandering the halls, no longer remembering what for.

Eventually I found the reception and the lovely concierge, who received the only full sentence of French I spoke that day: “Ou est le douche”?

As he pointed me to the door which was literally right behind him, I felt ever more certain that the douche was right here.