Plump sur l'amour

As much as I hate to affirm clichès, I confess I fell in love in Paris. It happened on my second day there, on a still, sun-flooded morning, about half an hour after I passed by the crowds at Notre Dame. It was something I hadn't expected, something I didn't even believe I was capable of. Not anymore. Yet there it was, that chest-hollowing rush, as intense, as vivid, as all-consuming as any teenage feeling. Though experienced enough to be cautious, I did not try to fight it; I let it carry me on its furious current, without a thought or care for where it would take me. And why not? I had quit my job, ended my lease, crammed my every possession inside a wooden container, and I was in a foreign city—the foreign city for love.

I hadn't been in Paris long—half a morning and an afternoon—but it was long enough to recognise the extent to which it is lifted by love. Without love, Paris would surely exhaust you with its splendour, its riches of art and architecture and discount supermarket wine. Without love it might even register that the Seine smells like piss and everyone is an arsehole. But add that finishing spark of romance and the rudeness washes off, and a syrup glow pours from the sky. Suddenly you're in your own mediocre summer movie and Paris is little more than the pretty backdrop of your dull fling.

I'm not sure I would have fallen in love had I only seen the ground floor. It has a creditable collection, certainly, and a charming enough ambience, but many a bookshop could promise the same. What did it were the elements upstairs: the antique volumes, the alcoves for reading and writing, the piano, the resident cat. Combined, these treats were absorbing enough to offset the passage of club-footed tourists, most of whom spent far more time disobeying the instruction not to take photographs than they did browsing the books. When not strolling aimlessly by the canal in the 19th, I could be found nestled beside the placid old cat in the poetry section, fancifully imagining I could learn French from Verlaine and Rimbaud. If that weren't contemptible enough—it is contemptible enough, but stay with me—some days I would transfer to the alcove with the typewriter and hammer out the kind of execrable nonsense you couldn't even rescue a comma from. I thought about taking this to the extreme and becoming a tumbleweed—one of those aspiring writers who, in exchange for some odd jobs and a one-page profile, sleep free of charge in the bookshop—but I felt enough of a fraud as it was.

A couple of doors down, beside Shakespeare and Sons' rare book outlet, there is an affiliated café. Having marinated myself in snatches of books I'd never finish, I would slip into a free spot overlooking the Seine—or rather, the road beside it—and enjoy a filter coffee and a slice of lemon pie, like the irredeemable beacon of privilege I am.

"Did you go to that bookshop again today?" my French friend would ask, returning to the apartment to find, as always, an Australian redolent of hummus and €2 sauvignon blanc at his table. Was it a note of resentment I could detect? Resentment, perhaps, at my overstaying my welcome in France and spending all my time in an English-language bookshop? It was difficult to tell with those erotic French voices. Maybe he was simply trying to warn me that my love affair would not last, that it could not last. He would have been right, too. It didn't last.

One day, having cleared my afternoon of any canal-strolling, I climbed the narrow winding stairs to the first floor and discovered that all the alcoves were occupied. I had expected this would happen sooner or later—it would have been controlling of me to demand otherwise—but it was still painful to see it. Even the cat appeared to be missing. I sought recovery in the cafè, repeating my favourite order, but the lemon pie turned up pale and waxy and the coffee had an acrid bite.

I stepped outside and the world was restored to grey.

Biggles the Sex Tourist

Reeperbahn must come as something of a shock to the naïve Beatles fan. There are no real monuments or museums, none, at least, that would justify the journey, and the few remaining venues associated with The Beatles are nestled among grim outlets of the sex trade. I'm told it's less sleazy now than it was, but it was plenty sleazy for me. On the day I visited, a fittingly foul Sunday, my only hope was that I was projecting enough of a 'Beatles fan' vibe to distinguish myself from the men who had come here to ejaculate against one-way mirrors.

My history with The Beatles extends back about as far as I can remember. The first music I purchased—my very first purchase, in fact—was a copy of Past Masters, volumes I and II, on double-cassette, which I found in an odds-and-sods shop near Melbourne Central. That is not to say I was precocious; it was simply that my taste in music, at that malleable age, was wholly a reflection of my parents' influence. There were many treasures to be found in their collection of LPs, but it was the Beatles records that my brother and I enjoyed the most—to the point where they began sounding like album-length extensions of 'Revolution No. 9'. We further repaid our parents' trust by cutting out all the cut-outs from an original mono pressing of Sgt. Pepper's.

In Primary School, when I was scarcely taller than the American basketball caps I wore, I would boast of my ability to name a hundred Beatles songs off the top of my head. I can't imagine this endeared me to anyone, but I remember an intrigued teacher stepping in once to correct me, gently, on one of the titles I had rattled off. He probably hadn't expected an argument.
"It's 'Buffalo Bill'!" I insisted, red and indignant; I was not backing down.

When my teenage years hit, I rejected the music of my childhood, as one does, and sought to define myself via more contemporary sounds. This meant that for a spell—and it must have been a spell—I subjected my poor ears to entire Offspring records, end-to-end. My brother and I even ceased our habitual borrowing of Help! on VHS. But as my taste matured, The Beatles returned. For all their grotesque ubiquity, I could not shake their achievement. The buggers were in my bones.

At the bar across from Kaiserkeller, the bar where The Beatles and their peers drank and where McCartney, in 1989, famously settled an outstanding bill, I climbed onto a stool and tried to drink away the taste of my lunch. The bartender, a descendant of the original owner, was enjoying a radio set firmly to '80s pop, the music of her youth. Out of the cycle, perfect and pure, came a call from my homeland: John Farnham's 'You're the Voice'. There was no use denying it.

I was glad I hadn't come to Hamburg solely for this—to say I had stood near the building where a Beatle had nailed a condom to the wall and set his room on fire. I had spent the previous day with a couple of old friends in Wedel, one of whom had finally cleared up the mystery of snooker for me. A horizontal hailstorm may have cost me my umbrella—a tragedy from which I am yet to fully recover—but the day had made the trip from Berlin worthwhile.

I sloped out of the bar and into the fading afternoon. Failed secret agents eyed me cautiously from their brothel-adjacent posts. Searching for change for my ticket back, I realised I was out of cash.

I'll say this about Reeperbahn: for all its seediness and substandard lunches, you certainly don't want for ATMs.