December: Chance Encounters of the Random Kind

I was on my way home for Christmas via Paris when I had one of those rare, magical experiences that made all that followed worthwhile. Well, just about.

With hindsight, it was madness to have gone to the music festival in Rennes, capital of Brittany and a million miles away from the comfort of my own bed. All for the sake of a paltry commission and a deluded ego. The auspices were not good: the press liaison officer informed me before leaving that my train back from Rennes to Paris on the Saturday morning had been cancelled. Hence my ride back – and my chance encounter – on the festival bus. I had a very valid reason for not shifting my arse, but for once I resolved to be optimistic. At my time of life, I should have known better. 

I encountered the striking hordes face to face in Rennes – and it was not a pretty sight. My hotel overlooked the big modern square that they must have constructed with demonstrations in mind. The Bretons, who don't necessarily consider themselves French, have a long tradition of dissent and disruption. On the Thursday, a national day of wrath when public 'servants' came out in force to voice their opposition to the latest attempt to reform the ridiculously complicated – and palpably unfair – retirement system, I could hear their riotous assembly in the square below, pumped up by a soundtrack of thumping electronic music.

Thinking nothing of it, I ventured out in the afternoon to pick up a takeaway from a nearby Lebanese that the Good Wife and I had discovered during our weekend in Rennes for France Magazine a couple of years ago. I found myself caught up in a madding crowd, trying to move against their momentum. Scary. I flattened myself against a wall to edge my way along between the buildings and the human throng. One or two looked at me as if I were completely mad and I growled my displeasure at them under my breath. Forcing my way to the back of the march, I saw for the first time the ranks of gendarmes with shields and full battle dress, blocking access to the Lebanese takeaway. Uh oh, I thought, I could get kettled here. Whereupon, I turned tail and allowed the crowd to carry me along in the opposite direction.

Across the main road and on the way back to the hotel, I watched with disbelief as a group of youths took a hammer to the window of an estate agent. No one seemed to turn a hair and I certainly wasn't about to confront them. Now look here, my good fellows, what on earth do you think this is going to achieve? What indeed? The following day, teams of white-van men were at work, boarding up broken windows everywhere and clearing up the debris of demonstration. No doubt the shopkeepers' insurance companies would pay, but it would mean higher annual premiums. Ironically, the estate agent's window was intact. Unbreakable glass unbroken. So the fighting anarchists had sprayed it with blue paint instead. Surveying the aftermath of humanity at its worst – mindless and multitudinous – only underlined the brilliance of Cole Porter's couplet: Use your mentality/Wake up to reality. What matters pension regulations to many of these people, decades from their retirement, when their world is facing an apocalypse of fire and flood?

I was right about the festival. There was a lot of hanging around and waiting – not helped by getting the 24-hour clock wrong on the second evening and turning up two hours too early at the Parc Expo, a vast tract of pre-fabricated exhibition halls next to the airport, each one big enough to house four or five thousand music fans. Somehow I bamboozled my logical mind into thinking that 21:45 meant a quarter to eight. Senility must be creeping in. I sat around, cold as an abandoned dog, till it was time to stuff some cotton wool in my ears and slope off to one of the three arenas to choose from in order to watch an act I'd pre-selected with the help of YouTube.

 

So, I was glad to be off on the Saturday morning, particularly as my poor wife's cough was getting so bad that she couldn't speak to me on the phone any more. There would be two stops before the festival bus's destination of Charles de Gaulle airport: one at a motorway service station and the other at the Porte de Vincennes, just off the périphérique. On the east side of Paris, whereas I needed to get to the west side for the night. No one knew whether any Metros or buses would be running. My heart was therefore heavy and full of the sorrows of this bedraggled winter as we set off, finally. We actually made a third stop, at Rennes' railway station to pick up a motley crew, whose garb suggested musicians from a far-off country.

On the road, I half-decided to hitch south and avoid the capital, if I could persuade the driver to drop me somewhere strategic. But the service station selected was of no use to me: it was northbound to Paris and before the confluence of the two motorways, one west to Rennes and the other south to Brive and beyond. So I wandered forlornly around the car park in search of a car with a 19 or a 46 number plate, someone heading my way who wouldn't mind helping a stray waif. Nope, all the plates bore the numbers of Paris and its surrounding departments.  

Outside the WCs, I spoke to one of the waifs who had boarded the bus outside the railway station. I asked him whether he'd been at the festival, but he didn't understand French. His English was passable, though, and I discovered that he was with a rap artist by the name of Edgar. Of course! He had put in a guest appearance on the new Nomade Orquestra album I'd recently reviewed, Vox Populi. So they were heading back to São Paulo, which kind of put my own journey in perspective. The musician pointed out their manager, who spoke better English.

He introduced me to a man called André, who indeed looked more like a manager than a raggle-taggle musician. We started talking about music, as one would, and I told him that I thought some of the best music in the world came from Brazil's biggest city. I dropped the name of an album I bought back in 2003: Alta Fidelidade by André Bourgeois and Mano Bap. Electro jazz from São Paulo via Brive la Gaillarde.

'But I'm André Bourgeois.'
'What!? You're André Bourgeois? That's just incredible. I keep that album with my favourites in the bedroom.'
'You really like it?'
'I love it. I always play "I love u" at parties.'
'It was the only album we made. I decided to leave making music to real musicians and manage their careers instead.'
'So you manage Edgar? Nomade Orquestra?'
'Not them, no. A singer called Céu...'
'Oh, I love Céu. Her version of "Concrete Jungle" – fantastic.' 

We wandered back to the bus together, both of us flabbergasted by the coincidence. André sketched his background: a Franco-Swiss who moved to São Paulo about the same time as I moved to France. He had a love/hate relationship with his adopted city, he told me. A vibrant but violent megalopolis, where you can never see the horizon. He and the band lived in a quartier by the sea, perhaps a little like Ipanema but uncelebrated in song. As for Mano Bap, he replied to my query, they'd met every day, seven days a week, for however long it was – a year, I think he told me – to work on their album, and he was now playing bass in a Frank Zappa tribute band. You couldn't make it up... 

Back on the bus, I moved upstairs from my seat down at the driver's level. There was clearly no chance now of jumping out somewhere to try my luck with the thumb. The band members were like hyperactive kids. 'Pancho Trackman' produced some funky sounds on a synthesiser not much bigger than a laptop computer and Edgar improvised words, and everyone laughed and clowned the rest of the way to Paris. They're like this all the time, André told me with a mixture of weary resignation and parental pride. 

I waved to my transient friends when we stopped at the Porte de Vincennes, clutching Edgar's CD as a parting gift. A music journalist who writes for Libération directed me to the Metro station, explaining that Line 1 would be running because the service is driver-less. I got off at the Champs Elysées, then headed for the Seine and speed-walked all the way past the Eiffel Tower as far as the Radio France building. I made it to my friend Sophie's flat just as our mutual friends were leaving for a concert in Montmartre. Their train back south had been cancelled, so they were stuck like me. They had planned to meet friends from London, who had sensibly decided to cancel their trip on account of the mayhem. While reading in my air-bed that evening, the thoughtful people at the SNCF sent a text to tell me that my alternative train home on Sunday had also been cancelled.

Next morning, I heard about the concert and the party afterwards, where they had found themselves sitting next to Jarvis Cocker. So we both had musical-themed stories to tell. Without a Smartphone to my name, I turned to my friends for help before they headed off in the rain for a lift home from the Place d'Italie they'd managed to secure. They booked me a BlaBlaCar for Monday morning at 9.30 from the same roundabout where I got off the festival bus the day before.

Meanwhile back at the ranch... Debs was getting worse. She'd had to cancel her clients for Monday and Wednesday. While clients fairly frequently cancel their appointments, things have to be really bad for the therapist to cancel a client. So the Doomsday scenario in my head became increasingly morbid. If I couldn't get out of this infernal city to administer to my wife, she might... 

Lying awake at 5 o'clock the next morning, with the rain beating down on the Velux window of the bedroom, it all felt like the plot of some sick deity. I was out of the flat by a quarter to six, prepared if necessary to walk all the way to the Porte de Vincennes. Such was the force of the vengeful deity's deluge that I got soaked in the 200 yards to the bus stop on the Avenue Mozart. After 20 minutes or so of wishing and hoping that I wouldn't have to traverse Paris on foot, a bus turned up. Getting off at the Arc de Triomphe, I wandered blindly in the dark in search of the Metro. I must have asked five or six people where it was. Each in turn pointed vaguely to 'just over there'. When at last I found it, my Metro ticket wouldn't work and I got stuck in the barrier. Having the figure of a Giacometti sculpture has its advantages. Somehow, I squeezed through. Waiting for my driver-less train, I realised that I must have used a used ticket. So I stood for the entire journey on the constant qui vivre, ready to duck out at the last second and wave smugly at the ticket inspector as Fernando Rey does to Gene Hackman in The French Connection.

I made a pact with the vengeful deity that, if I got to the penultimate stop without a ticket inspector getting on board, I'd get out and walk to the Porte de Vincennes. I regretted it, because the rain was heavier and the distance further than I'd reckoned on. Still, a bargain is a bargain and, if dishonoured, I would surely die on the motorway south. Despite the extra walk, when I checked out my pick-up on the périphérique, it was not yet 7.30. Two hours before the nominal departure. The traffic below was moving at the approximate pace of a garden snail. 

A nearby café sheltered me for almost two hours of watching people pass by under umbrellas. A TV camera crew popped in periodically for a coffee and some warmth before re-mounting their motorbikes to brave the elements. Inside, a big-screen telly beamed the images they were taking of listless traffic. By the time I ventured out for my lift, both the rain and la circulation had calmed slightly. In fact, once off the périph and heading south, there were few cars on the road – which was just as well, as my chauffeur drove like the clappers through driving rain. I sat up front, simulating relaxation as I chatted to my host, while the other two paying passengers slept in the back: a woman from Gabon and a young Chinese student who had to meet someone at the Asiatic eat-all-you-possibly-can emporium near Carrefour, where I would catch my bus into town and pick up my car.

When I finally rolled down the track to Sleepy Hollow, I found my wife 'under the doctor'. Please could I go back out again to pick up some medication from the pharmacy? Debs never takes medication and she hadn't taken antibiotics since living in France, but was coughing so much she could barely say hello and goodbye. However, the wrathful god had seen fit to deliver me safe and sound to cook her dinner and administer succour. Later, I listened to Alta Fidelidade – just to check that it was as good as I'd thought it was. It was. Even my invalid agreed. I wrote to André Bourgeois to reassure him. 

He wrote back from his urban jungle to say hi and thanks for the feedback, which made him want to make more music in Mano Bap's living room. I wish.