42, rue Cler : 19/09/06

It's so nice to be back in Paris; it seems that I've just stepped away for a day or two, and that strangely the leaves are now in Autumn rather than Winter as they were.

I slept under windows open to the sky last night, and the pleasure of the night air was intense after so many stifling hotel evenings. My apartment is very high, the highest you can be without being a chambre de bonne. The view is so enchanting I sat by the window all morning to daydream and read Lydia Chukoskaya's wonderful Akhmatova Journals.

This is s book I've owned for many years, but I could never permit myself to read more than a page now and then, as I didn't want to finish. Now it's time to reach the end.

I'm in the 7^th (as we say). I've been inching my way around the arrondissements and this time am living below the Eiffel Tower, if you need a landmark to fix to. This area contains the Hotel des Invalides (built for disabled soldiers in the 1670s), the Ecole Militaire and the wonderful Musee de l'Armee which contains among many other interesting things Napolean's dear little bed and his two petit slippers side by side. The Musee d'Orsay is also within walking distance. It houses my favourite painting d'Hiver possibly an instance of my undeveloped colonial aesthetique. I can't remember who painted it; nobody famous.

I don't have any plans apart from seeing a couple of friends and going to a concert or two if I can find anything pleasing to moi. Like their Brisbane counterparts, Paris concert-goers seem to cling to 'old favourites'. I've already scrutinised a number of posters for Vivaldi's Quatre Saisons, and Mozart's Petite musique de Nuit. But the myriad of Churches dotted across Paris, enticing enough for their medieval architecture, also have many lunchtime concerts where it's possible to hear Lully or Poulenc or Faure or other French composers, just en passant. And there's always the astonishing organist Olivier Latry at Notre Dame de Paris.

My little apartment is delightful but rather impractical. For example in spite of the plethora of prints and water colours, arrangements of flowers and dried things, and carefully selected 'appointments', there is nothing to wash the dishes with. I was forced to read many French labels in order to find the perfect liquide ultra degraissant with an agreablement parfume a l'orange. And just when the lights went out in the Supermarche too, one of a chain usefully named 'Shopi'. Prue will remember these for their aisles forever lined with half unpacked boxes.

The 'Eiffel' is a such beacon of hope to a navigational dyslexic like me. Wherever I am I can always find my way back home. Vive la Tour!!