Throughout my young adult years in '90s and '00s Britain, Paris was always right there. Since 1994, a subterranean high-speed train has linked London to Paris, formalizing a long-felt affinity, like two friends everyone always thought should be dating. I took that train a few times in my teens and scuffed around the Paris streets in the easily pleased haze of a kid yet to commit to a specific future. I spoke about as much French as a watering can. I had one of those oversized fold-out maps that remind you of changing bed linen. My wanderings ended in almost as many disapproving dead-ends as my attempts at conversation.

What I remember from those trips in my youth is being unhurriedly happy. There was no hurry, after all, because Paris was Europe. It was mine. Not in the same way as it was France's, no. But it was mine within the great landshare and dreamshare of the European Union. The "right to roam" was the right to nominate myself as part of France's future, and France as part of mine. I could make a business here, a family here, a lot of mispronounced noise here and eventually call myself French. Did I want those things? Not at all. But that it was something I could do was foundational to my sense of who I was, and of where I was when in Paris.

Almost twenty years later, with Los Angeles having become the terrain of my dreams now, Brexit happened. Its mandate was, to me, existentially impossible. I can no more "leave the EU" than I can leave my backbone hanging in the coatroom. I was born into the EU, and for three decades the EU and I grew in each other. I will forever be a citizen of it. From December 31st 2020, the paperwork will say differently, but paperwork comes, goes, burns and is reworded. Belonging endures.

It was in that agitated sense of belonging that I resolved 2020 would be my year of Europe. I would vacation there. I would watch more of its movies and read more of its books (I'd already flopped around with Baudelaire and Flaubert in my youth, per the dictates of the Pretentious Twat, but this time I was going to read it in earnest). I would find ways to practice my French, which by now had improved, perhaps not to fluency, but certainly to constipation. I resolved all this in the mournful self-reproach of someone who has taken something for granted. I thought I'd always have Paris, the way I had it before.

Little did I know that Covid-19 also had plans to visit Europe this year. By March 2020, infection dots were springing up across the Johns Hopkins map of the world with the relentlessness of a vomiting Pacman. By April, the "right to roam" of most citizens of the West had shrunk to one hour of exercise in their immediate neighborhood each day.

Boris Johnson's Britain took the same fumble-swagger approach to the pandemic as it had to Brexit talks, and was rewarded with the highest death toll in Europe, a disgrace and a sabotage of advantages that only Trump's "like a miracle" America would outmatch. France didn't do too great either, disadvantaged by those open borders Brexit Britain had rejected, by its dense family structures, and by the fact that the first thing Parisians did after the terror attacks in 2015 was swell into the streets and bars with their drinks and lighters raised for an en masse fuck you. When afflicted, Paris gathers together. Coronavirus therefore had the double-edged cruelty of denying Parisians their typical pleasures and their typical coping mechanism. They handled that about as well as could be expected.

When the EU tentatively reopened in June, I decided this was still the year of Europe. I'd take my vacation in Paris as planned. I had personal reasons to go, imperative to my inner life but not for sharing here. Suffice to say that, by this point in the year, I was a textbook case of cabin fever. I wasn't quite conversing with the wallpaper, but the routine that in early lockdown had been my savior was becoming my tyrant. Not least because a script deadline meant I'd been a shut-in since November 2019. I'd effectively done lockdown twice over. It was time for a hard reset.

(I understand there is some debate over the morality of non-emergency travel right now, with Covid still very much among us. Some folks might call me "selfish" for taking my trip, regardless of all the precautions I took. By that token, every time you drive your car you are selfish, simply by participating in the crapshoot of the highway that, statistically speaking, might very well leave someone harmed or killed. But that's not the attitude we take. We say: learn the highway code, keep your automobile in good condition, observe speed limits, and don't play Angry Birds or shave while you're steering. Think hard, and first, of the lives of others as you go about your own. I can, in good conscience, say I did that in my trip to Paris.)

I would go, but I would go safely. Coronavirus was going to have to pull an all-out Ocean's Eleven to get at my immune system. There was self-isolation before my trip and formal quarantine afterwards; that's 28 days in total -- a full calendar month -- of social deprivation. At home I practiced navigating pathogen minefields like public bathrooms without touching anything directly (tip: Ziploc bags worn as mitts). I wore a mask unnecessarily, Darth Vadering to the mailbox or while unfolding lawn chairs, in order to get used to it. (Good job... Paris mandated mask-wearing in certain of its streets just days before my arrival.) My eyes would narrow to FBI slits if someone coughed five blocks away. And if I myself coughed? Well, my world order would have buckled. (Thankfully, it never happened.) I was, in short, an unbearable wanker for an entire moon revolution of my one sweet life. But I went to Paris healthy, tricked out with all manner of what I call "housewife hazmat", and rigorously self-bootcamped to keep myself as infection-resistant as humanly possibly.

Eurostar hurls trains from St Pancras in London to Gare du Nord in Paris in just over two hours. Before boarding I was asked to sign a sworn statement (featuring a grammatical error I charitably ignored), affirming that I didn't have Covid and hadn't been hanging out with anyone with Covid lately. (Okay, only kidding about charitably ignoring it. Full governess voice came out as I Oxfordsplained their error.) You can imagine the self-righteous relish with which I agreed (Ziploc-mitted) that I was disease-free. The Eurostar seat assignment algorithm seemed a bit drunk... I arrived at my ticketed seat to find I'd be playing footsie with a woman who seat assignment had separated six aisles from her actual husband. It was like Eurostar was applying sex-party rules to the train or something. We agreed this was batshit, or "decidedly odd" as it's worded in simpering British English, and to rebel against the algorithm and sit wherever.

During the journey, I adopted the intense sleep-mask/face-mask combination that, con, made me look like a burns unit patient but, pro, meant I couldn't touch my face. Subsequently, I can tell you little about the expanse of Northern France the train zipped through en route to Paris. My cellphone, a British one I'd gotten especially for this trip, kept throbbing as it circled through potential roaming networks, to the extent that I felt like I was holding a small and very nervous woodland animal while blindfolded. And in this way, before too long, I arrived at the Gare du Nord.

Paris has a way of making utilitarian spaces stylish, and the Gare du Nord station was no exception. One step out of it, though, and it became quite clear where the style ended in Paris. That would be me, with my pink SoCal beach shorts, bandanna tied at the front, and general air of having escaped from a '90s movie about an inner-city dance school.

"You need a ride, miss?" a cab driver said in English, not bothering to entertain for a moment the possibility I might be French.

"I'm good," I smiled, unoffended because he couldn't know, could he?, just by looking that, once upon a time, not so long ago, I'd stood in these streets and felt they were mine. I still kind of felt that. "I'll walk," I added.

And I sure did. I walked Paris for ten days with my camera, and this photo journal captures the highlights of my experiences. Click any image in the grid on Homepage to dive in to my day-by-day journal. I've also written special features on Feminism on the streets of Paris; a poem I wrote by the Seine on my phone as a creative experiment (ill-advised? you judge); and Paris street art (this last special feature coming soon).

Roam on, friend,
Lex