Right. Before any of the Europe part, there was a morning in Bangkok, and I have never shown you any of it.
Brisbane to Bangkok, a strange half night at a place near the airport, and then most of a day to fill before the long leg into Rome. So I went and found water, because I always do.
A canal on the outskirts, out past the airport. Green all the way to the waterline, hyacinth choking the edges, and a wooden footbridge going over it in three lazy humps like something drawn freehand. And a bloke rode a motorbike across it while I was standing there, at speed, without looking, because it is Thursday and that is the road.
Look at the reflection under it. The bridge in the water is a better drawing than the bridge is. Softer, wobblier, and it tells you more about the timber than the timber does.
Then the residents turned up.
A zebra dove, I am fairly sure, going by the barring. About the size of my hand, grey brown, and the whole front of it ruled in fine black lines like somebody sat down with a very sharp pencil and did not get bored.
They are everywhere out there and nobody looks at them, which is usually the sign that a thing is worth looking at. In Thailand people keep them for the cooing and hold competitions to find the best voice. Imagine that. A whole contest for whose bird sounds nicest.
What I actually wanted from the video was the weight shift. Watch it come down off the bark. Nothing moves first, then everything moves at once. That is the bit you cannot invent at a desk.
And then this one, which stopped me completely. A pond heron, standing on a broken block of concrete in a wall of morning glory leaves, absolutely still.
I am not going to tell you which pond heron. Out of breeding colours there are two of them around here that look near enough identical and I am not going to guess on the internet where somebody who actually knows can read it.
But look at the shape. All that bird is, is one long wedge from bill to tail, propped on two wires. Everything soft is at the front and everything sharp is at the back. And it never moved once in the whole time I was there. If you want to learn how a stationary thing can still look like it is about to do something, stand in front of a heron.
Last thing before I went back for the bags. A long red boat pulled into the weeds, loaded with bagged greens, and a pair of blue gloves lifting the next bundle. Somebody’s whole morning, done on the water, twenty minutes from an international airport.
Then a plane, then another plane, and Rome tomorrow. But that dove is coming with me.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
