The last thing I did in that room was put a painting on the shelf and walk out.
Eight days on the Sorgue and I could not think of anything to say that would cover it, so I said it in blue instead. Into a sleeve, a tag on a bit of string, propped where whoever came to strip the bed would find it. I have spent a week watching this town sell other people’s leftovers for very good money. Least I could do was leave one thing behind that nobody has to price.
Then the long way north, which took the entire day.
Down to Avignon Centre, and then the strangest four kilometres in France. Avignon has two stations that are nowhere near each other, and since December 2013 a little connecting line has run between them called the Virgule. The comma. Five minutes end to end. Somebody in a planning office named a railway after a punctuation mark, and they got it exactly right. A comma is not a full stop. It is the bit that keeps the sentence going while you take a breath.
Which left me the best part of an hour at Avignon TGV, and this going on underneath me.
A kid in a red shirt, playing to an empty concourse. The sign over the piano says À vous de jouer. Your turn. SNCF put the first one into Montparnasse in 2012 and there are seventy two of them now, sitting in stations all over the country, free, no booking, no audience, no fee. He was still going when they called my platform.
There is no sound on that clip and you do not need it. Watch the shoulders. That is what I keep getting wrong when I draw somebody working. I go at the hands, and it comes out dead. The hands are only carrying out orders. Everything is decided further up.
Then the fast line, and France going past sideways.
Just south of Mâcon the line swings in beside the Saône and the whole window goes green. But look at the glass, because that is the bit I am keeping. Dust, a long scratch, somebody else’s fingerprints, and a river somewhere behind the lot of it.
I have spent this whole trip trying to draw things moving too fast to see, and I think it landed here. You do not draw the thing. You draw what is between you and the thing. The window is the picture. The river is only what it happens to be looking at.
Then Burgundy, thirty odd kilometres of it in eight minutes flat, which I know because the photos say so. Stubble, a hedge, a pond with a billboard behind it, a farmhouse with a van in the yard and a heap of building sand. Gone before you could get a line down.
Paris by eight, a room up in the twentieth, and a pair of legs with strong opinions about stairs. Eight days here. Best get on with it.
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.
