The food we ate

We come to Paris on the train. We stay above a courtyard, a square of calm in the seedy junction between two large stations, with bare wooden boards and owner-painted pictures of vegetables and a horrific erotic painting that we immediately turn to face the wall. In the morning we eat dripping blood oranges on a bread board and very black coffee because the long-life milk has frozen.

We go to the final weekend of a painter we like at the Pompidou - twisted faces across white walls. I’m finished before her and sit on the terrace with a €7 Café Crème which is one hundred times worth it for the view. When the sun goes in I stand in the tube listening to a hundred languages (but mainly three) and watching waves of pigeons crash over the rooftops and Sacré-Cœur atop the other side of the city slip in and out of shadow. (She takes another half an hour.)

We stand in a queue behind the yellow frontage of the oldest Jewish bakery in the city. I have an oily latke that stains its paper bag and is still somehow crisp as an autumn leaf.

We share a falafel and chips in a corner of the Marais, from the falafel stall with the shortest queue. (They are all the same. It’s all excellent falafel. This is the hill I’ll die on.) A pigeon crosses the cabbage I’ve flung all over the pavement and leaves six garlic sauce footsteps.

We spin around and around and around on a one-of-a-kind bicycle carousel that featured in Midnight In Paris (we are told), following a two hour tour of questionable 19th century fairground objects entirely in French. We have half pints of beer topped with peach syrup in the cafe of the Cinema Museum. There is a vampire exhibition on.

We buy very expensive macaroons of different colours and arrange them on a plate against the blue velvet of the sofa and look at them. They look very good - one is basil flavoured.

I drink a filter coffee in the sunlit courtyard of the Swedish Institute soundtracked by one thousand children, while she returns to the Pompidou to buy a print. (The print is sold out.)

We hunt for tart and zesty sorbet and find it.

We have tiny mint teas and mouthfuls of honied sweetness among the stained glass, mosaics and hard gold shine of the Grand Mosque. The colours of the courtyard make it feel like we’re swimming.

We order a board of cheese and two glasses of natural (???) red wine at the bar I used to live above, still run by  by three beautiful women who have sadly been joined by one very patronising man. It is called “The Wardrobe”; its sign is a clothes rack of wine bottles and we sit at the bar on high stools. We step out onto one of the city’s most ancient and winding streets and the rain has stopped.

We have two bites each of a lemon tart on a bench in a public courtyard, investigated by a large dog with a large tongue. She saves the rest for her sister to eat in the evening.

When I lived in Paris my romantic life was brief liaisons with men I didn’t respect and women I was afraid of, but in seven years a lot can change. I love this city. I love her. And we love food.