I loved running errands outside the apartment. It was spring and Paris was blooming. Tree blossoms rained on to the boulevards and flowers spilled from stalls on so many street corners, and the people – those who had the means to do so – dressed in colours a little more fantastic than real. Rosy-cheeked and flamboyant in skirt and hat. Shiny shoes fresh from the cobbler. Ribbons, scarves and lace. Foreigners wore clothing I didn’t then recognize: the turban, the fez. Scottish tartan and the embroidered Spanish cloak.

I meandered between boucherie and boulangerie and charcuterie. I varied my routes to get a taste of different parts of the city. I had to take care though. Madame grew anxious if I was gone for too long. Once, as I had just come in and was hanging my hat in the vestibule, she told me that she had become convinced I’d absconded with the day’s food allowance and was only just, moments before I came through the door, preparing to go downstairs and ask Monsieur Muller to alert the gendarme. After that, when I left each morning, she got into the habit of leaning from the balcony of her bedroom and watching me walk down the road. I would turn and smile and wave, several times, until I reached the corner. Often, when I came home, she would be there again, waiting. Her claim was that she was out getting some air, but I knew better.

Paris, however, provided me with endless excuses for being late: a dead horse in the middle of the road stopping traffic, construction, a crowd gathered around a fire eater or contortionist. A student protest, hundreds of young men marching, blocking the intersections, waving flags and singing ‘La Marseillaise’. I had to detour, I would tell her. I couldn’t face the crowds. Felt overwhelmed and had to sit down. She was very sympathetic.

It didn’t matter that I couldn’t afford entry to the theatres on the Boulevard des Italiens or Montmartre or any of the others. The streets were spectacular enough. A string quartet amongst the cafe tables, a man coming out of a courtyard on stilts, his face covered in blue grease. Vaudeville in the Place de la République. A woman in stage rags, her face grimy with charcoal, singing a gut-twisting aria under the glass-topped acoustics of a dark passage, pigeons cooing and shitting on the steel rafters above.

One morning in June, my basket heavy with bread, cheese, a bag of assorted sweets and a litre of wine, I stopped to watch a clairvoyant on the Rue de Rivoli, not far from the Hôtel de Ville. She sat stiffly on a tiny stool hidden by her skirt, her eyes blindfolded with a black kerchief. Her curly hair was unnaturally red and her neck queerly long, and she wore a simple yellow dress. Her companion, a much older man with a waxed moustache and an oily, black beard, walked amongst the crowd. He wore a smart purple jacket, too big, and under that a red waistcoat. Two young women who stood very near me, both leaning against bicycles, called out to him and he did a hop, a little half-twirl, and approached them. One of them dropped a few coins into the small wooden box he carried and the crowd hushed. He called to his lady in the yellow dress.