Whenever I have a week like this one, when nothing seems to add up to an 875-word column, I find it helps to remember other occasions when the situation seemed bleak. And so it was on Wednesday that I took to reminiscing about my days as a struggling writer in Paris. There were two of them, to be exact, and they both occurred last year. The first was the day of the European Champions League final. It was spring, and the cherry blossoms were falling in the Bois de Boulogne. I imagine so, anyway - I didn't get anywhere near the Bois de Boulogne. My friend, Alison, had found me a ticket for the game and was also kind enough to put me up in her apartment, where I arrived on Tuesday night in a plan intended to leave all day Wednesday for wandering the city. Unfortunately, it was a week like this one, and instead, I found myself sharing the plane to Beauvais with a laptop and several half-baked column ideas, all of which got unpleasantly drunk during the flight. Up at dawn the next day to write, I took to pacing the room of the apartment in the 9e arrondissement. It had a wooden floor (the room, not the arrondissement), however, and some of the creakiest floorboards in France. There were several other people in the apartment, journalists who needed their sleep, so I had to stop pacing. The floorboards were so noisy I was keeping people in the 10e arrondissement awake.
It wasn't until everybody left for the day that I could relax. But by then, I was pacing the room in one direction and my deadline was pacing in the other, and the racket from the floorboards was such that neither of us could think. So I took to pacing the balcony instead. Down below, the city was bustling, but I might as well have been in Dublin. The day I had planned to spend strolling the boulevards passed without me. It was late afternoon when I finally finished the piece, and there was only time to meet Alison for lunch in a pizza restaurant, before heading off to the Stade de France. (Incidentally, Paris may be a moveable feast, as Hemingway wrote, but it's a truism that you can't get a good pizza in it anywhere).
My second day as a struggling writer in Paris was in the autumn, when the leaves were gently turning in the Jardin de Luxembourg and chestnuts gathered dust on the walkways. Again, I'm guessing - I didn't get anywhere near that either. I was in the city with my family, and we arrived on Wednesday with the idea of spending a couple of lazy days there before a weekend in the mad excitement of Brussels, where we were meeting friends.
Unfortunately, it had been one of those weeks. And as if the tons of luggage you have when travelling with children wasn't enough, I flew to Paris with a laptop and a half-written column with which I was now on very bad terms. I took the laptop on board as hand luggage, but I checked the column through to Beauvais, half hoping it wouldn't arrive.
Alison had left Paris by then so there was nobody to meet us except my deadline, which accompanied us all the way to the hotel, checking its watch. Once there, and ready to work fast, I realised I had two problems. First, the laptop would need a French phone adaptor, which I didn't have. Second, the laptop would need a French mains adaptor if the battery went, and I didn't have one of those either. But I ignored these looming technical difficulties while I attempted to seek column-writer's inspiration. Unfortunately, the hotel was too cheap to have a subscription to the French muse system. In fact, our room had some of the worst decor ever perpetrated, and as I paced back and forth, the carpet was so loud under my feet I couldn't think.
YET, somehow, I was finally able to type the magic word "fin". Then I went in search of a phone adaptor. The hotel not only didn't have one but looked at me suspiciously as, in bad French, I discussed my plans to adapt their phone lines. My tortuous inquiries as to the whereabouts of a France Telecom shop earned me directions to a post office instead. It was getting late and I was growing desperate when, suddenly, God intervened I rang Alison's former landlady. Who, unbeknownst to me, had returned from a summer-long vacation in Cuba and other places 10 minutes earlier and only answered the phone as an afterthought. It took 20 minutes to reach her apartment, another 10 to run back to the hotel for the mains lead when I realised the laptop battery had gone, and to reach her apartment again. Where, sweating, I filed the copy.
Relaxing at last, I made my thank-yous and left. It had turned wet and I had no umbrella. But I didn't mind as, like Hemingway's character at the end of A Farewell to Arms (albeit he was in Switzerland at the time) I walked back to the hotel in the rain.
Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie