I have not written anything on this blog since May, a particularly long gap. I've had a long quiet summer of working, reading and writing, mostly good. I am fortunate. I've also been mulling over - very slowly, I admit - using Twitter to get this blog the audience even I reckon it deserves. But I have not yet ventured into that Babel of miscommunication. I need to hurry up and give it a go.

Meanwhile, this weekend, I am lucky enough to be in Paris. It still feels warm and rather summery here (at least to an Irish flaneur like me), and I have been walking the city as I love to do. I usually come here in midwinter, when the great flows of visitors abate somewhat, and the weather is rarely so dismal as to make exploring uncomfortable. I stay in Montmartre, on the south side of the butte, and though my dear friends R and R are not here at the moment, I can make my way nicely. Nearly always in my satchel I have one of Eric Hazan's marvellous books on the city.

Yesterday I decided to trace part of the route from south to north across the city meridian which Hazan delineates in his most recent book, A Walk Through Paris. I would walk the relatively short distance from the Luxembourg to Les Halles, or the area where Les Halles once was, before its disgraceful destruction in the early Seventies. I took the metro down to Cluny-La Sorbonne, and then breasted the waves of people up Boulevard St Michel. But just as I was facing across Rue de Médicis to the outer walls or fence of the park, I noticed the little row of bookshops on the near side of the street, and I went into one. I spent the next two hours chatting with the owner, Penelope, who runs a beautiful store, walled with books of all kinds, floor to very high ceiling, with ladders for remote access. It turns out she is from an area of western Canada which I know well from boarding school days long ago, and we even worked out that we have some friends or at least acquaintances in common. I bought a few books from Penelope, including a new Semiotext(e) chapbook by Francois Cusset, and Tom Nairn's and Angelo Quattrocchi's famous account and critique of May 1968 in Paris, The Beginning of the End. I noted to her my admiration (verging, it must be said, on idolatry) of Hazan.

So long did Penelope and her daughter and I stand talking that my feet were worn out without any walking of any route anywhere, and at around 5pm, I trundled back home on the metro.

And then this morning, as if at once to lift my spirits and frustrate me, Penelope emailed me to say that M. Hazan was in The Red Wheelbarrow (but I was not there to meet him, alas ...), and asking about histories of Ireland! I fired off a couple of recommendations, kicking myself for having missed a real hero.

Then I ambled down Boulevard de Clichy and then on along the Batignolles to Parc Monceau. There I sat on a bench, and finished the last 70 pages of Tariq Ali's 2017 book, The Dilemmas of Lenin, a stimulating mix of history, biography, analysis and speculation. The later chapters, about the women of the Revolution, and about the women in Lenin's life - Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand - are moving and impressive, and I was very struck by how formidable a feminist cohort had gathered in Russia in the immediately pre-Revolutionary period, and then the far-sightedness of much Bolshevik policy on women, fertility, marriage and the equality of the sexes.

Around me, Paris survived as only Paris can. A group of African people sang beautiful songs under the trees. Two boxers sparred, weaving, jigging, back and forth like dancers, the crack of gloves on focus mitts audible from a good distance. The dogs of the city - the domesticated ones - pattered or strutted by, meeting each other with taut excitement, ears forward, checking. Park attendants discussed the new gilet jaunes protests, with me trying to listen in. There can be few greater pleasures than good reading on a Parisian park bench on a warm September day, looking up every now and then to study the stylish, the beautiful, the ragged, and the conformist, and maybe the radical future in this great city, as they pass by.

Here is the website for The Redwheelbarrow Bookstore: