Girlie weekend

I felt uneasy at interrupting our walk for a girlie weekend in Paris; it was strange but exciting. This is an annual appointment, though usually for the middle of January and usually in London. It would have been easy to cancel this year, but David insisted: if we made an exception this year it would be far too easy to skip another year ... and then another. Childhood friendships are too important for that. And he was absolutely right. It may be only once a year, for two days, but we talk intensively, ritual conversations that revisit old incidents. An annual repointing and reinforcing of the stones.

This time we had rented a small suite with a little kitchen permitting regular consumption of tea. So we lay in a row on the double bed, our shoes kicked off after five churches, two existentialist cafés and a market. And we giggled like a wide, rippling waterbed as we recited the names of all our teachers and their foibles.

Which is not to say we didn't exercise our brains. A visit to the Pantheon (dead white males in a funky maze) with its reinstated original Foucault's Pendulum led to a complicated coffee stop with radiating saucers and swinging salt cellars as we checked the science. Sue showed an alarming passion for the reasoning behind Gothic architecture which tested my new-found knowledge. I admit it, I made some things up. And Helen kept asking the date of this or that war or treaty - Sue and I had done A Level History - then supplied the answers herself.

As for the girlieness - it was a poor vintage, I'm afraid. Champagne with our feet in the bath, but not much shopping. I seriously could not get the point of scarves in multiple colours. Though there was one skirt ... I fear I may have dragged the others down to my new standards. As we packed on Sunday morning Helen bewailed the clothes she hadn't worn. "We never even thought about changing for dinner last night!"

Gone are the days of dancing; not yet here those of evenings in jazz clubs.

So we nosed the shops of pointless gifts, looking for shiny things and chiffon things for their children. I knew I had returned to the shores of normality when I found myself urgently scanning the keyrings for a present for David. Important friendships were confirmed, the warmth would get us through to next year. It was time to start walking again.

3 March 2008