Heavens! Is that the date? I have just realized that three months have gone by without me making a single post. Fortunately now I am lucky enough to not only be on holiday in Paris, but to be ill, which means I need to find things to do to keep me occupied while I convalesce in our somewhat dingy holiday flat.
Yesterday my boss happened to be in Paris for a meeting with a company with which we have a partnership. I had earlier decided that I would tag along, figuring that I was in Paris anyway and it might be useful for me to meet the partners too. However I naturally hadn’t banked on having a stomach infection. I went through that familiar dilemma of “do I feel bad enough to cancel X?” and decided that I would be okay, factoring in the perking-up phenomenon that occurs when one has to put on a public face.
And yes, as soon as I met my boss and had to perform, I immediately felt fine. I felt okay through lunch, which for vegetarian me consisted of a salad of the sort that one suspected may have laid one low in the first place. Before we got ready to leave, I went downstairs to the toilet, which was — befitting the retro decor — the much-loved two-footprints-and-a-hole variant of legend. I thought about attempting a Big Job — there were grumblings in the engine room — but considered the logistics of attempting to use a French toilet while wearing a suit, and the terrible repercussions an accident would have, and opted for a Small Job instead.
Fortunately I survived the mercifully short meeting (in the brave-faced post-meeting evaluation, my boss and I both shyed away from mentioning that he had come all the way from London for a 40-minute rendezvous) sans stomach cramps.
Looking for things to do to fill the rest of the afternoon — he had to catch the Eurostar around 8, while I was due to meet S back at the flat at 7 and didn’t have any keys to get in beforehand — we decided to call our company’s Paris representative and see if he fancied meeting up.
He was around and had time to spare for us — in fact he didn’t seem to be under much pressure to get any kind of work done — so we spent a pleasant enough couple of hours reclining on the suite in his office, a stone’s throw from that park next to the Louvre, drinking coffee, eating the chocolates his secretary had bought and putting the world to rights. Little did they suspect that diabolical churnings were taking place in my intestines and that I was just waiting for a conversational lull to avail myself of the toilet facilities, whose location I had earlier made a grateful mental note of.
