Showboating on the Rhone

Péniche La Plateforme, Lyon III

I woke up at 10h on Tuesday morning with an immediate sense that there were more things I needed to do in the next two hours than I had managed to do in the entire weekend. My train was leaving from the Gare de Lyon at noon precisely. It had already been difficult enough to get a holiday from my night job, and of course I had to leave my room spick and span for the replacement to stay over. My room being, as it is, my room, was lacking in overall spickness and was in frankly dire need of spannage. Not helpful, then, that one of my superiors here at the hotel decided I also needed a long talk about all the things I'd got wrong on Monday, nor that I also needed to pack and make sure I had my tickets and all that nonsense.

You could argue that I need a course in time management, but there again, getting on the métro at St Paul at 11h53, and still catching a TGV leaving Gare de Lyon at 12h00, is a pretty nifty piece of temporal logistics if you ask me. (And that includes composting the ticket, Timberblog-archive fans!)

The journey down was uneventful other than the faint amusement of observing, out of both corners of my eye, the besuited but podgy middle aged man sitting on my right taking every opportunity to position himself as to gaze at the totally oblivious blonde Sheila sitting on my left across the aisle. (Ah, fleeting train-based lust. I guess we've all been there, huh?)

"Fleeting loves are beneficial and never painful. Love for a station or two is love without pretense and soon forgotten. Any contact beyond that pollutes the emotions and threatens to leave behind recriminations." - Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks, trans. Jeffrey M. Green

The destination, Lyon Perrache, was notable mostly for the absence of the person who was supposed to meet me. Somewhat fortunate, then, that I remembered the name of the quai where the péniche was moored, found it on a map, and was able to make my own way to it. Found my acting friends*, upon which the preparation for our show was mildly disturbed by the police turning up at 4 in the afternoon, flashing their lights, and asking whether we'd seen anyone fall into the river. So we did the show, Lyon seemed to like us, we told Lyon we liked it too. Our friends from Strasbourg followed but dragged out their show for too long (Sarah the kiwi, afflicted with jetlag, fell asleep while watching) before a truly bordellique musical jam featuring Timber and a number of instrumentalists I'd never met before. This stopped at 1am when the police intervened for a second time.

*Friends who act. Rather than replacement friends. As in "acting headmaster" and such. Just to make it clear.

A flotilla of cars then ferried all the performers back to an boarding school in the middle of nowhere - mass lodgings for the week (or, in my case, for the night). Dinner - oh yes, dinner - was served at 2am - no, wait, not served. Yer takes yer ingredients, yer puts em on yer plate, and yer shoves the lot in the microwave fer two of yer continental minutes. Of course this results in everyone being hyper - and remember, this is already a bunch of comic improvisers - everyone drinking a lot, and (perhaps a little less predictably, but what the hell) 20 people playing round-the-world table tennis until 5 in the morning.


Wake up time was, understandably, fairly late this morning. I gave some actors from other troupes their first experiences in improvised singing, before being entertained by the very hospitable Brogh, who lives in Lyon these days and like all Irish girls is gradually turning into Mrs Doyle. And finally made my way to the station, climbed onto my TGV.

"Pardon", I said to the girl occupying the aisle seat next to me as I edged past her. She looked up and smiled. Nice hair, I thought, vaguely, sitting down by the window and taking out a sandwich, a bottle of corporate fizzy sugar, and the intellectual-arse book I'm currently finishing, La religion est-elle une superstition? She took out a sandwich, and a bottle of corporate fizzy sugar. We finished sandwiches at about the same time, which I am going to put down to the prosaic fact that it takes most people roughly the same amount of time to eat a sandwich. I leant on the table and started to fill out some musical copyright forms. She was leaning on the table with a piece of paper, apparently doing some exercises in Arabic, from what I could tell. Nice hair, I thought, vaguely, as I finished my form, put it away, and then sat back, reading my intellectual-arse book in my lap and quite possibly leaning a little towards her in a casual sort of way. She was now working furiously on her lap and quite possibly leaning a little to her left in a casual sort of way. Her hair, which was still nice, was dangling against my sleeve. The armrest wasn't down, and in its absence we may have rested arms more against each other than anything else. She had got some books out about Islam on the table. Hence the Arabic, I guess. I wonder why she looks round like that occasionally. As she goes off into the corridor to answer her mobile, I think of the little note I could slip into her book, and I wonder why she had to be someone from Lyon going to visit Paris, rather than someone from Paris coming back from visiting Lyon. But then, Count Vronsky, why ruin everything?

Ah, fleeting train-based lust. I guess we've all been there, huh?