Things to do in Paris When You're Dead.


After the tour I felt dead. I usually do. And despite being in one of the most fantastic cities in the world (and it is...) and being in very special company I still felt tour-drained.

However, I saw some very wonderful sights, some old, some new.

Place des Voges - I think this is my favourite Parisian park. It looks like the setting for a monet painting.



None more dead.

This is Serge Gainsbourg's grave. Last time I went it was raining and I was smoking gitanes. I left him a pack. This time I didn't have any fags for him. Definitely too much fucking perspective. (Note the respectful fan tributes - even the metro tickets left for Serge didn't litter the other graves nearby. Not like the abomination that is Jim Morrison's grave in Pere LaChaisse--where the scummy hippies scrawl their pompous bollocks over the nearby gravestones and sit and get pissed nearby. Because it's important to write your tired, tepid, stoner insights on unrelated gravestones. Because your unique insight and vanity means you don't have show any respect for the surrounding families. Fuckwits. Kill them. Kill them all.)



Ever get that feeling someone's walked over your grave?

How cool is this one? It looks like Gaudi designed it--and it's got my name on it.



I liked this one because it's got the world's most depressed statue on top. Whoever was buried here wanted to be sure someone would always be grieving.



And Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's dual grave. Fittingly minimal. Dead classy.




Montparnasse is my favourite Parisian cemetery. I think being an old git enabled me to enjoy it all the more. I'm starting to feel like I'm robbing time from one of them....

I got to visit the catacombs for the first time. They're an amazing labyrinth running for miles underneath the city. This location was originally a quarry but they moved the human remains buried at Les Halles during the plague years here when they developed Les Halles. Later, in a super-French style, someone decided the bones needed to be stacked stylishly. It's spooky and surreal and fantastic.










On my last afternoon I went to a gig. Because I love them so. Fortunately this one was in a park next to the Seine and in true French style what would be a throway field in the UK or USA was a design triumph with balloon rides in it, a cool railway bridge, a riverfront esplanade, several water features and fountains and two giant glasshouses open for exhibits (well, one was, but I'm not complaining). Got to love France. If you don't, you're probably dead. Trust me on this.

Balloon rides - I have a feeling there's some link to the Montgolfier Brothers here but I'm guessing (and too lazy to look it up).





People in glass houses....



Oldies but goodies....this never gets old. It's always breathtaking, especially when it's up close.




From underneath the base it seemed completely implausible that it was built when it was as it's so huge. It also looks like a giant weird spaceship. As places to go when you're hurting, Paris has to be one of the best...