I’m on the Pont de Carousel. We all have to stand a long way from the road and wait because someone left a Lime bike and they have to make sure it’s not a bomb.
I had to make the Luton into a mobile consumables scrim tools and wayfinding shop, because everything was just lined up by the side of the bridge while things were being set up. I’ve still got some signs that should be at Trocadero. Most of the scrim has gone now, but there’s a tiny bit left just in case. I’m giving out cable ties like sweeties. And a speedboat horse just came past underneath me.
The Seine is active with RIBs today, and the police are everywhere. Also the gendarmerie, doing their best to confuse things. One guy broke the seal on my van just because he could. I was discombobulated and he had absently pocketed my fucking driving licence. Now I’m having to work out how to get it back from the idiots. “Do you know how I might get my licence back?” I asked a policewoman and she just laughed when I showed her the video of the guy. “Ahh that’s a gendarme. They are unprofessional. We would never make that mistake.”
Thankfully I met a young French lad who is really up for helping out. He’s been on the phone to the gendarmerie and generally trying to shift things which is good as I haven’t the time. He calls himself Fred, he drives vans, and I’ve saved him in my phone as someone I would call it I ever had to staff drivers in french speaking countries which, if you know me, is not as unlikely as it sounds. He’s a bright spark generally, and motivated. If I was an employer I would employ him.
I’m largely an energy shifter here. Moving stuff and retuning as I go. Big loads of random things go to one point, and then the next and then the next gradually getting smaller. Timber frames, loads of them, made up carefully by the chippies. “What the hell are they actually gonna use those timber frames for?” Ali said. They went out to Ceremony. Nobody had the staff to implement the signs into them. They came back. They’ll probably end up as timber again.
It’s magical being here. This is a nexus. But I’m up tomorrow at 2am and have to take all my bags out of the flat in Noisy and get on the road properly by twenty past. Argh. Night night.
AlBarclay 