Into town with the Luton van, to a little restaurant opposite Bercy Arena, and the local cops are going mental nowadays. They’re all very excited about having the limpicks happen, but I had a right shouting match with one of them after I perforce drove through a no entry sign. Once you’re through the barricade, signs and lights no longer have meaning. We all know that. We are all driving in bus lanes and on the wrong side within the closures. We had no choice but to do it, road was closed anyway. She didn’t like it one bit though. Ran after me and a panting monologue through my window. She wanted to confiscate my driving licence, but thankfully some idiot gendarme already has it and besides the road was closed, and I was supposed to be there and she can go fuck herself.
I think she was off duty, and very possibly not actually working on the games. It was all very hectic and sudden and I was just doing what I needed to do. In plain clothes, at my window with a badge, talking twenty to the dozen. I tried telling her I had all that papers I needed, she said she didn’t care. Didn’t check my accreditation. “I don’t care about your accreditation, you drove through a red circle with a white line.” “Yes, yes I did and I do it every day and I’ll do it tomorrow. Look at all the other vehicles that have done this?”
For a pretty authentic looking badge I might write her off as a local lunatic. I turned the van round and she fucked off to block my route out with ped barriers. While she was fucking around I opened the back and slung in the podiums and a whole pile of rubbish and if her job was to stop me doing my job she’s fucked it. Then I drove up and moved the ped barrier, took the van through, parked it next to another unloading vehicle and walked back to replace the barrier. Saw her haring towards me.
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced she was off duty, maybe not even from the area, getting stuck in when she literally didn’t have a fucking clue. About my age but short and built. Glasses and close cropped white hair. Tattoos to the shoulders but not the arms, but she’s wearing a crop top so they’re poking out. Talks threats at high speed and doesn’t act on them. On holiday from small town France to the big Olympics. P’tit QuinQuin, used to being the great I am, likes giving orders to large men in large vans. Bucket list.
I’m gonna watch a bit of extremely healthy people running while my room cools down. Then to bed and another early start.
What is this madness? I’m here in the middle of Paris and I’m trying to smooth the edges for this vast event. They are all running and jumping and pushing and pulling and achieving. Behind the scenes, incredibly organised people are Excelling in vast numbers. Work is happening hugely.
I’m periodically wondering how the hell I’ve ended up in this. By saying “yes” of course. But within that… I racked my brains for the right human to take my place. I’m leaving mid August. There’s a lot I’ve learned and relationships I’ve made. Rather than just fucking off now I’ve got so much in place, I thought long and hard about who to bring in with the driving confidence, chutzpah and calm attitude. I ended up bringing in Ffi. We finally got her accredited today.
Morning took us into GRP after having improvised a table saw with Kearan. Seriously lethal, a circular saw bolted to the underside of a table, cutting through. We needed to make a load of cardboard strips and we we only had corners. Had to leave the saw running which caused battery hell. But largely it went well. We were in central Paris, barely able to move for pedestrians, running in the stuff that needed running in.
It’s all sorted now and I’m gonna go to sleep. A lot more handy now, I am. We get that way on these jobs. This has been a wild upskill. My french, my tools, my handy. Hard to imagine that in a month all I’ll be having to think about is iambic pentameter…
I’ll try and be specific before long, just knackered by the time bed comes, always. Just as well I dream free. I’m starting to miss the things of home, the wonders of Lou, the shape of the non olympic world…
This morning an announcement came through suggesting that people were using their passes to watch the games. Apparently the obstructive motherfuckers at what they call P24 have become concerned that legit workers from our side of things are doing fuck-all – like most of their core staff – but then getting benefits.
I am happy to look into this because I’m not a games fan. I used to give a shit about the bob in the Winter Olympics. cus it was dad. But I’m not concerned about it all. Lovely of M to have facilitated my momentary access to his media stand, but that’s just me following the energy. It’s probably better that I only care about cricket. I’m not swept up in the details so I can just try and solve problems.
Considering how majestically incompetent the P24 security lot are, I’m delighted they’ve tried to make a request about how we use our passes. I’ve had people telling me I can’t walk through exits. I’ve had some people manhandle me on leaving – literally the man with no voice treated me like a bad prisoner when I had walked out of his logical unguarded exit. I was literally just going. The man is an idiot. Nobody is wasting time on our team, everyone is wasting time on their team. Useless self important fools.
I’m just going to bed. It’s been long again. I gave up driving through road closures and got the metro. I’m tired. Too tired. But half of why I’m so tired is because these fucking lunatics at P24 have no clue what it is to prioritise. They are a catastrophe. I’m largely just parking and carrying things in these days, as it is absolutely pointless trying to cope with the p24 fuckwits at the van gates. I would honestly be happier punching myself in the face.
Night night Paris. I’m getting to the point where I can’t be fucked there’s too much obstruction despite me trying to smooth, but… someone has to carry things… I’m good to continue to respond… but I’m fucked.
A quick run in the morning to Yves de Manoir. All the local police and security are clueless and they love to toot their whistles. I just had a pair of staple removers and I was on my own. Without someone to take the van I ended up being pushed from place to place until I was about a mile from the venue, at which point I reversed up to a bus stop right by the entrance to the official car park and told them they were going to have to get me towed if they didn’t like it, but that I was only there for as long as it takes to walk to the stadium and back.
Michael was there to take receipt. It took less than ten minutes. England was losing to Argentina in the women’s hockey. I just did my job and went. Loads of noise from the stadium. Nobody towed me but I had to have a heated discussion with the car park lady.
I’m still going into venues all the time but I can’t be fucked with going by van unless it is crucial or way too far to walk. It’s so obstructed. I’m so over these clowns.
The van gate guys are there all day, but they are mostly astronomical wankers and they don’t want to work. They’re not here to work, they’re French. It’s not worth having to get past their desultory shit. Even at VNS today I had some lardy old twit forcing me to jump through all sorts of hoops. Not because they were necessary. Just because… It’s idle work syndrome. They sit there all day doing fuck all. When someone shows up and everything is in order they don’t just wave through as they feel like this is their opportunity to justify the fact they’ve been rearranging their testicles for the last three hours. The other option for me is to walk miles though. I don’t have time for that shit. So for venues like Vaire Sur Marne Nautical Stadium I go sealed and then have to justify why I’m there in my unusual French. Today they made me get Marcus to come and wave at me from just inside the compound. I very nearly started playing the clown music.
Then a harness to Eiffel on the metro as the roads are closed, and a chance to return my media upgrade card to Micheal. I’ve got another one now. I find him in the beach volleyball. He has been quietly insistent over the last few days, using the Australian “eh” for gentle emphasis. “Drop it back when you can eh” It’s a clever little linguistic motif. In two letters it kicks responsibility to the recipient. It’s neat. I know it’s important.
I get myself onto the Champs de Mars. I’ve learnt to ask nothing of the site managers so I’ve switched on my resource management and I’ve arranged my accreditation swatches so that a high numbered media pass is the first thing the average Joe Potato sees. I meet with M and in a bout of boyish enthusiasm that we share he takes me up to the media tower between matches. “I’ll start to get anxious after about ten minutes,” I tell him. We look over the crowds. We take a selfie. We both start to get anxious as we are both here to work. We both tell each other we’ve got shit to do, which we do do, and we shake hands. Good lad that Aussie. Without getting that pass before I sorted my own I’d have been turned away for two deliveries.
“You two look similar,” observes Lou. I’m not posting his picture here as no permission. But he’s a solid geezer. We both use “unthreatening alien” as a way of breaking the rules while people mend them around us, we have both honed it to perfection, we know a fellow grafter when we see one. “I knew you’d need that pass mate. It’s why I let you make off with it.” Good lad. I believe him. “I think this is the best situated stage I’ve ever worked at,” he says. And I get it.
Gustave Eiffel was working with metal at a time when that was the new sexy thing. He put a small private apartment at the top of his tower, as you would. He used it as an office and to sweeten deals with the likes of Thomas Edison. The Liberty that stands in the bay in New York to remind people that the landgrab we call USA was largely pulled off by huddled masses of immigrants – he made that.
His tower still stands, monument to the optimism and fire of The Industrial Revolution. Guy de Maupassant, the French Chekhov, hated it. He ran from it in horror the first time he saw it. He was a humanist and a contrarian, a syphilitic social commentator, detesting the flock. Were he alive today he would have been happily using the word “sheeple” 5 years ago and now he’d be pretending he had never done so as he’d have realised it is a word for wankers. Like how the intolerant currently misuse “woke”. Clever clear human, Maupassant, but convinced he was the only one, perhaps as he was the only one at school or something. It happens to a lot of people.
He made a point of eating in the Eiffel Tower restaurant because it was “the only place in Paris I don’t have to look at it”. What a lot of discomfort for a soundbite.
His writing is dirty in the human detail. He taught me aged fifteen that fingernails and hair grow after death. Many of these curious voices push to the front through self-importance. He was one of them. Doctor Holland got me onto Bel Ami at school. I am very close friends with men very like the protagonist.
Anyway, the tower. The lightning nexus. Here in the electrical storm, I drove over the panels laid down over wet ground, not stopping until my back and front wheels both hit the concrete floor, carrying signage material. I slowly and carefully unloaded everything on my own as dawn broke somewhere behind the clouds.
Then back into the mangle until, at about ten past four, I emerged from Velodrome having brought some seriously industrial staples to make sure the signs don’t fall on the riders. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Thankfully that’s why Ffion is here, and even if she can’t get accredited she can take the driving. She took me home and then I chucked the key out the window down to her so she could give it to Ali to get in and I could pass out naked on the bed for three hours.
Now I’m up watching the boxing, which is at North Paris Arena – Tiny’s venue, which makes sense. He’ll like men hitting men. Lots of little things making a big thing.
I’m quite proud of myself for letting myself stop, and I’m happy Ffi saw it and immediately took the slack. It’s a calm before a storm right now, despite meteorology. It’s time to rest, having been on go go go. I’ll sleep a proper sleep tonight. And I really know this crap now, even if some venue managers and security are making it hard – the key is to handball over time. Very few deliveries won’t clear pedestrian security if you speak French, have Tools of Trade Sticker and don’t give up. Van entry is generally fucked as the local security team keep moving the goalposts and restricting delivery windows even though they are manned full time. I’m sure it’s because someone has decided that signs are never important, and that’s my Macguffin for being here on response. Tell Alexis at VEL that signs aren’t important, now he’s got a massive load of rapid staples and a gun that will stop them from falling on the cyclists. Tell Herless at DEF that they aren’t important when I found some sealant that will make damn sure nothing falls in the pool mid race. Prevention is always invisible. That’s the point. And I’m on a lot more than just signs.
The French security idiots can’t quite make sense of the fact that a man with a box of sealant and guns can be classed as an emergency delivery, so they’ve kicked us down priority as we are mostly anglophone. I had a security guard on his first shift today tell me before I had spoken but after he had seen my company name that he couldn’t understand a word I say. I immediately asked him if he was Polish, he responded in French that he was French but he couldn’t understand anything I said at which point his supervisor who knows me told him he should be able to understand me and I asked him how he had decided he couldn’t understand me when I had said very little if anything to him. It was an exposé of the fuckery. “The DW guys speak no French”. He’s learnt that. I had a security guy say in an undertone “You don’t understand a word I’m saying do you,” while smiling and nodding, and then looking surprised when I said “That depends on if you’re saying anything useful or not.”
I’ll keep doing what I do. Get the stuff to where it needs to be, learn the system, game the system, seek cracks, find them shored up. I can be like a white hat security hacker. I know enough to spot flaws in the system, and when I exploit them someone retrospectively closes the loop. But… it’s frustrating. I’m largely known to the gate managers. Some of them are helpful, personable, decent. Others are absolute twitbiscuits. Others are just being careful. The clown show music is reserved for ALX and INV. EIF/CDM/STE have been surprisingly helpful at security, perhaps to balance the arrogant venue managers. It was at CDM that the guy tried to diss my French, but that’s just detail – they largely treat me like a real person with a job to do.
I cover so much ground, it’s nuts. But the local obstruction is off the fucking scale. Ffi can’t even get accredited. They’ve closed it for the whole games. Absolute clowns. Still, I’ll hopefully give her enough info that she’ll be able to do the me for the paras, as I’m going home.
“No smoking. No farting. No sudden braking.” I’m not driving. Ali is. “We probably don’t need to go this way,” he says. We are going up the Champs Elysee. “How often do you get to do that?” he says.
Every day… Often a few times. It’s ace being the connection guy.
But not in an explosive van.
We nicked Dean’s propane canister about a week ago. I dropped it off on Pont Alexandra at 2am connected to a blowtorch. He wants it back. He lives in the warehouse yard and has barbies in his van. We needed a hotfix to dry the roads when we believed it wasn’t going to rain throughout the opening ceremony. Literally hot.
Ali and I are the only people on our miniteam who are successfully through checks and accredited. I didn’t know if I’d manage the thing solo, plus it was quiet at base. So In roped in Ali. About an hour ago we walked through the grounds of Grand Palais and then through an indifferent security, carrying a huge fucking great improvised blowtorch and nobody batted an eyelid.
I trust Ali not to crash and turn us into a fireball now the thing is in the back of my van. I can smell the propane but it’s probably just on my hands.
So I’m happily writing my blog now. Left the house at half 5 today and will leave at half 4 tomorrow. None of us sleep but I’m feeling very unsleeperated currently, and those heavy headed arseholes at CDM are my drop off tomorrow so that’ll be fun. I’ll finally get to meet Nico and I might need a shower afterwards.
Same old same old random. I’ve got Ffion on my team suddenly and I’ve been encouraging her to drive vans in difficult places cos she keeps doing it brilliantly and nobody dies.
The new game is working out what rules the venues have about deliveries. The more I establish where storage areas are the better I can drop what people want at times that suit me without disturbance. Apart from the CDM alphas who are too busy vanishing up their own arseholes to expedite things.
I’m loving this work drawing lines between people and shifting shifting shifting. There’s been an electric storm over the city for two days. Maybe that’s why they’re so uptight under the tower. The clouds have been spiking lightning, at times threatening and at times glorious. The world is doing sports, while thousands of sleepless men and women run around caring too much about ridiculous tiny things.
I’m almost home. Will seal the Luton, fill it with signs, seal it, fill in the papers, make myself wet, then faze into Dreamland. Should be asleep by eleven. Better than nothing. Irregular early mornings… yuk
I’m often running in something that will be needed but has been forgotten, and I’m usually going to get in before the delivery that has forgotten it. This has led some of the venue managers to misthink. “Al arrived at 6am with staple guns and staples and then a load of wood and banners came at 8am. We didn’t need Al to come at all. The tools should just have gone in with the materials.” If I find out the load has gone missing something I’ll usually be able to get it to the venue before the load. Some venues are getting very extra about it when things come though, and they can’t understand the time scale.
The guys at the Eiffel Tower in particular are annoying me now. Absolutely no help at all accessing the site – they seem to think the security bods will let me in without an upgrade pass. I had to nick a broadcast one, with permission, kinda. Then every time I ask a question I get a monologue. “I’m bringing something in to you. Might be worth mentioning it to local security to expect a van.” That one led to a monologue about how security worked from someone who has always been inside one compound rather than someone who is attaching different bits to himself the whole time and flitting between calm and active, French and English, firm and soft, charm and certainty, all in the name of detail to smooth this huge event. “Let me do my job so you can do yours,” I said to him. I totally held my ground as he seems to insist on making work for himself by obstructing me, and then moaning that I’ve made work for him. We parted friends and I got the code to his lockup so now I can make small drops without disturbing anyone. And I’m happy I held my ground with him even though it was harder. I know and trust myself in this work.
Sometimes though it is right to check. I was given a “drop everything and take this frane to Eiffel” type deal so I dropped everything, left the warehouse, thought better of it, parked up and sent photos to Scott. “I’ve got about twenty of those frames just gathering dust,” he said. “Why the hell are they sending you with another one? I don’t need it.” I didn’t take it.
Many venues now have made sense of how to use me. For the venues where I have the passes and the location of their container and the combination, I can be trusted to go there on my strange peregrinations and to leave a photographed delivery. It’s easy when you know how it all works, but every venue works differently.
Tomorrow, apparently, I’ll have to drop by half 6. Last thing I feel like right now. It’s been a long hot day into evening and bed is calling.
Roiling grey skies and regular flashes of lightning. “I’m fucking fed up of this shit,” says one of you artic drivers. He’s been waiting for Curtis to seal him. It has been a hot hot day. Hard work for these athletes, who stride around in the stadiums godlike.
I got hot today just buzzing around. TRO (cadero) first, with Wyn in full rebellion after waiting too long for his signs. He’s ordered them from another company now, he tells me, looking at me hard for a reaction. He’s a smart man, Wyn. I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with him, but I’d do the pub quiz. He likes to provoke though. He’s tried it every time I’ve seen him. Says something controversial then looks hard at you. He hasn’t hit on something I give a fuck about yet, but he’ll keep looking.
After TRO I’m going to EIF (fel) but there’s no answer from Scott, my contact. Later I discover I’ve been messaging him on a French burner phone he doesn’t check, but at the time I actively want to get an upgrade pass before I go to the van check area, and he wants to control flow. When it’s secure, the clowns really want to turn people away. Without a venue pass the first time I try, I know I’ll never get in. With a venue pass I can work in my own way and get it where he needs it without bothering him. But he clearly wants to be bothered. He keeps a tight stranglehold on his passes.
Stuck in TRO is a young German camera op, and he has waited over an hour for his driver. “He probably hasn’t got a VAPP so he’ll never get here,” I tell him. He’s not answering his phone either. I check his boxes and give him a lift to his hotel. Then I call his boss. One good turn deserves another. His boss lends me a media upgrade pass. He’s an Aussie guy who’s just arrived in Paris and is still full of adrenaline and jetlag. His eleventh Olympics now counting winter. He started out like me, he tells me as he waves me in to his posh crowded catering tent where they give you free flasks. He knows I’m gonna rush. He just wants to share his excitement, and having been in my position he knows I’m not gonna stop for lunch unless it comes as part of the job.
The Champs de Mars are pretty big carrying boxes in the heat so we go by golf buggy. It’s about who you know. We drop off at Scott and despite all my workarounds he still won’t give me a spare venue pass. So Micheal took me to the gate. And I stole the pass he lent me. After all his hospitality.
Didn’t do it knowingly. Meant to ask him. Texted a suitably contrite apology. “No worries mate, maybe you can use it to get in so we can watch the volleyball some time,” he posits. “I won’t have time.”
I’m not here to watch sport sadly. I’m here to ping from place to place, to be undaunted, to learn the systems and look for the cracks. My EIF media pass is one of the last pieces in the puzzle that’s called “how to maximise the last minute nature of what I have to do”.
Lou thinks he might have been hitting on me. I never notice such things but I don’t think that was the vibe. I think he would have behaved similarly in my situation and now he’s management he can’t have the strange joy of hard solving, but he sees it and it is difficult to find people who will drop everything and immediately carve out a role for themselves and put the hours in without bringing negativity. Lunch was an interview in events terms, in the same way that the first time I met Kester he got me to drive him somewhere in a van. “Maybe I’ll have to get you out to Sydney.” He does cricket. Maybe I’ll get to come be responsive at The Ashes… That’d be a slice of life. A possible interesting confluence of energies here, at this vast metal antenna as the storm gathers over Paris.
I love my symbols. I’ve face-palmed multiple times when people have blurred the caduceus of Hermes, found on medic alert badges for the NHS, with the much more modern satanic snake in Eden. Being a regular tarot reader I also deeply understand how interpretation of symbols is not and cannot be universal. Our experiences and the bits of us we haven’t examined tend to determine how we relate to most symbols. There is a jumble of reference points out there. It is very easy for us to forget that our particular understanding of each symbol is not a universal understanding, it is personal.
There’s a fundamentalist movement brewing, led by the stupid, driving against anything that brings people together. It is fronted by the Russian troll factory, which is seeded deeply now across social media, uniting voices that feel that they’re on the margins. They’ve tricked the incels, they’ve tricked the hippies, they’ve tricked the survivalists. The content of the message differs but it is universally against togetherness. It’s driven by Russia who must hate these Olympic Games. They’ve been excluded. So their troll factories are relying on ignorance. I slept through the opening ceremony, but apparently loads of people have been encouraged to mistake Bacchus for Jesus. When I last checked in, Jesus wasn’t half naked and purple, but the troll factories will be in overdrive. The country that invented propaganda has been excluded from this playful event. They will do what they can to hurt it. I’m surprised by how many of my friends are swept up in other people’s interpretations of symbols that, by right, should be theirs.
Things are going well for Team GB, a result that helps push towards a justification of all the years these modern athletes have trained… “sport is changing forever,” says the ghost of my dad. “True achievement is about having a life of your own th at is rich and still being an Olympian. But now these countries are pushing out people with no life but their sport, putting so much money into it, so much time. When you still beat them it’s satisfying, but there’s nothing to some of these people.” Funny to think of dad in the context of this event. He’d have been right at home here. Hot summer again. We are all getting knackered. But the team is strong.
Ali’s birthday today. He told me it was gonna happen. I forgot.
He had the afternoon off and went into Paris on the metro. Pounded the streets. Lived the life. For the evening we had a rendezvous with Bouillon Chartier, his favourite restaurant. I love it there as well.
The Cadogan Estate stifled The King’s Road in Chelsea when I largely was in my early teens. They turned a place that was wacky and colourful into a horrendous tack of chain stores, by putting the rent up to price anything interesting out. Similar hijinks in Soho. Chelsea and Soho had a little string of restaurants that did what Bouillon Chartres does. Quick in and out, cheap but high quality. Such options are dead now in London, but for all the fuckery, Paris is still a city with low cost options. You don’t get so ruined by parking wardens – they want people to use the businesses.
We had a birthday meal. I was designated driver. People talk a great deal with booze. By the time I got home I was feeling absolutely talked out. Knackered. Winding down.
I’m off to bed now in a nice new flat, all scrubbed. But I can barely keep my eyes open. I want this early bed but it is getting later and later. Ali is cutting down trees with a chainsaw in the room just the other side of my head, I can hear him. I want to join him.
AlBarclay 