The muttering started almost as soon as I left my flat. I’ve talked to myself for, I think, as long as I can remember, but I’ve known since the tragic demise of my imaginary friend, Dimio, (pronounced “Dee-mee-oh”) that it isn’t considered socially acceptable to be caught doing it. As friends will attest, in later years I have started talking to myself more and more. For those out there who share this trait there is, as you might be aware, a go-to line to trot out whenever anyone asks;

“Are you talking to yourself?”

“It’s the only way I can get an intelligent conversation.”

This habit of talking to myself has the potential to land me in trouble, for as I age (imperceptibly, I must admit – by the way anyone want to buy a picture of a dirty old man whose sins are writ large on his countenance and appear to worsen with the passing of time?) I’ve noticed that not only is the talking becoming more frequent, it is getting louder, and I am less and less likely to notice that I’m doing it.

Someone turns around and gives me a dirty look in the supermarket – did I say out loud how stuck up they act/grotesque they look/much I’d like to have sex with them/all three? The advantage to living in France is that in theory most people speak French and are unlikely, even if they understand English, to listen in on your mutterings. The unfortunate confidence this has lent me led to something of a scene at Austerlitz railway station on Saturday morning as I was trying to buy a ticket to Amboise to visit my younger shorter brother. (He objects to me calling him my “little” brother, so I must stick to what is factually the case, even if it makes it sound as though I have multiple brothers when in fact there is only one. I don’t know why I’m bothering – he won’t read this…)

Have I gone off on a tangent again? I do apologise. I’m sitting up in my foetid bed drinking vitamins out a glass waiting for a couple of inept French plumbers to turn my water back on so I can go and have a wash. I would try hurrying them up, but the French don’t see the urgency of washing…

Ah, that was it! Rampant stereotyping and xenophobic outbursts! I was hungover on Saturday morning when I recalled I had to get myself to the country. I recalled this fact just after my brother rang me and asked where the hell I was. I struggled into my trousers, added a few other items of clothing for decoration, and burst out onto the street. The muttering started almost as soon as I left my – oh, hang on, this is where we began.

Muttering on a velib is no good at all. The wind whips your words right out your mouth, over your shoulder and onto the windscreen of the bendy-bus behind you faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Why you would be saying that on a bike doing a steady twenty miles an hour down the Boulevard St Michelle is anyone’s guess. No, the thing to do is to sing. For some reason that morning I was belting out –

Sometimes there are gaps. I keep flicking back to the Gare Austerlitz, the yellow fringed computer screen, and the suspicious stares of my old arch-nemesis, the general public.

I ditched the Velib at the stop just outside the station and walked through its badly designed maze of shops. At similar train stations in Scotland you can buy croissants, pain au chocolat, and the ubiquitous baguette. Why the fuck wasn’t there a Greg’s here to sell me an anti-hangover pie? Surely it’s only fair – if we make our stations all French and welcoming to them the least they could do is flog me a saveloy supper with salt-an’-sauce and a can of Irn Bru? But that righteous anger was to come later.

Where are we again? Finding my way about Paris, like the inside of my mind, isn’t always easy. My main rule is to head for the Seine and work it out from there, leading to many hilarious conversations with French people at two in the morning where I ask them where the largest landmark in the city is only to discover it’s a mere one hundred yards away and I’ve been cycling away from it. The problem is there is no river running through my mind to navigate by, more like a pathetic trickle of consciousness, and as I might’ve told you already I’ve had the plumbers in turning everything on and off and severely hampering my attempts to make coffee. I’m toying with the idea of a hot lunch. I had an outrageously abstemious ham sandwich as my drunk food when I got back from the bar last night and my body feels cheated out of pasta a la kettle. God I’m hungover.

Yes! That’s where we are, I’m just about to buy something to get me over my hangover! But first, the entire point of this essay, my outburst at the ticket machine.

Later that day, once I’d finally started getting over my hangover in a delightful little restaurant with my smaller, less worn out brother, I realised that I might have over-reacted. Jonathan disagreed – he has had much experience of travelling by rail in France and even to his (comparatively) sober and well-ordered mind the machines make very little sense. It was rather lovely to chat with him in that restaurant, just under the aegis of the château. He ordered rather a lot of food, however, and I was already fairly full from the sandwich I’d eaten on the train to stave off an attack of, well, you’d really rather not know. The duck was particularly good, I rammed it into my face despite my protesting stomach and swilled it all down with a bucket of cider to put my insides to rights.

But I digress. Smudged fingerprints covered the touch screen and everything was in French. I understand French well enough for this not to pose a problem, indeed I smile scornfully whenever I see someone in front of me on the Metro switch the machine into English. As I selected option after option for what would have been a far simpler process in my native land, the pressure rose in my waters. Somewhere a pipe sprang a leak and a dribble of muttered vitriol escaped my lips.

“Fucking stupid French fucking machine fucking takes for fucking ever…”

The pressure mounted as the machine would not recognise my bank card.

“Fucking what? Fuck you you fucking fucked up fucking machine… fucking snails…”

But when the damned thing took a five minute break that seemed like an eternity between accepting payment and printing a ticket, something gave and the entire torrent of my rage flowed out like a newly connected tap spluttering out the air bubbles from some recently repaired plumbing.

I cant remember what I shouted at it. In many ways it would not reflect well on me, an ostensibly non-xenophobic pan-European citizen of the world to recall the precise details of my rant. It might’ve involved accusing the machine of being on strike, lazy, decadent and continental, of having sex with its sister giving rise to a whole inbred grotesque deformed group of bastard offspring whose only ability is to pointlessly “validate” the tickets before you get on the train. I might’ve been rude in more general terms about France. I might’ve called that noble country’s military reputation into question and had some rather emphatic opinions about garlic and frogs legs, tutus, mimes, and where exactly they could stick their Eiffel Tower. I shouted out –

Sometimes there are gaps.

But I digress…