Joys and disappointments in the summer holiday (ii)

Still not by Josiah, 2004

Here is one of my dad’s totally stupid ideas.  He suggested pretending that some of the red-headed Irish girls we met one evening in France were called Joy, and giving a blow-by-blow account of the night’s proceedings.  That would be ‘Joys in the summer holiday’, though I know I wouldn’t get away with it.  First of all, they were actually called Sinead, Aiofe, and (sigh) Victoria.  Secondly, despite the deceitful effect of the silvery moonlight, they turned out to have just a tiny aura of disappointment.  Even Victoria Joy.  I know it is a terrible thing to say, but they didn’t have the exotic allure of The Arcata Girls, who we met last year at Grizzly Creek.  You won’t know Arcata.  It has a webcam, and a major attraction is its swamp.  No, I’ve never been there either, but you see what I mean by exotic allure?  So the red-headed Joys would have to be classified, reluctantly, as a disappointment, except for the third and final problem.  You said you didn’t want to hear about our sordid dating experiences. So here we are at the end of the second paragraph, with nothing useful said on the subject.  Null points.  And I think I started a sentence with a sentence with a conjunction, so that would be minus uno.  Not a brilliant start.

So I’d better tell you about a real joy from our French holiday.  We went to Paris.  Romantic, n’est ce pas?  It was great.  We got up at 5am, and got lost on the way to the station before taking a train journey that lasted about three hours.  Then, because it was such a lovely day in Paris, my dad had this great idea that we should do a 10 mile walking tour of the city in thirty degree sunshine before going to the Musee d’Orsay.  The pictures in there are so great that they had about two thousand people in each room.  At the ends of the building are big station clocks that look as if they were made for Buster Keaton to hang from.  Probably to get cool.  One was just by the teashop, which we reached as it closed.  The best picture was that last one that Van Gogh painted just before he killed himself.  Crows over a cornfield.  I really identified with that one.  Boy, was that day a joy.  Do I love Paris.