16th April, 2006, Easter Sunday

WHO REMOVED MY STONE?

I know that to the inexperienced eye the prospect of driving around the Etoile seems a most daunting prospect – and even to the experienced eye it’s not exactly a piece of cake. At this stage, of necessity, I have reasonably mastered it. I’ve been honked at – I can never find my own horn quick enough to honk back – I’ve been glared at, but to date I haven’t been smashed into. Most often I am making for the Peripherique, so I enter the Etoile at the top of Av. Hoche, and leave it on Grande Armée, just a few streets away.

It’s on the return journey that I still encounter most problems. Getting on is not too bad - right of way (if you’re brave enough to trust them), and all that. It’s the getting off that’s the problem. I find I have to make for the very centre as soon as I get on, otherwise I will be forced down the Champs Elysées by the sheer weight of traffic going in that direction. Having gone ‘round the centre until past the Champs, then I have only the space of two streets to get from the centre to the outside.

In heavy traffic this requires a mixture of patience, nerve, tentative aggression, if you follow my meaning, and concentration. You will appreciate that with all that going on it can be very easy to lose track of one’s exit point, and more than once I will confess to breathing a premature sigh of relief before realising I’ve exited onto the wrong avenue. I quickly learned that I needed to have some point of reference to check that I was on the right avenue. I found it in the huge orange-and-white structure sticking out of the building a few doors down from us. Temporary it may be, but it’s been there since long before I came to Paris.

But even French temporary has its limits, and my landmark is almost gone. I feel a little like how the disciples must have felt on that first Holy Saturday. Their guide, their teacher, their Master was gone. How would they manage? It was only on Easter Sunday that they realised that all along, despite the words of Jesus, they had been building their hopes on all kinds of misconceptions. They thought he was a Messiah who would lead them to political freedom; release them from the slavery of Roman domination, while all along He was offering them something much greater – a New Life – His Life.