(*I used Google Translate. My recollection of French barely extends beyond a poem we learnt in year 8 about a frog who fell from a ladder, so I really can’t claim to be a polyglot.)

Ask any woman aged between 35-45 from where her first impressions of Paris arose, and she may very well respond with, ‘Amelie’, the 2001 film starring Audrey Tautou in which a young French woman with a pronounced-bob hairdo breaks away from an isolated, sadness filled childhood in the countryside to the capital, where she works in a cafe and finds a calling bringing joy to others’ through the simple pleasures in life. 

Her favourite simple pleasures include: plunging her hands into sacks of grain, tapping her spoon on a creme brulee, and skimming stones along the Canal St Martin. She considers the small things to be the big things, and takes masses of delight from them. And she’s quite right about that. And we could probably all do with being a bit more Amelie Poulain.

The film was an unparalleled success which provided many with a beautiful, romanticised insight into Parisian life that could not be learned from GCSE French classes and clichés about garlic and baguettes. As with any piece of art, it wasn’t to everyone’s tastes (a Lancastrian roommate at University was particularly unimpressed, handing the DVD back to me whilst muttering simply, “woman in it is serrrrrr fookin‘ annoyin‘” – poor ol’ critically acclaimed Audrey Tautou!), but in the quarter of a decade since it premiered, it has become one of the most renowned bits of cinema, and even led to an uptick in the number of baby girls being named after the leading character in the early ’00s.

It’s a film that once seen, stays with you. To the point where it’s hard to take a trip to Paris without seeing it through the eyes of Amelie, looking out for the tiny treasures, and yearning to float around the streets and parks of Montmartre as she did, in her uniquely whimsical way. Not here to tick off the famous landmarks, just here to simply feel all the simple feels. And eat all the delicious eats.

So, in the spirit of Amelie, I’ll write not an entire piece on everything that happened during a recent weekend away in Paris, but some of the small things that played a few notes within a beautiful piece:

• A simple heart painted onto the street, on a bridge over Canal St Martin. Maybe the same one Amelie enjoyed skimming stones off of.

• The perfectly imperfect choir rehearsals taking place in the church at Abbesses. The wrong notes. The stopping and starting over, again and again, until it works.
• The way Paris makes you question if everything you see is an intentional piece of art. Along the Rue de Dunkerque, a lettuce had been dropped on the pavement outside the greengrocers, and I wondered for a good few minutes about what the meaning of that was. Lettuce be more grounded? Lettuce leaves in a hurry and stumbles? Or maybe it just fell during transit, and means absolutely sod all. Nah, that can’t be the case! This is Paris!

• The repeated sound of the ‘Correct!’ notification on DuoLingo as a lady in the hostel dorm completes a French language challenge at midnight. This weird fusion of actuallythatsquiteannoyingbutIalsoquiteadmireit. Pa-baaa!
• The sight of a man on a bicycle wearing headphones, holding the handlebar with one hand and swinging the other to the beat of whatever he’s listening to.
• A big, grey cat sleeping in a living room window that overlooks the Rue de 3 Freres, to the delight of pedestrians walking by.
• Amusingly titled food products in foreign supermarkets:

• An American woman sat next to me in a cafe apologising to the waiter for how she’s “about to pronounce the words here‘”, which I think is very nice of her albeit unnecessary, until she goes on to absolutely butcher ‘Croque Monsieur’ to pieces, and a polite laughter among us – a group of strangers who’ll never see each other again – ensues. Croak Monjaw.
• Walking alongside the River Seine in the sunshine. Watching a guy do backflips on a wall. And another listening to French hip hop, whilst a third is drawing a landscape in fine ink. So many individual stories unravelling alongside this impressive waterway.
• Waiting staff who politely make you feel like an A* French student just because you said that the dish was, “delicieux”, aka one of the few bits of vocab you can remember: “Ohhhh your French, tres bonne!”, I mean it’s not really is it? I said one measly word. But thank you anyway, I’ll take it!

In fact I’ll take you any day, France.