Muristek
People are loud and annoying – and I can’t get enough of them | Emma Beddington
Cities, trains, a Paris weekend… It’s noisy and busy, and I didn’t realised how much I had missed it
I finally went abroad last week. It was a wrench to leave my silent monastic cell of a home office, with my blanket nest and laptop stand arranged just so, but a trip to Paris trumped all that. I’ve been bleating about it for months, pining like a Chekhov character, imagining café terraces and stalking Parisian pastry accounts on Instagram. My sister, who lives there, bought a flat recently, which sharpened my urge to go and cast a hard sibling eye over her soft furnishings, gossip about her neighbours and rate her local bakery.
That was January; it took me until March to stop dithering and get on a train. I started regretting it around Doncaster when the man across the aisle began watching a medley of Premiership goals without headphones, while the one in front of me was vigorously phlegm clearing. Following an hour queueing at passport control behind people astonished they needed to show their passports, I squeezed on to the Eurostar next to a group of large adult sons, loud, maskless and crumb-coated. “PEOPLE,” I messaged a friend, because tutting felt like an inadequate outlet. “PEOPLE,” she messaged back, sympathetically.
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