A Stone's Throw from Paris

We all know people who seem to attract inordinate amounts of terribly bad luck. The poor things seem to just have “wound me!” tattooed on their unfortunate foreheads.

Then there are others, like me apparently, who seem inclined to woo the low level, garden-variety kinds of bad luck. Nothing to get one’s face plastered across the Sunday papers, but enough to be annoying.

Like the time at Montmartre in Paris. Well, admittedly, being in Paris in the first place was actually pretty GOOD luck, so I probably shouldn’t be whingeing … but anyway, there I was.

Having ridden the famous Funicular up Montmartre ‘hill’, viewed the beautiful Basilica of the Sacre Coeur and dined in the history-drenched cobbled Artist’s Quarter, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. That was until, waiting innocently at the bottom of the hill with our tour group, I took a sudden sharp whack to the head.

Once I realized I hadn’t been fatally wounded (which was fairly obvious because I was still standing up and breathing), I started scanning the ground to see what had hit me. But it was dark so I then directed my efforts to trying to work out who the flinger of the projectile may have been; for clearly whatever had just hit me had not flown through the air by itself (unless it was a stone-like bird with very bad eye-sight). I was looking for a smug attitude; a face that had that “I’ve just sconed that dippy Aussie tourist with a rock” look written all over it but, alas, in a city full of smug looking tourists it was difficult to spot.

My spouse could barely hide his astonishment as I hopped around whimpering and clutching my head.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded, clearly bemused that I, alone could have been harmed when no-one else appeared to have been similarly stricken. When I explained my dilemma he just rolled his eyes.

“Jeez!” he said, “You must be the only person I know who can get injured by just standing still.”

Which I know may sound a little callous but, when you consider he had only the day before witnessed me plummet like a limbless sack of spuds to the floor of the bus for no apparent reason, you can perhaps see why he was a little less than concerned by my latest catastrophe.

Fortunately, as evidence, I did have a speck of blood and a slight ‘egg’ on my head where I had been hit. Even the spouse began to get intrigued and we speculated about who would be throwing things and why.

“Did you look at anyone strangely?” he asked. “Did you see anyone behaving suspiciously?”

I shook my head.

“I did wonder if it was some kind of nut falling out of that tree,” I said pointing above me. But then I realized that it would have to have been a nut falling at a rather peculiar trajectory to have hit me at a 45 degree angle. And a rather forcefully falling nut at that. While I’m sure many things in Paris are avante garde, artistic and unique, I am similarly sure that Parisian nuts falling from trees would still be required to adhere to the regular laws of gravity as per nuts falling in, say, Cobram, Australia. So the tree was off the hook.

“What happened?” cried my fellow bus travelers when they saw me nursing my wounded head.

“Someone threw something at her,” volunteered the spouse casually, seeming less surprised by the minute that some random stranger might take a sinister delight in clomping his wife with a lump of God Knows What at the bottom of a hill in Paris. Like it happens every day!

“I wonder if they were aiming at you, or whether you just got in the way?” speculated someone.

And that, my friends, is something we will never know. But I would like to think that they were actually aiming at the spouse.

After all, he was the dill who’d just paid 18 Euro ($31.56 AU) for a single pint of beer on Montmartre!

And he thought I was silly!