January 7

Outside the Notre Dame cathedral a blind hunchbank hassles the queue of tourists, umbrellas up shielding them from the splatter of sleet. One eye is white, the other rolled up the same heavens the angels on the cathedral point to. His face is scrunched up with suffering, splashed by rain.

A flurry of polite French from the blind hunchbank for every tenth tourist; the success ratio perhaps, or talk to anymore and there will be complaints and the gendarmerie will move him on.

The blind hunchback taps his white stick around him, clicking off the damp paving stones. The white stick wonders a little and strokes a couple of legs – an accident? Revenge? Or an unspoken attempt to get attention, money, help.

*

Inside it’s the sea of tea-lights that catch me: thirty of so flicker like eyes darting up and around to the distant ceiling. A chaotic yellow dance that is more spiritual than all the stained glass, prayer, choral humming and bibles put together.