After school her mother takes her Hello-Kitty schoolbag but the girl keeps wearing her Hello-Kitty sweater, apron style. The two of them stroll home to Villa Montcalm; at the corner they consider the shop but the woman's purse is empty.

Afternoon rain. A woman carries her umbrella across the street and along the church. At her car, she takes paper from her windscreen and throws it to the ground. It's bright pink, advertising a road-closure for the feast of the Holy Trinity. As she drives away in her tiny car, thunder over Paris.

She holds her phone like a miniature dumbbell, marching along rue du Faubourg St. Honoré with CANTERBURY scrawled across her shoulders. It's a sunny day. We pass antique stores, sushi delivery bikes, a man with clip-on sunglasses. Then, within view of the Arc de Triomphe, the woman enters a Franprix supermarket and shops for a while. Later, down a side-street, she enters another Franprix supermarket. (She turns down here as if it was an intuition, an addiction, as if she really knew her supermarkets.)

During our walk we've traversed a musical part of the city, centred by a concert hall and featuring a hairdressing salon that decorates its windows with recorders and violins. Across the road from the second supermarket, a sign that reads: "Cours de Danse - 1er Danseur de l'Opera de Paris."

A man heads out of the village, dressed in a dark coat. He crosses the river, greets a gardener, descends to a sports field and starts walking back and forth. There is a path of about 200 metres; he laps it twelve times. Meanwhile, the sound of flies, birds and crickets. Some wild ducks fly low over the grass. There is a pond nearby, which the man circumnavigates. One of the fishermen is playing with a slingshot. We return to the village via a walled road with a lovely view. The man has a chat with another local before returning home to pick up his shopping basket.

After church, three old ladies walking home together. One holds her back, and arrives home first. The second has an enormous garden. The third lives up on the main street. They talk easily and noisily, shouting "good afternoon!" like they really mean it.

His singlet is scarlet; his tattoo, an eagle. I haven't seen hair like this since I was nine. We're sitting beside the Eymoutiers station although on Saturday afternoon there are no trains.

The man stands up, circles through the village then enters the church. He sits in the front pew to rest or meditate; I admire the painted ceiling and old glass. After a while he goes to Our Lady of Lourdes and - using his cigarette lighter -  installs a candle before her. When he has left the church I add my own candle and pray for the two of us.

Then I see him on a bench at the top of the street with three other drifters. After thirty minutes they're joined by a person in a yellow dress. Later again they disperse, simultaneously, all going in different directions.

"Would you like to have a chat with Superman?" asks a charity man looking for supporters. I'm in pursuit of a family of four, however, so just keep on walking. There's a mother, a father, a daughter, a son, all looking sour and misunderstood, like some kind of argument in favour of the nuclear family's criminalisation. The parents enter an average shoe-shop while the children separate and slump oustide. Across the road, gleamingly, a store called THE MODERN SLIPPER. A boy walks passed in a t-shirt that reads "you wanna funk." The family splits into two groups: girls one way, boys another. I choose the girls, but find them so droopy that I leave them after five minutes and return to the slipper shop. (Easily the most diverting thing in Limoges.)

After seeing my parents off at the airport I catch the train back to Paris in pursuit of some other travellers - a couple of men, chatting quietly, back from somewhere. They disembark in the centre and head straight for a supermarket. One shops, one waits; I get the feeling that they're happy to be home. We pass an enormous golden snail on the way to their darling little apartment. There are homosexuals everywhere, here, and glitzy little shops. I say: "this feels like gay Disneyland."

A cloud-like dog lapping water from a gutter. Its bald owner jostles it to an empty park. Private property, apparently. The owner has a smoke, leads the dog around. They appear to genuinely like one another. As I'm walking away, the animal jumps up on me and I say - absurdly - "bonsoir!"

A red-stockinged girl with her kissy boyfriend, walking away from the Eiffel Tower and into a café; not to drink, but to piss. It's 50 cents, for the toilet.

At church in Geneva with the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation. He isn't preaching, just sitting there, but after the service he launches wholeheartedly into the daily congregational life of a pastor - chats, smiles, encouragement. I wait for him to finish doing his rounds before following him and his wife down the street towards the lake. She looks into the window of a relatively expensive shoe shop, then at Yves Rocher. Beside their car they examine a restaurant menu together, before he drives away alone in his sleek black Audi. I've already heard that he's off to the hospital, visiting.

It's one of the loveliest cities I've seen, so I follow a girl dressed in sunny colours. She follows the expected upwards path - away from the lake, towards the cathedral - then stops because the bells are so beautiful: really deep, radiant, life-affirming booms. On the way up we have passed some funny people: a man with a mega-blaster, a man with a hose.

He walks meticulously, crossing streets at right angles. Enters a stark building, a bank; there are tulips in the garden. I look up and see snow-capped mountains fronted by signs that read STADTGARTENWEG and GÄUGGELISTRASSE.  

Her lilac sweater matches her hair. Fascinated, I follow her to the outdoor tables at Burger King where her purple-spectacled friend is waiting for her. They eat their sundaes slowly, enjoying a perfect view across the lake.

The girl wears a red coat and carries a black bag; the woman wears a black coat and carries a red bag. They're different reds. On the bus, we pass the loveliest hospital in Paris, and I notice somebody reading "How To Get What You Really Want." They disembark at a tunnel full of shops, glance at Agatha (overstated jewels) and enter Sephora for some serious browsing. The woman is chewing unattractively; the girl makes hand-washing gestures. I'm fascinated by the way that people can bond across generations via a shared love of shopping. They spend a long time in Sephora; I start admiring bottles and examining the perfume Bestseller list. They fill a basket, then pay. We've been there long enough for me to have developed a fragrance-induced stomach-ache. A few minutes later, inside Fnac, I lose them on a crowded escalator.

***
Monthly Reminders -
After four months the online map stretches across two whole Google pages!
And thielpoems, although silly, is nonetheless friendable, if you like...

She's wearing some of the neatest jeans in Paris, lightly flared and impeccable. She leads me towards a bus-stop, glancing into every stylish window that we pass. Then, aboard the line #80, she buries herself in a photocopied document with details about hundreds of people with head-shots. The road splits a cemetery; we climb towards Sacré Coeur. There are staircases everywhere, here. She disembarks on top of the hill and strides towards her apartment building which is, like the area itself, a study in residential cuteness.

I follow an impressively small person, wondering about life for somebody whose hip reaches my knee. She takes the metro, balancing bags, then climbs the exit stairs with a run-up; lines up for cigarettes, orders normally but then can't quite reach the change. (It's a minor incident, I realise, but this kind of thing would get pretty annoying.) After that she walks home along rue Saint-Maur to an apartment block which seems, I don't know - unnecessarily gigantic.

From the concert I follow him to the lights. Waiting for the green, he turns to me and says "that was good, wasn't it." I agree, discover that he's a composer, learn that he remembers me from the previous Messiaen gig. Halfway down rue Mogador he says "until the next time, perhaps?" and enters an apartment building, smiling. 

Two symmetrical families, dragging babies and picnics around. The babies seem smarter than their parents, separating to explore the park's expanse of new-cut grass. In this environment the role of an adult involves much chasing. One of the prams has an umbrella attached.

They put down rugs in the shade and immediately start lazing, although one parent stays standing to carry the children back when required. I sit down under a nearby circle of trees.

Taking photos of children; then a funny moment when the boy has to get changed. Why do I feel so distant from these people - their commitment to reproduction, or simply the fact that they remember to bring hot coffee? The children's spatial training is almost exclusively about looking inward: any rush towards the horizon only results in being carried mysteriously back again.

In slow-motion, the larger of the two women gets thudded by a soccer ball.