'In Ireland, staying up all night is a sort of contraceptive'

After a long night of art and talk in Paris, it became apparent that Culture Night is Europe's new Easter, writes MICHAEL HARDING

I WAS IN Paris a few years ago for the Nuit Blancheall-night arts festival. I wandered around the old student quarter, near Rue des Irlandais.

In the lit-up city restless lovers wandered the boulevards, and young people queued for crepes at the corner of every street.

Along the Seine, big glass buildings had been transformed into television screens. The facade of a train station flickered with a giant projection of Humphrey Bogart.

Near sidewalk cafes the air was heavy with perfume, the aroma of coffee and cigarette smoke. There were enough lights blazing to attract ETback to earth. Museums were open and in various little galleries Parisians admired the art.

“All the galleries are open!” I exclaimed to a waitress in a bar near the Panthéon. “Even Notre Dame is open. It’s amazing.”

She had long hair, huge brown eyes and a tiny white apron around her waist.

There were photographs of Sartre and Camus on the walls. The bare floorboards and the red upholstery on the seats looked as if they hadn’t been changed since the days when Nazi officers strutted about the Luxembourg Gardens.

In those days my little Ireland was smothering beneath de Valera’s musty overcoat, but I tried to explain to the waitress that, despite centuries of repression, we are also a cultured people.

I tried to explain to her that in our country we also stay up late, singing and playing music.

“Even in winter, when the wind from Fermanagh roars over the rushy beards of Cuilcagh Mountain, we huddle at the kitchen range, reciting poetry and quarrelling about metaphysical issues until dawn.”

She zigzagged between the tables with plates of food, and she served me a stew of boiled bacon and potato, which I washed down with two bottles of wine.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, and we chatted in English whenever she passed my table.

“I saw a musician place his fiddle case on the bonnet of a Volvo one night,” I said, “in the middle of Tubbercurry, and take out his fiddle, and play a slow air, to welcome the dawn.”

“Irish people drink too much,” she joked.

“And long ago, at Christmas time, the mountains glowed, as people walked down the slopes, to Midnight Mass, with lanterns and torches in their hands.”

“What are you talking about?” she wondered.

"Europe," I replied, "Europe. Because now, in Europe, the Nuit Blanchehas become a metaphor – to bring light into the darkness. We make poetry in the dark. We sing songs in the dark. We play pianos and dance in the dark, and make violins speak such things that would soften the heart of a prison guard.

“Culture Night is Europe’s new Easter; post-religious modern Homo-Dawkins admires art, like we used to admire the bucket of fire the Bishop blessed, when we were children, outside the cathedral on Holy Saturday.”

"You talk too much," she said, "you need to relax. Lighten up – Nuit Blancheis just for fun. But if you wait until I finish work, I can take you to my studio. I am an artist."

We walked through the city, past the Pompidou Centre, where a friend of hers was distributing anti-nuclear leaflets and a boy from Clare was playing a didgeridoo.

The four of us went back to her studio. There were unfinished paintings on the floor, and white canvases leaning against the walls, and a bare bulb near the ceiling.

The Clare boy and the anti-nuclear woman went to bed on a vast mattress in the corner; a boy’s paradise of black ribbon and soft lace.

I sang Raglan Roadin a cloud of patchouli, amid scented candles, and the tang of linseed oil.

“Lovers should stay up all night,” I suggested.

" Au contraire," she replied, "if we were lovers, we would go to bed."

I was so terrified of committing the literal act of love with her that I dilly-dallied around the subject all night until 6am, quoting poems by Neruda.

I said, “In Ireland, staying up all night is a sort of contraceptive.”

She said: “Paris never sleeps.”

That all happened a long time ago. But now Ireland has its own Culture Night, and I wish I was in Tralee, dancing on the street, or maybe in Temple Bar, dancing on a table in some artist’s studio, like we used to dance, long ago, before I grew too old for dancing.

mharding@irishtimes.com