大象传媒

Author, Anne Enright, spends some of her time zipping around the world signing books and often finds herself among strangers ...

In Dublin these days, people walk so fast. And you meet no-one anymore. Everyone's nineteen. Time was, when you walked down a Dublin street, you looked at people, because you just might know them.

But it a serious business to walk down the street with your face open. It is a serious business to look into the eyes of the faces that you meet. In Manchester, I discovered recently, people actually smile back at you. In Buenos Aires, apparently, you end up in bed with them, or in a fight.

In London you keep your eyes fixed at around bellybutton level. No higher, no lower! And in the momentary snag of your glances, their eyes slide away. The London crowd flows. It clots and untangles, it dodges and slows and breaks free again. It has enormous patience.

I love crowds. I love the way they change as you do. These last few weeks, the crowd is full of women in the same winter coat, the one that makes you look like a sort of trendy prison guard. The world is being turned into an internment camp and no one is noticing except me.

My favourite crowd of all, is full of people who are lost. People who are stalled or stopped, who just stand there as we wash past them. And they are everywhere: a man endlessly studying doorbells under the swelling stone breast of a sphinx. A regulation drunk, sitting on the path and trying to lace his shoes. A small man with a chair on his back, a woman in the middle of the road, going through the contents of her handbag as the cars swerve past. It is a parallel world.

Oh but Paris, what about Paris! Walking down the street in Paris, is like being young again and in love with nothing at all. You look at people, they look back, and after a while you lapse into a sort of trance of recognition...

"Is it you. Is it you?"

I found myself at a baggage carousel once looking into the eyes of a very handsome man, and, "Is it you?", I said with my eyes. And, "Yes", he said with his, "It's me. It's Sting." And it was. It was Sting.