On busking: The job with no name.

If there is one way a musician can be guaranteed to find work in Paris, it is by busking. (I said find work, not a living.)

Although the French language has no word for busking, satisfied as it is with the un-reverential description that translates 'playing in the road', the majority seem to tolerate if not appreciate it, whether they are willing to show it by coin or not.

The majority of the 'playing in the road', particularly during the colder months, actually occurs in the corridors of the métropolitain underground. To do this legally, one must pass an audtion for the RATP, which for me entailed playing one and a half pieces to a video camera connected to a man, in a room beneath an office.

A week or two later I was invited to return to pay €20 for my pass which would enable me to play as often as I liked, anywhere in the network of the metro (except on platforms and trains) for a period of six months, at which point I must repeat the process in case my skills have diminished.

After a few weeks on the tourist-filled streets of Montmartre in the summer, I had become accustomed to my average haul of around €30 of holiday vouchers for two hours playing. Come October, on my first day of several wintery weeks spent underground I was dampened if not surprised to recoup a scant €7.41 in hard-earned pay for the same amount of playing time. As I learned to enlarge that amount by a sometimes-noticeable degree finding better spots (and having the forethought to learn a Scrooge-converting tremolo version of Silent Night as Christmas crept up), I reported a dramatic if short-lived increase in un-taxable profit.

I would now like to commit the highlights of my Paris busking experience to bullet points. I begin the day after I received my pass in October 2009, and end the day in January 2010 where after 40 minutes I felt nothing but the cold, and was forced by the frosty onset to retire for the season.

• One day a woman started dancing beside me in some kind of ITV-learned tango whilst telling me she was, more than a New Zealander, a 'citizen of the world';
• One day a homeless man gave me some coins and cried out to the people (in French) 'It's the poor who give, not the rich' (the strange truth);
• On two occassions I was given restaurant vouchers- which are given daily to many Parisian employees by their companies to cash in for lunch in numerous restaurants, cafes, bakeries and supermarkets- as they should be given to a homeless person who was hungry;
• One day being asked to play for a middle-aged woman's mother's birthday party (and being walked away from, after telling her how much I charged);
• One day being asked if I would permit a man with a harmonica to make blusey vibes all over 'Recuerdos de la Alhambra'- a man whose harmonica was in the wrong key;
• One day having a Venezuelan cellist father of two, and husband of a rapidly tiring wife, stand beside me for a quarter of an hour playing mime guiro to my choros, before giving me €4 and telling me his guitarist father was friends with Alirio Diaz;
• Having a Spanish school teacher give me a record €10 and have his whole class stop and listen;
• Having a Russian man of questionable mental health leaning against the photo booth in Bastille for an hour, sporadically interjecting that I had a gypsy's soul in my fingers...

To summarise then, based upon my continuing research; do it if you have some accessible repertoire that could benefit from a pre-concert airing or need cobwebs blowing off an old set. Do it for some pocket money. Just don't see it as a career option.

Unless you've got a monkey.