Now a similar thing had happened to me, albeit with a word, not a taste. The word was Levallois. It was there on a phone screen, like a missed call from an old flame, and now I couldn’t shake the memories attached to it. Some of them I had once written down, even published in a book, but those were the naïve recollections of a child, a mere imposter. This time I had some perspective, context. Not only that, time, plus the distance it offers, had given the fight between Jean-Marc Mormeck and David Haye a rather comforting sort of haziness. It was a test now to remember its details and to work out why seeing Levallois, while in Paris, had come as such a shock. Perhaps because it was so small, and not part of the Paris you recognise, it was a place easily ignored and forgotten. Or perhaps the fight itself, shamefully lowkey at the time, was easy to forget by virtue of how it resonated most with the few who were there and meant considerably less to everyone else.
