This weekend I am in Lyon, visiting a dear friend I first met when I was living in Paris after university. Since then, we have both accumulated relationships, cities, careers, opinions, regrets, better opinions. A life.

We walked for hours through Old Lyon, talking without pause about family, work, love, politics, art, capitalism, and how to remain true to our dreams inside structures that seem designed to constrain and divert them. There was also cake, and an encounter with a man with a rosella, a beautiful pink parrot from Australia.

My friend led me through the traboules, narrow stone passageways threading beneath apartment buildings, originally built so that silk workers could move delicate fabric across the city without exposing it to the rain. During the Second World War, the same passages became routes for escape and resistance.

We emerged into a small square full of marionettes. Lyon is the birthplace of Guignol, the puppet tradition born through Laurent Mourguet, a former silk worker. Guignol was comic, irreverent, political: a popular theatre that laughed directly at power.

Outside one shop, marionettes of contemporary political leaders dangled alongside figures from history. I found myself thinking about how strange satire has become when reality keeps outrunning it, and yet how necessary: the oldest way we have of cutting power down to size, making it mortal, ridiculous, ours to laugh at.

We took the funicular up to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, still laughing as we entered, and were immediately shushed by a priest with the expression of a man who has devoted his life to not finding anything funny. We apologised and stifled giggles. Inside, we lit candles. My friend to remember a loved one; me as a ritual I repeat when travelling, a way of keeping a light ahead on the road.

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