Postcard from Paris - in a word...French

‘It’s all very French’ became the phrase of the weekend. French service culture was in service on the Eurostar when, asked if there was any more tagnetelle for lunch, the girl serving answered not with an apology and an offer of something else, but a gallic shrug and a ‘pufft’ noise that resulted from her blowing air, fascinatingly, apparently up her own ear. Service culture part the second was the way a French at the Musee d’Orsay slammed down his ‘fermee’ sign as we reched the front of the queue at the gift shop. Henceforth, if things were going wrong, or were trying, or were just a bit shit, they would be described as being ‘a bit French’.

I may one day go back to Paris, but it’s hard to envisage the circumstances. Possibly flying a Lancaster full of horse-shit, or if I want to visit 1985, which is where the city is mired. The food, the fashion and the metro were all probably cutting edge in 1985 but things have moved on. For the French, stepping onto the concourse at St Pancras must be like visiting one of those ‘house of the future’ pavilions at fairs, but for real.

London does better food, and better art, for a better price. If I paid 14 quid for a sandwich in London I’d expect to eat it sitting on the throne at Buckingham Palace.

Would I go back? Not unless it was for an event. Other than that, the next time I want to see Paris is down the bomb-sight of a Lancaster full of horse-shit. Having said that, I could do a day. Just a day, wandering the streets at will. Because there is a lot to see here and, to be fair, the best stuff is free. The best sight is not to be found inside a museum, it’s the way the sunlight hits the golden tip of an angel atop a civil building. The most intense experience is not the aged cheese in a café, it’s two young lovers chewing each other’s faces off on the banks of the Seine.

But I think Paris is vanishing, if it’s not already vanished. The whole city has the feel of a theme park. The people conform so perfectly to stereotype that they appear to believe the hype of their own city. The sight of a man who considers himself hetrosexual roller-blading along with every indication of enjoyment is a sure sign of a culture in decline.

And food and wine? Where is the best place to try good French food? Not France. The problem is that while Paris has been ossifying in a miasma of bitterness and dog shit, the rest of the world has surpassed it in terms of cuisine. Also, I hate to break it to the French, but you can get their cheeses in British supermarkets. When you dine it’s an experience, it’s not just about the food. Great service can rescue mediocre food, but great food can’t rescue bad service. Best place for French food? Corsica. The people are friendly (everyone is armed, so everyone is polite) and the food far surpasses anything available in Paris because it all comes from the island. The Brits may have Pot Noodle, but we also have young, enthusiastic cooks who are not afraid to try new stuff. Possibly you’d get strung up for this in a Parisian café. Now, a British café, we’re not scared to try and in introduce salad. As a garnish.

Postcard from paris - the fisherman of the Louvre

Sunset at the Louvre. All day tourists have been displacing water in the fountains by tossing in coins. When I first saw the Fisherman of the Louvre I thought it simply somebody who was either drunk or warm, as he was wading in the fountains in the fading light with his trousers rolled up.


Soon though, I realised that what he was doing was retrieving coins from the ponds. Not all coins though, as there were still many left in his wake, glinting golden like the discarded scales of a mermaid. I presume that he was only plucking prizes of a certain denomination or above and, frankly, good luck to him. If somebody is stupid enough to toss a Euro in some water, then it’s eventual fate should be to bring good luck, if not to the caster then certainly to the Fisherman.

Postcard from Paris - the high cost of living

Paris is expensive. I mean really expensive. You know how we admire them because they go to a café or bar and make one coffee or a beer or a glass of wine last all afternoon, it’s because they can’t afford any more than a single cup. We were charged fourteen quid for a sandwich. Fourteen fucking quid! For a chicken sarnie! If it has been a dodo and panda sandwich served on a gold plate and I was eating it sat on the throne of France after being crowned emperor, maybe that sort of money would have made sense. Mind you, there were some crisps served with it.

It certainly explains the café culture, they’re not all talking about art, they’re eeking out a single glass of wine. It also explains the bread – it’s the only thing that Parisians can afford to eat in volume so it had better be good. And you’d better chew slowly.

Final proof of runaway prices? The male toilet at Guar de Nord. 1 Euro to use a urinal, 2 Euro for a proper toilet. One for a pee, two for a poo. Literally, number one and number two. What sort of warped, twisted sod actually prices relief by function? Christ alone knows what they charge for a swift bout of self-love or a homosexualist encounter.

The exception to the high costs and the crap service is the hop-on, hop off river-bus that operates from the Eiffel Tower up past Notre Dame. For twelve euros you get an all day pass and get to see the city from the river and it’s practical too. And there’s that great feeling you get hat travelling on a boat on a river is a little bit special. Okay, not as special as rowing yourself up an English river on a fine summer’s day with a large and well-stocked picnic basket in the rear of the boat and a couple of bottles of something cheeky already over the side chilling, but good all the same.

Postcard from Paris - Obama

The Da Vinci Code is, of course, set in Paris and never has a single city had so many places made so famous by a single work. And never has a city appeared so ungrateful. One gets the feeling that the Parisians consider that the world should have known about the Louvre long before Chapter 1 of the book. By ‘the world’, they mean ‘Americans’.

Places take on a new significance when they are written about in fiction and, generally, readers like that. But there’s a tipping point if the fiction is too popular. Then the feeling becomes the same sort of resentment you feel when you see a review of your favourite ‘best kept secret’ café in a Sunday supplement. My theory is that people resent it when an author makes money writing about something familiar to them. By ‘people’, I mean ‘the French’.

Add this to the base state of resentment that is the resting state of the French and you have a perfect storm of people who resent the hell out of lots of people enjoying their city in print and then coming here to see it and spending their filthy foreign currency without really appreciating the city and all it has to offer, which is equal parts dog shit and rudeness.


Occasionally you see that the Brown effect has been embraced and that has resulted in many Euros pouring into the coffers of various churches as tourists visit and line up to take pictures of one another being menaced by Opal Dai monks or whatever not knowing that all they have to do to be menaced by clergy for free is to be small boys. You can just see the vicars of small parish churches with a fund raising thermometer constantly stuck at artic wishing that Dan Brown had set his last bestseller not in Paris but in a small Cotswold village. Maybe the Cream Tea Code will make it big boys.

There are many American tourists in Paris, possibly there to follow the Brown trail but more likely at this time of year to see whet it was their grandfather nearly got his arse shot off fighting for in WWII. On the whole it must be an interesting experience for them, not knowing if they might be related to the person now sneering at their choice of wine.

The most famous American tourist in the city this weekend was Barack Obama, President of the USA. I have developed a theory about why he stays in the Embassy and why his motocade drives so damned fast – he’s trying to get himself and Michelle away from Sarkoze and Carla. Because they are sex pests. One can just imagine the scene.

Sarkie: Zo, your wife, she is very bon, no?
BO: Er, yes, I think so.
S: And my wife, Carla, she is also very, very, bon. No?
BO: Sure, I guess.
S: So, maybe, after the talks, we four can…get together.
BO: Er, maybe.
S: Or maybe just me and Michelle.
BO: Er. (Horrible realization dawning that all he has heard about the French is true).
S: And you and Carla.
BO: Wow, is that the time…gotta go.

Which is why whenever you see Sarkozi and Obama in the same picture now they are so far apart the lighting conditions on them both are different and it looks like the thing has been crudely photoshopped.

Also why, in a few months time, this is going to happen:

Reporter: And it appears that there has been a total power failure at the White House, not a light is showing. How embarrassing that it should happen during the state visit of the President of France.

Inside:

Michelle: Barack honey, why are we sitting behind sofas in the dark with the emergency generators unplugged.
BO: Shush, they might hear you.
Sarkozi: (knocking at door) Heloooooooooooooo.

The situation is of course complicated because Barack would have ‘phoned other world leaders to find out if the same thing had happened to them only to be told by Tony Blair that at no time were any approaches made at any time for any kind of swapsies action with Cherie. Not even with the Eastern Bloc types.


The Obama roadshow or, more properly, motorcade, was spectacular. Cops on bikes, cops in cars, cops in helicopters, cops in boats. It certainly gave the police a chance to play with all of their toys and blow the Departmental budget in one glorious weekend. The centrepiece, ‘The Beast’ was preceded cops and followed by ambulances and fire engines. All this and the roads it was travelling on were closed. The traffic was chaotic as a result (?) but even with roads closed and the natural Parisian flair for truly appalling driving, the traffic chaos is nothing compared to Naples.

In all probability, of course, The Beast was empty and Obama was travelling by metro or on foot. He’s heard what happened to the last really famous person who travelled at high speed in Paris and he’s not taking any chances.

Postcard from Paris - beggars

‘Don’t talk to me about the French social model, the whole country’s in flames’. – Lord Mandleson.

They stand or kneel, or a combination of the two, twisted like a pretzel. Often with crutches, the collection cup a tin can, beaten on the pavement in a tattoo not to draw attention, like an echo of a church bell appealing for Christian charity, but because of some disability wracking their frame into a shuddering judder of limbs and fingers. It would seem impossible to ignore the beggars of Paris, to pass them by without some sort of expression of pity, an expression that sends some cents clattering into their cup (an empty cat food can, the chap I passed) but they are ignored by the Parisians.

I consider myself to be pretty adept at ignoring beggars. Living in London you quickly develop either my own trademark apologetic shrug and half smile (‘I would like to help you but, despite appearances, I am inexplicably devoid of change’) or a keen interest in the architecture of rooftops, guttering, pavements and manhole covers.

But ignoring a prostrate wretch? That’s just not on. I tossed in my coin and wished him ‘bon chance’.

Parisians are very good at ignoring things. Over the last couple of days I have developed the theory that they simply ignored the entire German occupation, which is probably why they get so tetchy when I asked a waiter if his grandfather served nazi officers in this very café during the war.

Postcard from Corsica – Language

The first French I learned at school was the French for ‘a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of milk, a bottle of wine’. Needless to say, this was a state school. If I had been privately educated the first French I would have learned would have been ‘I do not speak French’ and then off for Latin lessons and some light buttered buggery. At the very least it would have been ‘red wine, white wine and a charming little rose please. Milk? Er, no thanks.’

In the 1970s, when a small Macnabbs was parroting this odd grocery list, we were being prepared for life in the Common Market, the town twinning epidemic and exchange visits. I think our teachers thought that we would be a credit to the country, chattering away to the locals in their native tongue. This was very different to their experience of foreign travel, which usually began with an opposed landing on a beach and where all the language training you needed was ‘hands up Fritz’.

In the seventies and eighties of course, Brits didn’t need to speak foreign, we were all visiting the Costa del Sol and they spoke English there, with an amusing accent allowing us to feel superior and get sunburned. No, French was not really useful until later on in the eighties, when the posh kids at school used to go on ski-ing trips. As I listened to them chunter on about how great it was going to be, I hoped that they had learned the French for ‘my friend has been eaten by a yeti’ or ‘the fondu has given me the most terrible shits’.

The French text book I had later on in my ‘education’ was most instructive. This was because some artistically gifted deviant had gone through it adulterating all the illustrations in a way at once amusing and alarming. I remember in particular that ‘Celine goes for a pony ride’ contained images so graphic that it took twenty years and the invention of the internet before I saw anything like that again. I didn’t learn much at all from that book, except that French boys called Xavier wear striped tee shorts and like to suck cock. Apparently.

I was terrified of my French teacher. A gnome like man, he was the deputy headmaster at my school. Jesus, if ever there was a thankless position in teaching, deputy headmaster is it. I bet you have to do all the work and get none of the perks. Even head of house is a better post, at least then you get first pick of the fresh boys. Deputy headmasters have nothing to do except resent the headmaster, simmer in their own bile and take out their frustrations on boys who can’t conjugate. I think those lessons helped contribute to my hatred of the French, although to be honest the French themselves have to bear most of the responsibility for that.

On holiday however, I always like to give the local language a thorough mangling, Corsica was no exception. Except that the Corsicans had beaten me to it. Ruled for a long time by the Genoese, their French had been corrupted by a strong Italian influence. I was easily the best French speaker on the island, which instantly made me a figure of hate so I quickly adapted my schoolboy French to something just this side of ‘Allo ’Allo, with pleasing results. They still laughed at me, but the scoffing had stopped. The great thing about Corsican is that people speak just like schoolchildren. When they say ‘Bonjour’ in the morning, it really is in a sing-song way that makes you smile when you say it.

Mostly I was using my vast linguistic skills in shops (lesson one, at the bakers…now what’s the French for baguette? Loaf?) so while it was great fun to try out the language, the risk of ballsing it up and coming back from a grocery shop with a boules set, a harpoon gun and a budgie was considerable. Luckily, I am a master of the art of pointing, grunting and rubbing my belly. Which is all French is really in any case.

Postcard from Corsica – eat, drink, drive.

As an island, there’s a premium on anything that has to be imported to Corsica. This means that the food in the markets tends to be simple but, because it is all locally grown or made, it’s all good. I think the term normally applied is rustic, which means that 90% of the diet comes from something you kill, and around half of that is killed in the traditional Corsican manner, that is, poached.

Because of their antipathy towards France, the Corsican’s have taken France’s sole contribution to world cuisine, killing things cruelly, and turned it on its head. The Corsicans have invented ethical veal. That is, veal that is allowed to gambol wild and free rather than living in a crate. Okay, so we’re still talking about killing calfs, but by applying ethical dilemma test number 1: does it taste good? I find that I’m okay with that.

So the majority of the food is meat and the rest of locally grown vegetables. You can tell that they are locally grown because they have clumps of soil on them. This makes the tourists coo with delight at the authenticity of the carrots and makes the shop keepers coo with delight because the veg is sold by weight and the tourists are essentially buying dirt.

The local wine is very local. In the valley inland from St Florent in the north of the island sit lots of little vineyards. These sit on the valley floor and then climb the hills until the vines are clinging precariously. The vinyard stops where the tractor used to harvest the grapes topples over. This is no rustic heritage site with horny footed sons of toil treading the grapes. The crop is collected in a big trailer and tipped into a huge press thing and the end result is either bottled, or sent to the shop in the town.

These are interesting places, most of the vineyards have a presence in the town, usually a sort of hole in the wall place selling bottles of wine…and containing two stainless steel tanks about seven foot high and three foot wide. At the bottom of these lies curled a hose and they look for all the world like petrol pumps. What you do is take along your two litre plastic demijohn and get it filled with either red or rose. Because this costs you two euros for two litres, I suspect that what you actually get is rough red or rough rose and one hell of a head the next morning but what you save on the wine you can use to buy paracetamol, or a new liver from a Turkish boy on eBay.

The main industry on the island is tourism, goats, wild boar and wine. If they actually did get independence, the economy would implode after about fifteen seconds, but it would be a hell of a party.

The sea food was very good, very fresh but the stand out dish had to be the wild boar and anything that had butter in it.

The wild boar was endlessly adaptable, by which I mean you get a lot of sausages out of what used to be an angry wild pig. What you also get is a boar pate. This is a speciality of Corsica, meaning that no other nation would consider making the stuff and no other nationality would consider eating the stuff. It’s basically a high velocity pork delivery system with some artery clogging properties tagged on for good luck. If you haven’t got the time, energy or inclination to cook bacon or sausage, this is a way to satisfy all of your pork needs quickly and efficiently. I was thinking of importing it and marketing it as the midnight snack for drunks. ‘Too drunk to cook but fancy something porky? Try a spoonful of pork paste, throw your lungs up and be right as rain the next morning’.

The croissants don’t need buttering, they are at butter saturation point. So what you do is smear fig jam on them. You now have a breakfast that is more than 100% fat and will not need to eat for a week.

Postcard from Corsica – weather

As a rule, if you are going somewhere that actually has different names for different types of climatic events, you are going to run the risk of encountering Weather. Indeed, there is a chance that you are going to encounter severe weather.

Weather is the stuff you see people on television prance around in front of as it moves over a big map of where you live. Severe weather is also to be found on television, usually blowing around a terrified reporter bellowing into a microphone while behind him, somebody is whisked away by the wind, possibly having enough time to question the wisdom of unfurling a banner reading ‘hello mum’ in the teeth of a hurricane before being embedded in a tree, probably not.

Lately, severe weather has also been found in the front rooms of many people in the form of a foot or so of caramel coloured floodwater. Floods make places uninhabitable because water is wet and also because there’s a reason it’s caramel coloured and you really don’t want that stuff on your carpets.

Societies give different names to different winds because it’s important not to confuse the wind that brings the rain with the wind that brings a cloud of locusts when you are a farmer. They also name weather because it’s important to find something to do to while away the hours during a monsoon. Most important of all, car makers need new names for new models and so need wind names, otherwise they would just do what the Germans do and give their cars numbers. This is okay up to a point, but what would you rather pull up in, a ‘number 2’ or a ‘El Nino’. Exactly.

On Corsica it had been a long, dry summer with the temperatures steady at 40 degrees. This, we all agreed, was what it was all about. Gently sizzling by the pool during the day, applying camomile lotion to one another’s sunburn at night and all punctuated by visits to the fridge and dips in the pool.

The French have a name for the wind that drives the rain off the bay and lashes it against the windows of the villa we were staying at. So do I, I call it the ‘bastard’. I don’t know if they have a special name for the rain but, if not, they can borrow my name for it; ‘fucking fucking fucking rain’.

And here’s a note for all holiday reps, if you don’t want to be thrown in a swimming pool to fight to death with the robot pool cleaner in a kind of trashy Jackie Collins meets sci-fi way, then don’t look out the window and say ‘you know, it’s been really sunny for months’.

As a tourist on the island, I felt really lucky. Most tourists don’t get to see the island in all its moods, they just get day after day of sunshine, no doubt with all the attendant hazards, such as insects and having fun outside by the pool. It was quite a thrill watching the curtain of rain sweep in across the bay, heading inexorably closer and don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being inside a villa and watching the rain fall outside, it would be a lot worse to be out on the hillside, with your rifle damply misfiring and the wild boar you were hunting closing in on you with tusks quivering and bristles backcombed. It must be like being gored by a bog brush.

Corsica attracts cyclists, walkers and motorcyclists almost as much as it attracts wasps (of which it attracts a LOT), God alone knows what they do when the rain comes (the tourists, not the wasps, the wasps come inside). Walkers are used to being damp I suppose, but anyone on the road must be wondering, among all the twists, turns, hairpins, goats, cows, pissed Corsicans and hunters who are bad shots, just what else could happen to make travelling by Corsican highway interesting. The answer is weather, lost of it, delivered horizontally or vertically or both horizontally and vertically at the same time. It snows in the winter – the locals probably taboggan. Pissed.

Postcard from Corsica – Corsicans

You can tell a lot about a place from the strength and attitude of its separatist movement. In certain, civilised, parts of the world the separatist movement is much less about bombing and much more about the sale of flags, mugs and tee shirts all bearing the symbol of separatism, usually a flag as this is so popular with the tourist trade. Some separatist movements, usually from the poorer parts of the world where there are less X-Boxes per capita and so people sit around fermenting discontent and apple based home-brew beverages in the evenings rather than playing Halo, do blow things and occasionally themselves up and this is generally considered by all to be a bit off, as it does nothing to help flag sales.

Corsica has a thriving separatist movement, judging by the amount of Moor’s Head flags on display. I’m not sure if there is any actual bombing, I suspect that all the plotters are too busy manufacturing and then flogging their flags to indulge in a spot of light terrorism. Terrorism would, in any case, be quite hard to distinguish from the general level of background violence on the island.

Violence is everywhere on Corsica. Not the pushing, shoving, spitting, hair-pulling violence one sees in the playground or after chucking-out time in town on a Saturday night, but rather the threat of violence. The local brand of knife (and that should tell you something) is called ‘vendetta’, one of the tee shirts has a picture of the island with an AK47 superimposed on it and something written in French which I’m pretty sure was either ‘freedom for Corsica’ or ‘fuck you, I’ve got an AK47 and I’m from a small, pissed-off island’, I’m not sure. Although, in essence, the two remarks are interchangeable.

Everyone on the island has a gun. Actually, I would guess that everyone on the island has two guns. The first gun will be an ancient, but beautifully lethal hunting rifle, which is carried out into the countryside and used to hunt wild boar and settle feuds with your neighbour. The second gun will be hidden under the floorboards, will be an AK47 or something quite dreadful left over from the war and is being kept ready for the uprising. This means that there are two guns for every person and as a rule of thumb, it’s advisable to keep an eye on any society with more guns than people.

Sitting by the pool at the villa in the afternoon, one would hear the crack, crack, crack of somebody trying to reduce the wild boar population on the island. Coming from a city where gunfire is still frowned upon as a method for pest control (although if I had my way I’d take out the Trafalgar Square pigeons with a cluster bomb), this is fairly disconcerting. One can only hope that the hunter has a good aim, is not as drunk as I was by three in the afternoon and isn’t the bloke I inadvertently nearly ran over that morning when I was doing the croissant run out to bag himself a tourist.

Everyone on the island is very polite. This is because everyone on the island has a gun, or possibly two, and probably a hand grenade or two left over from the war. It’s also because the island has its own knife factory and it’s also because the knives are called ‘vendetta’. The message is clear, if you are rude to me, my descendent will some day kill your descendant in a hunting accident.

Given the proliferation of guns, knives, alcohol and wild boar with tusks on the island, it comes as something of a surprise that the most dangerous thing to do, even more dangerous than hunting drunk, is go for a drive. The roads twist and turn round every bend waits a goat, cow or pissed-up Corsican driving towards you at speed and on the wrong side of the road. It does not do to respond aggressively when this happens, as goats can be malevolent, follow you home, and keep you awake at night with the gentle clang of their bells.

Mr Whippy's Corsican cousin; Mr Wrong.