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 - myths to bust, myths to trust

There are many French stereotypes. The famous hatred of hygiene, the ability to surrender in a crisis, a love of wine and bread and a dislike of monarchy or bothering to be polite. There are particular Parisian stereotypes, many of which I was, as something of an amateur bigot, happy to indulge without knowing if they were true or not. So it was interesting to go fact hunting.

French waiters are rude.

Trust it. Friday night: after pitching up at a likely looking place and eventually ordering something that, even with my mangled and offensive French, is unlikely to be gibbon on toast, it’s time for dessert. Cheese please. With wine. Sancerre. The waiter’s face was a mixture of regret and disappointment and it later transpired that one is supposed to order red wine with cheese. Well, sorry about that mate. I was restrained from asking him if I had made the same mistake that german officers probably made, night after night, while his grandfather served them in this very café. I was further restrained from asking him why they had a) snubbed our Queen and b) killed our Princess? Finally I was refrained from reminding him that he can comment on what fucking wine I eat with my fucking cheese when he fucking pays for it.

The coda to this is, of course, that the sancerre with the roqfort was bloody sublime and I oohed and ahhed in appreciation as the flavours mingled in almost pyrotechnic fashion on my palette. This was accompanied by the sound of the entire waiting staff grinding their teeth in impotent rage.

But the gold star for rudeness goes to the waiter at the pizza place who growled, as a welcome, ‘no visa, no card’. ‘Fuck off you french cunt’ I replied as I felled him with the sort of blow normally bestowed on mature hardwoods; ‘I’m trying to spend my way out of a recession and you’ll take my card and like it even if I have to bend you over and use your fat french arse as a swipe mechanism’. Actually, I’d just been to the ATM and was loaded with Euros, but if he had been telepathic, he’d of been fucking quaking.

The french are rude.

Trust it. There is no Parisian term for ‘excuse me’. Apparently.

Dog shit

Actually there’s not that much dog shit and I think I’ve worked out why. Stopping in a café off the Trocadero for a couple of beers, I was treated to the sight of a bloke bringing his dog into the café, being told he should sit on the pavement with it, finding no table, coming back and eventually having a table on the pavement located for him. The dog was up and down like a fiddler’s bitch and you could see the doggie resentment building, which will reach critical mass tonight when he craps all over the polished wooden floors of his apartment, after first eating chicken, leaving the bloke to combine his midnight piss with the sort of frictionless ballet that would get yield a perfect nine from the judges of an ice dance championship – were it not for the screams, flailing arms and eventual collapse backwards into a spreading pool of chien chit. So the dogs are shitting indoors.

Parisians, by the way, all have little dogs, this must add to their sense of inferiority. As they have already got a lot to be inferior about this is not a good thing. An Englishman’s typical dog is something that can either a) retrieve game from a marsh, b) defend his council house against rival crack dealers or c) defend his house against the sort of crack dealers who own dog b. This means that dog a has developed a soft mouth to make sure it doesn’t damage pheasant and dog c has developed the ability to operate a wire-guided missile. Dog b has developed the ability to savage its owner. But the Parisian lives in an apartment and so keeps a small dog in a small room, while the Englishman lives in a sprawling estate, even if it’s a sprawling council/mock-tudor housing estate, and keeps a reasonable sized dog.

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 Paris - getting there

Once, travel was synonymous with glamour. As soon as commercial passenger ships stopped carrying plague and slaves, they turned into floating international villages where a fellow could conduct a shipboard romance knowing that as soon as he got into port, and went back to using his real name, there was little chance of the scandal he created on board reaching friends, colleagues or his wife. Ocean travel as luxury stopped as soon as they stuck golf courses and waterslides on the back of the ship, turning it into a floating Butlins.

Air travel used to be glamorous. First we had the 747 where the posh folk actually went on the upper deck, then we had Concorde where the chavs were not even allowed on board. Now BA has stopped commissioning new airplanes with first class cabins and the French not bothering to brush their runways buggered Concorde.

Rail travel just keeps getting better. What started with a steam engine hilariously just this side of incredibly dangerous that ushered in a new age of killing a lot of people very quickly turned into the best way to travel, although you had to get your carriage romance over in short order, or spend a lot on buns in tea shops as in ‘Brief Encounter’. It was even, thanks to Agatha Christie, by far the most fashionable mode of transport to be murdered in.

There may be luxury trains like the Orient Express and the Blue Train, there may be faster trains like the Bullet Train in Japan (but who the hell wants to get to work that quickly), but the apogee of train travel must be the Eurostar, simply because if the Brits and the French can work together, it’s the eight wonder of the world.

Best of all, is St Pancras International and the new high speed link out of London, a station so effortlessly cool that it has the longest champagne bar in the world and a collection of amateur artists sketching the canopy badly. The centre of the city to the Dartford crossing in twenty minutes is spectacular, only teleportation would be quicker. Buy the right ticket and you get food and drink served at your table. It’s civilized, which sounds as if that should be the least you can expect but, if you’ve traveled recently, you’ll know that in certain cases ‘civilized’ is setting the bar pretty high.

A word of warning though, you may find yourself sitting next to French people. Being offensively French. By which I mean the chap had the sort of facial hair that I thought was only now encountered in sit coms and French language school text books. And porn films. Bad ones. From eastern Europe.

And you can take a Swiss Army Knife on the Eurostar. Try getting away with that on an airplane, where they have a girly strop if you try and sneak on some hand lotion. This means that should some mad mullah try and take control of the dining car or similar outrage, not only would be shortly resemble a pincushion but it’s a certainty that some wag would wade in with the corkscrew or bottle opener as well as the knife blade.

Eurostar also meant that I could start the afternoon at the private view of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. This means that the galleries are no less crowded, but they are at least crowded with the sort of people who have forked over money for annual membership as a friend of the RA. It also means there is a champagne bar, meaning that art appreciation is enhanced by a few glasses of fizz, enough to strip away enough of the higher intellectual functions to appreciate the works on an emotional level, and remove enough inhibition to either mutter ‘what a lot of tut’ when looking at the latest Emin or, God forbid, even speak to fellow gallery goers. Stand out works this year were a post-card sent from a sculptor who had his work refused and a fine impressionist style painting of Venice.

Surely the next step in the development of the train is the Euro sleeper. Fall into bed in London and wake up in Italy or some other far flung point, probably with a medium to high class hooker in your cabin, the choice is yours.