Postcard from Norfolk - value for money

North Norfolk Council kindly request that the North Sea refrain from getting all over-excited and move from the left to the right of this picture.

If you live along the coast in North Norfolk, you take sea defences very seriously.  In some cases these are concrete sea walls with gates that shut and have watertight rubber edges, because everyone knows that a washer is going to keep out the fury of a Force Twelve onshore gale.  In other places there are enormous shingle banks and probibitions about what you can do on them, like nbot being able to ride motorcycles, not being able to ride horses and not being able to drive up in the dead of night and fill your trailer full of free aggregate.

There are of course those tasked with putting aggregate back.  Pulling into the car park on Old Hunstanton beach I was pleased to see evidence of my car parking fee – one which I had negotiated rather than having to pay full price no less as this was a short visit – in action.  The chap in the shed was busy with a wheelbarrow full of gravel, a shovel and some pot holes.  The car park here is grass, well, grass and mud.  But increasingly also gravel.  Good to know that if the sea ever does threaten, there will be a bloke with a wheelbarrow at the ready.

Postcard from Norfolk - Drink up

'Boat on Cley beach'  The right light, the right angle, a right old pain in the arse getting this shot.

My tip - support the local economy and buy one of the many postcards available with this shot...

but better.

Every year you read about some poor chap who is drowned trying to save his dog after the dog decides to go swimming.  As one of the dogs ran into the surf and suddenly found itself out of its depth, the headline ‘Heroic dog rescuer mourned’, together with a picture of the canine in question sitting on my gave looking properly mournful, flashed through my mind as I started to take off my jacket.  I needn’t have worried as the next wave deposited the dog safely on the shingle, while I wondered if anyone else could hear my heart beating as loudly as I could.

Once my hands had stopped shaking, I set about trying to take the perfect photograph of an upturned boat.  This is apparently easy, as there are many galleries showing variations on this image in just about every visual medium available up to and including modern dance.  My conclusion is that getting a decent photograph is a lot harder than it looks.  You have to wait for the right light, not easy when you have to keep one eye on a dog apparently intent on doing a Reggie Perrin, and you have to find just the right angle, which is, let me tell you, hell on the knees.

After such exertion the place to relax is the marvellous ‘Lobster’ in Sheringham.  Sheringham had just finished celebrating some sort of festival related to World War II, and many of the buildings had bullet holes painted onto them, it was as if the Arab Spring had happened in Norfolk, but with more booze.

The pub itself is an interesting place.  You walk in and there’s a spaniel sitting looking at its owner eating and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time things will end differently and chips will be involved.  It’s also rather vast, and on different levels, but at the same time cosy.  Best of all, despite the latte and the food, it’s a proper boozer, where men can go in the middle of a long day for a sustaining pint.

I bet it bloody rocks in the evening.

Postcard from Norfolk - Chips with a view

Pass the salt, and the gull repellant.

French’s fish and chips shop is the best fish and chipper in Norfolk and, if we’re talking pure fish and chipper, probably the best in the world (the fabulous ‘Café Piquante’ in Edinburgh is in a class all by itself, selling as it does the ‘Ladies Special’, chips with cheese and a glass of white wine!), certainly when it comes to taste.  And location, overlooking the Quay at Wells, diners can sit and watch the fishermen arrive and depart and the crabbers pace the edge of the Quay with line and bucket, considering no doubt if they would be better off just making a sandwich out of their bait.


The restaurant area is small, which matters not because the sea wall on the Quay forms al fresco seating for anyone who can’t find a seat in the shop and of course that special extra something that any meal has when consumed in the open air with an aggressive gull beadily eyeing your chips.

As well as the sea wall, seating abounds in North Norfolk.  It’s a beautiful spot with many views, meaning there is no shortage of benches bearing sweet little plaques explaining that such and such loved this view (sometimes of a lovely natural spot, on one occasion in the Buttlands in Wells, towards The Crown, bet he liked the view from the bar out to the bench even more but I guess it’s harder to have a small plaque erected in your memory in a pub, in all my years boozing I’ve only seen one).  Normally, if you notice such a memorial bench at all, you have a read, give a small sigh and move on.

Rather unusual to see not one but two benches bearing bouquets.  If a public bench is adorned at all, it is usually with a scarf or mitten that has been abandoned, but flowers are something new.  And touching.

Postcard from Norfolk - Hut! Hut!! Hut!!!

Wells-Next-The-Sea, home of the £60,000 beach hut.  That’s right, a beach hut which comes without running water, mains gas or electricity or any guarantee of good weather, will set you back almost as much as a flat.

There are some wonderful examples of the art and I think that most owners are now developing along the lines of ‘the bigger the better’ and ‘the better to ignore any neighbours’.  It also gives an excellent opportunity to give your hut an amusing name, something nautical themes, like ‘the rum shack’, ‘the sodomy shed’ or ‘lashings’.

There are posh huts, there are sheds on stilts and then there are, well, the forgotten huts, victims of the last onshore wind where the beach has eventually crept up the stilts and stairs.  Ideal, of course, for anyone with mobility issues as these are essentially bungalows but it’s the half-buried examples that really pique the imagination.

Presumably the owner is aware of the desirability of the hut, they need only look in the window of the estate agent to realise the value, so why are they half-submerged in the sand like the relic of a lost city?  And does treasure lie within?

Postcard from Norfolk - Pull!

Once you have blended your own shot, you never go back to 'shop-bought'.  Like drugs and porn, the over-the-counter stuff just isn't strong enough.

They have refurbished the Victoria Hotel at Holkham.  Possibly this was because too many visitors were mistaking the distressed furniture and hard-to-achieve ‘shabby chic’ look as ‘shabby’, which is also hard to achieve, or at least takes some decades.  The place had had a makeover and very lovely, without a trace of shabby, it was too.

As was the young lady who served us our coffee.  She was also so very posh that looking at her was like turning to the frontispiece of Country Life magazine, where posh young ladies are presented for…well, I’ve never quite worked out why but suspect it has something to do with finding husbands.  The property is in the front, the small ads are in the back and Lady Jocasta Farthingham-Smythe-Smythe is somewhere in between.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being posh, or at least having a posh accent.  Maybe she was foreign and had learned English watching box-sets of Downton?

In between serving coffee and being from the upper classes, she was decorating the mantelpiece at the Victoria.  This was a simple, minimalist affair and the theme was ‘Autumn’.  So, you have your pine cones, of which there are many locally, you have your pheasant tail feathers, of which there are also many locally, and you have your empty shotgun cartridges, the abundance of which explains the feathers.

What struck me was the many varieties of shotgun cartridge on display.  Now, I am familiar with the simple red, and I know that people fill their own cartridges as well as buy them from a shop their own, but I never quite realised that this means you can blend your own shot like you can blend your own coffee.  Fantastic! 

One can imagine that if you are, for instance, a bank robber you want something that is half lead shot and half firework so that when you let off that all important warning shot into the ceiling, it really has effect, like an angry chrysanthemum.  If you are hunting, I suppose the different sizes and weights of the shot can be tailored to your particular needs.  For instance, when hunting pheasant, a bird so stupid that the only time it can be relied to go in a straight line is when it comes directly at your front bumper, you want a rather large cloud of shot to ensure that any scatty aerial zig-zagging doesn’t result in a miss.  And for those special outings, how about a little depleted uranium in the mix?  Just like Terry likes up his arse.

What I liked about the mantelpiece decoration was that it underlined that the only debate about hunting in Norfolk is what is the most efficient way to kill something.

Postcard fron Norfolk - Quay Tea

Ponies on a beach.  A serene scene, one would imagine.

The thing about the countryside is that it is oh so very dark and oh so very full of strange noises, or rather, noises made strange by the dark.  Ignorance, imagination and some woodland creature innocently and nocturnally going about its business do not for a great night’s sleep make.  In the past I have been kept awake by, in no particular order; a banshee (turned out to be the wind), a badger in the bathtub (turned out to be rain on a skylight) and a fox apparently caught in wood chipper (turned out to be a fox caught in another fox).

This morning’s alarm call came courtesy of a pine cone falling off a tree and rolling down the roof.  So, the morning’s cardio routine out of the way, it was time for a walk on the beach.

But not before preparing a picnic.

I have, for several years now, been trying to track down the perfect picnic hamper and, like anyone in search of just the right something or other, have in the meantime been going without, while droning on at length about it.  I was coming to the conclusion that the only way to obtain the perfect hamper was to make one myself and had gone so far as to Google ‘basket waving’ and follow up with ‘not as therapy’, when I was fortunate enough to be given a picnic hamper.

I can tell it’s a picnic hamper because it is lined with gingham and has plastic glasses, plates and some cutlery inside, all cunningly secured with loops of elastic.  Gentleman and Player’s fashion editor did not appreciate the aesthetics of the thing.  It is, I have to concede, not a traditional picnic hamper, being made out of bamboo rather than wicker, but I think calling it ‘The Tenko Box’ was a little cruel.  Not unlike Tenko.

Now that I’ve used it however, I am developing a degree of affection for The Tenko Box.  This is largely, I recognise, affection by association, because it contained sandwiches and tea today and anything that produces sandwiches and tea is OK by me.

There was also a bold experiment in pic nic tea making, or rather, a return to the days of greatness.  Back in the seventies, I had an uncle whose idea of making a proper cuppa was to get out his camping gas stove, brew up some boiling water, and do the thing properly.  The man could brew up in the teeth of a gale and, as somebody who liked an al fresco cuppa on holiday in Scotland, usually did.  The decades gallop forward and I had got used to the convenience of flask tea, that is, tea in a flask allowed to stew and brew until when you drink it you can’t shake the suspicion that somebody has used the flask recently to store Bovril, or diesel, and has not rinsed it out properly.

Fast forward to earlier this summer and a long overdue breakthrough.  A large flask for boiling water, a smaller flask for milk and some teabags.  And so it was that with my two flasks and my teabag, I was able to brew up on the harbour wall what shall henceforth be known as ‘Quay Tea’.

Quay Tea was a resounding success, free of the tannins and criticism that formed so much of a feature of flask tea it actually tasted like, well, tea.

And very welcome it was too.  We had just done two hours on Holkham Beach, where the early start was put to good use in beating the crowd.  The beach was deserted apart from enthusiastic dog walkers, there enthusiastic dogs and horse riders with their skittish mounts.

I had not appreciated just how crazy horses are.  At least the ones on the beach were. Presumably they have seen water before, not least in troughs.  One would think from the reaction that splashing across a small stream provoked that their rider was urging them to swim the Amazon.  I thought it was just supposed to be witches that had a problem with crossing running water but no, apparently it’s horses too.  This may explain why witches ride brooms rather than ponies.

Out on the beach, back through the pines.  And what better way to get the old heart rate back up again then, in the middle of a lovely walk through the shady pines, suddenly recall every M R James story I’ve ever read.

Still, better that than Black Shuck.

Run!  Run back to the car and waiting Quay Tea and, if necessary, beat the spectral hound to death with the Tenko Box.

Postcard from Norfolk - Tune in, drink up

I love local radio.  If you are visiting somewhere, the quickest way to get a handle on the local character is to pick up a local paper and tune into the local radio.  Despite the apparent homogenisation of the UK, it’s still true to say that every postcode has its own qualities.  That is to say, peculiarities.

In North Norfolk, the radio station of choice is North Norfolk radio (surprise!).  There are a number of reasons to tune into this excellent station, and these were all evident in the two hours that I heard this morning.  The first is that they actually do do an island waterways forecast, it’s like the Shipping Forecast for toddlers.  I love the idea that some weekend sailor facing a degree of chop on the Broads gets his forecast, just like some trawler captain with a hold full of mackerel facing the fury of the unforgiving storm and the cruel sea somewhere where the cod have retreated to because they think it’ll be too inhspitable for humans to fish.

The second reason is the limerick competition.  Now, can there be any better way of keeping yourself amused as a deejay for two hours than having people send you filthy verses?  I think not.  Apparently the way they do it is to go with a different letter of the alphabet every week to get a place name, so ‘There was a young man from Stiffkey’ for instance, and just wait for the amusing rhymes to pile in, because if there is anything the great British public are great at, it’s making up names for moist and thankfully normally hidden areas of the body so that they can just about rhyme with anything.  (As it happens, ‘There once was a wreck called the Vera’ was completed in clean and tidy manner, and the challenge here was because there are no places starting with vee in Norfolk, except ‘Very Fucking Expensive’, which is Burnham Market’s post code.

The third reason is the local announcements, both paid and unpaid.  Unpaid come in the form of announcements for local events, like the book and jigsaw sale at Fakenham parish church.  This sounds like a fantastic idea but let’s hope that they remembered to keep the two separate, unlike that time in Bromsgrove when there was uproar after some genius decided to combine books and jigsaws by removing the end pages from a number of whodunits and selling them in kit form.  On the minus side, quite a lot of people were both angry and frustrated, even more so than the Bromsgrove norm.  On the plus side, the auction for the concluding chapters for the mystery thrillers in question the following week raised several hundred pounds for MacMillan nurses.

The paid announcements or, as I believe they are called on commercial radio, adverts, are fantastic.  When I was but a youth, I heard a C60 tape of American radio that a relative had recorded when over in the US.  Just some songs and a DJ and adverts that appeared to have been scripted by the Monty Python team but were actually for real.  Fast forward thirty years and I have the same sense when listening to North Norfolk radio.  This is not, I hasten to add, because the tyre dealerships that advertise on North Norfolk Radio advertise family fun days with ‘free balloons, candy and clowns’.  Around here, the only time that tyres and clowns go together are when they put the former round the neck of the latter and set fire to it and, by extension, Coco.  But the advert that captured my attention was for logs.  Logs delivered free of charge.

That’s right, the good folk of North Norfolk get through so much wood during the winter that not only do they buy it, not only does the supplier offer free delivery but they actually have the money to advertise.  This is like Ocado, for wood!

Have just checked the Ocado web site.  They do not do wood.  Yet.

I’m not sure I like this.  When I’m in Norfolk I like splitting my own wood.  One so rarely gets to swing a huge axe unchallenged at home.  If you can’t chop your own, then the next best bet is to stop by a sign at the roadside that says either ‘logs for sale’ or ‘woods, next left’.  That’s the thing about the countryside, it’s quite acceptable to have a bootliner and an axe in the back of the car.  Still, if one is rushed, I can see the sense in getting logs delivered.  The next step must be the web site and the various packages, from ‘value’ (a tree and a spoon) to ‘luxury’ (organic scented wood chopped for you by the regional X Factor finalist of your choice, safety gear optional).

Away from the radio, it was a beautiful day.  Walking into the Within Hill Cider shop in Wells-next-the-Sea I cautioned Gentleman & Player’s cookery editor ‘don’t say we’re just buying cider to cook with’.  Two things then happened, G&P’s cooker editor piped up ‘we’re just cooking with it, what’s the best one for that?’ and the planet earth neglected to offer up a perfectly timed seismic event to bloody well swallow me up.

Actually, as you would imagine, the chap was very chaming about it, especially after I had back pedalled like a clown on a unicycle faced with a mob holding a tyre and a box of matches and explained that, yes, a small amount of cider would be going in a pan but a large amount would be going down my throat.

There is, perhaps, something of a cultural divide in the town and the city about cider.  In the country, there are, according to the documentary made by Oz Clarke and James May, three types of cider, fighting, singing and sleeping.  In the town, cider is known as ‘trampagne’ and also comes in three varieties, farting, shitting and shouting.

This had been a bad year for cider (I withheld my professional condolences as the owner of a vine) and for apples.  The crop yield was down and the chap explained that he was ready to go to Sandringham to ‘beg, borrow or steal’ from The Queen.

This was, bluntly, fantastic.

The very idea that one would have The Queen’s Apples in your cider press, presuming you could keep her son’s Duchy mitts off them for long enough, would allow you to slap the word ‘jubilee’ on the label and charge an extra 20%.  Moreover, the idea that this might be achieved by scumping made me want to purchase an under the counter bottle of ‘Sandringham scumped’ at once.  Forty quid you say?  Bargain!

Postcard from Norfolk -- Pub Grub

Dinner at 'The Ship' in Brancaster.  Note the bacon garnish.  There is no meal that cannot be improved through the simple addition of bacon.  In this case, liver.  A classic pairing.

It’s Friday night and at ‘The Ship’ in Brancaster every table is full of what could be described as ‘types’, although certainly not stereotypes, because these types are making enough noise for a full on surroundsound experience.

Which is no bad thing.  The background chatter is the aural equivalent of a flickering fire, making the room cosy.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there is the actual equiavalent of a flickering fire – a flickering fire – and that the lighting is just right, and that there are just the right number of tables spaced just so, that just being so that you are not banging elbows, conversations or opinions with the people next to you. 

This is not London.  This is a proper pub where food and drink and atmosphere are taken seriously.  That’s probably why it’s so popular.

On the table to my right a pair of mums and dads are having a dinner of weekend portions of wine garnished with a huge portion of fish and chips.  It’s good to see that having young children has not cut into their typical Friday night pattern of sodding off early from the office, flying up the M Way in their Volvo or Bald Man’s Wagon and being elbow deep in vino by six o’ clock.  The adults tuck into their wine (red for the men, white for the ladies) with nearly as much gusto as the kids tuck into their chips (dipping them in mayonnaise, ketchup is for chavs and soccer matches).

At the table next to them sit what might as well be their parents and grandparents.  The chaps are wearing white checked shirts, dark navy pullovers and a complexion that goes beyond ‘ruddy’ to a red normally associated with a warning sign.  In this case I would say the warningsign in question is: ‘you are one glass of claret away from going face down in your starter’.

Trouser of choice, corduroy.  Wellie of choice, Hunter.  Child’s name of choice, Toby, and that’s just the little girls.

Postcard from Norfolk – Postcards and bookshops

Writing a postcard, by which I mean a real postcard rather than a self indulgent and self referential blog entry about how I such the salt off my chips before eating them, if something of an art. You have a small space in which to convey much, so there's a quandary; does one go for wit, or brevity, or both? Or does one attempt to condense a best selling travel book into the space allowed? Should one confine oneself to a weather report and, if so, how truthful should one be? Or should one simply go for something the postman will enjoy reading?

Longer than a tweet, shorter than a letter, the postcard is, along with the Christmas card, the analog version of Internet communication. Essentially, the modern craze for forwarding pictures of kittens in hats with captions heavy on the use of the letter zed is just a cheap and lazy modern incarnation of sending relatives a saucy seaside postcard.

Given the utter dominance of texting and the ability to send e mails and pictures from your smartphone,it's good that postcards continue to thrive as a edits of communication. This is, I think, because that are considered to be the same as Christmas or birthday cards, something that are sent as well as a text rather than instead of. Nothing conveys the message 'we are on holiday and you are not' like a card depicting a handful of picturesque cottages on the front and a message on the back about drinking lots of tea. I always make sure that I leave a red wine ring stain on the back of the card, I am actually thinking about having a special stamp made.

There are two approaches to postcard sending. The first is to buy a shedload on day one, go to the pub and get it all over with in one mail shot. This is environmentally sound, as it allows you to recycle the same remarks over and over to different people. The alternative is to go for the episodic approach, which means sending a postcard a day and developing a theme, such as a beer forecast, reviewing a different beach every day or, my favourite, explaining how you are developing a relationship with the pretty girl in the post card shop by buying one every day.

As much fun as sitting in the pub writing is, sitting in the pub reading is even more fun, which is why, despite it lacking a fish and chip shop, Burnham Market is fast becoming one of my favourite places to visit; one spends half an hour in the Brazen Head book shop, then repairs to the Hoste to flick through ones purchases, while drinking beer.

The second hand book shop is the home of the unexpected treat. Visiting today I picked up a Tom Wolfe book that I've never even heard of, and a NEL edition of 'Assignment in eternity'. I really do hope that you can tell a book by its cover because this one is a corker, showing a rocket blasting off from a city, in a bubble, on the moon! It is the perfect science fiction book cover. Who could resist?

It also prompted something of a revelation - I like books more than I like reading. Peering over the shoulders of people on the train I have been very impressed by the kindle e book reader. The screen can be read in direct sunlight and it is pleasingly small and looks comfortable to hold. If I liked readying, I would have one and download books to it at a reasonable price. But I like books. A book is an artefact, not a stream of electrons. Maybe I am a showing my age but surely anyone who has written a book dreams of it one day appearing in print rather than on screen.

More than that though, will there be a second hand market for e books? Even if there is, even if we end up with an on line store curated by some caring individual who groups the books in a manner conducive to e browsing that leads one to unexpected treasures, it's unlikely that inside the front cover will be somebody's name and age, or, my favourite, a slip of paper explaining that this copy of 'A Pilgrim's Progress' was awarded to somebody as a prize for growing the largest marrow in the school garden.

Kindle readers lack charm (the device, not the people). Worst of all, they lack covers - I like rockets, science fiction and cities in bubbles and I don't want to be deprived of looking at a dramatic depiction of same before opening up the book to continue the adventure.

Postcard from Norfolk – Potato vodka

In the small, charming, Georgian town of Holt, where there is one posh shop for every 0.7 people, there’s a fabulous grocers. It sells all sorts of stuff. If you do your weekly food shop in a supermarket, then you are probably exposed to a limited range of stuff, because supermarkets buy food in huge, American-sized portion amounts and so are able to offer you a trolly load of crisps for a fiver because they have aisles full of crisps. But if you look closely, you’ll see that there are only three or four varieties of crisp, but a hell of a lot of packets and, hey, they are crisps, so who cares.

Passing the shop window I see a familiar logo on an unfamiliar product. It’s the Tyrrells logo. Tyrrells are a Herefordshire based crisp company that recently became a bit famous because they refused to let Tesco stock their product, reportedly because they did not like the way Tesco treated small farmers and wanted nothing to do with the company, but I suspect in reality because they did not want the sort of loon faced chavs who listlessly chew crisps in an open mouthed, slack-jawed ruminating manner before throwing the packet away onto the street to be eating their product when they do so. And very good crisps they make too.

This time, the logo was on a bottle of clear spirit. Ah ha, either they’ve gone into producing water, of that’s potato vodka.

Running into the shop I accosted the man behind the counter and asked if it was made by the self same sorts that made the crisps. He believed so. What was the vodka like, had he tried it? Indeed he had, it was smooth and creamy. Well, I opined like a true barbarian, if it’s half as good as their crisps, I’d be a happy man.

Doing a good job of trying to conceal his horror that anyone would pollute their palate with crisps when they could be marinating it in vodka, he sold me a bottle.

Like many bottles of spirits bought on holiday, this one went into the cupboard and probably would have stayed there with the other yellow, green and red concoctions bought in a moment of madness abroad that makes you think you can recreate the magic of a foreign place simply through alcohol, when the truth is you need alcohol served from a vastly overpriced mini-bar to really achieve the effect, or when you eventually get drunk enough for a traffic light themed drinking game. However, one evening I remembered it and poured myself a shot-glass full. Hummn, it was indeed smooth, and creamy. But what it was most of all was a glass of transparent spirit made from whatever they have left over when they have finished making the crisps. Gasping and shuddering, I followed up with a glass of water.

Okay, I wonder what it adds to a coke? What it added was alcohol, which is probably not what the people who invented coke had in mind when they innocently blended cocaine, sugar and caffeine, no, they wanted a stimulating drink, 110% global market share and the heads of those bastards at Pepsi on a spike at the factory gates.

All was going well until, bored one evening, I decided to enhance the film I was watching through the simple addition of alcohol. It must have been a very bad film or a very good vodka and coke, or several very good vodkas and cokes because the next morning the bottle was more or less empty and I was convinced that the cultivation of the potatoes, the setting up of the crisp company as some sort of front, the distilling of the vodka, the bottling and the placing of the bottle strategically in the window of the shop I was passing was all simply an elaborate plot to kill me with hangover.

A couple of days and a lot of paracetamol later I resolved to avoid the stuff in future. Some drinks are simply to be avoided and anything that is potato based and probably made in a tin bath has to be near the top of the list, right up there with the lemoncello my mother-in-law makes, from a recipe she has on a tea towel she bought on holiday in Sorrento!

Still, if they bring out a prawn cocktail flavoured liqueur version, I could be tempted.

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.