Edwin Morgan

Just back from a really enjoyable wedding in Edinburgh. The best man gave a version of The Loch Ness Monster's Song by Edwin Morgan - who was 89 yesterday, happy birthday. Photos will appear here, we'll add a few tonight..

In other pastry news, the boulangerie where I often buy my lunchtime sandwiches has made it onto a similar list for chocolate éclairs (sorry no handy pdf available) I might as well wave goodbye to my waistline!

Flan update

My local baker 'l'Autre Boulange' has been awarded the Best flan in Paris prize by Le Figaro. Full results here in PDF. There's a picture of the bakery top left of this sheet.

Anniversaire

Thanks for the cards and emails!

Sam made some cakes last night which I took into work today to celebrate. These disappeared very fast.

Poisson d'avril

The director of our lab just sent us a mail saying our laboratory has been awarded the prestigious CNRS 'Prix Gobshite', and that every member of the lab in posession of a BNP/CNRS business card can claim a 50 000 Euro bonus by senidng their card numbers (and CVV) to an email address in Tuvalu..

Meanwhile I've been invited to a meeting on increasing the attractivity of my employers to good researchers who might want to come and work for us. One of the other invitees (some recently hired, some old hands) replied, CC everyone, asking if this was a poisson d'avril since such meetings are obiously a waste of time. Finally he was disabused of this notion, and wrote back (again CC everyone) to say that he would participate with no enthusiasm and considered the time (2 hours) as time thrown out of the window.. oh dear.

Four newish reasons to love Venice

I'm back in Venice for work. Venice is a good place for new thinking. For one thing, it's a beautiful man-made place being destroyed by nature, rather than the other way round. Though of course mankind is chipping in, destroying the city economically and socially with the negative aspects of tourism. But there are still new good things in Venice. For example:

1. The new Calatrava bridge which is stunning. The best way to see it is from the front right seat of a vaporetto coming from the train station to Piazzale Roma. That way you don't see the scaffolding where they're trying to retro-fit a wheelchair lift.
   
2. New restaurants. Contrary to what one might think, the best restaurants in Venice are not necessarily the longest established ones. Though the residential population of the island is lower than it has been since the plague, there are still lots of professional people who come to work every day in Venice, and thousands of students. New places are opening (and closing) all the time, and often come without the stuffiness of some of the older Osteria. Last night we ate in Ae Cravate, a sort of equivalent of an up markt gastropub. Very good
   
3. imob - venice now has a contactless smartcard based ticketing system for the vaporettos. It's baffling the locals but it makes sense. The old system was a joke.
   
4. Da Lele - the hole in the wall selling wine close to Piazzale Roma. An essential rendezvous point for all arrivals in Venice.
   
   

Graham has been sadly neglecting this blog of late, so I thought I'd write in with a little update.

This year's salon d'agriculture is once more under way and we're planning our annual pilgrimage this Sunday along with my parents. Should be fun...

strikecam

You can watch the main protest for the strike on the bastille webcam (if you get there too late you can select recorded pictures - the head of the protest was due to leave bastille at 14h)

general strike- 08h49

No danger of a Velib to ride within bus-range of work, so I'll be staying at home.

The roads are quite quiet, lot of people (including Sam) are walking to work.

Bakery not on strike fortunately.

General Strike

On Thursday France is going on a general strike. It's not clear how many people will get involved, but the media is of course predicting 'black Thursday' and the Parisien is full of tips to avoid 'la galère'. I wasn't sure what the strike was actually about, but I was handed a leaflet on the street explaining. The strikers demands include, but are not limited to: a fairer and more transparent financial system, an increase in salaries and pensions, fewer people being layed off, less inequality, and an end to patronage by those in power. In my opinion, this may require more than a one-day stoppage.

There were no details of any particular demonstrations, but workers were urged to get 'into the streets'. I'll blog a report from those self same streets on Thursday.

Black Bream

The fishmonger at the Bastille market had a new catch today - line caught black bream, or dorade grise, from the costal fishing fleet of brittany. It costs just under 10 euros a kilo - as a comparison, regular bream costs anything from 8 euros (small, farmed in greece) through 16 euros (wild caught in the atlantic) to 29 euros a kilo (line caught). Black bream is one of these excellent under-rated fish - the flesh is not as pretty and white as a regular bream, but it's tastier to a keen palate and it's also much more abundant, which means you can eat a line-caught, good sized one with a conscience as clean as a whistle. Our one was a very decent size, and will feed us tomorrow as well. We roasted the whole thing en papilliotte, and filletted with the fancy knife sam's mum gave me for christmas.

When I go to the Bastille market, I usually take a coffee in the bar du marché. This is firmly in the category of places that will never be recommended by the lonely planet, but if you want to see a real parisian bar, this is it. It's about 20 square metres, and it's run by two brothers. The curved bar is real zinc, and judging from the number of dents and scratches in it must be at least 50 year old. behind the curved bar is a set of fridges with the catering-style lock handles, made of wood and fitted to the curve. The name of the manufacturer is still on one fridge - Meallet - and it was made when paris phone numbers only had 6 digits. It's always busy on market day. The clientele are of the 'pupils of the much respected old school' (I read that in Dickens! Did Victorian Englishmen really say 'yeah he's really old school'?), and when I'm taking coffee at 11am, most of them are on wine, demis, or calvados. Sometimes two of the above. The chap next to me today, with a hat like mine, had a white face and a long nose and looked like he'd been up for several hours. He complained about his colleagues, said he needed to find a job where you could work on your own, then ordered a refill of his beer glass while he stepped out for a cigarette. He stepped back in, downed the glass, wished bon courage and disappeared. Later, I was strolling round the market very happy with my huge black bream, and I crossed to the left side aisle of stalls. Like most markets, the bastille market has a certain geometry dictating where the good stalls are, where the expensive ones, the cheap ones, and the bad ones are. There are two very big and busy fish stalls, on th right hand side, where i regularly shop. There are a dozen servers at each one and half a dozen more people scaling and gutting behind. They also have managers who run around behind shouting 'let's sell some fish!' at the workers 'and i must be crazy look at my prices' to the general public. Everything I've bought from both has been very fresh and it's mostly served straight from cartons from the Rungis wholesale market close to Orly airport, with coded and dated labels. That way you know the fish has probably been out of the water for 24 hours at the most. On the left hand aisle are two deciededly more down at heel fishmongers where i've never bought anything - the fish are often very cheap but look second best, they often parcel them up on trays and price them before weighing them. It's a bit of a gamble. And they won't gut or scale anything for you. Anyway, as I was strolling past the southern one of these, I saw the proprietor shouting allez allez buy these cheap fish, and yes, it was the long nosed beer-downing man from the bar..

Politics update for inaugration day

Ségolène Royale, loser of one presidential election and one leadership contest for the socialist party, was in fact Obama's inspiration, in her humble opinion.

word of the day

Amerissage. Like aterrissage, except you land on water.

bonne année

we celebrated with a fruits-de-mer style dinner which is vaguely traditional in France. All the fishmongers were very busy. The off-licences were queuing out the door, most people buying champagne.

I just finished making a basic wooden frame for an 1812 map of paris we bought from the archives a few months ago. It's now hanging on the wall of our salon. Rue des Boulets, where we now live, is on the map but our little impasse looks like it was farmland. Of course all the main boulevards constructed by Hausmann didn't arrive until later in the 19th century, so the city looks quite different.

Beaujolais nouveau

Last Thursday was beaujolais nouveau day - this is still quite a big deal here, and lots of people take it as an excuse to half a glass or two at lunch time with their colleagues or take a couple of bottles home. Students in particular are well known for making a big night of it. Of course the actual wine isn't especially good, and we were planning on giving it a wide birth, but then on Sunday at the Bastille market, the fish stall was giving away a bottle of beaujolais nouveau to everyone making a significant purchase (the woman in front of me who only bought 3 salmon heads didn't get one). If we were real wine snobs, we would leave it for at least a few months to let it overcome 'bottle shock', but we're not,so we'll be drinking it some time in the next few days.. I will post my tasting notes

In other news, the boulanger I mentioned is turning out to be really great. On saturday we had a 'japanese' brioche loaf in vanilla and chocholate and a really excellent baguette campagne. He's closed on sunday and monday, and I have french class until late tomorrow, but we'l be back to see him on wednesday. He's a very good character - I might see if he'll let me take his photo..

quoi de neuf?

• we've discovered an excellent boulangerie close to us
  
  
• the drive in Mcdonalds I walk past from the RER station on the way to work is building a McGym annex. Bizarre.
  
  
• the front-page headline of Le Figaro headline today is 'British going crazy about cost of 2012 olympics'. Comment dire 'chip on one's shoulder'?
  
  
• My Euros are worth 86p each today. Soon people will be taking day trips to Dover just to go shopping
  

le Melac

Sam's off for the weekend so we took a stroll in the quartier last night to find a restaurant for a nice dinner. We stumbled in to le Melac close to metro Charonne, which turns out to be something of an institution in the area. The cuisine is Auvergnaise, the selection of cheeses and charcuterie formidable, and water is reserved for cooking potatos and washing up (this policy is even written on the waiters' t-shirts), which is fine as the selection of wine is enormous (the bottles are stacked all around the walls of the restaurant) and cheap (lots of choice for 20 EUR). I had a starter made from pancake batter, sausage and onions - an Auvergne speciality which I've forgotten the name of - followed by an incredible carré d'agneau (rack of lamb) with an anchovy, parsley and garlic sauce, and beautifully presented with red peppercorns and smooth mashed potato. Sam had a croustillant de poire followed by a pavé de truite, cooked with lardons and served with puy lentils. For dessert we had fresh pineapple and creme caramel. Everything was excellent, the bottle of Anjou provided a refreshing accompaniment, the atmosphere was convivial and the bill was very reasonable.

Demenagement

We managed to move house at the weekend using one taxi and a few trips on the metro. Our new place is furnished, but not completely equipped like the old one, so we've been running round shopping for towels and bedlinen since then.

The restaurant scene in our new quarter is very lively. On Saturday night we had a great meal at les Galopins near Nation, honest French cooking and reasonably priced wine. On Sunday we ate at Extra Old cafe, very cool interior and 'correct' food. There are a whole bunch of other more upmarket places around but they were all booked out on Saturday and shut on Sunday.. something to look forward to. There's also a place near nation called chez prosper that's a very famous large, noisy and cheap brasserie, but the queue of people waiting was out the door when we looked in on Sunday night, even when though we passed by quite early.

Streetview

Google has now expanded streetview to cover Paris. Search for cité Voltaire 75011 and you can have a look at where we're moving to on Saturday.

Rugby

We went to watch a heineken cup game on Saturday afternoon - stade francais against llanelli scarlets. It was pretty close at half time but ended up being an easy win for the French team. The tickets were only ten euros, which is not bad to watch a bunch of international players, though we were only standing around the edge of the ground. Next time we might splash out on some seats. The atmosphere was very good, though there were fewer welsh fans than we were expecting. We did at least hear them singing their song (the "who beat the all-blacks" version).

Nuit blanche

It was the nuit blanche on Saturday, where the modern art museums stay open all night, and various random contemporary art things take place all over the city. Of course it's all a bit corporatised, you're unlikely to see anything really cutting edge, but we took a stroll around anyway to see what was on offer.

The eglise s Eustache has a long tradition of contemporary art - it has a contemporary crib every christmas and artists compete to get the chance to do it - so they were open all night for the nuit blanch showing a film about blind men encountering an elephant. It was pretty cool, though the sound wasn't too great.

In front of the gare de Lyon, they were filming a bollywood film all night. A real one, to be shown in cinemas, with real dancers shivering in saris in between takes. There was a huge crowd and lots of cheering but it was hard to get a good vantage point to watch.

We also watched a short film on sentimental geometry, featuring a little square that moves around, which was quite cute. Unfortunately, while we were watching, a windows warning message 'your virus database is out of date' popped up. Bloody microsoft - spoil everything.

a venezia

I'm in venice working at the university in Mestre for a week. Yesterday I saw some of the regatta, where the old style rowing boats (think of a big gondola with a dozen gondoliers on it) race each other up the canal grande - very cool though very hard to watch unless you've got a ticket for the grandstand. you end up standing on tiptoe behind a crowd at the end of a passageway that leads to the canal. the best view I got was when I retired to a nearby bar and they had it on television.

La rentrée

The Parisians are back.

Curtis Mayfield - Move on Up - that's a tune I don't get to hear often enough. That should be played as I ride the escalator down into the bowels of Paris in the morning to get the RER. Today it was - in very low fidelity, and only for a few seconds, on the mobile phone of the guy in front of me. I was hoping he wouldn't pick up. Unfortunately he did, but it still improved the situation.

Au pied du sacré coeur

Sunday was wettish so we took our visitors Bridget and Alan to a cosy little restaurant on the north slope of the butte montmartre, safely hidden from the tourist hoardes. It's a true restaurant in style, with white tablecloths and proper wineglasses, but cafe prices for a menu of modern french food. we (the carnivores) had magret de canard, roast lamb and filet mignon between us, while the vegetarian had a warm goats cheese salad, which was a large version of a first course (Paris has still to get to grips with the idea of an enjoyable vegetarian main course - the only one on offer here, the assiette vegaterienne, is just a plate of steamed vegetables).

After dessert we climbed the staircase to the top of the hill in penance. I only recently discovered that the sacre coeur was built as recently as 1914. Work started just after the suppression of the Paris commune - the idea was to « expier les crimes des communards », i.e. make the working classes build a huge church to atone for them daring to rise up against their employers. For that reason perhaps, Parisians are pretty ambivalent about it, though the tourists still seem as enamoured as ever with it.

L'escale

It's been an interesting week at l'escale, the cafe on the ile st louis where I take coffee in the morning. I've obviously crossed some kind of boundary. Instead of just making me a coffee without asking for my order, which is obviously the first phase of becoming a 'regular', the barman now shakes me by the hand and asks comment allez-vous, before making jokes about the british olympic performance (the usual 'all medals won sitting down' jibes. France are doing terribly, by the way). This must be the second phase. The third phase, which I have observed in other regular customers, is when he calls you by your name. Your first name. I guess that probably takes about two years. The fourth phase is when you get a tab. This happens when you've been coming for about 37.5 years, i.e. the time it takes in France for a civil servant to get a full pension.

The barman speaks with a kind of staccato rhythm, showered with little quips and witticisms, which is apparently very typically Parisian.

The next day there was a film being shot in the cafe. I thought it looked a bit full for 8:15am - usually there's nobody sitting down at all at that time - and the barman waved at me from inside while an earnest young frenchman in a high-vis vest turned me away from the door.

Edited to add Thanks to a last-day rally, the French olympic team finished 10th in the medal table with more medals than they have won for many years. Reading the national press the mood seems to be one of perfect contentment with this result, despite the fact they were 7th last time (with fewer medals, but more golds). "Team GB", with a comparable population and GDP to back it up, finished 10th in Athens in 2004 causing something like a national outcry. I'm not sure either of these positions are laudable, but it's interesting to observe nonetheless.

champagne de Paris

Paris in the middle of August turns out not to be so bad - it's not too hot and the roads are very quiet so cycling is a lot of fun. Many of the best restaurants are closed, but lots of smaller places that cater for tourists and die-hard Parisians are still open, including chez Stella, close to the jardins du Palais Royal where we had lunch yesterday. The proprietress is really called Stella, the three course menu is 13 euros, a half litre of quite acceptable vin rouge du table costs 3,80 EUR, and when you ask for a carafe of tap water Stella shouts to her husband in the back for 'champagne de Paris'. The tiny 28-seat restaurant is decorated as if it were Stella's own front room, there is a fridge in the room with the special chalked on it and desserts are sliced and served from a sideboard by the door. There's no till and no card machine, all the cash goes in a draw in the writing desk in the corner. We had a salmon terrine, bavette (undercut) with onion sauce, chips and green beans, and for dessert, I had a chocolate cake and sam had a banana clafoutis. Both came with plenty of creme anglaise, which Stella was whipping up when we arrived. It was a lot of fun and an excellent rapport qualite prix for the quartier.

August

Paris in now dead. My lab is officially closed, so I've moved to Oldenburg in north west germany to work for a week at the University here.

On saturday we went to the Clown Bar for dinner on their last night before they close for three weeks. The menu was limited, but we were given a free second bottle of the wine we were drinking to finish up (it had already been opened to serve a glass). The staff told us they would much rather take their holidays at a different time, since all the nice places are so crowded in August, but for a non-tourist restaurant it doens't make financial sense to stay open in August.

Last monday we also got free drinks - aperitifs this time - in a little restaurant in the 2nd after we came in from a heavy rain shower looking drenched. It must be the holiday feeling. This kind of thing doesn't normally happen in Paris.

Weekend

Jamie and Ros visited us at the weekend. It was a top-drawer session of catacombs, cocktails and Clown bar. The waitress in the clown bar made some jokes about our last visit when the Italians left without paying (see blogs passim), before bringing us another excellent meal. On saturday we managed to get a seat for aperitifs at the top of the montparnasse tower. We queued for over an hour to get into the catacombs but it was probably worth it - seeing several million bones is certainly an unusual tourist experience.

Le Tour

I'm sure all the Velib riders have started going abour 30% faster since Le Tour started

week-end

Sam's folks were here at the weekend. We did a lot of shopping in the soldes, at bon marché, and on the rue du cherche midi. Everyone was tired by the time we got to the end of the r.d.c.m., so we got on a bus to get back to sam's folks hotel near to our flat, there being no convenient metro options. The bus was great theatre. At odéon a couple got on with an enourmous and very heavy flatscreen TV they had obviously just purchased in the sales, but the bus was so crowded the girl lost her temper and dragged her boyfriend and the TV back off again at the back door shouting things like 'take public transport you said! no need to get a taxi you said!'. In a few years time I'm sure they'll sit in front of the TV and laugh.. two other passangers were carrying small nervous dogs, one attempting to hold the dog, and a mobile phone, and hold on to the rail. The bus almost squashed a moped on the île de la cité, swerving and throwing passangers and dogs into each others arms, before finally depositing us a few steps from the hotel.

we ate some good food in le pré vert again, and also in Café Jav, where we've eaten a few times now, just south of Bon Marché, offering a winning combination of frites maison, bertillon ice cream and friendly service.