Winning at Easter

Last Easter Sunday I woke up early and was out of the door by 8.15am. I got on an underground train for 12 stops, got on a boat for 20 minutes, climbed up 377 steps, and there I was.

Completely on my own, the only person in the entire world at that exact moment looking out from the crown of the Statue of Liberty in N Y actual C.

Feeling very small and insignificant within the global scheme of things, but also a bit amazing and special for being there toute seule, just me and Lady Liberty, sharing the view and taking it all in. I felt a magical glow I wanted to protect, to remember in minute detail, along with an intense pressure to relax and enjoy my moment. It turns out that doing things you’ve always dreamed of doing is fraught with the panic of not quite doing it right.

And sure, the magical glow may have been largely due to a huge sense of RELIEF that I hadn’t passed out on the way up. Heights don’t bother me, but climbing up a double-helix spiral staircase where the steps are only 19 inches wide and everything’s made of metal and it’s 27 degrees outside so it’s much hotter than that in here, and the railing is just getting hotter and shinier and sweatier with every step I take – well, that bothers me.

So I make it. And by some fated planetary alignment, I’m undisturbed by other tourists and free to take as much time as I want for gazing and photographing, and regaining my composure and a normal resting respiratory rate. The sporty-looking couple who were ahead of me have been and gone, and the fanny-packed group behind me are evidently taking advantage of the rest-stops on the way up. 

Right now, in this moment, I am Winning at Easter.

Just below me in the statue’s headspace were two National Park Service employees keeping an eye on things, a man in some kind of nook (the Statue’s ear?) and a woman casually swinging her legs while sitting on a metal beam (as you do). They were lovely and helpful, and keen to chat. The man reassured me that my new obsession with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is really quite normal, and it turned out that the woman had recently spent her honeymoon in Paris, and we swapped stories about hunting down the many and varied Statue of Liberty replicas that are dotted about the French capital. (My own ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ challenge of visiting each one is in the works. I’ll get to it when I get to it, OKAY?).

I shared my anecdote about how the statue on the Île aux Cygnes, not far from the Eiffel Tower, was swivelled in 1937 so that she is now directly facing her big sister on the other side of the Atlantic. The woman lit up at this gem, and I like to think she’s woven it into the Liberty stories she tells tourists.

Visiting the Statue of Liberty is the only thing I’d booked before arriving in New York, mainly because people kept telling me it sells out 6 months in advance and you simply must organise yourself beforehand. It’s easily the most reasonably-priced ticket I bought on my trip, just $21 for visiting Liberty Island, climbing up to the Crown, visiting Ellis Island and its incredible Immigration Museum, and hopping freely on and off 3 different ferries around New York Harbour along the way. (Please bear in mind that in New York money, I had a plate of waffles and a coffee that cost more than this; they were really nice waffles, but still).

As regular readers of this blog already know, I am nuts for GOING UP STUFF, so this was an ideal morning for me. However, if you’re not sure about the steps or the height for climbing up to the crown, take a look online for what to expect. There are go-pro videos and suchlike. And I would thoroughly recommend an early-morning time-slot, as queuing was minimal.

I saw plenty of people not even bothering to get off the ferry at Liberty Island. They were straight round the harbour to the next stop at Ellis Island, ready to get going with the hours of fascinating stories and memories from 62 years of US Immigration. Self-guided audio as well as human tour-guides, so you can take as long as you like.

That was the best thing about the whole day; there’s something for everyone, and you can tailor it to suit the time and energy you have.

This Easter, I (sadly) didn’t go up any stuff. Instead, I went to the cinema and took in some art, and then I went to 3 different supermarkets in search of cocoa powder. I eventually found some (a different kind of Winning at Easter), which is sort of hilarious, given that I now live in the UK again, and I thought my days of being a confused moron in the supermarket were behind me.

Apparently not.

Confused Moron, Party of One, signing off, and planning to be Going Up Stuff every Easter from now on.

The Grapes of Passive-Aggression

Last Friday, I went to see a play. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment, I-wonder-if-there-are-still-tickets-available situations, and there were, so I bought one and went.

Plus, it allowed me to start a project I’ve been meaning to get off the ground for some time now, the ‘When they say ‘restricted view’, just how restricted do they mean? project’ (I’m still working on the name). Will a few square feet in the corner of the stage be hidden from view, or are we talking seats behind pillars, where you’d have to be next to someone you know really well to do the sort of leaning necessary to get a decent sight-line?

Now I’m not launching this project in the name of science, you understand; it’s purely self-serving. My quest is to find, at each of my local venues, the exact location in the theatrical Venn Diagram where lowest price and most acceptable view overlap, so that I can sit in it. Don’t worry; it’s not that I’m short on hobbies and one step away from taking up raffia-weaving. It’s that I usually buy tickets when there are only 8 seats left on the only night I can go, and I want to be speedy and efficient and feel that I’m snapping up a bargain, rather than taking what I can get.

*NB. This all comes after the Hamilton-booking shit-show, where my friend and I spent an impressive amount of time considering the relative restrictedness of a £30 ticket in a £50 zone vs a £50 ticket in a £70 zone vs a £100 ticket in a £howmuch? zone, before getting so overwhelmed at the potential for expensive disappointment that we opted for unrestricted seats to save our collective sanity.

At HOME in Manchester, it turns out that Circle Row B Seat 8 for £10 is in fact a pretty good seat (view only properly restricted in one scene for approximately 38 seconds, where I just pretended the actors were having a conversation off-stage-right).

The reason I know it is a pretty good seat is that my view was such that I recognised the actress playing the drama teacher as Steph Barnes from Coronation Street, who the rest of you would probably recognise from Happy Valley Season 2 (I still haven’t watched it yet, alright), but who I haven’t seen since she was married to Des circa 1994. Recognising facial features 24 years later? That’s a pretty good seat.

The play was Circle Mirror Transformation, and it was great. Set in Vermont, over a six-week drama class in a community centre, Steph Barnes (actual name Amelia Bullmore, if you prefer) and her 4 students gradually get to know themselves and each other through the magical world of drama – they didn’t quite play Slap the Butcher, but there were some nice moments where I was reminded of Mr G.

My real treat, though, was witnessing the solo meta-drama coming from the guy next to me. It was a play within a play, Silent Angry Man, from the moment he traipsed in behind his (probable) wife, to his visible upset when he realised there wasn’t going to be an interval and kept looking murderously at those audience-members brave enough to nip out to the toilet / bar.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such quiet yet determined anger. He wouldn’t take his coat off, which was weird, but turned out to be useful as each new seethe caused him to rustle slightly, meaning I was alerted to his full litany of rage, which went as follows:

      Phase 1. Huffing and sighing.

      Phase 2. Fidgeting.

      Phase 3. Refusing to look at the stage for a full 20 minutes.

      Phase 4. Practically crying every time the cast played the game where they 

                   try – and fail – to count to ten.

      Phase 5. Frenetically tapping a leaflet on his knee.

      Phase 6. Falling asleep.

The only time he perked up was when one of the characters was talking about how he used to have a stuffed animal toy of a snake in his childhood bedroom. And the only time he acknowledged his (probable) wife was when the characters had to each write down a secret that no-one else would know, at which point he and his companion looked significantly at one another. Both of which speak to much darker things, if you ask me.

So thank you, Angry Man. I hope you figure out your unresolved issues about improv exercises and / or community centres. Or maybe I should just make a note that Circle Row B Seat 7 isn’t quite as nice as Seat 8.

An Excessively Random Act of Kindness

Funny thing happened to me today. I needed to generate a £1 coin from a £10 note so that I could use a locker at the swimming pool. Not exactly a Sherlock Holmes-level of intellectual conundrum, but nevertheless; life cannot always reflect art, now can it.

So there I am, pondering just what I can buy, that will cost between one and two pounds, or between three and four pounds, thus ensuring my handful of change definitely contains a £1 coin. I’ve upped the level of my personal maths-problem game, you see, and I don’t want to risk spending, say, 95p on a loaf of bread, and then being landed with a fiver, some shrapnel and two £2 coins. That would be a failure, leading to an awkward conversation with the shopkeeper, in which I ask if I can change one of my £2 coins for two £1 coins, and the shopkeeper looks down his or her nose at me and refuses.

I’ve worked in retail; I know that £1 coins are like gold-dust, and must not be given away willy-nilly or, indeed, if someone asks politely. They are always the first coin to run out in the till, and it is a pain in the arse when that happens. You’ve probably got to ask Jane to go and get more pound coins from the safe upstairs, which will take an age, and the angry customers waiting for their £1s in change will have started to look remarkably like villagers with pitchforks.

Also, in a land where the customer is always right (haha), you really value opportunities where you can say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I really can’t spare any change,’ when what you actually mean is, ‘I would rather beat myself over the head with this barcode scanner than open the till again to give away my tiny stock-pile of gold. Also, why aren’t you paying by card like any normal person, thus minimising the physical and verbal contact we have to have with one another.’

I digress.

So, I’m planning my £1.50 purchase of bananas or post-its from the supermarket, when I catch sight of an ON-THE-STREET BOOK STALL right outside the swimming pool building. This is PERFECT, I think to myself. Not only can I indulge my weakness for second-hand books (inherited from my dad; totally not my fault), but I’ll get my change into the bargain.

Now here is where I experienced the oddest act of kindness I think has ever happened to me. I found a great book for the princely sum of £2, presented it to the book-purveyor-gentleman with my shiny new £10 note, only to find out that he has no change either. Which is when I find myself leaving the book-stall with the book, my £10 note plus a £1 coin given to me by the book-seller, who said I could just pop back later and give him £3.

Now I’ve just moved back from France, and I’m not saying that such a thing would never happen at a French second-hand book-stall, but I am saying that I think it’s pretty unlikely. And I know that I probably looked very trustworthy and honest in my sensible middle-class trench-coat buying my sensible middle-class book about castles, but still. This bookseller really put some faith in the human race with this gesture. This was a win for people being nice and helping one another out. And while we’re at it, aren’t Northerners just the loveliest?

So there we are. I experienced altruism. I got to go swimming. And more to the point, I got hold of my £1 coin without recourse to maths or shopping; instead, I essentially stole a book and was given a pound by a man in the street.

The fact that it got stuck in the locker because the swimming-pool hasn’t updated since the new-style coins came out, and apparently I should really have kept one of the old-style ones if I ever wanted to go swimming, is neither here nor there.

I have this friend...

I have this friend, and I’d like to tell you a few things about her.

Since I’ve known her, she has lived in an edgy and cool city apartment, by the sea and in the countryside. She likes to get around.

She does NOT like bananas.

She is an adventurer, and fearless, and believes in giving yourself challenges and goals, and then setting out to achieve them. Before I knew her, she visited the Arctic, and then several years later, she went to the Antarctic. She just decided she wanted to go, and then she worked really hard to save up and plan the trip, and then she went. Also, she bloody loves penguins.

She is very thoughtful and considerate. When I moved to a new country, she sent me postcards and letters throughout my first weeks there until I settled in. She would never in a million years fail to send a birthday or thank you card. She once gave me a necklace as a gift which was the exact match to one of my favourite pairs of ear-rings. I have no idea how she found it. The next year, she gave me the matching ring, which come to think of it, is the ring I wear every single day.

She is surprising sometimes. You think you know her, and you’ve got her figured out, and then she’ll tell you she’s lived on a barge, or that she’s been camping in Utah. Or she’ll throw into conversation that time that she got proposed to on a boat in Africa.

She is the only person I know who makes her own baked beans.

She is independent, and very brave. She has started her own business. I’ve seen her talk to a lecture-theatre full of people (without the need of a microphone). And she can pull off orange eye-shadow.

She is open to any number of mad-sounding excursions. If you want to rope someone in to do an all-day eat-yourself-uncomfortable Food Tour, she’ll do it. If you’re wondering whether it’s possible to visit all 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester in 12 hours, AND visit something cultural in each one AND have a drink AND only use public transport, she’ll sign up immediately. When I recently wanted to spend a day in Manchester seeing how many bee-related things could be found, of course she was right there with me.

She is polite, to the point of foolishness. I once witnessed her eat a whole plate of aubergine parmigiana even though she HATES aubergine, just because our friend made it for her.

She is not afraid to be different. She will hold up a sign that reads ‘Où est le Jen?’ when she meets you at a train station. She will use flash-paper to make FIRE in a job interview.

She is an excellent excellent friend, and she will always be there for you. I’ve known her to travel to another continent to visit someone who needed her. And she once came to visit me in Paris with another friend when she was DEFINITELY TOO ILL and nearly passed out about 6 times. She should clearly have been at home in bed, but she didn’t want to disappoint us.

She sometimes uses words like ‘poorly’ and ‘cross’.

She believes in kindness and being nice, and helping other people. I’ve known her for almost 9 years, and she is one of the people I admire most in the world. I’m not exaggerating when I say she’s influenced the person I am, and my idea of the person I’d like to be. When I work with children, I use strategies I’ve learned from watching her. Sure, this includes understanding the value of having something you can throw at them, or doing an impression of how not to react to a fire alarm. But thanks to her, I'm better at how to talk and behave with young people (or, in fact, any people).

When she got married, she asked 7 of her friends to walk her down the aisle. I could not be prouder or more honoured to have been one of those 7. However, I'd like it to be noted that I only ever agreed to help give her away on the condition that I also got to keep her.

She is great, and I have a sneaky feeling she has no idea how great she is.

And of course, I’m writing this today for NO PARTICULAR REASON WHATSOEVER. Any significance attached to this day or date is PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

To Elf or Not to Elf?

Newsflash: My Instagram feed is no longer populated solely with bowls of porridge and pictures of the Maldives. Since December 1^st, I’ve seen innumerable photos of little toy elves involved in incorrigible high jinks in the homes of many of my friends. Hashtag investigation revealed they are Elves on Shelves. If you are as puzzled as I was, don’t worry. Here is your handy need-to-know guide.

The Elf on a Shelf is an American tradition purportedly going back decades (well, on sale commercially since 2005 at least). This festive season, the elves have crossed the pond with a vengeance, eagerly waiting to leap from the shelves of John Lewis or Tesco to those in your very own home.

The premise of Elf on a Shelf is essentially an extension of Santa’s Naughty and Nice list. The little dudes are official Scouts for the big guy, and they live in your house throughout December, spying on your child’s behaviour and reporting back to Santa in the event of any misdemeanours that might warrant Christmas being cancelled. So far, so George Orwell.

It’s simple; you buy your elf in his nice red suit, take him home, and then he gets on with his surveillance and hides every morning in a different place in your house, cheekily lying in wait while your children try to find the little scamp. Except of course it’s down to you to cultivate belief in the ‘hotline to Santa’ side of things, and it’s you that will come up with all these inventive hidey-holes. Maybe not quite that simple after all.

Oh, and there’s a complicated bit about how you don’t actually own the elf, you’re just adopting him, and so the retailer who sold him to you should in fact be referred to as an Adoption Centre for Elves. And your elf is nameless, so you have to complete an online elf registration form in order to get an official Elf Adoption Certificate. Hmm. Anyone else hearing those Trumpian ‘special registration database’ alarm-bells ringing?
 

Not being a parent myself, I am constantly amazed at the lengths you have to go to in order to entertain, educate, morally guide and supervise your little ones. I assume I’d welcome any help available in the candy-cane-sugar-fest build-up to Christmas, and so initially, I admit, the idea of handing over behaviour management to a Santa Scout for a month far outweighed my concerns at any police-state undertones.

The tricky part is that in addition to an already-busy morning routine, parents have to arrange for the elf to be surprised in the middle of some exciting elfy shenanigans. Going from my Instagram evidence, this could mean he is poking about under the Christmas tree, doing a keg-stand with a bottle of Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup, or being part of a complicated skit involving some Duplo characters and a digger performing a heist on a biscuit tin.

Impressive and an absolute hoot for the kids, sure, but the level of ingenuity required to keep this up throughout December strikes me as immense. It’s the Christmas Eve palaver of planting mince-pie crumbs and sherry dregs in your living-room, not to mention shards of carefully-strewn carrot outside the front door, except you have to do it for twenty-four nights in a row.

Who will remember all the various japes your elf has got up to by the time you hit week three? You probably won’t, but you can guarantee your children will. Disappointed cries of ‘But Daddy, he’s already hidden in your sock drawer,’ must haunt the dreams of elf-owning parents across the land.

Tbh, it seems the majority of elf-shelf-enjoyment is being had by grown-ups that don’t even have children. That’s certainly the impression you get from perusing #naughtyelfonashelf threads on Twitter. (Warning: do this at your peril). These elves, getting themselves into scrapes involving Barbie strip-clubs and marshmallow hot-tubs, have clearly forgotten their brief of filling in report cards and carrier-pigeoning them back to Santa. Heck, by the number of elf-sized miniature liquor bottles being emptied, I’d say they’ve forgotten which direction the North Pole is.

I'm slightly confused by the shelf part of the whole operation, the suggestion presumably being that one’s elf is to be found each day on a different shelf. There are only 4 shelves in my entire apartment, and one of them is the high-up kitchen shelf where boxes of matches and my knife-block live. If I had kids, elves would only be invoked as part of darkly modern fairy tales that illustrate why the phrase ‘keep out of reach of children’ exists.

Are care-givers across the country spending this month endlessly debating the health and safety implications of placing an acrobatic elf on a bathroom shelf, where he’s abseiling down the hairdryer flex, or hiding in a fort made of aspirin bottles.

 

And when you run out of shelves, what then?

Actually, it seems that the shelf aspect of things isn’t all that critical. The Tesco product description of our elvish playmate suggests that he can sit ‘on the mantelpiece, table or even nestled in the Christmas tree.’ See, not a shelf in sight. Might as well call him Elf that’s Just an Elf.

My research led me to several reviews from parents who embrace the elf, and the power he wields. Notably, the single mum of 6 who praises the elf for keeping her sane and turning her children into angles (although I query the sanity and fatigue levels of someone who can’t spell angels).

However, many families are not fans of the elfdom. It’s just too fraught with stress. The playground competition of ‘their elf does more interesting stuff than our elf’ is a level of parenting critique that no-one needs. And life is far too short to ever be involved in a fight with a co-parent where your line of argument is that ‘it is completely inappropriate for Naughty the Elf to be hiding with his head poking out of the toaster.’

So, toy companies, bravo indeed. You’ve succeeded in creating the must-have toy of the festive season that sold out before December even began. I trust that you have a contingency plan for the middle of the month, when the parents and pitchforks descend, demanding that their shelves go back to being elf-free zones.

And as for the elves, I can only hope that they are receiving adequate wages and benefits for such gruelling 24-hour surveillance shift-work, and not just being fobbed off with vague whisperings of ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ and a bushel of sugarplums.


[Photo By An Errant Knight - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41334323]

Attack of the Wooden Mouths (or, how hangovers are different in your 30s)

By ori2uru - originally posted to Flickr as champagne tower, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5236607

On Sunday morning, I opened my eyes very slowly.

I was expecting the terrible sensation when your eyelids are stuck together and you forgot that they might be, and then you realise they are and your body half-heartedly tries to prepare itself for bright lights and the onslaught of gravity, while your brain attempts self-preservational shutdown by refusing to find out what might be going on behind all the blurry vision-fog and eye-glue.

You see, on Saturday evening, I went to two parties. Two parties. This is not the sort of social gallivanting that I generally get up to (query to self: have I ever done it?).

The first was my Work Do (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice free champagne until it all ran out and was replaced with questionable white wine), and the second was the Christmas party of my lovely Italian/Canadian friends (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice champagne all night. The sort that comes in the incredible extra-large bottles that are my favourite, but that are also very heavy and difficult to pour out of, so it’s altogether better if someone else does it).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t sink 15 glasses of champagne and get completely hammered, as the Jen at Christmas Parties of Yore would have done. These days I am (mostly) civilised and a grown-up. (NB. We won’t mention the Negroni-fuelled fiasco the night before these same Italian/Canadian friends got married in July).

But over the course of a delightful evening, I did drink quite a lot. And I probably deserved at least a bit of a hangover. Or, as the French so aptly put it, a gueule de bois, a mouth of wood.

Yet on Sunday morning there was not a headache or a spinning room in sight. I got up, ate porridge with seeds and goji berries, and smugly went about my day. This is fantastic, I thought; I’ve finally cracked it. Champagne is my drink. I’m never going to drink anything else again.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of my story.

It turned out the gods of the Wooden Mouth had other plans for me.

First up, I went to a lovely fancy oratorio choir concert that my friend Pam was performing in. I sat with two other friends, we enjoyed the beautiful music, and then we all went off to get the Métro together, feeling wonderfully cultured and stuffing our faces with mince pies as we discussed which station we hate the most. For me, it’s Châtelet Les Halles, hands down, which was ironically the station we were heading to.

And that’s where my troubles began.

My magical Métro pass, which I love and which makes my life reasonably-priced and easy, didn’t work. The gate didn’t slide open when I beeped, so when I re-beeped, I initiated the angry-sounding DOUBLE BEEP ALERT noise. Leaving me trapped on the wrong side of the barrier to my friends.

My brain could not handle this unexpected development at all. It was Sunday, so naturally all the ticket booths were closed, and there was not a single staff-member to be seen. My subconscious started heading towards a group of camo-wearing machine-gun-toting soldiers as the only available figures of authority in the vicinity before I stopped it. What did I think they could do, shoot the barriers down to let me through?

I wandered aimlessly around the station for a bit, and then sent a pathetic ‘Save yourselves. Go on without me’ message to my friends, before realising I no longer had any idea which of the 94 different barriers I was supposed to be trying to get through (there are many excellent reasons why Châtelet is the worst station).

Eventually, I beeped my way through 3 different barriers at random and I think the system let me rejoin my friends out of sheer pity.

To recover from all this, we went to have a festive drink and a welcome sit-down at Starbucks. Where I forgot my own name.

I was busy practising saying ‘gingerbread latte’ in my head in a French accent so that it would be intelligible for the nice French barista (it didn’t work; I had to repeat it six times before we got anywhere). And when she asked my name, poised to write it on my cup, I went completely blank.

Most of my students believe I’m called Jan or Jane, so part of me was excited to rectify things ever so slightly and get this right. And then I heard my friend Jo somewhere to my right declaring that her name was Hélène, and I realised it would be simpler to just say a more normal French name. But I couldn’t think of any of those either.

I said Jen. She wrote Jan. I said, No, no, with an ‘e’. So she wrote Jane.

My friends went on to have dinner that evening, but I decided to quit while I was (not at all) ahead. As I was walking home, a group of people asked me the way to the Opera House. They spoke French, but with Spanish-sounding accents, so I was overjoyed to not only understand but also to be able to answer their question. Of course, I declared confidently, it’s down that street. About 10 minutes’ walk. You’re welcome.

It isn’t. It’s precisely the opposite direction from where I so airily pointed. I’m sorry, Spanish tourists. Please google a picture of the Opera House; it really is beautiful, and well worth a visit.

I’m self-imposing a one-party-per-night limit from now on.

Two Years Deep

Friends, it’s been two years. Two whole years exactly that I’ve been in Paris, embracing my status as happy, often-confused, often-idiotic, foreigner in town.

Today is a fairly unimpressive day. I taught a private class this morning, for which I had somehow accidentally suggested the French electoral system as the topic. Then I bought a swimming-hat – bonnet de natation, if you’re interested.

But yesterday. Ah, yesterday. Yesterday was an excellent Paris day, so to celebrate my two year Paris-aversary, I thought you’d like to hear about it.

It kicked off with my favourite activity, GOING UP STUFF. After two years of recommending that all friends and visitors sack off going up the Eiffel Tower and instead go up Tour Montparnasse, I finally went up the thing myself. And, boy, was I right. There is no queue, you get to the top in a magically-smooth elevator which takes just 38 seconds, and then you are at peace to enjoy spectacular panoramic views (which, dur, include Lady Eiffel herself) without being elbowed incessantly or wanting to throw yourself off the top just to escape the 18,000 people around you who can’t form an orderly queue. And you get to take photos like this one. It was superb.

Then I did a spot of shopping. I spent an hour in San Francisco Books, looked at about a million books and managed to only buy three. I visited the shop of Henri Le Roux, the man who invented salted caramels, and managed to only buy four. And then I nearly bought a CAPE, before getting enraged at the counter by how long I was having to wait, and flouncing out of the store. I have never felt more Parisian. 

(NB. Well, it was labelled ‘cape’ but was really a cardigan with holes for sleeves. And if I was really Parisian I would have explained in a loud voice to no-one in particular why it was completely unacceptable to expect me to wait that long before doing the flouncing out. But it was as Parisian as I’m likely to get.)

Then I went home and read some more of Harry Potter 6 in French. I’m so close to the end. My deal with myself is to finish the whole series within two years of starting, so I’ve got until September 13^th. And I might actually do it, as I no longer have to stop every eight words to look something up (dungeon = cachot, half-blood = sang-mêlé, golden snitch = vif d’or etc. etc.). It’s all going swimmingly.

I spent the evening with my friends Pam and Steph, who I didn’t know from Celine Dion two years ago. We drank champagne and bitched about the 37-degree heatwave that has descended on Paris this week and discussed our favourite skincare products that you can buy in a pharmacy. It was all so very, well, French.

Then on the way home, I went the wrong direction on the Métro, which I have never ever done before, and which made me feel like a sheepish Paris moron. Because a little humility never hurt anybody, and sometimes Paris just needs to remind you that she's the boss.