There are four of us in my immediate team and each of us has invited the others around for a meal. It was my turn to host last. We are all crazy busy people and finding a free Saturday that suited everyone plus partners was a challenge. This has been in the diary for… three months? to make sure we could all do it.
I haven’t cooked a dinner for ages, which is a shame as I do enjoy it. My house is truly awful since the pandemic and was completely off the cards, so T hosted in his amazing home. (He has literally written a book on interior design and practices what he preaches.)
The menu started with smoked mackerel pâté – very close to this BBC Good Food recipe.
Pudding – well I wanted to do things quite similar to my CDWM menu, so was planning on making the strawberry jelly, apple tart and chocolate mousse I did back then. After a bit of conversation, the apple tart got upgraded to something with frangipane as T likes that in particular, so I settled on tarte bordaloue – not the chocolate bourguignonne I have had a bunch of goes at doing but a simple (!) poached pear frangipane tart (in French).
Which leaves mains. Always the last thing I settle on. Our guests – one isn’t vegetarian but doesn’t eat meat, but has a partner who likes the opportunity for meat when out of the house. My initial thought was a delicious pressure cooker based risotto – I thought it would scale up well and then you could garnish it differently, perhaps at the table – with prawns, fish or chicken depending on preference. Then T went to a dinner with DIY Buddha bowls and that turned into the main. Still use the pressure cooker to cook rice and black beans (perhaps the only positive outcome of the most recent diet – Zoe – has been the drive to eat more pulses) and assorted other protein and veg around it au choix.
In the run up, we carefully watched the weather forecast… could we eat outside? and I started on Thursday by putting all my Gu pots and espresso cups through the dishwasher. Did I have enough to do two puds and a pâté starter? You betcha I did.
On Friday it was time to make the jelly, the mousse, the tarte, the pâté, an amazing mascarpone with a vanilla bean and some icing sugar smooshed through it, and to gather the ingredients.
A melon baller is revolutionary for de-coring pears!
Saturday morning, disaster – the jelly didn’t set at all. Possibly because of my choice to use vegegel rather than leaf gelatin? I resolved to make lemon posset instead and walked down to the Coop. Maybe two desserts is enough, mused T. The very idea.
During the Friday evening cooking sesh I took a few moments out to and pick up an Amazon parcel, which I had accidentally sent to the locker up the hill, rather than the one down, containing this revolutionary idea: silicone lids for gu pots!
I know technically Pringles tube lids fit fit gu pots too, but they’re a little unconvincing – they are fine for stacking in the fridge but are too loose for transporting. These bamboo lids have silicon rings as well, and work very well. They also fit the full range of Gu pots!
On the way back I called in at the Bread and Bitter, where it was warm enough to drink outside (in a rather smoky beer garden) and that’s possibly why the tarte bordaloue ended up looking like this:
The recipe came from a French site and is not one I’d recommend. The syrup was far too thin – 2 spoons of honey in a litre of water was nothing like what I’ve used in the past (wine! sugar!) and I feared it actually pulled the flavour out of the pears rather than the other way round. I ended up boiling a few ladles of the syrup with a lot more sugar to turn it into a glaze to brush over the tart. In the end, the frangipane was more interesting than the pears.
Fast forward to the evening itself, after an afternoon of choosing crockery, we decided to eat outdoors in T’s garden. A beautiful view over the Trent valley and lots of lovely patio furniture and lighting.
The initial plan was to take the starters and the all of the dishes for the main down in one go and with many hands making light work, the outside table was soon set.
The pâté was super – simply served with nice loaf from the Co-op I popped out for just before we started.
The rice and beans in the centre were accompanied by some poached salmon, some sticky barbecue chicken, peppers, cucumber, cornichons, edamame beans, a vaguely Jamie coleslaw with red and white cabbage, apple, carrot, sunflower seeds, sultanas and a dressing of mayo, yoghurt, pepper, herbs, and celery salt. Also half cut nori sheets, balsamic mushrooms and avocados. After we’d eaten it was also possible to wrap up the nori into cones and make basic temaki sushi – an idea from the sushi packet that hadn’t occurred to me initially!
At this point there had been a spot or two of rain, quite refreshing to begin with but it got a little more persistent until we just had to grab everything – food and soft furnishings – and hurry inside.
So desserts upstairs on sofas:
A lorra lorra food! It was quite some effort to make sure I had all three puddings.
One interesting point for future use… in transporting the food I used my camping cool box. Later I bought a couple of bags of ice and stored them in there for cold drinks. I was quite impressed that the ice stayed as ice all through the evening… was still ice the following morning… and 24 hours later, there was still plenty of cubes, although it was also a little damp underneath. Now it’s turned into a science experiment… will there still be ice cubes Monday morning?
On April 17th, 2023 I had a seizure in a supermarket. I’d had a busy day at work (the start of the busiest week of the year) and decided to go to Sainsbury’s on the way home. I remember feeling slightly dizzy and very tired and my eyes feeling funny at the jam, and decided this would probably have to be one of the days when I got straight home and went to bed.
I woke up on the floor beneath the doughnuts, round the corner from the jam. Someone was mopping the floor around my head and I was damp. Someone was reaching over me to the doughnuts, my partner was present with two ambulance drivers; none of them had been there when I went out.
I got ferried to A&E where we spent most of the evening. I had a CAT scan and bloods, they put a canula in my hand, and many, many people told me I should go see my GP about my blood pressure.
Bit by bit I pieced together what had happened. I had been down and out for about 30 minutes, long enough for passers-by to take my phone off me, and because I had been using it for my shopping, it was unlocked and they could work out who to phone. They saw my dad and thought actually maybe it wasn’t worth worrying him. They found my brother who was great but a long way away and put them on to trying my partner who was five miles away. He was not in my phone under his government name, so that took a few goes – I could see from the call logs later quite a few people got a call that night. When they eventually reached the right T, they told him he should come straight away as it looked like I was dying.
I am so glad he did, as he was an absolute godsend that night. For starters, he was in a position to pay attention to what I was being told in A&E. For me it is all a bit of a blur. And he also took contact details from the people who were in the shop, setting up a WhatsApp group with them and asking them to write up what had happened from their point of view. He organised with Sainsbury’s that both our cars could stay in the car park overnight.
After a few hours A&E let me go home. I don’t remember how I got home. The CAT scan was clear, the bloods were OK, they fed me a sandwich and referred me to First Fit Clinic, a subset of neurology that I had never heard of before. They told me I shouldn’t drive. I went home, phoned in sick and slept and slept.
The following day, I started car stuff. I did drive one more time – to get the car back from the supermarket and do the clumsy manoeuvre onto my drive. T couldn’t help because he only drives automatics, but he followed me back through the journey to check all went well. I SORNed the vehicle, cancelled my insurance and filled in forms for the DVLA. Reader should this happen to you, please follow the Stopping Driving Advice from Epilepsy Action and don’t just fill in the most obvious looking forms on the DVLA website. This will be important if you get to the end of a year without driving and need to persuade our Swansea bureaucrats that you would like to get behind the wheel once more. If you fill in the obvious form, the DLVA will revoke your driving licence. If you surrender your licence, you are still agreeing not to drive but one year later you don’t need their permission to restart, whereas if you fill in the form and have your licence revoked, you cannot restart driving until you have a letter from them saying you can. And that is not a quick or straightforward process.
I can’t remember much about that week off work. I had abandoned colleagues to do the hardest week without me when they were already short-staffed, but they were understanding and forgiving when I returned. I barely remember, but I ached all over, having used all of the muscles in the body in a very new and different way whilst spasming. And my mouth was uncomfortable because I’d bitten my tongue quite hard down both sides.
After that sick week, I returned to work. What had used to be a 40 minute car commute through busy traffic was now a 90 minute bus-tram-bus journey, and because it was multimodal, it cost at least £6 a day. I spent most of the year doing this, with its highs and lows. The routes were mostly quite busy, especially through the city centre and especially in term time, when a handful of stops were absolutely rammed by under 16s going to school. Some of their conversations around me were troubling, and some of them were just awesome. One morning there was even a bunch of school girls doing German homework out loud around me and I had to restrain myself from joining in.
I never struggled to fill the time. It turns out I can very easily waste three hours a day on my phone and now I no longer have to, I miss it slightly. There were all sorts of suggestions made to me about how to fill the time – I could read! or listen to podcasts or audiobooks! In fact I could easily fill my time with a series of word games – Wordle, Waffle, Connections, Squaredle, OneWordSearch. I got nearly a year’s streak on Duolingo, first trying Portuguese ahead of a Christmas holiday, then returning to Swedish, T’s mother tongue. Any remaining time was spent on Twitter, which turned into X during that time, X being much harder to use as it didn’t allow the awesome Dabr client I used before.
First fit clinic was supposed to be a few weeks’ wait. Fair enough, I suppose neurology have actual patients who are more important. In the meantime I followed up on the contact-your-doctor-about-your-blood-pressure advice. They were slightly surprised to see me as they had recently checked my blood pressure at my turning 40 NHS Well Man check and had thought hmmm at the time so sent me home to do a week’s worth of home blood pressure checks, two in the morning and two at night. Dear reader, if you think your blood pressure is wrong, there is no point just going to see your GP, because the first level diagnostic tool will be to send you away to do check your own for a week, because they don’t quite trust the few readings they can do in a 10 minute appointment. So buy your own sphygmomanometer (they’ve fallen a lot in price recently), do a week of readings and show up armed with that, and you can cut down the amount of time it takes to get a diagnosis.
The next thing I learned, on my return visit with a fresh week of BP readings, was they are going to want an average of all the top-of-the-fraction numbers and an average of all of the bottom-of-the-fraction numbers, so if you want to pre-empt your GP hurriedly typing them into his phone, you could set up a handy spreadsheet that works out the mean for you. At this point we are entering into not-a-serious-problem but-still-too-high so I leave with three months supply of entry level BP medication and get told to return with a fresh set of a week’s BP data. At this point I raise that we should have heard from neurology by now and haven’t, and the GP promises to get his secretary to chase them. I get a phone call a few days later and a person who sounds rushed off her feet confirms I am on the list, but that the waiting time is increasing, wait your turn and it will come.
Eventually probably the same rushed person phones again and asks if I can be available for a phone call the following day between 2 and 4 as first fit clinic happens by telephone these days. Yes, that’s fine – preferable if anything – I can book a quiet working room away from the open plan office and wait there till the call comes, and I don’t have to take half a day or negotiate the QMC.
The call comes on 1st June, six weeks after the seizure. I speak with the head-neurologist’s deputised person who has a strong accent but is just about understandable. He takes me through the day of the seizure and the WhatsApp messages from the bystander who saw me go down turn out to be extremely valuable as I have nearly completely forgotten everything that happened that day. The length of the seizure and the tongue biting strongly point to this having been an epileptic fit. No news at all about whether I should ever expect another one. Take care around water, take showers not baths (no bath in my house, not a problem), never swim alone (OK, this I can manage, I mostly only swim in the sea very occasionally) and never cook alone (completely impractical, advice ignored)
At the end of the call he asks me about my drinking. I log all my alcohol intake quite precisely after a weird meeting with a locum GP a few years earlier. I met this woman once, and at least three things she said are etched in my mind. 1) you probably drink more than you realise, try logging it for a while and see. I huffed, said of course I didn’t, followed the advice and whaddya know. 2) she told me the phrase “sitting is the new smoking” which I think I have said to someone else at least once a month ever since. and 3) she was actually mainly a nutritionist before a GP and so I quizzed her on where she stood on carbs. Bad, she thought. But I like bread!
Anyway, I log my alcohol intake. I measure all spirits and wines and of course things in pubs and cans are also measured carefully. So I knew that in the previous year my average had been around 21 units a week. I suspect health care professionals hear something like that and at least double it, so while I’m fairly sure that’s my levels, I also feel like I am being talked to as if I was a very heavy drinker, which I’m not really. He asked if I needed help to cut down and pointed out that the NHS advice is no more than 14 units a week.
Now I have a bit of a routine about units, I spared the consultant’s junior partly out of my own racist assumption that someone with that name is probably teetotal anyway and wouldn’t get the joke. My hypothesis is this: at school we were told 28 units a week for men and 21 units for women. This is the advice that carries through with my generation until the end of time. The new, reduced, 14 units a week only applies to younger people. It is the same with GCSEs. I will carry my letter grades with me to the grave, they don’t get converted into newfangled numeric grades. Etc. So as far as I am concerned, I am well within my limits. This however is not the point of view of the expert on the phone who asks me to cut down. (Blog post to come about dry weeks…)
And at the end of the call, he says he will refer me for a head MRI, should be a two or three month wait because it’s not urgent, and says I should probably google fudep. ?? It’s not very clear what he’s saying but I eventually I understand it’s SUDEP.
So I hang up and google and find SUDEP is Sudden Death in Epilepsy. I feel this is rather a cheap and shoddy way of letting me know that what I have experienced kills some people and there is no way of telling who will make it and who won’t.
So now we are waiting for an MRI and waiting for BP meds to kick in.
At some point I see my GP and they have a letter from Neurology which apparently had been CC’ed to me but my copy never arrived. It covers the points from the phone call, and not all of the sentences make sense. It’s obviously a form letter that was poorly drafted in the first place.
So we are cancelling holidays as suddenly quite a few things that were in the diary are no longer possible. A road trip to the Loire to see Château Chambord amongst many other Loire castles is now too difficult, so cancelled. A weekend to see friends in Normandy… not quite cancelled, but the dates are close so I adjust the ferry booking to the distant future since it isn’t possible to cancel and get a refund. No camping trips at all this summer. When I go camping, I fill the car and camp in comfort. This means weekends away have suddenly at least quadrupled in cost. You can find a campsite for a £10 a night. No other weekend away is anything like as cheap, so pretty much no weekends away this year. A road trip down the M5 to visit friends in the countryside near Bristol turns out to be just about possible by Megabus, so that stays in.
I have been talking a bit about the seizure on social media and an old friend from the very early 2000s drops me a line with some surprising news – he’s just finishing a year of no driving, having had his own seizure 11 months previously. He has lots of tips and tricks – it might be worth selling the car, getting it back on the road after a year will be a pain, and leave it in gear, don’t leave the handbrake on as you may never move it again without. But most importantly of all, if you are disqualified from driving on health grounds, you are automatically entitled to a disabled bus pass. I had no idea. This has not been mentioned by anyone in the medical profession who deals with seizures all the time, and it hadn’t come up in googling. But in the end it made a huge difference for the year without a car.
I got in touch with the part of Nottingham City Council who dealt with Mobility Cards and they were absolutely excellent, really the ray of sunshine in officialdom of this whole sorry saga. Neurology / MRI – slow. My GP, fairly good. DVLA don’t get me started. I did not have high hopes for NCC but actually this team was top notch. On the phone they heard my story, and thought I would qualify. They got me to fill in a form. I was worried I didn’t have any evidence at this point – the neurology appointment had been sorted by phone, and the DVLA hadn’t responded to me in two months. They reassured me that it was better to just get on with the application, see their medical specialist and not wait for the ducks to be in a row.
I made an appointment – there was a staff problem and one wasn’t available for weeks and weeks. The transport team actually phoned me back and asked why I hadn’t sent my form, and when I said I couldn’t get an appointment for weeks, they huffed, said that wasn’t right, made some calls, got back to me and said actually you can have an appointment much sooner. Another tick for them.
As it turned out the letter from the DVLA saying “you must not drive” arrived a few days before the appointment with the transport GP who helpfully was walking distance from my house. The medical check turned out to be just showing that letter to the GP who said, yes, you qualify for a disabled person’s bus pass. Most usefully of all, Nottingham City (not even Nottinghamshire County does this) makes their disabled person’s bus pass work all day not just after 9.30am, and makes it work on the bus and tram, so my whole commute to and from work is covered by this and is now completely free. This saves me £30 a week. Like I said, ray of sunshine.
The summer arrives. Choir tour in Beverley is entirely possible by train. For the August bank holiday I reheat my plan to go to Normandy. It’s… a bit of an ordeal. Trains to Portsmouth for the ferry take all day. My friends have to collect me directly from the port in Caen, which either means being there to meet the night ferry at 6am or me having a hotel night in Portsmouth. But it all works out and a lovely weekend is passed.
In September, me and T have our annual holiday away – these are normally quite active sightseeing affairs, often multiple heritage sites a day, a fly drive or a ferry drive, with yours truly behind the wheel. This year we resolve to go to a self catering resort and essentially just stay on the resort for the whole week. And indeed we do and it’s kinda marvellous. The resort is remote and there is absolutely nothing within walking distance. I slept how I wanted, drank how I wanted, cooked every night, and read a million books. Well not quite, but books blog post to come as I’ve not written one for years. Towards the end of the week I said to T that I had rather enjoyed it and would be up for another week of lounging and reading. I don’t think he quite agreed.
No news on the MRI. Neurology have proven hard to contact – the phone is never answered, there is no email address. So I wrote them a letter and five days later the frazzled woman phones. I am in the queue. They are aware. The waiting lists are getting longer. No more detailed updates can be given. Wait.
Eventually I am seen mid October, six months after the seizure. A space becomes available at the MRI in the Sport Science department of Loughborough University where they keep an MRI as part of their work with elite athletes. On the Olympians’ day off the NHS gets to play with it instead.
I’ve had 2 head MRIs before this as part of research projects in the University of Nottingham – in 2017 they were trying to work out if you could visualise noise related hearing loss through MRI, and it turned out you can. In 2022 the same researcher got back in touch and asked if I’d be up for going back through the tube for another project and yes, I did. In exchange for your time, they emailed you some scans of your own head, which I have now printed on a mug and use as a desk tidy at work. I rather like this slice which demonstrates very clearly why I am short sighted:
Look how non-spherical that eyeball is!
Anyway, I have had head MRIs before and this one for personal clinical reasons is no different from the earlier ones. A bit bangy, a bit claustrophobic, but concentrate on breathing deeply and it’s over soon enough. This tube has a lovely screen to focus on above your head. I mean, it would be lovely but they take your glasses off you and I can’t see that far without them, just look at those egg-shaped eyeballs.
There’s a team of about 4 people manning this MRI centre – a receptionist, a couple of nurses in scrubs to say what to do and where to wait. At the end a very nicely-spoken lady in a white coat and a fancy hair do comes out to thank me for staying still and to warn me that getting the imaging done is only one part of the process. The images now need reviewing and that will take another few months.
So back to the GP for the next blood pressure review. The pills do not work. The GP gives me a choice – a few more months on the same pills, but redouble my efforts at exercise or start new pills. He is wanting from me 150 minutes a week with an elevated heart rate. In fact my Fitbit and Google Fit are already monitoring and I manage something like this most weeks anyway – largely from walking up the hill to my house, and occasionally, weirdly, from bellringing, which Fitbit misinterprets as swimming. The GP is not reassured by this and wants me to fit real, heart-rate rising exercise into my routine weekly activity. I don’t have the heart to tell him about the week by the pool on La Gomera.
A few years ago, I sort of ran. I recently had an email from Park Run with a list of all my runs. Fewer than 10, the most recent five years ago, age grade around 30%. PB was 35.44 in 2015. So if any exercise is to be done, sort of running seems to be it? I can’t cycle. I don’t want to swim in local pools although I do like splashing in the sea on holiday / Wales in September. But, you know a 5k didn’t used to be impossible. But it had been a while so I resolved to start gently, plotted a one mile route from my front door and off I went at a very slow jog. My knees hurt to start at once and then they really hurt but I persisted and got back and then it was clear that my knees were a serious problem.
The pain hasn’t gone away since last October. I now have bad knee days. There are bellringing days when I worry about not being able to get back down the stairs. I can’t do heel kicks any more. I have to get out of cars like an old lady, swivelling slowly sideways and using the handle.
I have taken the knees to the physio and they suggested some exercises which haven’t really helped and strongly implied the problem was probably that I was old and lazy. Two insurmountable problems. But given I was expecting to hear arthritis, it’s possibly good news.
So now I need to find something else that raises heart rate and I’ve not got there yet. I did personal trainer / gym, for a few years a decade ago and I don’t want to do that again. I am reluctant to start swimming, but I probably should. I probably last tried a Nottingham municipal pool 25 years ago (I can remember where I lived, it was two houses ago and I’ve lived here 19 years this Christmas) and I found it hard to complete even one length. They’ve subsequently demolished that pool and there were long-running rumours it was going to be a mosque so everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it was just turned into a Lidl.
The GP also finally tackled the caffeine question. I had deliberately not been raising it but he actually asked at the most recent appointment. Turns out six mugs of filter coffee a day is actually quite a lot, who knew. Caffeine has never affected my sleep so it was easy to overlook it might be having other health consequences. I sort of stupidly had drinking a lot of caffeine as a personality thing so I felt it was very deeply ingrained and impossible to change. But it turns out my brand of ground coffee (which Nectar once told me I bought more of than anyone else in Nottingham) is also available in decaff. The doctor said switch mostly to decaff or tea, and I did, and that was actually a very straightforward easy lifestyle change.
Having had a lovely time lounging by a pool for my September summer holiday, a similar opportunity came up for Christmas, and I had both Christmas and New Year alone in Madeira. On two previous visits to this resort, I have had a car, but there was loads to do directly from site both on foot, through organised trips, taxis and even via local public transport. Turns out a fortnight mostly reading books, eating, drinking and quite a lot of walking is amazing, and I will definitely pencil it in for future years. Maybe not every year, as it was rather pricey.
In the new year, I finally received the outcome of the MRI telling me there were no abnormalities detected. This meant I had done all the tests neurology wanted and essentially had the all clear to return to driving. If I had followed the right path, I could have been back behind the wheel the same day I received the letter but because I had filled in the obvious but wrong form, I had to wait for codified permission from the DVLA. I completed the form that had arrived with the “you must not drive” letter, and posted it to neurology expecting them to return it to me. I did this wrong and week later, the neurology person phoned me again and asked me to post extra parts of the form to them and told me THEY would post it to the DLVA. I was worried about this because I would have no idea on timelines or when to expect a response.
It was a long wait. I managed an Easter holiday to the Dordogne – another remote resort, this time driving duties undertaken by my brother, who conveyed me, my father and two thirds of the nephews around for a week. Fab time had by most, eventful journey home involved being deplaned and hotelled for 24 hours while they struggled to get a plane that would fly…
The timelines are a little blurry now but at some point the DVLA posted me back my entire application and medical evidence with a complaint that I hadn’t sent them a fresh photo. (They hadn’t asked for one, but my old photocard was old, so perhaps I should have understood they would need one.) The handwritten paper form had been annotated by hand in red ink, and a slip in it explained this meant it had already been checked and not found wanting so all they were waiting for was a photo.
I can remember I took the photo at a student photo ID booth on campus the same day as a university choir concert, so that must have been 16th March 2024. I started using the DVLA licence online checker and have a screenshot from 23rd March from when it went from “you may not drive” to “you have a full driving licence.”
Once the permission was back, then the technicalities. My car was completely dead. No battery, brakes locked. I live on a steep hill on the inside of a tight bend, and my drive slopes downhill so it was quite a technical feat to tow the car out. We blocked the road for a bit and the tow truck driver passed the hauling cable around a tree to be able to pull in the right direction. The steering was extremely unresponsive and the seats were disgustingly mouldy. But eventually the car was hauled out and taken to the garage and a four-figure sum lavished upon it until it was finally roadworthy once more. I think the garage was a little surprised I would pay, but in fact getting it back on the road was not very much more than the last lot of MOT work needed and although new car is on the cards, I felt getting back to driving probably suggested a pause on that.
I had had some concerns about whether I would remember how to do it, but in fact getting back behind the wheel was like – well I can’t say riding a bike, because I can’t do that – but like a well fitting glove. I was straight back into the swing of it and managed to fit in collecting a parcel, going to Ikea, doing a bellringing tour and getting the seats steam cleaned in the next few days.
Not quite the end of the story – no discharge from neurology yet. The first fit clinic came with an inbuilt consultant review – in fact the appointment for that arrived before any news about my MRI. I almost phoned and cancelled since from my point of view the year of non-driving was over. However, the appointment was useful and the consultant made more sense than the registrar I had had the phone conversation with the year before. He told me that it’s not unusual for a person to have one seizure in their life… but if you have two, you have epilepsy. He talked to me in more detail about drinking, as one possible cause of seizures is withdrawal from alcohol. But this tends to be linked to people who drink mostly nothing, then have a huge 15 pint binge, and the seizure happens in the following days. My drinking pattern is much more regular and the consultant told me, and I quote verbatim here because it’s not the view most people have of me, “your drinking is not that impressive.” The outcome of the appointment was a final referral for an EEG, which is in the calendar for 12 November. If this is all clear, then the seizure journey is finally over. If not…?
As is now traditional, here is a blog post with all of my passport photos. Well, kinda – this photo had to be taken to renew my driving licence after my seizure, and actually I don’t think I have scans of previous driving licence pics. Alarmingly in the 10 years since last time, a strip of ID photos from a booth cost double – £10 not £5 – but for the first time came with a code that means the government can directly use the digital version without you needing to send it in.
Below are 2024, 2015 (these pics are still just sitting on my desk, nine years later), 2005, 1996.
Further self-absorbed “passage of time” posts that established bloggers get to do:
Last year after much pandemic delay, I took my oldest nephew to Paris; this year, his brother having reached Y7 it was his turn. There’s a third, but that birthday will not be reached by him until 2028! Some of what I know about Paris comes from living there during my year abroad from my French & German degree in 1999; some comes from a few years of winter coach trips with the school I used to work at. A few new things this year came from a friend I trained to teach with who does Paris trips with her own school.
Again I am writing this as much for my own benefit to remember how much we did, because we crammed a great deal in and pounded many miles of pavements (around 50 miles in 4 days!) It was just as EPIC and the nephew was a treasure.
Same Ibis hotel as before, 122 rue Lafayette – super close to the Gare du Nord, walkable to Sacré Coeur, Opéra, Grand Rex and on line 7 Poissonière which connects well with lots of lines. There are also many restaurants and cafés in the surrounding streets.
As last year on arrival we dropped bags and started pounding pavements. At least this year we didn’t have to wear masks on the train (everywhere had signs saying masks were compulsory, but only a few people wore them.) We walked down rue Lafayette to the same café I had frogs legs in last year, Restaurant le Royal, 8 rue Lafayette. And I began to realise things had changed over the year and last year as the pandemic was easing we had been extremely lucky to have experienced Paris when it was pretty quiet. This year the café was very busy, the food took ages and we were back to no chattiness from the wait staff, the typical Paris hauteur. Nephew had a burger, I had duck confit with dauphinoise that turned out to be sauté when they arrived. Oh well. We tried frogs legs again, and the nephew made some extremely entertaining disgust faces.
The ultimate goal of the walk was to climb the Arc de Triomphe for night views over the roofs of Paris; last year we got there too late so this year I put us on the metro at Opéra after marvelling the building a bit from the outside. Next time I want a backstage tour of the palais Garnier! (there’s an online one here). This year I used Google Maps to plan lots more of the journeys rather than just eyeballing the metro map, and it favoured the RER a lot over metro trains, so it took us through long walkways to Auber, which is below the Opera tube station and just one stop away from Étoile for the Arc de Triomphe. Which was, of course, closed as we got there. The ticket office closes 45 minutes before the top and without a ticket you can’t get up. So instead we just decided to take pictures of the outside, see the Eiffel Tower for the first time and go on a bit of a wander.
A bit of a wander turned into another 5k on top of the 2k we did from the hotel to the restaurant. We walked from the Arc to the gardens of the Trocadero (it turned out, I didn’t realise at the time and turned away). We turned east and walked along the Seine. We crossed at Pont de l’Alma, stopping for Eiffel Tower pics, walked along to Esplanade des Invalides and crossed pont Alexandre III. Photos, Jeff Koons Balloons, homeless people in tents, and rats. Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries (well the outside of the garden wall.) We peaked at the pyramid and then got on the métro at Palais Royal and headed home.
This time, btw, I didn’t buy “Paris Visite” metro cards, but a series of carnets (the book of ten singles). I will tot up when the credit card statement comes whether it was cheaper or not. There were starting to be signs that they are phasing out carboard metro tickets, so I don’t know what system will be in place next time I go.
As last time, I had booked a guided tour of the Stade de France. I made the same mistake as last time in that they only have English language public tours on Fridays and Saturdays and we were only there Sunday to Thursday, so I had to translate again. The infrastructure is brilliant, the tour has lots of show biz gossip as well as football facts and this time we weren’t shown the jail, we saw the onsite hospital instead. The cranes building the Olympic pool are still there but there has been a lot of progress:
Olympic construction 2023
Olympic construction 2022
From the Stade de France back into the city – this time to actually climb the Arc de Triomphe and get the views. Then two visits booked on the internet the night before, with time stretching a bit. We were bang on time for FlyView Paris – a virtual reality experience where you stand on a fake jetpack and wear VR goggles. I booked two experiences – a flyover all of France and one just of Paris (they also offer Hidden Paris and… the Pyramids…) we started with France and it took us on a whistlestop tour of the entire nation, criss-crossing and returning. I mentally polished my nails to find I’d been to about half the sites already in person. The VR thing occasionally gave you control and it let you pick your own path over Etretat in Normanday and the alps at Aiguille du Midi / Chamonix, where you had to fly over mountains and the sea. This was quite awesome… then we came back for a second tour because if you booked 2, the 2nd was at a massive discount. But the version of the VR they used for the Paris tour was a generation before – no private headphones, no choices of where to fly, slightly lesser graphics. This time as I flew over I was noticing that the Paris sites were out of date. Notre Dame was intact, there was no security fencing at the Eiffel Tower and so on. It was still worth doing – you get to see things from a point of view you could never see in real life.
After that, we were already late for our timed Louvre tickets at 4pm – and we also hadn’t had lunch. So we walked to the Louvre, stopped at a Paul bakery and bought jambon-fromage baguettes which turned out to be a taste sensation for the nephew who ended up having 2 more over the next three days! We walked and ate and I was conscious literally no-one else in Paris would dream of walking and eating when you could sit down and enjoy it properly.
The Louvre let us in, just about, the queue for ticketed entry at the Pyramid wasn’t tooooooo bad. (Last year I went in through the Carousel, much easier, and of course there is also the Port de Lions entry on the other side with no queue) The place was absolutely rammed and we allowed ourselves to be washed along with the crowds towards the Mona Lisa. We did not join the queue to see her up close and personal, we got an oblique side view and hurried on out of dodge. We took in the amazing hall of crown jewels and were just starting to get acquainted with the Egyptians when the guides started flushing us out. It was 5.30, the place closes at 6, and actually clearing so many people out must be quite an endeavour.
We walked around the Tuileries garden as the sun was beginning to set and then onto the Pont des Arts. A little bit of hanging about and thinking – also noticing the locks. If you look at Google Streetview (2014) you can have a view of what the locks used to be like:
Those sides of the bridge were in danger of collapse so have been replaced with glass barriers which cannot have locks put on them. However, any remaining spot for a lockhold on signs, the streetlights, the safety instructions for the boats below, are still infested by incurable romance. Anyway, we walked on from the bridge, up the side of the Panthéon (worth a future visit perhaps?) down past some very chichi interior design places on the rue Bonaparte to St Germain des Prés and the Deux Magots which I airily translated for the nephew as fag ends but which on checking I see I am confusing magot (nest egg?? “stocky figurine from the far east???!) with mégot. Fag end seemed to fit a little better with Simone and Jean-Paul.
We got on the métro (at this point in the middle of our long argument about how to pronounce it, he thought “meat-ro” sounded more French) spent two more carnet tickets and got out at the tour Montparnasse. After a few false starts we finally went through the right door, got into the fastest lift in France and got out for the amazing views over Paris at night. Just as we bought tickets woman scanning them told us if we hurried we’d get to see the Eiffel Tower sparkling, so we hurried up to the outside deck and indeed saw the sparkle. (We were out walking for so long last night we had in fact already seen it twice, la grande dame de fer sparkles in the dark for five minutes every hour, on the hour). As is traditional, I made the nephew buy and write some postcards and I also had the joy of bollocking someone else’s English teenagers who were trying to buy cigarette lighters in the gift shop. The gift shop staff don’t care, but their teachers definitely will! Do you know the phrase “mauvaise idée”? The café there looked dark and closed and no-one was using it, but the staff got me a coffee when I asked and it was fine to sit at the tables for an hour as night fell.
Then we got back on the train back to digs and found a late night pizza place (Vittoria, Paris 10) for dinner. This nephew definitely did know what tiramisu was (that manky coffee thing that dad likes) and also knew what to expect from a chocolate fondant. Before hitting bed, nephew notices his fitbit is only 1,000 steps off 30,000 so we trudge round another block to get him over the line.
(Note to self, Louvre and Pompidou don’t open on Tuesdays, Orsay is closed Mondays)
At this point it is starting to be a little difficult to drag our sorry carcasses out of bed with a spring at 8am, and we both snooze through a few alarms and startle the guy by coming down for breakfast at 09.59 when he is starting to tidy up. Time doesn’t matter today, we have nothing booked until 9pm when we have to find dinner in front of a sporty screen because PSG are playing Bayern Munich.
I am very much appreciating breakfasts made up of cake and cheese. I have not had any vegetables since leaving England. My nephew says orange juice and pizza tomato definitely counts towards your 5-a-week.
Today the weather is brilliantly sunny and we head to the Eiffel Tower. We go to École Militaire and describing it as a kinda French Sandhurst turns out to be entirely unhelpful. This part of town lets me have another look at the Grand Palais Éphemère which so surprised me last year – a temporary palace, housing the contents of the Grand Palais while that is rejuved ready for the Olympics in 2024 (beattie dubs, quite a lot of our trip this time was cluttered with scaffolding as the whole city is getting spruced up for the JO) When the rings swing into town next year, both the temporary and real palaces will be olympic venues.
We walked up through the Champ de Mars and into the queue for the first of two bag checks to climb the Eiffel tower. The staff at both do not really appear to be paying much attention, but I’m sure it’s fine. In the first queue nephew notices PGL staff in uniform, and I say a little too loudly, oh yeah PGL are amazing! and we end up chatting with the staff about the awesome PGL Château and how great they are for school trips. This school group is a bunch of tiny Y5s.
From one queue to another and nephew notices a sign saying top closed. There is definitely nothing wrong with his eyes, he has been spotting things I can barely see and asking ooh what’s that? What’s what? I can’t see anything! When we reach the end of the next queue, buying the walk up the stairs tickets you can’t book in advance, the cashier explains the top is shut because there are too many people, but it might re-open today, tomorrow, *shrug* who knows? She will only sell me a 2nd floor ticket. We climb. I had been dreading this a bit because my knees hurt quite a lot these days, we had already done the steps of the Arc de T yesterday as well as walking the best part of 12 miles. It was not as bad as anticipated. We had a breather on level 1 and took a drink in the bar in the geometric sphere which was filled with gold heart-shaped helium balloons. A bit of a clue about why the summit might be over full today, Valentine’s Day… As we continued to level 2 we passed a man with a backpack hoover cleaning the steps. At level 2 we get views over the city in all four directions and point out the places we’ve been and are going. The tour Montparnasse we were last night, Sacré Coeur which I’ve not planned yet, the balloon in parc André Citroën that is pencilled in.
At this point I’m also mulling over some stats and figs… the signs in the Eurostar said it was 75m under the sea; the Eiffel Tower is over 300m tall and level 2 is 115m. This means we have walked up stairs into the air higher than the chunnel is deep. This seems unlikely. I can see the ground below me, surely the sea is deeper? A bit more googling. It seems Eurostar are a bit confused but the tunnel is 75m below the sea bed and 110m below sea level. At its deepest, Hurd’s Deep northwest of the Channel Islands is 180m deep. If you put the the Eiffel Tower on the sea bed in any part of the English Channel, a large proportion of it would stick up out of the water. The North sea is 700m deep at the lowest point but the average depth is only 95m; the Mediterranean is over 5,000m deep at it’s lowest.
Aaaanyway, back to the main narrative. Eiffel Tower kinda sort of done. The summit is closed so we make do with level 2, then head back down to streetsville. I had planned to walk around the Trocadero gardens, but we are quite late in the day now, and we could see from the air that the fountains were boarded up, probably being cleaned for the Olympics, so we queue for a crêpe and head down the river, and catch a boat. I use Batobus again because we can get out at a different point. We head all the way out and most of the way back and disembark at Hôtel de Ville.
We are headed for the Grand Rex, a large art deco cinema the far end of the Marais. It’s not far, the sun is shining, and we are young so we decide to walk. It’s definitely worth doing. We pass the outside of the Pompidou centre (closed, it’s Tuesday) and the outside of Les Halles which I am amused to see is now Westfield Les Halles, and any number of cafés fleuris, decorated with fake flowers, and a huge graffito of Capitaine Haddock and Tintin snogging.
Finally we find Grand Rex, and pretty much ask at every door where we need to go for Studio Grand Rex. As we walk around the outside, they are laying red carpet for the gala opening of Antman and Wasp Lady, Quantumania. We wonder idly if that means that Paul Rudd is in town. Eventually we find the Studio. This is an interactive tour round parts of the building that takes you through the history of the 90 year old megacinema. Along the way they show you some of the magic of movie making and cinema projection, you get a view down over the actual stage of their largest screen (a 2,300 seater auditorium). They asked us as we bought tickets if we wanted it in French or another language, so we said English, and they said queue here for the English version, your tour will start when this French one has gone in. In fact, we had the whole tour to ourselves, just the two of us, which was awesome but also a little weird, as some of the interactive elements clearly had a bigger crowd in mind. The nephew was dubious at first but the tour won him round quickly and he loved acting out on the green screen and seeing his scene played back. The whole tour ends in a bit of a surprise, but I won’t spoil that for you too much… please go and do this, it’s amazing!
We had a debate about whether we wanted to see a film there that evening, but the PSG match took priority. We needed a viewpoint for sunset for this day so headed for the métro. Nephew started a bit of an obsession with the platform vending machines… can you get what you want out of it before the train comes? Very hit and miss, sometimes easily, sometimes the machines will rob you blind, whether you use coins or contactless. Also there’s a danger you buy maltesers, open the bag and then fling them all over the top deck of a RER while the people nearby laugh at you.
We headed out to the Grande Arche de la Défense for our viewpoint – the plaza beneath it feels very futuristic, not very “Parisian” but very “important big city”. It’s a nice change of vibe, both in the daylight and then after at night. We were there quite a bit before sunset, but there are lots of seats so if you want to sit and wait, that’s fine. There’s no catering here in the evening. The views are super, and you can have a bit of a talk about the Axe Historique and what all lines up neatly here. Also the idea of “golden hour” and starting to understand the phrase Grand Paris, which was new to me, and sounds a little nicer than the proches banlieux. There were hardly any visitors at all, just us, a romantic couple who got a lot better deal than the crowds on the Eiffel Tower on Valentine’s Day, and a crowd of about 6 people who looked like they’d come straight from a work event. It got a bit cold up there but wasn’t quite dark enough for the best photos, so we went inside for the photography exhibition and the gift shop for half an hour. The photos were a mix of the damage and the start of repairs of Notre Dame and a photo essay contrasting the astonishing luxury of the Opéra Garnier and Versailles, obvs, with a hi-rise council estate. We got back outside just before 7pm towards the end of the opening hours when it was properly dark and appreciated the night horizon.
This left us plenty of time to get back on the metro but not at super peak 6pm when the tower block offices were just emptying. A return to the hotel for a brief recharge (of phones!) before finding a restaurant with a TV screen for the match. We went back to Baroudeur Patient outside the Gare du Nord for perfectly respectable, slightly pricy brasserie fare and the kiddo watched the match and I read twitter. We did have a bit of a conversation with two middle aged guys opposite who wanted to practice their English (my aunt she was always the difficult one in my family… she married TWO English guys!! lolwut?) The waiter was keen to impress on the nephew the importance of learning Spanish (oi, mate, seriously?!). The match got very close in its final minutes, the nephew pulled this face:
Then back to the hotel for the closest thing to an early night we got all week!
Tuesday – from Fitbit, 18,882 steps, 13.68km, 65 flights of stairs, 4,053 calories burned.
Day 4 – Wednesday
Nephew had asked to visit Parc des Princes (2 football stadiums in a week!?), which I had never done before, but looking it up on the map it was close to few things that had been on my radar for a while and I’d never done, so it sort of slotted together OK. The visit was booked before leaving the UK for 3pm which left all morning for exploring. We took the métro nearly to the end of line 8, Lourmel, and walked through some interesting parks and neighbourhoods on the way to Parc André Citroën, on the site of a former car factory. I have meant to visit this park for ages, having never got around to it while I lived there in 1999. And now I have to go back because I feel like I’ve seen its winter bones, but not the flowers and colours and fountains that are its main summer features. We were visiting to fly the Ballon de Paris, a tethered helium balloon that climbs up to half an Eiffel tower and does lots of air pollution science. (It rose to 150m, which was higher than we had actually managed on Eiffel Tower day) There were no queues… in fact on our brief flight, the balloon didn’t take off on time because it was waiting for more people. We ended up about 10 of us in the air, and balloon gently twisted so we could take in views in different directions, before silently and smoothly coming back down again. Then we walked the park, saw a single duckling surrounded by Parisians concerned that its mother would not be able to get it out of the water without some kinda ladder (I think a sensible concern – the water features all had concrete overhangs which meant there wasn’t a walking route out for tiny duckling legs). Park and mairie staff in uniform did not share the concern. We didn’t go in the greenhouses. The park is organised around some themes… go read the wiki page.
On from the park to quite a walking day – it’s just a few steps away to a small model of the Statue of Liberty, at one end of the Ile aux Cygnes. The island is small and not a lot going on, there’s some outdoor exercise equipment that creaks and groans, and there’s plaques and things to read. I tried for a while to get a photo with lady Liberty and la grande dame de fer, but basically I think you have to be ON the river to get this shot.
So we walked on towards parc des Princes, at this point with a lot of time to spare we were also keeping our eyes peeled for a neighbourhood boulangerie whence we might procure yet another baguette jambon fromage. We passed a few but they looked a bust – some of them had everything but – but the final one we tried, just around the corner was the ticket. It was a curious place, it could have been straight out of my 1980s childhood with just the addition of a contactless coffee machine. There were very few people in there but it took a long time to get served. When we got to the front the lady instantly detected my non-French accent and attempted to switch to English but unfortunately her English was pretty ropey and communication was poor. Eventually I switched back to French and made myself clear and she was like, oh you DO speak French. Oh, you speak French well! I have some little things I do if anyone ever says this to me, having been corrected on a campsite in Normandy in 2006. You can’t say je fais mon mieux, I do my best with all the words translated straight up. You have to say I do OF my best. Je fais de mon mieux. She eventually went out the back to fetch the jambon and fromage at which point the person behind me in the queue said in French, actually I think you speak French really well, I understood you perfectly, so I wheeled out my next fave, ah monsieur vous êtes trop gentil!
We sat on a bench in the street for our baguettes – I had gone for camembert:
Then on to the stadium. There were a lot of people – it looked like two school trips had just dropped off their students, so there was much milling, and indecision about where to queue. Eventually the teenagers were marshalled away and the door became clear and we wandered in and got stuck in another queue. It became clear we were in the greenscreen queue for fake pics with footballers, which we didn’t need, so we bypassed and got stuck into the “sens de la visite”. It was a self guided tour, follow the signs, look at the places, no guide, just some bouncers keeping us on the right side of the barriers. You sauntered through the pitch, the stadium, the press scrum place, the changing rooms, up to some extremely glitzy VIP boxes, past a very full trophy cabinet. It was a bit chaotic – it would not be fun with a school trip because there were lots of chances to wander off and merge up with other people. It was not nearly as well as organised as the S de F and there was no guide with celebrity gossip, but there were many more people there and the football fans seemed to find it more meaningful.
Then we had to go to the stadium shop. Which was awful! Nephew was trying to buy tops for his friends, having been whastapping them about nothing else for days. But the shop was not well stocked, so compromises had to be made. There was a terrible queue that snaked all around the shop to get to 4 rude cashiers (many more security guards). Frankly everything took much too long and I was glad to get out, get on the métro and return to the hotel for the briefest of sit downs.
The dusk view point for Day 4 was Sacré Coeur, and so we… walked there on an already very walky day. And then wimped out of climbing the worst of the stairs and went up the funicular instead. We had a nice time admiring the views, the love locks and the souvenir shops, and then wandered around the square at the top. I had been hoping to find a cartoonist to draw a pic of the kid – last year I sent the one made of his brother to his mother, and I’d imagined getting the next one to make a set. But no artists were available – there were much fancier portrait painters but no caricaturists.
So for an evening activity… well, we returned to the Grand Rex, via a terrible burger and crepe shop directly opposite. It was still Ant Man in the Grande Salle, in VOST (version originale sous titrée, ie in English with French subtitles.) I don’t think I saw anything with Wasp Lady in it although I think I saw the original Ant Man, but MCU is fine for dropping in and out of. The place was packed with over 2,000 Marvel fans so there were dramatic gasps and whooping and the whole place went nuts at the post-credit reveals. It was exciting to see a film with so many fans again. I was vaguely annoyed at never having been here before: my Paris studies included a film class that made us go to the cinema every week, and I went a lot more than that, to screens all around Paris. And somehow I never heard of Grand Rex, which is such an exciting venue. I was so excited about it I even looked up the future screenings to see if maybe it was worth returning for a weekend with just the plan of seeing a big premier. The list includes lots of American titles, many MCU, Dune II…
We went for a very late showing that kicked out well after midnight and as we came out we found the road closed to traffic with a lot of work going on as it was being resurfaced. A quick play with my phone maps and we found out actually, it really wasn’t very far from our hotel on foot, so we got even more steps and walked back to base.
Wednesday – from Fitbit, 26,426 steps, 19.19km, 43 flights of stairs, 4,483 calories burned. (Wednesday was the day I got my 70k steps!)
Day 5 – Thursday
The night before we didn’t get back to the hotel until nearly 1am so I was again in no hurry to get to breakfast. The Nephew chose to eat a kiwi fruit, an action so out of character I took a photo. This being our final day we knew whatever we had planned we had to return to the hotel to collect bags before too long. The choices were the Pompidou centre or les Invalides – both places I had walked past the outside of many times but never actually been into. I opted for les Invalides in the end. It’s really shameful I had never been before as my digs when I lived here had a very close view of the golden dome and I walked past it practically every day. I think there are parts you can visit without paying – the corridors, the soldier’s cathedral, the shop and café; but we also visited an amazing display of armour and weapons and the Tomb of Napoléon, which is… really quite something extraordinary.
We went for a coffee and a snack in a nearby café and a quick walk down back streets to the now extremely chichi rue Cler which was once my local shopping street before heading back to the hotel. Before we checked in for the train we went hunting – a house in the same street as the hotel is one of those mystery ones bought by the Métro and converted into ventilator shafts. Up close if you know it’s there, it’s not hard to spot which one it is.
We bought more cheese and ham baguettes to eat on the train and checked in for the return journey to London. The terminal was crowded and chaotic and there were frequent announcements to warn us that most of the toilets on our train were out of order and to make sure we used the station facilities. Which was pretty poor, but made worse by the fact that also, most of the station facilities were out of order too.
Onto the Eurostar, successful parental hand-off at St Pancras and then as one last treat before heading home to Nottingham, I met up with a friend in London for some transport highlights. The Elizabeth Line! The DangleWay! How exciting!
Thursday – from Fitbit, 16,012 steps, 11.59km, 34 flights of stairs, 3,795 calories burned.
We went to Lanzarote in October last year, mainly for a pilgrimage around the César Manrique sites but I love to swim in the sea and Lanzarote was amazing for that. There were four beaches we tried which were easily available since we had a hire car – but one was a very straightforward walk from our Costa Teguise digs.
I am very short sighted, so for a while I have been using goggles with lenses in – when I’m sea swimming alone, this is literally the only way of ever finding my clothes again. My eyes are -12 and the strongest lenses available are -8, but this is easily enough to make a huge difference. Goggles like this are easily available, including on Amazon.
My main concern with the goggles is just not getting lost or losing my glasses, but in Lanzarote there was an unexpected benefit in that you could also immediately see the amazing sea life. There were tropical fish everywhere we swam, immediately available to see in all of the beaches, right around the swimmers legs. It seemed a lot of people were oblivious, just getting on with usual beach/sea horseplay and not looking below the water. But every beach also had its share of snorkelers around the rock formations checking out the variety of stripy and bright flashed tropical fish. Perhaps next time I’m headed to a similar location, I’ll be packing an optical snorkel mask – not something I knew existed but also cheaply available on Amazon!
I also have very fair skin and I hate sun cream so almost all of the times we were taking our tops off on beaches were late in the day – 5pm and onwards – so pretty successful in avoiding sunburn while swimming.
Playa del Caleton Blanco
The first beach was the first day. After check in we just drove for a bit to see what we could see, and Playa del Caleton Blanco was in the north east of the island. There are informal car parks on one side of the main road, and on the other, a mix of volcanic rock and dazzling white bays. There’s any number. It’s a completely wild place with no shops or toilets, and as we came there late in the day there were only a handful of other people there. There were any number of bays to choose from, all shallow, calm and gentle. It was a struggle to get to waist depth, but plenty enough water to dunk your hair in and as soon as you looked under the waves there were fish to see.
Playa Famara
Again late in a day after visiting cultural sites, we made our way to Playa Famara, on the north coast under the cliffs that are home to the Mirador view points including the Manrique resort one.
This beach is famous for surfing, and there is a little sort of shanty town here full of surfers, and space to park your camper van. The vibe here is very different. There’s at least a mile of sandy beach with parking and a small supermarket at one end. The days we were there there were red flags flying, but it didn’t stop a small army of surfers, so we went in the sea too. Swimming is tricky here, it’s more one of those beaches for jumping up and down in enormous waves. But the sea and the wind are warm so I was happy to jump in the surf for hours. I didn’t really put my head down into the sea to see the sea life as I was too happy just bobbing around.
Playa de Papagayo
Our itinerary had taken us south in the island, and although this was still a drive away, nowhere is really far on Lanzarote. This looked good from googling, but on arrival it was slightly offputting. There is parking but it is a long way away from paved roads. You have to follow bone shaking rough roads for a few kilometers, and the only indication you were on the right track is that there were a lot of people doing the same. As we were again late in the day for a typical beach trip, most of the people were leaving but there were quite a few in the same direction as us. At one point we passed through what felt like a toll booth – I think if you choose a more normal time, you have to pay, but in the early evening everything was shut up and we just drove through. If there is a charge, I think it’s an astonishingly reasonable €3 a day
The unmetalled roads led to a busy car park followed by a path up to a headland, what turned out to be a series of headlands with bays and beaches down steep paths in each one. There were miles of this beginning to be visible, with different sorts of beaches. The further ones seemed to have fewer people and bigger waves. At the top of the cliff there’s a small and busy restaurant with outdoor tables. We didn’t eat, but it smelled good.
From the headland looking down into the beach I had huge waves of feeling how fortunate I was. This struck me as a world class, tourist brochure cover beach. Golden sand, luscious waves, lots of swimmers. I think this would be an amazing place to stay and watch a sunset.
We walked the headlands a bit for photos then went down to swim. This beach had a strong slope so it got deep quite quickly, and you could easily be swimming out of your depth just a few metres from the shore. Again there were a lot of fish to see with snorkelers above them highlighting where everything was.
Playa del Jablillo
The final beach was one closest to our accommodation – easily walkable. We’d walked around it after dark on our first night and not been super impressed. It’s right outside a noisy ziggurat hotel with some sort of pool entertainment and the noise from that (karaoke? bingo?!) wafted from the bar over the beach.
So it was a bit of surprise to read that despite the close encroachment of holidaymakers, this beach too is a magnet for tropical fish and snorkelers. There’s an artificial reef partially closing the bay which creates a safe place to swim but which has also made it a great home for the wildlife. One side of the bay to the other is just over 200m, most of it properly deep, which, it turns out, is a bit further than I can comfortably swim there and back.
In the peak of day you can hire sun loungers and parasols and presumably there’s some kind of drinks service, but by the time we got there this was closed for the day. There are still a few miles of beach front businesses nearby with all sorts of bar and food offers.
Taking full advantage of non-term time holidays for the first time in 10 years, we headed to Lanzarote to stay at HPB’s Santa Rosa site. Rather used to the “spectacular historical building” side of HPB, the “pool based resort” version was a bit of a shock to the system, but our upper floor apartment boasted a sea view as well as the pool, a full sun balcony and the standard well-equipped self-catering kitchen. (I did use the butter dish, couldn’t find the soup tureen but didn’t use the rolling pin.)
You can definitely see the pool and just about see the sea
Our main purpose of heading to Lanzarote was a cultural pilgrimage of the sites of César Manrique, a Lanzarote-born artist who had a 1960s vision for tourism on the island and built some des res resorts but whose vision of classy, artsy tourism eventually gave way to mass package holidays. Our resort certainly catered well for the English-speaker hoping not to have to deal with anything unspeakably foreign; but we were able to find the vaguely authentic without having to trek too far.
One feature of the island was unfinished and derelict development. The island has been hit by a planning scandal which saw notable politicians jailed for bribery and development malfeasance and the upshot is large scale half-finished projects. Driving to our digs we passed a huge number of empty, windowless buildings with flapping tarp, and the skyline view from our balcony was a huge concrete shell.
This was Manrique’s home up until the end of the 80s. Large rooms carved into rocks with passive ventilation, a view of a volcano and many, many rooms with banquettes built into walls with cushions on top. Some wag on the 4Square checking in app had labelled it César’s shag palace and the view of him running bunga bunga parties everywhere started to colour my appreciation for the interior design. All his rooms could certainly lend themselves to orgiastic pursuits.
View from upper floor down into a pool in a lava cavern
For the past three years, the Fundacíon has filled the rooms of Manrique’s house with photos of Manrique using those rooms. This detracts slightly from a purist attempt to appreciate the mid century interior design, but certainly gives a strong flavour of the life once lived here.
I never knew César Manrique had made a sculpture of your girlfriend!
A big feature of his art was kinetic sculptures that either move in the wind or use the wind to change shape when you’re not looking; and each of his major installations had a huge sculpture announcing it.
Never the same sculpture twice
After a few days driving, you started to navigate the roads by the sculptures
The next sculpture along was a Monument to Fertility overlooking an installacíon praising Lanzarote’s farmers for all they did to bring forth abundance from lava fields. As you can clearly see, the sculpture is a representation of a farmer with with a beast of burden (probably a camel) tilling the fields. It is painted a brilliant white and made from abandoned water tanks from ships.
Monumento al Fecundidad
The monument gives great views over the complex underneath: a row of workshops and salesrooms for artisans, a restaurant, and dug into the ground, a really massive dining hall. Really massive dining halls turned out to be a feature of many of Manrique’s sites.
Fabulous idea but in application… well several of the shops were empty. The leatherworker had a nice leather worked sign saying back later. There was a cochineal beetle dyeing workshop and a tempting soap maker but the tiny bars were €7 each.
The place was whitewashed and treated with the traditional green Manrique wanted to be the only colour on buildings on the island.
On a drive slightly off the beaten park to small town in the mountains. The Fundacíon CM was in his house up until the late 80s and the House/Museum was the luxury pad Manrique developed from 1988 to his sudden death in a car accident in 1992. As such the interior design was beginning to have a different feel. Still an outdoor pool and a house looking in on itself. A millionaire artist on an island choosing a house with no views was a definite decision. The house was laid out, apparently, exactly as he had left it on his death.
His ‘n’ his sinks
Manrique’s drinks cabinet. I could work with this.
Technically I think this site was not César Manrique, but the work of another 60s artist who developed a path through lava tubes and a series of rooms within. The bilingual tour lasted 50 mins, and had a truly excellent joke they asked us not to spoil à la Mousetrap. There was even a concert hall halfway around.
I knew the word “mirador” as “viewpoint” from Madeira holidays. This viewpoint is built high into a mountain with a view over to one of the tiniest Canary islands. Again the interior design is spectacular, built around the views. There’s a beautiful bar with modestly priced snacks and drinks.
We’d tried to visit this first thing in the morning only to find it absolutely heaving – carpark very full, several coaches there – so we pulled a Uey in the carpark and went over to the caves instead, which was also very full but extremely efficient at moving groups through the site.
Jameos for underground lava tunnel, agua as in water
I’d heard a few of these sites described as Bond villain lairs, and this one was perhaps the Bondiest of lairs. It’s the same huge lava tunnels through the rock as the caves above, but this is set out as a huge underground dining hall, access to a huge freshwater pond filled with white crabs that live here and nowhere else on the planet. (I don’t understand how bright white tiny crabs living on jet black rocks haven’t been fished out of existence by birds… but actually there weren’t all that many birds in evidence anywhere on the island). Beyond the nature pool is a swimming pool like a larger version of Manrique’s own home, and beyond that is a massive auditorium with banquettes carved into the rock.
Tiny endangered crabs
I didn’t quite get how this was supposed to work as a resort because there wasn’t any accommodation. It would be a great place to see a show, have a meal, get a drink… then what? A bus back to Costa Teguise?
This is an ancient fort in the capital town of Arecife, given the full César Manrique treatment. Upstairs is a small modern art museum MIAC with a few interesting pieces and downstairs is… what by this point was becoming familiar as the Manrique dining hall / bar vernacular. The bar was laid out the same as the Mirador and the Jameos del Agua – and later too, the Jardin de Cactus. Same mirrored alcoves (from a different material). Same cupboards and fridges, same hinges on perhaps a different wood. The same vast fine dining scale as the Monumento and Jameos. The staff in all of the places wore the same uniform (and almost appeared to look alike!)
I might have critiqued it for being samey but I’m now wondering if I can do out the back wall of my conservatory in homage
I did enjoy the art #butisitart
I loved the placement of this piece in a stairwell so you could appreciate it from many different angles as you went up and down the stairs.
It was a jardin. With Cactus in it. Meh. Well I wanted to be meh at the start, and it was a little samey, as much horticultural variety as could be provided from just cactus laid out in a terraced basin. But there were some waves of Manrique magic overlaid.
Another bar, but this one with cactus
Famously mad toilet door signs
Kinetic art
Massive roadside sculpture
Cactus crenellations on top of the walls
A historic windmill that seemed to have made cornmeal / polenta
We were completely in two minds about visiting this place. On the one hand – chicken cooked over volcanic fumes, another amazing lookout spot, twisted volcanic rock, volcanic demonstrations. On the other, horrendous online reviews about two hour queues, food poisoning from inadequately cooked volcanic chicken and T’s recollection that it had been awful 15 years previously.
In the end we decided to go and took the precaution of arriving not too long before it closed for the day. A brief queue before we were allocated a parking spot. A slightly strange twist that the main attraction was a bus ride for which a face mask was compulsory – the only covid shadow over the whole week really. No mention of this at any other point than immediately before you got on the bus; happily the gift shop sold masks for under a euro, so hurdle easily crossed. The bus tour was good – some really other-wordly views of lava formed rocks that looked like they had only barely cooled, and an English / German / Spanish narration that covered the bases and had some lovely colourful German idiom (“unterirdisches Grollen”)
The volcanic demonstrations were simple but effective – if we put a bush in this cave it bursts into flames in about 3 minutes, if we pour water down this tube, BOOOM, insta geyser.
The restaurant had a lot in common with all the other large viewpoint dining rooms – there was an à la carte menu but we ate a perfectly respectable volcano-grilled chicken panini from the snack bar at the self-service tables.
Restaurants
Over the week we mostly cooked and ate in the evenings in the self catering digs, but we also lunched at very reasonable prices at the Mirador del Rio, the Jardin de Cactus, Timanfaya and the Monumento al Campesino. We had great evening tapas at La Tabla and a good Italianish mean Restaurante Sausolito, both in Costa Teguise.
Separate post to follow about the beaches and sea swimming.
As a student, I lived in Paris for six months in 1999 and as a teacher I was a staff member on four coach trips there, so I’ve some experience of the city and of young people. I’d offered to my brother to take the oldest nephew for a half term trip there at some point. The initial plan was when he was 11, and Nectar points were converted to Eurostar tickets for October 2019, but some pandemic wave or other prevented this from happening. It’s just been possible now to reconvert Eurostar vouchers to tickets and try for a February dash.
And it was EPIC. The nephew was supremely well behaved and adventurous and endured an extremely dense itinerary across Paris over four days. We visited the old classics and I also included a huge range of things I’ve wanted to do for years but never quite got around to.
I am writing up the list here as much as an aide-mémoire for myself because we got through so much… and there are two more nephews…
Sunday arrival, after dark
Drop bags off at hotel, chosen for cheapness and proximity to Gare du Nord. This was an Ibis (an old favourite of mine, reasonably priced, huge continental breakfast). We used Ibis Gare du Nord, 122 rue Lafayette, which turned out to be ideal. 300m from Gare du Nord which meant we could get all over Paris – walk to Sacré Coeur, take RER to catacombes and Stade de France. Just a few paces down rue Lafayette is the Église St Vincent de Paul which was JUST beginning to have cherry blossom, and the Métro station Poissonière which goes directly to the Louvre and from there, the ultimate touristy destinations of Métro line 1. A sneaky building over the road is actually a métro vent hiding behind a façade.
Immediately after dropping bags off we went for a walk. My thought was that we’d been sat down and masked for five hours at St Pancras and on the train, so a bit of time stretching legs and breathing normally was required. The hotel is about 3 miles from the Arc de Triomphe with interesting things en route and a nice chance to absorb what the city feels like and the styles of buildings. So off we set.
At this point we also noticed how many awesome French cafés and restaurants there were right outside the hotel with also some Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Italian choices.
We walked almost as far as Opéra Garnier and stopped for dinner at Restaurant Le Royal, 8 rue Lafayette… including frogs legs, which nephew bravely tried. To be honest, I’d never had these before and probably wouldn’t have ordered them or been brave enough to eat them myself if it hadn’t been for showing off. But they are basically garlicky chicken wings, although they are very obviously very froggy in appearance. My main was a souris d’agneau (lamb mouse? it was a shank!) with a ratatouille and a cheese burger for nephew.
The waiters here were extremely friendly and helpful, and chatty. We bumped into one waitress outside in a fag break and she persuaded us inside. Paris waiters are notorious for brusqueness if not rudeness, and for switching to English at the merest hint of an accent in your French. Many friends of mine have felt slightly snubbed because waiters essentially refuse to speak French to them. Despite a French degree and a decade teaching French, I am no exception and almost all Paris waiters switch to English for me too. I assume this is just because they are absolutely working at full tilt and rushed off their feet and it is simply quicker to switch to English and more likely they manage to bring the food you actually want without the complication of changes. Perhaps because we arrived at this café so late after most people had gone, the waiters had more time to be friendly and chatty and help the nephew practise his French. Which was lovely. They were also amazed we had walked “so far” – about 2km at this point.
On past the Opéra building with a mini lecture about fly towers towards the Arc de Triomphe and our first view of the Eiffel Tower in night mode with its search light. The plan had been to climb the arch for a night view of the city but we arrived too late in the end and the ticket office was already closed. Instead we went down into the métro, bought a Paris Visite ticket each (13 year olds count as adults here…) and planned a route home to bed.
Since the route back to our hotel involved changing at the Louvre stop anyway, we got out there and went upstairs to look at the pyramid and the Louve palace from the outside.
The only trip I had planned from the UK in advance was a guided tour of the Stade de France, as nephew is v interested in football. Unfortunately there weren’t any guided tours in English in the time we were staying there so we had to do a tour in French with me translating highlights to nephew as and when required. I was highly dubious of this part of the trip, but in fact it was fascinating. Even though I have no interest in football, the infrastructure elements were really amazing and the tour really pushed my “finding out how things work” buttons. On the way we were shown cranes that turned out to be the construction of the 2024 Olympic pool and village so perhaps the next nephews will get some very different views! The visit includes the pitch, the on-site jail (!) the players’ changing rooms, the presidential suite and a special look at how the stands can be retracted – which takes 6 days to do!
Train back to the hotel and a walk up the many many steps to Sacré Coeur from the side. First through the wedding dress district of Montmartre – many dress shops and a few groomsmen outfitters too. Up the top for savoury crêpes in the place du Tertre and a strange encounter with a street artist.
Down the funicular (why down?? up would have made more sense!) which we did free with our Paris Visite métro cards but would have been free anyway as for some reason the barriers were unstaffed and open. A few more streets to the nearest métro station and away to the Grande Arche de la Défense.
I lived in Paris for half a year and used Métro Line 1 pretty much daily, but I only ever knew Défense as the terminus of the line, so this was the first time I visited. It’s quite impressive. Unfortunately the roof visit is closed on Mondays. So we just wandered around the huge plaza and gawped a bit before heading back onto the métro to the Arc de Triomphe which this time was open, so we climbed the steps to the top. Legs seriously hurty by now after 3km of walking around the stadium and climbing stair cases to Montmartre as well as the enormous spiral staircase here.
Views, selfies, a grey sky view of the Eiffel Tower. Back down the steps and onto the Métro. I wanted to see if the ice rink was outside the Hôtel de Ville again this year (just to look, not to fall down on) and I also wanted to wander around the amazing department store BHV. Nephew was dubious why anyone would ever want to go shopping but was a convert once he discovered there was pretty much a whole floor of computers and phones…
It turns out the huge square in front of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris is actually currently a vaccination centre for Covid. Sign of the times!
At this point we got back on the métro (so helpful to have unlimited travel during the whole stay thanks to Paris Visite tickets) back to the hotel and out again to look for a café for the evening. This evening I was less decisive than Sunday night and back to my old habit of wandering for miles past many places that would have been fine. Part of the excuse was actually nephew quite fussy on food front so we did check menus before going in and eliminated a few ideas. One pizza place looked ideal but was rammed so we wandered, and turned a few streets and let ourselves get delightfully lost – one of my favourite Paris activities normally but perhaps not ideal late at night with a young teen and when starving! We eventually found Pizza Capri, 49 rue Richer, late in their service and for a while had the place to ourselves. Another excellent, very friendly waitress, jokingly bullying nephew into ordering his own food and saying some whole French sentences. Strangest nephew question of the whole trip “what’s a tiramisu?”
On our way home trying to get unturned around, discovered our hotel is also very easy walking distance from Folies Bergère…
The night before I had booked more tickets. This seems much more important in covid times than normal. The weather looked a bit grim for Tuesday so I tried to switch my mental plan around a little and go the Louvre on a grey day and save climbing the Eiffel Tower for the following, sunnier day. This turned out not to be possible as the Louvre was sold out for Tuesday. Well worth bearing this in mind – book ahead and book more than a day ahead.
So we ended up heading for the Eiffel Tower anyway, definitely an expected highlight for nephew. I have only ever gone up the Eiffel Tower by climbing the stairs of Level 1 and 2 – and you actually cannot prebook tickets for this. There were no queues to speak of when we eventually got there.
I planned the day with a bit of a walk to start with because I wanted to see my old studenty neighbourhood. (I had an amazing address in the 7th because I had a crummy maid’s apartment without my own bathroom.) We took the métro to Place de Concorde and walked over the Alexandre III bridge down to les Invalides, past my old address on av de la Motte Picquet and my old stamping ground the rue Cler. Then on to École Militaire to walk the Champ de Mars to the Eiffel tower. A couple of KM but oh, our legs at this point after days of walking and stairs!
Opposite the old École Militaire is currently a wood and polythene building called the Grand Palais Éphemère, which was a surprise to me… Googling at home, I discovered it’s a temporary building hosting things from the Grand Palais (I’ve never been there…) which is being refurbished ahead of the Olympics, and the temporary building itself will be an Olympic venue before being removed at the end 2024. Remember the Eiffel Tower was also intended as a temporary building but somehow has lasted since 1889!
Up the Eiffel Tower stairs. This was harder on the old legs than the last time I did it with a school party! The new exclusion zone around the pillars of the tower worked fine but there were serious bag checks and airport-style metal detectors to get through first. So, we climbed the stairs, admired the view and I used the facilities there for the first time in all my years visiting. A lift to the very top, the photos and a new one for me – an attempt at video calling home. It didn’t quite work as it was busy and windy at the top, but the call was placed from beneath.
Down the lift and stairs again, much easier than up! And across the road for a very trashy snack lunch from a street stall selling French hotdogs and other snackery. Then down the steps to the Eiffel Tower stop on all the various boat tours.
There are many options and most are fine with turn up and go plans. I chose Batobus as it looked like it was the next one due to arrive and it runs a plan like many cities have open-top sightseeing buses – you can hop on and off and your ticket is valid all day. In the end we just sat and did a complete tour, happy to see the sights and happy to be sitting down and resting our legs for an hour. I did mentally pencil in the sculpture garden just before the turning around stage for something that would be interesting to do on a subsequent trip.
Nephew had been interested in the Statue of Liberty and the fact that she was a gift from France to the United States. I was able to share that there is a small copy of her on the Seine – in fact we saw it from the Eiffel Tower – and that she is held up by a miniature Eiffel Tower structure inside her designed by the same Gustave Eiffel. Unfortunately the boat tour didn’t go as far as that on its return, so visiting Madame Liberté is also something pencilled in for a future trip.
Batobus eventually returned us to our starting point on the quai under the Eiffel tower and we got out and walked along the river bank to another old favourite of mine, the Sewer Museum. You can walk down a set of concrete steps to a mix of tunnels, some of which are bespoke museum and some of which are working sewer tunnels with actual sewage flowing down them to the huge riverside collection tunnel which takes most Paris effluent for treatment outside and downhill from central Paris. (Most, because like London, in stormy weather the whole system is a little overwhelmed and just dumps into the river.) Most of Paris has a network of sewage tunnels that follow the street pattern even lower down than the métro tunnels. If you want to work up a detailed understanding of sewage you can spend half a day there reading all the panels (they will give you a printed English translation of everything if you ask) but you can get a basic understanding and walk along some mock alleyways in an hour.
We were ahead of my mental schedule when we left the tunnels so we continued our walk along the river, past the American Church and a bunch of embassies in search of the Musée Rodin. I had booked tickets for this in the expectation of doing it the following day when we were planning to see a bunch of different museums, but a quirk of the prebooked ticket is that it was valid for ANY day after purchase, not a specific day or time. This visit was more for me than the nephew – despite living very close to its beautiful location near les Invalides, I had never actually visited. I’ve never been inside the Invalides either! The museum has many of his sculptures including many different versions of The Thinker, the Burghers of Calais and the Gates of Hell, many outside in a well tended garden as well as a large house of statue and paintings. One of these paintings is Van Gogh’s Père Tanguy. I was unable to get nephew to recreate the pose of any of the statues and he was previously not aware of either Rodin or Van Gogh so wasn’t super interested.
Our next stop was a return to the Grande Arche de la Défense and this time it was open to the public. At the foot of the tower was a ticket booth with a really chatty saleswoman and somehow a conversation started on the back of her asking me which départment of France I was from (this is a frequent question at venues like this as they track visitor origin data). We ended up each showing off in various languages, so I gave her my best Italian attempt, due biglietti per favore, and she gave me a long blast of response in Russian which I could understand none of!
Unlike the leg challenge of the Eiffel Tower, the only way to the top of the Grande Arche was by a set of amazing lifts that only had buttons for level 3 and level 35. The view at the top is good, much of it beyond actual Paris into Grand Paris. There are the skyscapers that are banned from actual Paris, including one still in construction. I’d never been up here before so the enormous exhibition space was a surprise. When we were there it was an A-Z retrospective of a paparazzo photographer Daniel Angeli – the one who took the famous photo of the Duchess of York with her foot in a Texan’s mouth – which was included in the display. There was a whole panel of Johnny Halliday, which led to a conversation that went “He’s like a French Elvis!” / “Who’s Elvis?”
The sun was beginning to set at this point and the next idea to carry out was to find a nice spot with a good view of the Eiffel Tower when she does her hourly sparkle session. This happens for five minutes after the hour, every night time hour. I thought returning to the Place de la Concorde would be a good bet so we hopped back on the métro. Unfortunately, it was 6.30pm and all of the very many offices all around la Défense had just kicked out. The métro was very full indeed and the nephew was a little freaked at peak time megacity mass transit. By the time we got to Place de la Concorde, we were very grateful to return to the surface and breathe. We were in time for the 7pm sparkle and we sat on bollards and watched.
Then it was time to eat. But Place de la Concorde is not full of budget eateries or eateries at all, and is slap bang in the centre of some of the most expensive real-estate on the planet, so we walked. Again. Again for ages. We took streets north and east, and walked through Place Vendôme, famous for extreme luxury brands, and it was entertaining to window shop on the way. It was also interesting to know what brands the nephew knew and didn’t – Gucci and Balenciaga and even Chanel were on his horizon but Patek Philippe was not. I guess I’m not getting a watch for Christmas again.
Ultimately with enough up and right we ended up on rue Étienne Marcel, having explored the menus outside a bunch of cafés and restaurants until ‘appy ‘our posters at Café Étienne Marcel drew us in. Ribs for the little ‘un and a caesar salad for me. This place was busy and the waiter here was not up for a chat. At dessert o’clock he brought us a tray of pâtisserie to see what was available and for me it was a Paris-Brest which was absolutely delicious and the teen took a tarte au citron which went a long way towards his 5 a day #beatscurvy. A quick stagger from there found a métro stop on line 4 which took us back to the Gare du Nord and an easy walk back to our digs on what had been a really epic day of walking and climbing.
Wednesday was booked in as our giant museum day so up early for timed tickets at the Louvre. I got slightly turned around at the métro station and ended up following signs for the Carousel du Louvre, the underground shopping centre tacked on the huge underground space beneath the giant glass Pyramid. This turned out to be a really quiet back way of getting into the museum with next to no queuing at all. There was a short hold up for bag check but then it was easy enough to walk right into the museum and around. The place was very busy, people everywhere. A visit to the Louvre is always two museums in one – the building itself, and what that tells us about pre-Revolutionary France, and the contents. Our route took us through the basements where there is a display on the mediaeval foundations and walls of one of the earliest fortress palaces on the site, up through some of the extensive Egyptology collections (personally I always try and find the mummified cats, but the layout now puts mummified dogs as one of the first things you see.) A giant timeline had me trying to work out when the Egyptian artefacts were from compared to the timeline for construction of the Louvre itself… was Ancient Egypt really so many thousand years before European civilisation was kicking off? Some of the Egypt material is unbelievably old. After Egypt we headed through some amazing halls with amazing contents – no hyperbole, literally gilded walls hosting crown jewels – before heading to paintings and the main event, the Mona Lisa. I think she has been relocated since the last time I saw her in the 90s as it all felt very different. (The Louvre was never on the itinerary for the school trips I was on after 2010). Now she essentially has a huge room to herself, she is mounted alone on a wall with a long snaking queue ahead of her for people hoping to get ten second directly in front. The queue looked too long for us and was full of people ignoring some amazing paintings on every other wall just for a little alone time with la Joconde. I got a perfectly adequate photo side on without queuing and it still looked like she was looking right at me.
This was enough museum by this point so we exited through the gift shop in search of a café, returned to the basement level and found… a Starbucks. This was very much what the nephew wanted so we headed down for some sort of sugary American blender horror and reacquainted ourselves with the outside world shortly after.
We came outside to some of the best weather we’d had all week – a shame we weren’t able to do the Eiffel Tower in the sun – and were ahead of time on our ticket for the next stop, so had a lovely walk along the Jardin des Tuileries. Along the way I got the best photo of the nephew all week by tricking him into photobombing a selfie, and we saw a fab bronze sculpture that looked like a realistic fallen tree. We also walked past another giant temporary venue that will be something Olympic in the fullness of time.
Our next appointment was the Musée d’Orsay, which we reached by walking over the footbridge that had been under construction in 1999 when I regularly walked home from the Marais to my digs in the 7th. Nice to finally see the finished bridge! Our timed tickets took us into the Orsay with very little fuss and we walked up and down the central sculpture hall to start with. The French approach to ticketing was different in every single place we visited – for some, the teen was a full price adult, in other places he was free. The Orsay was the only place where he was free and I got a discount on MY ticket just for taking him!
I was very taken with the display about the Opéra Garnier at the back with a huge cutaway model and mentally pencilled in a guided tour for a possible future grownup visit. Most of the art was leaving the nephew cold but he was taken with a bloodthirsty depiction of an African execution, all swords and heads bouncing down stairs, and as we turned around again we discovered we had completely walked past another version of la statue de la liberté as we came in. I particularly wanted to see the boatloads of Monet and Van Gogh that are here, and loved seeing the Floor Scrapers in person. I might see if I can turn my cameraphone pic into art posters for my house. The poppy field painting that I had been attempting to teach colour theory from when I was suprisingly timetabled to do art last September was there, as was creepy “let’s have a picnic while our lady friends strip” Déjeuner sur l’herbe – I knew the painting but I had no idea it was absolutely huge! There was also a Whistler exhibition so we made the acquaintance of Whistler’s Mother.
Somewhere around here, nephew let me know that he’d not heard of any of these painters ever and the only painter he knows about is Picasso, so I googled a bit to see if we could find any Picasso. The internet suggested there was loads at the Orsay but a conversation with the information desk finally led me to understand that had been a temporary exhibition that finished years ago. There was however a Musée Picasso not a million miles away…
We left the museum and went across the road in search of lunch. There was a fancy café with lots of staple French cuisine that didn’t look palatable to the teenager and Le Royal Orsay which was offering pancakes, including the special savoury sort with the buckwheat flour which I’d been raving about previously, so we went there. After our tasty meal, our neighbours in the café engaged us in conversation so I had quite a long chat in French about visiting Paris and London, living in border country and fearing invasion, Russia and Ukraine, and Brexit, before heading back on my phone to chart a course for Musée Picasso.
En route we passed les bouqinistes selling postcards on the river bank so picked up a bunch for later use, and as I got my bearings I noticed a few things we could easily visit with only a slight déviation. The most obvious between the two points was the cathedral of Notre Dame which had had its huge years previously and so clearly was not yet open to the public. It was interesting to see the cranes and construction portakabins and hope that their work will be done soon.
If you’re here, an interesting but devastating monument just around the corner that I’d not seen before but wanted to was the Mémorial des Martyrs de la déportation, an installation to remember French victims of the holocaust deported to extermination camps after the Nazi occupation of France.
We walked on through the Marais, past some old familiar haunts and the Dr Who doors from City of Death (1979) and got to the Musée Picasso with an hour to spare before closing. It was a bit of an interesting beast. There were some Picasso works there but a lot of the space was for video installations of him talking, and an entire floor not of Picasso at all but of Rodin, including yet another version of The Thinker – in stone this time, not bronze.
My final plan for this day was another high up panoramic view, this time from the top of the Tour Montparnasse. A new discovery this trip was how amazing Google Maps is at understanding the Paris transport system and it found that there was a bus directly from the Musée Picasso to the Tour Montparnasse. So another Paris first for me was using the Paris bus! On the way, we were treated to a bizarre conversation in English between two elderly ladies who liked going to exhibitions and who thought Boris was a good PM because he exemplified the English sense of humour so well.
Leaving the bus and walking to the Tour took us past a post office and after an unsuccessful attempt to use the machines I got the evergreen delight of reusing a phrase learned for GCSE thirty years before, je voudrais des timbres pour des cartes postales pour l’Angleterre. This time it led to a slightly baffling conversation about what sort I’d like, would I like Mariannes? Oh no, I don’t have any Mariannes, I’m going to have to give you self-adhesive ones, are you sure you’re OK with those? My mind was partly taken up with self-congratulation on remembering the French for self-adhesive and partly worried that there might be a good reason for me to prefer the elusive Marianne over the autocollant, but we eventually got out of the post office alive and fully equipped for postage.
Another speedy lift took us to the enclosed viewing level and we sat in the café as night fell completely. We were writing the postcards – nephew by hand, me using my app – and we spent at least an hour and half on that, and it was rather nice looking up occasionally to see how the city beneath us had changed, swapping ideas on what to put on cards and texting parents to get addresses. Eventually we surfaced from the concentration and realised we’d missed Eiffel Tower Sparkle O’clock and that we would have to hang around a bit to see 8pm, but that was OK, and we headed up to the very top outdoor floor to get ready. It was a bit of a surprise to find an ourdoor ice rink up there, and I’m afraid at this point I actually said no, we wouldn’t skate. There was a choice of roller blades or ice skates for those who were, and the surface seemed to be made out of tiles, not actual ice. The vibe up there was pretty much unaccompanied teen, but it wasn’t rowdy or unpleasant and we spent 40 minutes walking around and waiting for the grande dame de fer to do her thing. Shortly after, the roof terrace was emptying and we decided to head back to digs and find food there.
Directly outside the Gare du Nord there are a lot of options for eating and we walked up and down a bit and looked at menus and tried to avoid being accosted by over zealous waiters before we settled at a place called Au baroudeur patient, who lured us in with a promise of a table with a view of some football match or other. We ate a spag bol, a rare steak frites and we “shared” a plate of snails which came with some rather exciting cutlery to hold the slippery shells still. At the end of the meal, people at the table next door engaged us in conversation again – it turned out mainly to be a charming young maths post-doc who had just secured a research post in Australia who really wanted to practise his English, but who had pretty strong skills on that front. We explored non-Euclidean geometry for a bit and taught him some vital Australian slang like “throw another sheila on the barbie!” and his friend fell asleep, which was our cue to return to the hotel and sleep.
Our final day allowed us a slightly later start to pack up and put our suitcases in the hotel luggage store before heading on the RER to Denfert Rochereau for the famous Catacombes. This was the most expensive trip of the weekend, barely any child reduction, and although it had looked like we were on time for the timed tickets, we took a wrong turn out of the RER station and showed up too late. The website threatened that the tickets were not valid 15 minutes after the face time, but we were sent to the back of the queue with slapped wrists and eventually allowed down there. There was an option of half price on-the-day tickets but not taking that option proved the right decision as they were completely sold out by the time we got there. We opted not to do the audioguide and I read some of the panels and translated fragments where necessary. It’s a bizarre and creepy place. When you surface you are a long way from where you went down into the ground and it’s not immediately clear how you return to the start, but we sorted it eventually and headed to a café for our final elevenses. Café Daguerre on a corner somewhere brought me a double espresso and I ordered for the teen and got him a citron pressé – something I’ve seen in books and on menus but never actually ordered. It took a LOT of sugar added to the lemon juice before we got to something he could drink, but it was good to know that we had #beatscurvy for another day.
Then that was it – métro back to the hotel to reclaim baggage, postcards posted on the way back to the Gare du Nord, then the long slog of baggage checks, 5 separate checkpoints to cross the border, a long sit in departures and a long sit on the train, and our French trip was over.
Totting up the fitbit data suggests I dragged the poor long suffering nephew through 71km or 44 miles of walking in three days, le pauvre petit garçon!
Last year I was very well organised and wrote a guide for Christmas food for one or two people. This year was loosely based on that but went adrift a bit and there was a bit too much food waste in the end.
Christmas Eve I went bellringing at St Marys and stayed for 9 Lessons and Carols, which was all lovely. The plan was to have the oven working on baked potatoes whilst I was out, but on my return I discovered I had set the oven to come on but left the spuds on the side. I also realised walking from the church to the car that I’d completely forgotten about cauliflower cheese. The plan was to buy frozen free flow, but that hadn’t been available so I just moved on. I was able to duck into Sainsburys on Clumber Street (how long has there been a Sainsburys on Clumber street?!) and pick up… a head of broccoli. So far, so close.
Anyway, home to the preheated, empty oven which I added a large bacon joint, made broccoli cheese from scratch, and microwaved the jacket spuds and finished in the oven.
And it turns out microwaved jackets are not as bad as previously thought.
Christmas morning was also bellringy; on return I opened this pint size bottle of fizzy Italian cider in place of the usual Norman fizzy bottle. (500ml rather than 587 and bought before the all the daft wiffle about pint size champagne from Downing Street)
Turns out the cider was quite a bit stronger than the usual barely-more-alcoholic-than-apple-juice and I subsequently lost a bit of Christmas day to napping. Lunch was… a tray of pigs in blankets…
and after one of the Die Hards in the evening I used pre-Christmas duck fat to sauté cubes of spuds to have with steak, frozen greens, and creamy mushroom sauce, plating shortly before midders.
A few days later we hosted friends chez T and we ate…
A tray of bulgur salad with chick peas, celery and red peppers
Homemade smoked mackerel pâté on slices of cucumber (variably sliced… some way to thin to support a quenelle of pâté)
I have possibly allowed myself to be too closely linked with cocktails in some people’s minds. Perhaps I need to dial back from all the photos on #socmed! But my neighbours asked for suggestions for Eurovision cocktails and here were some suggestions that crossed my radar:
Gin Club have a few suggestions here – two champagne cocktails (not a huge fan) – Waterloo Sunset and Bucks Fizz – and a colour changing horror which require butterfly pea flowers, which I had previously never heard of.
Randomly heard on the radio this afternoon that Bob Dylan liked a Kamikaze which is very doable
This lovely list of “retro” cocktails might also inform. Crème de menthe arrived this week as part of my attempt to get the ingredients for the insane Difford’s mai tai (although bugger, I now see I was supposed to buy white crème de menthe) so grasshoppers might feature tonight…
Over on facebook there were requests for Cobb bbq recipes that might fit the theme too. My quick google turned over a couple of marinade ideas for chicken – this Portuguese chicken recipe looked good and so did this German dark beer one.
TBH though it is a little hard to fit all of this in on Eurovision night. Watching the songs and reading Twitter takes up nearly all of the available time. Good prep is the key I guess.
Niles's Blog 
