The Bonne Année spiel

The French love to wish you a bon something or other, be it bonjour, bon appétit, bon fête or bon film. But they really go for it when wishing you a Bonne Année, so much so that im already looking forward to the end of january and the end of this repetitive well wishing. To give you an idea, here is a typical exchange i've been having at work today:

Me: "Bonjour"
Work Person: "Bonjour. Et bonne Année, bonne santé, bonne chance. Je vous souhaite beaucoup de bonheur, amour, argent, prospérité et paix. Mes meilleures voeux pour 2012."
Me: "Merci. A vous aussi. Bonne Journée.

When you've heard this catalogue of lovely sounding things being reeled off by 10 people in the same morning, it starts to sound less sincere and more like a shopping list. I want to challenge them, "do you really wish me all these things? Prove it by doing my photocopying for a day." I know that I won't even speak to some of these people again until this time next year, except perhaps for a "bonnes vacances" in the summer. Yet here we are, pretending to care about each other to the exaggerated extent that saying "happy new year" just isn't enough, we must declare our desire for the other person to be rewarded by good health, money, love, luck, prosperity and peace. It's a little over the top to say the least. But hopefully their wishes come true and i'll finish the year a happy, healthy millionaire, surrounded by love, at peace with the world. Anything less and i'll be annoyed.

Salon des vins

Last weekend over a thousand wine makers gathered in the parc des expositions to sell their produce to thirsty Parisians. It's right next to where I live which is pretty handy & each year allows me to roll home after a hardcore tasting session. Whilst I don't pretend to be a wine expert, my pallette has certainly developed from almost 5 years of an increasingly loving relationship with the stuff & I can now taste the difference between vinegar de plonk & a 2005 Pomerol. We'll be having a wine expert on the show at some point (which will prove how little we actually know!), but in the meantime here's 10 alternative bits of advice & things to consider when going to one of these big wine tasting events:

1. Go with friends. Its more fun when there's a few of you & you widen your chances of discovering a good bottle. It's always a good feeling when you taste something nice & encourage your friends to try & they agree with you & end up buying a bottle, you think "yeah i'm good, i'm like Oz Clarke".

2. Get a chariot. Not a gladiator style chariot (fun as that would be), but one of those little caddy things that can carry a load of boxes. Not only is it useful for carrying your wine but it makes you look like a serious wine buyer & the wine sellers take you a bit more seriously.

3. 100 bottles or 1? Following on from point number 2, looking like a proper wine buyer with money to burn, one of the things I like doing is very seriously asking  my wife whether we should get 100 bottles of the stuff we've just tasted. You need to make sure the wine seller hears, & although you might think it cruel to get his hopes up, it's good fun to do. I'll sometimes say that i'm hesitating between 100 & 200 bottles of a cetain wine, then just buy one measly bottle, or none. Try it if you can keep a straight face. Although on a serious note, if you are buying in large quantity, make sure you haggle, I got a few euros knocked off each bottle when I bought a load for my wedding.

4. Taste an expensive wine. Go around & find someone who is selling really expensive wine & try it. You have to look convincing & give the impression that you might actually buy a bottle, when in fact you're thinking that it's worth more than the clothes you're wearing. It's especially good tasting a wine you can't afford when the guy has to open it specifically for you to try.

5. Look for the moustache. I think its important who makes the wine so if I see some really smart looking clean shaven skinny bloke selling his wine i'll walk past & find the rosy cheeked pot bellied guy with a moustache. Thats my man, I can see him getting his hands dirty & putting all his love into squeezing the juice out of those grapes, now give me a taste.

6. Nice label. Now everyone says don't judge a book by its cover, & the same goes for wine. But when you have 1000's of different bottles to choose from you need something to catch your eye. I like it when someone puts a bit of thought into the label, as with an album cover. Most places go for the boring picture of a chateau, but if I see a label that looks a bit interesting, I might just stop & taste it.

7. More than just wine. Yes as well as red, white & rosé wine there's also champagne, cognac & even food like foie gras, saucisson & sandwiches, which you'll probably need if you're going to mix all of the above!

8. Leave the baby behind. Im not saying just leave him on his own & go off drinking, obviously get a babysitter or whatever. But the salon du vin is crowded & hot & even if your baby is French he shouldn't be wine tasting. I went once with my son & didn't feel like the best father in the world sipping wine as he whinged to go home.

9. Give your address. When you buy a bottle, leave your address with the wine seller. Don't worry he's not going to show up at yours asking to stay, he's just going to send you an invitation to the next salon des vins in Paris. I had about 10 invitations this year, pretty useful getting your friends in for free & you get a free glass too which is always nice (i've got a whole set of them now!)

10. You can't taste them all. Don't even try, it's literally impossible. You'll die.

The website for vingerobles independant is http://www.vigneron-independant.com/auxsalons/ Maybe see you at the next one in Paris!

Bald Mouse Man

Bat in French is "chauve souris" which literally translates as bald mouse. At first I thought this was pretty weird, what if you're actually a mouse who's got a receding hairline? It would get confusing: "Oh look there's Michel, he's a bald mouse, not a bald mouse that flies & is blind, just a regular mouse that is bald, get it?" But then it got me thinking imagine if we hadn't invented the word bat, batman would be Bald Mouse Man, how about that?! Maybe we should get rid of the word bat & use bald mouse like the French just for that reason! Batman becoming Bald Mouse Man would sound a bit less sinister for sure, & might not govern the same level of respect in Gotham City, but I think it would give him  a lighter, more humorous side to his character. Otherwise we could just create an actual bald mouse man character (as pictured) to rival Batman.

My Journey on line 4

Pushed left & right, forward & back

I must be strong, I must not crack

A child is crying, can't take any more

Why all this suffering what is it for?

I paid to be here, what have I done?

Surely taking a bus would have been more fun

Bloody bastard metro line 4

You piece of shit you diseased old whore

You're always packed no matter what hour

And hotter than DSK when he comes out the shower

You're a sauna of germs & as I look around

There's sneezing & coughing, sweat on the ground

Or could it be sick? Its hard to tell

In this bubbling, moving cauldron of hell.

But wait now we've stopped at st germain des pres

And pray we must that's it not a long delay

Signal failure or suicide, usually one of the two

Lets hope for the former because between me & you

I can't think of a worse place you could choose to die

Than on line 4, shut off from the sky. 

'Attendez quelques minutes' comes the familiar voice

I'd have taken another line but didn't have a choice

From porte d'orleans to porte de clignacourt

Central & straight goes good old line 4. 

"But its better than london" I hear you say

"And you get phone signal to text & play"

A carriageful of people shouting down their phone

Angry & annoyed that they'll be late home

No I prefer the british way of suffering in silence

And thats what im doing but im sensing violence

Especially now that an accordian has started

And someone around me has definitely farted

I think of the bars & cafes above

People laughing, people in love

Blissfully unaware of us below 

Waiting, hoping, praying to go

And I know there's worse things to complain about

But right now I just need to shout 

Bloody bastard metro line 4

You piece of shit you diseased old whore!

Written & performed by James at Spoken Word in Paris 14/11/11

Merde alert

It had to happen. After proclaiming in last weeks episode that there was starting to be less dog poop on the streets in Paris, I only went and stepped in a load of it on my way to work. I wasn't aware of it until I was having a coffee with a group of colleagues & we all started smelling something that certainly wasn't smooth, aromatic & coming from our mugs. It was a moment of horror when I checked the soles of my shoes & realised it was me. The others looked at me with a mixture of disgust & relief that it wasn't them. The only thing worse than the shame was cleaning the damn stuff off. PICK IT UP dog owners s'il vous plait. And if you're a dog reading this & your owner doesn't pick it up, first of all well done for being able to read, but secondly & more importantly: crap indoors, it's more fun.

There's a pigeon under my bed

Four years ago, on my way to my girlfriend's place to stay the night for the first time I was pretty nervous, not because I was a young Englishman who'd just moved to a big foreign city where the men pride themselves as being the world's finest lovers*, and not because I was carrying a cheap, probably disgusting bottle of wine that i'd bought because it had a nice label. No I was nervous because she lived with a cat. Or rather the cat lived with her. A nightmare for me because i'm allergic to cats, dogs, hamsters, parrots & pretty much any other animal someone might choose to keep as a pet. Now whilst I can get through a dinner or a few drinks chez a pet owner, sleeping over is another kettle of fish (incidentally im fine with fish & have a goldfish named Brains). But I thought I have to give it a go, maybe i'd be able to cope. However as soon as I arrived at her apartment I felt my eyes starting to water, my chest wheezing & my nose blocking up & this got worse as the evening went on. Not the most enticing thing for a woman, a wheezing man looking like he's crying & constantly blowing his nose. So I left. Not a complete disaster though because she still wanted to see me, & accepted that it was better if she always came to my place, which I liked not only because I wasn't allergic to my place but also because it saved me quite a bit of time & bother travelling on line 13. So if you meet a girl who owns a cat & you're not fond of travelling, tell her you have a cat allergy & she'll have to come to yours. That is the moral of the story.
But wait a minute you might be thinking, what about the pigeon under the bed?! Well, one day I had an urgent call from my girlfriend telling me to come round to her apartment. I grabbed a few packs of tissues & an asthma spray & jumped on the metro. On arriving I noticed pigeon feathers all over her floor & furniture, must be the latest decorating trend in Paris I thought but no apparently the cat had brought back a pigeon & my job was to find the pigeon & get rid of it (put it outside, not kill it). Im probably the worst qualified person for this job but pretended I could manage & hunted around the apartment for a scared, possibly wounded pigeon. Luckily for me I didn't find it & concluded that it had either escaped or been thrown out by the cat the same way it came in. I went home feeling relieved that I hadn't come face to face with a pigeon that needed evicting. Two days later, in the middle of the night, my girlfriend was awoken by a coo coo (pigeon noise). Panicking she jumped up & realised the sound was coming from under her bed. Probably the only place I hadn't checked to look & as a result she'd been sleeping on top of a pigeon for 2 nights! This time she called her mum & together they lifted the mattress & removed the perfectly happy looking pigeon before the cat could pounce. My girlfriend was a bit traumatised after this & would wake up in the night hearing a coo coo & not be able to go back to sleep before she was sure there were no pigeons squatting in her apartment. Fortunately for me she didn't blame me too much for not checking under her bed. Now we're married & because of my allergies don't have a cat, so we shouldn't be seeing a problem like this again!


*Although they're not.

City of Frights

If you listened to this weeks show you'll know all about the mysterious 'red man', but amazingly there's also a story concerning a 'green man'. It stems from the Catacombes de Paris which houses the remains of over 6 million people so is bound to harbour a haunted tale or two. At the end of the 18th Century workmen carrying up stones from underground to build modern Paris saw a green man running about and hiding in wells and cellars. Those who saw him were cursed, which seems a bit unfair seeing as they were already having a hard enough time working underground & lugging rocks about. So there you have it, a red man & a green man and not a traffic light in sight.

There are numerous reports of people visiting the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise & encountering the ghosts of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrisson, Moliere or some of the other famous people buried there. What's not always reported are the large amounts of drugs that have most probably been consumed before these 'encounters'. Still, it would be nice to think that you could go & have a chat about Dorian Gray with Oscar then walk a few steps & talk rock n roll with Jim, as well as finding out how he really died. But the story that really caught my eye was one concerning a ghost that gets in a taxi at Chatelet & asks to be taken to Pere Lachaise, then disappears on arrival. Apparently this has happened to several taxi drivers. So if you ever need a free taxi ride from Chatelet to Pere Lachaise, tell the driver you're a ghost when you arrive and make yourself scarce!

As for Halloween, no trick or treaters chez moi (as expected), so enough carambars & marshmallows to see me through winter. Bit of spookiness prevented the show going out on French Radio London, they told us it was due to some kind of technical error but clearly it was a witch casting a spell. Thankfully the spell wore off in time for it to be broadcast the next day. Oh & didn't get round to apple bobbing, partly because it's pretty weird & partly because I didn't have any apples, although I am definitely looking forward to introducing it to my son & his French friends in a few years, & even more to reassuring some confused parents that it is a traditional game with a very low fatality rate.