So here we are opening Marks & Spencer in Paris

As they say in France: Tout ça pour ça!Marks & Spencer closed its last shop in France in 2000 and since then many Parisians- and French in general- have been ambling around supermarket aisles bemoaning the loss of le lemon curd, le shortbread, la marmelade, les scones and other twee British delicacies.

So, imagine our excitement when about a year ago, rumour spread that M&S was going to open a store in Paris, on the Champs Elysées no less which is convenient for me as I work close by. True, it's less convenient for everyone else as mainly tourists go that way; its former location in the centre of Paris (Galeries Lafayette area) would've made more sense.

So on Thursday November 24th I ambled down there to see if I could grab a nice beef and horseradish sarnie for lunch. The shop had only been open for an hour or so and a sinuous queue of about three hundred people put me off so I postponed to the next day.

It's proof of my love for M&S beef and horseradish sandwiches that I stuck it out this time. Last time I queued so long for something was probably for the new rollercoaster at Disneyland in 1998. It made the queue on Uniqlo's opening day a couple of years ago look like a pleasant stroll down the pavement.

So first, I queued for the queue. Yes, 20 minutes to receive a small pink ticket that then allowed me to queue just outside the shop for another quarter of an hour. It was a good opportunity to chat to a few other ladies, mostly middle aged, and see what their expectations were. They confirmed what I'd been hearing from students at the school: top came jams, scones, muffins, cakes, biscuits and so on for le English teatime, followed closely by ready-meals. Then came Christmas decorations and assorted festive paraphernalia and underwear.

It thus came as rather a surprise upon entering the shop to see that of three floors, one is dedicated to undies, but only a small side room for food and two entire floors full of women's clothes. Hmm... did someone forget to conduct a market survey?

Shopaholic that I am, I only managed to find a bearable t-shirt- a rather interesting blue silk number embroidered in tiny metal skulls- which stuck out a bit amongst the rather dowdy seasonal cardigans and flashy sequinned party dresses. Of course I had to queue for ever as they only have ten fitting rooms for the three floors, none of which are equipped with space for the attendants to fold or put away. A lot of the ladies, mostly over 60, were having a tough time converting the sizes. And most didn't take the clothes they had tried on. Fashionable English clothes and French bourgeois women seem to be a bad combination.

Time to check out the food hall, which I finally did after another 20-minute queue, and shock-horror, the first thing my eyes caught was a big basket full of fresh fruit. Who trawls to the Champs Elysées and visits a British food hall to buy a banana? There was honey and a few jams, but no shelves stacked with all the goodies Paris has been drooling over for months. People were expecting something like in Fortnum & Mason's in London, an entire room of candied peel jellies and quince jams spiced with nutmeg. They got something rather less impressive than the food section WH Smith on rue de Rivoli has got upstairs in what used to be the travel section.

Moving in, I realised that most of the space is occupied by fridges full of M&S sandwiches (I got my beef and horseradish!) but with only around 15 different fillings. The hugely successful Eurostar terminal in London probably has 50 and counting. Same for salads. Notably absent were ready meals, a biscuit section (people were glumly falling back on kitsch double decker shaped tins full of shortbread), drinks (decent teas, cordials etc) crisps and Percy the pig sweets. Weirdly present were smoked salmon (Scottish, sure but ridiculously easy to get in Paris), muesli, yoghurt and the aforementioned fruit.

Suddenly it all clicked. M & S in Paris haven't opened a gorgeous food hall full of luscious titbits that in the French collective consciousness are the saving grace of British food. They've opened a glorified lunchtime snack shop. French people believe, more or less tongue-in-cheekedly, that the Brits eat grey meat and mint sauce and baked beans, probably boiled together, except when they are sitting around in a salon for four o'clock tea, indulging on fairy cakes and delicate fruity, spicy, buttery treats. I didn't even see any mince pies.

So who is this food shop aimed at? Clearly the busy Champs Elysées worker who will pop in for a lunch of Crayfish and Rocket on wholemeal, mango yoghurt, apple and cereal bar, washed down with blueberry flavoured water. And who then might buy a tin of shortbread and a slice of Scottish salmon on a whim. Who were the hundreds of people queuing outside? Middle aged and well off ladies who cross Paris to stock up on crumpets, lemon curd and elderflower tea. Monoprix figured that out years ago and you can now buy some of these things at exorbitant prices at the supermarket.

To be fair, the underwear section was buzzing and the salads and sandwiches were flying of the shelves so clearly a lot of it is popular. Time and the dying down of the initial hype around the store re-opening will say whether those who designed the new shop are right. My personal bet would be that the ground floor on which there food room is will eventually be all food, drink and seasonal stuff that is tellement Breeteesh. Clothes upstairs with maybe a men's section and undies with the wonderful all body gusset and bum uplifters in the basement.

To end on a positive note, I heard a lady ask one of the very friendly shop assistants where the crackers, carols, cards and baubles were, and she replied "oh it's still too early for us to display the Christmas items". Seriously on November 25th Christmas hasn't yet made it to town? It's a rather nice change.

So here we are pulling teeth

Forget giving birth, broken bones and bad hangovers, real pain is the one experienced by people who have tooth problems. My fourth wisdom tooth had been playing up since May 2010 when I staggered around Venice, stoned on pain killers and rubbing my jaw. After a few weeks the pain had gone thanks to regular massage and a certain terror of the dentist, so I assumed all was well and that it was growing happily. And sure enough it started to poke through in the right place.

Ten days ago I came home from work feeling a bit sore around around the lower left side of my face and swallowed a couple of paracetemol. In the night I woke up realising that it now really hurt and was throbbing, and that my neighbour was playing music extremely loudly at 2.30 on a weeknight. I crossed the hall and hammered on her door; when she opened I opened my mouth to ask her to please turn it down. What came out was 'estchze qchze chtu peux echteintchrela muschiqsche'. She looked blank. While I was miming the perfectly obvious, her cat left her appartment causing me to cry out 'Chton Czstchat!'. This finished, I went back to bed pausing only to stare at a huge bloated bullfrog with a swollen neck in the mirror.

Friday at work was just embarassing as this type of condition does not suit the teaching profession. Saturday morning I went to the emergency dentist centre near Gare du Nord. The huge waiting room was full of people clutching various parts of their jaw, stoically waiting their turn. It's also the type of place you go to when you don't have private health insurance and the visible poverty of some made the place exceedingly grim, like a documentary on those the welfare state forgot.

Thankfully though this is France and it was pretty efficient. An X-ray showed that my poor fang was growing horizontally, pushing everything towards the centre on one side and digging in to my facial nerve on the other. The dentist cheerfully said this was a horrible emergency as my tooth could saw into tangled and mangled nerve causing paralysis. 'It's like a dolphin caught in a fishing net' he grinned. My huge left side throbbed in agony.

To cut a long story short, my deformed tusk (yes, tusk, the size and shape of a shark tooth or near) was whipped out with me on local anaesthetic . I felt ok if a bit woozy, but about 40 minutes later the pain kicked in and, a week on, hasn't really gone. Yeah sure I'm high as a kite on various doses of everything (teaching is fun again), but I still wake up in night to take a steroid paracetomol cocktail. It's getting much better and I had my stitches out today but fuck me has this been a screamingly horrid experience of sharp pain from the chin right up to the inside of the ear and dull tingling inside the skull. Not even counting I couldn't eat, smile or talk and have an open wound in my mouth.

All this brings me to say that we hold the ultimate proof that intelligent design is absolute bullshit. Why on earth do we still grow wisdom teeth if our modern, post neanderthal jaw is too small to cope with them? It's not like we've crunched sheep bones in the last few millenia . And go through all this pain? How the fuck do and did they manage when anaesthetic is crushed cloves? Time to bring out human v4.1, God.

So here we are with Charlie Summers

The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers by Paul Torday

In a nutshell: Hector Chetwode-Talbot, aka Eck, works for a London hedge fund and specialises in wining and dining his friends to get them to invest large sums of money in schemes that in these glorious early 2000s cannot go wrong. He meets Charlie Summers, a pathetic entrepreneur whose dodgy schemes make him cross paths several times with Eck, for better and for worse.

The blurb: First we are introduced to the narrator Eck, the amiable buffoon, who naively glides from dinner party to shooting party embarking his friends on hopelessly complicated investment schemes that the reader knows are doomed to fail as they involve the very investments that sent the financial world arse over tit in 2008. One of these excursions we meet Charlie, the opportunistic yet hopeless businessman looking to make a name for himself in the world of entrepreneurship.
As the novel progresses and their paths cross we realise that despite their differences, the two characters are strangely parallel, and when the inevitable happens and it all comes crashing down, the two men need each other to redeem themselves in ways that couldn't have been imagined before.
Like Salmon fishing in the Yemen (review here) and the Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce (review here) this novel gradually swings from comedy to tragedy, the light tone of the novel betraying a much deeper builup to a dark denouement.

IMHO Paul Torday is my favorite contemporary writer and this book just confirms it. A beautifully written easy read that carries with it a haunting storyline that stays with one for days.

So here we are cussing Tunisia

This is such a negative title for my first post of the year. Let's start with what was good about our 4 day trip to Tunisia, which took place at the end of October.

Well the wine was really nice.

OK, so back to cussing Tunisia.

To be fair, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In order: Air France was on strike, we got badly ripped off the second we arrived, the weather was catastrophic, we got the runs, the museum (that was dry unlike the rest of the country) was mostly shut...

You could argue the Air France strike was not Tunisia's fault, and that we got there in the end. You could argue that the weather was not Tunisia's fault either but it certainly didn't help.

We'd chosen Tunis, and more specifically its suburb Sidi Bou Said, a pittoresque cliff top village all painted in blue and white as a base to escape the onset of cold and grim weather in Europe. The plan was to relax in the North African autumn sun, going for beach side strolls and visiting the incredible Roman sites around the capital, more specifically Carthage which is part of Tunis and Dougga, the Tunisian Pompei which is about 150 km away.

The worst rain to hit the country ever put a bit of a damper on these (pun etc...). Though we realised at the time that it was bad, we later heard that people had died as the equivalent of 2 months rain fell in 2 days, putting severe pressure on the country's medieval infrastructure (exploding drains anyone?), flooding the city and generally causing a lot of damage.

We experienced this when, eager and rested after an easy afternoon wandering around and snoozing, we ventured off on the Sunday to Carthage, the suburb town just a few minutes train ride away and former capital of the Punic civilisation that occupied this part of Tunisia 2000 years ago before getting sacked and destroyed by the Romans.

We got the little train at Sidi bou said station, a few minutes walk down the steep hill on which the village is perched overlooking the marina. Less than a dinar (0,50 cents) for the two of us to get to Carthage, four or five stops down the line. When we got to there we realised that the rainwater was forming huge puddles every few feet by the side of the road and that making it anywhere with dry socks was going to be complicated.



We ended up cutting our losses and wading, and then set off in search of Carthage museum, one of the many sites we were going to visit that day. A good twenty minute walk up a hill, past huge designer houses with black window tinted Jeeps outside and we got to a huge soggy and flooded archaelogical site with an impressive 19th century mansion overlooking it. We spent a shivery hour in the Museum before we realised that we were coming down with pneumonia. Found a taxi outside who cheerfully announced that he would drive us back to Sidi but for a more expensive fee than usual as it was raining and we were clearly desperate. At least he was open about it.

The next day was crisper, cloudy but with the occasional sunbeam so we put on our dry clothes and set off back to Carthage. We started with the temple of Tophet, a site with three distinct layers of Punic and Roman remains, though we only ever really identified two. According to the Romans, the inhabitants of Carthage would sacrifice babies here, burning them in a kind of brick oven (which is still distinguishable) after slitting their throats. Ashes would then be put in clay jars stacked row upon row. Some historians argue that these sacrifices were actually stillborn or deceased children.


Saw some Punic columns with inscriptions and representations of Baal scattered around and hundreds of bits of broken clay pots crushed in the ground.

These amphoras dating back two millenia are so common that they are ground up and used on tennis courts, or used by local fishermen to weigh down their nets. We saw dozens neatly stacked up on the site of the Punic war port, which is a perfectly circular harbour giving on to the sea,and is still used today by fishermen.

As we settled down on a seaside terrace for a frugal lunch of fish and red wine, the storm rolled in from the jade couloured sea. It started slashing it down but we refused to be abashed, as at this rate we would have seen sweet piss all of anything; We trudged to another site, again of depressions in the earth, columns, wells and flashes of mosaic on the ground when the heavens opened. We took refuge in a hut with a couple of other glum tourists wearing T-shirts and flip flops. Feeling more confident in our anoraks, pullovers, umbrella and sensible shoes we decided to persevere and go to the Antonin Roman Baths, a huge site just down the road. We got there and went in to the vast area, which is like a Mediterranean garden with tombs and columns scatterd around, and the vast Bath buildings to the right. These are ruins but one can see the cathedral high columns which once supported the roof and make out the various bathing rooms and underground passages that carried the water, as well as the incredible drainage system (which failed to work that day). It was magical having the place just for us but as the water rose and we got wetter and wetter, the situation was pretty quickly ridiculous. We ignored the notices saying we couldn't climb on the ruins as it was the only way to stay above the waterline.



Once again, we cut our losses, and standing in the middle of the overflowing intersection got a cab home.

Our last day, we went to Bardo, a town just west and more or less adjacent to Tunis to see the renowned Bardo museum, home to many ancient mosaics. They are absolutely fabulous, covering scenes of feasting and myths and incredible sea creatures and allegories and scenes of everyday life.


We saw the later (Christian era) stuff, whichwas actually much less intricate, especially when it came to portraits. This is because early Christianity forbade depiction of allliving things- like Islam- and so portraits could only be done for tombs once the person was deceased which led to a lack of practice and loss of certain techniques.

We inquired how the mosaics got from the sites to the museum ( rip it up and reassemble jigsaw style?). It turns out that superstrong glue is poured on the mosaic, covered witha sheet of something, and the whole thing is ripped off. Kind of like waxing it would seem. It is then laid out on a new surface -concrete like the floors of the museum which are also covered in them, plaster like the walls- and the glue is dissolved off. .

We went into Tunis and walked around the Medina, having gone past the heavily barb-wired place Kasba around whichthere are a coupls of ministries and official government buildings. A tank was parked in the flower beds and there were soldiers with machine guns,but all around life rattled on. There were a lot of election posters of all the candidates (over 75) and some elderly women were yelling at soldiers. The medina is made up of zigzagging narrow streets, sometimes outside, sometimes under plastic sheeting , sometimes under a stone roof. There are shops, which become very dense as you hit the souk, but also little courtyards, artisan shops, houses, schools and a lot of people scurrying around in this maze dodging puddles with plastic bags on their heads.



That evening we made it to the airport in time to relax a little before boarding. saw several young men, severly wounded and either in leg casts or bandaged up in soggy looking cloth that dripped red. A plane from Tripoli had come in and we wondered if they came from there. Lots of Libyan flags and badges for sale. We had time for a final half bottle of lovely Nuit et Jour red wine, a fruity and peppery Shiraz, Cab sauv mix.

Also good as we found out as we spent fortunes in various restaurants for lack of anything better to do during our trip were the hearty Magon and Chateau Magon reds, but also the flowery Muscat white. It all goes perfectly with the best of Tunisian eating (once one has got past the excitement of briks, couscous and endless fresh fish served grilled), which are the nibbles one gets at the beginning of a meal. Little chunks of tuna in oil sitting on a mound of fiery harissa. Pickled sliced vegetables not unlike Korean kimchi. Little triangular goat cheese briks, carot sticks and chili and sliced boiled eggs. In one place we even got a palm sized whole fried fish.

Full of Tunisian red wine we hobbled back to Paris, actually feeling quite relieved to get home. It's put us off travelling for a bit, which is lucky cos we can't afford to go anywhere!