It is snowing

I am having a strange time. I am in Paris, on a covert mission that I cannot talk about, living in the building in the picture in a tiny apartment that smells of someone else's poo.

Every day I go somewhere where extremely nice people who are 10 years younger than me carefully explain things that I know already. I watch things happen and try and make them go as well as they could; if they do not, I demonstrate my maturity by not worrying about it.   I go for a long walk and I look at things; in the evenings I go to the many food shops on rue Montorgeuil and look at things I do not buy: cheeses and confections, mainly, although tonight I have a small apple tart and some Tomme de Savoie and a pear.

I come  home and I drink one or two glasses of faine waine; I eat a salad or a grilled meat and some sort of vegetable; I watch television programmes on the internet; I go to sleep, and I sleep well, and I wake up and it starts again.  I am not sure where the time is going, although it is passing pleasantly enough.

My husband is not here, which is not as it should be.  But still, it is beautiful here, and I feel as if it, like London, is sort-of my city, because we lived here when I was a tiny child for four years.  We lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine and my brother and I went to L'Ecole Active Bilingue, and became bilingual when we were very young; when I was 12 and doing my French O-Level oral exam the lady said: "There is no point carrying on; you speak better French than I do." It was true; she sounded like an underpaid extra from 'Allo 'Allo. Now, of course, the Parisians pat me on the shoulder and tell me that really, my accent is not so bad, and that I should not worry, because I do not yet have "a trace of Quebec".

I walked a long way the other day to go to a bookshop on the rue de Rivoli. The rue de Rivoli is full of stupid tourist shops selling aprons with cats in berets on.  I was looking for Shakespeare & Co which I thought was there but that wasn't; instead there was an alarming branch of WHSmith, that I did not go in to, and another shop, called Galignani, which said on its awning that it was "the first English bookshop established on the continent".   It smelt like a French bookshop smells, and the boys at the till wore tight cashmere v-necks and heavy spectacles and muttered rudely about the man who ran up and down the shop building a pile of hugely expensive art books. "C'est une PATHOLOGIE", said one, as he deposited a book about Vermeer that must have cost a hundred Euros.

It is snowing now. They do not really know what to do with snow here, despite the fact that the hipsters wear Canada Goose jackets and gigantic beards.   I am going to stay inside in my tiny poo-smelling flat and eat my apple tart and watch English television on the internet, and tomorrow I shall go and look at Versailles.

I am in Amsterdam

Mainly I am in Paris, still on covert operations, but this weekend I am in Amsterdam with good old friends and my splendid family.

So far, it has resulted in this, my favouritest Facebook status ever:

Otherwise, I am here, taking photographs of foodstuffs.

Yours distractedly

NWM

I read an email

In it, the following line glowed at me in the manner of a phosphorescent, potentially fatal jellyfish in the calm waters of Reason:

"It'd be an idea to verbalise it to the audience we're with tomorrow."

Would it? Would it really?

I hope things are going to get a little more 'jazzy'

Yes, it is true. Tomorrow I am leaving Canada for a month. I will first of all be engaged in covert operations in Paris (with brief sojourns to Amsterdam and London) for a fortnight.  On the 21st of December, I will leap aboard a TGV, accompanied by my 'husband',  and travel south to see my parents, who will meet us and drive us to their house in a village near Cognac. There, we will sample three flavours of Bailey's and play Trivial Pursuit, using questions published in 1983.

Life is Canada is of excellent quality and extremely pleasant, but my monkey sense - fuelled, as it is, by absinthe and Hula-Hoops - tells me that this web-blog may once again become more interesting, what with these instances of travel and amusement.  Who can tell?  It is probably better not to promise too much, but - fingers crossed!

Pip "Jules Verne" Pip

NWM

I am presented with a mystery

What in cock's name is a London Routemaster bus (now out of commission, unless you are having a 'special event') doing in the middle of rural Quebec?  Someone put it on a boat once and sailed it across the sea.

It is mysteries like this that fill me with wonder every day.

Pip "Lew-ISS!" Pip

NWM

Do not forget my other blog. It is ace. (Or so I tell myself as I sip gin through a long bendy straw and rock backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.)