I wonder at the hair of France

It is not the first time I have wondered about the hair of France. There seems to be a coiffeur on every corner of every street in Paris, and yet the hairstyles seem to come in only four varieties:

Ladies under 45: Long, slightly tousled, choppy fringe or unspecified 'short'
Ladies over 45: Crop with frondy bits dyed dark black/purple or blonde helmet head.

But the men! The men I am most often in contact with in France (don't ask) have shaved heads and bustling beards. Some of the older gentlemen have nondescript short hair; this type of thing is mercifully rare...

...As is this mother-and-daughters trio o' mullets spotted in the Louvre 2 summers ago. (They were not French, so they don't really count but still - wouldn't YOU want to find an excuse to post a photograph of three ladies with matching mullets?)

But yesterday, whilst lunching with the incomparable Belgian Waffle, I began to detect what can only be described as "a pattern".   Here is a man I saw in Paris two years ago:

And here is a man dear Waffle and I saw yesterday, captured on my SpyCam, and enabled by two glasses of wine.  You will note with interest that the texture of his hair matches his collar exactly - the kind of attention to fashion-detail we have come to expect of our French cousins.  (The temptation to nestle in his curls was almost overwhelming. Waffle says she did not want to lick them, but I do not think she was telling the truth.)

On that note, I must leave you. I have only two more nights in Paris before I must leave, propelled into the loving arms of my husband and simple-minded (but enthusiastic!) parents. 

Pip "Curly" Pip

NWM

It is still snowing

Tomorrow morning at 11am, I meet a very special "associate" outside a shop opened by the man who invented the Baba au Rhum.  Other than that I have very little to do this weekend; for example today, the only things I had to do were:

1. Walk to Sacré Coeur, because I cannot remember ever having been inside it and it is a good walk from where I am;
2. Buy something for supper;
3. Not eat a macaroon.

It is now the end of today, and today has been a mixed success.*  Sacré Coeur was indeed a good walk from where I am staying.  It (and the surrounding area) was also full of people who, like me, are not from Paris.  I did not have to engage with any of them until it became clear that out of the thirty people getting in the way of me getting a ticket for the funicular, I was the only one that understood the instructions on the machine.

Unfortunately,  I have the kind of simple-minded face that means that people ask me for directions and instructions wherever I am in the universe (even Mars).  It was therefore ten minutes, three Chinese people, a cluster of Japanese, some Spaniards, five Americans and a group of disorientated Greeks before I managed to mount the funicular myself, accompanied by my grateful international consortium of new best friends.   (Next time, I will stand by the machine wearing a badge that says: "I put the fun in funicular".  FYI this is the best joke I have ever made.)

Anyway, here are some photosnaps from my walk. Have a look. You may like some of them; you may not.  Either way, it is snowing again tonight and properly chilly, but I have wine in the bottle and the knowledge in my heart that in four sleeps, I will be boarding a train to Angoulême with my husband, the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist; after two-and-a-half hours, I will get off the train and find myself waving my tiny monkey paw at the simple drooling faces of Monkeymother and Monkeyfather. Thereafter, we will get inside their car and disappear into Christmas-related activities for two weeks. It will be great.  In the meantime, I must not eat too many macaroons.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with standing outside in the cold taking
 photographs of people buying things made of butter.  And crying. 

Regardez! C'est le Père Noel.  Do not be afraid. He cannot see you naked.

Statue man. Smoking a fag. And fucking loving it.

This man played "Greensleeves", and then he played the theme from  The Godfather.
 I laughed very loudly by mistake, felt guilty and gave him 2 Euros because I am an idiot. 

I can barely look at this photograph, which is why it is smaller 
than the others. If someone put this on my plate with those
 fucking crustaceans looking up at me, I would faint. 
If you are insane, you can click on the photograph and have
a better look. I have deleted the original. 

Anyway, that is enough of that for now. If anything else interesting happens, I will let you know.

Pip "stop looking at me you shelled freakshows" Pip!

NWM



*I succeeded on the first two fronts but failed on the third. (You may, if you wish, see evidence of the success of number 2 and the failure of number 3 here).

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?