Small Beds and Large Bears

We’ve both just returned from Copenhagen: a conference trip for me, a birthday holiday for K. Denmark is an oddity: much as Finland looks Scandinavian when you squint, Denmark looks a little Germanic when you don’t.
The capital city is wonderful in a lot of ways: it has London’s green lungs, and a brilliant public transport [...]

In the most recent LRB, Stephen Shapin reviews Michael Steinberger’s book about the fall of French cuisine. While Steinberger’s frankly bizarre neoliberal, uncontrollable-market afterwords can probably be discarded, the basic premise—that French cuisine is ossified and tedious—is one with which I can definitely concur.
I’ve suggested before that vegetarian food is a national cuisine’s “canary in [...]

We’re back from what could now start being described as our “yearly vacation in Brittany,” seeing as we’ve done it two years in a row now. K’s parents own a one-time nightmare property which, in its fifteenth or so year of decorating and wrangling-with, has gradually been turned into an idyllic little retreat in the [...]

Last week I went skiing with work. How lucky am I? Well, given I’m not the sort of person who would necessary like skiing—an extrovert’s sport, with potential for showing off and excessive consumption, both of which I grumpily frown on—then the jury would be out. But I loved it.
Obviously the fact that it was [...]

French cuisine is fucking awful, isn’t it? Not French food so much: I know people who’ve eaten some and enjoyed it. But cuisine, the artistry and craftsmanship of cooking, is pretty much dead in France. Ignorant, thick-headed, ritualistic, closed to new innovations, and just plain bad. Like Parisian architecture and the French language under the [...]

Paris was lovely, apart from the food (more on that later.) With alternately gloriously late-summer sunny and heartlessly mid-July rainy—like the most Parisian of love affairs—and with beautiful parks and fantastic architecture, it was a city to melt the heart. The métro was a smooth and cheap experience, with trains running till well after midnight. [...]

It’s raining in Paris. Great umbrellasful of rain, refusing to soak through surfaces as though they were newly waxed, and pouring off the tarmac into the tramlines by the Cité Universitaire, thence down those metal channels as though they were the city’s storm drains. Porte d’Orléans is kept dry by its hill; it doesn’t look [...]

Most of the days at our parents’ Breton cottage ended up with a lot of red wine and some DVDs. Given that the restaurants that didn’t close were a car journey away and only served meat with meat, it was a good solution to the problem of everyone enjoying their evening.
This also meant K. and [...]

I’ve been away from blogging for a good couple of weeks now, and physically away from my computer for around ten days. This has been spent in a landline-free, signal-free Breton valley near Guingamp. Every once in a while a journey to a nearby beach would put us in range of a mobile mast and [...]

K. and I are back from our wet weekend in Brighton. Without meaning to, I ended up indulging my weakness for out-of-season coastal towns: this particular location was quite lovely, with the shops on the pier dotted with boarded-up units, and the groynes and coastal walks quiet and windswept; the city centre was probably still [...]