The drug dealers law-abiding citizens who live opposite, who usually play loud reggae music on Friday nights, have switched to Michael Jackson.
M&S
I have always liked shopping at Marks and Spencer because it is such a sensible shop, and when I am pretending to be a grown-up I like to imagine I’m sensible. It’s also where my rich auntie used to buy her food, so from a young age I thought of it as the place to go for luxury foodstuffs, even though what it offers foodwise is really limited to things you put in an oven and warm up, rather than than things you can use to cook with.
But after some thought, I’ve decided that after Stuart Rose’s rant in the Observer last week, I will be buying my tights elsewhere. It can be very hard work trying to be taken seriously in the workplace when the obvious sexism is unspoken – especially if you work, as I do, in a male-dominated sector – but it’s really very disspiriting when someone as prominent as he is can, apparently unchallenged, say something like this:
Girls today have never had it so good, right?…Apart from the fact that you’ve got more equality than you ever can deal with, the fact of the matter is that you’ve got real democracy and there are really no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time. Women can get to the top of any single job that they want to in the UK. You’ve got a woman fighter pilot who went in to join the Red Arrows yesterday. I mean, what else do you want to do, for God’s sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven’t got?
Yes, what on earth are we complaining about, now that we’re allowed to be miners? The piece goes on to suggest that he might have been attempting to wind up his (female) interviewer, but it’s such a vastly stupid thing to say that I don’t much care what his motivation was. Your tights aren’t that good, mister, and your cheese selection is crap, and whilst there are probably a hundred reasons to boycott any high street store if you look closely enough, this one was so eminently avoidable; so completely unnecessary, that I shall be taking my fluffy little head elsewhere in future.
The horror
I would like to propose a moratorium on the use of emotive language in news reporting. I expect it from the tabs, but I don’t need proper news providers talking to me about “the tragic death of Baby P” or “a catastrophic drop in numbers of cuckoos”. Tell me the facts, and let me decide how tragic or catastrophic they are. Tell me about the preventable death of a child, or an unforeseen drop in numbers of cuckoos, and let me choose where to place them on my own scale of tragedy. Give me the information, and allow me to make the value judgement.
Ramsay
I decided yesterday that a meal in a properly swanky restaurant is worth at least a weekend away, for the amount of pleasure it brings. This was on the back of lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Claridges restaurant, which might have been the best meal I’ve ever had. We had the set lunch, but it was so good I’m tempted to go back and try everything else, and if I could afford it that’s exactly what I’d do. As it is, I’ll just share the menu with you so you can enjoy it vicariously.
Since it was a special occasion our waiter gave us a whistlestop tour of the kitchen, which was much calmer and quieter than you’d expect. I thought kitchens of posh restaurants were supposed to be a louder and hotter version of actual hell, but this was more like a very orderly production line. Which, I suppose, is what it is.
(Do you like my new design, by the way? It’s not my own; it’s one of WordPress’s standard designs, but I like the layout and the header image, which makes me think of Ireland, where I will be next week. A fantastic meal may be a good substitute for a holiday, but there’s no harm in having one of each.)
Erratum
When I said
Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
What I really meant was
Not including London, Paris does human-scale street life…etc etc.
London is bigger, so there are more places where it doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s as good as anywhere else’s. I was reminded of this yesterday coming through Brixton Market, which is still the most interesting place I know in London.
Shoes
I have bought these
and these
and these
As astute eyes like yours will have noticed, they are all the same. I bought the black ones first, and they were SO comfortable and SO pretty that I found myself thinking about the other colours and wondering whether they’d be a good investment. And after a couple of days I remembered something that an ex-boss at the Guardian once told me when I couldn’t decide whether to buy a lambswool Elvis Presley scarf for £45, which was that the amount of emotional energy I was expending worrying about whether to buy it would soon outweigh the financial cost of just doing it. So I did.
Paris
…was still lovely, of course. We caught the sun on the first day and I realised I hadn’t been there in good weather since 1998. It makes walking with no particular purpose in mind much more appealing.
In my second, or maybe third, year at university, I wrote an essay about Haussman’s Paris, and the period between 1853 and 1870 when he, along with Napoleon III, was responsible for what amounted to a wholescale razing and rebuilding of large swathes of the city. Huge numbers of slum-dwellers were effectively banished; their homes replaced by shiny new apartment buildings which only the rich could afford to live in. This is still the main reason why Paris’s inner city, in the sense in which we use the term, is largely outside the city.
Anyway, one of the things Haussman succeeded in putting in place was a set of rules governing future development in the city, which meant that subsequent building projects have had to abide by the aesthetic rules devised during his period as Prefect of the Seine. As a result, one of the most immediately Parisian of images is the wide, tree-lined boulevard edged with elegant buildings of greyish-white stone, never more than five stories high. This is the Paris that Haussman defined, and it’s still there much as he envisaged it.
And yet, there’s more variation in Paris than you might think, and it’s the sudden differences as much as the general sameness which make it a beautiful city. Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, but the unexpected sights which lurk around every other corner: a flea market; a gloomy courtyard, usually occupied by a grumpy-looking cat; a carousel; a sudden sharp hill leading up, or down, to a new vista. Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
And it has La Grande Arche de la Défense, which is really big and has a hole in it:
More photos here.
Gay Paree
I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.
Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?
Search terms
WordPress has a facility which tells me the search terms people have used to find this blog. I’ve just had a look at the list, and I am in roughly equal measure pleased, entertained and baffled by it. The top ten, edited to remove near-synonyms, looks like this:
- Fail
- Barack Obama’s mother
- London smell
- Scary playgrounds
- Zed Police Academy
- Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre
- Palestra
- Margate
- Young Bono
- Earthquake ball
It’s good to know that I am the go-to person for each of these things. The “Fail” searches were all last year, but there were a lot of them. The people looking for “Barack Obama’s mother” are a steady trickle, and I hope, but doubt, that they find what they wanted here. Of course, I have skewed their results even further in my favour now with this post. Sorry.
Glad All Over 