Parisian mason of the porcelain bowl

We went to Paris for the (long) weekend. In her ongoing culinary sacrifice, the lovely selected a vegetarian restaurant in the carnivore's capital. Sadly it was shut. After making the schlep over to the area we chose somewhere near - in front of a pretty building. It was recommended to us by the I heart NY t-shirt wearing Parisian woman out the front (the horror, she said, "you can't smoke inside, but it is a great brasserie, the best in the area"). We sat in the smoking section. Our table for two was by the window and joined to another occupied table.

And that, is how we met Alan.

Alan was a charming Frenchman in, to quote Sinatra, the autumn of his years. A wealthy financier he represented everything about old world France that was alluring, and a dose of those which area antiquated. He lives in Bordeaux, but came to the city to dine with his friend. And see his girlfriend (in that order). Alan's guest, Name Forgotten, had come from Hong Kong for the dinner.

It was a great night. They entertained us, talked politics, global affairs, France in the modern world and their lives. One of those nights you have when travelling where a chance meeting of locals makes you feel like you got know, just a little bit, of the people and city.

Talking with Aland and Name Forgotten (NF) was an exercise in the fine line between comfortable (with oneself) and keen (to impress others). Alan, most assuredly the former, was polite, amusing and aristocratic. NF idolised Alan, but was trite, annoying and phlegmatic.

It was painful to watch someone so keen to emulate fall so short, so clumsily. It made me realise that if you really want to ingratiate yourself, let them finish their point, and then agree. If you give your unrequested opinion, the absolute best case is you are right. But the strong odds that you are wrong far outweigh the very marginal gain from being right first (rather than through agreement). This little law is especially true if your idol starts a sentence with "I'm not racist, but ..."

Mind you, Alan's point, when he says it at least, seeemed to make a measure of unexpected sense at the time. At the time.

They recommended the oysters (Alan: the number five; NF: the number four - we got half a dozen of each. They were great, but Alan's selection was exceptional). They ordered for both of us (on Alan's recommendation the lovely had perfectly cooked deep sea fish; NF ordered for me what turned out to be macaroni and frommage - when the French serve justice to vegetarians it would seem to be a dish best served bland).

Alan ordered a Rose champagne ("the finest champagne in France" Alan tautologically declared to admiring foreigners) and gave us a taste - it was exquisite. They ordered a spirit to finish; "made by monks, a hundred or more herbs .... it is French." It was, to our surprise, Chartreuse. Green chartreuse served in a tumbler resting on a gigantic silver platter of ice. Our enchantment resulted in Alan discretely ordering 2 glasses as our finisher, to be put on his bill.

The low light arrived with ironically sobering clarity. As the chartreuse wound its way through NF's blood system to his head, he was to be taken aback. Actually he was to be taken a-spew. His dash to the toilette, with as much haste as a jet-lagged Frenchman can muster, allowed us to find out why they were having dinner.

Alan is a Freemason.

The first time I heard someone say "I am a Freemason" was in Paris. It was said by a man who was "the head Freemason in France" (a fun game is to try and guess what absurd title he might have 'overlord of the intolerance smock' perhaps). NF was, for want of a better word, his protege (that's French, by the way). NF was battling to find a 'lodge' in Hong Kong, hence the dinner to discuss. Alan had used connections in an attempt to introduce him to the HK massive, to no avail.

And then NF returned. And then they left.

As we drank our stunning smooth and complex Chartreuse on ice 60-something Alan walked off to see his 30-something girlfriend, and 30-something NF stumbled off to see his something-star hotel porcelain bowl. And there was justice. French-style.

The common cold wasn't on the list of illnesses

I have a cough/cold thing. You will be pleased to know it has moved from that phase where you just feel unwell (and there are few symptoms that would differentiate it from a hang-over) to the rather satisfying phase where you are coughing with 'a phlegm rattle' in your throat.

I can't just blame the inconsistent weather for my illness. I must admit that Sandra lulled me into a sense of security with her sunny bursts and spring blossom days (before turning to rain and clouds and bleh). But I really blame the city. If New York is the ''city so nice they named it twice," then London is "the centre of influenza." London is a heady brew of millions of people crammed into underground trains and walkways - coughing into their hands (that are then wiped onto handrails) and ill-ventilated air-space. Oh, it's pleasant.

So I took a day off to get better. When I got back to work I needed to fill out my time sheet. Fine. It had a section about why I was sick "please choose the illness from the attached list". Sure. .... Guess how many possible illnesses there were ...Go on ... think of a reasonable number. I thought 15. How many (did you guess)? Not many? If any? .... six hundred and fifteen - from Abdominal Hernia (as opposed to Abdominal Operation, Abdominal Pain or Acne) to Whooping Cough (not Warts or Vertigo ... there are different types of vomiting for god's sake). There are literally 13 varieties of cancer - and this excludes the 14th catch-all "Cancer" which is on there as well. Don't you think that maybe "Assault" might be a bit vague (to me it implies you were unable to come to work due to the fact you were assaulting; otherwise you would be suffering from at least one of "Arm Injury," "Bruising," "Head Injury" etc).

Even if it was the reason you weren't at work yesterday, is anyone actually going to remember to put down Amnesia?

Do they really need to know if someone had an Abortion? Do I need to admit I suffer Alcoholism? These are rhetorical questions, don't answer that last one. Why is Affective Psychosis on the list, but I can't have "effective psychosis"? For the love of god what is Anal Fistula (and before you look it up think about whether you want that on your Google-search record). These are only a portion of the A-section (AIDS, by the way, is on the list).

I chose "hormonal imbalance" and under symptoms wrote "general lack of balance." I love the fact that I might make a footnote in the annual report. ... Oh yeah, sticking it to the man.

Weather forecast: teething

There has been a lot written about the weather in Britain. Few of them in rhyme and (although i have the time, and rain pairs with pain), I won't write in prose because, frankly ... it's difficult and I am lazy.

Most people talk about how miserable the weather is. Some how inherently interesting weather here is, or how inherently boring. Lots have even written about how commented upon the weather is. None of these work for me. I think the weather here feels like having a small child around. Lets call her Sandra. Like all children, Sandra dominates your life - your mood and your tolerance for everything and everyone. Speaking as someone who is deliberately barren, I feel qualified to talk about this at (a slightly longer than your busy schedules will allow) length.

When Sandra is in a bad mood, Londoners is in a bad mood. They're tired, can't leave the house ("why don't you come over here ... Sandra's sick, we haven't slept and I'm now in a foul mood"). In the fleeting moments when Sandra isn't glum (when her tears [despite my parting-gift-from-work-umbrella] aren't soaking the bottom of my trousers; when she is actually exposing that beautiful hen's-teeth-rare smile), her parents, the collective metropolis, are ecstatic. Radio DJs play bouncy-happy music; people hold doors open for each other, everyone smiles, laughs and drinks outside on the street.

It's May. May is Spring. Instead of that adorably cute kid in those calenders (by Anna Whats-it), dressed as a sunflower, Sandra is teething. Sandra, to be honest, is a pain in the arse. Sandra is dominating, domineering, moody ... a little shite ... and I blame her for the cold I now have.

I'm looking forward to summer. Summer will be the equivalent of Sandra's first day at school. She'll make friends, be entertained and challenged - she'll grow into that happy cute kid on the sitcom with a catch-phrase (that will be adorably mispronounced) that will light up the "ahhhhhhwwww" sign in society's subconsciousness. All will be right in the world. I think this will last until November whereupon Sandra will be moody, melancholy and cold - Sandra will be, in weather-years, a teenager.

Since I've been writing, her tears have filled the streets. But now she is tired. The grey has left her cheeks. I have a few hours of dusk while she rests. I'm going to go out and play.

Hope this finds you well.

Hoff-a-holic

We interrupt these long posts with a short one:

If you were David Hasselhoff's kids and you were going to film him so you could later play the footage to him as part of an intervention that aimed to change his ways, wouldn't you do it for humanity, not sobriety?

I mean can't you just show him some of his acting?
You could then show the footage of him in Baywatch and say "Dad, don't do this. You are a bad actor, you are conveying sadness in these scene. And in the last scene, the timing of your punchline was waaaaay off"

Haven't we been here before?

Ahh Barcelona (yeah, the London update, which will be ha-ha-sterical,hasn´t happened yet. In short: settling in very well though, thanks for asking). City of sun, streets, wine, beer, food and culture.

My present from the lovely for my birthday was a trip to three places of my choosing (I know, I don´t deserve her; and no, you can´t have her). First up, Barcelona, for a week revisiting (for her, not me-I hadn´t been here before) her favourite city.

My borrowed guide-book triumphantly informed me that "Barcelona is a sunny city, enjoying clear blue skies for a large part of the year."And it clearly stated, with the mythical wisdom we seem to give these guide books when travelling, that "Grey drizzly weather, lasting days on end is VERY rare"

And so it was that I experienced a very rare Barcelona.

Late breakfast of coffee and cigarettes? Yes please (or as the ´locals´ say "si, por favor."* Barcelona is a city you can get lost in. Fortunate, really, when you are as directionally challenged as I am (I still, 2 months into my new job, get lost in the office-particularly humiliating when you are meeting external people at the foyer and get lost taking them to your meeting room). North? um... that´s where that shop was earlier, near the ... hmm. sorry, where was I? - maybe this is why i get lost sometimes.... anyway

Fear not! I had the lovely - a veritable compass. Better than a compass! North, south, east and home - she has it covered. And, unlike your silly little compass, the lovely remembers streets and places and reads maps and stuff. Finally, the baby shambles can see stuff in a new city beyond concentric circles around the hostel. Now I can get lost in a city (a passtime and a passion) AND know where I am and how to get out (a depressing practicality).

And this is broadly how our first days functioned- left right, left, right coffee and some toast. Stumble, stumble bar - talk and drink, eat and read ... stumble fumble ... home? (how did we get home? I thought it was north .... of ... here).

And so on, and so it rains. What can you do when it rains? most go to museums and galleries. And that´s PRECISELY why the baby shambles doesn´t! The lovely wanted to visit somewhere few tourists would venture and she knew exactly where. After a walk along the beach (in the rain) it was determined, from upon high, that we would venture to ... a solar park - a big, open park by the water, with a huge solar panel (the size of a soccer pitch) hoisted 10m up in the air!.

Yes, what could get away from the Foddor´s-bearing menopausal Americans and their brow-beaten husbands more than a solar park ... in the rain ... that isn´t finished yet ... only 20 inconvenient minutes by bus from the centre!

So we went. And it was cool (in both senses) and we walked around and the lovely stared in wonder at the vision and the construction, and I stared, smiling, at her wonder, in the rain.

And we both left happy.

On the second day I had brought shoes. One pair had ´contact earth´ a function that supposedly grounded me (in a static electicity sense, not metaphorically). I thought it was bollocks, but it turns out on day three, my ´contact earth´ was interfering with the lovely´s compass.

Some form of magnetic interference with ´magnetic north´ (unlike the true north of which some of you are painfully familiar) that they talked about in physics when you were day-dreaming about something more interesting and less important. Her cunning sense of direction was askew, what would we do?

We would get lost. Then we would (re)discover where we were again (by, for example walking past where we had eaten lunch 30 purposeful-walking-to-a-museum mins ago). Then we found a fantastic Bodega with huge barrells of beautiful cheap wine and not a care in the world. And we stayed there. Happily.

Haven´t we been here before? Yes, and hopefully many times more.

It's north of the thing ... right?

The Pete Doherty Tour II (from Laos to London)

I spent three relaxing, glorious days in Luang Prabang. A pretty andrelaxed World Heritage listed city. I accidentally got out too much money (there was only one cashier who did visa withdrawals (I didn’t have traveler’s cheques or anything) so ate at fantastic restaurants and had a ball. I decided to head to the capital for the weekend and organized to meet up with friends' of a friend there. But I needed to catch a night bus.

The good bus (with food and drink and leg room and no windows) would leave at 8pm, but arrive at 3am. The dodgy local bus would leave a bit earlier, but arrive at 5.30am. So I caught that. Knowing I would regret it (but I didn’t realize how much).

Third worst bus I have ever caught. The worst was a night bus in Peru that climbed from sea level to about 2km up on rock roads and made me sick for a week (pre Machu Picchu) – I can still remember the feeling of the freezing cold dirt in the air going down my throat at 2am. The second worst was during the day, climbing up “the world’s most dangerous road” in Bolivia. I can still remember the panic as, when the bus overheated, the driver almost ran off the bus without putting the hand brake on (we were half way up the windy cliff face that we had just ridden mountain bikes down). Rounding out the top three was this trip.

My curiosity was piqued when the driver handed out plastic bags (and the lady in front of me got one). I got a bit nervous an hour or so in when she opened the window to let some fresh (freezing) air in. For the next 8hours she coughed up phlegm from the depths of her ankles and spat it out the window (impossible for 100% of that to go out the window and not land on the guy behind her, right?). But it really troughed when I realized why people had accepted the plastic bags.

Appears it is pretty common for locals to get motion sickness.

Obviously this wouldn’t deter you from catching a bus at night …. Nooo
It would just mean you would accept you were going to vomit, at leastonce, so you’d bring your own bag, or vomit in a bus-supplied plastic bag. And then hold on to it, you know, for the rest of the trip, just in case. Oh it was a pleasure.

It is always nice to identify a low point of one’s trip. Mine was at 2.30am. the window in front of me had been open for four, chilling, hours. The wind was slicing through my wool jumper and I had been having a silent war with the old lady in front of me for two hours. The game involved me deftly shutting the window for literally minutes of warmth. She would then reach back, open it up and prove her need for it by hocking a mouthful of phlegm out the partially open window. I had four sheets of A4 paper in my pocket (a Demos piece on aspiration) and used it to fashioned a shield between the window and the seat. As I started to fall asleep (basking a the warm feeling that was a heady combination of no cold air and the glow of the ingenious use of Demos research) my low-point arrived as she threw my shield out the window and spat out something the size of Saturn (unfortunately the gravitational pull was insufficient to create an orbit for some of its 'moons', who crashed into the constellation of my face.

What goes down, must come up, and the rest of the weekend was absolutely fantastic. Taken under the wing of two expats I was shown the delights of Laos. This included a walking tour to Laos’ leárc de triumph (aka the vertical runway as it was made from concrete the Americans donated for a runway), a laos massage, an expat party and a Laos wedding – and that was just on Saturday. Sunday was whittled away at old temples, lovely coffee, beers at sunset by the mighty meekong (that is less mighty in January, and a bit more meek than kong) and a dinner of dumplings in a kooky restaurant with squawking birds. ThanksClare and Cait.

My final morning in Laos was spent having a glorious coffee and croissant for breakfast, before jumping on a bus for Thailand. When I got to Bangkok I had my final meal (a lovely hot Tom Yum soup) grabbed my bags (which hadn't been stolen) and high tailed it to the airport for a flight to my new home with the lovely .... London

ThePete Doherty Tour (A baby shambles) Part I (To Luang Prabang)

I like to travel by the seat of my pants. Partly because I like to think that’s the best way to travel, partly because I don’t like to be ‘locked in’ to any particular plan, but mainly because I am an intensely disorganized guy and like to label my incompetence something more palatable .. I call it ‘spontaneous’ … yeah... I’m spontaneous.

So an hour before I left for the airport I realized that I was going to arrive in Bangkok at midnight with no guidebook (as I left it in a friends car), no hostel booking, and no real idea. So I was convinced (thanks date) to call somewhere and book. They were full, but the next place dutifully took down my booking.

I had (obviously) left my camera in Australia (it is with you, right Mr and Mrs Cohen?), so I brought one duty free as my flight was in final call. Not realizing the battery would be flat and that an Australian connector probably wasn’t going to be the same as Thailand.

I got into a cab and realized I didn’t have directions in Thai for the hostel. And they don’t read English, and I don’t speak Thai. But I knew roughly where it was. Shouldn’t be a problem.
A very long time later I arrived, at about 1am. There are three hostels together, and not a lot else in this area. I walked past the nice one (that was full) to the other one (that had my booking). Only they didn’t (they don't know how to 'take' the booking, let alone how to'hold' the booking). And they were full. And it was 1am. And I was tired. And she offered me the massage table (which turned out to be generous, but was weird at the start as I thought she was offering me a massage). I ended up getting the last room at the other place. I was last minute and lucky. My theme for the week.

At 9am the next morning I spent an hour online trying to figure out the best way to get to Laos. At 10 I realized it was a flight that left at 12.30. At 10.01 I realized I didn’t have enough money on my credit card. At 10.30 the bank registered my transfer, let me buy a ticket. As I got into a taxi at 10.45 I realized I hadn’t asked the hostel guy if I could leave my bag with him for a week, that I didn’t have enough Thai currency to pay the taxi driver (and the departure tax) and at 11.30 I arrived at the airport and got on the flight.

Arriving in Luang Prabang airport is a funny thing. It is a single runway that ends next to a kinda house. But customs is where it gets odd. You need two passport photos and a very specific amount of US currency (varies by country) for the visa. I obviously didn’t have the photos but I had cleaned out my currency draw at home and put it in my pack. I had 60 Canadian, 500 pesos, 1 quetzal (Brazil), 60 pounds and $27US. The first queue you gave them your photos that everyone had. I explained my predicament (not that I am an idiot who doesn’t read visa info, but that they had mysteriously disappeared). They would sort me out for a $1. Sweet, now have $26

Next queue was the visa. There three pages of typed text that was a price list. I have never seen anything like it. Canada was $22, UK and almost all of Europe was $30, US and Switzerland were $35. It was bizarre. Australia: $25!

Taxi ride to the city: $1US.

Got a very nice hostel, had my first shower for the trip (I didn’t bring a towel, but this hostel supplied them (and soap…. Which I also didn’t have). They also had an international converter (so that’s where my photos start).