At a tiny natural wine bar in Bologna, a French couple from Paris walked in while I was sat at the counter and struck up a conversation with the Italian server. 'I hate Paris,' he said with a big smile, 'because every time I go there my
A couple of weeks ago now I resigned from The Saturday Paper, a decision I've felt coming for some time but had resisted for about as long. I'm unsure what to say about it other than to make the observation that it can take me many
No one made me go to the pet cemetery. I stumbled across it while idly zooming around on a map of Paris, the better to acquaint myself with its features outside of the famous centre. On the Seine, just a little outside the périphérique that encloses that celebrated middle, the
On a recent Wednesday, the kitchen sink in my Paris apartment became totally clogged and I was deserted by the civilising infrastructure of modern life. Thus begins my nightmare. The building pipes in the French capital – and probably the rest of the country, too – are notoriously old and narrow. As
Last week it snowed heavily twice in Paris, turning the city into a frigid, monochrome fantasy land over three days, and at the weekend I popped into the Musée Marmottan Monet for a spot of impressionism and an exhibition called the Empire of Sleep. In what seems to me a
The Morton family has never really been good at surprises. To be surprised meant being the recipient of unscheduled bad news. To wit: a part on the car that none of us previously knew existed is broken by decree of the cosmos, like the long-lost cousin that appears on soap
I deliberately booked the MRI for my knee in the late afternoon on the other side of Paris because I thought it would be fun to turn it into a walking tour and take some photos with my new camera. There is a logic to this, if you squint. I
This horror story begins with a wandering brass band; my sirens. I will follow a brass band anywhere. There is just something about the way a tuba cuts a shape on the horizon – so brash, so untoward – that gets my motor running. The string band played as the Titanic went
Despite appearances, I am not much given to writing about my personal life. Acres of print about my family, my moods, my eternal and meandering self-reflections have been produced. There is also the very fact of this newsletter, I suppose, but not so much about boys and various, or invariable,
I night not tell you if I win the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, but there will be signs. Ha ha, I'm fully kidding. I did win it. The news was everywhere anyway. I was a push notification! I've discovered in the course
The ball soared over the towering fence and landed right in front of me as I walked down a pedestrian only cobblestone street in Abbesses. It was the size of a football (soccer, if you're basic) but lighter, and made from a spongy blue foam. And now it
I was the first person at my coffee shop one morning this week and there I found a lovely young French man with a pencil moustache who looked lost and alone, as if he had broken into the place and then decided on a whim to try and run it.