I'm a writer and reporter. My latest book is Mean Streak, the full account of a government shakedown that stole billions from Australians by raising fake debts.
I was going to have some fun with the newsletter this week until the French authorities – who, for official purposes, I love and adore – sprung the steel trap of bureaucracy on my bliss and visited upon it a great injury. So the fun has been cancelled. Instead, today, we are
I have signed a contract to lease an apartment from a couple in Paris. She is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and he is a professor of modern literature with a side expertise in the philosophy of Hegel, a man whose work is so dense, so sprawling, that the only way to
A few days ago I was in a boulangerie a few blocks from the Champs Élysées ordering a sandwich, drink and dessert in one of those French lunch combinations, or formule, which requires a level of language just one step above rudimentary. 'Ah, you speak French,' the server
At the book launch in the Oberkampf district of Paris last Tuesday night I met an incredibly beautiful dog named Toula who was adopted as a rescue from the Greek Island of Santorini by a couple who live in Switzerland, all three of whom had just that afternoon arrived by
There was a moment, as my flight landed at Charles De Gaulle airport in the very early hours of Tuesday morning local time, when I believed fully that I had made a mistake. I was going to have to speak to some French people and my low-energy, three year stint
The seven books I take with me for a year living overseas may not be the same as the bundle chosen for a year in solitary confinement. If I was stranded on a deserted island for a few months and needed hunting weapons I would not, for instance, want with
The kinds of grievous injuries for which I might be covered under my travel insurance policy are oddly combinatorial, I noted with some grim amusement from the couch while I read. A lousy $25,000 for the loss of both feet or the loss of both hands. Similarly, the loss
The world learned a new Pope had been elected seconds after a seagull regurgitated part of a Vatican street rat for its chick, white smoke curling through the scene like the mist that conceals the organic horror of Skull Island. Before the elder gull vomited the mangled corpse of rattus
How gauche to be living in a small rural town with a dark secret. Boring, done before. And just as I was about to retire (to France). The town is all a-flutter because somebody has gone to great expense to print an eight page, full colour 'community newsletter'
Newsletter
I have no idea what I am doing
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the mendicant class is up, not down
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which bears absolutely no* resemblance to my first