Each year, on the summer solstice, Paris and most of France becomes what is essentially the world's largest outdoor party for Fête de la Musique. Bistros, restaurants, cafes and sundry businesses saturate the air with live music, DJs, bands, drummers and cabaret singers and, in the capital at
When the writer and humourist David Rakoff died in 2012 at the age of 47, This American Life ran a previously unaired reading he had done for show about the hit musical Rent. It remains one of the funniest things I have ever heard. The characters are artists, creative types.
Much has happened and I have been very unwell. I think, perhaps, I've been having one of my all-time nervous breakdowns. But in Paris, which is a vibe. This has been going on for a while but has been particularly acute over the last few weeks. I
That terminated Department of Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo thirsts for war quite as desperately as he does is confusing for, however much he fancies himself the master of whispers and strategy, the disgraced public servant has neither the stature nor the cunning to survive one. At a glance it
Spring, naturally, has some false starts. In the middle-ish northern hemisphere, I'm learning, these are many. There have been some sunny days in Paris since March, even some relatively warm ones, but on the whole the weeks have been cool and gray, like an emotionally unavailable grandparent.
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
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
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
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.
There was a man at the ice creamery the other day and I cannot stop thinking about him. He looked about 50. No family in tow, indeed no other travelling friends or acquaintances in sight. From his person there were wires, running out of his ears and a battery pack
