A Guide to Gardening

Today, gardening is a bit of an anachronism, like natural breasts and idealism. But retro never goes out of style, and what could be more retro than good ol’ agriculture? It’s what separates us from the reptiles. Gardening is really just agriculture, but without the ambition. So get gardening!

Step 1: Make up a theme

The best gardens follow a theme, like “Japanese” or “Soviet Gulag”. To illustrate, we will examine my recent visit to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival, in the Loire Valley. The oh-so-important theme for the festival was “Gardens of the Deadly Sins”, of which there are seven, apparently.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, generally speaking, the theme of a garden might not be obvious to the naked eye. Thus, it is important to accompany your garden with a descriptive plaque in order to get the message across. For example, this paragraph served as the description for the abovementioned Festival:

What if, entirely naturally, the garden led to unbridled hedonism - temptation born from a lost Eden, a thirst for knowledge and expense? A magical place which, to blossom, relies on the rule that subversion is possible and which, to thrive, knows where its limits lie…The gardens will celebrate an alchemy which, while far from flawless – ie free from sin – will nonetheless be, as Valery put it, “the perfection of the righteous.”

It is best if your plaque conveys very little except that you own a thesaurus.

As mentioned, the theme of this Festival was “sin”, and some of the garden exhibits approached this theme more literally than others. This garden represents “purgatory”, which I believe is the Catholic equivalent of café jazz:

This garden highlights an important concept: the hardest part about gardening is getting things to grow. To get around this, the gardener here just built all the hard bits out of wood. Simple! Then, to really nail the theme, [non-gender-specific pronoun, because it’s 2014] added some fun little “confessions”. Voila, la theme!

Apparently, we spend all our lives balancing sin. At least, I think that’s what was written on the plaque for this one:

See, those are all seesaws! That’s quite a feat of engineering, I’d say. Maybe not the best at getting the flowers to grow, but the carpentry is nice.

Step 2: Once you have a theme, pretend that your garden matches it

It doesn’t really matter whether you have the garden or the theme first, because whether you are a good gardener really depends on whether you’re a good carpenter. Just build something, plant some flowers around it, then act like you planned it all along.

In fact, if I had one tip for becoming a great gardener, it’d be doing a carpenter’s apprenticeship. That’ll sort it!

Step 3: Be a patriot!

They had a garden themed for the Volcanic Plateau. Our Volcanic Plateau. It was Mt Ruapehu, Mt Tongariro and Mt Taranaki, but in France! It even had its own obtuse write-up:

There was indeed smoke (steam, I reckon) rising from the volcanoes, especially Taranaki. As with many of the garden exhibits, if I’d never read the plaque, I would never have guessed that this was a venomous love triangle. I probably would have just thought that someone cleverly put together a few mountains and added some NZ-native bush. [See Step 2, above].

Strictly speaking, the mountains (as represented here) do not exactly accurately match their namesakes. But who cares? They had them, and they were glorious.

Step 4: Things you can walk through are good things

You’re already a whiz at carpentry, so why not carpent yourself up a pseudo-tunnel thing to walk through? Make your tunnel a spiral shape, to really show off:

Is that a young Liam Neeson?

Step 5: Accessorise!

As Seth from The OC once said, “if you were to put a mirror on that opposing wall, I really think that would open up the energy flow in this room.” Mirrors can be outdoor things too:

This is a great way to confuse any animals you might own, and is perfect for narcissistic nudists. If every garden had a mirror, can you imagine the improvement in everyone’s parents’ gardening attire?

You might like to put a table in your backyard. I would applaud that decision. I would double-applaud it if the table was enormous and had flowers growing in the middle of it:

This has dual benefits. First, your table can take up the entire backyard, but there is still room for all the pretty flowers that you will forget to plant. Second, you can conduct UN negotiations from the garden:

Step 6: Forget the flowers, a pool is better

Flowers die, but a pool won’t. Sure it might get all green and scummy, and if you get fish, the fish might die. So you get a cat, and train the cat to eat the dead fish, thereby saving you from flushing them down the toilet, and thus saving water (clean, green alternatives).
What if the cat drowns in the pool? The fish are piranhas. They’ll sort it out.
What if the cat dies in another fashion? I’ve got this cousin…never mind.

Don’t bother with the fish. What’s more important is that you have a pool. In fact, get a pool like the one above. It’s not even deep enough to swim in. There are no fish; no ducks. This pool is entirely aesthetic. What a display of needless excess. You had potentially useful land which could have grown crops or housed animals, but you put in a functionless pool because, eff it, you can. This is why the terrorists hate us.

Conclusion

If I were to critique my friends at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival (if!) I would say that a garden festival is best suited to happy, colourful themes. A Lion King-themed garden would work, as would a Roses theme (the chocolates, but you could use roses – the flowers – to represent Roses – the chocolates). The gardens were very well designed (and carpented), but the theme was a bit of a non sequitur.

If I could leave you with one bit of advice, it’d be this: get a big field, and fill it with sunflowers. Sunflowers are the people’s flower.

Bringin' the (Cham)pagne

Myself, the Baguette Winner and two of our friends hopped on a train to Epernay, in the Champagne region. That’s where they make the champagne.

The easiest way to explain it - even down to the travel time – is that it’s just Martinborough. A cute little town set up to accommodate tourists for a day or weekend, there to tour the champagne houses.

We kicked it off with a tour of Mercier. The pride and joy of their house is a really big barrel:

The cask was made for the World Fair in 1889, and nicknamed the ‘Cathedral of Champagne. Apparently, it was such a big deal that it was considered the main attraction of the Fair – alongside a little metal structure made by a chap named Eiffel. It doesn’t get a shout out in the Wikipedia entry for the Fair, however, and I’m starting to think that Mercier’s promotional video may have taken some liberties. According to Wikipedia, the main attraction (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was in fact a “Negro Village”, but perhaps Mercier felt that mentioning this would be a tad negative.

To get the cask to the fair, Mr Mercier had to buy and then demolish five houses. They seemed rather proud of this fact.

The tour included a slightly bizarre laser-guided train tour of the cellars (which they refer to as caves, with good reason). This was way slower and more boring than it looked in the pictures, as there really isn’t a lot to see. The trouble is, these vast, endless cellar/cave things pretty much look the exact same the whole way. The histories of these places are obviously pretty interesting, but all the best bits of this were detailed in the promo video mentioned above. And the cellars are pretty much full of bottles that just sit there and don’t get touched for awhile, so unless you’re a identical-stationary-bottles-with-no-labels-ophile, there isn’t much to see. What did make it impressive was the size, and the fact that these tunnels had been around since Queen Victoria.

The good news was that the tour finished with two glasses of champagne (a brut and a rosé), and it had barely hit midday. So can’t really complain.

After Mercier, we took ourselves back down ‘Champagne Avenue’ and into Epernay, in search of a traditional French lunch. We managed to find this at La Cave a Champagne, a funny little Fawlty Towersy restaurant, which had a collection of Michelin Guides on a shelf, but did not in fact have a Michelin Star. [It is in the Guide, though]. It was a very classically French menu, meaning that everything was either in a cream, butter or cheese sauce, and it was very good for the price (€20 for three courses). The huge disappointment, for me, was seeing the chicken come out to every other table, immediately after I had ordered the fish. I just don’t like fish as much as chicken. When will I learn?

You can read more about this meal (which included snails!) here.

After lunch, feeling tired and full (all that cream!), we stumbled back up Champagne Avenue to check out Moët. They didn’t have a big barrel, but they did have a statue of Dom Perignon:

This tour began with one of the tackiest promotional videos I have ever seen. People were audibly giggling during its screening. Luckily, it’s on Youtube!

Let’s examine some of the finer points:

-       Great generic music; because nobody is so rich that they want to pay royalites;

-       Every time we saw that finger delicately tracing the rim of the glass, people laughed. Is it a pensive gesture? Sensual? Erotic? It is clearly meant to be evocative of something, but we all just thought it was stupid.

-       “Pioneer in technology and innovative research”: A whiteboard pen? That would be a huge claim to fame, indeed.

-       The main problem with this video is that it says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE. Did you know that Moët is owned by the same company as Henessy and Louis Vitton, two other standards of luxury? Why not throw that in? Or how about showing some of the process, or giving some of the history?

-       This is literally the bit in Entourage where all of the talent agencies are trying are sign Vinnie, and they all show virtually identical clips beginning with “BMW…Rolex…Vincent Chase”. Nobody buys this crap.

I guess it’s not that bad. But they actually sat us down with a straight face and had us watch this. We had already paid, so who were they trying to convince? And if they really wanted to sell champagne, this would have been a far more tasteful advertisement:

The good news is that the tour itself went straight uphill after this. The cellars in these places are directly under the buildings, so we went from watching that dumb video, straight down a marble staircase in the same room. Suddenly, we were in the caves where they store millions of bottles of champagne. Of course, it looked virtually identical to the Mercier caves, even though each house would claim that it was the ‘original’ or whatever.

For this tour, there was no train, and we actually had a human guide (about 15-20 people in our group). This meant that we could ask questions and interact a little more. Our guide could pick up a bottle and point out the sediment, for example, and demonstrate how they are rotated. There still wasn’t a lot to see down there, but it felt much more informative.

Moët & Chandon also produce Dom Perignon, which you will recognise from your favourite rapper’s humble-brags. Dom Perignon is strictly a vintage champagne, which means that all of the grapes used are from a single year, deemed to have produced an especially good crop. There were other facts about what made it special, but you have Wikiepdia.

"Y'all drink Dom but not rosé..."

A few fun champagne facts before we end this thing:

-       You know how champagne bottles are really thick? That’s because they used to explode all the time (due to the bubbles). Apparently, Dom Perignon himself may have come up with this solution.

-       The Moët people claim that “magnum” is the best size for champagne, because it has the best volume to surface area ratio (ie, the amount of wine touching the air pocket at the top). There’s a good chance that this is just the size they wanted us to buy, for margin reasons and whatnot.

-       Champagne is fermented in the same bottle right the way through, in either your standard bottle or a magnum. If you buy a bottle bigger than a magnum, it will have been filled from other bottles (and this is why they reckon magnums are better tasting).

Snailed It!

If there are three things that everybody thinks of when they think about France, they are baguettes, snails and eco-terrorism. This food review deals with the second of these fundamental Frenchities.

Whilst upon a daytrip to Epernay, one of the key locales in the Champagne region, myself, the Baguette Winner and two friends went out for an intentionally quintessential French meal. We ate at a small, crammed-in bistro named La Cave a Champagne, which looked so much like what you’d expect a little French restaurant to look like that photos are unnecessary (also, I forgot to take any). Just know that if it weren’t clichéd to refer to things as clichéd, this place would have been a total cliché.

I won’t go over the entire meal, but just know that it was both perfectly nice in that it allowed me to finally enjoy some traditional French food (and it was inexpensive), and also it was slightly disappointing to learn that I may not actually be a big fan of the old French classics (at least as they were presented here). For now, I’m going to hope that I just failed to order the right items for me, and hope for better next time. Incidentally, the snails dish (the entrée) was actually the best part of the meal.

[As an aside, the same team went out for a more expensive French meal the next night, and I enjoyed it far more].

Let’s get to the main attraction:

That’s artichokes and mushrooms in a creamy sauce, and the little black things are the snails. Either you’re dying to know what the snails tasted like, or you’ve had them before, and you’re acting like it’s no big deal; you eat way weirder stuff all the time. Well, you don’t, and if you do, what’s wrong with you? Try eating delicious processed foods like the rest of us. They process the flavour right in there!

Anyway, the snails were fine. They don’t taste like a whole lot, which is why they work in that super-creamy, buttery sauce. Think of them as chewier mushrooms, or far less chewy paua. In other words, they’re pretty dependent on what you put them in. It is for this reason that I shan’t be seeking them out in future, but if they’re put in front of me, I won’t vomit everywhere either.

The following night, we went out for the aforementioned “expensive” meal, which was kindly covered by our friends to thank us for giving them our fold-out couch. Again, I won’t go over the whole thing, but it did include another new for me: guinea fowl. This was genuinely delicious:

"It's like chicken, but not trying as hard." - Helen, our friend

I suppose if you’ve had pigeon or pheasant before, this might be like that. It’s a gamier, darker version of a chicken leg, but maybe not quite as deep red as duck. This was great, as I’m a “dark meat” guy. It was served on roast potatoes with a simple gravy, and I ate every little bit of it.

Also, there was only one guy in the kitchen, churning out three-course meals! Either these were some of the best microwave meals any of us have ever had, or he was good, man.

A Be'er-Do-Well In Paris

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Parisian beer habits. I can confirm that they drink beer. Throughout my study, I have made some observations; have had some thoughts. I will try and have these thoughts again, in writing.

Beer we go!

The beers here seem to fall into two broad categories: lager pilseners (Heineken and Kronenberg 1664 are everywhere!) and strong “Abbey” beers, which are typically Belgian (Leffe, for instance). There is very little of anything hoppy, not an IPA in sight. Not much dark beer (except for Guinness), not much “amber” and nothing “low carb”. While most of it is better than your standard Lion Brewery stuff back home, I am yet to have a beer here that is more than “just another beer”. The beer aisles at supermarkets are nothing like the long, packed shelves back in Wellington. Everything is beerily similar.

One of the more perplexing differences between New Zealand and France (it’s probably more than just France, but how should I know?) is the slight difference in serving sizes. For instance, instead of 600mL bottles of soft drinks, they go for 500mL. Instead of 330mL bottles, they prefer 250mL or 500mL (they also refer to these as 25cL or 50cL. I can only assume this is some high-brow existentialist maths). This actually makes sense; 600mL is a stupid volume. Half a litre is more common sense (by the way, 2.25L?). But having had the 600mL, I just can’t get used to the smaller bottles. I bet that’s how Heidi Klum feels.

You can get beer in 33mL bottles and cans, but it’s far less popular than the littlies and the slightly biggeries. I’m told you can also get craft beer, but it is rarely on tap, and the range is not like back home. Which seems odd. You would expect there to be a vast range of beers from all over Europe, each nation’s export claiming to be superior to the next. But maybe this is that thing that you always hear about: the snooty (read: xenophobic) French. They know what they like, and what they like is usually French (or Belgian, but what’s the diff?).

[Beer in mind, I realise that a great deal of the beers here are not from France. I am trying to say that the stereotype of the French not being open to new ideas might be reflected in their beer selection, as it is not varied. Like Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends.]

Before leaving New Zealand, people kept warning me about the French, and how they can be so rude if you don’t speak le français. I haven’t found that thus far. Most people are very nice. In fact, just this evening, a man rang our doorbell, wanting to advertise that he is a real estate agent, and if we ever want to move apartments, here is his business card. He spoke about as much English as I do French, so this (theoretically) short interaction took about five minutes, with both of us trying to express something or other in horrific versions of the other’s mother tongue. It was delightful. Pointless, as we are locked into our lease for a year (something I failed to express immediately), but delightful. There have been two occasions where people have said something to me in French, and then become pretty brassed off when I replied with “je ne parle pas français”. One was an apparently crazy old woman, and the other was a 20ish young guy who I think wanted to seem tough. I could have taken either of them.

Sorry for the tangent. Thanks for beering with me. I mentioned earlier the strong beer fetish. It is perfectly acceptable to stroll around the streets, parks and canals of Paris with one of these things:

That’s proper homeless territory, as far as I’m concerned. Just this morning, I saw a guy, mid-thirties, suit and tie, leisurely heading off towards the metro with one of them in his hand. It was 10:30am! He’d probably just brushed his teeth. And this is pretty popular over this way. It seems pretty much the norm to have a big, strong beer for brunch, on a work day, while you walk, pushing a pram. Maybe it’s a bohemian, life-is-meaningless-type thing (you know, Jacque Kerouac-style). All I know is, if I ever drink one of these things, somebody better get John Kirwan on the phone:

When I Googled Faxe Extra Strong, I got a bunch of “Worst Beers Ever” reviews. That is a litre of 10% beer in one can. Don’t tell Family First.

On the plus-side, the Parisians have done a few things right when it comes to beer:

-       A pint here IS ACTUALLY A PINT!!! As in, when you ask for a pint, you get roughly 473mL of beer (usually they round up to 500mL). Bars in New Zealand seem to have concluded that the word “pint” is just an expression, and will happily advertise “a pint for $5” and proceed to deliver a handle. A pint is a specific measurement, which makes that false advertising. DON’T MAKE ME CALL FAIR GO!

-       Happy Hour is an institution, and somewhere along the way, someone must have wrongly translated “hour”, because it’s never just an hour! Our nearby café Les Anemones (“the anemones”) has a happy hour from 4pm-midnight. What’s the point in ever having full price?

-       There doesn’t seem to be any liquor ban here (as evidenced by my suit and tie friend above). It doesn’t seem to cause much of a problem. Whereas us Kiwis can’t be trusted – we fight or break shit – the French just seem to get a bit tipsy and talk about Voltaire (I assume). There are a lot of street cleaners out in the mornings, though.

And those are my thoughts, more or less as I thought them. Apologies if you expected something comprehensive, but I think we got the beer necessities. (Good night.)

All Purple Everything

ACT I: Setting the scene
4:30pm-ish: The Baguette Winner and I were wandering around our neighbourhood Sitis Market – basically a Four Square – buying low-calorie, high protein snack foods, and not ice cream (obviously). On the radio we hear a couple of snippets of Purple Rain and When Doves Cry, with some French chatter in betwixt. ‘Hm,’ I said, ‘perhaps Prince is coming to France this year?’ [And wouldn’t that be amazing?].

Sitting around at home, I figured I’d Google “Prince Paris”, just to see whether we might have any luck. Shocked, I was, to discover that not only was Prince coming to Paris, but he was coming TONIGHT (ie, yesterday). Two shows, one at 6pm and one at 9:30pm. As it was nearly 5pm, I (with immense help from the BW) set about trying to find tickets. Eventually, we found a GA ticket for the 9:30pm show, heavily marked-up on a third party website. I have always said that I would happily pay more to see Prince than anybody else, and this ticket was about even with some of the pricier gigs I’d been to. The ticket was duly purchased. I WAS GOING TO SEE PRINCE!

Confusion. Shock. Despair. CYCLING…

After finding a nice hotel where we could print off the ticket, I set about becoming wildly excited.

I also had dinner.

The Baguette Winner and I discussed what time we thought I’d need to get there; General Admission, after all, and I wanted to get a good spot. I checked the ticket to see when the doors would open.

How peculiar: this ticket says the show starts at 6pm (it was now after 6).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They sent the wrong ticket. [I have since double-checked, and I definitely selected a 9:30pm ticket. My lawyer (me) has demanded a refund].

This must be what it feels like to be the President of South Sudan. The power, the glory, the new-found independence. On election night he’s on top of the world. And then the next morning he wakes up and realises he’s the President of South Sudan.

I was in a panic, and the Baguette Winner gave me one simple instruction: “ride like the wind”. [She actually said that!] The concert venue – Le Zenith – was about a 15-minute ride away. So ride I did.

 

ACT II: In Which Sarah Ulmer Could Not Find A Place To Park Her Bicycle

I rode really fast, making great time. I was only going to miss, maybe, the first hour. But Prince would play for 2 hours at least, I figured, and Purple Rain would be right at the end.

Two issues: I only vaguely knew where Le Zenith was. It’s in a big complex – a park which straddles a canal – and the venue could have been anywhere. Also, I was riding a Velib, one of the very affordable subscription-based bikes that Paris offers. These are wonderful when you are not in a great hurry, but sometimes it is hard to find a place to park them. [There are Velib parks all over Paris, but you need one that has a free space to hook your bike to]. For some reason (I blame sin), all of the parks out near the venue were out of order. Eventually, I found somewhere to leave the bike, and began sprinting in the general direction of the venue (I had peddled past it earlier, but wasn’t quite sure how to get in).

By now, it was 7:20, and I knew there was not much left of the show. Desperation; heartbreak; anger at myself for believing that good things can happen to great people.

At this point (I was still running), a man (Turkish, maybe) dressed in black, with a funny little bum-bag called out to me ,‘you want Prince?’

I said, ‘yes, which way is it?’

‘I have two tickets for you, my friend’.

I walked past him, as I already had my ticket, and hurried off down the pathway to the venue. About 100 steps in, I decided that I had NOT come all this way to see 20 minutes of Prince (and who knows when my next chance would be?).

I went back, got money out, and bought a ticket off my "friend". [This ticket was literally half the price of the one I had got online, which wasn’t even the right fucking ticket!]

And I went in to catch the last 20 minutes of the first show.

Act III: In Which Dreams Come True

I walked into a surprisingly small, surprising not full venue. Standing, as I was, at the back, I was maybe 15 metres away from the stage. The next 20 minutes are a complete blur. I remember coming in to the end of a very funk/rock number that I didn’t recognise. He then played Something In The Water (Does Not Compute), which I also didn’t know, but was amazing. 

And then it happened. I had been in the room for 10 minutes, when the first few notes of Purple Rain kicked in. And I cried a bit. [In that totally masculine way that girls respect because it shows you have feelings and aren’t a robot.] It was one of the most surreal moments of my life. And 12 minutes later, Purple Rain had finished and the house lights had come on and I was off to wait in line for the real show.

Evidently there aren’t the same liquor bans over here as in New Zealand. People, knowing they’d be queuing for awhile, had brought a few beers down to pass the time. You could also buy them a number of people who had set up stalls around the queue. Although I didn’t have one (I was petrified of having to leave my spot to find a toilet), I thought it was nice. Nobody was especially drunk, by the way, just having a couple of beers on a Sunday evening.

After about an hour in line, and half an hour in the General Admission area, Prince came back. [He actually did a couple of laps on a bicycle outside to see all the crowds lining-up (separated by a huge fence, of course)].

The show started with a cool funk/rock version of Let’s Go Crazy, and then Take Me With U. I had actually been pretty worried about the setlist. This was a small venue, and he is in Europe all the time. He is also with a new band, and they are releasing an album sometime soon. I was worried that it was going to be a whole load of new stuff, as well as some other obscure miscellanea that I would not recognise. It was neither of those things.

Prince proceeded to play almost nothing but hits, and he played them pretty honestly. He also seemed to have a marvelous time doing so. Raspberry Beret; When Does Cry; Sign O’ The Times; Kiss – all the big names were there. Early on, he announced ‘At our parties, we play the songs we want to hear!’, and went into an awesome re-working of Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough. He played Little Red Corvette, the whole thing, and it was incredible. He sang a long version of Nothing Compares 2 U, and it was pompous and camp and spectacular. And then he went off-stage.

For the encore (one of those encores that’s really part of the set), he came out on his own and gave us a medley on the piano: Diamonds and Pearls, The Beautiful Ones and a great version of How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore, the song he wrote for Alicia Keys. And then it was Purple Rain again. The feelings this time weren’t quite as powerful as the last time around, but the spectacle was better. For one, I was in the fifth row back from the stage, and when the purple confetti dropped it was everywhere. The guitar solo was (obviously) sublime; both true to the original, but with some vamping in there to show he was trying. It’s a pretty remarkable thing that this was so affecting, when you consider the backbreaking number of times he has had to play this song. 

And then he went off-stage.

The people of Paris were not content with one encore (although I had now been standing for 6 hours, and was pretty content). 5 minutes of cheering and screaming later, and Prince was back onstage again. He played three songs in this encore, and while I didn’t know any of them, it was still a grand ol’ time. He went away again.

More cheering and screaming, and back he came. The highlight of this encore was What’s My Name, which I didn’t really know either. [I can’t find a video of this one, sorry]. This involved a lot of really silly dancing from Prince, while police sirens blared over the chorus. It was really excellent. He went away one more time.

This time he came back and played the only song that I was hoping to hear, which he was ever actually going to play. [I would’ve died if he’d played International Lover, but that was never going to happen]. The final encore was a beautiful, passionate version of Sometimes It Snows In April, which you will remember from the end of the film Under The Cherry Moon (obviously). And then he was gone again, this time for good.

It was, without a doubt, the best concert I have ever been to. Seeing Prince in a 6,000-seat venue (which wasn’t even totally full) was pretty much the best case scenario, and he played every song I could’ve requested. 

The only downside was that he HATES people filming or taking photos, and he had security people shining bright lights in the faces of anyone holding up a camera. I still managed to get a couple, however, so that will do. I will say that the lack of phones being held up did help to keep focus on the show, so maybe it was a net positive.

I rode like the wind home, stopping only to buy a poster on the way out. I triumphantly strode through the door at 12:30am, where I was promptly told off by an angry Baguette Winner, who had been expecting me back at home 3 hours earlier. But it was all worth it when she saw the beautiful purple confetti centrepiece on our coffee table...

Suck It, Cesson!

Last night the Baguette Winner and I went to another handball game: Paris St-Germain vs Cesson-Rennes. Based on my dubious translating of the programme, this was the last game of some sort of round-robin competition. PSG ended up coming second to Dunkerque, who I can only assume are big jerks.

The game began in a disappointing fashion – our two favourite players, Luc Abalo and Samuel Honrubia (left and right wing, respectively), were out, presumably with injury. PSG didn’t miss a beat, with their two replacement wings (Jeffrey M’Tima and Fahrudin Melic) each scoring six goals in the game.

-       Mercifully, we did not have to hear “TNT” after every single goal, as at the last game. The team introductions were conducted over an AC/DC backdrop, but that was all we were forced to endure.

-       This was shaping up to be another pantsing, with the Parisians going up 10-2 after 15 minutes. Cesson-Rennes finished the first half with a flurry, and just after halftime it was only a four-goal game. While PSG ended up winning by 7, it was a hard-fought victory, and the result was not guaranteed until the final few minutes.

-       Unlike the previous game we attended, the PSG players actually seemed willing to compete. Perhaps this was due to them being down two starters (they also relied on back-up pivot Robert Gunnarsson more heavily than usual starter Igor Vori), but they defended stoutly and chased down loose balls with gusto. This was a far better example of competitive handball.

-       This had, easily, the best ambiance of any handball game I’ve ever been to. They even had proper NBA-style player intros!

Well, that photo did it no justice whatsoever, but in the right corner, you can see the beginning of PYROTECHNICS! For someone used to playing handball in far-flung gyms with three spectators, this was rather thrilling.

There won’t be too many more handball games in the near future, unfortunately. It’s a winter sport, after all. So this sports post will have to do until the FIBA World Cup in Spain (September!).

Rabbit Hunting Season

The Baguette Winner is still out of town. She is a vegetarian. As she is out of town, I made the executive decision to cook rabbit, or lapin. The nearby Casino supermarket sold me five quarter rabbits for €4, which was the smallest pre-packaged amount I could find. [Pre-packaged is important, as it means that I do not have to attempt to communicate my request to an actual human].

It didn’t occur to me to Google a recipe for this, so I was forced to rely on attempting to recreate the only rabbit-based meal I’ve ever sampled: rabbit stew. We have a tiny kitchen, relatively understocked in terms of sauces, spices, etc, so my chosen technique involved filling a pot with everything that seemed loosely stew-applicable. This meant an onion, tons of garlic, a couple of carrots and some stock , then some lentils and lemon juice  and a splash of beer later in the piece. At the end, I wacked in some spinach and a little toasted bread, and voila (getting better at French!).

The end result was not bad. Too salty – probably didn’t need sea salt on top of a stock cube – and there were a lot of bones. But overall a pleasant experience. Quite a lot like skinless chicken wings (the skin was removed).  A smarter chef would’ve taken to the leg/thigh cutlets with a knife first, to break them down a bit. But mistakes are all part of the fun!

The novelty was certainly worth it. Duck is next on the menu, as it is abundant at most supermarkets (although not especially cheap). I’m sure you can’t wait!

Mission Improbable

The Baguette Winner is out of town. I know absolutely nobody else in Paris - well, except “Adele”, the waitress at our nearby café Les Anemones - and by ‘know’, I mean she recognises me as the guy who speaks English at her - which means I am staying in, enjoying cheap bottles of Stella Artois, and watching Mission Impossible. As has become custom, I have made note of my thoughts:

-       Emilio Estevez is in this film. That’s how you know this movie was made in the Nineties.

-       Kristin Scott Thomas is in this film, and is not speaking French. This is further evidence that this film was made in the Nineties. I happen to like Kristin Scott Thomas, as she made her film debut in a Prince movie.

-       Jon Voight instructs the crack team of carefully selected specialists that they will meet back at “4am. That’s 0400.” This team can’t be all that elite.

-       Tom Cruise just performed an internet search. I am delighted to report that he does this using an acceptably low (and therefore realistic) number of keystrokes. One of the great grievances in popular culture is the depiction of computer use in late 90s - early 2000s film and television. An ‘internet search’, apparently, typically involved wild mashing of keys and virtually no use of a mouse, which resembles no internet search I’ve ever performed. Kudos to the Mission Impossible team.

-       Wikipedia informs me that the team that Tom Cruise’s character is/was a member of is the IMF, the “Impossible Missions Force”. That’s a little fatalistic. Why can’t it be the “Improbable Missions Force”? Or something more optimistic. Perhaps the “Missions Which Are Destined To Succeed Force”? If you think positive thoughts, good things will happen. [That last sentence is the premise behind The Secret, just FYI. I’ve just saved you time and money. You’re welcome.]

-       Ving Rhames plays the computer nerd Luther Stickell. This is the very antithesis of type-casting.

-       The famous “Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling scene” (or Sporty Spice, if your only reference point in life is Spice World): It really is a good scene. Of course, surely they could have imagined that the foreign guy might get tired of holding Tom Cruise, but no harm done. They also could have waited until the CIA vault guy goes for lunch, so that he doesn’t keep intruding (as opposed to making him sick for about 5 minutes, which seemed like a strange plan). They could have just made him so sick that he had to go home… But these are minor details.

-       The whole peeling-your-face-off-to-reveal-you-are-someone-else thing is also pretty great, if totally unbelievable.

-       Even more unbelievable is the scene where A HELICOPTER FLIES THROUGH A TUNNEL TO KEEP UP WITH A HIGH-SPEED TRAIN! 

-       After the aforementioned helicopter/train scene, Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames meet up at a café for a beer, and discuss something-or-other. In the background, almost imperceptively quiet, you can hear Dreams by The Cranberries. This is both pleasant, because it’s a nice enough song, but also strangely jarring, as the rest of the soundtrack is action-movie-esque.  

      And it’s not just that it was a hit song at the time; Dreams is from 1992, and Mission Impossible is from 1996. Now, if Dreams was featured in the soundtracks to Aladdin, Home Alone II, Beethoven or The Mighty Ducks, it’d make a lot more sense.

And with that Emilio Estevez full-circle callback, I will end this post.