Frustrations

We left home in the cold and dark. After five minutes I had to run back to collect my phone... I'd left it charging as the battery (once again, and too soon thank you for nothing Apple) fades quite fast.  The trains got us to Gatwick smoothly enough, but I was resenting lugging my bag along. Wheels next time.

We'd booked for the first time into Bloc, the Japanese-style minimalist hotel which is so conveniently right in the terminal building. The room looks fab - suede walls, nice lighting, very chic, but there are no window and the aircon is quite noisy, and the bathroom is a wet room. That means if you take a shower straight away, the whole floor is really wet and subsequent trips to the basin to clean your teeth mean you must either dry the floor with a towel or get very wet socks.

For the first time that I can remember we weren't asked to go through a passport control, but the usual chicane of baggage screening always seems to result in delays and questions which create frustration and anxiety. Not that we were short of time, but - surely they can see we are not terrorists. I feel we should be waved through - with an airy 'Ah, hallo Mr and Mrs Mussett - how nice to see you again - do come in...'

I think that winding pathway which connects from the security zone to the waiting area must be a practice run for the entry to hell. Its black marble floor tiles are sprinkled with alarming sparkles. The air is scented with - what? - the dying agony of musk whales and chemicals.  Slender young people want you to wander into their expensive areas of retail.... It's hateful, nasty.  No doubt it's all this retail which subsidises the costs of the airports, but we have to factor in a profit-margin for shareholders. I remember when Heathrow was an airfield off the A4, and the departures hall was basically a barn where you waited. It had nice floor tiles in a design made by an artist. (Who?)

We bought the most delicious croissants since our visit to Sceaux in December, from Pret, and sat with coffee and fruit salad and feeling as if our holiday was at last beginning. The masses and hordes of people are terrifying. The sheer numbers.  We are so many on the planet. But each is a universe, a dreamer, a family-person. This is one of the great conundrums which we face.

Then we waited and walked to our gate and had a scuffle with the EasyJet employee who said only Speedy-Boarding passengers may keep their handbags outside their cabin bags. So I stuffed my two carriers into one lump and held up the queue.... Again, the shareholders' profits come before the care of customers... Squeezyjet makes you pay for everything. I remember when I used to be a person, someone. Now I am just a number, a blob of data, and they see my bank account rather than my self.

Walking onto the tarmac into the bright cold air we stood and marvelled as a Virgin Airbus taxied past - this giant, gleaming metal thing, huge and dominant. How do they do it? How has man made these enormous things which can rise up into the air, carrying souls and cargoes? How? It is miraculous.

Our own plane was smaller but not full - and that is a relief. The cabin crew not so stressed, room to move about.  I met a woman whose sister is dying of cancer in the Midlands. We did a bit of yoga together at the back of the plane.

The touchdown at La Palma was miraculous,  light as a feather and fifty minutes early.  We could see those typically Canarian volcanic rocks - black and crumbly-looking, as if they had spewed out of the ground only last week - but perhaps those flows were a hundred years ago or more.  To see it, the rock looks like cake. To touch, it's as hard as the hardest thing you ever touched, or shrank away from.

Our car - a Fiat 500 - is spot new and reminds me of the tiny space I was used to until I swapped my own 500 for a Fiat Doblo earlier this year.... We set off, trying to get the phone satnav to give us a signal, to see where our turning is, to look at the surroundings....

Eventually we're on the right road, zigzagging over the central mountain. Down by the coast are swathes of banana fields, like they have on Tenerife but looking in better condition and tightly fenced in. The houses are surrounded by flowers, everything looks bright, and there are so many plants I have never seen before along the roadsides - dragon trees, euphorbias, some deciduous woods....

We cross over a strip of land which the satnav calls Alter Flugenzahn or something - an airstrip, and surprisingly (to me) labelled in German.  Then over the ridge, and into a different landscape - pine forests and broader valleys.  We drift down to the western coast, through El Paso, and turning south to find Puerto Naos.  We have to ring the owner of the apartment to find out where it is, evidently not in the town at all.

He meets us at 'the roundabout' and leads us along between banana plantations with their high dark stone walls, and turns sharply into a tiny narrow alley between two fields, like a canyon. The road is rough stones and dust, with deep pits. Will our little 500 make it?  At the end, by the sea, is a black dusty carpark with a few cars and then a wall and a terrifying descent of these hard black rocks and a swirling mass of waves thundering and booming below. To our right is a gate and then a building.... Our guide - who is German - says 'I am Oliver'.  That's about all he says.  But, our apartment is right on the terrace. Not quite ready for us but two women are cheerfully cleaning it out for us. They bring us mint tea as we wait under a real palmtree umbrella sunshade, sheltering from the wind and enjoying the sun.  On the headland behind us is an hotel - a bit nearer to the town. We can piggyback on its wifi.

The girls leave, and we explore our new quarters - all very practical and though not new, comfortable and bright. The waves are crashing below the terrace.

We drive the mile or so back into town to walk around and get some supplies.  There the promenade lies like a harlot waiting for customers - glammed up, easy, complacent. Everyone around us is German. One beach shop is owned by a Mr Wong. Our waiter (local) explains that a Nao was large ship or boat, not for fishing but for trade.  Hence Puerto Naos. The way he says it, it sounds more Portuguese than Spanish and I wonder if the word comes from 'navo'?  The only boats in the port now are for tourists, though there is still a working fishing fleet at the next town ip the coast - Tazacorte.

We eat - my favourite Canarian dish of prawns in garlic, and salad, and I drink some local wine which is delicious.  We shop - at Spar, that successful retail brand which appears round the whole of Europe, selling what people really want, it seems, instead of that vaporous stuff at the airports.  We come 'home', fall into bed.  The waves crash and crash outside. The deep booming noise every few seconds keeps me awake. I have strange dreams - of powerlessness, anger, invasion.

How welcome do you feel?

As an addendum to yesterday's report....

To get to the famous Cliffs of Moher, which are hard to see because of their remoteness, you do have to drive really quite a long way, through the Burren landscape which is pretty empty. On a drear day, with clouds barely higher than the stunted trees, and with rain pelting at your windscreen, and a winter solstice gloom cloaking round you as you press on into the bogs, it's a mournful ride.

But the enticement, the excitement is, that you will at last see these famous cliffs - a massive dark barricade which rises up to face the unrelenting battering of the Atlantic. It's odd to think that (as far as we know) people have only been to see such awe-inspiring places for pleasure since the 18th century. The Romantics who trekked up to Scotland and the Lake District, or into Germany, were deeply moved by the silent and dramatic power of the mountains and chasms, and their enthusiasm helped spark off the whole of modern tourism. People - peasants and their landlords - who had previously lived in blissful unawareness of the rich opportunities locked up in the rockfaces, came to realise they could get money out of other people's pockets in return for lodgings, food, and a nice place to stand and look.

Thus it was that our long drive out to the Cliffs of Moher, through lonely hills and winding lanes, between endless stone walls, past ancient farmsteads and ruins, splashing mud as we went, silent as we progressed towards one of Nature's great marvels, ended with a truly horrible experience.

We could - just - see the Cliffs as we wound our way along the coast road.....

Double yellow lines appeared on either side of the empty road - for a long way.   In the distance, we saw a set of barricades and a huge carpark - once a whole green field - with huts, fencing, lines marked out, ominous signs and control barriers, some sort of traffic light system on the pedestrian crossing.   There were about five men, maybe six, wearing high-viz jackets which shone out of the gloom like traffic lights. It looked like the entrance of a concentration camp, or a toxic industrial plant.   It is quite clear. If you want to see the Cliffs of Moher (from the top) you have not only to brave the elements in the middle of nowhere - the blistering wind, the soaking rain, the mud on the path - but you also have to park in this place which represents the worst possible aspects of human life. Greed, control, power, concrete everywhere, domination. Here, where Nature has mutely offered up one of the wonders of the world - a spiritual place, historic, inspiring, memorable - Clare County Council has stepped in with its jackboots on. The cost is €6 per person, from which, we learned, they derive €7m a year.  Good for them.

I cannot believe this is the way to do it. Having been through the whole of France, the Pyrenees and Northern Spain earlier this year, where there are similar landscape marvels to see, somehow the authorities have devised ways of accessing these places without this brutal harrumph, this handbagging.  It's almost unbelievable. It's the most inhospitable thing I've seen in Ireland.

We didn't get out of the car.  We certainly did not go into their brutal naked horrible carpark. It made me think of gas-chambers to be honest.  The weather didn't help, and yes, I know it's the darkest time of year - but surely, this can be managed better.   The Clare Museum in Ennis (by contrast) is welcoming and fully textured with great displays and good information. And the shops are marvellous.

Will you be my mum?

One of the reasons for traipsing about the way we do is that it chips away at the arrogance and ignorance which props up our daily lives, quite inadvertently. There are all these amazing places, which we've never heard of, and which are filled with wonders and wisdom - ways of living, truths, scars, whatever.... Only by wandering about can we actually see for ourselves and take in some of the reasons and truths.  These journeys are a form of pilgrimage, paying respect to people and places by just turning up, and looking and listening.

For instance, leaving Dublin yesterday and heading west towards the little medieval market town of Ennis (chosen more or less at random) for a couple of nights stay, we stopped for lunch at a place called Maynooth. Now, it's quite a place, with an ancient ecclesiastical foundation and a large university, and (as we found out) a great selection of cafes and restaurants supplying lunch in a pretty and buzzing high street. But we had never heard of it, till we got there. Silly us.  It's definitely worth exploring and we were lucky to get a table in the pre-Christmas rush at a Spanish bar/restaurant called Picaderos which supplied us with stonkingly good food in a fabulous atmosphere.  Memorable.

And when we finally clawed our way through the fog and dark wetness of an Irish December, and found ourselves in Ennis itself, we could hardly contain our pleasure and excitement. True, the hotel had a style of decor which can only be described as ambitious, but once outside and pushing into the town centre we found ourselves in a magic place: small medieval streets with a wide variety of pretty and old buildings, all lit with dazzling Christmas lights which were reflected on the wet pavements to create a kind of fairyland.  Up at the top of the hill is a splendid monument to that great Irish patriot and pacifist Daniel O'Connell - standing on his column and surveying the whole area.  The shops are just plain gorgeous - stylish, inviting, varied, cosmopolitan, artistic, thriving. The main streets are crossed with small alleys which lead through into a variety of marketplaces and squares. The town is girdled by the River Fergus - a great character in its own right - powerful, embanked, pushing along relentlessly at about 5 or 6 miles an hour - really fast.  We found the remnants of a series of mills whose origins go back a thousand years or more, most recently 19th century, and with a bewildering array of races and sluices, leats, bridges and stonework, watched over by a regal heron who stands by the fish-ladder waiting for his dinner to arrive.

Walking round again this morning, a group of lads called out to me.  One said, 'Will you be my mum?' He was serious. We chatted, and he said he came partly from Ennis, partly from London. Only he doesn't have a mum and wants one.  I said no, but he asked me again. One of his friends said 'He's seriously mental....'  He asked what I do - and I said I make things. He said, 'Can you make snow? Can you make it snow?'  I had to say no again. He was beguiling, and needy. I hope he finds a mother. But it won't be me.

We love Ennis. It has such a buoyant nature, pride in its past, and it's set on the edge of the enticing west coast region called The Burren which we went to see this afternoon, despite the dreadful dark wet weather.  We will have to come back when it's lighter... what a lovely place. Small hills and woods, interspersed with plateaux and bogs, with some of the hedges bent over into haggard crone-shapes in the wind.  Some of the cottages are thatched.  Cattle and sheep look muddy but robust. The colours of the land - even in the dull light of the solstice day - are rich and glowing - reds, purples, greys, blacks and blues.  A huge quarry is carving its way back into a mountain ridge and is filled with huge crushing systems so that the piles - slagheaps - of rock are graded for road-making or other construction work - all a dark slatey grey.   

A land like this, with the sea not far away, and a complex history, and solid land-based economy of small farmers and resourcefulness, is very attractive. I guess most Britons have no idea of the history of what 'we' did in Ireland. The stories are deep-rooted and powerful.  The injustice and cruelty and greed were relentless.    But I have to confess, reading about one battle - maybe the decisive moment when the Jacobins (Catholics, of course) had to give up... that did make me laugh. It's the Battle of Aughrim.  A very grand French general came to command the Irish, and the final confrontation was to be where the R Shannon was understood to create a workable boundary.  He was called Charles Chalmont, Marquis de Saint-Ruhe, generally referred to as Saint Ruth who assumed the post of Marshal-General of Ireland, in May 1691.   One of his main assets was an unassailable belief in his own powers - he urged his men to fight because he was leading them, and bolstered their morale by telling them that he was marvellous.  Not all his officers agreed with him, but enough stayed around to get the battle going. 

The story of this great face-off between the Irish Catholics and the English-sponsored Protestants in the form of a Dutch army led by a man called Godard de Ginkel, is available in huge detail at http://www.historyireland.com/early-modern-history-1500-1700/the-battle-of-aughrim/     

But the fact is, from an Irish point of view, that two dreadful things happened on that day. After a confusing day, Saint Ruhe's head was knocked off by a cannonball.  This fact was concealed from his troops for a while, enough for them to fight on.   But they were losing it. The skirmishes between cavalry and infantry, the taking and losing of high ground, the battle itself was slipping out of their control. They lost their cannons, and had to resort to small arms.  For that, they needed more ammunition and tore open the boxes which their glorious French commander had brought with him.  Then, the ghastly truth came out. He had brought French shot. It was the wrong size for the Irish (English) guns.  For all his planning and swaggering and grandeur, he had no idea that there was any difference.  The soldiers had to use the buttons off their clothes, small pebbles from the ground, and the wood ramrods which they used to charge their guns.... But, of course, it was hopeless.  

There is some doubt about many Irishmen and how many Protestants died that day. Thousands.  The only ones to survive were those who fled the field.  The Jacobites left Ireland altogether and mustered on the continent ready for another battle another day - the planned invasion of England accompanied by rebellion.... the whole romance of Bonny Prince Charlie....   

This glorious, or inglorious bit of the Irish resistance story has faded from view in the light of more recent rebellions and wars, but you can't overlook it. Every church, every village, every high street in the land reflects it, in the proud names on the shopfronts and on the stunning marble and limestone gravestones and monument. This is Ireland. It's just a bit like England, in some ways, but it absolutely is not at all like England. It's a parallel universe. And it's still 'in Europe' which Britain may not be for much longer.  History has weird ways of changing things.  I think of England as my mother-country, but I feel more at home in Ireland in so many ways. I wonder if I will be asking Ireland if she will 'be my mum', one day. 

Private View

Private View

We were invited to a private view in a pub along the road. Two artists were collaborating - a sculptor and a street artist. Olivier Duhec creates metal pieces which may be lamps or (very loosely) ornaments, themed on space fiction or animals,  or animated TV characters. Mygalo's paintings are similarly rather steampunk, some themed on skulls, some more brutal and explicitly sexual. It makes for an exciting show.
Nathalie and I walked down together, admiring the work of another local artist - the wind - whose powers had swept a chair from her balcony the night before, and, we now saw, had totally trashed a building-site hoarding along the road, leaving the mud and excavations open to passers-by, like a mute invitation to get into trouble.
The pub was an interesting place to have an art show. The owners are already committed to Mexican death-cult art, so the bar is decorated with a series of brightly coloured skulls.
But the expo on the other side of the room basically consisted of Mygalo's paintings behind a long table set out with Duhec's sculptures. During the evening one of the paintings sold at €2000 which cheered everyone up.  'Everyone' consisted of a couple of dozen mecs and some very pretty ladies of various ages.
Gradually, the secrets of the works revealed themselves. There were some bunches of metal roses with glossy petals and sharp thorns - only the black ones contained tiny skulls in their centres. A shining cubic metal lamp (containing a sphere which very slightly emerged from its vertical constraints) could in fact be opened up so that the light shone upwards as well as forwards. A glass and steel table was supported by a complex and polished animation of Atlas, who practically groaned under the weight of the top, like the obedient servant of an unseen dominatrix.  Some stickers on a side table featuring details of Mygalo's slave-girl nude were free to pick up - one disguises her face but shows her arse and vagina, another closes in on this sensitive area but as she pees, her thumb (or someone else's) is penetrating her arse.  Another sticker shows a coy skeletal couple who've been together for 357 years. These tiny giveaways are both cheerful and disturbing, and free art at an PV is a new one on me.

There were an array of glittering model machines - tiny motorbikes deconstructed and then put back together like calligraphic scrolls, deeply desirable.

The star sculpture was hanging in the air above us, a model of a popular French TV spaceship from the 1960s - Albator - a fabulous complexity of guns, decks, thrusters, portholes, welding, ports, and more. This model itself weighs over 100 kilos, and anyone who knows the US Starship Enterprise will understand how childhood hero-worship for an animated fantasy spaceship can translate into a lifelong obsession and desire.
Outside France, you may not have heard of Albator, or Duhec or Mygalos. But this show has an electric streak of recognition all through it. The stickers and death's head paintings are workings on an eternal theme - like Holbein's Ambassadors with its skull at the foot, or Titian's nudes laid out for consumption and trashing. And the sculptures are all about light and dark, and how heroes fight against evil. Rembrandt would have recognised all of it. I loved it, and came away with some stickers, a tiny motorbikey thing, and a red rose (without a skull).

Survivors

Getting onto the RER into Paris, a young woman bounced past us and laid a carefully printed card on the seat facing us. It said she was unemployed, had two young children etc etc and she was asking us to pay her something......
Later, near the Notre Dame, we saw a huge old man bundled up, not begging but just sitting there, and with two puppies snuggled into his jacket.
Nearby, an old woman sat patiently on the pavement with her back to the parapet of the bridge, not begging, sharing her little mat with a rabbit. The rabbit wore a smart red jacket and was nibbling some biscuits. The woman had a bunch of grass and herbs beside her, ready to give to the rabbit later on.
These last two people were the classic clochards of the Paris streets, honourable, resourceful, calm. The girl on the train was part of a huge international network of 'workers', slaves maybe, possibly trafficked, whose gatherings are paid to the organisers.  I last reported on this phenomenon when we were in Albania in the summer - at Durres, where the girl begging had a drugged baby on her shoulder, and a very sinister man was not far away, sitting on the pavement in the happy evening crowds, hitting another baby on the ground in front of him. This is a new industry - the pitiful pitch, the tug at the heart strings, the use of children in 3D or in reported form ('I have two children....'). I saw this typical family at Gare du Nord on Saturday.  Nathalie says their 'nationality' changes according to what wars are in the news.

On Facebook, I had posted a video clip showing the beam of laser light swinging round in the darkness, filmed from the kitchen window of this apartment about 8km away... And a friend riposted that this was the same beam of light searching out the homeless so they can be swept from the streets: she hates Macron and his policies.   But I think it's more complicated than she suggests.   Of course there are desperate people whose only resource is the pavement and a bit of cardboard and their numbers are growing, but they are not all the same.
I am reminded of a trip I made to Dublin in the 1970s and seeing barefoot children begging on the Halfpenny Bridge in the bitter cold. I had never seen anything like that in England, so sheltered was I from poverty in those days.    Ireland was all too familiar with it, the hedge schools, the outcasts and denial.  It's all crept nearer now.
How do people or things survive?
We went for a hot chocolate, and the couple sitting behind me were deep in conversation in English. He was a smart young lawyer, French, briefing his client on what was likely to happen.  He said, they were lucky to have been allocated to a certain judge who was known to deal swiftly with cases. He thought the hearing would be deferred to June. He thought she was likely to get a prison sentence, maybe 7 or 8 years, but it was her first offence, so it was likely to be suspended and so as long as she kept out of trouble, she would not actually go to jail.   She was youngish, had bare ankles (that is the fashion at the moment).  Andrew thought she was Russian. They were speaking in English as a shared or common language......
We went towards Notre Dame, intending to go in but diverted into the Archaeology Crypt instead. This area was destined to become a carpark in 1965, but the architect, one M Fleury, realised the importance of what they found when they started digging and the area eventually became a fascinating and compact underground museum describing the ancient history of the city, and the carpark was built slightly further to the south, towards the present bank of the river.   The jumble of stones, walls, ditches, doorways, steps, benches, slabs and pavements is almost impossible to interpret as you look at it now, but has had decades of interpretation and analysis , and the presentations and explanations are very clear. From the Romans onwards, this tiny bit of the Ile de la Cité has been valued for its location and everything and everyone has been here.  By the 17thC there were so many babies being abandoned that the authorities realised they had a problem, and by the 18th there was a positive torrent of newborns being left in doorways (too young to beg for themselves).  A special hospital was set up and at first these children were well cared-for, but it rapidly deteriorated into squalor and agony (not least because pigs and chickens were reared in the same premises, so disease spread very rapidly).

I liked very much three delicate wooden spoons dug up from the mud, with tiny little finials, and these elegant practical little things were 800 years old.

Who, and what, survives?

We then walked to the Tour de Jean sans Peur, a remarkable medieval structure (c1409) which was a triumphalist gesture made by an ambitious aristocrat known as Jean sans Peur (Fearless John) who wanted to sneer at his rival the Duc of Burgundy. He built it as part of his palace on the edge of Paris as it was then, part of the city wall.... Later, the palace disappeared, the estate was chopped up, new boundaries appeared nearby, and slums grew up all around it. The tower was used for lodgings, warehousing, a dumping ground. Probably a brothel.  Not till the mid-19thC, when a new road was being pushed through the slums, and the surrounding buildings were demolished, did anyone realise it was there. It's five storeys high, and is more or less just a staircase with a couple of small rooms leading off at the top, and with an astonishing tree carved of stone on the fourth floor. The tree is the newel post for the stair, and has branches spreading right across the little vaulted ceiling. The branches are covered in stone leaves of three varieties - oak, hawthorn and hops, which each refer to the John's family origins.

It's definitely worth a visit next time you come to Paris, and you'll find it at 20 rue Etienne-Marcel, just north of les Halles.   It removes that fascinating Parisian veneer of uniform pretty buildings and straight avenues, and shows you the old history underneath. It's a true survivor.

Repairing to the fasts

Two words have drifted past me with slightly unexpected meanings.  At the top of Sceaux's high street (rue Houdan), among many other delicatessens, is a wine shop called le Repaire de Bacchus. I have not seen the word 'repair' used in this sense as a noun in English, but only a verb.... 'let us repair to the garden....', with the idea that repairing means to go to somewhere safe, quiet, delightful.  That is in addition to the usual meaning of mending, where of course we can have 'a repair'.  The second word is 'fast', which again has many meanings in English - but here in French it is used in the plural (les fastes) to mean 'luxury, extravagance, richness', quite the opposite of  'going without', or 'fasting' as in 'the Lenten fast'.  I have seen 'le faste' twice now, once at the chateau of Sceaux, and once in a rather enticing book about places to visit in Paris. The book is called Metronome illustré, and is based round various underground stations to give you a detailed guide to the history of the capital. My only criticism is that it's too darn big to lug around with you, but we'll take some notes and see what we can find.

It's somehow surprising to find a chateau so close to the centre of Paris, still sitting in its huge park complete with avenues, canals, lakes, forests, vistas and so on. Everyone has heard of Versailles, and this is smaller but very lovely and thought provoking. It has a newish area of topiary laid out, which is interesting to see because of course while we are used to seeing topiary gardens in their maturity grandeur, the people who commissioned these palaces and gardens would have seen their topiary in its hilarious infancy with tiny little twigs being trained into cones and baubles.

The chateau houses the museum of the Ile-de-France and so has a regional responsibility for cultural displays for the whole of Paris. The ceramic displays are fascinating - covering the many potteries which produced fine and domestic wares in the Paris locality and - my goodness! - some of it is utterly wonderful, with sculptures, figures, ornaments, services, and decorated china of great beauty. There is also a set of more domestic plates with printed illustrations worthy of Punch magazine, extolling the royal virtues of various vegetables, which are elevated onto comic characters parading around in amusing activities. That is a permanent exhibition.

The temporary exhibition at the moment is of works by Picasso - drawings and paintings and some assemblages from the 30s, many never exhibited before. The theme is 'nature' and includes some amusing cartoons of animals, some 'sur l'herbe' studies (musicians, naked women), a very nice little mountain landscape, studies around the theme of a woman at a table with a vase of flowers, and a few  roofscapes.  It's a charming show, well curated with extensive notes and a fine book to accompany the show.  It's interesting to see how he understood the construction of things - partly through his ways of disassembling them in the drawings. There are some oils paintings, and several mixed media works - crayon, aquatint, linocuts, etc.  I particularly liked a couple of assemblages made on framed canvases, with collages of objects which he then covered with stained sand. One of these was made on the back of a framed canvas so that the frame has become a kind of container. It has a tiny figure of a woman sitting on a bench in one corner. I have never seen anything quite like this before, with this scratchy tarry-looking moonscapey surface. Very interesting.

The staffing levels of the chateau are slightly eye-boggling especially considering the punitive laws for employment in France. In effect no-one can ever be sacked.  Whole businesses go under because the owners can't rationalise their staffing levels.   But (as we saw in Greece a few years ago) museums are very highly staffed.  I don't know how many staff we counted in what is really a small area - no more than eight or so public rooms. A man to check your bags by the door. A man in the left luggage. A man to sell tickets. Three ladies in the shop. About five guys patrolling the exhibits.  And outside (staff or contractors, I have no idea) a large gang of guys trimming the older sweeps of topiary - at least a dozen of them.  The ladies in the shop were very helpful and kind. The guys sitting and standing in the rooms (all black, by the way) looked bored out of their heads.  Outside, it was very cold dark wet and windy.  We came home to Nathalie's flat with a copy of the Picasso book, some postcards and bits.

The rue de Houdan was glorious with its food shops and Christmas window displays, many with animated animals nodding and waving to catch your attention.  We did a little shopping, had fruit tea (and an iceream to the astonishment of the waiter), and then came back to eat a superb cold seafood supper bought earlier in the day.

Paris

We are spending a few days in Paris as the guests of Nathalie Banaigs who lives half the time in Faversham and half the time in Sceaux, where she grew up in the southern outskirts of the French capital. We were driven to Ashford International Station by our friend Debbie Lawther who does a very useful taxi service in return for use the car during the owner's absence. Saves the car parking fees.   The day was superbly bright and clear. The landscape was shining and radiant with a pearly dusty quality, absolutely mesmerising.  The Eurostar was late in arriving, and the train itself so shabby, rusty-looking and worn out.  We remember how marvellous it all was just a few years ago when it started. Like the whole European project, we are disillusioned now. It no longer looks so attractive and the experience of travel to the continent is all a bit squalid. We learned that the new trains which are available cannot use Ashford Station, only Ebbsfleet. These trains have wifi and gloss, but we will have to wait a year or so till we can access them at Ashford.
Nonetheless, the seats are quite comfortable. The ride is quiet. You can - just - see daylight out of the filthy windows, and so we caught snatches of the magnificent sky, and then we plunged into the tunnel. A baby nearby was howling with tiredness, and it was half an hour before he settled down to sleep.  We emerged in France as the dusk cloaked everything in darkness.
There was - not surprisingly - some sort of strike on the metro in Paris, so at the Gare du Nord we plunged into the crowds expecting chaos and trouble, but it was remarkably good tempered. It was noticeable that people look somehow less stressed than their counterparts in London. Down and down we went, tracking our way to the RER deep level platforms. Everything was brightly lit. The adverts show impossibly beautiful seminaked women, with the text extolling their spiritual qualities, while they model the tiny necklace or vest or invisible perfume, and the people rush past muffled up in their puffer jackets, scarves, hats, gloves....
On the platform we were in a remarkable tumult of confusion.  Apparently far fewer trains were running but those which were flashed up onto the signboards but with unreliable information - the platform, the destination, the times....    A young official was helping to push commuters into the carriages as they do in Japan, and he was hurling information out as a kind of waterfall of speech, while simultaneously covering the little loudspeaker on his chest which was sending him the information he needed to direct people to the right platform. Thank god we had Nathalie with us. It was practically impossible to find out what was going on. She could see the trains were on the wrong platforms, going in the wrong directions, with wrong stops advertised on their itineraries. We went back up a level to try another platform, but then returned to our original spot.  A train was waiting, destination Robinson!  That was our train, rapidly filling up.
As we got on, a man sprang from his seat and insisted I take it. I am OLD!  Later, someone gave his place to Andrew, for he too is OLD.   The train took us out through the centre of Paris - Chatelet, St Michel, southwards and out to Sceaux.
We emerged into a quiet, elegant residential area which reminded me of Swiss Cottage in the old days. We dragged our cases and bags through the streets, past the old walls and gardens of the 19th century villas, and then up into the centre.   We got some cash, some milk, and then came up into this tiny apartment in its tidy block.  There's a large terrace, two rooms, k, b and loo.  Dumping everything, we went for crepes... I was given colouring pencils to complete a printed image on the menu paper, and the food was simple and welcome - ending with a pretty spectacular flambé for my dessert.
We walked on to a friend's house - artist Sophie Tandel - and were enchanted by her gallery/home filled with works - a paper hippopotamus, a 60's TV converted into a tableau of Star Trek, many African masks and carvings, ceramics, model ships, paintings, jewellery, feathers......   She lent us a heater and we set off home again.  An old woman lurched towards us, swathed in rags and cloaks, entirely bent over so her torso is parallel to the ground, and carrying many bags and bundles. She looked like something from a Victor Hugo novel, ancient and powerful, a lost person who has seen everything. I wished he 'good night' but I doubt she heard me.
We slept peacefully, and overnight the clear air was changed into a rainstorm. The sky was low and dark, the rain sleety and hard, the wind gusting. We went out this morning to find breakfast - hot chocolate and baguettes. Sceaux has some of the most enticing food shops I have ever seen. We will come back.