I Hate Fauchon!

This is a sad state of affairs for once I loved Paris's fabled food store at the Madeleine. I could never afford it but still it was fun to go in and look at 'smoked salmon millefeuille' or a turquoise blue eclair ("vanille et menthe glaciale")  that only a French pastry chef could get away with. 

Then they remodelled. They picked pink - shocking pink. This has been a trend lately - Hediard across the way has been red for years - more recently and quite disastrously, dear old Fortnum and Mason's in London decided to go turquoise. In all three cases this means that rows and rows of identical boxes are placed on shelves. Hundreds of pink (or red or turquoise) tea caddies line up on shelves just across from hundreds of pink (or red or turquoise) chocolate boxes. I can think of nothing less tempting to the consumer.  Big blocks of one colour. That's it. That's all.  So, the pleasure of Fauchon has long gone but yesterday, tired and footsore, I thought that their relatively new teashop upstairs might merit a visit. I steeled myself to pay 5 euros for a cup of tea - it's a scandalous 4 euros elsewhere so I factored in the Fauchon extra and headed upstairs. The place is dull and cold - wispy and grey was the impression I had. And the tea costs 10 EUROS!!!!!!

What is it with Paris and tea? What do they think that we think that they are doing back there in the kitchen? Anybody who has drunk tea in Paris knows that they are turning on the hot water tap and running it over a sad sachet of tea factory floor sweepings. Now, I grant that Fauchon may have actually gone out and bought real tea, may even be serving it in loose leaf form but 10 Euros??? Ten euros is about £6. 50. 

I headed off to Angelina on the Rue de Rivoli - expensive too but still elegant and with a uniquely rich, dark hot chocolate at 6 Euros 50, I felt that I'd made 3.50 euros.

Alone in Paris on Christmas Day

This morning BBC Radio 4 ran a feature by a reporter who spent Christmas Day alone  in London. It it was a dull couple of minutes. The guy droned on about cooking dinner alone - forgetting the sprouts, admiring the Queen's handsome appearance in her 80s.... he didn't say a word about feeling left-out, marooned or just plain old lonely.

Lonely and left-out. I was sure that was how I would feel when I found myself alone in Paris on Christmas Day. I knew people in the city but good Frenchmen and women that they are, they had all taken off for the provinces and elderly parents. I tried to duplicate a lone London Christmas and sign up to help those worse off. I was actually staying in an apartment next to the Salvation Army refuge so called them on Christmas Eve to offer my services. A jolly man with a thick African accent answered the phone. "You can spend Christmas Day looking after me if you want," he suggested. I declined. 

The day dawned. I'm not a practicing Christian - this was not my celebration and so it should have been ' just another day.' Why couldn't I just get up and go about my business indoors - do some writing, a bit of reading? But the change in the world outside the Paris apartment was almost palpable. The silence of the boulevards, I was convinced,  hung heavy;  the families and friends gathered together all excluding me seemed almost visible. I'd once seen a Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander, where Christmas celebrations included forming a very Scandinavian conga line and dancing from one opulent red-velvety room to another, singing all the way. In my lonely state, all of Europe was engaged in similar festive pursuits - that long conga line stretched from County Cork to the Urals but made a stonking great detour just before it got to me.  I was alone in the  13th arrondissement with just the cats for company.

Then I remembered that unlike London, Paris does not close its public transport on Christmas Day. I rode the Metro from Bibliotheque Francois Mitterand to Chatelet. I made my way up the steps into the daylight fearing a Parisian version of High Noon. But the cafe next to the subway was open . So were most of the restaurants on the street. I wandered through  the crowds to the Marais and a modern art exhibition just off the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.  In another gallery of naive painting on the Place des Vosges, I bought a couple of postcards and watched a Jewish wedding party make their way into a restaurant. In a cafe opposite Notre Dame, I drank a hot chocolate on this very cold Christmas Day and listened to two women from New York discuss the general hopelessness of men.  In a video shop on the Rue Mazarine, I joined a scrum to buy cheap DVDs and came away with a 5  euro copy of David Lean's "Rencontre Breve".  

By the time I got back to the 13th arrondissement apartment, all thoughts of happy Scandinavians doing the conga without me were long forgotten. I settled in with Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard and the cats and watched duty and loneliness triumph over love in a season that wasn't even Christmas.