Changing Rooms, Soane-style

This bland façade at 13, Lincoln’s Inn Fields hides an Aladdin’s cave of artistic quirk. It is the Sir John Soane’s Museum – a bewitching magpie’s nest cluttered with curiosities in stone, plaster and paint.
Soane, an architect best known for designing the Bank of England building, seems to have been an early DIY renovation fanatic. He began in 1792 with a single house containing living areas, a library and drawing room where he schmoozed his clients. Over the following 30 years, however, he undertook an extreme home makeover, demolishing and remodelling, gradually spreading into the two neighboring properties. His aim was to create the ideal space to display his extraordinary collection so that “amateurs and students” of architecture could appreciate and learn from the classics.
Apart from an abundance of antiquities (including a cross-eyed Hercules looking for all the world like a dim-witted quarterback), there are countless fragments of architecture: plaster casts and marble cast-offs perching and crowding every inch of space. It must be hell to dust. There is even the enormous alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, which the British Museum couldn’t afford, and had to be installed though a demolished wall. Soane threw a three-day party to celebrate its arrival.
My favourites however were the paintings: three Canalettos, glorious expanses of Venetian detail and light, and an embarrassment of Hogarths. An entire room in fact full of two Hogarth series: A Rake’s Progress and An Election. I could have stood for hours, gasping with recognition of the funny, brutal and poignant characters in these canvasses.
The star of the museum, though, is the building itself. Soane’s wonderfully modern eccentricity shines through in the way light is coaxed into every corner of the house, through glass domes and metal grilles, so that unexpected shafts illuminate even the depths of the sepulchral chamber. Here, you really do feel like you are exploring a crumbling crypt or the half-excavated streets of an ancient city.
Just as Soane, in his home-reno makeover madness, intended.

AUSSIE IN CHIPPY FROGGY TITTY SHOCK

We arrived in London last Thursday. The first thing I noticed was the sickly-savoury smell of hot chips, wafting and soaking entire stretches of street. Chip shops here as common as boulangeries in Paris, and while the warm greasy pall is perhaps not as exquisite as butter-pastry bouquet de baguette, it must have spoken to some deep need within, for my first meal here was fish and chips with a pint of Guinness.
“Oh la la, mais quel cliché, le fish and chips, c’est so British!” This was the next surprise: almost every second person you overhear seems to be speaking French. I had heard that there has been a massive influx of young frenchies to London, keen to gain experience in the anglo-saxon corporate world, but I was not prepared for the sheer number. Someone told me before leaving Paris that London was now the second French city in the world by population, and I find that utterly believable. It’s quite comforting to hear the familiarity of French all around, making the cross-channel transition softer somehow. But I’m ashamed to admit how often I feel a mean surge of schadenfreude when I see a poor frog-out-of-water grappling with English. See what it’s like? See?
Language is just one reason why I am feeling instantly comfortable here. So many unexpected idiosyncrasies seem to remind me of Sydney, from red-tiled terraces to the way shops are strung out along the high street. Sunday trading! Customer service! And – bright zenith of pleasure - fat weekend newspapers!
There are of course other aspects of life here which strike me as particularly British. Bosoms, for example. Our first night in London was a marvellous introduction to that unique “oo-er” naughtiness which is so very English. We went to a taping of The Sunday Night Project hosted by Alan Carr, the current Queen of TV innuendo, and his guest Barbara Windsor, of “Carry On” fame. We enjoyed classic clips of Barbara’s bra pinging off and giggled at character names such as “Doctor Nookey”. It may be a French(ish) term, but the double entendre is, to me, quintessentially English. Take this smutty gem from “Carry on Columbus":

Marco: I wouldn’t if I were you, miss. I’ve heard these waters are full of man-eating sharks.
Chiquita: Oh no! So if I fell in, do you think they’d swallow me whole?
Marco: No, I’m told they spit that bit out.

Ah, England. The land of Charles Dickens, tabloid headlines and Mrs. Malaprop. I feel at home already. Yes, we’ll miss Paris. Painfully. But so far it’s been an encouraging opening (fnar!) to our cross-channel odyssey.
Or, as the Rev. Spooner might have called it: “A Sail of Two Titties”.*

* With apologies to Monty Python.

Steamy

Just try to resist those krazy prices!

P.S. Happy Blogiversary to me. Thanks to you.

Cat Lady

I see her every so often on my morning run, this woman walking her fat tortoiseshell in the park. On a leash. The cat seems so utterly mortified to be seen in public in such a demeaning situation, and punishes its misguided owner by refusing to walk very much at all. It just stands there, facing away from pointing passers by, tail twitching indignantly. Simmering and waiting for the shame to end.

Cat Lady coos and coaxes, but Minou won’t be having it. Usually, having passed them in the same place a few times, I see her walking sadly up the hill, the cat grimly triumphant in her arms.

I’ll miss them.

Chunnel vision

It’s time to face it. Time to admit that our days in Paris are numbered. In a little over three weeks, the lease ends on our apartment and we have to move on.

We’ve set our sights on London.

Like so many Frenchies, we’ve decided to give our careers a shot in the arm by going where the work is. LSP has suffered for so long, swimming against the tide in the French job market, where experience, it seems, counts for nothing unless you’ve been to the right school, and handwriting analysis is seen as a legitimate recruitment tool. I, too, will have more options to broaden my field of work, being able to work in the UK thanks to a British-born grandmother.

So we’re shaking ourselves out of what has become, if we’re honest, semi-retirement and plunging back into the fast lane. The main thing, we tell ourselves, is that we’re staying in Europe, close to our ever-expanding clan of friends and family here, and still providing an attractive option for our Australian circle to visit!

The master plan is still Paris; but Paris on our terms, in security and certainty. One day, with replenished resources and renewed desire, we will return to carve our slice of this wonderful place.

In the meantime, we are keeping the farewell melancholy at bay by packing and looking for somewhere to live. Nothing like a rising wave of panic to stem the tide of sentiment.

Lord. Even my metaphors are muddled.

Shhh!

The most annoying man in the world was at my gym this morning.

I was in the middle of my wake-up workout, whittling away the grogginess, when my slowly sharpening focus was shattered. The swing doors smacked open and in he strutted: Mr. Cocky McTosspot. You know the type. His invasive swagger advertised his inadequacies so loudly that he might as well have been holding a sign saying “I DRIVE A RED SPORTS CAR.” He was one of those sad little men who compensate by making as much unnecessary noise as possible.

Ratcheting up the seat on the machines with an arrogant flick. Adjusting the weights with showy clanks. Huffing and straining, veins popping ostentatiously. Dramatic grunts and hiss-counting reps: “Dix-huitttttttt, dix-neufffffff, VINGT!” and then dropping the weight with an echoing crash as if to crow “Hear that? Hear how much iron I can lift?”

Mister, if eye-rolling made a noise, I’d be DEAFENING you right now.

Then, appalling cherry on the cake of his awfulness, he answers his mobile and shouts belligerently at some poor assistant. Repeatedly.

My mind seethes with revenge-thoughts of frightening violence. I stand up and tap him on the shoulder as he admires himself sickeningly in the mirror. I reach down, take his phone, place it on the floor, and smash it to pieces with a 25 kilo dumbbell.

OK, that last bit didn’t actually happen. But I did give him a really withering look on my way out. Take THAT, McTosspot!

Lemon Drops

Back in Paris after a glorious time on and around the Amalfi coast. Impressions and highlights:

The transformation of Capri in the evening, when the daytripping hordes have emptied onto the ferries, and the island exhales into dusk.

Sunset Bellinis made from fresh white peaches on an impossible terrace hanging – so high! -above the soft darkening sea, pink cliffs fading in the twilight chill.

Trying not to hum "Funiculì, Funiculà" on the ride down to the Marina Grande.

Arriving at our villa in Amalfi, running from room to room trying to work out which one Ingrid Bergman used to sleep in.

Breakfasts on the blue-tiled terrace, squinting into the diamond-dazzled sea.

Exploring the terraced gardens dropping down to the water, picking armfuls of fruit and flowers.

Days spent at the tiny beach club, lizard-like on the rocks, and long shady lunches of seafood and wine.

The crystalline sea, so cold it made you laugh, enticing with mysterious grottos and white pebble coves.

The colourful chaos of a religious festival greeting St. Andrew’s relics, arriving by boat from a two-day visit Rome, to be re-interred in the Duomo, 800 years to the day since they first arrived from Constantinople. Priests and policemen, sailors and schoolchildren, everyone bedecked in robes, band-striped uniforms (swoon!) and medieval finery, church bells topping the joyful din.

Fireworks after dinner, deafeningly close, lighting up the buildings clinging to the hillsides like a Neapolitan nativity scene.

Afternoon gelato and after-dinner digestifs.

White-knuckled bus trips along clinging cliff-top roads, winding and lurching from near-miss to near-death, trying still to take in the beauty flashing by.

The first thrilling moment in the streets of Pompeii when you share the sensations of its original inhabitants, shockingly immediate.

The smell of wood smoke and wisteria in the gardens of Ravello, perched prow-like over the coast.

Being told I spoke Italian with a Portuguese accent.

Above all, and everywhere, the scent of citrus blossom; the lush yellow and sharp syrup of lemon.