A quick Google search assures me that the French use ‘être une bonne pâte’ (to be a good dough, more or less literally) as a vaguely colloquial equivalent of ‘a decent chap’ (or female equivalent, no doubt. But we know that I could spend hours of agonising over register and gender-neutrality, and actually I’m just […]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33257415 I don’t tend to read BBC news: it’s a bit wishy washy, the epitome of dumbing down, failing to ask searching questions (or, from the looks of it, any questions) and way too fond of the over-simplistic bullet pointed list. But although I can dismiss and despise The Sun and the Daily Mail from […]
It is the biggest transport cliché of all time, and one that has become applicable to almost every and any facet of modern life. You wait ages for a bus and then three turn up at once. And as a confirmed public transportophile, I must confess that there is a certain amount of truth in […]
I grew up on an island. A reasonably sized island, a country, where we eat fish but don’t necessarily live by the coast. (Indeed, even when I was taken to the ‘seaside’ as a child, it was often the Blackpool-Southport area, where the tide goes out so far that you can’t even catch a glimpse […]
22nd December 2013, Paris Over these last few days, there have been too many cakes (and non-cakes!) to count, to mention, to describe… There was the waffle (I would call it Belgian, they call it liégeoise) with lines of chocolate embedded in it, oozing slightly, dangerously, temptingly, so that I almost burnt my mouth biting […]
And so it comes to an end. One final day of ticking off the last few things on the list I made on the train to Portsmouth back in June, a fit of giggles at ‘Last Christmas’ in a French cookware shop and enough dodging gormless tourists and awkward Parisians to qualify for the next […]
…well, actually, there’s over a week to go, but it is undeniably getting closer. That said, I’ve not been feeling overly festive, perhaps because, despite the presence of large numbers of excessive Christmas lights (there are Christmas trees hanging in the air across the middle of my street) and incredibly tacky Christmas markets, I don’t […]
Next Monday (ie. the day I return to England) will be exactly six months since I left Manchester to begin my year abroad. And, quite amazingly and excitingly, I now have plans for next summer too! Yes, I will be returning from South America in June, staying in England for about a week, and then […]
Paris, Île-de-France, 6th December 2013 As soon as I saw the name of this one, sat in the window of the boulangerie down the road, I just had to have it. It was the right moment, the perfect day. Why? Well, there was the fact that on my way to work in the morning, the rue […]
Home from my epic weekend practically in Germany, I thought I’d treat you to a bit of a change! 10. Practically everything has bacon in. Or sausages. Or is ‘Choucroute’, which is basically a vegetarian’s nightmare, made up of about twelve kinds of meat heaped onto a mound of cabbage. I mean, in my world […]
CakeonFridays 