Six Days in France: Overnight to Biarritz

I took the sleeper to Biarritz. You can fly there from the UK, but the flights are in the middle of the day in both directions, so you lose two days messing around airports. Take the sleeper and you get two full days back.

SNCF's idea of a "First Class" sleeper compartment is pretty basic: four bunks, thin mattresses and foam pillows, and if you're lucky the water works in the little toilettes at both ends of the carriage. If you're lucky. I shared the sleeper compartment with a young lady Korean student and two early thirty-something Frenchmen: a BCBG investment banker based in London and a supplier manager for a company whose business I didn't catch but was based in Biarritz with suppliers in Poland (not a thinkable sentence in 1970). We chatted politely for a short while and then got on with the serious business of trying to get to sleep. It takes a while, and I find I woke up when the train stopped rather than when it was running. The Korean student barely got off fast enough at Bayonne, and what felt like a split second later, it was our turn to tumble off at Biarritz. 07:00 in the morning. I had a quick coffee and croissant in the station buffet, where the barman suggested I take the A1 bus into town. I explained to the driver where I was going and he told me the name of the stop I needed. Don't even think about walking from the station into the town: it's steep uphill all the way and a lot further than it looks on the map. The hotel let me in, at the unearthly and still dark of 07:25 and I had breakfast on the patio as dawn broke. My chosen table is right in front of the camera. This was my breakfast view all week.

This is the road to the "Cote des Basques" in the signpost. It's shorter than the walk across my local Cineworld on the way to the station every morning. That's right. In half the time it takes me to walk from the car to the station, I could walk from the hotel to a Biarritz beach. Or in the other direction, I could be down in the town centre. You see, heaven does exist. Just not in the Middlesex suburbs. The beaches are for another post.

Six Days In France: An Afternoon's Stroll Through Paris

I arrived at Charles de Gaulle about 13:00, thanks to delays at Heathrow, and took the train to the Gare du Nord, and the 5 line to Gare d'Austerlitz - the minor miracle being my use of the machines to buy a carnet for the Metro. I left my bag in the Consigne at Austerlitz, where I would be catching the 23:15 sleeper to Biarritz, and headed into Paris.

First stop, a visual rest from the, err, urban experience of the railway trip. A walk through the Jardin des Plantes, which is about a hundred metres from Austerlitz.

After a quick omlette in sight of a closed (Tuesday!) Centre Pompidou, I wandered into the Square de la Tour St Jacques, where I don't think I've wandered before.

The whole of Europe was having a September heatwave, and under those circumstances it is compulsory for Parisians to have picnics in the park. Besides, they have to got be outside to smoke. Smoking is still big in France. They have traditional values there. My destination was the restaurant Le Telegraph which I'd booked for 19:30 on the internet on Sunday. So I did what everyone has to do on a sunny late afternoon...

... I visited the Notre Dame and walked along the Seine. Everyone was out and drinking decorously from bottles. And smoking.

It gets no more laid-back romantic than this. Well, okay, the Nikki de Saint-Phalle statue in the Caisse de Depots may not be romantic, but it's a neat little piece. The staff at le Telegraph couldn't have been more charming, the restaurant was almost full by half-past eight, mostly of family groups, and the food was good. Ten years ago I would have said it was wonderful, but London has moved on now, and I've got used to that level of cooking. I spent the best part of an hour in a sidewalk cafe just up the road, before heading back to the Rue du Bac Metro and so to the train at Austerlitz.

Six Days in France: Padlocks on the Pont des Arts

The Pont des Arts is a wooden pedestrian bridge between the Left Bank and the Louvre. The last time I crossed it, it was a wooden bridge across the Seine. Now look...

The idea is that you get married in an exotic city famous for l'amour and proclaim your undying love by locking a padlock on a bridge. It's done in many other places, including Luzkhov Bridge, Moscow, the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, and has been going on in southern Hungary (!) since the 1980's. The first padlocks appeared on the Pont des Arts in 2008. In 2010 the Socialist Hotel de Ville de Paris made a noise about removing the locks, but that hasn't happened yet.

Well, who cares. The light was perfect and the images are great. Someone with a good camera should do a book on the cadena's d'amour.

The Art of Manliness As Nostalgia

There's a web site out there called The Art of Manliness. Have a look. Find yourself agreeing with a few of the things they say. Have more of a look. Find yourself wondering: do these guys know what day it is? Do they know there's been nearly forty years and several economic upheavals since the 1960's?

The basic premise at the Art of Manliness is that men today are directionless wusses, whereas their fathers and grandfathers were real men who could catch fish with their bare hands, fix a locomotive while it was still hauling freight and smackdown anyone who dis-respected them with a practiced one-two. A representative of the genre is a recent post about the fitness tests for soldiers in WW2 and today. The article infers from the much stricter test criteria for the WW2 armies, in comparison to the criteria for today's US army, that the WW2 GI was fitter than today's soldier.

Hello? The test might have been well written-up, but no-one was going home because they were two push-ups short of the target. Oh no. The US and UK armies of WW2 were conscript armies: they took just about anyone with four working limbs and two working eyes who wasn't actually coughing up blood on the day of the physical. They could not afford to be selective because they needed cannon-fodder by the brigade.

The truth is exactly the opposite. A soldier in today's professional armies is fitter and better trained than any soldier before him. This applies in most other occupations and pastimes as well. An eighteen-year old competition-level classical pianist today could outplay almost anyone from the past, and if your seriously think that a 1960's tennis player would get past the qualifying rounds at Wimbledon, you are not paying attention. The best of today are so much better than the best of the past that it's difficult to explain to anyone who wasn't there in the past. The same can be said if we step down the scale slightly. I work in an office and so did my father, and I am so much fitter and healthier than my father it isn't true, and the same can be said for most of the men of my age. It's when we look a little further down that it all starts to go wrong. But then, it always did, just in a different way. Today, the problem is high blood sugar, being overweight and inactive, back then it was, oh, black lung, asbestosis, and being underfed, underweight and working twelve-hour shifts as standard.

"Manliness" is nostalgia and nostalgia is a species of denial. The nostalgic does not understand a lot of the present, and does not like much of what they do understand. They look back to a time when the things they don't like seemed not to happen, and about which they don't know enough to know its flaws. There's a reason it's the past, which is usually that it didn't work so well. Books work well, and we still have those, penny-farthings didn't, and we don't. Sure, some progress turned out not to be so beneficial - bring back the Routemaster bus, but with modern engines - but is there anyone who wants to work down an old-fashioned coal mine? But the nostalgic doesn't know this, because they weren't there, and they only listen to those who were if what they say fits in.

The real trick for a pop guru is to exploit this ignorance by claiming that stuff that doesn't work well now, like marriage, employment, manners and the like, used to work much better back in when men were men and women were grateful. In that world, Mom and Dad had their problems, but they toughed it out and kept their marriage together, instead of Mom cashing it in through the divorce courts at the first opportunity. Except it wasn't like that. Mom and Dad didn't tough it out because they were Better Than Us, but because they Didn't Have The Options. If marriage worked as well as it was supposed to, the Divorce Reform Act (1969) would never have been proposed, let alone passed. When it took effect in 1971, years of bitterness, anger and frustration flooded into the courts and applied for divorces. Mom cleared out the moment she could find a job to go to and a simple way of cancelling the marriage.

The same goes for cars. Sure, a reasonably handy man could tune and fix his own car of a Sunday. Which means that manufacturers were making cars so crudely-designed and badly assembled from poorly-machined parts that they needed constant maintenance and tuning. I don't know how to fix my car now because I don't need to: it doesn't go wrong. Don't ask me to describe what hamburgers used to be like. There's a reason McDonalds swept all before it, and it wasn't because Wimpy made tasty, Aberdeen-Angus beef patties. Don't ask about beer either: just ask a silver-haired person about Watney's Red Barrel, the piss-water that angered Graham Lees, Bill Mellor, Michael Hardman, and Jim Makin so much, they founded CAMRA.

The Art of Manliness and a number of other sites love to re-hash quotes and style looks from men who were old in the 1940's, and who could lead their patrician or celebrity lives because of economic circumstances that no longer obtain. As for re-cycling the philosophers? Aristotle, Seneca, Catiligione, the Stoics and Epicurians, were advising the modern equivalent of today's oligarchs and billionaires. Those wisdom philosophers weren't writing for people with day jobs who spent three hours a day commuting, and if they had been asked, they would have said that servants need only honesty and humility, not philosophy.

As ever, it's the missed opportunity to do something useful that's the real loss here. A bunch of reasonably smart people are writing articles of what looks like advice and wisdom for the conduct of life, but it's pretty much a marketing exercise exploiting insecure men who can't figure out how to handle the modern world. Those guys are being handed a bunch of nostalgia that makes it their fault if it fails. Why don't those smart people write articles about how to handle the modern world? The first few lessons might be in how to identify BS and decode the lies, evasions, brush-offs and fairy tales with which we are surrounded every day.

Starting with the idea that our grandfathers knew how to live and we don't. Hogwash. Greatest Generation? Poker-playing, black-market trading conscript cannon-fodder the lot of them. Spent their post-war lives coddled in jobs-for-life companies with final-salary pensions at the end of it, protected by the Iron Curtain, the tail end of Empires and a whole mess of trade tariffs. They made such a lousy job of running the largest economies in the world that first Japan, then Korea, then China ate their breakfast, and then they handed the whole lot over to a bunch of asset-strippers and robber-barons, and retired as the jobs went to Mexico, the Philippines and any other low-wage economy that would take the work. Yeah right. Great role models.

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 32

Flowers outside a clinic on New Cavendish Street; ever wanted a giant J-cloth to clean the front of your building? Well, now you can, check the difference between the grand floor and first floor stonework; tropically-heavy rain sweeping across the centre for about fifteen minutes at 17:00; red carpet and flaming torches for Katrina Kaif at my local Cineworld, which is one of the larger Bollywood cinemas outside India.

Why Governments Like the Thermodynamic Theory of Weight Management

The thermodynamic theory of weight management is the one behind "eat less, exercise more". It is the preferred theory of weight management of governments everywhere, which alone ought to make you suspicious. Why do governments like it?

Let’s suppose that the human body responds continuously to changes in exercise and diet. Eat a little less, you’ll lose a couple of grams; walk a little further, you’ll lose another couple of grams. And all four of those grams will stay off. Eat less, exercise more, however little, and you will lose weight slowly and surely. What are the implications for public policy? You don’t need trainers, gyms, sports parks or special advice. Drink low-fat milk and get off at the stop before your regular stop. Keep that up for ten years and you will lose a stone. Of course, that 3,000 calorie Christmas dinner will blow months of gradual weight loss out of the window. You must be ever vigilant. You can’t weaken once. Failure is clearly down to your lack of self-discipline, but don’t fret, you can always start all over again. How useful: a government policy that costs nothing and blames the citizen when it fails. That doesn’t happen often.

Now let’s suppose the body does not react continuously to changes in exercise and calorie intake. It’s a local equilibrium machine, which means that if you eat a little more, it will speed up to burn it off; if you eat a little less it will slow down to conserve; if you exercise it will prompt you to eat a little more; and if you don’t exercise, it will ease back on the promptings. In this case, not eating that croissant and walking the extra quarter-mile will make no difference at all. You need to shake your body off its equilibrium and take it to another one at a lower weight and body fat ratio. That is going to mean a discontinuous change in diet and exercise routine. This is not easy for anyone, as adult lives are generally only manageable by routine, and can cause all sorts of insecurities and upsets with partners. Plus you know nothing about diet and serious exercise, so you need a trainer for a while – and now we have a public policy problem. Good trainers cost money and don’t work for the NHS (though it might be cheaper if they did and the NHS stopped spending hundreds of millions on drugs with names ending in ..statin and ..formin).

So that’s why governments believe what they do about diet and exercise. Not because it’s true, but because it gets them off the hook of having to know something and provide facilities and training, instead of spending the money on something useful like a huge computer project that fails but gets the senior Civil Servant a partnership with a top five consultancy. Because they can blame you for lack of self-discipline and moral fibre, instead of themselves for failing to provide useful advice, facilities and for creating an economy that consists more or less entirely of low-calorie-burning jobs.

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Phoenix Gardens