This year – Thursday, August 31, 2017 – it will be remembered worldwide that on that day in 1997, twenty years into the past, a Mercedes S280, bearing the number plate 688 LTV 75, smashed into one of the pillars supporting the overpass of a Paris tunnel, the Pont Alma underpass. Nothing unusual about […]

All hell has broken out in London, yet, Paris this morning of Sunday, June 4, 2017,  is a haven of peace. Probably the way Jesus of Nazareth envisaged a Christian day of rest should be. I walked around Paris’s beautiful Montsouris Park this morning. Lots of couples out in the park with their small children.  […]

  Is there anything more French than the guillotine, you may well ask? As a true crime writer resident in France, I’ve written about this head-chopping apparatus which was first put to work in 1792 and last put to work in 1981, four years after capital punishment had been abolished by a parliamentary vote (1977). […]

  You need not hang your head in shame because you have never heard of this artist: Jacques Truphémus. I have not, not until I went to, or rather returned to the Caillebotte Property in the town of Yerres, 23 kms (14 miles) south-east of Paris.  The Caillebotte Property, once the family home of the […]

I love zoos. Therefore, I often go walk around in Paris’s two zoos –  Vincennes Zoo and the Jardin des Plantes Zoo. I even have an annual pass for the Vincennes one. You can read what I wrote about the Vincennes Zoo here  The Jardin des Plantes Zoo is different. It is smaller. Very much […]

The next time you walk in a park in Paris – the Tuileries, Luxembourg, Montsouris, Jardin des Plantes  whichever – you will come to realise how polite the French are. They would not want you to walk on the lawn, or pick the flowers, for example, but they will tell you so in a most […]

  When I am not writing, or reading what others have written, I paint. No, not walls, but canvases.  Here is a series of paintings I’ve done of flowers: and yes the above ‘Flowers in a teapot’ is also mine.         I do hope you like all of the above. All are […]

  Here is a list of Paris’s radio stations according to their popularity. All broadcast 24/24 every day of the week, but night broadcasts are repeats of the day ones. In millions of listeners from January to March 2017: RTL 6,590 up by 5,8% from same period last year France Inter 6,259 up by 10,9% […]

  Today, April 16, 2017, France commemorates the Battle of the Ladies’ Road – Chemin des Dames. This battle begun on this day of April 16 one hundred years ago had left 40,000 French soldiers – the Bearded Ones (Poilus) – dead or wounded and the town of Craonne destroyed. One of the wounded was […]

  Don’t ever think that a museum filled with porcelain items will be a bore. The Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique museum is nothing but boring.  In the town of Sèvres, 10.5 kms (6.5 miles) south-west of Paris, I spent a really pleasurable and interesting two hours in the museum recently. I can actually […]

    Is it possible to hide something which is 35,000 sq m (376,737 sq f or 8.65 acres) large? In France, it is being done. This most-secret ‘thing’ is hidden away on a terrain of 11.6 hectares (29 acres). And even if I know where this is in France, I won’t tell you: won’t […]

      Orvault is the kind of town where nothing newsworthy – good or bad –  happens. There is never any rioting of which there are much in France these days; no street marches of which there are also many in France currently; no acts of terrorism with the dead and wounded lying in […]

The good are few: the baddies are many. Hitler and his Nazis were baddies. Their names are engraved in Mankind’s memory: Goering, Goebbels, Mengele, Stangl, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann –  do I need to continue? Then there were the good Germans. Germans, who helped those the Nazis wanted to kill, to escape. One good German was […]

I thought that wine bottles were always lying down on the counters and shelves of bars and bistros, and indeed in shops, to be aesthetically pleasing. But no! The reason is that by lying down the wine conserves all its quality because the precious nectar remains in contact with the stopper. And through being in […]

Two Englishmen aged 42 and 51 are under lock and key in France for having sold a fraudulent cure for  cancer. And not only cancer but also sclerosis, alzheimer’s, parkinson’s and even autism. And they claimed furthermore that their magic medication protected the human body against all infections. They marketed their miracle cure under the […]