Rib update

Our Courtyard 15 November

You haven’t asked about my ribs for a while so I thought I would give you a status report – because it is nearly a year since I broke five of the little blighters in Lapland – by falling off a dog sled onto my Canon 400D camera. 

Well they are much, much better – but not completely mended. I still get some pain and discomfort and they are uncomfortable at night when I roll over in bed – not that this is easy to do anyway when you have cats perched on top of you.

The reason I was reminded of my ribs was that on my last day in Paris I got a doozey of a cold - the worst part of which is a gasping, rasping, hacking, wheezing cough – which when performed in public makes people move away very quickly indeed.

This still gives my ribs a twinge – but had I had it last January would have finished me off completely. For the benefit of those who have never broken five ribs - I have described some of the ramifications here.

But I am sure it will be better soon. Molly got me some cold tablets in Paris and I am taking these assiduously.  Not that I think cold tables do much, but I do like to avoid – as much as possible – the leakage that attends these types of events – and cold tables tend to mitigate these. 

So there is not much one can do when one is in a complete fug so last night I turned to learning how to use Aperture which is the Apple equivalent of Photoshop.

Now I will never be any good as a photographer – have no pretensions or expectations to be - and in fact take all my photos on the automatic setting so as to avoid the fiddling.  

Such adjustments as I do make I do with the Aperture software and I like playing around with special effects. You will have noticed that I like saturated colours.

But I have barely scratched the surface and have never even opened the book – which I bought a year ago – until recently – when I loaded the software and photo library – which one needs to do the lessons.

It was then that I discovered that part of the library - the ‘San Diego Zoo’ was missing. This is unfortunate because the first few lessons about white balance and exposure need the pandas and Saki monkeys and bears and other critters in the zoo.

Well – they would not give me a book and CD without a critical photo library would they? So it must be there somewhere. I will just have to find it.

Well I examined that CD within an inch of its life and I could not find the San Diego Zoo file. I did find and downloaded a lot of other photos that were not downloaded in the initial foray.

I also – somehow – managed to hide my main Aperture Library. Yes this was the library I just spent weeks building and culling from 35,000 images to 23,000 images and putting into projects, folders and albums.

This caused a temporary (but wild and heart thumping) panic until I discovered that I had moved it to another folder.

So I am never going to be much good at correcting the white balance on pandas – but we are through the zoo stage and I think I have everything else I need.

Perhaps it was supposed to be snow?

La Tour Eiffel from the Pantheon

We covered quite a bit of ground during the recent visit and I saw some things I had never seen before - including the inside of the Pantheon and also the Musée national du Moyen Âge.

I am of course not the world’s most patient visitor to things like this - but I did my best.

It is hard not to notice that inside the Pantheon – which houses hordes of famous French dead people – that there are almost no dead women.

In fact the only one we could find was Madame Curie. Now I am no expert on French history but I am betting that there are a lot of women who should be there in place of some of the arch plonkers who have been entombed as Citizens of the Republic of days gone by. I mean most of them wrote a book or won a battle or became a senator. I am sure they all drank too much and caroused until dawn and fornicated abominably. 

I mean Nicolas will probably end up there. Spare me!

Anyways – I did finally see and at last understand – Foucault’s Pendulum. But I am still not ready for the book. 

Cate noticed – as I did last time – that there are more homeless people and beggars in Paris than in any other city we have visited in Europe. It must also – as I have mentioned previously – be the grubbiest city in Europe and have the most Graffiti artists per square metro. They should spend some tourist dollars on cleaners. 

There is barely a millimeter of Montmartre which is not covered with graffiti and the whole place is a shambles. There is not much you can do about this – Vienna is not much better. It is not as though much of it is artistic. Most of it is just vandalism.

But we were glad to escape from our hotel and I have promised to do better in future. It is not really that difficult and I have promised Cate that next time I will stop taking my stupid pills at least two days before making the booking.

On reflection I think the feathery effect on the wall in the stairwells was supposed to be snow. I still have no explanation for the crazy blood splatters in the elevator.  

Weasels seized my brain

La Tour Eiffel at Sunset

You will not be surprised to learn that Cate does not like the hotel. Anything about it in fact – including the location. She may not – in fact – accept that it is a hotel – in the true sense of the word.

On a scale of 10 this is a 4.5 and - my lowest score since Prague in 2009 – which I really never thought I could beat. That was really special – the one with the door that you could lick while you were sitting on the toilet – if you had a mind to lick toilet doors.

That was also the one that was next to the church with the belfry and you could not only hear the bells you could almost touch them as they were just across a narrow street – and at the same level as us - and we had no sooner asked the question ‘I wonder if they still ring those?’ than our question was answered.

But they stopped at midnight at which time we were able to stop gritting our teeth and our ears and ungrip our fingers from the frayed arms of the lounge chairs that once belonged to communist apparatchiks - and even the rats became more relaxed and stopped crashing around in the walls and bleeding from the ears.

Other than that – and perhaps Stockholm – which was not really my fault – this has not been my finest hour.

But it is entirely due to faulty planning and research and a last minute panic. There were indeed mitigating factors but I will not affect to apportion blame but will take the whole burden upon myself.

But it is indeed a stupid hotel. I mean it has shag pile carpet on the walls in the restaurant and the stair wells and the elevator looks like the movie set for a scene for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre - and it is in a part of Paris where you simply would not go after dark without armed guards or unless you were training for a tour of duty in Afghanistan and even then you would not do it without 12 navy SEALS in tow.

When I got the taxi there from our first hotel my driver had never heard of it and was amazed that it existed. When I said it was 4 stars he laughed out loud and said `why would you put a 4 start hotel here?’

Why indeed?

Well we had dinner here tonight. It was adequate. We saw no beautiful people although the nightclub fired up at about 9:30 and the singer was excellent. She looked liked she was Algerian.

She clearly had the hots for me because I was wearing my Eric Bompard cashmere top – and was looking for a more mature (if not fossilised) man - but Cate kept her at bay with a mild death glance.

The Ice Cube Bar is somewhere you go by booking in advance and paying €38. For this you get to go into a freezing room and have four shots of Grey Goose Vodka.

They have these places all over Moscow. They call them Metro station entrances. The vodka is not Grey Goose but the results are much the same. The greatest hazard in the Moscow metro in winter is circumnavigating the comatose Russians and the empty vodka bottles.

In Vienna the biggest displays are for chocolate. In Moscow they are for vodka. In any given supermarket – 50% will be devoted to vodka.

Given what I have learned over the last few years – and the mistakes I have made – I am astonished that I have fucked this up so badly. With the benefit of hindsight there was almost nothing right with my decision in terms of location, quality, style, presentation, ambience etc.

I mean it is a complete Goat Fuck. It is just stupid. This is the last hotel in the world we should be at. Weasels obviously seized my brain just before I made this decision. There is no other explanation.