The New Grub Street

Sorry for silence. NaNoWriMo – in all its adjective-laden, adverbally-challenged glory – is eating the screentime spat back out by jobhunts. I have half the recommended wordcount, a plot that’s racing towards the edge of a cliff, and one character I love so much it’s ridiculous. Occasionally a tangental paragraph about NOTHING (a blink-and-you’d-miss-her character watching Saturday telly with her grandchildren) blossoms into something like prose, but whenever I prod the plot, sentences start committing suicide. I’m worried that the hero is just me with a beard. I’m worried that the heroine is just me with spatial awareness. I’m resigned to the fact that yet another character is someone I loathed at university, and that changing her hair colour really changes nothing.

But occasionally there’s a sentence (the state of St. Aldate’s, inclement weather, that bloody woman and her grandchildren) which arrives of its own free will, and for a few minutes I’m God on the seventh day. In a less sacriligeous/bearded/infallible sense. I love the NaNo pep talks, especially this one by Chris Baty (quoted below):

In fact, by November 30 you will have amassed tens of thousands of words of very solid prose. You will come up with things that make you laugh so hard you have to wipe off the keyboard afterwards, and passages so moving that you will cry as you write them. Your plot will unexpectedly give birth to fantastic subplots, characters will reveal surprising and juicy things about themselves, and you’ll have some moments during NaNoWriMo that will rank among the most satisfying and happy-making of your life.

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she’s always nervous.

and this one by Jasper Fforde [via email]:

Because here’s the thing: Writing is not something you can do or you can’t. It’s not something that ‘other people do’ or ‘for smart people only’ or even ‘for people who finished school and went to University’. Nonsense. Anyone can do it. But no-one can do it straight off the bat. Like plastering, brain surgery or assembling truck engines, you have to do a bit of training—get your hands dirty—and make some mistakes. Those 22 days of mine were the start, and only the start, of my training. The next four weeks and 50,000 words will be the start of your training, too.

[...]

So where do you start? Again, it doesn’t matter. You might like to sketch a few ideas down on the back of an envelope, spend a week organizing a master-plan or even dive in head first and see where it takes you. All can work, and none is better than any other. The trick about writing is that you do it the way that’s best for you. And during the next 50,000 words, you may start to discover that, too.

The best pep talk of all, though, didn’t come to me via NaNo: it’s Janet Reid’s ‘Less Than Zero‘ on what – or who – constitutes a ‘real writer’. One line in particular has become my mantra, and motivation for sticking with NaNo: “Make no mistake about this: if you have written and finished a novel you ARE a writer“.

So, here I am, hammering away in my parents’ living room, Corrie descending into scary psychodrama on playback, and approximately eight thousand characters beating genre to death in Word (I run MS Word on Mac. It’s not a happy marriage. Incidentally I went in the Apple shop today, and cannot tell an iPod from an iPhone. Is this the middle-class, 2009 equivalent of never having seen the sea, etc etc). I am still happy for this novel to be largely ‘bad, boggy and unpublishable’. If I can have enough good sentences to get me through & stave off the fear of a crawling wordcount enough to do something about it, I’ll be delighted. I don’t expect this novel to be good or fantastic or even adequate. I’ll settle for mine, and finish. The rest is for the second book.

 

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• Last night I read Brrnrrd’s work from the MyPlaceOrYours residency, heard at the Soho theatre last year & now up on the project website. In person my favourites were towards the start of the cycle; ‘London’ and ‘Love Is Not A Potato’. Now it’s ‘Woman With Bird’ and the end of the end – ‘The song and the yurt’. I didn’t expect the form of ‘London’, but, then again, the artist did combine the residency with English Mods. I also have increased fondness for the second piece, ‘Two dogs’. At the time my memories of said dogs were somewhat fresh and my overwhelming feeling relief that we didn’t go to the Hobgoblin. Putting it out there: she needs to write a novel.
• I am completely obsessed with Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. Everyone is beautiful and queer, everywhere is San Francisco, and the plotting is that of a technicolour detective novel written by a wizard. I love the women. I love the men. I love everyone else. There are SEVEN books and I have read THREE and I will not obey any injunctions to be sensible and wait for Christmas. I shun the library copies. They must be mine mine mine and I must live in them and be BFF with Michael Tolliver (who Lives, according to Book 7). There are three miniseries and one stars Thomas Gibson (cf Aaron Hotchner, cf Criminal Minds). Armistead Maupin, blessed man, started Tales of the City as a daily newspaper serial, a chapter at a time. If I could write in any form, it would be that one. I can’t think of anything better.
• I took a decent photo of London. Keep watching areyouaspy.
• New blogs on my RSS — Murderati, BookEnds, LLC and Janet Reid. Writing in general & crimewriting in particular = relevant to my interests. If you like crime/detective fiction, definitely check out the first.
• I am consumed (respectively this’ll seem like a pun) by a pre-festive urge to order enormous food hampers online. For some reason we get the Chatsworth catalogue. And finally (my parents have started reading the Sunday papers aloud, probably a sign I should stop typing and engage) if ASW is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

oranges and lemons, say the bells of –

I’m in London Wednesday to Friday this week. Thursday’s fully booked during office hours but otherwise parental unit and I are free. I mean my mum – dad’s filming in Bristol, replete with masses of Sunday roast leftovers destined for some apocalyptic fry-up. He took them in a Pyrex bowl, it feels a bit like he’s the student.

Our natural stomping ground is always Soho, Covent Garden, Charing Cross way (food, shops, books) – we used to stay in Piccadilly but this time, for various reasons, it’ll be the City. This is our second visit – until the first, I don’t think I’d ever set foot in the place before. I’m wondering about the bits of London I don’t know so well, and which to explore this time.

I/we already know Southwark, Spitalfields/Aldgate/Aldgate East/Petticoat Lane/Middlesex Street/Liverpool Street way, Shepherd’s Bush, Notting Hill Gate, Camden, Haringey, Hampstead, Mayfair, Marylebone, Waterloo, Kensington, Camden and Maida Vale/Warwick Avenue/Little Venice way reasonably well. And no, that list wasn’t in any kind of geographical order, thank god, it was by emotional association – Shepherd’s Bush is my friends Lucy and Jenny, and the Oxford Tube. Haringey is at least five Oxford friends. Charing Cross is Rhian, Kensington’s a recent addition, the South Bank is school trips, Maida Vale’s my uncle and Hampstead is my mother. Camden is the summit of ALL my EARTHLY AMBITION when I was about sixteen.Waterloo is the Old Vic first night party where Jack and I almost disgraced ourselves (Jack really wanted to run up behind John Suchet and shout BONG, possibly my clearest memory of the evening).

I don’t know where else to go. I welcome suggestions! Help me, lazywebs, you’re my only hope (&c).

this is the creed of hotel tumbleweed

Just blogged another photo to my photography blog (please, Sophie, make your written style more repetitivephotoblogphoto). I got incredibly lost the first time I tried to find Shakespeare & Co (my mother, should she read this, will interject to say that I’d seen Shakespeare & Co. before but mother that is another of those great cultural experiences you gave me in earliest youth & which accordingly I do not recall). Rue de la Bucherie is a street of lies, it’s split in two and Shakespeare & Co. is not where you would think. In the middle there’s a square to an homme politique and upstairs there’s a bed where a girl and her boyfriend were sleeping. They liked photography and time machines, according to their books. I left a message on the glass.

The next time I got lost again, which was much less of a laughing matter – I had Chloe with me in the wheelchair, and the Left Bank (while not as bad as Opera, after which I became like a bird with broken wings) longs only to chuck its wheelchair users into the traffic via potholes. But we found the homme politique again and there’s a lovely photo of us flanked by tramps in a dustbowl. Chloe looks winsome but I look Satanic, so it won’t be published here.

Here’s the shop’s website. I’m going back soon.

(tumbleweed is sort of the way I currently feel about this blog. But watch this space. Also, you know what I do not love? Christmas theatre tickets costing an arm and a leg yet giving you space for neither, at the edge of row X …wow, that last phrase sounds like the title for a kinky if clinical B-movie.)

NaNoWriMo, murder and the Wallace affair…

This is, I guess, an appropriate post for the run-up to Hallowe’en! Warning: gory/disturbing stuff beneath the cut (my first attempt at using one on WordPress, hope it works!)

A couple of days ago, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, this is a worldwide online project where participants each write a novel – 50,000 words – in the 30 days of November. Since signups, I’ve been fretting about the possibilities of libel, slander and nobody speaking to me ever again. I hope this is merely a clever displacement activity to avoid the most likely reason for failure – simply not producing those 50,000 words.

The prospect of winning NaNo (trans: successfully meeting the word limit) fills me with huge relief: in 30 days, it’d be done. I’d have written a novel, and – no matter how bad, boggy and unpublishable – I would know it could be done. And then I could do it again, rather better – it’d never be so difficult again, not until the tricky third-novel-slump where I have to go and stay in a friends’ house in the Fens and drink tea and stare out and possibly have a passionate/doomed love affair with the man who brings the post/dark-eyed waif from the village. And then produce something a bit Woolf and a bit Dylan Thomas.

God, can you imagine how that child would have looked.

I am also, my brothers, joining A Book Club. I have never been sure about Book Clubs. They always screamed Richard & Judy and those 3 for 2 stickers (no that’s not just snobbery, those stickers induce HORRIBLE ANXIETY, I can NEVER find 3 books I want on the table and then the girl asks and god), also the prospect of sitting round discussing Clarissa Dalloway’s Motivation does tend to make you scream when it’s what you do for – well, not a living. For the three years that push you dramatically into debt, teach you to eat plovers’ eggs and are so golden-and-aquatint that the rest of the world seems cold and dark, woe, woe, et cetera. But Simon is in lots, so they must be okay, and now Book Clubs appeal to me in the same way as NaNoWriMo. I am jobless. I am dolescum. I finally have the time.

Plus, my sole close schoolfriend currently in Really Gainful Employment (Recruitment Consultant, hoyes) hates it so much he suggested a Book Club in his first recorded moment of speech without irony. Sincerity, from him, indicates a man on the edge of a quarter-life crisis/a Birmingham-based Columbine, so we’re all going to sit in a pub and mock our own literary endeavours, before choosing books to read for next time.

Of the two readers whose tastes I know well, I predict – respectively – Nabakov and Orwell as opening gambits. I’m veering towards Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (haven’t read it yet – any thoughts?) for several reasons: 1) love my boys though I do, I’d be surprised if they chose many women writers – they’re Salinger & Orwell kind of guys, and 2) the fact it’s dystopian means they might actually like it. I’m not a big reader of dystopia, but I adored Oryx & Crake. Here’s another reason I’m nervous of the Book Club – when I talk about books outside an academic context, I sound sort of stupid. I don’t know whether to play nice and seem witless, or leap into a tutorial-style discussion and attempt to shed their hearts’ blood.

In terms of what I’m actually reading, I’m on a massive P. D. James kick, and waiting (probably forever) for Gary Taylor’s Inventing Shakespeare to arrive from Amazon. I heard P. D. James preach in chapel once, but until now Dalgliesh has been a big omission from my personal detective-canon. Having read Cover Her Face, Shroud For A Nightingale, The Black Tower, A Mind to Murder and now Death of an Expert Witness, I watched an ITV3 profile of her earlier in the week. Gyles Brandreth being an amiable idiot, Ruth Rendell being surprisingly closed-lipped on a woman she obviously loves, Mark Lawson being an unforgivable cretin (apparently Dorothy L Sayers “was all right on character but couldn’t really write a sentence”, berk berk “>berk berk) and Val McDermid rather ostentatiously calling her “Phyllis” (I wanted to link directly to McDermid’s website, but the typewriter sound effects are too annoying).

Several of PD James’s novels owe a positive debt to Dorothy L. Sayers. Shroud for a Nightingale has the same closed female community, sexual spectres and last-minute-assault-on-the-sleuth as Gaudy Night and, not coincidentally, is my favourite thus far. Set in a nurses’ training school in the 1970s, its opening pages contain one of the most horrific murders in detective fiction, the death of Nurse Pearce in the nurses’ demonstration room.

Talking of horrific murders, it cannot be every family that stores an almost-forgotten cache of crime scene photos in the same blanket box as old letters and birth certificates. I guess I’m just lucky. Our blanket box is a last-chance saloon for paperwork, never opened except  for those mysterious periods in my childhood when my father would get out 400 pieces of paper and  balance our finances (or at least acquaint himself with the imbalance).

Beneath the layers of respectable bills and invoices lies stuff from a film my dad worked on in 1990,about an unsolved murder in 1930s Liverpool. Do you remember the Prudential insurance ads? The Man From The Pru was the story of William Herbert Wallace, whose wife Julia was bludgeoned to death on the hearth in their shabby, cramped front room. Wallace claimed he’d been out at the time of the murder, searching for a non-existent in a street that was never built. The client was R. M. Qualtrough and the street was Menlove Gardens East, and I am enough of a terrifying crime nerd that I’m telling you all this from memory.  Wallace was tried, convicted and then sensationally acquitted. He didn’t hang, but died a broken man. The film starred Jonathan Pryce, Anna Massey and it dates horribly and as a child I was strictly, strictly forbidden to read the contents of the THE MAN FROM THE PRU file that was exacavated during my father’s financial archaeological digs.

My parents rarely censored what I read. Occasionally my mother has guilt that I got hold of trashfests like Yes, Mama (illegitimate orphan cruelly treated father disinherits mother senile child abuse prostitution suicide marries one-armed Boer veteran) and A Lady in Berkshire (“Kitty Winters could never have been called handsome but at that moment she looked almost beautiful” — trufax, and I found that at primary school) at nine, but since I also read all her Shakespeare, Dickens, Blyton, Christie & EJ Howard, it didn’t hurt. I think censoring children’s reading is pointless and stultifying, unless your precious lamb is somehow veering towards Firearms Monthly and Mein Kampf. I was only ever banned from The Jewels of Tessa Kent, which I read surreptitiously and guiltily in five-minute intervals (at thirteen, two years after Emily Organ passed round the sex bits in The Horse Whisperer to an awestruck Form 7X), The Betsy (mother decides Harold Robbins automobile expose will destroy child’s innocence) and, unforgettably, The Contents Of This Folder. My father said sternly that it was Not Very Nice (I must have been about five or six the last time the folder was unearthed in pursuit of papers – not long after the film was made, in fact), but otherwise I think he’d forgotten the thing existed.

I must have been a compliant kid. I didn’t read the folder until yesterday. And yes – apart from the respectable and fascinating original newspapers, it was horrible, horrible stuff…

Oxford-based bloggers

I know there’s plenty of you out there. Calling anyone who was ever woken by Magdalen or shouted shut up at Christ Church c. 9 o’clock at night. I’m calling out readers and bloggers who are, or have been Oxford residents. Whether for work or educational reasons, if you live or lived or work or worked or study or…. yeah, if you did anything significant inside the Oxford ring road, I want you.

I’m wondering about the diversity of subject & experience, about which writers I’m missing, and also about simple numbers. In a shock twist of fate a lot of my readership (serried ranks that you are) at some point had an OX postcode, so I’m looking to you to help me out. I know some of you now- or post-Oxonian blogjunkies already – Velvet Coalmine, C**** Are Still Running The World, Eat Your Sherbert, American Amazon, Write Off The Map and Penny Red head up the alumni (as it happens, alumae) but Stuck In A Book, Oxford’s Omnivore, Brrnrrd, Wanderlust and Oxford, Abridged are all RL friends with .ox.ac.uk emails and an undue familiarity with words like ‘battels’ and ‘pidge’.

All these writers come heartily recommended. I’m aware I haven’t given you any clue as to content, merely titles. Assume American Amazon doesn’t sell books and Eat Your Sherbert doesn’t encourage gum rot and get reading. But before you go, give me links! Who’m I missing, here?

ARTICLE: Nushu @ Dimsum

NUSHU: A secret code of the sisterhood

I’m really excited to be writing for Dimsum, the British Chinese community website. The idea for this article came about during last-but-one weekend’s visit to London, and I’m impressed by how quick the turnaround’s been. I’d love to work for these guys again in the near future – I’m enjoying articles by their columnist, Suzie Wong, and this thought-provoking piece on theatrical yellowface by Anna Chen (especially as it eviscerates a playwright I’ve previously enjoyed).

Click below to read the rest of my article. Turning pure research into features writing was fun & an important learning curve. Now, off to order that MLA handbook – it’s time to start reformatting some more/other work for journal submission…

The story of Nüshu is uniquely fascinating in the history of the Chinese language: yet, for many, the word still means nothing. Now, as a once-secret script becomes a tourism moneyspinner, it’s time for everyone to learn about Nüshu – the two thousand characters that make up the world’s only single-sex writing system.  This secret code has survived for seventeen hundred years, inspiring songs, poetry and journals of the most personal kind. And it was created by women denied the chance to read or write. (read more)…

Bullingdon Revisited

Although few who know me will believe this, I do not, in fact, obsess over my blog statistics. When I first started this blog, those little graphs were something of an addiction, but the dependency wore off (Brrnrrd told me it would. At the time, developing RSI from the ‘refresh’ button, I didn’t believe her and took this as one more indication of her cool/nihilism/being totally dead inside). 

However. I just happened to check my hits this morning. And, apparently, today was Clamorous Voice’s second-busiest day, ever. All because of this post, and my incoherent-but-inviolable-views-on-the-Bullingdon. The Bullingdon Club (Oxford, tailcoats, Tories, wankers) has been on my mind again today, for the unrelated reason that yesterday my beloved (my Scottish male homosexual beloved; there are several) asked whether I’d been watching ITV’s Trinity. Apparently it is Just Like Our College. I can believe this. Whereas colleges like Queen’s, Trinity, most of the Sts and to some extent Worcester seem amiable but bland, everything about our own alma cogan has always been quite startlingly bonkers. I ought to do a post on college stereotypes one day, were it not for a) fear of libel, and b) almost all of my out-of-college friends were thesps and/or homosexuals, at least as an undergraduate, resulting in an extremely skewed but highly-coloured and entertaining version of events. But Trinity really does seem very boring.

Can only attribute ClVo’s  sudden surge in popularity to the fact that today is Sunday of 0th week (in English, the start of Oxford Freshers Week) and thus tiny Bullingdon wannabes are googling for advice. Mine is: don’t do it. Or, you know, in less spire-centric and more plausible news, because Channel 4 is fervently promoting When Boris Met Dave, a depressing look at the origins of everyone who’ll shortly be running the country (say it again: Oxford, tailcoats, Tories, wankers).

Anyway, hello to the first-time-callers; I hope you stick around.

These are the people to hate, my children.

David Lynch, Mike Nichols, Tilda Swinton (oh, my lifelong irrational hatred of your self-satisfied pointy artist’s muse FACE = so justified now), Terry Gilliam (WHAT?), Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster (PAUL AUSTER), Woody Allen, Diane von Furstenberg, Martin bloody Scorsese, STEPHEN FREARS and Wes Anderson all think it’s totally okay that Roman Polanski anally raped a thirteen-year-old child.

They, with hundreds of other actors, filmmakers and a diverse group of European arts organizations, have signed Harvey Weinstein’s petition to protest the ‘astonishing’ arrest and potential extradition of Polanski for a 1978 ‘American arrest warrant on a case of morals’. Polanski drugged a thirteen-year-old girl with alcohol and Quaaludes. And anally raped her.

They say that Polanski’s extradition ‘will be heavy in consequence’ and ‘take away his freedom’. One lives in hope.

Here are the court documents: 36 pages of victim Elizabeth Gailey’s testimony. Here is what Polanski’s adherents call ‘a case of morals’. The people who’ve signed this petition think it’s totally unreasonable that an unpunished rapist, after thirty years of undeserved freedom, receives justice rather than a lifetime achievement award.

And here is an excellent article. I cannot do better than to reproduce the words of Melissa McEwan:

Very few, if any, of the people who have publicly defended Polanski, or who have worked with him, make it their business to champion or associate themselves with admitted child rapists. They make an exception for Polanski for the same reason exceptions have been for other famous, artistic men – directors, writers, actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, photographers – who have been known to sexually assault women and/or children: Because geniuses get special dispensation.

Because there’s only one Roman Polanski.

So goes the breathless defense of the artiste, while the flipside of that particular coin, because thirteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, goes unspoken.

I do know that, in real terms, my boycott of these people will have little or no effect. I’m so sad that people I admire (nb not all of those listed above – I have always loathed Swinton and find Rushdie personally annoying) have been so misogynist and cowardly and blind. I understand what a powerful man Weinstein is. But Polanski raped a little girl, and I hope he gets hell from the legal system and spends the maximum amount of time in prison.

And although Polanski’s defenders haven’t committed any crime, I hope their fanbases and the international press both give them hell. I hope that their careers are blighted forever. They deserve it.

ETA: The LCA Broadside lets a picture paint a thousand words…

We don’t need no stinkin’ content

1. Apparently, I will not rest until I have made this blog look as ugly as possible.
2. My father has returned from a night shoot and currently exists in his own timezone.
3. Today I walked round London in HIGH(ish) HEELS for the first time. I currently have stabbing pains in my soles previously associated with Year 8 School Discos.
4. I have seen the garb I am supposedly wearing for this choir I have supposedly joined with the artist formerly known as my mother. Said garb was described as TABARD but LESBIAN BASEBALL JACKET would be more appropriate. Suspect she has signed us up for Scientology.
5. On Thursday I am going to the Press Performances of both The Drunks and The Grain Store! Dizzy with the prospect of using my THEATRE tag once more.

the myth of paris

Nancy Mitford’s third Radlett novel, The Blessing, details the marriage of a French Marquis (charming, unfaithful, Gallic) to his English Marquise (beautiful, innocent, a bit thick). To rescue my credibility, I could call it A SEARING STUDY OF INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE IN POSTWAR FRANCE, but it isn’t. I can be edgy, really. Just not now.

Central to the book is Grace’s Nanny, who hates France and isn’t scared to show it. “Funny-looking lot, aren’t they? Not to fond of washing, if you ask me. Dreadful smell of drains, dear” is her definitive remark within the pages of this 1951 novel, and arguably, her attitude remained the definitive British verdict on the French.

That is, the real French. Not the Givenchy-drenched sexy lot. Exclude Bardot and Deneuve. Exclude Coco Chanel and a score of skinny-trousered hair-cutting room-tarting beauties (of all sexes) sniffing at fashion and defining Euro-cool.

Instead, think of the French, the massed and massive French, when not on strikes and before the bainlieues worked their way into film. Focus on the kind of dusty village dominated by trailing wires and being closed for August. Consider the lilies of their various fields. Now give me the knee-jerk preconceptions already creeping into your soul.

Don’t tell me you’re too young and too liberal to play. You may not sing the Dambusters when England plays Germany, believe that all the Dutch where clogs or that every Russian’s a depressed alcoholic, but even if you don’t share the common view of what makes a Frenchman French, you know exactly what that view includes. My summer students were forty (mostly) lovely kids from almost as many countries, neo-liberals with the occasional baby fascist. All of them could reel off the nuances of  Danish/Czech/Lebanese national stereotypes just as soon as the strange Greek word (“What mean stereotype?” – a grammatical habit of which I could never break them) was explained.

We all know exactly What They Say (where ‘they’, of course, means ‘we’) about other nations in the big Eurotrash clan. So let’s talk about the French.

Exclude, for the sake of politeness and historical futility, any snide remarks with a military edge. Also, since the peer review would be exhausting, the notion they’re great lovers – actually, sod it, let’s talk about sex for a bit. Despite having lived in France like a nun in a wall,  I can tell you that French teenagers will flirt harder with you than any other sort of student (withering sarcasm is more effective than a lecture, my sisters). Moreover, uniquely, Parisians have mastered the art of the sex shop. Their versions of the British frosted-glass nightmare are stylish, witty, and staffed by exactly the sort of cheerfully disinterested gay man/unbelievably well-dressed woman you’d want to sell you yr feminist adult goods. All without warning signs, PRIVATE SHOP in allcaps (far more of a tell than a few oddly-shaped things in a window), sweaty-faced men or hateful films.

The Parisian chain is called passage du desir and if anything so chic opened in Mittelengland tomorrow, there’d be great cultural conniptions. I know, because the Land of My Fathers has just opened an adult boutique called Romeo & Juliet’s.

Heterocentricity not exactly for the win, there, and they have made the cardinal error of placing terrifying rubber garb right at the front (not my thing, might be yours, difficult to explain to yr four-year-old why he can’t try on the exciting Policeman’s Outfit visible from across the street). Even so, I love the Shakespearean witticism and how much the shop has irritated the locals. Almost as much, in fact, as the Polish deli it replaced.

Anyway, in the spirit of Anglo-French relations and wishing I’d been born a small golden-skinned child sailing toy boats in the Tuileries, here are three of the worst accusations levelled at Parisians, and why they’re untrue.

1. Parisians are rude. Like the  Rudeness of New Yorkers, this is a myth. My crowning childhood experience of Great French Loveliness (Year 9 skills fail; Vespa driver escorts father to Nantes hotel) may have occurred elsewhere, but if you tend to depend on the kindness of strangers, Paris isn’t a bad place to start. There are the students, old men and businessmen who rescue wheelchair, Chloe and self (in that order) whenever pavements veer or drop kerbs fail to drop. The charming vendeuses who welcome you to posh department stores where, in London, you’d be treated as student-come-lately dolescum (which, admittedly, I am). The nice old bloke somewhere in twentieth who made us breakfast in his hole-in-the-wall bar (would you want to wander into a locals-only British pub as a single, foreign woman?). And, finally, the absolute love of a man running the all-night bar beneath our flat, who went above and beyond the call of duty by peeling junkies off our doorstep at odd hours of the night. Parisians are kind.

2. Parisians will probably refuse to speak English to you – rubbish. I’ve read this in several guidebooks and quasi-guidebooks, including the otherwise excellent Paris Footprint (online version here). Poss. the embittered author fared poorly because she was American; I can imagine that might have been an issue five years ago. But everyone speaks brilliant English and is hugely willing to do so when your linguistic skills fail. Personally, my vocabulary gives out somewhere between ‘I am living with a vegan, succour me lest I perish’ and ‘do French women just not have periods? You call yourself a chemist?’.

3. Paris is dirty. Untrue. Admittedly, from time to time there really is a fearful smell of drains, and it might not sound like much of a compliment to say there’s much less dog shit on the street than there was. However (you have no idea how hard I’m fighting against a no poos is good poos pun) Paris is becoming a clean city. With the natty green rubbish bags set up as bins, the French capital is achieving what London, apparently, can’t: collecting litter without getting blown up. This might sound very prosaic, but not to anyone negotiating a pushchair or pram – and, by the same token, to anyone using or manoeuvring a wheelchair. With rubbish drop kerbs, a need-not-apply Metro and endless authenticity when it comes to road surfaces (I hate the flagged Rue de Rivoli so much I wheeled Chlo on a feverish circular diversion that encompassed a whole page of our map), this is a small but essential Parisian blessing. Also, fewer Parisians smoke; their leavings are constantly picked up by Parisian street-cleaners who apparently operate 24/7. They’re all black, and seem to get constant abuse from anyone they impede, even momentarily, confirming – along with the five-every-minute churches, that Paris, like France, is often run by big Catholic racists. Sadly not a myth, that one.

The city retains, of course, other and more trivial problems – the ridiculous prices in bars and cafes, the traffic, the air quality that’s like an industrialized Black Death. The pickpocketing that would make Barcelona blush.

But Paris is so beautiful – not like the non-stop epiphany of Rome, where every street shows you something more wonderful than you’ve ever seen at home, even if it’s a minor public fountain with a dog pissing up the corner. Even as proto-dolescum ex-students, you start to believe that Paris, cream-and-gilt and covered in sun, with its fantastically well-organised gay district, beautiful shops, and seamless supply of cake, really could be your playground. Even the Seine stinks less than the Thames.

After a fortnight, I wanted to stay forever. Holiday experiences aren’t the whole truth about a city, but I’m still wishing I were back there, eating falafel on Rue des Rosiers and pain aux raisins from the boulangerie Julien. Worryingly, my Francophile desires seem to revolve entirely around food. After this belated burst of travel-writing, perhaps I’d be better off as a food critic?