Childish Excitement

I have a jobby thing starting in September! I am going to my team's first ever Premiership away match tomorrow! I am seeing people I've not seen in aaaaaaages on Thursday! I am seeing Radiohead and Beck at a festival on Saturday! Tonight I will be sleeping on a settee in Stoke!

Do things get excitinger?

Here's a photo of l'Hôtel de Ville to be getting on with.

Staring into the abyss

This is an interesting month, in the sense that I have absolutely no idea where I'll be at the end of it. Presumably France, ideally Paris, but you never know. Such periods of flux have become something of a yearly ritual. And sending off dozens of emails to prospective employers and landlords - I'm trying to keep the two separate this time round - is proving pretty time-consuming. Luckily I am not in ze sheet quite yet but Timberlife does seem to walk a hazardous tightrope between uproarious success and appalling failure without ever fully comitting to either (those of you who have ever lived in France will recognise this as efficient application of le système D).

Sometimes I consider taking drastic and definitive action, in a heroic all-guns-blazing, all-or-nothing gesture of defiance against the system. Not unlike Chief Leaf, who just left to spend two years in a remote Cameroon village, and has thus comprehensively amputated all four limbs that once held her to the career ladder. Or Luke, who's dropping everything to go and work in a Swedish restaurant in Perpignan. (Student city. Young Swedish clientele. Shameless, Luke, shameless, although possibly not quite so much as that nanny thing.)

Timber propaganda shot
You too could be this popular at parties.
(But only if you buy a digger.)

I suppose you'll have to read next week's Timberblogging to find out what happens. (I'm also thinking of bringing in other soap-style dramatic storylines to Timberblog. This will depend partly on audience reaction.) Meanwhile, regarding Timber's upcoming UK tour, nearly everyone has said "yes, I'd like to see you in London", which is great. Nearly everyone then continued "let's meet at half 7", which isn't.


Corrections Column
Qwik Crisp isn't a franglicism, as suggested on 23.7, it's the international trademark. We apologise for any offence, inconvenience, or freak microwave-related injuries caused.

Rolling Stones, Stade de France

Rolling Stones, Stade de France
Originally uploaded by mattzparis.

Just testing the "blog this" feature on Flickr. This is where I was on Friday night! Well, a bit further back. And to the left. But, you know.

London Calling

I happily purchased a bolognese pastry thing from Franny P the other day, took it out of its box, and found it in a cardboard sleeve thing (for microwaving) labelled Qwik Crisp. In the great pantheon of bad franglicisms, this comes fairly high, although its purely spelling-based badness means it can't quite compete with le relooking (a grammatically incorrect compound of what is already the wrong word) and the unforgiveably awful le pin's (greengrocer's apostrophe creating a bad plural which is then casually used as the singular with not the slightest regard for anything).

Then again, there was a processed poultry product in the next-door freezer compartment labelled "Chick Balls".

This is nearly as bad as the impro show we did last week, at a 19th-century château in the Picardie countryside. It was the single worst show of any sort ever. We were hired out to entertain 300 corporate guests. Slight issue: they were eating dinner at the time, and weren't remotely interested in any comedy impro that might have been going on. Especially as half of them didn't speak English.

Château les Fontaines - scene of stage death on a grand and repeated scale

Also didn't help that they were all middle-aged engineer types with the charisma and outgoing nature of an office carpet. So we did an hour or so of bollocks that no-one really watched, abused the audience thoroughly in the final scene, and left several hundred euros richer, our artistic souls well and truly flogged. In many senses of the word. Come to think of it, the château did look just like the Star Ac one.

Anyhow, this week has been more positive. The big news, in case you haven't heard, is that there will be a late August Timbervisit to, of all places, the UK. Timber will be appearing in Stoke on 22nd, Brum on 23rd, and London on 24th and 25th. Due to unprecedented public demand, we advise you to book early to avoid disappointment. Unless you don't want to see me, in which case don't.

Timber's Career Moves N° 27

Quite apart from not being able to live in the same place for any length of time - 24 years of Timber and 13 addresses so far - I am also, since my first job as a paper delivery boy at the ripe old age of 14, proving to be remarkably inept at keeping the same job for more than a few months at a time. Or indeed even remaining within vaguely the same field of work.

This year, frog sample, Timberblog followers will note I have been mostly working as a translator, receptionist, teacher, and professional musician. I suppose if you look hard there are some transferrable skills in there somewhere. Which doesn't explain why, this month, I am a web site developer.

In fact a girl I met in April did ask me, within I suppose a few hours, "so... do you actually have a direction in life?" Actually, perhaps it was more tactful than that. But, you know.

Anyhow, it's only since being a web site developer that I have truly realised how fundamentally useless Internet Explorer is.

You see, it's a bit like preparing a romantic meal for the immaculately well brought-up girl you invited round for dinner in a fit of misplaced optimism about your unreliable cooking skills. What happens is you throw in ingredients, such as "head" and "body" and so on, stir them round a bit, add some seasoning, and then just when the dish is all lovely, ready to take off the heat and serve piping hot to the webby table...

PING! thwack

(sorry, I seem to have overstretched the elastic of my metaphor here, bear with me)

(ok I think I've got it back, hang in there)

...yes, as I was saying, immediately before serving it obviously you want to taste it to see if it's good. So generally you run it through a couple of tests, which involves looking at it in different programmes and asking friends to check it on different computers. Just to make sure it looks fine to everyone. And generally it does, with one notable exception.

You may not know this, but Internet Explorer was specifically designed for the sole purpose of irritating the hell out of designers. It's the single most useless programme ever invented for looking at the Internet. And it also happens to be the one that comes free with your PC, and which therefore nearly everyone uses.

Observe:

Sophie's lovely new website, as displayed in A Sensible Internet Browser

Sophie's lovely new website, as ruined by IE's refusal to handle transparent png files in any sort of mature and responsible manner

Worst of all, I know that Sophie herself uses IE.

If YOU are using IE right now, please consider changing to Firefox (or telling your company to do so). You can get it here - on a fast connection, you really have no excuse at all. It's free, it's safer, it's faster, it blocks pop up advertisements, it's morally more sound, hell, it'll even make you more desirable to the opposite sex.

(Although not as much as purchasing a new digger.)

Thank you for your attention.

Nous aurons toujours Paris

Les leafs naturels de l'if, Sceaux
This is a reference. Approximately two of my readers will understand.

Parental visits are something of a challenge.

When my family first visited Paris in 1994, a combination of good fortune and ruthlessly efficient forward planning meant that we managed to experience pretty much all the major sights in three days. All well and good, you might think, but it means that since they've now been visiting me here for the last five years, it's more and more difficult to find things to entertain them with. We've long since moved on from the A-list tourist spots, scuttled through the B-list ones, and are now into the realms of "vaguely nice things that are sort of near Paris and might be worth seeing" - cf. the entry from two weeks ago.

So my progenitors (mmm thesauruses) were back up from Nice this weekend after two weeks of searching for wild flamingos (paternal) and improbably long-range cycling (maternal).

So, Sceaux.

Château de Sceaux

There it is. It's in the outback of zone 3, on the Chevreuse branch of line B. It's alright. There's a lakey thing (much like Versailles) and people playing football nearby, which commonly results in floating ball incidents, and teenagers debating whether to jump into water murkier than an Italian referee's history. Maybe you'll want to go there sometime and witness such a thing. There are worse ways of spending a sunny afternoon.

Meanwhile, quite aside from the parents, my lack of recent blogular action can be attributed to:

1. Spending far too many nights down the pub with people of various nationalities glued to the Weltmeisterschaft. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
2. Doing concerts with Eddy and wondering when, or indeed whether, the nice cheque will arrive in the post. I guess the good thing about having a well-known convicted fraudster as your manager is that you know absolutely for sure that he has a dodgy past. With most band managers you just suspect it.
3. Concluding no nice summer job is going to fall into my lap, agreeing to stay looking after a Paris hotel all July and August, then promptly having The Best Summer Job Ever suddenly fall into my lap.
4. Backpedalling like an epileptic hamster.

Parents, kangaroos, and whipped cream

Uh-oh. Parents have hit again. They arrived on Monday in a week where I was already recording for a cd and trying to watch as much of the Weltmeisterschaft as possible. Perhaps not hugely surprising, then, that Timberblog hasn't seen any entries for a bit.

The band spent the whole of Monday and most of Tuesday in the studios recording the instruments for an albumy sort of thing. Result: nine songs done, and parents wondering whether they were actually going to see me at all. So I appeased them on Wednesday by taking them on an exciting trip to the Oise region.

In the morning, after another ticket-inspector-based near miss (cf. "A countryside adventure" from the June 2005 archives), but luckily happening upon the cheeriest SNCF employee I have met yet, who totally ignored the fact I was travelling on the wrong ticket, we took in Senlis, a town that goes back to Roman times and has that whole cobbled streets and medieval architecture thing going on. This seemed to please the parents, who don't get so much of that kind of action by the Patchway Roundabout. And yes, it was good to get out of the big city for a bit.

From here we caught a bus to Chantilly and headed to the château. On the way we passed the Grandes Ecuries (Great Stables). The Prince of Condé had them built in 1719, apparently convinced that he would be reincarnated as a horse. Hence their ridiculous size and luxuriousness. You can just imagine his consternation when he came back as a bathroom sponge.* Anyway, his château was destroyed in the revolution. The present day building was finished in 1881 and looks alright. So we walked around it a bit, found the place where they invented whipped cream, and made friends with some kangaroos.

* Information not historically verified.

On Thursday morning it was time for a visit to the Musée Carnavalet, which has the twin benefits of being just up the road, and free. The permanent exhibition tracks the history of the city of Paris from prehistory up to the modern day. The several scale models of the city as it was in the ( x ) th century were impressive, as was the sheer variation in exhibits - helpfully pointed out to us by the incredibly dull curator bloke in the 19th C art gallery section.



Finally, on Friday morning we went to the end of line 10 and walked to the end of line 9. This was rendered more exciting than it sounds by taking a diversion into the Parc de St Cloud, where you can get views like this, and where I will be seeing Radiohead at the Rock En Seine festival on August bank holiday weekend (woo!).

Parents have now been successfully shipped off to Nice.