15 free live acts in one weekend

In preparation for selling small yellow diggers to Americans, I shoved my teaching hours to the weekend, which means that I now wake up in the single hours on both Saturday and Sunday to go to work - this is fairly horrific.

Of course, as you will have read oh ye loyal blogfollowers, I walked out of that job on Wednesday and instigated plan B, but it means that at least the week is fairly clear now for picking up the Holy Grail (the bogstandard mon-fri full time 35heures could-be-done-by-a-trained-monkey kind of job which I have so far proved incapable of procuring). Which made it a little surprising when plan C suddenly phoned up from nowhere and invited me for interview on Friday. I did the interview, had a little tour, and concluded that plan C is lovely and I want it like a big cake. Watch this space for developments on plans B and C.

Diggers give you influence among colleagues and make you popular with the opposite sex.

I spent Friday night with an epic hayfever-induced headache, very much as if several hundred elephants were enjoying a raucous trance party in my brain. This made me fairly unpresentable for the Saturday morning lesson (as usual, for differing reasons) with Marthe, who always smiles very politely when opening the door to her parents' enormous flat in the 7th, but has probably got me down as some kind of uncouth tramp who happened upon employment by mistake. However, none of this prevented me from going down to the Paris Jazz Festival with Olly for the afternoon. The day's two acts, Daby Touré (Mauritius) and Rokia Traoré (Mali) proved that the word "jazz" was being used liberally if not downright irresponsibly. We became quickly bored of Rokia, and the evening ended up with beer and friends, which - I have noted - is generally what happens to evenings.

Sunday followed a not dissimilar pattern, with morning teaching, followed by a gig of my own, and then popping down to the Champs de Mars where NRJ radio had organised a free concert on the flimsy excuse that they were supporting Paris' bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Feel free to go positively green with envy when I announce that I have now seen Maroon 5 and Natalie Imbruglia, plus a huge number of terrible French pop acts, "live". The inverted commas are necessary, because I am highly suspicious of exactly how live it all was. The singing was live. The music, particularly for Imbruglia, sounded remarkably like a CD backing track. So, basically, a glorified karaoke show. I don't recommend any of the acts to anyone, unless you are a 12-year-old girl who thinks NRJ is trop cool!!!!. The evening ended up with beer and friends, which... think you can see where this is going.