Travelling is great! Work is . . .

. . . a bit fierce. That said, my lovely jubbly UK working set-up allows me a whopping 25 days' holidays, and I've always been one for taking them. Just as well, because I did something extremely stupid this evening at 8.40 as I planted my ass - none the shaplier, mind you, for having given up the bike in the bucketing rain - on a northbound tube. I worked out my hourly take-home wage. For a forty-hour week, we're looking at around £7.40 per hour. A fifty-hour week drops me to a truly uninspiring £5.90 per hour. Usually, it's somewhere in between. Yes, the books are great and the people are lovely and I'm very lucky, tra la. It's true.

Back to the positives. My pre-Christmas trips -hah! plural!- were to Brittany to see the Babbo do his Swiftian thing, and later, to Brussels. Originally, for the former, the idea was that we'd toodle over to Brest and enjoy the hospitality of the conference at a four-course seafood dinner. Not yer tradish Thanksgiving, but I'm a very forgiving person when it comes to epic quantities of shellfish. Instead, we got stranded in Paris thanks to the strikes, and also because life is hard. Imagine our horror when at midday the man behind the guichet said, 'Baaaaah, ouais. Le prochain c'est à . . . bon, c'est à 19h05.' Ooookay then.
'It could be worse!' piped up the Bearded One with a toothy grin. So we checked the bags and hit the streets.The weather was sunny, the pastries were plentiful, and Paris was Paris. Ok, so Thanksgiving dinner was a greasy turkey galette off my knees in the Gare Montparnasse, and I had to evil-eye a pigeon to keep my meal on its sagging paper plate, but somehow that was alright in light of having just marvelled at the most breathtaking chocolate shop in Paris. I won't mention it by name, as it may well be magic. On a road that cuts the length of the Île Saint Louis, it's a dusty, arty, exotic little cushioned wonder. Run by a quiet, skeptical-seeming chubby French granny and her younger similarly-shaped South Asian counterpart, all glitters and winks. They serve myriad herbal teas with tiny flowers in squat iron pots, tea towels made from sarees and a selection of flat, ganache-drenched tarts. How many could you have? So many. Oh, and, ahem, tartes au citron. They would be my personal favourite.

We sat in quiet awe with a coterie of equally hushed and bemused tea-house regulars. Grown men's eyes sparkled, and one leaned over to confide with no small glee 'C'est magnifique!'. Another chuckled at the disturbingly realistic chocolate dog turds and bought praline tortoises instead.

We got to Brest and an ebullient papa at midnight. The hotel was cuteness and did the job and Brest is French and, well, ugly. True to form, the Allies bombed the shite out of the place at the end of the war. But France is France, and, forgive me, it survives ugliness better than some other places I might mention. Not only that, but these Frogs are Celts, and you can't tell me that doesn't help matters. The people are friendly, the food is astonishing and the Nouveau Beaujolais was in. Life, in short, was good.

Life was equally good in Brussels, for many of the same reasons, with added beauty. Poor wee Brux gets a bad rap for hideous architecture, but dammit, I think it's charming, particularly at Christmas. My hosts, also charming, were somewhat the worse for wear with a shared fierce bout of the winter vomiting bug, but were valiant and successful in their efforts to entertain yours truly. Lots of shopping when we should have listened to the weather and museumed. It was most unnecessary and extremely kind, and we likes kindness here at parkbench. We also likes penne with pesce spada just in from central Sicilian Luxemburg and big bowls of carbonnade and the little squishy hands of friends we miss. Said squishy hands at Advent-time tend to hold squishy bonhommes for Saint Nicolas, and the local ones, the hand-owner told me with authority, were simply not up to the challenge.

Predictably, immigrants were soon on the scene, doing the job better.