When I came out, though, they had stopped laughing and had spread out a map of their own on top of the ice-cream freezer. Without having to employ so much as a syllable of my atrocious schoolgirl French, I came to understand that I was only one very important left-hand turn (which I had already passed) away from Épernay.
Bless their little hearts.
Less than 40 kilometres later I was pulling into the house of Tarlant, a small family-owned champagne house where I was staying for a few days while I did my research.
Micheline Tarlant, the matriarch of the family, brought me a tray bearing a baguette, a fat wedge of brie, home-made chutney, a pear tart, and a half-bottle of their house champagne.
I’m hard-pressed to remember a meal that has made me happier.
Two FABULOUS THINGS — no, three — happened during my first stay in Champagne
I got to drink a LOT of champagne.
I got to see how a truly chic woman can wear three scarves at once.
I got handed the heart of my novel on a plate over a long silver-service meal, each course matched with a different vintage of Moët champagne.
The first two things were very satisfying, but, because I was on a research trip for what eventually became The House of Peine, the third probably had the most impact — and being handed the heart of my book wasn’t the only thing I learned that day. Non, monsieur, I got a lesson in the fine art of French manners.
Through my old food-writing contacts I had been invited to lunch at Moët’s Château Trianon with their exceedingly refined PR person, Monsieur A. (Hey, I can see your eyes rolling from here! Stop it at once! So what if I am good at extracting lunches in French châteaux out of helpful, refined people? There are worse things to be good at, you know!)
Anyway, when I arrived at the château, built for Napoleon Bonaparte to stop off at on his way to war, so I believe, my charming host introduced me to another guest whom I was told would be joining us for lunch. I never quite caught his name, but he was a Greek chef working at some fancy restaurant in Athens. He seemed cheerful enough about being there, but he didn’t speak much English, so all the talking was left to me.
As we were enjoying a little bubbly apéritif, Monsieur A inquired about the subject of my book, and when I told him it was about three sisters who inherit a champagne house but must get over themselves to get on with it, he nodded wisely.
‘A-ha! So just like the three different grapes of Champagne, your sisters must blend together to create something new and truly wonderful.’
I agreed so heartily that my eyeballs nearly fell out of my head, but in truth I had not quite put three and three together in this way and it was like pennies falling from Heaven.
I knew that champagne was made of three grapes, of course I did. (No, I really did.) Chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier are the official grapes that must be used, and they each bring a different purpose to the blended non-vintage wines. Some years, due to the weather or the crop, there’ll be more chardonnay; some years more pinot. But the point is that the three different flavours are used year after year in varying degrees, along with a selection of older wines, to provide an exact, consistent result.
Monsieur A had hit the nail on the head so hard that my ears were ringing. Although the book was only in its very initial stages, it fell instantly into place. It was cause for celebration! And luckily there was quite a bit of champagne on hand.
The three of us were soon led to a long, oval table and seated around it like very rich people in gothic mansions and The Addams Family.
We each had a white-gloved waiter standing behind our chairs, who would deliver the food and fill our glasses with champagne, which Monsieur A would then describe before we looked at it, sniffed it, and tasted it.
Except for the Greek chef who threw it down his neck and then nudged his waiter to keep filling the glass.
I may not always display good manners, but I do know when they should be used, and this was the perfect place for them. The Greek chef, however, shovelled his food in and kept holding up his empty glass and wiggling it, which I found so embarrassing that the only thing I could think of to do was babble to Monsieur A in the twittiest way in the hope that he would not notice.
Why I felt responsible for the Greek chef’s woeful behaviour I don’t know, but in trying to avoid a scene I was probably only making it worse. I shouldn’t have bothered. It was about to get worse all by itself.
Monsieur A finally halted my torrent of rubbish talk long enough to start telling me a story about his expensive mistress — which turned out to be a house, thank God, or I would have had to jump out the window, my nerves were so shot — when the Greek chef’s cellphone rang.
Now, I had already noticed that the French people with whom I was dealing were very decent about phone etiquette: they did not take phone calls while speaking with a real person, they did not put their phones on the table while they ate, and in fact I had barely even seen a phone.
But when the Greek chef’s phone rang, he not only answered it, he also kept eating and drinking while he was speaking into it.
I found this so unbearably rude that I could not shut up.
‘But your house!’ I cried to Monsieur A over the torrent of the Greek chef’s babble. ‘Tell me more about your house!’
The Greek chef’s call continued most enthusiastically. It was clearly not a matter of a near relative’s pending death. Both elbows were on the table as he nattered and gobbled and slurped.
‘I love houses!’ I continued to blabber. ‘French houses! Your house! Tell me more, s’il vous plaît!’
Monsieur A looked at me and said, ‘I think we should wait until our friend is ready.’
‘Our friend’ discussed what sounded like the weather, the Greek football scores, global warming, how to knit the perfect tea cosy, gay marriage, and the price of fish, before finishing his call.
My stress levels were through the roof at this point. I could not have been happier had our friend had choked on a chicken bone and died right in front of us. He didn’t. He kept eating and drinking while I waited for Monsieur A to give him a right old tune-up for his atrocious manners.
But Monsieur A did not. He simply picked up the story of his country house where he had left off and graciously continued in his role as the perfect host. I was pretty blown away by this, I must say, because I thought our Greek friend deserved a pistol-whipping. I had thought Monsieur A was made of sterner stuff, but then he perhaps didn’t want to embarrass me, I thought, what with being so sophisticated and all.
About five minutes later, however, Monsieur A stopped in the middle of what he was saying and turned to the Greek chef.
‘I am terribly sorry but I must stop you here, because you are doing something that I find quite shocking as I am sure does this charming woman.’
‘I’m not that charming,’ I joked, still a little on edge.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘you are not the best judge of that.’
What a deliciously French way to compliment a girl! I think!
Anyway, he turned again to the Greek chef.
‘You, monsieur,’ he said, ‘have come all this way to France to find out about our champagne, non?’
The Greek chef grunted in agreement.
‘You have come to savour our precious wine, to admire its bubbles and to taste it?’
The Greek chef grunted again, perplexed.
‘Then why,’ Monsieur A continued, raising his voice somehow but stopping short of shouting, ‘are you holding your glass by the bowl? This not only warms the champagne but keeps you from being able to see that which you have travelled so far to admire. You must always hold a champagne glass by the stem.’
He then leaned over and whacked his knife against the Greek chef’s knuckles until his fingers moved down his champagne glass to the stem.
I looked on in astonishment. I didn’t know that about holding the stem, and I doubt very much whether that is what I had been doing, but what
I thought was so very, very clever was Monsieur A taking on the Greek chef over a matter in which Monsieur A was indubitably the expert. Telephone etiquette was and remains something of a grey area. How to hold a champagne glass? Monsieur A quite possibly wrote the book on that.
‘Our friend’, the Greek chef, was slow to get the message. His knuckles bore the wrath of Monsieur A’s knife edge on two further occasions.
Much as I loved the champagne, and our gracious host, my nerves were jellified by dessert-time and I excused myself.
But I’ve held a champagne glass by its stem ever since. And some days, when I need a little extra joie de vivre, I will go somewhere and have an expensive glass of champagne, just because I know it will make me feel better.
There is no AWESOME
For the past few years I have been single-handedly fighting a battle against awesome.
This one-size-fits-all adjective started cropping up in jazzercise classes about 30 years ago, and, even though it was used relatively sparingly in those days, it still irritated me. Why is doing a grapevine or kicking your legs in the air at an aerobics class awesome?
Awesome means impressive or amazing or awe-inspiring. If you were doing a grapevine or kicking your legs in the air after your entire family had watched you die in a fire, that would be awesome. Doing it because you’ve paid money to go somewhere where that is precisely what is done is not awesome.
I’ve watched this insidious adjective move from the gym, where it never belonged, into the teenage lexicon, where at least the users could be excused for not knowing that many other words, to — horror of horrors — the coffee klatsches much beloved by middle-aged women. I am one, by the way, so I have nothing against those per se, but the day I watched three others thank a wait-person for delivering their lattes with a staccato round of ‘awesomes’ was the day I knew I was losing the battle. For a start, I’d already had half of my cup of coffee and knew it was below par, not even good, let alone awesome.
Now I have trained a small circle of people around me to not use awesome in my presence unless they want to annoy the hell out of me, which still happens quite a lot, and I know for a fact that they also use awesome behind my back even though they have all agreed to my face that THERE IS NO AWESOME.
Well, I can’t do anything about them being sneaky, except tell them that there’s a special place in Hell for those who believe tinned peaches and Weet-Bix are an awe-inspiring breakfast combination. After the apocalypse, during the peach and Weet-Bix famine of the future, maybe. But right now, when that’s a pretty obvious choice?
So.
Not.
Awesome.
Despite the struggle I face, every now and then my anti-awesome crusade picks up a new follower.
A while back I was in New York with a colleague of mine from Woman’s Day, Vanessa, who knows about my awesome issue because sometimes it might creep into a caption, say, that someone at the magazine has unwittingly put on one of my pages and it is to Vanessa that I will vent my spleen.
Anyway, it came up a couple of times while we were in New York together, and I eventually got her to admit that perhaps awesome really was turning into the Emergency B of adjectives, and not a Grade A one that people, especially journalisty-type people who by rights should know a lot more words, should be relying on quite so heavily.
Of course, being in New York, life in general veered more towards awesome than it usually would. One night, as part of a cocktail crawl, we got a booking through a lovely friend of Vanessa’s at a place up in Harlem called Ginny’s Supper Club.
After arriving in a throng at a well-known restaurant called The Red Rooster which sits atop Ginny’s, we were shown down a dark staircase while a burly doorman barked instructions at us to stay lined up against the wall.
I’d never been to Harlem before, and suddenly felt very unsure of what was going to be behind Ginny’s closed door. I’d read The Bonfire of the Vanities (I’m actually one of the few people who also saw the movie) and could not help but re-live the panic that the Master of the Universe and his social x-ray felt when they stumbled into the wrong part of town and couldn’t stumble back again.
Would Vanessa and I, and my friend Ann from Wellington, be mugged for our traveller’s cheques, chopped into tiny pieces — or, worse, would there be audience participation in which it would immediately become clear that not only can white people not dance but they can’t sing or tell very good jokes either?
I’m speaking for myself, of course — Ann and Vanessa might be stellar at all three — but as it happened these skills were never tested, because when the door opened we emerged not into a hotbed of sin seething with sweating people in studded leather gimp suits, but into a warmly lit, low-ceilinged speak-easy, fresh out of the 1920s.
In the far corner, old jazz buffs rubbed shoulders with each other and with star-struck young up-and-comers, first-daters gazed at each other over candles, sipping cocktails out of moonshine jars, and locals hugged the bar, chatting animatedly as we slid past and were seated a few tables back from the stage.
Then Benny Golson’s jazz quartet came on and started playing their set. Well, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. We’d been told Benny was ‘jazz royalty’, but I didn’t know what that meant until he started playing the saxophone. It was like being in another world. A world full of cats and jamming and whisky and forbidden love and late-night police raids and smoky dawns.
I looked over at Vanessa at one point, and she had the same is-this-really-happening look on her face as I did. She raised her eyebrows at me, picked up both arms and made a little kayaking movement.
I knew exactly what she meant. Oarsome.
Not awesome. But close.
Another thing we both loved about Benny was the look on his face when one or other or all three of his quartet did their thing without him. Benny had a way of holding his saxophone under his arm as if it was a folded-up New York Times while he closed his eyes, moved his head and beamed as the music flooded through him.
‘Imagine feeling like that about your job,’ I whispered to Vanessa.
But I thought about this the next day and wished I hadn’t said it, because I didn’t mean it. When I caught up with her again, it was the first thing I mentioned.
‘Actually, I do feel like that about my job,’ I told her.
‘I’m glad you said that, because I do, too,’ she said. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’
Now, when we’re having a really good day or we’re really pleased with how something in the magazine has turned out or we’re particularly happy we send each other a quick text that reads, simply, Benny Face.
It’s oarsome.
1. The Grand Canyon in the USA.
2. The Grand Canal in Venice.
3. Grand Central Station in New York.
4. Quite a lot of things with GRAND in the name.
5. Most of Tuscany.
6. Dawn in Paris in the Tuileries Garden with the Louvre at one end, Concorde at the other, and the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur all in the distance.
7. The birth of a newborn (preferably not your own).
Letter from PARIS, PART TWO
OK, I’m back at the café around the corner from my apartment, having some potato crisps and a glass of rosé.
Yes, I’m still in Paris, and grateful and all, but after almost another month here, much of it on my own, I’m kind of sick of not having anyone to talk to. I’m a yapper. And yappers need to yap. But with all these French people jibber-jabbering on in their funny little language I’m not getting a yip in, let alone a yap.
And the weather here sucks. There, I’ve said it. It’s the beginning of July, and for three weeks there has been nothing but grey skies and cool temperatures. If I’d wanted sh*t weather I could have stayed at home. At least if I moaned about it someone might listen. Or even if they didn’t listen, they might understand what I was saying.
I’m still trying to make the most of the Year of Me, but my bo
ttom lip is starting to wobble a bit, metaphorically. Oh, and literally. And that makes me feel bad, because here I am in Paris!
Actually, I had a wonderful night out last night with friends of friends, who took pity on me and proved utterly delightful company. After half a bottle of wine I cycled home at midnight, on my own, taking a detour around the Arc de Triomphe.
It might be like a knock-off version of Gran Turismo during the day, but at night, with the twinkling lights of the Champs Élysées stretching out in one direction, Sacré Cœur beckoning from atop Montmartre in another, and only a handful of deranged drivers circling the famous arch, swerving and honking, it’s beautiful.
I flew home on a high (chablis will do that), but today I’m feeling lonely again, and I think I saw more pigeons eating vomit than I saw sights of great beauty.
What’s wrong with me?
I am a strong, independent woman, but the truth is I miss my Ginger. I can live without him, and indeed I often do. But I don’t really want to.
Cycling around the Arc de Triomphe was great and all, but I would rather have been cycling with him.
Oh look. Another pigeon. More vomit.
I thought being in Paris for my fiftieth would automatically bring me happiness, but it seems to be wearing a bit thin, so now I feel bad that I’m not happier, which was not the idea. again!
I have already learned this lesson once before: a lesson so valuable that I instantly forgot it and now have had to learn it a second time. It’s about expectations. Everything is, one way or another. Remember?
Screw You Dolores Page 9