Trendy But Casual

Great Day

Today, like everybody else pretty much everywhere, we watched the Inauguration. We saved the champagne for this evening, but that didn’t prevent us from being tired and emotional for much of the morning.

The ceremony itself didn’t last very long, but the post-game analysis has been going on for hours. I think it may never end. Too much excitement for one day.

Things I would like to know: why Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair (really); what Hillary Clinton was thinking during the swearing-in (really); and what was with that E. Alexander poem?

Later, to please T. Middy, I told him that he was the president of our marriage. But then, we agreed, it was like the Bush presidency, and I was Cheney, i.e. manipulative and conniving and really in charge of everything, not to mention attention-seeking (see wheelchair, above).

In the new spirit of responsibility, we had a chickpea/tomato stew for dinner, while watching Simon Schama talking about American history. And then I went back to work.

Paris, memories, etc

In Paris it was cold, but not in a bone-crushing, nose-bleeding St Louis way: temperatures were around freezing every day, with light snow a couple of days. Once we were on the Rue Jacob shopping for tea towels – because a holiday is not a holiday unless Team Middy buys a tea towel or six, the more expensive the better – and snow began to fall. It’s an attractive street anyway, and a dusting of icing-sugar snow made it even prettier. This was one of the many chocolate shops we frequented, on a non-snow day.

And here is more chocolate, spotted elsewhere.

I’ve never been in Paris when it snowed; I’ve only visited once in the wintertime, just before Christmas some time in the late 90s. Usually I’ve sweltered there in the summer, starting with the first visit in 1978, with my parents and brother: I celebrated my thirteenth birthday while we were there. That was our first and last European family trip, though it wasn’t even the complete family: my sister, seven years older, had already extracted herself from group holidays. 

My father enjoyed various driving escapades, including an illicit circuit of Trafalgar Square, a wild trip around the Arc de Triomphe, many forays the wrong way down one-way streets (mainly in the UK, where he would point to the car’s “Visitor to Britain” sticker whenever challenged), and some of his patented Kiri Morris Adventures in Long-Distance Driving, including one the length of France and the breadth of Switzerland all in one day.  This latter trip was especially impressive given his determination to avoid toll-charging fast highways. That was the day we ended up in a small town near the Swiss-Austrian border, staying at the Hotel Bahnhof – the meaning of which became evident many, many times through the night. That was also the day we had dinner outside at some rustic place in Switzerland and saw a wedding party ride by in a horse and trap. Also, it might have been the day we stopped in Liechtenstein in order to experience its scenic principality-ness, and, waiting in the car at some border crossing, encountered an Australian who came over to chat. (We also had a New Zealand sticker on the car, of course.) In his car, the Australian must have loosened his belt, and as he approached us, he was languidly re-buckling it. When he leaned in the passenger window, where my brother, wearing Mickey Mouse ears, was sitting, the first thing he said, in a broad Australian accent, was: “’Scuse my belt.” Thirty years later, my brother and I still say this to each other, and my niece has caught onto it as well.

Anyway, on that first trip to Paris we stayed at the Hotel Regent on rue Madame, a block from the Luxembourg Gardens. TM and I went looking for it and found two hotels: one of them looked sort of familiar, but the name has changed. There my brother and I, in a small room far from our parents, had our first experience of a bidet. We had no idea what it was. After much discussion, we decided that it was a foot-washing device. My mother came by and put us straight: we were disgusted, of course, and a little hysterical.

My brother was eleven then, and still short.  (He’s six-foot-two, I think, these days.) I was about to turn thirteen, and was almost as tall as I am now, with the figure of a stick insect. I was acutely self-conscious, and hated walking past all those cafés where people sat looking out at passers-by.  My hair was bobbed, with a heavy fringe. I wore culottes a lot, and a braid-trimmed butterfly-sleeve top I’d been forced to make in sewing at school the year before. My sister did most of the work on it, because I had no ability or enthusiasm for sewing, preferring peer dissections of the latest episode of Starsky and Hutch, or daydreams about becoming a member of Charlie’s Angels. Most of the time during that Paris trip I wore jandals/flip-flops, because my feet were too big for all known shoes. On my birthday, during breakfast at the hotel, my parents and brother sang to me sotto voce, and the woman serving us, who’d seemed generally impervious to human emotion, smiled and nodded to me. My parents gave me a ruby-embedded gold signet ring with my initials on it, because that was what I wanted more than anything.

We went to the Louvre, of course, to see the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa, and I remember seeing the outside of the newly opened Pompidou Centre. My father made my brother and me climb the stairs of the Arc de Triomphe, and catch the lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower. (I hate lifts, especially ones that climb in a diagonal fashion, so I’ll never do this again.) My mother didn’t join in with either of these view-seeking activities. She’d lived in Paris in the mid-50s, and was over all the sightseeing. She was much more excited about visiting all her old haunts on the Left Bank.

I don’t remember any specifics of those haunts, so for this trip I asked my mother for some details. She lived on the top floor of a building on rue des Saint-Pères in the Sixth, not far from the Bon Marché department store. It’s a very chic neighborhood these days: Ferragamo is on the ground floor of her building. Here are some pictures of it, with me standing by the front door.  I’m wearing my new red hat, bought at Galerie Lafayette the day we arrived. This is the same place my mother went to buy a much smarter sort of hat more than fifty years ago when the Queen Mother was visiting the British Embassy. 

In those days, she said, Bon Marché  was a joke, provincial and dowdy. Now the world’s oldest department store is smart, like Harvey Nichols: all the hats I tried on there were beautiful but very costly. The food hall next door was amazing, more extensive (and expensive) than Selfridge’s. If we lived anywhere nearby, it would be the end of us.

While wandering the neighborhood on a Hemingway/Stein/Joyce Moveable Feast odyssey, we also came across the Alliance Francais, where my mother studied. I'm not sure if she ever ate at the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, where Hemingway liked to sit writing in a corner. Both of them would be shocked by how fancy the place is these days, all red and gold and sparkling. We had lunch there on New Year’s Day, and TM opted for the world’s largest oysters.

This is possibly one of Hemingway’s corners. I’m saying it is, anyway.

Between the lunch bill, the tip for the solicitous toilette attendant, and the tip for the pianist, we were cleaned out. We couldn’t even come up with one Euro for the coat-check. In the 20s, Hemingway could sit there for hours sipping a café crème and writing The Sun Also Rises. Nowadays, the café crème would cost as much as a meal somewhere else. (T. Middy had a hot drink at Café de Flore, and I think it was seven Euros, or what TM romantically described as “ten bucks of hot chocolate.”)

We walked home to the little apartment on rue Cardinale via rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Hemingway lived above a now long-gone sawmill. I was about to write “to our little apartment,” but Dinaw Mengestu might be annoyed by our appropriation of it. It’s such a perfect place, all low-beams and slanting floors. T. Middy bashed his head at least three times on a low beam, and I took a stupid tumble over the two-hundred-year-old step leading to the bedroom, blackening a toenail and grazing my arm. Places we can’t be trusted in: chocolate shops, cafés, character properties.

We spent much of the time in Paris walking, walking, walking. It’s the city in Europe I’ve visited most often. When I lived in England, I made various short, cheap, pizza-in-St-Michel-eating trips there with various friends and boyfriends: we’d do the train/ferry/train thing, staying at no-star hotels with tiny lifts, and spending all our time looking at paintings. I had a number of business trips there in the 90s, which were all much less enjoyable than the earlier visits, despite the nicer hotels and restaurants, and the expense account. Those trips always seemed to involve meetings in smoke-clogged offices or bars with various European colleagues. Half the time we ended up drinking stew-like coffee out of a machine, which was only palatable if you added a great deal of sugar. No wonder I was so wired all the time.

Once I was there for just one night, and my French colleagues took me out for sushi. I lived in New York at the time, and didn’t want to eat sushi in Paris, but I’d just flown in from Detroit and had to go to London the next day: I was too tired to argue, especially as I’d spent the afternoon sitting on my hotel bed, answering e-mails. Another time a group of us ended up in one colleague’s hotel room, squishing mini-bar peanuts under his bedcovers, and singing, over and over, “The Way You Look Tonight,” until the hotel management called to say other guests were complaining. On yet another pan-European-colleagues night out, eleven of us drifted hand-in-hand through various metro stations, so we wouldn’t get separated; I had to buy us tickets and make sure they got through the turnstiles safely, because everyone had lost their heads. We’d been in meetings all day, and nobody wanted to be sensible or think anymore.

Once I stayed on for the weekend with my colleague David Kuehn, and my friends Pete and Deborah came over from London to join us. I bought myself one of the stupid things I was always buying myself back then, in order to make up for everything else that was driving me crazy: a ring-watch shaped like a flower. Afterwards, we wandered the streets, Pete and Deborah holding hands and kissing, David and I talking about work. “They’re in Paris,” he said, “and we’re in Detroit.”

The last time I was there was with T. Middy, eight years ago, at the end of our honeymoon. It was October: we’d just spent a week or so in Brittany. We stayed on the Ile-St-Louis. When the taxi pulled up to our hotel, I saw it was right next door to the little shop where I’d bought the ring-watch. The shop still sold a lot of over-priced tat, to which (TM alleges) I’m inexorably drawn. I didn’t buy anything there on that trip: I wasn’t in Detroit anymore. On this trip, we walked past same shop, but we didn’t go inside. There was too much to see on the streets, still decorated for Christmas, and it was so cold: we just wanted to keep walking.

Of Airlines, and Their Wicked Ways

It’s a new year, and I know it should be a forgive-and-forget, looking-ahead, making-resolutions time. It’s also ages since I wrote, and I have lots of pictures – of Christmas, of our trip to Paris – to post. But first I must get all this hatred for airlines (or “evil-doers”, as I now think of them) out of my system. This post will be long, and over-detailed, because I have a lot of venting to do.

As the constant reader knows, I’ve done lots of flying about this year. Too much, perhaps. There have been some highlights, like getting upgraded to whatever Air New Zealand calls business class these days, after the bird-strike/Victoria Beckham incident this summer. Of course, in order to enjoy that particular highlight, I had to spend the night in an airport hotel, without luggage, and spend c. eight hours in the Koru Club at LAX, looking forlorn and disheveled. I’m trying to think of any other highlights, but that’s about it, aside from the time they brought around a tray of Afghan biscuits in the Koru Club, and perhaps the time they let us board late in Auckland so we could watch New Zealanders winning Olympic medals in rowing.

Lowlights, however, have been ample. Often they involve these so-called partnerships between airlines, and lead to a conversation like this:

United person: Here is your boarding pass for the LA flight. You’ll have to get the boarding pass for your international travel when you arrive at LAX.

Me (thinking of time it takes to catch bus to other terminal, stand in line at check-in, etc, and worrying about tight connection, chance of losing my seating assignment and getting stuck in a middle seat for twelve hours WHICH HAS HAPPENED BEFORE): Why can’t you issue it? It’s all on the same ticket, and Air New Zealand is part of the Star Alliance.

United: Because you didn’t book the ticket through United.

Me: But when I fly from New Zealand, they give me both boarding passes, even when I don’t book the ticket through Air New Zealand.

United: We cannot issue a boarding pass for another airline, even a partner airline, unless you book the whole ticket through United. Now go away and enjoy the lack of facilities in Louis Armstrong Airport, like the PJs coffee house that closes at four, and don’t even think of visiting the Red Carpet Club, because we don’t have one.  [That last sentence was implied, rather than stated aloud.]

OK. So that’s the United rule. Except the next time I fly United, I’m given both boarding passes, even though I didn’t book the ticket through United. And then the time after that, I’m NOT given the second boarding pass. And so on. When I ask Air New Zealand about this, they say that United should issue the boarding pass. These two airlines need relationship counseling.

Other United lowlights: no food served on the three-and-a-half flight from LAX to New Orleans, though they do offer lame “snack boxes” for sale – nothing like a sandwich, say, because the flight is too short. No free drinks served on international flights, as we discovered flying to London: you’ll need to cough up six dollars. And, as T. Middy found out on his fourteen-hour flight to Sydney, no TV-screens-in-seatbacks, just four movies played back to back on those small cabin screens. (Note to United: this is why we usually fly with partner airlines.)

And this conversation, when I was checking in for my flight back to New Orleans at LAX in September, after spending the night there: at certain times of year, apparently, there is no way you can fly in from New Zealand and get back to New Orleans on the same day, even via Denver.

Me (after the machine has told me it’s too late to check in): Excuse me, I’m not being allowed to check in, but it’s more than an hour until my flight leaves.

United person (in nasty and sarcastic tone): You better check your itinerary, ma’am.

Me (producing itinerary, feeling flustered): Here it is, see?

United (reading itinerary, saying nothing at all, not changing facial expression, printing out boarding pass, handing it to me, tagging my luggage, not saying anything at all. Not a word.)

My flight time had changed to forty minutes or so earlier, and an e-mail had been sent to me in the middle of the night. But that morning I didn’t check e-mails: I got straight into the shuttle van for the airport, and then spent two hours driving around Los Angeles. I don’t think airlines should count on people having internet access at all times, especially when they’re in transit. And – call me old-fashioned – I think that people who work in Customer Service should be polite and helpful, rather than surly and bitter. Or at least they should know how to mask their bitterness, the way waitresses and teachers do.

Today I checked my Mileage Plus account, and discovered that at least four trans-Pacific trips are missing, as well as the trips to Sydney and all the trips to Wellington, though I know my account number was in the system. To ask for these (more than 30,000 miles) to be credited, I have to supply ticket numbers and seating assignments. So now it’s play hunt-the-boarding-pass time. This may be Air New Zealand’s fault. United can’t be THAT bad.

Not when there’s Delta and Air France. These two airlines make United/Air NZ look like exemplars of marital bliss. Delta and Air France are in some sort of alliance, but it’s one of mistrust, non-communication, and mutual frustration. I think they may be about to break up. Maybe they should. Their relationship is extremely dysfunctional.

In October, when T. Middy and I decided to celebrate my return from the deepest south (and what he sulkily termed our “long-distance marriage”) by spending the New Year holiday in Paris, it all seemed very straightforward. We were going to be in St Louis for Christmas, so we’d fly out of St Louis on Boxing Day and connect at some more eastern point to a Paris flight. We could book the whole thing through Delta. We were routed through JFK on the way out, and through Atlanta on the return. I went online and chose all our seating assignments, including a group-of-two on one side of the Air France Airbus.

The amiable and generous Dinaw Mengestu offered us the use of his Paris flat, while he and his fiancée were in Ethiopia. We booked a hotel in St Louis for the night we returned, Friday. We left our car with the Middy family, and arranged to take TM’s mother out for lunch the next day, to celebrate her 80^th birthday. Actually, this was a ruse: we were charged with getting her to the surprise party TM’s sister was organizing. Our plan was to attend the party and then drive part of the way back to New Orleans, staying somewhere in southern Missouri that night, arriving home on Sunday afternoon.

Instead, this is what happened. On the outward leg, we got a taste of the chaos and eccentricity that is the Air France seating system. Five days before we left, TM called Air France to check on our seating assignments. He was told that we had none at all, and the seats I’d booked back in October were unbookable, because they were always reserved (for unclear reasons). But we could have another pair, in a nearby row, so everything would be fine. Except maybe it wouldn’t, because at this point it was too close to the day of travel.

When we checked in at St Louis, about eight hours before our Paris flight was due to leave from JFK, we found we’d been separated and placed on different sides of the plane. The Delta agent shrugged, and said we’d have to speak to the Air France agent at JFK. So there we lined up for some time in the general melee, watching while agent after agent closed up his or her counter, until it was down to two people working. The guy who helped us, at last, was very nice and tried to help, something we found of most of the Air France employees at JFK and at Charles De Gaulle. But he couldn’t get us seats together. The flight was very full, he said, and there was the business of “unlocking” seats, which he couldn’t do; the reservations we’d made in October, and the conversation we’d had earlier in the week, meant nothing.

While we were waiting near the gate, I called Delta and Air France to investigate. The Air France agent said she couldn’t access our reservation at all because we’d booked through Delta, even though the agent T. Middy had dealt with earlier in the week had been able to call up the booking without a problem. The Delta agent said that the flight was not very full, so not to stress out – we’d be able to get reassigned once the unlocking took place. I told her that the flight was, in fact, very full. She said she couldn’t see that on her system. Also, she told me, I shouldn’t worry about the return journey, because that flight wasn’t full either. When I expressed doubt about her ability to see into the dark heart of the Air France booking system, she called an Air France agent, and told me that our seating request for the return flight had been duly noted. But Delta could never do anything but request seat assignments, because it was all up to Air France. I asked her if this meant that we should have booked through Air France rather than Delta, but she said it all came down to the eleventh-hour unlocking of seats. I don’t think anyone actually knows what this means, but a lot of airline employees talk about it the way people in the Middle Ages might have referred to the onset of the Black Death, as mysterious and depressing and beyond anyone’s control.

And Air France, I’ve learned, loves to lock up those seats. We saw some friends from London when we were in Paris, and they said they’d had the same experience on a flight to Bordeaux: their family of five had been separated, despite having booked seats together, and there was much talk of the drama of unlocking and its total impossibility. Later, at CDG, I was talking to an American who said he, his wife, and their small child had all been separated on an Air France flight to India, even though they thought they’d secured seating assignments together. It seems there’s nothing anyone can do about it, not even check in hours in advance, because all the mystical unlocking goes on at the last minute.

Finally, at the gate, an agent instantly gave us seats together, a pair of two by the window. Unlocked – voila!  The flight was very full, but we could sit together in the newly unlocked area. We were happy at last. The food was pretty good on board, the best Economy airline food I can remember. Drinks were free, including an aperitif of champagne, and there were TV screens in our seatbacks. Our bags arrived; we bought tickets and caught the train into Paris without a problem. We then had a lovely holiday, which I will talk about in another, happier post.

And then: the long journey home. On Friday morning, we returned to CDG, arriving several hours before our flight was due to depart. Too late! The flight was over-booked, we were told, and we would have to go on standby. A lot of people around us were hearing the same thing. Nobody was happy. The stress of the situation was exacerbated by the insanely long time it took to get through Immigration (more than 30 minutes in a queue of hundreds of people, with only two people checking passports) and Security (another half an hour, though at least they don’t make you take off your shoes). At the gate, everyone was standing in various snaking lines, for no apparent reason, as the flight was delayed and nobody was allowed to board for almost an hour. One agent tried to deal with all of us left-behinds, including several families – two of which had a mixture of seats and standby notices.  Everything depended, we were told, on people transferring from other flights: if their flights were delayed arriving, some of us would be able to wriggle on.

After everyone boarded, she told us only three could wriggle on: the two standby members of one family, who looked beyond relieved, and a fifteen-year-old boy traveling alone. The rest of us would have to stay overnight at an airport hotel; they’d try to find us flights for the next day. This process, of sitting in another area, waiting while the agent assigned to us tried to get us seats on a flight home, took hours. By the time we had our boarding passes for Saturday, it was getting dark outside. I used the ten-minute phone card I was given to call the hotel in St Louis and re-book for Saturday. TM sent a Blackberry message to his sister telling her we were going to miss the surprise party. The agent kept coming to talk to us, asking for ideas of other cities where we could connect to St Louis – I suggested JFK and Dulles. Some time later she returned: she could get us to the US, but not on any connecting flight. Finally, in exasperation she pleaded with her supervisor to unlock some seats on the Atlanta flight, and this worked. Of course, it meant that we were bumping people with reservations for the next day, just as we’d been bumped that day.

Another night in Paris doesn’t sound bad, I know. But we didn’t have another night in Paris: we had a night at the Park Inn outside Roissy-en-France. T. Middy was sick: he’d almost thrown up on the train that morning, and was clammy, feverish, and nauseous. And our luggage had been checked and could not be retrieved. So we went to the Park Inn, part of a charmless industrial park of jerrybuilt hotels ten minutes drive away, a hotel so given to primary colors it appeared to be made of LEGO. We had our free dinner, which was OK, particularly the free-glass-of-wine part, and listened to everyone else in the dining room complain about getting bumped from their flights. (“Welcome Air France!” read the sign outside the restaurant.) TM needed to sleep, and we’d decided to get to the airport first thing in the morning, just in case. It’s not a bad place to spend time – attractive, not noisy, you can get manicures and/or decent sandwiches – and there were no major lines at Immigration this time.

We got on the full plane – avoiding the gaze of the angry and despairing people clustered around the stand-by desk, complaining that they had reservations, that their families could not be separated, etc – and arrived in Atlanta more or less on time. In Atlanta we had about half an hour of false hope. “This is so much better than LAX and JFK,” we told each other. The TSA workers seemed non-belligerent and willing to speak. (Elsewhere, they favor curt nods, rolled eyes, and other minimal gestures over actual language, unless they’re shouting at people who don’t speak English.) The lines were long, but moved swiftly. Our bags came out right away, and there were helpful people to point us to the transfer area. We went through security again right away, without having to ride to another terminal.

But on the other side of security, it was a different story. We had no boarding passes for the flight to St Louis, because Air France said it couldn’t issue them. Of course they couldn’t. But we were booked onto the next flight, and had a piece of paper to prove it. I joined the line of over 50 people at the Delta desk, many of whom had missed connections and were frantic, trying to get to overseas destinations. Someone at the Info desk told TM we should just go to the gate. I’d just overheard this conversation in the line.

Desperate Passengers: We’re trying to get on the flight to Puerto Rico!

Delta guy, working the line: You can get your boarding passes at the gate.

DPs: We were just there, and they wouldn’t give us anything! They said we had to line up here.

Delta guy: You go back there, and tell them to give you your boarding passes.

DPs: What if they say no?

Delta guy: You tell them that THE SUPERVISOR SAID TO GIVE YOU YOUR BOARDING PASSES.

DPs: What is your name?

Delta guy: Just tell them THE SUPERVISOR.

I whispered to TM, as we ran to our gate, that we could mention that THE SUPERVISOR thing if necessary. It wasn’t, as it turned out. Not that we had seats on the flight. Oh no. The Delta agent told us the following: that there was no record of us on this flight; that the piece of paper we had from Air France was, in effect, so much meaningless nonsense; that we weren’t even on standby, though she would add us to the long, long list; and that it was a very full flight and we were unlikely to get seats.

But we did, after a tense wait while everyone else was seated and all the other standby names were called. And on the flight itself, we especially enjoyed the announcement made towards the end. There’d been turbulence, so the drinks service had been abandoned. The flight attendant wanted to apologize to those of us – most of us – who did not get the chance to get, as she said, “a cup of water, or … or a hot drink.”

So much for an aperitif, T. Middy said; now we’re reduced to “a cup of water,” which we don’t even get.

At St Louis, it was busy, busy, busy, and the baggage took ages to appear on the carousel. Not our bags, of course. They were AWOL. In the Delta baggage office, small and crowded, we waited our turn. The agents there were clearly tired from dealing with the annoyed general public. They were snippy and frowning. One of them raised her voice when some non-English-speakers didn’t know how to describe the color of their missing bags. The man gestured at his jacket sleeve. “IS THAT BROWN OR GREEN, SIR? BROWN OR GREEN?” We were next. We handed over our luggage receipts. She looked at them as though they were Tarot cards, maybe, or missives from an alien planet. She could not deal with Air France receipts, she said; we’d have to wait for the other agent.

We waited. The other agent explained that Delta had no record of our luggage, because it had been checked by Air France, and their numbers did not compute with the Delta system. Did we see it in Atlanta? Good. Because otherwise, Delta would have no clue as to the whereabouts of any of our bags. Maybe our luggage would arrive on the next flight, around midnight, or maybe not. Delta could not tell us. We’d have to wait until the morning. After some sob-storying from us, the agent said she’d call us on T. Middy’s cell phone if the bags came in that night. We decided that if she called, we’d come back from the airport hotel to retrieve them.

There was no call, so when we got up on Sunday morning it was Day Three for the clothes. After more than 48 hours without a shave, TM was developing a beard, which he alleged was George Clooney-esque. You be the judge.

He called the 800 number we’d been given, and was on hold for half an hour. (We couldn’t check online, because we hadn’t taken our computers to France. It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.) Good news: our bags were in St Louis. They’d arrived last night. Thanks for calling, Delta agent!

So that’s about it. We caught the shuttle back to the airport; we retrieved our bags, returned to the hotel, and got to change our clothes. TM shaved off his grizzly whiskers. We visited the Middy family to collect the car, pack up all the Christmas gifts, and hear about the 80^th birthday party we missed. Then we drove for ten hours so we could get home in time for TM to go to work on Monday morning.

Here are the luggage tags of meaninglessness.

I don’t want to fly again any time soon. I have to go to Chicago in February for the AWP conference, and I’m paying more to get a direct flight. Also, I’m only taking hand luggage, even if it means dressing like Heidi en route. I’ll probably get snow-bound, or diverted to various regional airports. Or else there’ll be so much turbulence, I won’t even get my cup of water.

One good thing about all this, that we’ll appreciate long after all the hassle of the trip back is forgotten, more or less: the 1200 Euros in compensation we received from Air France for getting bumped off our original flight. This will cover our excessive eating and drinking for the week in Paris, turning what was an extravagant holiday into something approaching a cheap one. We were offered a choice – 600 Euros each in cash, paid into a credit card, or a travel voucher for 800 Euros each. Sorry Air France, but we’re in no hurry to fly with you again. Despite the aperitifs.

And now, after all this complaining, here are some pictures of our place decorated for Christmas. These were taken just before our party, the one day of the year when most of the apartment is tidy, and the piles of magazines are exiled to the back room. All of this should have come down today, I know: it’s carnival season now, time to move on.