Living on The Island, where a pizza isn’t a phone call away simply because it’s too far and too inconveniently distant for the pizza guy to get to, one has to develop levels of organisational skill which one might not necessarily need to acquire in the sun-baked deserts. Food has to be hauled, pushed in a cart or balanced on handlebars. Over the bridge then five hundred metres beyond. Which isn’t a lot, as it happens, unless it’s pouring with rain or covered in sheet ice, in which case, it can become something of an ordeal. A bicycle or scooter is the best idea, some have one or the other, many have both. Since my means are modest, self-propulsion is a healthful and practical means of locomotion. 

I hadn’t ridden a bike seriously since I was sixteen. It does happen to be true, however – ‘it’s like riding a bike’ means the old skills just come flooding back after a few hair-raising moments of unstable equilibrium when the ground , grey and unsympathetic, sometimes rushes up to meet you. Twenty-one gears – however did one manage with three – I think I managed to change up and down across about four of them, with a little squeezy thingy close to my hands. All massively high-tech. It’s only a couple of kilometres into town so a ride into civilisation didn’t seem like a bad idea. Except for the roads. The French are fortunately quite obsessional about le vélo and generally skirt a cyclist with  gentlemanly discretion – just as well, really since I tended to grimly occupy the crown of the road and to hell with the klaxons of disapproval. Being a motorist, I followed the rules of the road, obediently pausing for red traffic lights and following the one way systems, until it occurred to me that I was the only cyclist so doing. Everybody else rode where they chose, over pavements, dodging perambulators and old ladies with walking frames, and parking up against trees. It’s surprisingly liberating once you figure it out. The one thing which I hadn’t remembered was the – let’s say – ‘discomfort’ of a hard saddle giving what the French delicately call ‘les parties nobles’ something of a bumpy ride. I think a saddle with proper suspension might be the answer…

I was left with an overwhelming sense of order – as communities are ordered, with rules, traffic regulations, penalties for jaywalking. I had hoped to find an image is of a hornets’ nest found abandoned in a high crevice of the house, or pictures of long walkways with bamboo on either side. Instead, to maintain a theme of peace and tranquillity, this – a five minute drive away – was too good not to include.

It came as something of a surprise the other evening when a large, rough-hewn object, the size of a softball having been boiled upside down for exactly nine minutes was placed in front of me with a quite delicate mustard vinaigrette. I was also provided with a knife and fork, the sole purpose of the fork, it would seem, was to prop up the northern edge of the plate so as to drizzle dressing on to the south pole. I watched, cautiously. The leaves form what looks like an anticlockwise Fibonacci in several layers. One places the object upside down, the woody stem like a tree trunk, grasps a leaf, sawing as necessary since it is both tough and inedible, releasing a small quantity of flesh which one sucks out having first flavoured it with a little dressing. This, I gather is not an activity recommended for those who are about to lose their infant teeth, since the suctorial action required may very well dislodge one of them. The leaves become smaller and more fruitful as one proceeds – surely a spiritual lesson there somewhere – and finally the hay, like a perfect Mohican, is revealed. Like a stripper shedding the last item of clothing, a quick deft flourish reveals the prize, the artichoke heart, delicate and succulent. Leaves are recyclable on the compost heap, so I felt virtuous having had no meat and returning the leftovers to the ground from whence they came.

In Kuwait, Mohammed and Abdullah look out of the window and, if it’s a nice day, say to one another “I know. Today we will have a sale”. So, they break out the orange stickers and drop the prices by 20%. The French have a rather different, more revolutionary approach. On the day after midsummer, the ‘soldes’ begin – a principle enshrined in the immutability of the law – Medes and Persians meet on Boulevard Haussmann. The result is, of course, chaos. The metro overflows with dentists’ wives from Lille clutching huge Galeries Lafayette bags, having clawed, spat and punched their way to the front to grab the Lancel handbag whose price has plummeted from its original, eye-watering eight hundred euros. Even the silk  Dolce & Gabbana underwear is reduced. You get the idea.
I am one of the few men I know who quite enjoys a little amble around the temples of retail Mammon. This is not girly. Should anyone wish to debate this with me, I should be more than happy to have a full and frank exchange of views on the matter. Outside. I realised however that I was physiologically ill-equipped for survival in the environment of the Paris sales, not having hips the size of Hampshire and bosoms the size of Bournemouth which could be used as battering rams. As it happens, the above is not strictly true – French women are obsessed with their size so it’s more like being battered to death by sapphire-clad claws while running through a densely populated forest of bamboo. It’s the only place in the world where it’s cool to be anorexic. Gipsy calls herself a really cheap date; “don’t worry, darling, they don’t carry my size”. I therefore waited until evening, drove to Versailles – there’s a mall with all the big names (so chic) – and being almost dinner time it was quiet (the French let nothing interfere with gastronomic delight), and collected a few things I liked from Zegna,  Ralph Lauren and Hermes. A kindly friend bought me dinner afterwards in a rustic little place in the centre of town. I ordered calves’ liver. My dining companion was asked if I would like it well-cooked, being ‘un Anglais’ thus unable to speak the language and as subtle as a brick when it comes to culinary niceties. I glowered at the waiter as if he had just grabbed the last Ralph Lauren jacket on the rail and invited him outside.

It has taken thirty five years for me to evolve from the chrysalis of MSDOS into a fully formed Apple whore. No, that isn’t strictly true, since I won an Apple computer for the school years ago and loved it. Get a Mac, don’t look back. In the day, yeah, I have to shamefacedly admit to being if not a geek, at least a languid anorak, casually tapping shortcut keys which looked almost alchemical at the time and driving friends insane… “how did you DO THAT?”
Ten or so years ago, a mobile phone was an almost essential, but I would not have suffered permanent paralysis without one. Last week, I bought an iPhone, the Vuitton of communication devices. I can subside into a self-contained virtual reality with this thing – reading Heart of Darkness as well as sending banal little notes to people via a chic little message interface – while jolly little gnomes trot glibly across the bottom of my screen. There are thousands of apps to play with – a melancholic’s paradise. I now have one more thing to worry about – the cost of the bereavement counselling I shall assuredly need if I leave it on the train.

Apple’s first computer arrived when I was twenty-four years old – half a lifetime away for both them and me. It had a massive 4 k bytes of RAM with an ‘ 8 k byte capacity ON BOARD’ . Wow. This, together with a cassette interface, made it a world beater. They have come quite a long way from Steve Jobs’ slightly greasy chalk pinstripe Madison Avenue look – nice parting, Steve. The image is from the first edition of MacWorld, ‘dealer enquiries invited’, and a quite awful first logo of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. The original machine was priced at – wait for it – $666.66. Say no more.

It’s quite nice to be back in Paris. In spite of the fact that it was raining; quite a novelty, there were 137 km of tailbacks in total around peripheral highways and we had to detour as far as Cergy Pontoise to get home. Parisians are mostly philosophical about  ’les bouchons’ – corks as in bottlenecks – but the extent of a completely unexplained standstill seemed to have taken many by surprise. Rumour had it that the Paris air show was to blame but I doubt it, since the roads seemed clogged by what looked like a million behemoth juggernauts, all crawling remorselessly westward. The show was rather spoiled by an Airbus A380 with a rather careless driver – one hesitates to use the word ‘pilot’ who sliced a wingtip off in a collision with a building. Oops. It’s going to need more than a roll of duct tape, I think.

Suddenly, after doing what appears to have become an annual event, clear-out and move, I felt able to slow down. There’s a new Guatemalan hammock in the garden which in less wet weather will doubtless beckon invitingly, but doing nothing is unlikely to be an option for long. Neglecting the fact that I need to become reacquainted with my petrol-driven, Honda ‘tondeuse’ to clip the encroaching greensward,  Paris can be busy in June – Roland Garros being only one busy week of many. Tomorrow is another annual event, the celebration of the summer solstice which unlike dreary British anoraks who head for Stonehenge and start a riot when they can’t get near enough to do a bit of stone-hugging, France has a Fete de la Musique, which stops traffic just as efficiently but with a good deal more bonhomie. Paris will be crowded, hopefully just with locals who gather at a favourite arrondissement to listen to ethnic offerings from local residents.

Postscript. Rive Gauche was a bit busy, it has to be said. After half an hour of a truly awful concert from willing but talentless Romanian singers in the crypt of St Sulpice and a street art show, a short but congested meander in the sidestreets off the Boulevard St Germain subjected us to a randomly cacophonous macedoine of performers, from balding Rolling Stones tribute bands to dreadful post-punk wannabes, more decibel than dulcimer, with barely fifty metres separating each. All in all – a good-humoured but determined assault on the tympanic membranes which are still gently quivering some hours later. I must be getting old.

Part Two. No, it’s not me. It’s a movie. A sequel. Kind of. The three original characters from the (quite hilarious) 2009 film are transplanted from Vegas to Bangkok where a similar, nightmarish alcoholic blackout causes them all to retrace totally forgotten drunken steps. Three American men with a shared history of misbehaviour travel to Thailand for the wedding of one of them, a dignified and slightly anally retentive dentist  who is marrying a beautiful, educated Thai girl from a highly respected family. One little drink on the beach then morphs into an awakening with a drug dealer in a seedy Bangkok hotel room who promptly dies after snorting a line of coke, a missing teenage genius brother of the bride and a bridegroom with a quite fetching, if large, facial tattoo. Imagine the unimaginable and it probably happened. There isn’t really a story, more a concatenation of retrospective and highly unfortunate series of events, pieced together painfully and appallingly slowly around the general theme of finding the missing boy.  In case it’s not obvious, this is not suitable for children It’s violent, crass, offensive to every conceivable interest group, and liberally besprinkled with profanity and male nudity – yes, being Bangkok – a transsexual prostitute puts in an appearance with whom, apparently, the bridegroom-to-be had consensual gay carnal relations. Oh, dear. The whole point seemed to be to to make even seen-it-all-done-it-all adults laugh in shock at each dawning, ever more shameful recollection.