Friday, 16 September Trick question: what is the oldest monument in Paris? People who don't know the city well might answer Notre Dame (1163-1345), but Our Lady isn't even the oldest church, with Saint-Germain-des-Près preceding it by a few hundred years (founded in 558 by Childebert I, rebuilt at the

Friday, 2 September Most years, I watch the light in August with a tinge of regret, a pinch of anticipated nostalgia. The days are getting noticeably shorter. Evenings, out come the candles by supper's end. Mornings, I wake, make my coffee and get down to work in the dark. With

Friday, 15 July To prevent my Paris-Perche Diary from becoming a cahier de doléances, the register of complaints presented by citizens to the king during national assemblies of the Ancien Régime, I did not write a blog last week as planned. The list of minor misfortunes I enumerated in Best

Friday, 24 June The past week has left my mind softened and scrambled, and whether or not it's up to telling you about it today, we’ll see. First, let's back up a bit. You may remember that in April I declared our house works in the Perche, except for

Friday, 10 June Right now, this early morning, all I can hear through the open window is a pair of cooing wood pigeons and the faint, intermittent din of traffic on the boulevard Saint Germain. But in the next hours, the noise will ratchet up, be close to unbearable by

Friday, 20 May Once on holiday, my friend Dana loaned me a book on Buddhism. I don’t remember the title or much about the finer points of the exposé, but as is often the case with me and books, I do remember one passage, read in a particular setting.

Friday, 6 May When I was about 12, I had to write a family history. Don't forget, the teacher stipulated, to explain how and why your families ended up in the United States. Of my four family prongs, three - the McKnight, Ellis and Hastings lines - could be passably

Friday, 8 April Extinct civilisations are following me. Or I'm following them. First, the ancient people of Stonehenge [https://mf.ghost.io/drawing-parallels/] at the British Museum exhibition, now those of Filitosa. Those eyes (Filitosa menhir)We stopped there while visiting friends in Corsica last week. Isabelle, who is half

Friday, 11 March It’s hard to imagine, surrounded by the pre-dawn calm here in the Perche, that last week I was staying at a hotel behind Piccadilly Circus in London where the noise of Friday night partying in the bars below kept me awake despite two sets of heavy

Friday, 25 February There I go again, writing too soon [https://mf.ghost.io/fogged-in/]. No sooner had I sung the praises of February than Storm Eunice battered northern Europe with gusts of wind up to almost 200 km/h/120mph. Close to 20 people and countless trees were killed.

Friday, 11 February February has a bad reputation, at least in my book. A short but nasty month. Dark and cold and only fun if you spend part of it in the mountains or at the beach. Since I don’t ski, the former offers no relief, and it’s

Friday, 21 January I wrote too soon. Two weeks ago on this screen, I declared the works on our house in the Perche almost finished. I showed off renovation photos. More emphasis should have been placed on the ‘almost’. Just two days later, the house was once again under siege.

Friday, 7 January The 6th of January seems a date destined to mark important moments in our lives. Fortunately, in the private sphere, it has more positive connotations than in the public, where it may yet go down in the history books as the day democracy in America received a

Friday, 17 December “Stop being such a pessimist.” “I’m not being a pessimist. I’m being a realist.” This exchange occurred between my husband David and me on several occasions last summer, i.e., every time someone asked us when the renovation project on our house in the Perche

Friday, 3 December I've been going to the dentist a lot lately, thus giving me occasion to consider a particularity of the French medical world. Doctors here are highly professional, but their context is often quite personal. Rather than being situated in sterile, neon-lit anonymity, the cabinets médicaux I visit

Friday, 19 November “Paris is a rubbish bin.” Thus spoke Stéphane Bern in a recent front-page interview in the daily newspaper, Le Parisien [https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-est-devenue-une-poubelle-pourquoi-stephane-bern-quitte-la-capitale-13-11-2021-IAF76QPSMVDKLLOXCJW7Q7R4SQ.php] . Calling Paris une poubelle made a splash not just because he’s a media personality and President Macron’s guru

Friday, 5 November Maybe it was the travel, an activity that now seems almost unnatural to me. Maybe it was just the contrast between the two destinations, Arles one weekend and Vienna the next, the first city intimate, winding and narrow, the other outsized and of Habsburg imperial design. Long

Friday, 22 October Late last year our son William joined the Covid-inspired urban exodus and moved from Paris to Arles, where his girlfriend Margaux was already living and where he'd spent the various lockdowns during the pandemic. We visited for the first time last weekend. As the high-speed TGV train

Friday, 8 October Something wonderful has occurred the last couple of weeks: for the first time in years—since we started living half-time in Berlin in 2013—I’ve got my old Paris rhythm back. The beat is not complicated: reasonably uninterrupted days where I work mornings, and in the

Friday, 24 September My birthday is in April, but I got my present late this year. Daughter Georgina and son Christopher, born on the 19th and 15th of September respectively, decided that they wanted to spend theirs together and chez nous. With brother William, plus partners, plus newly minted grand-daughter

Friday, 27 August In my many blog posts over the last year about the renovation of our property in the Perche, there is one element of the project that I have studiously avoided, both textually and visually. Rather like tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. And it is large,

Friday, 13 August When I pushed ‘Publish’ two weeks ago, it was with a limp finger. I was not completely satisfied with the blog I’d just written and not happy with myself either. Quiet, Please [https://mf.ghost.io/quiet-please/], seemed unfinished, missing a descriptive detail here, a clarifying