Sorry, my head is full

"How is education supposed to make me feel smarter?", Homer Simpson once opined, adding: "Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."

If only I had his problem: thanks to obscure prog rock lyrics from the early 70s, trivia about Glen A. Larson productions from the mid-70s, and even more song lyrics from the New Wave of the late 70s, my head is full.

You can try pushing new stuff in, but the old stuff won't budge. My 43-year-old noggin needs decluttering. That seems to be the only reason why, in taking French lessons currently, precious little seems to stick.

It's been 30 years since I last sat in a French class, learning such useful phrases as: "Nikki le singe est dans l'arbre". As Eddie Izzard brilliantly observed, that is not too helpful when you first arrive in Paris as there are precious few monkeys up trees to point out. In fact so far, I've seen none.

Strangely, some of that O-level tuition did get lodged in the deep recesses of my nut. I can confidently order an ice cream, even ask politely for a beer in French. Probably, all essentials are covered with those two requests alone.

So here I am, for three hours each week, wearing the dunce's hat because I'm failing to remember how to  conjugate a verb we went over three weeks ago...or last week...or ten minutes earlier. It's not that I don't want to try: nothing would give me more pleasure than to be able to converse freely in another toungue. I used to think it was the height of erudition: what could be more impressive than James Bond describing exactly how he - and the lady - wanted his filet mignon prepared in any one of a number of languages?

I have dutifully attempted the lingo wherever I've travelled, but this has amounted to nothing more than bad Berlitz versions of ordering a sandwich in German, or requesting a table by the window in Spanish (and wondering why a toasted shoe has turned up in Berlin, and a wine glass and two Nurofen in Madrid). My Italian is, apparently, even worse, sounding closer to an Olive Garden menu being read out by a Midwestern farm boy than anyone genuinely from the Roman peninsular.

For nine of the last eleven years I have lived in the Netherlands. Where they speak Dutch. Given that the Dutch only have to look at a guidebook on a foreign country before they're fluent in its mother voice, my command of het nederlands taal has been woeful.

I can blame the fact that I spent five days of the week in an English-speaking business environment; I can claim that Dutch TV was crap and I watched, mostly, the BBC; I can argue that this nation of polymaths would simply give up listening to my awful attempts at their language and revert to English (arguing, somewhat patronisingly, that "yours is the more popular language, so we should speak English, rather than you speaking Dutch"). The bottom line is that the Dutch language just doesn't sound as poetic or as romantic as Italian, Spanish or French. Still, I should have learnt it; it wasn't about speaking it for effect - it should have been about learning it to communicate.

Now I find myself living in Paris, I know that I must learn French. Why? Because as Steve Martin famously warned: "If you go to Paris, France, 'Chapeau' means 'hat', and 'oeuf' means 'egg'. It's like those French have a different word for everything!".

Almost a month into my course, I'm wondering whether my brain has been progressively and poorly rewired over the years. I'm even seriously contemplating the possibility that mice have simply found their way in and chewed through the wiring. Whether it's stress, tiredness, laziness, or that you really can't teach an old dog new tricks, these twice-weekly, post-work lessons are making no progress whatsoever. What I can say, I can say. What I might want to say seems unattainable.

I'm frustrated by a glass ceiling of sorts: I see children of four learning new languages in a matter of months, their sponge-like brains soaking it up; I'm surrounded by non-native English speakers who are fluent in a variety of tongues, and yet by virtue of the fact I was born to speak what appears to be the closest the planet has to a common language, I feel cursed by ignorance and the inability to add to it fluently.

Technology hasn't helped: we're becoming congenitally lazy thanks to the Internet, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. Need a fact? Wikipedia will have it. Confronted by another language? Whack it through Google Translate.

Perhaps my only hope is that, now we're in the 21st century, science fiction will become science fact: someone must be out there working on a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy's Babel Fish, or BIG RAT from Gerry Anderson's Joe 90. If they are, it will probably be Google.

Surviving an angry Earth

I've just been watching an incredible tale of survival: a Japanese woman who, as the tsunami struck on Friday, was sucked out of her home by the rushing tide, and clung to a tree for all her worth as the deluge flattened her village. As she felt her grip on the tree loosening, she grabbed on to a floor mat passing by, and held on to it until she was rescued two days later. Her daughter wasn't so fortunate.

By now we've all probably seen the footage of 60-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa. Shortly after the earthquake happened, he and his wife went to pick up belongings from their house in Minamisoma. As they did, the tsunami crashed through their town. Shinkawa and his wife were swept out to sea by the wave. He survived by holding on to the roof of what was left of his house. His wife slipped away and hasn't been seen since. Shinkawa was eventually found, clinging to a narrow strip of roof, some 15 kilometres out at sea, by a Japanese navy ship which just happened to be passing. Who knows how long he'd have remained adrift - or alive.

All this brings into sharp perspective any travails we might be experiencing. Nothing can compare to the desperation these people must have felt as they clung on for dear life, the freezing cold water surrounding them. It has been a stark reminder of the utter fragility of life, and our relative insignificance as a species in comparison to the power of Mother Nature - even if we continue to challenge her authority.

Situations Vacant

During a recent viewing of The Bourne Ultimatum I lost count of the number of times somebody in CIA collar-and-tie barked out the phrase: "People, we have a situation here". Each utterance prompted deskbound underlings to look up from the keyboards they'd hitherto been furiously stabbing away at.

Quite why, in the 21st century, people in thrillers are still typing anything baffles me: the computer mouse has been around for 47 years, but apparently the only way to demonstrate Really Important Stuff Being Done Really Urgently On A Computer is by typing stuff frantically.

But I digress: in the last 24 hours, no doubt, "situations"have been declared in the boardrooms and business development meetings of Samsung, Google, Motorola and the unfortunately initialled RIM. For Steve Jobs - no less - has finally announced the iPad 2. It is, as people in this business are inclined to say, a "gamechanger". Much like its predecessor.

At his press conference yesterday, Jobs let the figures do the talking: 15 million iPads sold in the nine months from its launch last April, pulling in a handsome $10 billion in revenue. Not bad for one product category alone. You just have to look across the aisle on your next flight or your next rail journey to see  how much the iPad took off. It does seem like everyone has got one.

At Mobile World Congress recently, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of my new company, noted that during a panel discussion at January's World Economic Forum, he looked down onto the front row of the audience, and eight out of the 10 fellow CEOs he saw were nursing iPads. That might say more about CEO remuneration, but Verwaayen's point was important: this was a product that didn't even exist 12 months previously.

The challenge facing Google Android and all the other tablet manufacturers is breaking Apple's 90% market share in the tablet business, especially now the bar has been set higher still. Featurewise, iPad 2 doesn't offer any real surprises: front and back FaceTime cameras bring it up to par with the Samsung Galaxy device, and the addition of more horsepower to run memory-heavy multi-tasked applications was always on the cards.

The improved performance, in particular, will enable the iPad 2 to run dedicated versions of iMovie and Garageband. This, in itself, is big: the idea of shooting and editing a high(ish) quality resolution movie, or recording an entire album on the iPad is a delicious extension of the so-called 'digital lifestyle' Apple and Microsoft coined in the heady early days of convergence.

As usual, however, the talk is quite rightly about Apple's design: thinner than a magazine and weighing just over a pound, the iPad 2 is a marvel of minimalisation. Having recently taken ownership of an 11-inch MacBook Air, I've struggled to go back to any portable computing device which can't fit into an A4 envelope. The iPad 2's thin design completes this transformation, taking the tablet tantalisingly close to a laptop or netbook in what it can do.

The one genuine surprise during yesterday's press event was the appearance of Steve Jobs himself. Barely days after Apple investors were nervously circling vulture-like over the company's succession plans while Jobs was undergoing further treatment for cancer, he bounded (relatively speaking) onto the Moscone Center stage in San Francisco declaring "I wasn't going to miss this one."

The enthusiasm and the drive was there for all to see. And therein lies the concern about Apple's future: Apple IS Steve Jobs. The passion with which this übergeek rattled off the iPad 2's statistics and then cheekily declared that its competitors were "flumoxed" about what to do next was a huge statement of vitality - even if it was contrived. Whether he didn't personally want to miss the event, or whether his investor relations team didn't want him to, this was vintage Jobs. And you can see why some people really you have a situation.

Shut that window, mother, it's freezing out

For those of you who didn't get the memo, we are still in the grips of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Despite the cartoon snowballs of optimism rolling down the Davos mountainside from last week's World Economic Forum - at which Very Important People talked up a bright, new, post-recession future - we remain in deep cack.

Governments everywhere have instigated ruthless austerity measures to reign in spending. Everyone has had to tighten their belts. Why, even Wayne Rooney, who earns a pitiful £200,000 per week, has wisely opted to give his Range Rover a vinyl "wrap" makeover, turning his grey motor into a white one rather than trade it in for a new one of the preferred hue.

With these desperate times calling for such desperate measures, it's heartwarming to see the English Premier League splashing out a record £225 million in the January transfer window. I say "window" but by the time Monday's limo rides and helicopter flights began, it had closed to little more than a slight opening for ventilation.

As usual, the bigger clubs played the game of waiting until the dying hours of the month before concluding business with a staggering £120 million of wheeling and dealing, ensuring that the January 2011 window beat the previous record - set in 2008 - by an incredible £50 million. That's an entire Fernando Torres.

Significantly, just four clubs - Manchester City, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea - represented 80% of the spending during this year's window. This quartet all have something to prove: for City, it's their continuing determination to challenge the old order with financial clout; Villa's controversial poaching of Darren Bent from Sunderland, and the loan of Michael Bradley, gave Gerard Houllier a sporting chance of dragging a moribund side out of lower-half mediocrity.

Though no more about confidence and progress, Liverpool and Chelsea's respective exploits in the window were as much about credibility as they were about bringing in new players. Whether Liverpool were resigned to losing Torres or not, they didn't mess around in coughing up £60 million to bring in Luis Suarez from Ajax and Carroll from a noticeably unreluctant Newcastle.

Torres, for his part, had been hinting at a move since last summer, and with Chelsea making eyes at the Spaniard for some time, the question wasn't about "if", or even "when", but "how much?". Comfortably wrapped in the blue blanket of Chelsea's welcome, Torres diplomatically (and clearly on-message) made his statement to his new club's fans with only a hint of a barb at the Liverpool he was elsewhere more desperate to escape. Kenny Dalglish, being a marginally better English speaker, used the full power of his native tongue to wither a snipe at Torres' departure, but based on the maxim that an unhappy player is not much of an asset to a manager, the parting is for the best of both parties.



All-in-all, the Torres/Carroll transactions actually represent good business for the three clubs involved: Newcastle get £35 million for an at-best £20 million player which means, if Mike Ashley applies his allegedly good business acumen, Alan Pardew might have a very healthy purse to open in the summer. Or maybe not. Liverpool, for their part, get in Carroll and fellow newcomer Luis Suarez a new strike duo to ripen things up and plant a large red flag at the North Pole of intent that they want to be seen as an undisputed and justifiable Top Four team.

Chelsea have demonstrated an almost penurious nature in recent transfer periods. Now they have, potentially, the No.9 they've needed and craved for years, and have spent handsomely to get him. If he can be kept out of the treatment room, a Torres playing alongside Drogba, with Anelka off the front pair, could scare defenders witless.

The £75 million Chelsea has spent in the last week on Torres and Benfica's David Luiz is not, as one commentator lazily contrived, "a return to the bad habits" of the early, profligate Abramovich era (i.e. carelessly spending obscene sums on players no longer worth their boot laces). The club has filled two badly vacant positions, and in Torres invested in a genuinely exciting star player. Yes, £50 million is a preposterous amount of money for a football player. Yes, that money would go a long way if spent on more worthy things elsewhere. But it is what it is. It pains me to say "market forces", but if that's what it costs to prize a star player (and the proprietor is happy to stump up the cash), that's what it costs, irrespective of the relative morality of the cost.

Enticingly, we'll get to see if things, as D:Ream optimistically predicted, will only get better for Liverpool and Chelsea when they meet on Sunday at Stamford Bridge. With Torres fully eligible to face his former club, it promises to be a mouthwatering test of who will get the return on investment sooner.

Replays from every angle

"Sky Sports is not inherently sexist. It is something that is a leftover from when we started."

Apparently, that was something of an apology, an explanation by Sky Sports' Richard Keys on talkSPORT of why he and fellow Sky football presenter Andy Gray had a less-than enlightened conversation about female assistant referee Sian Massey. The conversation was meant to be off-air, but somehow a recording made its way into the public domain.


As last weekend unfolded, additional evidence surfaced of Gray and Keys demonstrating behaviour that Sky would come to deem "unacceptable". By Monday, Gray had been sacked and by Wednesday, Keys had fallen on his sword, figuratively speaking. You might say "who cares?": after all, this is just a juicy media story - the perfect media story, actually, combining celebrity, sex and salacious scandal. It has, however, unleashed two separate debates. Firstly, the issue of sexism. Ironically, Sky can be credited with the modernisation of televised football and probably football itself.

When, in 1991, Sky successfully bid £474 million for the rights to broadcast the inaugural four seasons of the Premier League, it not only bid way over the top to secure those rights (leaving fellow bidders trailing by some considerable margin), but established a pattern that Rupert Murdoch's media interests would replicate elsewhere. David Hill, the ebullient Aussie who masterminded the Sky bid for the Premier League, went on to do the same for Murdoch in the US, where he was the architect of Fox Sports hijacking NFL American Football coverage from the CBS network using the exact same tactic.

Sky brought a brash new approach to live football coverage, turning its Sunday afternoon broadcasts into "destination TV", and introducing another American institution, Monday Night Football, to British audiences. Keys - a refugee from TV-am - and the ex-Everton and Scotland forward Gray were installed as the faces of Sky's football coverage, presenting a more laddish appeal than the BBC or ITV style, and clearly targeting Bloke At Home or Blokes Down The Pub.

When the Premier League rights came up for renewal a few seasons later, Sky - once again - pitched up a whopping bid to retain them, somewhere in the region of £700 million. Move on to the next renewal, and their [successful] bid exceeded £1 billion. With each successful bid, Sky consolidated its influence over the Premier League. The notion of football matches kicking off at 3pm on a Saturday or 7.45 on a Wednesday evening disappeared for good, as the broadcast schedule started to dictate the fixture list.

Money talks, clearly, and by now you'll be making the connection between Sky's dominance of football coverage, the money it has been prepared to pay for it, and the money sloshing around the Premier League itself. All those mansions in Cheshire and Surrey, WAG holidays and the parade of blingmobiles parked outside club training grounds have been funded largely through television revenue.

Sky not only revolutionised football financially, but also the football debate. It innovated where rivals like the BBC and ITV had not. Sky introduced 13-camera match coverage, generating multiple angles from which to see every goal, every tackle and, significantly, every disputed decision over and over again. This saturation created armchair referees and saloon bar linesmen, unsolicited second opinion and unprecedented pressure on the actual match officials getting every decision right. Barely a weekend goes by today without a referee's judgement being called into question over some disputed penalty, red card or offside decision, all thanks to the greater availability of media.

It's ironic, then, that this week's kerfuffle is the result of unguarded moments being caught on camera and on audio. Neither Keys' or Gray's behaviour comes as a shock to anyone who knows their reputations. A long-standing media rumour suggested that Roger Mellie, Viz comic's foul-mouthed and profoundly misogynist "Man On The Telly" was strongly based on Keys' somewhat 'earthy' vernacular. Gray's iffy history with women has been lengthily documented by the tabloids this week, and I can certainly concur that when I worked at Sky, I regularly witnessed Gray acting the star and in particular, chatting up anyone in a skirt, which must have been hazardous for some of his fellow Scotsmen.

Whatever your view of their behaviour, Keys and Gray's departure has certainly been accelerated by the apparent ready availability of audio and video material of the duo being boorish. Arguably, their behaviour has been no different to anything else witnessed in a pub on a Saturday night, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable for Sky who, as a modern employer and publicly traded company, must maintain a spotless reputation as an organisation of the highest ethical and moral standards, and a positive, inclusive place to work. This, of course, doesn't reflect the fact that Sky has appeared to have an editorial policy of promoting female presenters of the "phwoar" variety for its sports, news and entertainment channels, clearly aimed at appealing to the 18-35 year-old male who represents the bulk of their target advertising audience. That, by the way, is not a sexist comment. Just take a look at Sky's presenter roster.

The issue of whether a woman can be an assistant referee or even the 'man in the middle' (yeah, I know...), shouldn't even be in question. The interchange between Keys and Gray about Sian Massey may have been Neanderthal, and may have been no different from conversations going on in every pub since this issue first surfaced, but it's irrelevant. If Massey is good enough to boss the line, then she's good enough. End of discussion. A match official's chromosome content shouldn't really make any difference (and I'm going to swerve clear of that rabbit hole about men and women in sport in general).

What truly is murky is why this has become such a media storm in the first place. Why so much content has been released to the press, ironically condemning Keys and Gray to trial by video replay. The conspiracy theory doing the rounds is that, with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation looking to wrest total control of British Sky Broadcasting (despite his dominance, Murdoch has always been a minority shareholder), Sky could do without any reputational diversions. As it is, there have been all sorts of hints and suggestions over David Cameron's relationship with various Murdoch executives, as well as the disastrous way Vince Cable was removed from the process to approve the  takeover.

Knowing the individual reputation of the two presenters involved, it was probably only a matter of time before something like this happened. Television stations - like newspaper offices - are notoriously leaky sieves, and the release of video of Gray being lewd towards a female presenter didn't have to travel far to reach the surface. 

Perhaps Sky were even looking for a reason to change anchors of their football coverage? It's been 18 years since Keys and Gray first came on air, heralded by Simple Minds' Alive And Kicking, and until this week, pulling in £2.3 million a year in salary between them would have made them easy targets for change. As I know from my own experience, when there's a target on your back at Sky, someone will find a reason to pull the trigger. The trouble is that Keys and Gray made that reason just too easy to find.

Alone again, naturally

The science fiction premise that the universe is broadly populated by a multitude of alien species who, rather conveniently for script writers and costume designers, speak English and have the full earthly complement of limbs, heads, eyes and mouths, has for years been dutifully accepted as harmless entertainment.

However, in the real world - this one - the question still remains: are we truly alone? Planet-sized intellects like Stephen Hawking less than helpfully conclude that, based on mathematic probability, it would be unlikely for life not to exist somewhere in the cosmos. Well, thanks, Professor H, I feel so much better informed now.

So at risk of leaving sensitive Trekkers (remember, they're never "Trekkies") sobbing into their pints of Romulan Ale, news reaches this galaxy that, most probably, we are the only living residents of, well, anywhere. According to a leading Harvard astrophysicist, the continuing mission to seek out strange new worlds - sorry, I'll stop doing that - the ongoing effort of the scientific community to identify new planets is drawing a big fat blank when it comes to identifying other places where life might be supported.

Picture: NASA

News, two weeks ago, of the discovery of an "Earth-like" planet only 560 light years away (pack up the car and program the TomTom, kids, we're off!) was hailed as a stroke of brilliance by the Nasa scientists who found it circling around the star Kepler-10. The excitement grew from the fact this planet is about 1.4 times the size of our own and was a "bona fide rocky world", which shouldn't be confused with Sylvester Stallone's next theme restaurant.

Unfortunately, despite also being something of a "missing link" between all the other gas-filled saunas in the universe and our own, gradually decaying orb, Nasa's finest were brought crashing down by the reality that, with a surface temperature of 1300-degrees (Centigrade, not that it makes much difference if you were planning a holiday), the chance of it supporting anything more than an oven glove was nigh on impossible. Sadly, says Harvard's Howard Smith, every planet so far discovered circling around stars has been profoundly uninhabitable for any form of complex or even simple life. 

That said, star gazers have only found 1000 or so planets so far: given that there are between 200 billion and 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and that the universe is, according to someone with an enormous tape measure, 14 billion light years across, you do wonder whether Hawking's mathematic probability has a point. Even if he's just guessing - and who's to say he's not - we're in similar territory to the comment oft-heard on the streets of Manhattan: "There's bound to be a Starbucks around here somewhere." And, nine times out of ten, there will be.

The American research institute SETI - the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - was largely founded on the basis of an equation, by astronomer Frank Drake, that took into account all sorts of factors (such as how fast stars formed and how many were likely to have planets) to arrive at a likelihood that 'out there', something or someone might be living. Drake believed that there are as many as ten planets in our neck of the celestial woods which could be habitable by intelligent life. Well, at least someone's thinking about it.

Meanwhile, while sci-fi conventioneers continue to dress up as Klingons, and dispossessed individuals still camp out in the high desert of Nevada in the hope of seeing alien spacecraft doing doughnuts in the Area 51 car park, it would be nice to think that a little more time, effort and research could be put into addressing what the intelligent life on this planet has been up to since it pitched up just 200,000 years ago - a mere 4 billion years after Earth was formed.

Perhaps there are aliens out there, looking through telescopes right this minute, and saying to each other - in English, of course: "Nah, too hot. And getting warmer. It could never support intelligent life."

A Paris Love Affair

In The Sopranos episode Cold Stones, Carmela Soprano and her best friend Rosalie Aprile take flight from northern New Jersey mob life by jetting to Paris.


Meandering the boulevards, musea and churches, Carmela gushes uncontrollably about the city, its signature architecture, its culture, its squares, its bridges - just about everything one comes to think about the self-style City of Light. For Carmela, it's a spiritual awakening, the realisation that there is another life outside her marital car wreck of lies, evasion and deceipt.


While most of us are not seeking such contrast to a life in organised crime, it's hard not to wax as lyrically. For some, Paris is a noisy, traffic-clogged migraine waiting to happen, frustrated by indifferent waiters and made hazardous by streets peppered with dog poop. For others - and here's to whom my subs get paid - it's an intoxicatingly beautiful city, by turns prompting curiosity, swooning and shear enjoyment just to be out and about.


Spend anything more than a business daytrip to the city and you'll quickly become taken in by its charm and knowing beauty: every neighbourhood invites you for an hour, for an afternoon...forever, ensnaring you with the escapist prospect of living in one of those small but airy, big-windowed apartments, with the smell of freshly-baked bread wafting up from the boulangerie below.

If this already smacks of cliché it's because Paris is almost unreal; like a Vogue cover model, it can be too attractive. Stroll down another of Baron Haussman's perfectly planned streets and you're not only confronted by a the bewildering, myriad corner brasseries in which to drop in for a livener, but also an ambience as unique as your fingerprints. 

The thing with Paris is that even though you know what you'll get when you turn up, you still can't feel dissatisfied. It's like a theme park you never tire of revisiting. It's all there for you, waiting as you walk through its gates - the Seine, the Louvre, the Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the royal palace. All these landmarks are within one open-topped bus ride of each other, a Universal Studios tour without rubber sharks.

No city can offer the same scale of overwhelming drama in its vistas as, say, Yosemite, but the grandeur of the buildings lining the Seine and the almost audaciously ornate architecture surrounding the Louvre and the royal palace (despite its inherent anachronism) will leave anyone in a state of awe as gape-mouthed as any other world wonder.



Now, before you think I've been retained by Nicolas Sarkozy himself to big up his capital city, let me state that I still hold affection for my native London: I'm proud to have grown up in its leafy suburbs, proud to have worked in its choking midst, and proud to have spent some of the most enjoyable days of my life in its music venues, restaurants, art galleries and all the other places the make visiting and living in London such a rich experience. And, while I'm at it, I still hold candles for Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco, the other cities I can enjoy unconditionally. Paris, however, holds different currency. In overhauling a medieval city - some say for the better, others for the worse - Haussman's renovation worked wonders in creating a city for its people.


There is, though, more to the appeal of Paris than urban planning alone. London is comparable in bustle, New York equal in vibrancy, and Rome, Vienna and Prague in architectural interest, but what all lack - and Paris has by the bagload, oversized, WAG-style Vuitton bags - is romance. It flows through Paris like the Seine itself; it is alive in the character of every street, every street corner, and every street corner cafe.


It is also, surprisingly, more laid-back than you might expect. Of course, being on the Metro at 8.30 in the morning carries its proximity and claustrophobia issues, and by laid-back, I don't mean the way Madrid, Barcelona or Milan ooze chilled-out cool. But there is a subtle, even gentle manner to which Paris carries itself: at 11am on a Monday morning, when the office-bound in most other metropolises would be cursing the mountain weekend e-mail clogging up their inboxes, the Parisian is in a bar quietly sipping a thimble of coffee, perusing Le Figaro or conversing with a neighbour about national politics. Or Carla Bruni.

Its tempting to scoff at such apparent reluctance to take gainful employment seriously. Or show fear at the sight of gangs of wealthy, elderly (and almost exclusively) women marauding through the 8th arrondissement on shopping trips, all Gucci sunglasses and Prada handbags. "Haw," you might say, "these are just actors, hired to manage the expectations of gullible American tourists".

It would generally be wrong to look at Paris only through rose-tinted RayBans. It is not totally the chocolate box cliché it might think it - and  apparently, I - would like to think it is. Driving is mostly easy, but there are times when you can't help hearing the voice of Alec Guinness intoning: "Use the Force, Luke", as you squeeze between  taxis hell-bent on competing for your lane, regardless of you actually being in it.

Not all of it is so attractive to look at, either: the downright ugly 'grand arch' of La Defense, not to mention the neighbouring mountains of steel that house this district's ghetto of banks, corporate HQs and management consultancies are, thankfully, a sideshow, a mere reminder that big business needs big buildings in which to make big money. 


Straddling la Périphérique are edges to the city that have grown tougher in recent years, with racial and social tensions venting themselves periodically and the far-from cosmopolitan French melting pot boiling over. 


Then is also the French propensity for industrial militancy; a day's journey into, out of, or across Paris can swiftly be irritated by wildcat strikes breaking out over the most trifling of issues. But even being the capital city of post-industrial Europe's most unionised economy cannot detract from the copious reasons Paris is rivalled by a scant few and probably bettered by none. 


Paris has mastered the art of intertwining modernity and classicism. The Louvre extension, with its remarkable glass pyramid (and, now, its own subterranean Apple Store), exemplifies this perfectly. Throughout the corporate Parisian landscape, offices sit behind traditional street façades, hiding the cleverly incorporated modern architectural designs within- the use of natural and artificial light.

It is a wonder anyone gets any work done at all in Paris. There's a cafe, bar or restaurant on just about every square meter of real estate, and from petit-dejeuner until last knockings, they all seem to be full and bustling. Again, temptation makes you think that it's all an act, but it's not. Parisians really do make time to enjoy the finer things in life.

Paris isn't a city, it's a novel that engages you and won't leave you alone. It is the most enriching cinematic experience you will ever pass through a box office to see. As you witness that Parisian strut - a combination of elegance and indifference - you realise you're not walking through a living museum, and you're not even looking at a place, but you are watching the most well-rounded, multi-layered and intrinsically fascinating character ever written. Perhaps that's what's drawn writers, poets, philosophers and intellectuals of all shades over the decades to its dens of discourse. I know I can't wait to get stuck in.