No Sacred Cows

August 2025, and back in Paris with Ian – fifty-four years after we first met as teens in Harrogate – and still managing to enjoy ourselves without needing an afternoon nap. Mostly.

Bacha Coffee: Breakfast With an Ego Problem

One morning began at Bacha Coffee on the Champs Élysées, a café so polished you feel underdressed the moment you step inside. Chandeliers, lacquered wood, immaculate black-and-white floors… the sort of place where asking for a straightforward coffee feels like using the wrong cutlery.

The menu resembles a geography exam. Brazil, Yemen, Colombia, Burundi on just one of a dozen pages. All reasonably priced at a mere €9.50 – until you reach the Café Paraíso Gold at €324.

And for those who read to the middle of the menu, the legendary Café Camocim Jacu Bird sits there at €104 a cup – beans (“cherries”, to coffee geeks) having taken a brief detour through the digestive system of a Brazilian bird before ending up in your porcelain. Apparently some people will pay a small fortune for coffee that has already been swallowed once. Call it recycling for the obscenely rich.

We settled for the sensible Brazilian brew, pastries, fresh orange juice and the satisfaction of not needing to re-mortgage anything to pay the bill.

Evenings: Bistrot Tables and the Illusion of Youth

We came perilously close to visiting the famed Caveau de la Huchette in the 5th arrondissement, but the queue stretching down the street looked worryingly young and suspiciously immobile. We appeared to be at least a generation and a half older than the next oldest person in line.

Leaving Ian to hold our place, I approached the doorman to ask what the odds were. He gave me a full top-to-toe assessment and told me to “go in and have a look” – clearly having concluded that I was unlikely to vanish into the depths of the club without returning to pay. I am still not sure whether that was a compliment, an insult, or simply accurate risk assessment on his part.

Inside, every seat in the live-music basement was taken, and with bodies already packed tightly enough to qualify as a health warning, we made the sensible decision: retreat, locate something with chairs, and give our ageing joints the evening they deserved.

The piano bar at Café Georges V across the road fitted the bill perfectly – here the singer performs on the piano, and the audience appreciates it from the comfort of actual seats. Civilised nightlife for those of us born before Spotify.

Other evenings were more familiar: Parisian terraces, cold beer, good food and wine, and the sort of people-watching that passes for entertainment once you reach a certain age.

Later, a wander along the Seine – Eiffel Tower glowing obligingly in the background – and a brief moment of “yes, growing old gracefully is not so bad”.

Musée de l’Illusion: Dignity Optional

In a clear sign that either maturity has bypassed us or we are simply beyond caring, we spent part of an afternoon at the Musée de l’Illusion.

Heads on plates.

Giant chairs that shrink you to garden-gnome size.

Handstands.

Rooms designed specifically to make adults look ridiculous, which of course we embraced immediately.

Coffee Pilgrimage, Part Two

Paris also delivered on its other speciality: very good coffee in very small cafés.

Terres de Café offered yellow tables, perfect Arabica espressos and generous slices of cake – the sort of combination that makes you feel briefly optimistic about everything, even your bank statement after Bacha.

Fifty-Four Years and Counting

Fifty-four years of friendship and, frankly, we still behave like the same two teenagers from our days in Harrogate. Just with earlier bedtimes. Different countries, different lives, long stretches without meeting – but whenever we do, the conversation resumes as if we were in the pub last Friday night.

Paris gave us the usual routine: resurrecting old stories, laughing about who misremembered what, and at antics that would baffle – and occasionally shock – anyone under forty. Apparently some double acts just keep going, whether the world has asked for them or not.

But there is also that faint, unwelcome voice in the background reminding us that we are not stockpiling infinite future trips.

So we make the most of the ones we get.

Still Standing

Paris snapshots from last week… still standing, still laughing, and still proving that growing older does not necessarily mean growing up.

It just means you schedule your fun between coffee stops.

Well, if one must wait for a delayed TGV, this is surely how to do it – sinking into a leather armchair beneath chandeliers and gilt, in the quiet splendour of Le Train Bleu. 10€ may seem steep for a double shot of caffeine – even a Finca El Platanillo 100% Guatemalan Arabica, cultivated at 1450m – but context is everything – and here, nestled into a leather armchair at Le Train Bleu, you are not paying for coffee so much as an experience.

Besides, you get a free madeleine on the side, and with a single shot at €7, the double almost counts as thrift. Almost.

In this echo of another age, even a delay becomes something almost deliberate – an invitation to linger rather than rush. Opened in 1901 for the Universal Exhibition, Le Train Bleu is a showcase of Belle Époque grandeur and Beaux-Arts theatricality… painted ceilings, sculpted cherubs, and a setting that once welcomed travellers bound for the Riviera, Cairo, and Constantinople.

There is time, here. And perhaps that is the rarest luxury of all.

Sometimes the best way to silence the newsfeed, the static, the murk of thought, is to lace up your shoes and head for higher ground. This morning, I did just that – setting off early with my indefatigable four-legged companion, Glo, for a fast 9.6 km hike through the garrigue behind the Colline Saint-Jacques in Cavaillon.

Glo is a rescue – of entirely indecipherable ancestry and unbothered by the mystery. When I adopted her in September 2019, she was five months old, skin clinging to bone, with a look in her eyes that spoke of beatings and bites and a life already too full of fear. She had been chewed – quite literally – by other dogs, and the world, understandably, made no sense to her. It has taken years, but much of that fear has gone. She still startles at sudden movement or unexpected noise, but in open spaces, on winding trails, nose twitching and eyes scanning the horizon, she is transformed. Steady, alert, and inseparable. What remains of her past now follows behind us – at a good distance.

The route itself was anything but tame. Twisting rocky paths, sudden inclines, a few scrambles, and more than a few sections tipping into “peak exertion” – according to the tracker, at least. But the physical effort was laced with something deeper. A sense of continuity, of walking quite literally in the footsteps of thousands who passed this way before.

Saint-Jacques has been occupied since the Neolithic. At La Grande Baume, a cave still sheltering in the limestone, our ancestors left flints and arrowheads – but no trace of themselves beyond that. Romans later carved their passage through the rock at Le Passage en Tranchée, their carts biting ruts deep into the stone. Quarrymen followed in later centuries, chiselling into the hillsides at Les Carrières, leaving behind the ghost grid of their labour. The paths loops through it all, past dry gorges, shaded ravines, low holm (evergreen) oaks and sun-shattered cliffs. Glo, wiser than me, took the steeper stretches at her own unhurried pace, pausing to sprawl in the shade with the confidence of a creature who knows the heat will always outlast us.

After nearly ten kilometres and a fair bit of sweat, we descended into town – dusty, satisfied, and ready for something restorative. I dropped Glo off at home for a well-earned nap in a cool corner, then made my way solo to Bistrot Ô Méryl, tucked under the plane trees by the Hôtel de Ville.

L’Assiette ô Meryl arrived like a love letter to Provence on a plate. First, a half of chilled Cavaillon melon, served plain but dusted elegantly with piment d’Espelette – sweet, cool, with just the faintest warmth on the tongue. Then the main affair: a generous salad of local greens dressed in light vinaigrette, overlaid with folds of cured ham, thick shavings of aged cheese, confit tomatoes bursting with intensity, and thin grilled slices of aubergine just kissed by the flame. Anchoring the whole dish were two slices of courgette terrine – a savoury loaf packed with slices of summer squash, bound in herbed egg, baked to just the right balance of soft and firm.

It was rustic without being rough. Thoughtful without being precious. Paired with the rosé maison – pale, dry, and properly cold – it did not so much rejuvenate as reassure: yes, some things still make sense.

To finish, I wandered across to Café-s-Hop Cavaillon, my favourite little torrefaction spot in town. Glo stayed home, sleeping off the morning’s adventure. Inside, framed hessian coffee sacks and shelves of beans and paperbacks lined the walls. Tourists and a few locals lingered over laptops or shared low conversation, the whole place running on the unspoken agreement that time could afford to move slowly, just for a while.

An espresso – no embellishments, no sugar, just beans and heat and clarity – was the final punctuation mark. Well, nearly.

There was cake. Of course there was cake. A rustic slice – peach and red fruit folded into a golden sponge, gently sweet, served with a curl of ripe peach and a spoonful of crème fraîche just tart enough to restore perspective. Simple, and perfect.

Inflation is often sold as a mysterious force in mainstream commentary – like weather, or fate. In reality, it is a predictable redistribution mechanism. A stealth tax. And like most mechanisms in our economic system, it redistributes to the few. It’s a pipeline – straight from your pocket to theirs. A slow, silent redistribution of value upwards, wrapped in economic jargon and blamed on whatever is culturally convenient.. globalists, migrants, wind farms, your neighbour’s pronouns. Yes, energy shocks and supply issues play a role. But who ends up better off after the dust settles? Not you.

The Winners?

• Governments groaning under debt (they repay with devalued money).
• Borrowers with fixed-rate loans.
• Owners of property, stocks, and commodities.
• Corporations with pricing power.
• The already rich, who simply rebalance their portfolios and barely feel the breeze.

The Losers?

• You.
• Wage earners, pensioners, small businesses.
• The so-called “middle class”, now largely the working poor with a better wardrobe.

While prices rise and security slips away, people get desperate for someone to blame. And into that void, step the salesmen..

Enter the Snake Oil Populists.. in suits, flags, or fatigues.

They arrive with righteous fury and easy targets. “Your life’s getting harder? Blame the EU. Blame immigrants. Blame the green mafia. Blame the elites in Brussels, London, or Washington”.

But look closer, and the story collapses under its own hypocrisy.

Nigel Farage

Swills pints and rants about sovereignty – while pocketing over £1 million a year from media gigs, crypto promotions, and campaign donations. Net worth? At least £3.2 million – and that is just the declared portion.

Marine Le Pen

Claims to stand for working France – but the lifestyle says otherwise. Between her MP salary, party stipends, and her role as sole heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s estate – including a multi-million euro villa in Saint-Cloud – her financial comfort is beyond dispute.

Her father, who died earlier in 2025, was tied to a Swiss trust valued at over €2 million, including gold coins and ingots, as revealed by Mediapart in a 2015 investigation. Whether she benefits directly or not, she now inherits the broader political and financial legacy of one of France’s most entrenched dynasties. Populist on the podium, property heiress on paper.

Viktor Orbán

Waves the flag of Hungarian values – while consolidating media control, funnelling public funds to friends, and ruling over a loyalist oligarchy where nationalism and self-enrichment go hand in hand.

Donald Trump

Back in office, and back on the grift. Claims to be saving the nation – while peddling merchandise, crypto coins, and policy outrage. He imposes tariffs that make Americans pay more, while offering tax breaks for the already wealthy. He promised to drain the swamp. He bottled it, slapped his name on it, and sold it to Americans instead.

Vladimir Putin

Less a populist in the Western electoral sense, more a czar in camouflage. But the performance is familiar: defending tradition, civilisation, the ‘Russian soul’ – all while dissent is crushed, fortunes are hoarded, and ordinary citizens bury their sons.

Officially, he earns a civil servant’s salary. Unofficially, he is linked to a financial empire worth up to $200 billion via oligarchs and offshore proxies. While sanctions bite the public and war drains the economy, the regime’s upper tier remains insulated.

The slogans are nationalistic. The results are plutocratic. Ordinary Russians, meanwhile, face inflation, shortages, and funerals.

Giorgia Meloni

Italy’s “outsider” PM now governs comfortably within the system she once decried – especially when Brussels keeps the money flowing. Loud on cultural warfare, quiet on protecting oligarchic tax perks. She rails against Brussels while happily spending EU money. The rhetoric is nationalist. The reality is fiscal dependency and strategic ambiguity.

And on, and on.

The grift Is the point.

Modern populism is not about fixing problems – it is about monetising resentment.

It follows the TV preacher playbook.

• Convince people they are under attack.
• Offer salvation through loyalty and outrage.
• Live off their fear, their donations, and their despair.

Whether it is miracle water, nationalist rhetoric, or freedom coins, the pitch is always the same:

“Trust me. I’m one of you”.

They are not.
They never were.

What the sea remembers, the land forgets.

The first people to walk this green and pleasant land came from Africa.
Not recently – but in the long dawn of our species, when the only borders were rivers and mountain ranges, and the only language was survival.

They carried no papers or flags. They followed herds, water, warmth.
They crossed what was once land, and what would one day become sea, and left only stone tools, footprints, and genes in their wake.

They were not white – and whiteness had not yet been invented.
That came later, gradually and imperfectly, through ice and pigment, adaptation and isolation.

Evolution, not entitlement.

And still, they moved. Across rivers and seas, over ridges, through forests, to the islands.
Long before there was a Britain to be British about, there were people here – wandering, settling, moving again.

The earliest settlers brought fire and language. They carried no passports.

Then came others, in waves, over centuries.
They brought bronze, iron, farming, burial rites, new gods and ghosts, memories and myths.
They came from the west, the east, the near continent –
from what we now call Europe, Asia, the Middle East.

They came because people always have – in search of food, space, safety.
More clement skies. More peaceful and accepting neighbours.

The Celts – only a beginning because the fog of time obscures what came before – were just one ripple in the sediment time left behind.

The Romans followed, with roads and walls and underfloor heating.
Then the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Norsemen.
Vikings who came to plunder and stayed to trade.
The Normans came latest of the conquerors, but left their mark in law, language, and stone.

This island has never been still.
Never pure.
Only porous.

And yet somehow, in our painful and lingering post-imperial insularity, we convince ourselves we are the finished product.
Native. Defined. Entitled.

Some scowl at the boats now battling the waves across the Channel –
forgetting that boats carried all of us, if not in our lifetimes, then in the long-forgotten memories of our ancestors.

Some of my own forebears came in chains. Others wielded the whips.
One branch fled Jamaica. Another claimed a Scottish coat of arms.
That is not contradiction. That is Britain.

Every family tree, if traced without blinkers, eventually runs aground on a foreign shore.
Refugee. Coloniser. Indentured labourer. Chancer. Survivor.

We are not a race.
We are a journey.

It is not migration that is new – it is the outrage.
The myth of purity.
The delusion that history and culture start and end at Dover, and that identity can be ring-fenced by fear.

It is not the boats that shame us.
It is how we greet them.

Take your pick – CouchSurfing, HelpX, WWOOFing. Different acronyms, same broad principle: a kind of barter network for the twenty-first century wanderer. Travellers exchange their labour, skills, or mere enthusiasm for food, lodging, and a taste of local life. No money changes hands – just goodwill, elbow grease, and a pinch of cultural curiosity.

CouchSurfing always sounded vaguely disreputable, conjuring images of scruffy backpackers slumped in smoky lounges. In reality, it’s more often a polite, Airbnb-lite experience. Mostly urban. Mostly brief. And nowadays, largely sanitised.

WWOOFers, meanwhile, tend to head for the hills – or at least for the nearest compost toilet. In return for shared meals and fresh air, they plough the permaculture furrow, dig ditches by moonlight, and discuss lunar planting cycles with soft-spoken eco-hosts and their dogs. Always dogs.

HelpX falls somewhere in between. It casts a wider net – no requirement to know your nitrogen from your phosphorous, or to ferment your own vegan kimchi. If you’re willing to paint a wall, prune a vine, or just not leave toothpaste streaks in the bathroom, you’ll probably do fine.

When I stumbled back home to France after one of my extended spells in Thailand, I started hosting. Sceptically, at first. But a year in, I had to admit – it worked. Mostly.

There were hiccups. One Brit arrived oozing menace, told us he kept a gun in his lorry cab, and allegedly pulled a knife on his previous host over dinner. His stay here ended with Kathryn, a wonderful Yorkshire lass who returned for multiple stays, being thrown against a wall. After he left, he rang late at night to threaten us all. The usual pleasantries.

Then came John – a wide-eyed Englishman with a time perception problem. You could send him to weed a remote patch of garden and find him an hour later in the same spot, mid-stare, seemingly locked in existential awe at two coupling gendarme beetles. Then cannabis plant began popping up instead of courgettes. Nina, our 90 kilo English Mastiff – who would sample anything remotely edible amongst the veg – ambled erratically poolside early evening, and fell in. It was a full moon, and she apparently discovered her inner lupus and began howling at the moon. John wrote later, asking if he could return. We declined.

Another helper, a sweet but baffled French girl, was asked to turn over a flower bed. Half an hour later she returned, garden fork in hand, looking forlorn. “It doesn’t work,” she said. She hadn’t realised you needed to use your foot to push the fork into the earth. To her credit, she later became an expert at adorning the sunloungers.

But there were gems. Retired Canadians who could tile a roof without complaint. Hungarians who cooked like angels and fixed broken water pumps. Germans who repointed walls with frightening efficiency. A couple of Irish lads who drank most of the pastis but rewired the entire barn. An entire New Zealand farming family who had taken a year off to tour Europe in a camper van, and stripped the brambles from steep slopes with hand-held scythes at speeds a Stihl brush cutter would struggle to match. And countless others, from early-twenties backpackers to seasoned nomads in their sixties, who left behind more laughter than mess.

At the dinner table, stories were swapped about hosts. There was the swinger couple in the Dordogne, who preferred jacuzzi-based bonding to house renovation. The Dutch château owner who believed aliens lived at the Earth’s core and fed his helpers little more than lukewarm lentil soup. One HelpXer escaped on foot to the nearest village, with the host following in his car, accusing the poor guy of “ingratitude” through the open window.

Of course, the system has its flaws. A minority of hosts exploit cheap labour; a minority of travellers exploit generous hosts. There are the overstayers, the under-washers, and the pathologically oblivious. But the same could be said of any extended family.

What struck me most, though, was the sheer global sprawl of it all. There were host listings in Moldova, Fiji, El Salvador, even Jordan (spelled with an extra “n” on the site last I checked). South-East Asia was catching on too – Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, even parts of China.

Would I recommend it? Without hesitation. If you’ve got a spare room, some half-finished projects, and an appetite for strangeness – yes. If you’re twenty and restless, and you don’t mind weeding courgettes in exchange for clean sheets and dinner – absolutely.

It’s not Shangri-La. But it’s real. Human. Messy. And occasionally magnificent.