Passementerie

Alive and well!

Darlings, you are so patient and I don't deserve it.  It has been such a busy week and blogging was on my mind but I never actually got around to actually achieving it.  But I *am* alive and well, as the picture above, taken today in the Jardin de Palais Royale demonstrates.

It has been months since my husband and I have been alone together in Paris and now that we are at last, we almost don't know what do to with ourselves!

Yesterday we took ourselves and our new granny trolley (Practical Passementerie strikes again) to the rue Mouffetard to replace all of our cleaning products with Ecover and to do our first big food shop since before we went to India.  Since before I was stranded in Dublin for the week that time (do you remember that far back?).  I wore a short tunic dress (bare legs!) and Birkenstocks and felt very... well, however you are supposed to feel when you are wandering thus attired down a market street in Paris with your husband on a sunny May afternoon with bare legs.  We made it back just in time to watch the thunderstorm from our window and listen to the hail dumming on the bedroom roof.

Today it is much cooler and I wanted to go out to WH Smith to buy a copy of Vanity Fair (in a gorgeous and very smart new sap green cover for Penguin Popular Classics) as the beautiful antique copy given to me by the wonderful Elizabeth of The House in Marrakech (here are some lovely pictures she took of our house last week when she and her husband came to tea) is too delicate to be rammed unforgivingly into a handbag or used as a mat for my mug of tea (I also wanted a toaster and a weighing scales from BHV, but that's somewhat less romantic) so we set off on the bus to the other Rive.

Buses are our new discovery here, inspired/insisted upon by my father, who has recently become our unexpected arbiter of taste.  Why scurry underground on a sunny afternoon just because you're not sure you want to walk all the way There and Back Again (A Blogger's Tale)?  Why not nip around the corner to the Pantheon and hop on the 84 which takes you to the bookshop by a scenic route past St. Sulpice and the Musée d'Orsay to Place de la Concorde and up the rue Royale to the Madeleine?

To make it even easier, the blessed bus people have this wonderful interactive map which I think you should go and play with for a bit now before leaving grateful comments below.

In answer to some questions which were posed in response to my last post, it should be quite evident by now that I am an international spy.  That's all I can say now - I have a government to infiltrate before dinner.

Staying Still

I feel a bit stunned, almost.  We got back to Paris from Marrakech yesterday afternoon and went for an early dinner with my father on Place de la Contrescarpe in the evening sun and now... and now... we're done.  No more hopping on planes every week, no running around for positively MONTHS.  I will still be flying to Dublin for one night every month to do various things there and I am going to America for a week in mid-July, but that is all I have to do before we leave Paris in the autumn.

You can probably gather from the blog that I love travel and that I get to do quite a lot of it, but after the last six months I am keen to have a rest for a little while.  Flying is at best boring and uncomfortable, and a very poor second to travelling by train, so I am very glad to be able to spend a little more time with my feet planted firmly on the ground now for a while. 

Photo is of me peering out of my sleeping bag in the Great Himalayan National Park at six in the morning in early April.

Do you remember...

...when I used to live in Marrakech?  It's how many of you met me, isn't it?  Through reading A Year in Marrakech, my first blog.  Well, guess where I am sitting right now?

You see when we left Marrakech last November in order to be closer to my mother we realised that our excess baggage charges would dramatically exceed the cost of a return trip to Marrakech at a later date ( you see? practical!).

So a few weeks ago we booked our flights and rang Hugo to ask if we could take him up on his rash offer of a roof over our heads whenever we were in town and accordingly this morning we woke up in our old bed, in our old house, with our old housekeeper (our mother here in Morocco, who duly refers to us as her children) preparing us a delicious breakfast as if we had never left.  It was, in fact, as if the last six months had never happened.  It was like coming home.

The first picture is of the blissfully cool salon in our landlord's own breathtakingly lovely house, where we lived when we first came to Marrakech, and is by Vincent Leroux via the beautiful diana:muse blog.  The second image is of our own house where we eventually lived (and which has recently been sold) and is from this post on My Marrakech, the blog which inspired me to start blogging myself and the writer of which, the beautiful Maryam, we will get to see again on Thursday evening.  The champagne is already in the fridge...

Mark the Perfect Man

Well, we didn't have cocktails at the Ritz after all.  The weather was simply too divine to even think of being indoors, so there was really only one solution, wasn't there?  A picnic at Pere Lachaise cemetery, of course.

Now, one or two of my friends have made a criticism of Passementerie, if such a thing could be imagined (unfaithful creatures), and that is that the frivolity of the blog does not do justice to my almost spookily practical side.  Because it's true, you know.  I am very VERY sensible, behind the facade of international flitting, shopping and general lounging about. 

I have therefore promised to include more sense in my blog and allow my inborn practicality to shine through the morass of tiaras, thrilling travel and Parisian anecdotes.

For now, I'm starting small and telling you about the extremely practical object we bought in India.  My husband might have had notions of his own about it, but when we walked into the steel box shop in Jaisalmer, I thought of one thing.  Picnics.

We don't have a proper picnic basket (yet) but one hardly needs such a cumbersome thing (especially on the Paris metro) when one has a tiffin tin.  With a tiffin - three layers, the perfect size for filling with slices of mango, exciting cheeses and black bean & sweet potato stew - and a knife, fork and miniature bottle of champagne tucked into her handbag there is just no stopping the practical girl in her quest for the perfect way to spend a sunny afternoon in Paris.

 

We dined with our darling friend Laura on the tomb of Clementine, not far from a grave which appeared to belong to "Mark the perfect man" until we read the rest of the inscription... "and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace" (Ps. 37:37). 

Well, it must be admitted that peace is limited in a world where there are smartly dressed bloggers out with their tiffin tins looking for a suitable picnic spot, but for anyone lucky enough to have their bones interred in such a beautiful place as Pere Lachaise on a May morning, death must surely have some compensations.

First picture my own, others from here, here, here and best of all, here with thanks!

Go now and buy a fabulous little tiffin tin for yourself here - Tiffintin.com

Louche Living

I love having house guests. 

For as long as they stay, one is quite at liberty - indeed positively obliged - to provide fresh flowers and fluffy towels, devote entire days to making (and drinking) the thickest, creamiest hot chocolate, wandering around the prettiest parts of Paris, eating lunch in the most elegant of arcades and selecting macaroons at the most decadent of tea-rooms.  And that was just yesterday. 

Today I find that my hostess duties require me to spend the afternoon at the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Grand Palais and the evening at the opera. 

Tomorrow it seems that we must go for cocktails at the Ritz bar.  Oh my life is such a trial at times.

Further tips for stylish living (and you thought I'd forgotten)

Business cards are all very well, and indeed I am very glad that I finally got around to printing the beautiful cards that clever Jenifer Altman designed for me, but one does not always want to present oneself in a professional context.  After all, we have personal lives too, don't we?  But what do we do then?  Honestly, how many times in the last month or two have you scrawled your name and telephone number on a scrap of paper or the back of a notebook for somebody?  That's not very stylish of you, is it?

So now you must realise that what you really need is a calling card.  And I've found somebody to provide one - Madame Stern.

Madame Stern, of Stern Graveurs in the Pasage des Panoramas, one of the myriad arcades in the second arrondissement, will take care of your every whim when it comes to stationery (after all, she counts the royal family of Morocco among her clients, and they're just the start) but when it comes to calling cards, she will call the shots, even asking you to write something for her so that she can take your handwriting into account as well as your general demeanour when designing your achingly elegant card.

 

However, if you cannot make it to her shop in person (as you must in order to secure her services) there are one or two online options out there for you, including the services provided by Crane's or, better yet, Smythson.

And speaking of Smythson you will probably need something in which to store your new cards (just hope that Madame Stern selected a conventional size and shape for you), won't you?

   

And, well, as it must be admitted that not everybody with whom you will come into contact will be quite as elegantly equipped, you might find this convenient too.  Both the card case and the jotter cover can be stamped with your name or initials in silver.

Home at last!

Oh darlings, there are no words to express how happy I am to be home again.  Wonderful as India was, I yearned for Paris so much in the last couple of weeks, and to be home is the the most perfect bliss.

Getting home was a far from blissful experience however.  India might be able to manage trains, but New Delhi airport leaves a lot to be desired in terms of usability.  Still, we made it through and got to terminal five in Heathrow to await our (delayed) flight to Paris which was *terribly* good fun.  For all the bad press about baggage (and they did indeed lose our luggage, but delivered it the next day) it is paradise for this particular girl.  After dinner in Wagamama, I found Smythson, Tiffany (not a big fan, but still don't object to ogling when I'm there), Prada, Ted Baker, Paul Smith Global.... I had great fun, although my husband confiscated my credit card before letting me run off, for some reason.

We didn't get home until 2am, thanks to the delayed flight and the baggage loss, but that did not stop us from going out for the day yesterday with my father, who has discovered all the chicest places in Paris in our absence and took us to lunch at Bistrot Vivienne in the elegant and adorable Galerie Vivienne where we lounged over all sorts of delicious food, wine and champagne before wandering through the Jardin du Palais Royal, Tuileries and then the Rive Gauche in general as we made our leisurely and circuitous way home through a newly green and leafy Paris.  I am in heaven.

Images from here, here and here with thanks.

Is forbidden to attend herself, but must share...

For those of you in the UK, in particular in Oxfordshire, make a note in your diary for the OKA sample sale on the 25th - 27th of April and know that I am devoured with jealousy that I cannot go myself.

Last days in India

Today is our last proper day in India in a lot of ways, even though we don't fly home to (much-missed) Paris until Friday.  Yesterday I was hit by my third ever migraine and only recovered after breakfast this morning, which involved generous helpings of paracetamol and coffee as well as proper food.  This afternoon we take a train back to Delhi, which will take 20 hours, but I love trains here - they may not be as clean as Chinese trains, but you can hop straight into bed and wait for the cups of tea and meals which they bring you at regular intervals and bask in the airconditioning.

Technically, we have three days in Delhi, but only one of them is a full day and (at my husband's suggestion!) we plan to spend that middle day in the Connaught Place area of Delhi again, munching on another wonderful breakfast at the Imperial but hopefully this time rousing myself sufficiently to tour a few cafes, bookshops and cocktail bars instead of collapsing into the spa while John rather energetically visits the Red Fort, as happened last time.

Image with thanks to Nathan Golden, whose beautiful pictures can be found here and on his weblog here.

More Rajasthani treasures

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Craft shops abound here, but it is hard to know what has been done where, and by whom.  Legitimate as most sellers surely are, there is often the vague anxiety that what you are buying as "local" craft may actually have been produced in a factory in China! 

However, it is impossible to doubt the veracity of a shopkeeper who looks up from his painting to show you around his studio and offer you a bewildering variety of tiny paintings from simple trees to detailed and exquisite court or hunting scenes.  I can't wait to show you what I got!  Here are a few examples to keep you going in the meantime.

 

Part of their appeal is their very tininess.  I have slight World of Interiors aspirations for my Future Home and have no desire for my house to bear even the slighest resemblance to a fortune teller's shop or polyglot "Oriental" market, but I am still irrestibly drawn to the sort of delights only to be found digging about in a souk in Marrakech or an artisan's shop here in Jaisalmer, so the discretion, if that is the right word, of these tiny miniatures (I picture them in simple wide-edged oak frames from Habitat, of which I have many) is deeply appealing.  Does that make sense?  Do you know what I mean?

 

Images from here, here and here with thanks.