Valley of the Seine

This year, the Parisian summer has been glorious. This is not true. This is an abject lie. This year, summer has not arrived in Paris. Back in April, it was unseasonably warm. We hit 35°C, dizzyingly, which lasted for a couple of days before exploding into black thunderstorms, and ever since then the weather has

Walled cities and salt

I’m jumping back into the South for this post, because this is a place I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now but I kept getting distracted with life and Paris and moving and work and all of the other things that distract me. It would be a shame to skip this though,

A fancy castle

Since things reopened a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been very urban. I did do that white-sands hike last week, and the week before I did a tiny 5km very brisk hike around some fields and forests on a Sunday morning, but mostly I’ve been taking advantage of things being open again. I think I’ve

The white sands of Paris

How’s it going for you guys? Here, we have freedom! Well, kind of. We still have a 9pm curfew, but this is the latest it’s been since October of last year, so it does feel like freedom. And mostly, outside seating is open again for bars and restaurants, along with museums, cinemas, and theatres. When

Trees are lovely

Down underneath Paris, in the Hauts de Seine, there’s a botanical garden called the Vallée-aux-Loups. There are no actual wolves, but there are a zillion different trees, and a bonsai collection (closed to the public due to covid restrictions right now), and the house of the writer François-René de Chateaubriand, now a museum. While Chateaubriand’s

Creepy abandoned castles

Apparently, a lot of people who have castles near Paris just leave them to the weeds. Maybe they got murdered and now haunt the premises, making life uncomfortable for potential buyers. Maybe they just couldn’t deal with the electricity bills, and absconded to live happily in reasonable 2-bedroom apartments in Corbeil-Essonnes. Who knows? You should

Weird sculptures and an ice forest

Back in February, after I’d got through the bulk of moving in and some of the tiredness that comes with all of that, I went to visit a place I randomly found on Google Maps, the jardin de sculptures de la Dhuys. It was a freezing, sunny weekend, and all week it had been either

A Parisian forest

My goodness, it’s been a long time since I wrote here. Before I get down to business, here are my excuses: moving is hard; I’ve been working so much you guys; we’re locked down so my brain has turned back to cottage cheese and all I do when I’m not working is look at Twitter

Ohmygordes

Jesus, it’s been a while. This has been CRAZY. I moved across the country with the cat, and four huge dudes lugged my piano up six flights of stairs (sorry, dudes), and the cat is having the absolute worst fortnight of her existence ever, despite having gone to stay with the loveliest catsitter in existence

The Abbaye St Félix de Monceau

Over here in France, we’re still in lockdown. I thought about writing a post about my immediate radius, as that is the place I see the most at the moment – although the radius has now been extended to a 20km circle, rather than the 1km we had at the beginning. But then I came