1. Quoi?!
2. Mais quelle absurdité!
3. Et quelle insulte à la cuisine française!

The response tends to become one of genuine affront at the idea that a French cheese could ever contain something so nasty and so plebeian as a listeria bug.

The next step is to offer possible excuses or ways of getting around this unfortunate piece of medical high-handedness.  Amongst the ingenious responses offered:

• the most important thing in pregnancy is to eat well! (ie, plenty of brie and camembert, suggested the fromagère)
• just cut off the rind, that’s where all the bacteria will be
• if you’ve grown up eating cheese made from lait cru, there’s no way you could ever catch a bug from it
• no French person has ever developed listeria from cheese anyway
• as well, of course, from the classic response from all Frenchwomen surveyed so far: I ate it all through my (two, four, seventeen) pregnancies and never had a moment’s trouble…

When one is seriously craving a good chunk of forme d’Ambert, fougerus, St-Marcellin or well-matured chèvre, these intriguing manifestations of French logic can seem strangely persuasive.

Thus far, I remain an uptight and rule-bound Anglo-Saxon.* But it’s going to be a long month.

One French tradition I believe we will respect, however, is that of the unofficial baptism, carried out at the celebration that follows the official one: the lips of the infant are brushed, first with a finger dipped in champagne, and then with a cut clove of garlic. Thus will she grow up to be a true (honorary) Frenchwoman, properly appreciative of good food and good wine.

*Ok, I did have one mouthful of the fougerus. It was the best thing I’ve tasted in 21 weeks.

Then there was St Michael, Irstead (with 13th century font), St Lawrence, Ingworth (very old sermon-timer hourglass suspended by the pulpit) and St Benet’s, Horning (round tower and mysterious ancient effigy above the porch), all of them with lovely Broadland thatches…

Then today we went to Ranworth, purely because we left rather late for our walk and it was close and lay promisingly between two of the Broads. We had a very nice stroll, then, as an afterthought, thought we’d stop at the church (St Helen’s) on our way back. Even after a week of exploring extraordinarily beautiful and ancient buildings, I wasn’t prepared for this: another gloriously outsized building in a village that basically consists of a pub, a wildlife centre and a few houses; a 15th century lecturn, with antiphonal fragment (Gloria) somehow pasted on; 500-page illuminated Antiphoner, made by monks at the nearby Langley Abbey and used here before the Reformation, and what is apparently the finest painted rood screen in the country (also 15th century). And in the 19th century the church was in such a bad of repair that parishioners had to attend with their umbrellas. I’ve rarely been so moved by something so beautiful and so unexpected.

Also, to get to Ranworth we drove past a little wood called Hilly Holey, which is quite possibly the best place name ever invented.

We also enjoyed the French proprietor of an excellent wine merchant in nearby Wroxham (we went in to buy a bottle and ended up with a dozen); he had that wonderful French trait of knowing exactly what you should want and leading you along until you see it: ‘Well, you can buy that Pouilly-Fumé, but I won’t sell it – I’m going to sell you wines that you don’t know…’ And he did. And the prosecco was superb. Which accounts for the shortness of this post.

On the headland below the ruins of the cathedral in St Andrews, I look back to the snow-covered hills of Fife, sleet rattling around my head and the sea all whitecaps– a blizzard-scape in white and storm-grey. I walk a little further and look down to the town from a hillside as the sun comes out and shines blue and pale gold on a big, untouched snowy field. (Just for fun I plunge into it and see how far the snow comes up; when it’s knee-high I reckon it’s best to get back on the road.) Late afternoon, walking around the coast and the golf course and I turn back to the town again – looking up at it now – with the evening snow-clouds behind it, blue and green light streaming from a gap in the clouds on the dark stone buildings, huddled on their peninsula, and in the other direction, the palest blues and pinks of early sunset on the snowy hills.

This morning the Scotrail website declares that there are no trains running on the Edinburgh-Dundee-Aberdeen line, but leaves the Dundee-Glasgow link optimistically unmentioned. We take a taxi from St Andrews to Dundee –the first tendrils of light just starting to creep over the snowfields, little ice-floes on the Tay – and skid and slide into the station carpark. Just before 8am we wander into the station and look at the departure board: every single train is cancelled – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen – nothing going anywhere. Glasgow – where Roy is due to play a concert at 1pm – suddenly feels a very long way away. ‘The website didn’t tell us this!’ we lament to the ticket clerk. ‘It’s minus twenty in some places, the diesel’s all frozen’, he says; ‘there’s not a train running in Scotland north of the Edinburgh-Glasgow line’. So we haul our cases through the streets of Dundee to the bus station (ever tried lugging a 24kg suitcase through 30cm of snowy slush?). A bus to Glasgow is meant to be leaving in a moment but it hasn’t arrived yet and nobody’s quite sure where it is; after quarter of an hour or so it heaves into view.

The beginning of the journey is stunningly beautiful. The sun is up now, and on both sides of the road the snow is turning pink and blue, but mostly gold. The deciduous trees are lace sculptures; snowy highland cattle stand stoically in the fields. But as we’re coming into Perth, suddenly our blue sky is grey again and it starts to snow – heavily, really flying past the windows. For the rest of the journey – which takes two hours, just 45 minutes longer than normal – these heavy snow flurries come and go and come again. Now we’re passing plantations of fir trees, all the branches heavy with snow, and the landscape is utterly without colour – just white and black and misty grey. It is cold and beautiful now, almost grim – and Grimm perhaps too, with the dark fairytale snowy woods. And the snow flies past the window, and the bus toilet has blocked and I really hope that there are no ten-mile tailbacks heading into Glasgow and that we won’t share the fate of those other bus passengers, a day or two ago, stuck just out of the city for five hours… Then suddenly, miraculously, we’re in; it’s stopped snowing and we can see the edges of the heavy grey clouds that stretch almost to the horizon. At their edges the sky is yellow – real yellow – and light is filtering around and through and onto the snow. And the journey becomes a memory of a slightly eccentric adventure, happily untainted by the failure actually to get to where we’re going: Roy plays his concert after all.

‘…Fauré piano solos (and duets with Emily Kilpatrick)’ the woman sitting behind me reads off her programme. ‘Emily… that’s his latest lady’, her husband comments.

An American aviator, Mathilde Moisant, yesterday intended to execute several flights above the Nassau Aerodrome (Long Island), but she was prevented by the arrival of several representatives of the sheriff, who came to arrest her for breaking the laws concerning Sunday rest. Mme Moisant revved up her motor and, at the exact moment that the ‘functionaries’ set foot on the aerodrome she took off [or ‘showed them a clean pair of wings’ – ‘elle leur brûla la politesse’]. Furious, they jumped in their car and launched themselves in pursuit of the fugitive, whom they would never have captured had she not most unfortunately run out of petrol. After flying for about half an hour, the aviator had to land and allow herself to be stopped. The many onlookers who had accompanied the pursuit did not want to see Mme Moisant treated too severely, and they tried to have her released. A lively struggle ensued, but the Law had the best of it. The aviator, having been manhandled by the sheriff’s representatives, and despite her protestations, was led off to prison.

I’m still not quite sure how the fishmonger could have carefully gutted and filleted my fish, then just as carefully picked up a completely different fish and handed it to me, but there you are.

This week I’ve also increased my vocabulary of automotive French quite considerably, through helping two Australian friends to buy a car. As well as negotiating the masses of paperwork that accompany every such transaction in French (papers that go with the car, papers that go with the owner, carte grise, certificat de conformité, certificat non-gage, volet A), I also discovered that car salesmen pitch things a little differently here. ‘This car is an excellent buy’, said Jean-François at Porte de Saint-Cloud, ‘it has never been owned by a German. It has never even been driven by a German!’

In the eleventh arrondissement, meanwhile, we spent some time looking for an address that, in true Parisian fashion, n’existait pas (see this post from December 2009). Well actually the address did exist, but 68 boulevard Richard Lenoir was unquestionably not a car dealer’s but a formidable 1960s apartment building. We googled, we asked in nearby cafes but nobody had heard of it and they weren’t answering their phone. So we went and had lunch in a nearby bistro. After lunch we called them again. ‘Oh I’m sorry, we sold that car this morning’, said the woman who answered, and I thanked her and hung up, then wished I’d asked her where on earth she actually was.

And trying another car out at Levallois, I received the best, albeit strangest, compliment that I’ve ever received for my French. ‘Gee, you speak English really well’, said the dealer as I translated the car’s history for my friends.

Meanwhile, the lightwell of our building is being resurfaced. Apparently this is also proving a more difficult task than foreseen: ‘most of the wooden beams up the top seem to be rotten’, our first-floor neighbour told us, ‘ça coutera très cher…’. It certainly seems to be a laborious process. Great showers of plaster and various other unidentified objects routinely come cascading down past our bathroom window. And the other day I got quite worried when, whilst I was getting lunch ready, I heard the most appalling sounds coming from just outside our door (we’re on the ground floor, just next to the entrance to the lightwell). It sounded like someone in severe distress, making great, wet-sounding rasping gulps. We thought of all that plaster and who-knows-what-else falling down and opened the door to see what was going on. The workman was stretched full-length across the entrance-way of the building. Roy went up to him and asked if he was ok. No response. Roy leant down and touched his shoulder and the man jerked awake. It was his break-time, he explained, and he was just taking a nap. It was his snores that we were hearing. Personally, I think the man needs to get himself to a sleep apnoea specialist fast. In any case, in the past few days we’ve become accustomed to coming into the building and stepping over the sleeping, snoring builder. Why he has to stretch himself across the entrance-way instead of along the wall I don’t quite know.

Best English translation for the week, on a restaurant menu: ‘Main curses’.

One noise that there will be less of from now on is football, since France has made an inglorious exit from the Coupe du Monde. Four years ago, in my 2^nd-floor apartment on the rue de Cléry, it was much too hot to have the windows shut, so the street noise was inescapable. When France was playing, I would look out my windows across the street and know that in almost every one of the dozens of windows facing me, someone was watching the game. This would be confirmed whenever France scored, since people would rush to their windows and hang over balconies, yelling and waving at each other and passers-by. This time round, all the cars on all the boulevards only got one chance to hoot wildly.

This week I have been observing and appreciating the different messages our bread comes wrapped in. The boulangerie at the bottom of the rue des Martyrs is currently encasing its croissants in paper covered with pithy observations about the importance of bread: ‘without bread, love dies’, ‘bread makes the meal’ and so on. Its ‘baguette de tradition’ comes in a special bag that explains that the appellation ‘de tradition’ is ‘regulated by the Bread Law of 19 September 1993’. Not to be outdone, the next boulangerie up the street presents its croissants in paper explaining that they adhere to the rules laid out by Antoine Augustin Parmentier in his Le parfait boulanger of 1778. You can’t just call yourself a ‘traditional’ or ‘artisan’ bakery here; you have to prove it. I like this a lot.

Our day in Rome was brief and crowded; I would love to go back with some more time, to explore areas away from the main tourist centres. Still, we had a lovely hour or so wandering around the Forum – not so much the actual Forum bit, which was hot and swarming with people, but on the hill above, where the richer residents had their villas. Up there it was more of a garden, much quieter with lovely views across the city. It was much easier to get a sense of what the place might have been like – to look down and realise that there were Roman mosaic tiles or marble slabs beneath our feet, and to think of the feet that walked there more than two millennia ago. And I loved how the bricks of the villas echo the bark of the pines that grow around the hill.

We were also delighted by this eccentric edifice (notice the leaning columns?), perched on the top of the hill. When it was erected and what its purpose is I have no idea, but there it is, rising out of the ruins with all those broken columns around its feet. Extraordinary.

Civitavecchia was our last port, apart from a couple of hours in Gibraltar. All the passengers get very excited about Gibraltar, partly because it’s British (enough of that foreign-ness!) and partly because of the VAT-free shopping; they dash off into town, staggering back along the hot boulevard to the docks with badly sunburnt arms weighed down with Marks and Spencers’ bags and large quantities of alcohol. My main priority was to avoid being bitten by monkeys and to get a decent coffee; I am happy to say that we achieved both of these aims. As we sailed out we found ourselves surrounded by a very dense, low-lying mist: from the top deck the view across to Africa was very clear and beautiful, but the sea was invisible; the Atlas Mountains rose out of this thick, rolling fog. When we descended to the prom deck, we couldn’t see more than a few metres in any direction. It was quite strange.

After that, the trip home was pleasantly uneventful, with the Bay of Biscay as calm as a mill-pond (bless it). We broke the drive back from Southampton with a gorgeous walk around Selborne, in Hampshire, through beech forests and along a stream where we discovered a pair of swans with six very new cygnets pottering peacefully around a quiet pond, surrounded by beautiful yellow irises. I didn’t have my camera with me but it’s a picture I’ll remember.

We were looking out the windows trying to guess precisely where France became Italy. Then the train pulled into a station and about six hundred people climbed into it, all talking at the tops of their voices and gesticulating madly, completely oblivious to the passengers attempting to disembark – and we knew which country we had arrived in.

Ventimiglia is wonderful. I love how easy it is to change countries in Europe – Ventimiglia is a twenty-minute train ride from Monte Carlo – and how absolutely different everything feels when you get off the train. After the Riviera towns, which are gorgeously elegant but inescapably pretentious and moneyed, it was a delight to sit in a cafe on the sea-front and have a €1.50 coffee (you won’t find that across the border), listen to earthy Italian, browse in the market, watch kids playing on the beach and generally enjoy being part of an interesting and very real little town. We didn’t hear a word of English all the time we were there (though we heard as much French as Italian). And the thing is, Ventimiglia is stunningly beautiful. It has an extraordinary old town, perched on a high promontory, and below it a big river flows down from the mountains into the sea. It is an old fortress town; from the air would look like a single, almost impermeable mass of roofs, for the steep and narrow passageways dart through and beneath the buildings. Sometimes they become real tunnels; elsewhere they are crossed continually by multilayered stone arches. And there was not a single tourist tat shop to be seen: the buildings that create these magical alleyways are all lived in, with washing and children’s voices emerging from their windows.

We sat at plastic tables and ate pasta with fresh local seafood, at a cafe just outside the city walls at the top of the old town, looking straight down at that very blue sea. Then we walked back down through the alleyways and crossed the river back into the new(er) bit, went back to the market and bought an enormous wedge of parmeggiano, some good dried pasta, porcini and a punnet of strawberries. We met a bloke selling bunches of gorgeous-looking garlic off the back of his van on the quayside. We asked for one bunch but he insisted on selling us two for €5. They are big bunches.

Then we caught the train back to France.

And today we went to Pisa. We shared a bus from the main square to the train station with about thirty Lancastrians, none of whom seemed to have noticed (or believed) either the timetable on the bus stop which said in big letters that the terminus of the No. 1 bus was the Stazione, or the bus itself, which said Stazione in similarly forthright lettering on its front. ‘Does’t’ boos go to’t’ rèlway stèèètion?’ they all asked… then asked again, after the driver and other Italian passengers had inexplicably failed to understand them the first time around.

We had originally planned to get to Lucca (from Livorno, where we docked), but when we got to the train station we discovered that the Sunday timetable didn’t allow for such ventures. But Pisa was a perfectly acceptable alternative. We had a happy wander around its streets, self-appointed judges in what appears to be a long-standing local contest in aperture reconfiguration: on almost every old building an extraordinary array of bricked-up, re-modelled and otherwise inventively rearranged windows, archways and doors gives a fascinating insight into changing usages and architectural tastes. We saw the Leaning Tower (and indeed it does), and admired the classical perfection of the Duomo.

In a back street we found a little enoteca where we ate cavolo nero (I so wanted to have Tuscan kale in Tuscany), slow cooked with a very fruity olive oil, served on bruschetta with some soft cheese and drizzled with truffle oil – the third gastronomic experience of this cruise that has prompted ecstatic moans after every mouthful. Regional, simple, perfect.