Lyon suffered a double blow to the sporting stomach on Saturday night, both Olympic Lyonnais teams lost in finals. Both were plying their trade away from home and both were up against the most formidable foes, their respective bête-noires, Barcelona for ‘les Fenottes’, PSG for ‘les Gones’. The women’s football team is way is more successful than their male compatriots, serial winners, the beast that ate everything, eight Champions Leagues including a record five successive titles from 2016 to 2020, fourteen consecutive French league titles from 2007 to 2020. They have also won five trebles, the most for any team. Barca, featuring several of the key women figures in the awful Spanish FA mess around the Women’s World Cup win, just proved too strong for them. The men are a shadow of the success that the women’s team are. They skirted with relegation, went through 3 managers and the squad faced the ignominy of being gathered together and scolded publicly through a megaphone by the leader of the local hardcore fans or “Ultras”, as they are dubbed. English football fans know some of the men’s team as they were once stars in the Premier League. Alexandre Lacazzete and Ainsley Maitland-Niles formerly of Arsenal, Nemanja Matic of Chelsea and Man U fame, Said Benrama of West Ham and Dejan Lovren of Liverpool; all players who for the most part, without being disrespectful, their glory days are behind them. The club of OL is owned by Eagle Sports Group, the frontman of which is John Textor. Textor is an interesting chap, he is one of the sprawling DuPont family heirs and spent his early life as a pro freestyle skateboarder until he had a serious head injury and decided to focus on technology and making money. He has successfully built up a fortune in snowboarding, special effects, (his business won the Oscar for the backwards aging of Benjamin Button), digital media, (he started and ran Fubo-TV), and he was responsible for the virtual Tupac at Coachella. He bought Crystal Palace, hence the Eagles as well as OL, an odd Belgian second division club and what sounds like an insult but is actually a Brazilian football club, Botafogo.
It’s interesting to watch the money flow into European football, some of it is smart money and some of it is not. American entrepreneurs, moguls and general wealth-hoarders, billionaires and investment funds own 9 of the 20 Premier League teams as well as five of the French Ligue 1: OL, Marseilles, Le Havre, Strasbourg and Toulouse. They also own 5 of the Serie A teams in Italy including both the Milan teams, Roma, Fiorentina, Atalanta, the recently crowned Europa League winners from Bologna and Genoa. Other than Steve Kerr of Warriors’ fame and Steve Nash’s group owning Mallorca the Spanish La Liga and German Budesliga have avoided the influx as they have strict fan ownership requirements. The leagues have no guaranteed incomes like the US Major Leagues so making money is less easy than some of the investors who do own franchises, like Todd Boehly of LA Dodgers and Chelsea, would like. He famously was justifying his new shiny purchase to journalists and his approach of paying fortunes for amassing the future stars of 5 years’ time when he was asked a question of how would they be able to afford these expenses if they were doing so badly, as they were at the time. He reassured the gathered audience that the Champions League revenues would cover the new expense levels, they then pointed out to him that lying 12th in the Premier meant that Chelsea would not, and indeed did not, qualify for the money spinning Champions League, as they had previously done every prior year. He checked with one of his bag carriers and was assured yes that was correct, to which he remarked “I did not know that”.
From one shining example of failing upwards to another, finally Great Britain was put out of its misery and Rishi Sunak or as John Crace so perfectly puts it ‘Rish!’ called a general election. Unlike the US with its fixed election calendar, the UK has a moveable feast, only time-barred by a limit which could have kept the kleptocracy that has been the Tory government, in charge until the end of the year. Rish! felt that this was his moment to seize, partly because they finally had a bit of good news on the inflation number which was one of his previously stated 6 fixed deliverables that would demonstrate how he was a serious, if somewhat tiny, politician, in contrast to Truss and Johnson who were larger but not serious. The fact that he failed to deliver on any of them in the time span he set himself and to date had only that one glimmer maybe he thought it was now or never. He demonstrated very clearly the ineptitude of his administration as he exited 10 Downing Street to make the public announcement in torrential rain. No-one had looked at the weather forecast, or even looked out the window, thought of holding an umbrella or god forbid, have an awning erected over the podium. Maybe its the Tories publicly stated dislike for ‘experts’ which now includes the weatherman? The little man stands in his shiny, now soaking-wet suit addressing the press to make the most important statement of his term in office and he is drowned out by a troll playing Blair’s Labor Party celebration song from 1997 “Things Can Only Get Better” on a boombox. His campaign has been a comedic treat in the 5 days since, highlighting his total inability to relate and be relatable. Throwing any thought of his carbon impact out of the limousine tinted window he has private jetted around England and Ireland from one disaster to another; the factory visit with the 3 stooges from local Tory office pretending to be employees asking soft ball questions, the teetotalling Rish! asking the Welsh brewery staff how they were looking forward to the Euros football championships not knowing Wales had been knocked out and planning a stop at the Titanic museum and being surprised at the analogies being made. It was such a resounding success that they cancelled all events for Saturday and he and his crack media team are now planning a reset, after a solid 3 days.
On Tuesday the baker’s shop informed us it was St Constantine’s Day. Constantine, unlike Rish! was a consummate politician and a pretty good general. Born in what is modern Serbia to his father, a Roman general Constantius and an inn-keeper’s daughter in 272. Now I hear you saying, a man of the people, Mum being familiar with the hospitality trade and handy at pulling pints. You will be surprised to know that Helen, his mother was a star in her own right and is also celebrated on the 21st of May. She also goes by ‘Empress Helen, Equal to the Apostles’, which is a bit of mouthful but she appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of England as supposedly a British King Coel’s daughter and is credited with finding the relics of the cross of Christ and not only that she also finds the remains of the Three Wise Men which currently reside in the Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral. So regardless of not having access to a private jet she managed to get around. As did Constantine, his father becomes Caeser in 305 succeeding Augustus Maximus but he dies a year later in York. Constantine manages to get to the deathbed, again no small feat on horeseback and is appointed Emperor by his father’s men. For the next 20 years he fights his way to supreme power in the West and finally as overall Emperor. He is responsible for the formal adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire. The myth is that this is as a result of an omen — a “chi-rho”, the Greek letter of P on top of an X in the sky, with the inscription “By this sign shalt thou conquer” — before his victory in the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, when Constantine cemented his power as Emperor of the West. He is said to have instituted the new symbol as a battle standard standard, called the labarum, other sources say he told his soldiers to paint it on their shields. All the sources are actually written later, so there is a sense of some hagiography occurring. The venerable document called the “Donation of Constantine” was attributed to proving the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity for centuries, but in the 15th century it was discovered to be a forgery. It is now assumed that he was politically shrewd and the decriminalization of Christianity was smart business rather than he was desperate to proselytize, in fact to keep the Army on board he allowed them to continue all the traditional pagan practices that were thought to bring good luck in battle. He becomes Emperor through a relatively long civil war so it was hardly smooth sailing, his private life was complicated too. Constantine’s wife attempted to seduce Constantine’s son (her step-son) and when he refused her advances, she accused him of raping her. The penalty for doing this to an Empress was death, as was any act considered to be treason. So firstly he has his son killed and then when he finds out the truth he has her killed too. He is to this day venerated by the Orthodox church, not the least for his creation of the New Rome in Byzantium, which later was named after him as Constantinople, modern Istanbul. As Rome waned, it subsequently became the capital for more than a thousand years of the Holy Roman Empire.
We had visitors from out of town this week, so have been happy to show them Lyon and its numerous treats. We took them to a Bouchon, as it is part of the tradition of Lyonnais cuisine, where the ‘Mères de Lyon’, the formidable women chefs first plied their trade. These were household cooks who had worked for the bourgeoisie; during the period just before and after the First World War the mass move away from domestic staff left them without work so they started the informal restaurants called Bouchons, serving primarily the workers. Daniel et Denise Crequi (there is another in St Jean in the old town) is usually our go to and it does not disappoint. We carefully guided our friend to avoid the andouillette and instead went for the ‘Quenelle de Brochet’ which is served about the size of a child’s American football, swimming in nantua sauce.
For something more modern we went to try Siprès just off Rue de l’Université in Place Prado. It recently got a Bib Gourmand mention by Michelin and deserves the accolades. Its a smallish ‘Canut’ style space with exposed stone walls and yet bright and airy as it has windows on two walls. The food is modernist farm to table fare, we had cod in a sweet tamarind glaze, sweet potatoes and black garlic and a great duck dish with spelt, miso carrots and pickled redcurrants. We finished with a lovely concoction of rhubarb with pink peppers, tonka beans and maple syrup. Dinner was €39 for three courses and the wine by the ‘pot’ was cheap and cheery. I cannot recommend it highly enough, great food and friendly people; they had English language menus for the faint of heart too.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 