When does the constant climactic chaos convince the conservative pols that this shit is real? I was reading an interesting post by the Ruffian Ian Leslie where he made the following point using an old quote from G.K Chesterton: “…the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The divide I think that is most apparent now is those who accept that the climate is fucked, and we need to do something about it, and those who don’t think we need to change anything. Either you think it’s an ongoing catastrophe, and we must do something, everything, to stop it getting worse, or you think it’s just more liberal, woke, green garbage, and you are not going to do a thing to change your gas guzzling, methane spewing lifestyle. That we continue to pump oil, burn coal and let methane vent into the atmosphere without limit is a mistake. There is no debate on the science of the climate crisis, outside of certain tin-hat wearing conspiracy groups. There have been and continue to be massive misinformation campaigns on behalf of the fossil fuel-committed, but you would think at some point even the hard core petrol heads have to accept that the consequences of extreme weather are getting in the way of them having fun.
The French endured their worst nightmares this week with the return of Nelson. Not happy with the mass destruction of Bonaparte’s navy over 200 years ago this week, Tempête Nelson ravaged the French coast. Record wind speeds of 187 kmh hit the Finisterre peninsula, followed by flooding and rain across most of the rest of France other than the very south. To the east of Lyon in the Alps 150kmh winds kept resorts closed for two days and on the peak of Chamrousse near Grenoble 200kmh gusts were recorded. This is not normal. Lyon was an odd twilight world on Friday night, t-shirt warm with crazy cold intermittent gusts and lit up by pre-thunderstorm yellow tones. The streets around the apartment are more Kiev-chic than France suburban as they are torn up, piles of concrete, pipes and barriers everywhere. The sewers and electrical conduits are all being replaced around Rue Garibaldi. This is a superb piece of joined up thinking that the French excel at; the reason they are doing this upgrade all at once is that they are taking half of the roadways on Garibaldi, Felix Faure and other major routes and planting trees. Lyon is planting 56,000 trees this winter, part of the national ‘Canopy Plan’ which targets 30% of urban surface areas to be tree covered by planting 3 million trees. They will create major gardens and tree lined pedestrian and bike paths completely separated from the cars. Having done all that work, they want to avoid then disturbing the roots and digging them up to upgrade someone’s fiber, so first steps, get the pipework done. The city has its own incredible Tree Charter which covers every aspect of the incorporation of trees as a critical element of the city’s landscape from choosing the right trees, diversity of trees for various uses, pollen issues, creating tree surgeon and maintenance skilled jobs, it’s here in French but just skim it to get a sense of how thoroughly thought through this approach is. The key benefit is that the trees reduce the temperature by 4-5 degrees C and have been shown in some situations in Lyon to drop it by 10C in mid-summer. So instead of causing more carbon by allowing A/C systems to proliferate, the window-mounted A/C typical of a New York apartment block are banned and Lyon is instead going to use trees, and lots of terraces and cold beer.
Today is Easter Sunday, so I thought I would give you a break from yet another pious rich woman getting a sainthood and would share some French Easter traditions. Every pâtisserie and chocolatier is chockablock with chocolate Easter baskets and chocolate animals full of treats and little eggs. Unlike in the UK or the US, the animal of choice is not the rabbit. The French quite correctly from a physiological perspective prefer the Chicken as the animal to bear the chocolate eggs. So chocolate chickens, chocolate frogs, chocolate shrimp, chocolate hippos, even lots of chocolate fish but not many bunnykins in sight. So if the Easter Rabbit is not delivering the Easter eggs, who is? Well of course here in France the Bells are. Bells? This is a deeply Catholic tradition. From Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday, the church bells are stilled. To explain the absence of the bells ringing, they decided to tell the children the bells were going to Rome and the Pope would bless them before their return. Then Easter Saturday night and Sunday morning the bells ring again, bringing treats back from Rome and hey presto chocolate fish, eggs, chickens, hippos are strewn around. In eastern France, to replace the bells “gone to Rome” during Holy Week, children rang rattles in the streets to announce services. The altar boys got a starring role in those 3 days too, as they would announce the services several times during the day. The first time they shouted: ‘Réveillez-vous’ “Wake up”. The second time: ‘Préparez vous!’ “Get ready.” The third: “Hurry up”, ‘Dépêchez-vous’. We woke up, got ourselves ready, and then hurried over to La Garibaldine to line up in the rain and secure a chocolate chicken.
We also celebrated Easter on Friday night over on the banks of the Saone in the old town at Grive. The narrow streets gave us some protection from the gusts, and the chalk board menu of small dishes never disappoints. We had not been for a while, so every dish was new to us. Small plates work great for a couple or as we were 3, but for 4 they can be a pain as no dish comes with more than 3 items and if you order 2 plates it’s still odd with 6 items for 4 people. The veggie dishes were superb, white asparagus is just in season, and you cannot go wrong with roast celeriac. The pulled pork on a bed of roast mashed parsnip was a winner too. There were 3 fish dishes, monk fish wrapped in cabbage and confit of cod on a squid ink sauce as well as bulots with miso mayo. Bulots are sea snails, they are rarely seen on a menu in England and never in the US but the French rightly love them, as do I. Less chewy than clams but more substantial than mussels they are often served as part of a large seafood platter, the ‘Sélection de Fruits De Mer’ served up on a stand at coastal sea-food places in Province and the Cote L’Atlantique. For the squeamish, pulling them from the shell can be off-putting, but they were served here already shelled. Monday is Poisson d’Avril but that is a fish tale for another day.
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Green, yellow and pink. The colors of the Charolais countryside are ‘other side of the rainbow’ technicolor contrasts after the cement and tarmac gray of Lyon in March. The green is so lush and bright that it has a hyperreal quality as the sun courses across crisp, clean blue skies and appears to welcome us back to the country. We welcomed visitors from Brooklyn who had spent some fun but rainy days in Paris, before the TGV delivered them into the underappreciated former industrial belly of Burgundy at Le Creusot. We had plans for an indulgent culinary tour of our part of France, a bit of a blow out, a ‘bonne bouffe’.
As we headed south into the Charolais the weather smiled on us, and we were greeted on either side by the white cows of the local breed, nuzzling their way through the pasture in their small hedge rowed fields. As you get further south into the more hilly and higher elevations of the Brionnais, its sister breeding ground of the Charolais beef cattle, the fields are edged by dry stone walls that are familiar to anyone from rural England. The fields are small to allow simple rotation, avoiding over grazing, the walls provide shelter from the wind in winter. They are too small and uneven to be used for arable crops at scale, so we are spared the pesticide induced monocultures of the north of France. We benefit instead from lots of butterflies, bugs and crawling things and all the birds and small animals that feed on them, and the larger birds of prey and larger animals that feed on them in turn. The forested parts are full of large wild boar and to a lesser extent deer, which keep the local hunters busy every winter weekend and provide a steady supply of ‘saucisson de sanglier’, dried wild boar sausage, to the local shops. They -reintroduced wolves to the Morvan, a forested mountainous plateau 45 kilometers to the north of us, Romanian wild wolves. Much to the annoyance of the local sheep farmers, the wolves will do their wolf-thing regardless of man-designated borders and fancy lamb in their diet from time to time. The protests of the farmers are smoothed away with cash payments for lost livestock at market pricing, quietly and quickly, like a wolf in the night the problem comes, and the problem goes away.
Our grand bouffe took place on March 14th which was the feast day of St Mathilda. Unlike many of the saints who followed a path of denial and simple life, our Mathilda was a Saxon Queen and was used to feasts and wine. She was the first of what are referred to as the Ottonian Queens, she gave birth to the first King Otto, who then had more descendants all named Otto. Her lad Otto is ‘important’ as he restored the Holy Roman Empire. Charolles ended up being an island of the Holy Roman Empire, part of the Dukes of Burgundy’s lands and the seat of Charles Le Temeraire. Charles’ father Philip the Good was the most powerful of the Dukes of Burgundy and responsible for the creation of the united low countries of what is today Holland and Belgium. His troops captured Joan of Arc at Compiegne, and he handed her over to the English, who with the help of Burgundian judges burnt her for heresy. Phil was a bit of a player, he married three times and had three legitimate sons, all from his third marriage; only one, Charles the Bold, reached adulthood. Philip had 24 documented mistresses and fathered at least 18 illegitimate children, who are bluntly called things like “Anthony, bastard of Burgundy, Count of la Roche” or “Philip, bastard of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht”. Anyway, Mathilda was a good wife herself and gave birth to two other boys and 2 girls, as well as Otto. When her hubbie, Henry of Saxony, shuffled off from his mortal coil, she used her not insignificant wealth to set up convents. Not a great number, just 3 and they tended to be finishing schools for the daughters of powerful families, so once again hardly a path to beatitude through pain and suffering. It seems it was easier to become sainted in 968, when Mathilda died, than later, or they tightened up the rules to make it a more exclusive club.
The daffodils are out, as is the forsythia, bright shards of yellow catching the eye as you walk the lanes. We have a grand old magnolia tree in the garden, and it was just breaking into its pinkness when our visitors were here, but today it’s barbie-ing out. In two days it completely opened up, partly as those two days were warm and bright in a way that they should not be, in mid-March.
As it mentally to me was still winter, we planned the local delicacy, Boeuf Bourguinon. It’s an easy dish to cook in advance, so I would not be faffing around while we were all chatting and enjoying drinks. In such a beef area you simply ask the butcher for ‘Bourguignon’, he then asks how many people and whether you want it ‘gelatinous’ or not? That would not translate well into English, as we have terrible memories of gristly meat, especially from school dinners. I asked for ‘half-and-half’, M. Jardin, the butcher, then cut the chunks off the piece of beef in the right size. If the beef is well browned, and you cook it in the wine for a long slow time, the gelatin dissolves completely to help make the liquor with the onions and mushrooms gloriously unctuous. I had the luxury of cooking it slowly most of the day, then letting it sit for a couple of hours before rewarming to serve. It was to be served with a simple Baker’s Potatoes, ‘Pomme de Terre Boulangère’, another easy comfort food dish that cooks quietly while you do more fun things, like snacking on foie gras on brioche and a glass of 2012 Monbazillac. I did manage to get distracted enough making the starter that I burned the first few slices of brioche in the toaster, even at a setting of 1 it has so much butter in it that it needs a constant eye and attention, not one of my strong suits, especially if talking. I was all for scraping off the burnt bits with a knife, but that was universally rejected as too English, 1960’s post-rationing thinking.
Eating salad as a starter rather than an accompaniment or later palate cleanser is a very American habit, but in my defense the local Mich 1* place is now serving ‘Salade Hivernale’ as an Entré, so if it’s good enough for Maitre Frederic Doucet, it’s good enough for me. The pears and walnuts are at the end of their season, but they nuzzled companionably with the mid-winter mâche (or Lamb’s Lettuce, as it’s known in England, although I have never seen it in the US on either coast), pea shoots and a local hard goat cheese, Pyramide d’Argolay. I am a massive fan of Alsace Gewurtztraminer wines, when they are dry and balanced they are the perfect accompaniment to this green mix of flavors and textures, the hint of sweetness within the dry backbone of the wine stands up to the Banyuls vinegar in the dressing. We had a cheering 2019 Wolfberger Gewürztraminer Hatschbourg. It’s not particularly expensive or a ‘grand vin’, Wolfberger is the local cooperative wine making organization for the picture-postcard village of Eguisheim in the Alsace, just outside Colmar. We visited in 2022 and picked up half a case of this Gewurtz and a full case of covid while we were there.
We washed the beef down with Givry Premier Cru. That is the closest, most serious Burgundy to us. I bought this from the winery of J.P. Berthenet, a friendly family winery tucked away on the hillside of the village of Montagny. You could drink his Montagny as an easy-going weekend burgundy, but his Givry is great and has a bit more elegance. This was a 2018, it had a bit of bottle age but was still relatively fruit forward, perfect for the richness of the Bourguinon. We also had a 2020 Clos de la Servoisine, Givry 1e Cru from Deliance Freres, less mature and tighter, but it helped keep the conversation flowing through to the cheese course. We had some local Charolais ‘mi-fraiche’ goat cheese, a local Palet de Vache, a serious Maroilles from Lille that had the fridge stinking for a week and a big hit with the crowd, Shropshire Blue.
The meal ended with a pear tart from the local bakery Boulangerie L’Éclair-cie. Like many of the bakers in town, his bread is very good if uninspiring in its selection, but that is down to local tastes. Where he does stand out is his pie crust, that crunchy butter texture comes from a really hot oven and great technique. We had a smashing time, as you can probably guess.
As can be expected, we had a slow, lazy start to the next day and blew out the cobwebs with a walk along the former disused rail line to the local Fours à Chaux, what look like a castle for gnomes but are actually lime kilns. The little white calves of the Charolais which we hoped to find foraging in the fields either side were absent, probably rotated off somewhere else, so the promised close up photo ops were not delivered, but perhaps after indulging in beef the previous evening that was a welcome mental degree of dissociation.
The French love rules. Love rules. They have a process for everything in public and probably all aspects of private life. They follow the rules, and they really have no respect, time nor affection for those who do not. Everyone is polite, it’s a simple sign of mutual respect. Saying ‘Bonjour’ to every single person in a shop in a small town, saying ‘Bonjour’ before you ask someone a question at the station or on the street, saying ‘Au revoir’ when you leave a place; they all signify that the other people are human like you, and deserve the basic respect. This is the Egalité in action.
The Liberté is limited in so far as one is free to do what you like, say what you want, as long as it hurts no-one and remember that it is but the first word in the Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite trifecta. The liberty, equality and brotherhood of the motto of the Republic are not taken as separate beliefs but in the power of their combination. So no semi-automatic rifles here; religious freedom does not mean one’s beliefs supersedes those of the state or, as of yesterday, the ability to remove a woman’s inalienable right to decide for herself whether she brings another life into the world.
They also take the small rules seriously. We have the recycling picked up three days a week, today the Music School from the Université de Lyon next door had overstuffed their large recycle bin. The binmen or ‘les ébouers’, took offense and taped over the bursting dumpster lid with red tape, declaring it was non-conforming and left it behind. We have a compost bin on most blocks now, in an effort to get the methane creating organic waste out of the landfills. They distributed to every household a little brown compost bin and a 120-day supply of brown paper bags which get thrown into the larger bin out front. Someone obviously didn’t read the rules and threw something they were not supposed to in it, and we had our compost bin taped shut for 2 weeks, as a punishment for depositing “non-conforming waste”.
I think the French approach to rules is refreshing, especially if your reference points like me are either England, where no one gives a shit for the rules or the US where they have a blind obsession for the rules even if they make no sense (pick your own personal amendment). The French had got sick of the hierarchical aristocratic system overseen by the King and the system of privileges for the guilds and the church. They had themselves a revolution in 1789 and threw all that out over a period of 10 years. They decided that the people were better at ruling themselves than having to listen to someone who happened to be born in a certain place to certain other people and so in 1793 cut off the King’s head to prove, amongst many things, that he most certainly was not divine. The practical difficulties of this degree of self-determination and the struggle for political control was demonstrated over the ensuing further 6 years of chaos starting with the Reign of Terror, under the ironically named National Convention to the Committee of Public Safety. It was not safe for the 16,000 members of the public who were executed in about 9 months. They had two further changes of power, and the Republic which had been so proudly and vehemently celebrated in 1792 gave way to the Directory. The French do love a good bureaucracy and two key the things that struck me reading “Citizens!” by Simon Schama (the best single volume history of the Revolution, even if a bit weighty) was that firstly, during all this 10 years of absolute chaos, France was embroiled in near constant wars, Prussia, Spain, Austria and good old Blighty shit-stirring from the sidelines, all had a go at settling scores with France. Secondly, they tried desperately to have an enlightened democracy and formed one after another of various forms of representations, taking lands and trade monopolies from one part of the society to try and give to others to equalize the country. They formed different lower and upper houses, localized representative assemblies, centralized budget forming bodies and one after another failed to unify the country. So they would start again, a few people would be executed and someone else got to try their idea until that failed, and they found themselves facing the guillotine. Finally, the Directory gave way to the Consulate, one of whom was Napoleon Bonaparte, and the rest as they say is history. As much as Boney gets grief now for restoring slavery and his warmongering, the France of today owes much to his administrative changes and rules which settled France into the 19th century power house that it became.
The French follow the rules religiously as long as they are seen as being applied equally and making sense. When they do not, they burn shit down. The spirit of the Revolution definitely lives on in that aspect of life in France. Since we have lived in France full-time we have had the ‘Gilets Jaune’ movement, ignited by protests against changes to rules around car emissions which punished the rural poor. We have had the concerted efforts by the French Unions to block arguably much needed reform of the sprawling pension system, because it punished the working poor. This became more of a fight about modern capitalism, and we enjoyed hearing the smashing of cars, shop windows and the smell of burning trash cans and bus shelters off and on for 3 months just around the corner. We have had the farmers blockading the major freeways and donating supplies of old tires and manure to local government offices. In each case there is a general support for the plight of the victim of the bad rules, the hardworking Everyman, suffering at the hands of an unseen bureaucrat in Paris or Brussels.
Wednesday was the day of St Colette. You may be surprised to read that as much as the French do like the writings of Colette and that she was honored by the state and buried in Père-Lachaise, the Catholic Church found her ‘sulpherous’ and refused her a church burial, so they would be pushed to beatify her. St Colette was a woman born in the late 14th century who found the normal life of a nun in an abbey too comfy and so started a new order that prescribed extreme poverty, going barefoot, and the observance of perpetual fasting and abstinence. The supposed anti-pope at the time in Avignon gave her his blessings and issued papal bulls to support her mission, and she managed to persuade enough other women that this was the life for them that she opened up 18 monasteries under her regime. This probably tells you more about how much fun normal life for women was in the late 15th century in rural France. As much as you may be being introduced to St Colette just now, she is known more widely than you would think as she is the Catholic version of IVF. Her mother gave birth to her at the age of 60, so not unsurprisingly she is patron saint of women seeking to conceive, expectant mothers, and sick children.
Wednesday’s lunch was postponed to Thursday due to what could best be summarized as a phone panic. When you lose a phone with all those great banking apps, business apps and documents accessible that you would not want anyone having access to, it’s not conducive to a relaxing lunch. When your 2-factor auth is only available on that phone which would normally allow you to change passwords, it pisses you off for the rest of your whole day for sure. If you happen to have your American SIM card as an E-SIM in the same phone, and you realize you would have to fly to the US to restart service, on which all your US banking 2-factor auths depend, it would ruin your week.
Hosanna! The Joy of Relocating Previously Lost Phone!
Spraying shit on the town hall has to be the best performative protest against bureaucratic bullshit ever conceived. The French farmers are in round 3 against the government of Gabriel Atal and the bright young thing PM is scrambling to defuse the situation ahead of Macron, never a popular figure in the countryside, making his cow-admiring, cheese tasting appearance at the annual Agricultural Salon in Paris this weekend. France loves a good protest and also love their farmers. The food and wine of France are at the heart of its self-image of being paradise on earth, the very essence of the good life. They parade their local produce as part of the ‘patrimoine’ and have been fierce in the protection of the various ‘pays’ and ‘produits’. There are 114 different protected types of agricultural produce under the AOP scheme in France, plus 363 registered protected wine designations. The obvious problem is that all of the protections mean nothing if the supermarkets are doing their best to drive price down and the incredible concentration of their purchasing power – the top 6 supermarkets are French owned and have revenues of €180 billion. Milk is bought at a marginal price that keeps farmer’s in penury and forced to use whatever production enhancers they can to keep alive, regardless of the long term damage to the cows. Several publicized suicides of farmers has reinforced the public support for the farmers and even with their protests blocking roads with what the Spanish are calling ‘tractorados’, as the protests spread to Spain, Czechia and Greece against what are seen as overly bureaucratic and complicated oversight and rules emanating from Brussels.
What is putting a hair up the ass of the farmers is that these rules which are costly and frustrating do not apply elsewhere. So the target for their ire is the import of foods from outside of EU, milk from New Zealand seems a ridiculous example yet finds its way into European dairy products. French farmers did an inspired version of a trolley run this week by going into French major supermarkets, loading up in front of the cameras with products either masquerading as ‘French’ produce, or imported where the local version cannot be made for similar pricing; walking through the doors, without paying, and then donating it to the food banks that are a part of everyday life for many people in the rural farming dominant communities.
Attal and other officials were supposedly surprised by “the scale and fury of the protests” . I was impressed. We had tractors ambling along the major freeways in and out of Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and most major cities, 3 abreast, at 5km an hour. Dumping of manure, hay bales and that staple of farm equipment, the old car tire, outside local offices of the government that are involved in any way with administering the EU’s farm policy. There is a speed camera on the way to Macon in a rural part of the department, and it often gets spray-painted but it got tired two weeks ago, and they have either not bothered to remove them or they keep them topped up. Surveys in France showed 90% plus support for the farmers, after all in principle they only want French produce as it’s the best and anything that threatens that gets an easy thumbs down.
In a familiar routine now this has been going on now for 4 weeks, protests, disruption, and widespread support, Attal and other ministers urgently travel hither and nither meeting with the local Farmer’s Union guys. Every time one is interviewed on TV we get yet another example of regional dialects living on, I can barely understand them and I think the urbane Gabriel struggles too. Having survived his brush with the blue-overalled ‘Bobs’ with tractors and wellies, he dashes back to Paris and prepares another round of concessions. One early give was the repeal of the 16, yes 16, different regimes involved with preserving and controlling hedgerows. This week brought increased checks on food producers claiming their products are made in France and heightened legal action taken against those that did not conform. Attal promised there would be “product by product” checks on foods produced outside the EU containing pesticides banned across the continent to ensure they were stopped. Which is all well and good, but you cannot help but wonder why did it take 4 weeks of mass protest to get that to happen? The original protests were about the byzantine pension rules for Farmers and the pending removal of the agricultural fuel subsidiaries. Those got rolled back, but the issue is less about which little ‘give’ the government acquiesces to next but the ongoing fight underneath across the European Union.
We have an existential threat to European peace and harmony sitting in his bunker under Moscow at the end of a 30’ long table, probably at this very moment lecturing some poor lackey on the history of the Kievan Rus, or at least his own personal take on it. His Ukraine adventure cranked up energy prices to the point that inflation took off. Everyone got squeezed. Everyone was supposed to make sacrifices, but it seems the large corporations, especially the supermarkets, didn’t get that memo. While they record soaring profits, paying dividends and obscene bonuses to each other for ‘job well done’ the farmers and the ordinary person struggles with higher costs for fuel, food and rent. At the same time we have very lofty and admirable goals to right the years of ecological wrongs with rules to reduce loss of hedgerows, biodiversity, over dependence on monocultures and overuse of pesticides. However, no-one wants to price that in and so as the pithy adage goes, the shit flows downhill and the farmer is supposed to deal with the consequences, but the supermarkets can still make their profits and the ordinary person does not want to pay €0.20 more for a liter of milk or butter to keep the farmer from bankruptcy or in extremis, suicide. So yes, I guess I understand why they are spraying shit at government offices.
Lyon this week has been mild again and although the schools are off for ski week the only snow is at high elevations and the smaller, low level elevation places in the Jura and the Alps Maritime are fields of unwelcoming brown rather than glistening pristine white snow. It is the snow season so the restaurants and media are talking up the winter dishes like Choux Croute, Fondu, Tartiflette and other various holy alliances of cheese, pork and potatoes.
Saturday was St Modeste’s feast day but again no special dish in his honor. St Modeste is, it transpires, one of those fortunate chaps who was considered a generally good sort as Bishop of Trier and was rewarded with sainthood for being a best in class confessor. So he actually died in his bed in 489, no miracles, visions of the bleeding pumping heart or public beheading following several days torture for him. He got the honor as more of a local nomination process that people put forward their local martyrs and their very best confessors. After being canonized locally, all it took was some local big wig to persuade the Pope to support it, perhaps while on pilgrimage to Rome, or Avignon. Having a local saint was always good for tourism and trade with people coming to see whatever relics remained at the patron church, so the big-wig would return happy, some fiscal lubrication of the process may have been necessary, but it seemed to work for these what are called Pre-Congregational Saints. All good things come to an end, and Rome and the Pope stopped the local ‘Vote for your local Saint’ efforts in the 11th century. By that point I think they were afraid the title of Saint was being devalued as there were mushrooming cases of miracles, no shortage of martyrs and by that time there were confessors nearly everywhere. So St. Modeste is really an old style saint, and in full Lent no real feasting to be had anyway.
Friday night we went to “Le Cochon Qui Boit” tucked away in the narrow streets between the hillside below Croix-Rousse, ‘Les Pentes’ and the Saone. The Drinking Pig is a bright small space in a typical Lyonnais Canut-style building run by two guys who trained at Tetedoie, the expensive Mich one star up on the hill of Fourviere. The food was very veggie led, a fabulous Jerusalem Artichoke bisque as an amuse-bouche signalled their intent. The wines are all natural as is the trend now. Natural wines all have labels that are bright-colored, and the names pun their way to taking what was traditionally very cheap wine from non-fashionable appellations into something cool and sells at 3 times the price of their traditional neighbors. The first white I tried was a Gros Plant Nantais which was crisp with a hint of the fruit from the Melon de Bourgogne grape it was partly blended from. More succesful than the Jura white that followed, a grassy yellow Chardonnay which only just made it on to the side of pleasurable. The Carignan from Languedoc was lighter than I expected but a great compliment to the Pigeonneau fermier de Bresse, petit épeautre et blettes. Filleted breast of roast pigeon, served with spelt, chard and a cabbage parcel stuffed with all the inside bits of the bird made into a deep red rich sausage. The dessert was insanely good. Describing it as butternut squash three ways does it a disservice, one caramelized round of roast squash sat in a nutty foam and was topped with a quenelle of butternut ice-cream wrapped in a stripe of chestnut puree. I always feel a bit uneasy taking pictures of plates as it is so clichéd, but here is the pigeon dish. In conclusion, this particular pig was well-fed and did his best to join in the drinking.
There are several words that, if not unique to the city, they are redolent of and in their repetition evoque Lyon. Canut, canaille, coquins, bouchons and gones. Gones technically is local slang for young kids but is appropriated to represent those who think of themselves as truly Lyonnais, the children of the city. We have become the adopted children of this great city, we explore with a childlike curiosity. Since we found our little part of the 3rd near Place Bir Hakeim 18 months ago we have spent more and more time here, discovering our way around, venturing further and further and developing the useful mental maps of where we find the things we need.
As someone said to me this week, Lyon fundamentally is a city of nosh, ‘une ville de bouffe’. That manifests itself in various ways. There are more restaurants with Michelin stars here than in Paris, this is where people come from around the globe to learn to cook. From the pilgrim like Bill Buford, the serious foodies, to the many Japanese who come to worship at the altar of Bocuse. France is famously great for French food, and generally sucks at all other cuisines. Lyon is the exception. Many of the global visitors, having learned their part in the brigade at one of the many cooking schools, stay for a while and present their version of their culinary tradition for a French audience. So Lyon has a ton of good Japanese restaurants, Korean, Thai, West African and even Mexican (not Tex-Mex). They are forced to tailor their offering to the local tastes, especially at lunchtime, the hot spice is turned down to 2, a basket of sliced bagette is provided and there are 3 courses, the main course has a starch and a protein.
The 3-course meal comes in around €20 as that is the average allowance that all workers get on their ‘carte resto’, the French equivalent of the old luncheon vouchers. It’s a great example of state intervention that works in France. The worker in a large company has a canteen where free or heavily subsidized food – again 3 courses and wine is available. When I visit a large client CMA-CGM in their gorgeous tower on the waterfront in Marseilles we go for lunch in their ‘canteen’; as much as it’s served buffet style the food is serious. For everyone else who does not have access to a company restaurant they receive a restaurant card, it looks like a standard credit card and functions like one for food and drink. Couple of rules: can only be used on a work day, no Sundays, no holidays; can be used anywhere you might buy lunch from supermarkets, snack bars, fast food or restaurants. Food or booze but up to a daily limit, Mme Britton’s card is €25 a day. Just think about that with an American legal mind set: a company provided card is used to buy alcohol?! The deal with the card is the employee pays a contribution, the restaurant gives a discount and the company pays the spread. The company gets a tax deduction, the employee gets a tax-free perk, the restaurant/retail business gets business for a discount; win:win:win.
It is winter in Lyon, or what passes in our post-truth days as winter, it’s mid-February and since the Fête de Chandeleur, February 2nd the temperature has been more spring like with warm showers and temperatures in 50’s and 60’s, 8-14 C. We missed the pancakes on Chandeluer and will do likewise tomorrow on Shrove Tuesday. Not that I have anything against them, we had an old recipe that was Rachel’s grandmother’s for Finnish Pancakes, which produced crêpes as close to what I remember as my Mum’s Pancake Day pancakes, but we cannot find it. I remember my Mum gamely running a Pancake Race with other mothers at my elementary school in Bradford on Avon, I am pretty sure that is a tradition that has been consigned to the Ladybird Book version of English History and not something you would catch a French housewife doing on Chandeleur.
In the real spirit of winter, especially as we are but an hour from the Alps, we went for Raclette on Saturday. The restaurant l’Altitude on Rue de Crequi is the best rated of the mountain style places in Lyon and is a very pine-plank walled ski-lodge of a spot. Raclette is a cheese and the deal with the eponymous dish is that the cheese is melted to the point of bubbling yummyness and then scraped over steamed potatoes to eat with various hams and dried meats with some nods at healthiness via sides of a green salad or haricot beans. It is meant to fill a starving stomach following hours of skiing in cold weather, so it is heavy and filling. Lazing around watching Fulham thump Bournemouth followed by England remarkably beating Wales in the 6 Nations is not the most exacting form of exercise as preparation for such a repast, but we did it justice. The Savoyard food or Mountain cuisine developed around what you can keep in semi-isolated mountain valleys during winter and pre-refrigeration. Cheese, air dried hams and sausages, potatoes and pickles are served in various forms; tartiflette, which is basically a complete baked cheese filled with potatoes and added cream to make it more runny; fondue, which is either melted cheese into which you dip stuff or Raclette, which is made from various hard mountain cheeses made from the milk of cows who have been grazing on the rich summer pastures like Comte, Beaufort or Raclette itself.
Most places have electric hot place devices to do the melting, but Altitude has charcoal fired table-top braziers that are awesome at heating the cheese together with the diners and just about look safe, in a way that you know would never be allowed in the US without a shit storm of lawsuits. By the time we had near consumed the 300g of cheese allocated per person, we were cheery-cheeked and down to t-shirts. They unsurprisingly do a good line in ice cream and sundaes to help you cool down. The ice cream was seriously good, house made and artisanal, including a Charteuse flavored one, which is a bit their thing as they have a bunch of cocktails using the green and yellow monk’s bane. To finish, I felt obligated to have a Chartreuse but chickened out and went with the 2cl rather than the 4cl option. They presented a special glass about the size of a thimble, into which a monstrous Jeroboam sized bottle of the green lightning poured by measure. I had forgotten how much of a punch it packs, and we agreed we should have a bottle at home, it’s a very Lyon thing.
There was a rumour that my grandfather, Arthur Harris, was part Chinese. His grandmother was Irish who arrived via the port of Liverpool. According to the legend had been left, with child, by a Laskar sailor, she moved to London, married Arthur’s grandfather and life moved on. Looking at pictures of my grandfather and our mutual lack of body hair supported this bizarre legend right up until ’23 and Me’ burst that bubble to reveal the more prosaic fact that I am mainly English and Irish, genetically, with a 6% smattering of French, probably via Huguenots arriving in East London in the 18th century.
I first went to China in 1992, a quick and unremarkable business trip to Beijing which was cut short after a day when I was sent packing, for the unforgettable business crime of being found out that I was about to jump ship to the competition. I think at the time we still referred to it mostly as Peking. In the intervening 30 years I have been often to China, mainly in the south of what is an immense country, so I would not in any way consider myself an expert or even a Sinophile. I have had offices under my direction in Shanghai on three occasions, one of which was actually on the Bundt in the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building. Now occupied by some regional minor Chinese bank, its insanely large single-piece 50′ green marble pillars hold up the domed roof of the grand foyer with its mural of the centers of global trade, as of the time of construction in the 1930’s. Our office was accessed from an unassuming side door around the corner but there was definitely a sense of Shanghai as this global city of trade. The Bundt was that symbol, colonial grandeur on a grandiose scale, replete with expensive restaurants and bars and the view of the burgeoning Pudong business district with its Soviet style Sputnik inspired radio tower overshadowing all else. Since then, I have had two depressingly small and modern offices in unassuming buildings back from the main drag and that has been mostly due to Shanghai’s rise, its massive building boom and the inflation in office rents.
I had a gap in visiting China from the middle of 1999 until 2005, and on my first trip back I can vividly recall the long grey drive from the airport into the city and seeing all the factories, that you were used to seeing, being knocked down and office parks being built. The offices were for banks and insurance companies as Shanghai pivoted to try and become the Asian financial hub and compete with Hong Kong. This was the start of the rise of China’s middle class, the domestic market for houses, apartments and appliances was taking off. There were of course still factories and a trip to Shenzhen the next year, where we held a sales meeting at a golf resort reminded you of where that growth was fueled. Western golf resorts have one championship course designed by famous old white golfer dude, maybe two. This place had 18 courses, each 18 holes, each designed by a different old golfer dude. I could run first thing around the various fairways but only that early. By coffee break at 10.00 the air was acidic and metallic, by the lunch break it was visible and by the evening it was plainly toxic.
In 2005 Shanghai was booming, the old houses of the French concession held small boutiques and restaurants, and it was popular with tourists. I like many visitors brought back imitation luxury handbags and watches, if you paid a bit more you went to rooms in the back of shops where the quality knock-offs were found, probably copied directly on the production line of the main western brands, but if you just wanted a Louis Vuitton copy handbag there were hundreds of street sellers who would sell you one for $10 in hard green currency.
I took another break from visiting between 2009 and 2015 and when I came back next the change had accelerated again. The Chinese financial and property development companies were trying to out-do each other with more and more ornate, flashier towers overlooking the Bundt from Pudong. The radio tower is now completely overshadowed by these new and ever taller skyscrapers of modernist style that would not look out of place in Hong Kong or New York and in a uniquely Chinese touch, each of these large glass monuments to commerce is completely covered with moving light displays, mainly high-tech ads for cars and air conditioners but on a scale that makes Time Square seem like Piccadilly Circus in the 1950’s.
The cheap knock offs had gone, and the reason was self-evident, in every shopping mall that had popped up the western luxury good shops were wall to wall. Xintiandi had become Beverly Hills. There was an odd irony as in the middle of the district is the hallowed site of the first national congress of the Chinese Communist party and around that much lauded and revered former school is surrounded now by some of the most expensive real estate on earth. I visited other cities like Xiamen and Quanzhou and back to Shenzhen. The acrid air had completely gone, as had the factories producing running shoes, sneakers and plastics. They had been shipped off to cheaper labor markets in Vietnam and Thailand. The riverside locations which had been convenient to load finished goods in boxes into boats to go down river to the ports of the Pearl River delta were now apartment buildings and parks. President Xi’s mother lived there, of course the air was clean. If you were a resident of Guangdong province, you had unfettered access to Hong Kong, partly to allow residents to work in Hong Kong. If you were mega-rich it was worthwhile having a property in Guangdong and make that your official residence to get that access to Hong Kong and the freedom to travel when you wanted without visa issues and if something went sour between you and the increasingly doctrinaire government, you could get out of the country easily.
The Bundt and the dome of HSB Building
I always loved Hong Kong. Its energy was stimulating, the variety of food and shopping was more interesting than the mainland generally, and as I was fortunate to have friends living there I would by default weekend in Hong Kong rather than Shanghai. If you stayed in a western primarily tourist hotel in Shanghai or Beijing you still had reasonable internet access to the west, CNN was on the TV together with BBC World and Al Jazeera. If you stayed in Hong Kong, you were still in the democratic world, both figuratively and spiritually, basic western norms of censorship, freedom of the press, freedom of expression. It was the only place anywhere in China where you could even mention Tiananmen Square, they even commemorated it every year.
Since the ascendance of Xi and the shift from politician to God-like figurehead, the new Mao in the Chinese consciousness, things had been going generally well on any measure. GDP growth was the envy of the world year-on-year, even if we all knew they massaged the numbers. They had been successful at bringing a billion people out of poverty. They also seemed to be making massive strides in technology, what the Chinese people used their phones for, on a day-to-day basis, was 3–4 years ahead of the west. Their on-phone gaming, entertainment sites and combinations of what in the west are several distinct activities was impressive and world leading. The reason was simple, they had a massive domestic market, and they were pretty good at keeping foreign well-funded competition out. They had done that across many sectors, but the phone-based consumer economy really stood out.
Then they decided they didn’t like a China copy that didn’t have the same restrictions as the motherland, as it might give people ideas about their Xi-thought based controlled existence, if they saw another way for Chinese people to be governed. Unsurprisingly then Hong Kong got shut down, freedom of press gone, right to protest gone, right of assembly gone, right to criticize the government gone. The local government does not just kowtow to Beijing it actively worships the direction and instructions handed down. They also quietly closed that escape route for the rich and successful out of Guangdong.
Then they gave the world Covid-19, either directly through a lab escape or indirectly by continuing to turn a blind eye to live wild animal ‘wet’ meat markets to mix pathogens and species. In a country with an infallible God-like leader massive uncontrolled pandemics are embarrassing, so the Chinese government went by the standard authoritarian playbook. Denial, punishment of anyone who has the temerity to report that shit is out of control, belated and limited steps to lock it down, refusal to cooperate with all the multilateral medical treaties put in place to speed sharing of vital data. As China prides itself as a technological global leader it would be equally embarrassing to admit that it cannot make a truly effective vaccine, so they continued to ignore Western offers of assistance and continued to promote the myth of their great scientific hegemony by donating millions of doses of Sinovac’s vaccine to the emerging economies in Africa, Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, even though it had very limited efficacy and had issues with younger patients and limited testing data was shared. The elite in Beijing were of course protected and their limitations experienced daily were mild. The rest of China however enjoyed Orwellian levels of control; months locked inside their apartments with food delivered to the housing compounds while geriatric male local wardens enjoyed the power of an official armband on the sleeve to enforce an iron like lock on daily life. Shanghai had the temerity to suggest the rules were overdone and after the first wave of infection abated tried to move back to some sense of normalcy. Beijing always has a beef with Shanghai, it’s always seen as too uppity, too open to the outside world and their heretical views. So, while the rest of the world actually went through various waves and built up a general herd immunity over the two years of the main pandemic China isolated itself. The government recommended traditional herbal remedies, partly because their health system is spotty at best and if you are in the boonies your local ‘health care’ is a partially trained nurse in the next village over and you are hundreds of miles from a real hospital. They spread good news stories through the media about their medical heroes, how everyone was happy and at home. Chinese social life is set up around very small living spaces, generally shared with multiple generations, leaving for work 6 days a week and eating out a lot. Not as great a place to be locked in for months at a time. Unsurprisingly at the end of 2021 the wheels started to come off so overnight it seemed, the government gave up and let it rip through the population. They still publish death figures, but according to the official data very few people were able to die in front of someone having just been tested positive for covid to qualify under their byzantine rules as a ‘covid related’ death. However, the crematoria data told a different story. The data was leaked then quickly disappeared, as is their way.
Technically Chinese residents have been able to travel, as in request an exit visa, since January 1st, 2022. Very few did in 2022 as they faced a 4-week, later reduced to a 2-week, government sponsored and controlled quarantine upon return. As of this January the requirement for quarantine is only in the case of a resident arriving in an infected state, although they have a declaration requirement for entry into China which generally prevents you entering back into China, resident or not, if you are ill with Covid. Chinese tourism to Europe and the US is still very low this summer, the large number of Chinese tour groups with their flags, obsessive photographing anything and everything will not be missed other than by the tourism industry. We did a tour of the Vatican and Sistine Chapel in 2018 and it felt like getting on the Kowloon Ferry at rush hour, all you could hear was the sound of the cash register and the fact that every piece of elaborately ornate art bore the legend of how someone or other had gifted it, Jean Calvin would be surprised to hear they are still selling indulgences it seems.
I arrived in Pudong airport two weeks ago for the first time since 2019. I scanned my QR code of my health declaration entered through the ubiquitous WeChat app and was let in. It had a whole performative quality to it as no-one really took the code check seriously. A Polish acquaintance on the same trip had struggled to get the QR code so instead, in frustration, photographed an Amazon return label’s QR code and brandished it noisily rather than scanning it and was waved through. Very few people wore masks. In fact, I saw more masks in San Francisco on hipsters walking their dogs in the Spring. There are 42 desks for passport checks at Pudong. I have been through on prior trips and all 42 are in use, its massive but historically they are set up to handle very large volumes, over half are for returning residents. They had 8 open for residents and 4 for ‘Foreigners’. The airport is cavernous and empty of people now, for a long boring reason I ended up arriving and leaving China twice in 5 days. I decided to get some exercise after a long flight from London and walked up the half mile long terminal away from the gates that were active and after a couple hundred yards it got super sticky as they had turned off the AC for that half as it was just not getting any traffic, the retail outlets are shut down at that end. Shanghai was busy, it is holiday season and I was attending a trade show, one of several that were going on. The majority of visitors though are Chinese. The hotel we use near the office is a Marriott Renaissance but it has now pivoted to Chinese domestic tourists as the foreigners are obviously not numerous enough to support the hotel. So now on the hotel WIFI you cannot access Google, you can access the sanitized Bing (thanks Microsoft, still helping Big Brother!). The TV only shows Chinese TV, 32 channels of sanitized approved messaging consistent with President Xi Jinping Thought. There is an English language new channel, China International News Television. We were served up some scripted version of global news by their versions of William Joyce, a big bluff American anchor in suit and tie straight out of CNN in 2005 and supported by a couple of Aussies. The ticker across the bottom was displaying headlines about US aggression and Chinese good works. Looking out of my hotel window the building site across the road where they cleared the old style Shikumen houses is still scrub and debris. The cranes across the cityscape can still be seen but you can count them now, a fools’ errand in 2015. The electric scooters have mysteriously disappeared. They had competing app-based young startups fighting for share and Unicorn valuations when I was last here. They have conquered the world although Paris just banned them and San Francisco have limited them but in the homeland they have been completely excised as if they never existed. When I first visited Shanghai, the streets were full of bicycles, old big wheel city bikes. The cars were revamped older models of Volkswagen and Buicks, Toyotas and Renaults. Then the bikes were replaced by motor bikes and the cars started to get more diverse. Then the motor bikes were all changed for electric, silent death for unwary pedestrians, the e-scooters were all over the pavements and the cars were all BMW’s and Audis. Years pass and the bikes are back, but they are rental bicycles, the e-scooters are gone. The cars are now 50% electric with Tesla the market leader but most of the brands are local. The models are futuristic and slightly alien, the diversity of car brands you have never heard of is odd. The strangest one is “Build Your Dreams’, yes that is the company name and it’s not a shake-based diet, the badge is on the car rear in all three words not BYD, which I guarantee is how it will be marketed in the west; they are serious, and Berkshire Hathaway is an investor. Zeekr, Wuling, Xpeng and Nio are all fighting for share and all looking to export. I have been involved with purchasing lots of stuff from China over the years and its low tech in general but their predilection for cutting any corner they possibly can to save a nickel does not make me rush to buy something as serious as an electric car. In fact, I pull my hair out over how a garden hose cannot make it through the summer so a potentially very fast lethal device built around a lithium battery that can and do explode does not fill me full of hope.
Rental bikes in SoHo
Overall Shanghai looked tired and worn around the edges. The Beverly Hills style shopping malls with Carrara marble entryways are now all chipped and any fine work is broken or uneven, probably was not Carrara marble after all. The exhibition center which was built for the World Expo in 2010 has seen better days. It has a leaking roof, I have seen toilets in better condition at an English football ground, and the main hawser cables holding the curved sail shaped roof are all corroded. It does have shiny new facial recognition cameras at the entry gates, but they only work on the locals and even then, we get funneled into one of the 10 gates that are lit up as if working because the process is we show our badge, look at the camera then the young lady presses the button to let us through. The other people at the vacant gates are just there to direct us to the one where the gatekeeper is working. We then get patted down and bags X-rayed but all the beeps of the hand scanner of our phones and keys etc. are just ignored, as long as we have been scanned, that seems to be the important point, not that they investigate anything the scanner finds.
In 2016 it really felt like they were winning, that China was the most vibrant growing economy on earth, they owned the West. Since then, it has slid sideways and backwards as Xi’s thirst for control has pushed all the resources into a centralized Communist Party-controlled state sector. That only goes so far especially as the building boom is bust, regardless of how many aircraft carriers you build, there is a limit to state sponsored infrastructure. I met with a State-owned shipping line exec and on his card, he proudly states he is Party rep as well as CEO. They have been locking up the tech entrepreneurs, banning games, restricting hours that children can be on devices for pleasure. As much as the elderly curmudgeon in me thinks limited access hours is not a bad thing it should not be a state dictate. It sure as shit destroyed the blooming tech sector. They are publishing economics guidance for the coming year and finally they are making noises about the need for the Private Sector to grow as well as the state sector. However, they also at the same time released notes and guidance for private companies about the need for them to foster Party behavior, structures and Party practices, that should do wonders for entrepreneurialism, having some more committees to vet the next steps. China has graduate unemployment at 20% currently. So, the loyal members of society who stuck by the one child choice, scrimped and saved to pay for the private tuition to make sure little Lian or Lue get into the best schools, then do it again paying for tutors so that they get into the best University and after all that 1 in 5 cannot find a job. President Xi’s grand plan is that they should go and work in the fields, to develop character.
They had successfully managed to take the shine off the tech sector and its growth and jobs by 2019 and then Covid 19 and their heavy-handed approach, especially the serial shutdowns has taken the wind out of the economy. It has quietly kick-started a brain drain, which is just what you need for a country with a declining birth rate already below replacement levels. Everyone I met who has built a business up and is successful has moved their family offshore and commute back. Australia, Canada but mostly Singapore. Hong Kong is no longer safe so they cannot even take the half measure of moving there. Hong Kong’s brightest have moved to the same destinations, the less gifted have made it to Taiwan and Malaysia, Cantonese restaurants turning up everywhere. All things have a natural cycle, especially economies. What the Chinese have done since the death of Mao is incredible, especially in comparison with Russia. They have lifted the majority of their people from absolute poverty and enduring short unpleasant lives. In the 90’s it looked like the ‘End of History’, that capitalism would level everything, if you gave everyone blue jeans and an I-phone democracy would follow. Xi obviously saw that as a threat to the Party and to China’s future and has done what he can to preserve a sense of Chinese destiny and control. However, with all authoritarians the world has a habit of coming up with levels of complexity beyond the ken of a single man, regardless of how deified his very thoughts are. Democracies greatest strength is that it allows discourse and different opinions and solving big issues sometimes needs that debate. As much as we can get annoyed by the stupid decisions that democratic countries make, like Brexit, BoJo and Truss as Prime Minister and Trump’s election to the Presidency, regardless of the not so hidden hand of Putin in all of that, it is so much better to have that choice to be stupid as a society. One guy does not have the answer to everything, and history has a way of sticking that reality up their ass in the end.
There is an apartment frenzy in the Dogpatch, the scrappy former industrial dock area of San Francisco but there is no one around except food delivery people trying to find obscure addresses and pick ups of laundry, because even thoug your $1m apartment has a washing machine and drier you are just too busy. Incongruously there is what appears at first sign to be a large luxury hotel, or is it a member’s club, there is security at the door and two valets for parking. No, its a furniture store in a building the size of the White House, its “The Gallery at the Historic Bethlehem Steel Building”, of course it is, this is San Francisco. There are lots and lots of new buildings around The Chase Center and mix of bioscience and residential- still no shops or bars so the desert is soulless. The old bars like Rock Island Resort and Ramp must be killing it after the Warriors and the concert crowd arrived, their land was worthless when it was empty shipyards and broken windows but its the pulsing heart of Mission Beach now. Where I am staying, in the old residential heart of the Dogpatch, wine bars and brew pubs abound on 3rd and some old dive bars still survive like the Dogpatch Saloon and The Star Bar from when I was living in SF and dating Rachel. Magnolia Brewery is gone and is now Souvla which is a Greek cum Mediterranean, I missed their beers and bbq on metal tins like at War Pigs in Copenhagen. The inhabitants are classic Bay Area folk: Earnest young white men with large but trimmed Mormon like beards, lots of Carhartt and shiny brown leather boots still. Just as many cool young active Asian kids, predominantly in work out gear. The homeless tents and camper vans have self agglomerated on wider access roads and in SOMA so as much as it is deserted it is not overrun like some end of days movie. The spontaneous food truck gatherings are now in controlled fenced entertainment zones near the apartments around UCSF. Also spotted The American Middle Aged Male – nominatively casual above the ankle, hoodie, jeans, clunky wallet chain clip on belt loop. But where did they find those brown slip on casual shoes so effortlessly matched with branded black sports socks – usually a minor brand like Reebok or ASICS bought in a 10 pack at Target or Walmart? Cocktails are in but we are no longer in the Age of Cocktails. These are artisan cockertales, hand crafted and as such are sipped referentially and veeeery sloooowly so you can get from sitting down aperitif to the main course with one and then relunctantly add another to cruise thro to post-check escape. Unwritten class divide continues…well-educated white graduates are waitresses, taking orders, doing the recommendations, enjoying the jokes and land grabbing the tips. The Latino guys bus and work the hot iron in the kitchen, the Latina women do some food and drink delivery and bus. And this is at a women owned and managed place with a Latina head chef. Face masks are the new backpack – having a heavy fabric base mask on while walking the dog in March 2023 is the equivalent of the Herschel backpack of 2014 to establish your cool credentials in a post anti-vax world, you are woke and you are post-Covid-sensitive individual. Or you are wearing a crappy cheap blue Chinese-made mask and are part of the poor working class who is just scared shitless of getting sick and losing pay, again. But it was noticeable to leave a Europe of large reported Covid deaths and arriving in the land of the free to see how traumatized the blue part of the country still is by the ‘civil’ discourse around how to manage a public pandemic or at the least how to score political points. I went to see Tortoise, the ne plus ultra of post rock at the Great American Music Hall, an establishment as venerable as the Fillmore. The audience was obviously mainly male and white and a touch of grey abounds, as well as the young and hip. And there was a fair spread of masks, some which ended up as chin bands after a couple of beers but it is part of the standard attire here. The GAMH is, as it says on the can, an old music hall with balcony and ornate gold trim. It has its regulars who sit up in the balcony with their twin stereo mikes and camera on a stand openly recording each and every gig, a dead head tradition. It’s marginally in the Tenderloin altho technically Union Square. It’s the shittiest part of Union Square and to get to it you have to pass through the tenderloin and my Lyft did the full dystopian tour crossing 6th in SOMA. There is a sad and dangerous world covering an area of 4 blocks by 6 blocks where the desperate live and die on the streets. Hostels, liquor stores who all cash money orders behind their armored tills, functioning bars and eateries dotted amongst them but all with heavy security. Multiple variations of crazy are on display, the naked, the shouting, a plethora of wheel chaired usually in the road, the dazed and the hustlers, male and female all trying to make enough to score. Trash on the streets, literally and figuratively. The new Chinatown station is open now. It is the final link of the above the ground T line on Muni that snaked south through the Dogpatch and former industrial lands of the south side of the San Francisco Bay down to Hunter’s Point and Sunnydale. Now it goes underground at Bryant to new stations at the Moscone exhibition center, Union Square and stops on the top of the hill on Washington street smack in the middle of Chinatown. Real Chinatown, not tourist shops and lanterns Chinatown. Stores selling boxes and boxes of roots, ginger or ginseng I have no idea, store after store with all signs in Chinese characters. Stores selling everything you would find in a Safeway but compressed into a space the size of two phone booths. Lots and lots of restaurants, snack shops, coffee shops, bubble-tea shops. Most with frayed and faded pictures of their proud culinary offerings with bad English translations. Crowds of generally elder Chinese with wheelie shopping bags, a blue and white striped plastic bag of some food treat hanging from one wrist. Always wearing sneakers, not for any desire to suddenly sprint away but because they are the cheapest shoes available. Chinatown is not wealthy or aspiring it is where people who have no English language skills or any other skills survive in their own community, cheaply. There is a communal square off Kearney called Portsmouth Square for some reason. It has a quasi temple shelter and raised beds and benches. It is populated with mahjong playing old Chinese geezers, occasional Tai Chi exercises and social events. Like any open space in downtown SF it is shared with some homeless men, with their worldly possessions in a shopping cart and their woes on display. Portsmouth Square sits on the border of the Financial District where my office is. The FiDi has seen better days. The remote work option combined with awful prior commutes has killed the area, stores have not reopened since the pandemic, windows are boarded up and there are more signs saying To Let than there are toilers in the now dark offices. There is a shoe to drop soon as the leases – which the super greedy and sharp landlords kept short so they could keep jacking up the rents expire and the rents come tumbling down at the same time as the loan financing costs of the commercial property market are going up. Maybe a good potential outcome from this debacle is that the offices get converted to cheap apartments, something SF desperately needs.
Cheap rooms are not in short supply in Las Vegas. As the plane circles over what is left of Lake Powell and banks towards Vegas the context of its desert surroundings is in your face, flat scrub in all directions until the salt flats run up against the Sierra mountains to the west. From the air the urban sprawl is evident which provides the cheap housing for the worker bees that keep the facade of the wonder of Las Vegas humming along. I was staying at the Mirage, an appropriate metaphor for Vegas, aging, a bit battered and down at the heel, unloved and relying on its former glory. The Hollywood entrance to a Vegas hotel is that you drive up in the convertible to the shiny loud entrance foyer and valets rush out to take the keys, grab the bags and the beautiful couple sashay into the bright lights of the lobby to join the other beautiful people. The reality is the arrival in a line of cabs fighting through the baffled Ubers being turned away in the direction of the parking garage, the families discharging from minivans and the harassed dads trying to work out where to park. The hustling porters are juggling the departing and the arriving with equally cheery calls of “Welcome to the Mirage” and “Come back and see us soon” and for every seasoned business traveler on convention duty in control of their wheelies there is a family with mountains of bags, strollers, pillows ( seriously who travels on a plane with their own pillows?) and backpacks.
I didn’t see anyone scream to a halt in the Red Shark on its over-inflated tires and Hawaiian shirts seem to have been replaced by dark hoodies as the de rigeur costume of choice, partly to deal with the freezing A/C. Once inside the hallowed halls of this gambling paradise it is never bright and airy, thats not the vibe. Its permanently 2 in the morning. Its dark but illuminated by the non stop wall of flashing betting machines, pinging, ringing and strobing us with enticements to take part in every game of chance, every TV show game, every cartoon character’s demonic gambling twin encouraging us to just try our luck. It is also a journey back into the 70’s as people are smoking all around you. They cannot smoke in the restaurants, common areas or non-smoking floors but in the gambling areas and bars. Those A/C systems run on overdrive trying to suck the cancer our of the air for the majority who do not want it. In Vegas’ defense there are 4 or 5 smoke free ‘resorts’ but most business events take place at the run of the mill for whom smoking is still part of the code of malpractice.
The casinos throb with people for 20 hours a day. People on the move from the rooms to the food outlets to the pools and theaters and convention spaces. People checking in, people checking out, people passing through, there is no room to run and you sure can’t hide.
If you missed it Vegas is now a place for families. Why anyone thinks children really want to be inside a behemoth smoke filled gambling machine surrounded by the old and desperate is an interesting question but they have been successful. At least in terms of persuading vast numbers of parents that the pizzazz will wow the tots. There are random kids characters around the Strip, Goofy-like giant dogs hi-fiving the kids to reinforce the “Fun!!” vibe. However they seemed to be outnumbered by the semi-naked young women in platform boots and giant headdresses offering selfie photo-ops and free passes to Clubs scattered around the rim of the city where more nakedness and intimate entertainment is offered. They are technically clothed but in a classic Vegas move having large artificial boobs protruding from a bodice covered in repurposed pantyhose is ‘clothed’ but walking towards you in broad daylight it is more an act of display than one trying to dissemble. Outdoor speakers along the strip blare out Uptown Funk and half the strolling holiday makers are carrying a drink as they amble from one shopping mall to the next, as they boulevardier from Paris to Venice.
The family groups look predominantly recent immigrants of all hues, Vegas is America writ large and they have come to celebrate their success in being there and having the money to enjoy it. Las Vegas is not in anyway a cheap experience. The rooms can be a deal for sure. I was staying at corporate rate of $149 for a room that was larger than most European 2 bedrooms apartments, in fact my bathroom was larger than a San Francisco studio currently renting for $3500 a month. But….everything is Vegas priced. Breakfast was $50, drinks are $15, dinner main courses start at $45 with the median $80 and when the bill arrives the tip choices are laid out for you 22%, 25% or 30% with the correct amount shown to help you if the drinks have slowed down your mental arithmetic.
There are lots of entertainment options which is part of the draw. From the never aging kings of magic like David Copperfield, the never aging kings of pop like Donny Osmond and Rod Stewart and the never aging kings of rock like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon. Big acts continue to bolster Las Vegas’s reputation as an entertainment center for the aging boomers but you have to be really big for the numbers to work, Adele is there now in residency, which surprised me but in a way it encapsulates her fame, she is a global star. Muse will be there for a two week stint, I was less sure about that but I am sure they know what they are doing. There is a rotating roster of ‘global’ DJs headlining sets at the clubs and the EDM scene is alive and kicking, but there is less surprise about that with middle America being the biggest market for the big beats and easy access to the drugs that make that repetition more ecstatic than tedious.
As you leave the airport is well manned and efficient. When you get through the super quick security you understand why as the casino experience continues in the concourse. Surrounded by more of the 21st century versions of the one-armed bandits, people are desperately stuffing notes and credit cards in to make that last winning bet that will wipe out all the losses, the luck will turn if only one you take one more chance, imagine if you stopped and the next person sitting down at your machine wins the jackpot? So with all that they don’t want people stuck in long security lines, time is not a wasting in the Harry Reid International Airport. Which Harry would have been happy with, after all Harry was a man who famously took every dime the government could be persuaded to shovel Nevada’s way or his way for that matter. He was also a believer in UFOs, and why not, its Nevada.
As a not quite stranger in an increasingly strange land I was happy to take off and head back to the old world, I was afraid of it and yes, I loathed it.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 