Giving it the Mad Elbow

I love good names - the crazy, the clever, the downright eccentric; like a resto I saw in Paris the other day called Le Coude Fou. Wondrous . . . it means The Mad Elbow; or as we'd say, the Raising of the Wrist. But it's also a play on le coup de foudre or love at first sight.

I used to know a great restaurant called The Angry Cheese. Don't you just love the overtones of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear? Then some prong bought the place and changed it to the utterly boring Frère Jacques. How could you possibly dump such a memorable name?

It’s always the details of a place that catch your eye and give it colour and identity. It's kind of handy in Paris in August when the locals have all legged it to avoid tourists like me. Of course I’d legged it from the Aude to avoid tourists like them. But when a great city is mostly away on holiday it gives the place a languid elusiveness that makes it hard to get your bearings.

You mostly navigate by Metro stations and the big museums. We were staying out in the Chinese Quarter, a quick wizz away by the ultra-posh new Metro Ligne 14. Incidentally you can get a three-course with wine, Michelin-listed meal for €20 a head in the neighbourhood; Paris doesn’t have to be pricey.

It has to be said that apart from posters for the deliciously-named Les Lapins Crétins Show, brand-new line 14 is a touch on the bland side. For the real flavour of the Metro you need one of the old lines with their grotty tin-box Hornby trains, grease, grime, sweat, slappers, itinerant sax players and miles and miles of lumpy white tiles. No stupid rabbits curiously.

The subterranean intestines of Paris are loosely connected by an incredible collection of passages which may or may not lead you to the next platform that you’re looking for; there must be literally kilometres of them, weaving their way drunkenly between the different lines and multiple exits to the streets.

To add a touch of class to the whole idea, one old railway station, presumably called La Gare d’Orsay, though I’m guessing, ended up as the wonderful Musée d’Orsay, home to the city’s collection of 19th and 20th century figurative painting. A four-hour or even an all-day wallow in Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne and many more costs a princely €8, i.e. bugger all.

Both the d’Orsay and the equally brill modern art collection at the Pompidou Centre have their fraught moments if, like me, you have a crap head for heights. Personally I’m not enough of a stupid rabbit actually to want to be dangled off the side of the (very tall) PC building in long glass tubes. The pic, by the way, is of the Louvre taken from the roof terrace of the Musée d'Orsay.

Somehow as a break from art-mania, Claire and I ended up in the bizarre necropolis Père Lachaise. For a crematorium and graveyard it’s definitely a touch prétentieux but some of France’s finest are buried there; Balzac, Proust, Molière, not to forget our own dear Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison of The Doors. It’s the Crem de la Crême.