Here's one I prepared earlier - The DIY Pollack

Regular readers of this well-belovèd chron will have twigged that gawping at seriously good pictures is one of my favourite spectator sports.

I find it deeply satisfying that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be an artist myself and am content merely to appreciate. After all, if people can be bothered to do the paintings etc then someone else has to do the looking at them; it's only fair.

I have a lot of time for dear old Jackson, much as he may have been completely off his trolley. This gives me certain logistical problems in that all the real Pollacks live some hundreds of miles away and I am about €20 million short of the funds to buy one.

However I couldn't help remarking on the fact that, when you get up close, nature doesn't do a bad job of imitating an action painting. Knowledgeable botanists will have noticed that the Pyrenean silver birch involved decided to lie down for a rest during picture-editing.

I suppose it's one way to solve the parking problem

After all, if you can't find anywhere to stick the old jalopy, why not just lob it on the deck of your boat?

The vehicle in question is fun too, the kind of clockwork car you'd find in a fleek comique par Jacques Tati. Must admit that I haven't a clue what make it is, though obviously a classic in its own eccentric way.

I think it's obligatory to be mildly odd or at the very least a tad bohemian to qualify as a houseboat owner on the Seine. Perhaps you have to fill in a form claiming to come from a long line of loons, tracing your lineage back to Louis XIV? Then you send in the form, they lose it and you send in again two or three times. All water under the bridge, I suppose . . .

There is an enduring tradition of strangeness relating to water-borne transport and Paris. Take the Canal de Nivernais. They built it as an emergency measure after the capital ran out of firewood during an exceptionally bad winter in 17 something. Responding brilliantly to the crisis, the canal opened bang on time . . . 60 years later.

It makes a wonderful walk of a sunny autumn Sunday to stroll up the river, maybe starting opposite the Eiffel Tower and wandering until your feet give out; in our case just past Notre Dame.

Shock as Président Pompidou admits Pöang fetish

Keeping the old hawk-like optic mercilessly trained on the world around me, I've previously observed that homesick anglaises just love to seek refuge and solace in IKEA at Toulouse. OK, so IKEA's Swedish which makes it a bit of a non-sequitur logically speaking, but it's nonetheless true that a good wallow among the Ektorps and Grundtals does seem to blow away the blues.

Me, I've always had a bit of a thing about Pöang armchairs. They're a seriously elegant and effective design. IKEA always claim it's a modern classic and, lo and behold, I've discovered that it's true.

Wandering happily through the permanent collection of modern art at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, I practically tripped over the daddy of all Pöangs: An original by the Scandinavian designer Bruno Mathsson from 1943. A true moment of anorakismo.

Celebrating la belle vie des huîtres : A cautionary tale

I like to dwell from time to time on those little details which colour our life here in la belle France and make it what it is. As the calendar goes round each year, I'm trying to catch up with them all.

This time it's la saison des huîtres so naturally the pic shows a dozen of Leucate's finest plus accompanying chilled white wine and segments of lemon. Actually there are eleven of the finest and one rogue . . . but more of that later.

There are extensive oyster beds on the coastal lagoons along the coast east of Perpignan right over to Montpellier. You can get a dozen from about €4.50 compared to about £12 on the net in England. And that's the way it should be. Oysters have been a cheap and valuable food source since Roman times. It's only in the last 70 years or so that pollution and over-fishing have made them a luxury item.

I can never suppress the admittedly smug bastard sense of unholy glee that anyone can afford them here. It must be the old égalité et fraternité coming out in me. Unfortunately this time I got my comeuppance, or to be precise, throwuppance.

There are certain rules for the avoidance of a duff oyster; notably you should always throw away any with a loose or open shell. Now all of these seemed even tighter than usual while digging them apart with the special oyster knife or spike.

Incidentally, the spike itself is well worth buying. There are few better ways to run a sharp kitchen knife straight through your hand than to slip whilst trying to prise open a particularly recalcitrant marine bivalve.

Actually there was one duff one in the dozen. Of course, you only need one . . . and guess who got it. Being unwell à cause des huîtres is rightly notable as an experience of extreme violence; a 10.5 on the Hughie and Ralph scale.

Much as I enjoy them, I think I shall be taking a modest sabbatical. But don't let me put you off. Les huîtres are a great tradition here and you have to be unlucky to get a bad one. Bon appetît!

Just when you thought it was safe to come out . . .

I've previously hinted that my principal excuse for unblogness of late is that I was writing a novel. Matters have reached the point where I've decided to unleash a couple of chapters on unsuspecting readers of this time-honoured and distinguished chronicle. The story starts with a bloke who wakes up every day in a different time and place and kind of rambles on from there for 70,000 words or so, each of them lovingly hand-crafted and personally selected by individually-etched virgins, blah, blah, etc, etc, hem-hem.

I'm not being so rash as to clog up le blog space sacré with the aforementioned masterpiece but if you like to follow the link, you can check out a couple of chapters of The Reluctant Trilogy. Any fervent praise, blistering brickbats or even constructive crit gratefully received as it would be extremely helpful to know what anyone makes of it.

Ta in advance, Eddie

Let's get moody and evocative dans les rues de Paris

I have to admit that there are moments when even living in the Centre of the Known Universe, AKA Fa, does induce a certain stir-craziness. Moments when I need to seek yer actual kulcher, the zest and pace of city life etc etc.

This is when it's good to spend quelques jours à Paris, a city I am fast coming to love and actually to know rather better than I know London. So thanks to kind invitations from some very nice friends of girlfriend Claire, we braved the slings and permanent grèves of the outrageous SNCF and wizzed off up there.

They adore grèves on the SNCF, think how frustrating life must have been for them before the invention of the railway. Actually strikes in France are not all bad; they tell you that all is as it should be in the world. If they ever stopped, there really would be something wrong . . . Still we got there and back.

Particularly intriguing on the way up was the presence of no less than six guards, not one of whom checked any of the tickets. On the way back one lonely valiant operative faithfully carried out his appointed task, though his compadre on the drinks trolley was deeply unmotivated, prompting severe caffeine deprivation on the slow bendy bit, just this side of Limoges.

I seem to be lucky with Paris. The weather was good again and all the Parisians we met were friendly and polite, in complete contravention of their notorious stereotype. We managed to wander straight into Notre Dame without queuing at all so the pic is, I hope, a reasonably unobvious one of said famous landmark.

It's years since I did any moody, evocative black-and-white photography so it was rather fun to discover that I can fake it on my picture editor. As it's only a couple of buttons, I can only conclude that I must be terminally thick not to have noticed the facility before. I also love cropping pix dramatically deep and narrow. So that's what I did with this one.

It Came From Somewhere Else 2: The Tin Dinosaur

In straightened times, both of pockets and jackets, it never ceases to amaze me what the powers-that-be can find to spend money on. I have remarked on this before and now I am provoked to do so again.

It has to be said that rival Quillan set the pace some months ago with its instant classic, the kitsch tin feesh complete with pretend waterfall on the roundabout outside Carrefour (see blog entry, previous).

Not to be outdone, Espéraza has hit back with an absolute masterstroke, a fabulous fabrication in polished steel, Dolores the Amazing Tin Dinosaur. Shopping trips to Intermarche will never be the same again.

Actually I suspect that this lovingly-crafted waste of money was partly put there to paper over another more yawning gap in somebody else's financial sanity. Only a few years back they spent a huge amount of time and money hacking a mountain to bits to provide room for a roundabout serving Intermarche, various other businesses and the local EDF leccy depot.

The EDF received a magnificently extravagant slip-road for their exclusive use. Now one end of the slip-road has been blocked off and a stout chunk of crash barrier installed, together with delightful Dolores and some landscaping, presumably to pretend that none of this ever really happened. Well, I believe them . . .

Actually, as local readers will know, the dinosaur theme is not entirely spurious. They do dig real dinosaur bits and pieces out of the hillside up the road at Campagne-sur-Aude, and bung them in the dino museum in Espéraza. Some species are even exclusive to l'haute vallée. I'm quite a fan of said museum, largely because its dinosaurs are genuine. Which of course begs the question of why you have to waste money on a fake one, especially as I've just noticed that it looks like it's on crutches . . .