Maintaining one's profile

Q.E.D.

I'm still alive

Spring has sprung
and cherry blossoms keep falling on the bikepath!
More soon, I promise
Love to all,
Hugo

Non licet ombinus Londinium adire!

I'm trying not to complain too much about being left to guard plum jam in Lutetia while the human conveyed himself to Londinium by stella europae on the slightly dubious pretext of purchasing books and visiting the bibliotheca britannica. All Gaul may be divided into three parts, but the human was able to confirm in person earlier documentary evidence that the British have made progress in the blessed domain of cheesemaking:
Needless to say the human returned immoderately well fed, on everything from bacon (viz.)

with eggs and hollandaise sauce, Szechuan hot-pot ("hot and numbing" read the menu -- and I was most intrigued to note an apartheid-like divider allowing two different broths to be cooked in the one pan), aperitifs aboard what I suppose one would have to call a public houseboat, and finally an excellent Korean barbecue only rendered incongruous by being served in a quiet South-East London local with careworn oak panelling:
Old friends make for great happiness, and there is even news from the illustrious Dr. L that my dear comrade Fidel has emerged from hiding under a bed in Hackney. I can only hope I'll be included in the next visit...

C'est en faisant n'importe quoi qu'on devient n'importe qui

Shamefully stolen from elsewhere, but there's a good lesson here -- Les forçats de la route meets Barthesian epic meets "The Passion considered as an uphill bicycle race"...

Of unexpected châteaux and the objects to be found on their doorsteps

When he wasn't excalming to all and sundry about how the country really was divided into three parts, the human's last Gallic expedition seemed to revolve largely around the search for a suitable château.

This time around, he seems to have found one -- conveniently linked to public transport, no less -- in the most unexpected of places. The châtelaine is expected.
The setting is most pleasant, the interior is most spacious and the furnishings most commodious. Administrative and financial bureaucrats of various stripes seem unexectedly eager to please. The bibliotheca quadriturricula subterraneana is closed for holidays, but there is a well-catalogued library of several thousand volumes on the premises. The natives who maintain it are more than friendly -- books are not the only object occasionally to be found on the doorstep when returning from an excursion by bisorbiculus liberalis:

I'm not complaining!

Culinary rifts in the space-time continuum

The human had been muttering for some time about something called a kitchen clickalong, which I'd been praying would be something reasonably innocuous, like snapping one's fingers in time to the exhaust fan while watching the toast burn. No such luck I'm afraid -- it turns out to be something resembling a parody of/improvement on obnoxious real-time TV recipe shows, with the added interest of being able to receive instructions and ask questions in real time via a blog.

Never one to make life simple when it could be complicated, the human wanted to follow a clickalong based rather a long way away, giving the options of making provençal fish stew for breakfast, or missing the point entirely by following live instructions after the event. Then struck an even better idea: take the list of ingredients distributed beforehand, harass the patient staff of the local pescatory emporium for a sea bass equivalent, and assemble them by elimination to produce something resembling dinner.

Voilà: Not identical to the official version but not too far off it; and we've ended up with a ponus potful of seafood stock fur future projects. So there. The sauce didn't emulsify as well as it could have, but was great fun pounding it!

I've been resting

in the handkerchief pocket of the cream, the white, the off-white, the ivory or the beige, no less.

I faithfully promise that this is the closest this blog will ever come to talking about cricket.

For those who thought acceptance speeches were all style and no substance

meet Steve Obama Fletcher, newly arrived in the F-H household.
answers to Hussy!