We’ve been to another restaurant. Sort of.

Scarlett and I were in London the other day – just popped in, you understand, to see the V&A’s Hallyu! exhibition about Korea – and noticed that there’s a branch of The Ivy restaurant a couple of stops away on the Tube. So, having popped in to the V&A we popped in to The Ivy Kensington Brasserie. Catchy name, and a lunchtime (well, until 6.30 pm) menu for under £18, bargain.

We both started with the confit rabbit croquettes and then Scarlett had the Chicken Paillard with its wild mushroom sauce, mash and watercress while I had the chargrilled halloumi with “Farro grains with crushed artichoke, hazelnuts, mushrooms, black truffle and a plant-based sauce”. A bit of a mouthful, I have to say, to say and ultimately a pleasing collection of risotto-like things on my plate under the halloumi. I used to eat halloumi a lot back in the ‘90s before moving to France but now it’s pretty unavailable here, so I eat it in England whenever I can.

Two menus, a smoothie and a glass of nice rosé (for an eye-watering price very near to what I paid for five litres of the stuff last week) and we get out for under 60 of your Brexit pounds. Good deal.

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Left to right: Halloumi, halloumi with company, nice gaff this, rabbit croquettes with some expensive rosé.

No

Themes for the year are so much better than resolutions, see the video above. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it works well. Essentially, when you come to a potential forking decision you think of your theme and act accordingly.

Last year, my theme was ‘Me’, and this led to me quitting the main job I’d been doing for nearly a decade and going to work elsewhere. And being much happier about it.

But, see my earlier post, this also led to me doing too much work for fear that I wouldn’t have enough.

So my theme for this year is ‘No’. Which is a very hard word for me to say, on a number of levels. My parents always told me that one’s mission in life should be to make others happy, so obviously you never say ‘No’. Also, fear of not having enough money to pay my rent and, above all, my daughters’ horrendous school fees made it very hard to ever say ‘No’ to work.

But events of the past month or so have taught me – well, forced me – to learn how to say it. First a school called up and asked me, begged me actually, to come in and teach 10 hours of English. I could, possibly, have done it by moving things around and working late and seeing my family even less than I do now. Or – and, gentle reader, spoiler alert – I could say ‘No’. Which I did.

Things came to a head this week with a doctor’s visit where my GP, whom I’ve known for getting on for two decades, told me to take 10 days off work or, and I’m not making this up, risk losing my leg. She was exaggerating, at least a bit, but my leg has been very painful over the past three weeks with what she diagnosed as an Erysipelas, a nasty-looking bacterial infection.

I ummed and ached on the way home on Wednesday morning and decided that, well, yes, she had a point. Last Wednesday was coincidentally the first day I’ve had off from work since September, apart from the Christmas holidays. I’m working myself into an early grave, and I have to stop – not stop next year but right now, I decided. I contacted the schools where I work and told them I couldn’t come in, but that I could do classes online. One and a half agreed, the half of one school is being weird and difficult but that will be sorted out, and not at the cost of my health.

So, home schooling for a week and a half, no driving, no walking, lots of lying down or sitting with my leg horizontal. I’m proud of me for saying no and doing it, this is the very first time as a self-employed person that I’ve dared to say “I’m not coming in”.

French administration

The French love their paperwork. They have tonnes of it. They keep every bit of paper sent to them for ever. When my ex needed to produce 10 years’ worth of wage slips to qualify for a training scheme – no problem. Here they are.

I once had my ID card stolen, and needed to replace it. My local Mairie doubted that they knew how to do this so sent me to The Expert at the Prefecture in Nimes.

This Expert gave me a list of all the documents I needed, which it took me three months to assemble. Stuff like, a copy of your birth certificate but the copy has to be less than three months old. Nothing too easy.

I took all my papers to The Expert and he examined them one by one, ticking them off on the list he himself had given me. Then he said, “All you have to do now is take them to your Mairie and get them to post them to me.”

I was a little nonplussed. “They need to stamp them?”

“No.”

“They need to do something to them? Verify them?”

“No. Just post them to me.”

“But,” I said, “you already have them. In your hands right now.”

At this point The Expert dropped my bundle onto his desk and pushed them towards me. “Ah yes, but I do not have the right to accept them in person, only via the postal system.”

I understood even then, over 20 years ago, that if I’d left my documents there they’d still be on his desk to this day, unmoved. Like him.

So I took them to my village Mairie who understood the problem immediately, put the documents into a large envelope and posted them to Nimes. I got my ID card a few weeks later.

Tell this story to English people and they’ll shriek with incredulity.

Tell it to a French person and they’ll nod sagely, then come back with their own story of bureaucratic stupidity. Like a colleague who got a new ID card after her divorce and the person making it accidentally put down her date of birth as the date the card was being issued. Nothing for it, just start all over again – otherwise you’re not even 18 years old and can’t drink any more in bars. Or drive. Or do anything without the permission of your parents – who are both dead.

Or back to one of the times I got married, my passport called me ‘Chris Ward’ and my birth certificate ‘Christopher Ward’. Clearly, said the secretary of the Mairie where we planned to marry, clearly these are two different people. Go away and try again.

And go away and try again we did – I got a new passport.

Today I’ve exchanged half a dozen e-mails with one of the schools where I work, trying to get my bill right.

Things I got wrong include, but are not limited to:

• The dates – the period is not from 1 January to 31 January but 3 January to 31 January;

• The amount of the bill: the € symbol should come after the amount, not before it.

• The date of the bill: This should be updated each time I send and resend and re-effin’ send the bill to the current date.

• The reference number: Should not be all in caps but as in the original contract.

• The file name should reflect the date the bill is sent, updated as above.

  All this is on an Excel file that the person concerned could easily change themselves, but OH NO, eff you stupid English person this way I get 5 days work not 1 per week.

  And, after bitter experience, I know that there is absolutely no point in my pointing out the bleeding obvious, you just have to do what they want to do and that’s all there is to it.

Jeez.

I have a plan

It’s not cunning. Well, only a little bit perhaps.

My life will change fairly substantially over the rest of this year, mostly in good ways but with tinges of necessary sadness.

Me, personally, I want to go and live by the sea. I hope to be able to do so, at least part of my time, by the end of the year.

I’m also going to work less. My plan at the start of this year was to have a day a week at home, hopefully writing but probably teaching online. That didn’t work because I frightened myself into not having enough work so I took on too much. Next Tuesday is the second half-day I’ve had off since the end of August. So, right, do better next year. Which will be fairly easy as I don’t particularly like one of the schools where I teach (“Here’s your broom cupboard for today’s class, sorry there’s no power point. Yes, we do know you’re teaching a computing class”) so I’m going to drop them and not work on Fridays.

I’ve been working towards this by eating my lunch on the beach whenever I can, since a number of the schools where I teach are a 10 minute drive away, so I have that going for me.

And yeah. Live besides the sea for around half of every month by the end of the year.

Yippee.

Restaurants of the year

I live in France and many restaurants are excellent. Some aren’t, of course, especially in big cities where they depend on passing, never to be seen again tourists.

But it’s still pretty much the case that you can get a decent meal in most dining establishments here.

The first I’d like to mention is the Thoumieux, where we ate in at the end of 2021 rather than in 2022, but so what.

I first ate there with photographer Stuart Clarke, who’d learned of its existence from the guy who was the Daily Telegraph’s Paris correspondent for 25 years.

Now I like to eat there whenever I go to Paris, which hasn’t been that often these past few years. Marie-Helène and I ate there just over a year ago and the foie gras and the duck were as excellent as ever.

Earlier this year we ate at The Marcel in Sete, down on the coast south of Montpellier. The Marcel has a history for me going back more than 20 years, when I used to go and eat there with Steve and Bob and Mat when we were all freelances working on our own, missing the conviviality of the office Christmas party.

Now, it has a Michelin star and is very, very much worth the €100 or so it’ll cost to dine there. The two dishes below are the cheese plate and the crystallised sage leaves which come with the coffee.

We ate during the summer at l’Entrecôte in Montpellier, always the best place if you fancy steak and chips.

Steak and chips at l’Entrecôte in Montpellier.

Later in the year we went back to Paris and ate Chez Paul, an ancient bistro with a no-nonsense, real French food menu. It’s absolutely excellent – so excellent, in fact, that after eating there on Friday evening we booked a table for lunch on Sunday.

This is the menu Chez Paul, a real old-school production full of real, old-school food which was just absolutely perfectly delicious. What’s good? It’s all good.

A stroll around the village

I used to go for a walk around the village most mornings and often at the weekends until a year ago. I had various problems from last January onwards and haven’t been doing much walking at all until now.

I went out a couple of times last week, and again this afternoon. The advantage of going out in the afternoon is that you can actually see things – in winter I walk at about 0630 in the morning, when it’s still dark.

Horses come and go from the field opposite the cemetery; sometimes there’s one, today there’s two. I’m not sure if they’re doing it on purpose to try to confuse me.

The lonely olivier provides a few fruit at the end of the year, but it’s been a while since anyone cut it back so it fruits less than it could if it were properly looked after. No, I’m not going to climb up it and start hacking away, even if this is the season to do it.

The vineyard is still looking pretty dead; vines look like they’ll never grow again in winter, but they usually do.

2022. Another year.

It’s quite nice here sometimes

Here’s some advice. When you wake up in the morning thinking, “I fucking hate this job”, stop going. I did just that this year and I feel a LOT better. I’d worked at Vatel for nine years and, frankly, for the past couple of years they’d been taking the piss. Things really came to a head early in 2022 when, having asked for timetable changes for the previous two years, the changes were again refused on the grounds that “New teachers need those slots or they won’t come to work for us”, or some such nonsense. So experienced teachers with 9 years of seniority go to the back of the queue. Get lost.

By the pool with the sisters, early 2022

I was, naturally, worried – very worried – about finding a job elsewhere, but soon discovered that there’s something of a shortage of English teachers around here. Lots of former teachers went back to England after Brexit since it became very difficult to work on the black, and left lots of jobs open. In the end I took on too much work and am, as recently as three weeks ago, still turning down job offers. So, as usual, I was worrying for nothing.

We had some excellent weekends away, here in Sete

I now work in three new schools, only for whole or half days (no more “Come in from 9-11 then come back for another lesson from 5-6pm’“ rubbish), and in general they’re delightful. One has proven very complicated from an administrative point of view but, at last, they’ve started paying their bills. My morning drive takes me to Nimes just one day a week now, and for two or three days a week I drive to Montpellier along the Grand Travers, a narrow spit of land between the Étang de Mauguio and the Mediterranean.

It’s a beautiful drive, for 15 minutes with the sea on one side and the ponds full of flamingos on the other with the sun rising behind me in the morning and setting behind me in the evening. I don’t get to do it every day but I do love those days when I can take this route.

Just to be clear, this is a day when I DID make an effort.

I’ve also had to start making my own lunches again; this is not really a hardship, and the canteen at Vatel was never that great. Some days I make an effort, other days – well, other days I don’t.

Dad with his great-granddaughter Maya

We went to England in the summer, the first time since 2019 and it was a real joy to see everyone. My father was in good spirits but seemed frail.

In London for the day we visited the Science museum. We also saw lots of the family and went to the Harry Potter studios which kindled the idea in Scarlett’s mind that she’d like to work building film sets.

The autumn brought LOTS of work for me, too much as I said, and lots of administrative problems. But most of all I’ll remember the autumn of 2022 for the half-dozen trips I made to England to visit my dying father, and then to come to his funeral, and all the travel problems that came with those trips. Flights cancelled, delayed, moved a hundred kilometres to another airport, trains cancelled, waiting on train platforms listening to a live commentary of the driver’s lunch…it moved from despairing through ridiculous to impossible. A few months I never, ever want to have to repeat. I had already had my fill of flying when I gave up journalism and I’m REALLY sick of it now. Flights are to be barely tolerated, they are impossible to enjoy.

Christmas at Matt and Helen’s

We ended the year at Karen and Martyn’s for Christmas, the first time since 2019 and one of my favourite moments every year. I – we, the sisters and me – we love their welcome, their home and their company. We had Christmas lunch at Matt and Helen’s, a new tradition for us. May it continue for a long time to come.

Happy New Year, everyone.

London for a day

Nice view from the top of Tower Bridge

Hamleys was not as great as last time. Scarlett said it was because they were younger before.

Lunch at The Ivy was excellent and expensive. £180!

From the top: Sirloin steak (rare), creamed spinach, fries, truffled fries with parmesan, confit goose and duck shepherd’s pie

Tower Bridge was interesting and cut short as Roxanne was tired so no engine room. Lots of trains cancelled on the way back got home about 1830.

The sisters on Tower Bridge at the end of a tiring day

End of an era

I stopped cooking for a living nearly 13 years ago – carpal tunnel problems brought on by those 7 years julienning carrots and 25 bashing computer keyboards for Mr Murdoch, among others.

What to do? Write again? Meh. Translate? Turns out you need a Master’s degree to do this properly in France. Become a security guard? (Seriously, the French dole office person who looked after me had 13 security guard jobs to fill and I was big enough to fill at least two of them).

Well no, I don’t want to be a security guard, I told her, so she sent me off for 20 hours of French lessons. Anything to get me off her books and reduce the employment totals, basically, even though my French was pretty good. I got thrown out of my French class after 17 minutes because I spoke better French than the teacher.

My unemployment counsellor then had a brainwave – become a teacher! An English teacher! Turns out, you also need a Master’s degree to do this in France. Unless, that is, you teach in the private sector.

So I started teaching, with a special discount on my taxes offered by the Government for two years for changing professions.

I taught teenagers who could care less in their homes to start with, then fell in with a few agencies and taught adults in their workplaces – some interesting companies like Alstom and Ubisoft and Astra Zeneca. During this period I had sent my CV on spec to Vatel, the world-famous (no, really) Hotel and Restaurant management school in Nimes. A year after sending it in, I was summoned to an interview and hired on the spot to teach English to First, and then later Second year, students.

And also teach Professional Culture, i.e. the history of French gastronomy what with me having been a professional cook and all.

And also teach Professional News, what with me having been a journalist for all those years.

All these subjects I taught in English to international and in French to French 1st and 2nd year students and the French and International Master’s Preparatory students (three classes), who also got me for Culinary Culture (English and French) and F&B Environment and Professional culture (again all in two languages).

And at the start there were six 1st year classes, six in the 2nd year, I did a Culinary Culture class for the six classes of 3rd year French students, there were 3 French and 3 international preparatory classes. So 24 different classes of students. Most subjects were just 2 hours a week but English was six hours a week.

And my life was full and I worked full-time at one of the most prestigious schools in the industry anywhere in the world.

But over the years the number of students has dwindled and I lost more than half of my work there, so had to turn to other schools to make up my wages. Which should have been easy, except Vatel refused point-blank to change my lesson times. So to do 11 hours of English lessons and 7 hours of other lessons, I would need to go there five days a week. For 18 hours of teaching. Including starting on Monday morning at 9 am, doing two hours of teaching, then coming back in the afternoon for one more hour from 5pm-6pm.

Genius.

So we have parted ways and, I’ve discovered, there’s a national shortage of English teachers in France. Many who were teaching on the black have found it impossible to continue and, without tax records, have been forced back to the UK. Leaving their jobs open for me, thankyouverymuch.

Now I’ll be teaching in three schools, all for either half-days or full-days of teaching. And only English, nothing else. Plus I’ll be teaching in Scarlett and Roxanne’s Montessori middle-school which is just down the road from where we live. And I’ll be at home most Fridays to write, do a spot of online teaching or have a nap.

Most Excellent.

Chicken liver and raspberry mousse

Parfait de mousse de foie de volaille aux framboises does sound nicer, doesn’t it? In fact, and yes I’m showing my linguistic prejudices here, all menus sound better in French than English.

Crème anglaise or custard with that, madam? Vichyssoise or cold leek and potato soup?

It’s an easy choice.

This chicken liver and raspberry mousse is pretty easy; a little cooking, some assembly required, there you go.

Start with your chicken livers; no need to do much to them, just put them into a frying pan and heat them through in a little melted butter. I did this with 600 grammes of livers.

Next, the slightly difficult part: mix them up them force them through a sieve. Yes, against their will if necessary.

I cook them in a saucepan so I can mix them up with a hand blender and then sieve them; if you wish, you could use a frying pan and then a blender, which I never use. Blenders are something else to go wrong, less versatile than a hand blender and much harder to clean to boot. But it’s your choice.

It takes a while to do this and it it pretty messy. There are other ways to do this, but this is the easiest overall. Traditionally when cooking chicken livers you trim them by cutting out the veins and cells and crunchy bits before frying them off, and if you’re putting them in a salad then that is what you should do.

However, to get the perfect parfait you do need to ensure no nasty bits are left in them, so you sieve them anyway. So cut out the first bit and do this anyway = 10 minutes of your life back, you’re welcome.

I put my sieve on top of a close-fitting stainless steel bowl and force the livers through using a wooden spatula. It works well, but you could use plastic or silicone scrapers if you prefer. The object it to get all the meat through and leave behind the stringy bits.

In the bowl I’ve already put two 250g packs of butter, on salted one unsalted. The mousse will start to melt the butter, making it easier to mix them up. Once you’ve finished sieving the livers, add in 500g of raspberries and 100ml of raspberry vinegar. Then you mix it all together to a smooth paste.

You can do this with a wooden spoon or even your hands, and your resulting parfait will be denser; I use a hand mixer and it makes the mixture quite airy and light.

Scrape around the bottom and sides of the bowl with a spoon a couple of times to ensure it mixes well, then put it into individual ramekins, large ramekins, whatever you want depending on how you want to portion this up.

Then cook it in a bain marie for 30-60 minutes at 150°C – until the temperature inside gets over about 75°C. For the bain marie I use a regular oven dish into which I pour a kettle of boiling water. Bains marie ensure that whatever your cooking’s bottom doesn’t get over 100°C, so it doesn’t cook to quickly or too much and dry out.

Allow the resulting parfait to cool down after cooking before refrigerating; I keep it for 3 days in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer.

Spread on toasted sourdough, it’s delicious.