Greetings, my beloved blog devotees! I have decided that my travel journal and blog must now separate as I am too forgetful to carry it all the way out to this internet cafe. This means, unfortunately, that instead of vague extracts slung haphazardly together I shall continue to treat you to badly crafted extempore summaries.

Now it might have escaped your notice, but this post is indeed titled Mr Chicken. This is because a few days ago a former tumbleweed Jean-Pierre Poulet spent the night at the shop. He was good chat, we conversed mostly in Franglaise and his English and my French improved remarkably the further down the bottle of Aberlour we got. Now remember children, don’t buy beer in France, do buy wine and if you have to buy whisky get it from Franprix where it’s even cheaper than Tesco.We also drank some wine Sylvia left for us – it had a chicken on the label. If only we’d had some Pouilly Fumé (admit it, you all miss my shit puns.)

The next morning saw Jean-Pierre, Saskia, Wendy and me lined up along the bar of Cafe Panis trying to drown our hangovers in orange juice, coffee and pain au chocolat. Interesting point on ordering stuff in bars – never say “Je voudrais.” It is completely polite French, but that isn’t the Parisian way. Instead say “je vais prendre.” If you’re a 6’4″ long-haired brightly dressed wastrel they’ll still know you arn’t Parisian, but they wont go through the embarrassing charade of deliberately pretending not to understand you and speaking to you patronisingly in English.

The other day instead of a shift of book shelving I went on a mission across Paris to buy an armchair for the shop. This involved taking a large and cumbersome dolly (is that what you call those upright metal trolleys?) on the metro to Courcelles, finding a random address and shunting said armchair down six flights of stairs. The metro back would have been impossible, so I hailed a taxi to get it back. This was all good training for that evening, as Patrick and I had agreed to help Linda move a sofa out of her flat. Only four flights of stairs this time, and she kindly gave us each food coupons which you can use in any restaurant and most supermarkets in Paris.

We were in the region of Barbès, and Patrick had a friend in the area so we went to pay her a visit. My god he walks quickly, possibly even giving Lewis Stowe a run (or walk) for his money. Four bottles of wine and some pizza later we rather exuberantly caught a metro (still swigging wine from the bottle) back to S&Co to lock up. We then decided on getting some more food and wine, and were dining in the library when Lucy just so happened to pass by the window. We left the shop and walked with her round to n flat for some thanksgiving grub and, bien sûr, more wine. You might imagined the next morning to be somewhat difficult for me, but I revelled in the hangover and actually got some writing work done.

Yesterday, as I shamelessly boast-posted on fb, I was recorded for a TV pilot. Carolina had received an email from a woman wanting native English speakers to read sections of letters, requesting one male and one female. Instantly she thought of Saskia and me. So at around one o’clock in the writer’s studio we had a visit from Dorothy. Saskia had a choice of letters to read, for me it was just a couple of takes reading a letter from Churchill to Roosevelt. I don’t know whether it will come to much, but she’s going to send me a copy of the pilot (for the portfolio, dahling), and if she hears anything from her contacts in film dubbing she’ll put them in touch.

My most recent cooking adventure involved cutting up the shop pumpkin. Because of course we have a shop pumpkin, massive and orange, that has been sitting on the table outside for approx two months, and Terry decided it had to be eaten. It was still fresh enough inside and so I converted it into pumpkin biryani. Alas, it’s an ornamental variety and so rather watery and flavorless, but a good dose of curry helped make it more interesting. Now it’s somebody else’s turn to do something with the rest of it.

Ignore the wastrel in the background, no idea who that is.

More instalments at irregular intervals soon, later, or not at all.