Worlds turned upside down
January updates ( + the right to set pudding on fire)
Dear Friend,
Happy rather belated new year! If this is your first letter from me, thank you for signing up and i’m delighted to be your pen friend.
These letters were weekly, and for the last months have been a little more sporadic. This year, for the foreseeable at least, I am going to commit to writing every two weeks, with some exciting guest letters in between that!
Though it seems a while ago now, I hope you had a good Christmas or end-of-year break. I spent two weeks in the UK, mostly at my mother’s house in the ‘burbs of West London. We ate plenty, watched lots of tv, went on walks and set a pudding on fire*. All the essentials.
* For anyone unfamiliar, it’s a tradition in the UK to douse the Christmas pudding with brandy and set it alight (‘flamber’ it, if you will), before consuming with brandy butter, brandy cream or custard.
I also spent a couple of days in Uppingham in Rutland, the smallest county in England, located in the middle of the country. We were beautifully welcomed by my dear friends Kathy and Andrew, whom I met when writing an article about pet-sitting. Their blond labrador welcomed my dog, Babbet, very handsomely also.
The town of Uppingham is maybe the most English place I have ever been. There were medieval stone buildings, rolling green fields, surrounding farms and a high street with a butcher, a baker - maybe even a candlestick maker (if there is still a candlestick maker anywhere, it would be in Uppingham). We had a delightful and interesting time and saw a another side to England, so different to the London-y world I grew up in.
I came back to Paris just before new year’s and my first morning back I read the Libération newspaper on a (cold) café-terrace. The headline was a pun on a phrase meaning: ‘A world turned upside down’.
The cover featured several portraits of people who had a significant impact in 2024, for better or worse. This included Léon Marchand, Gisèle Pelicot, Michel Barnier, Bashar Al-Assad, and - perhaps inevitably - Donny Trump himself.
The headline encapsulates a feeling I think a lot of us are experiencing. A sort of relentless topsy-turviness around the world - fire, war, corruption, impropriety, and even people being duped out of vast sums of money by an artificially generated Brad Pitt.
Trump’s second coming puts me in mind of Ancien Regime monarchs, in particular the most bombastic of all, the Sun King, Louis XIV. In our house we’ve been watching the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and I can also detect echoes of the Henry VIII in the about-to-be-president’s ways of working.
This is most evident in the supplicating reactions of those who might once have tried to distance themselves from Trump. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in which he verbally bends the knee to the new president’s preferences for social networks unencumbered by factual accountability, or overtures to inclusivity.
In my last letter, I drew Trump's other court supplicant, Elon Musk. They put me in mind of how representatives of the church, or powerful guilds, might have come to Louis XIV or Henry VIII to court favourable conditions. Then the prize was land, gold and riches. Today, from what I can tell at least, a big part of it seems to be share prices and an unbridled regulatory environment for artificial intelligence. Different century, same energy!
Funnily enough, I learned recently that the phrase ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ was first popularised in English as the title of a protest song in the 1640s, a little after Henry VIII during the reign of Charles I, concurrent with the early reign of Louis XIV in France. The protest was specifically about government policy to make Christmas more sober and less celebratory, i.e. more Protestant. The dissidents were fighting for their right to set their figurative Christmas pudding on fire.
READ: Protestant January (January 2024)
According to an unconfirmed legend, the song was said to have later been sung by the retreating British army during the Battle of Yorktown during the American Revolutionary War in 1781. It was taken up and revisited by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his show, Hamilton, about that conflict and time period - which is actually where I first heard the phrase.
In today’s topsy-turvy times, it can be hard and even involves some dissonance to keep one’s own life in calm order, and yet it feels probably more important.
Going from a large scale to a smaller one, my own small world has been turned upside down - in a happy way - in recent months, and is set to be more so, as I am pregnant and expecting a baby with my partner in May. (If you made it this far, past the Henry VIII reference and Christmas rebellion ballad, I am now rewarding you with gossip!).
In these letters, I often write about my impressions of French society, administration and life. Being pregnant has opened up a whole new vector of experience. The first thing I did when I learned I was pregnant was, naturally, to Google advice, and I studied both the NHS website in the UK and the French health service equivalent. Immediately I sensed a difference in tone. For example:
Introduction to the French advice on nutrition:
FR: “Pendant neuf mois il est recommandé de manger un peu de tout... ou presque ! Manger varié et équilibré est un atout pour une grossesse en pleine forme. Seuls les aliments pouvant transmettre des germes ou des produits toxiques pour bébé sont déconseillés. Il est important de les connaître mais aussi de prendre quelques précautions avec certains aliments autorisés. Que ce soit au restaurant ou chez des amis, on n‘hésite pas à poser des questions sur ce qu’il y a dans notre assiette, et sur le mode de cuisson utilisé.”
EN: “During nine months it is recommended to eat a bit of everything…or almost! Eating a varied and balanced diet is a plus for a pregnancy in top form. Only foods that can transmit bacteria or products that are toxic for baby are not advised. It is important to know them but also to take some precautions with some foods that are allowed. Whether we’re in a restaurant or dining in friends’ homes, we shouldn’t hesitate to ask questions about what’s in our plate and how it has been cooked.”
Introduction to the UK advice on nutrition (a touch more Protestant):
“Most foods and drinks are safe to have during pregnancy. But there are some things you should be careful with or avoid.”
When I told my doctor pal, Dr Diane - about whom I’ve written before - she said “this is great news!”, and then just a few moments after, “I will send you the list of cheeses you can still eat.” Curiously, comté and gruyère are off-limits according to UK advice, but ok for the French! Interesting.
I’m also tickled by the very name of pregnancy here: “La grossesse”, or ‘the fatness’. In a country so concerned with the general look of things, I am entirely unsurprised that the name for this human life stage would reflect the appearance of the pregnant person in question. Several French women have already impressed to me the importance of not getting too fat during the pregnancy - which in French would be, ‘ne pas trop grossir pendant la grossesse’, or ‘to not get too fat during the fatness’. Indeed.
A midwife is called a ‘sage-femme’ in French or ‘wise woman’, even if the practitioner is a man. My sage-femme is indeed very wise, and kind. She operates from a small and nicely scented office near where I live. She’s French, but lived and worked in the UK for several years, mixing elements of French and British influence in her approach. An example: before Christmas she told me not to eat too many mince pies in the UK!
Help us name our explorers’ club
I have written before about my friend Fiona, a very clever American writer/journalist in Paris, with whom I share many interests including a love of old Hollywood and good food. With Fiona, we developed the tradition of ‘Intentional Friday’, a weekly bit of time together - ideally on a Friday but not necessarily - where we share bagels and coffee at Bob’s Bake Shop in the 19th arrondissement. I have also introduced Fiona to my life-long passion for Party Tea - a tradition also discussed by my former housemate Ellen in this wonderful guest letter, as such - “crisps for dinner, but make it an event”. Now Fiona and I have started on a new ritual, which involves: going out for dinner in an arrondissement of Paris that is not the 18th where I live, or the 19th where she lives, and then having a stroll around the chosen area, preferably while picking up a dessert from a different establishment. We embarked upon our second of these events this weekend, choosing to dine in the 13th arrondissement, in the Southeast Asian quarter around Avenue de Choisy. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant called Pho Bom and then walked to the Butte aux Cailles neighbourhood, a quaint village-y area with cobblestone streets. We wandered the main street, Rue de la Butte aux Cailles, passing a Breton crepe restaurant, a couple of pub-like establishments including one named Sputnik, and some delightfully old-fashioned bistros. Looking for a place to have pudding, we came across Le Feu de Mars, a dinky Japanese restaurant arranged around an open grill where all the customers wear bibs. Fiona had a yuzu cheesecake and I had a beautifully sliced fresh mango. The idea of these outings is to make the most of this world city in which we live, and as I looked around at my bibbed co-diners, I was happily reminded that Paris has endless versions unfolding simultaneously.
READ: Un monde si rude: How many lives can I live this year? (January 2023)
The only snag is that we have not yet thought of a good name for the new ritual. We did have the idea, 'Explorers’ Club’, but it has a certain ring of girl scout about it. Please write if you have any ideas! And if you have any similar rituals.
Thirty-second book club
I got a clutch of new books for Christmas. My mum gave me What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s the first time I’ve read anything by the famous Japanese writer, who ran his own jazz bar in Tokyo before becoming an author. Published in Japanese in 2007 and in English translation in 2008, it talks about his life through the prism of his years-long habit of distance running (often more than one marathon a year). He draws parallels between his life as a runner and life as a writer, and seems to suggest both involve a kind of introspective doggedness. Here’s an extract:
“What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run – simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.”
I next read a recent novel called My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, which was a Christmas gift from my uncle. In the first-person, it’s a kind of detailed, sometimes claustrophobic, description of a young woman’s parents and her strained relationship with them. The characters are convincingly drawn and the setting is unmistakably English. It’s not a warm world, but it’s impeccably evoked, and stays with you.
Now I am half way through Germinal, the fifth I’ve read of Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novel series, which through one extended family, explores different aspects of society in Second Empire France. Because all the characters interlace across the novels, it’s quite satisfying to recognise old friends (I wrote before it’s a bit like Eastenders!).
Thank you for reading this January update newsletter.
As ever, please do write back in the comments or by sending me an email. If you enjoyed this letter, please go ahead and ‘like’ it or share it with a friend.
I will write again in a couple of weeks. I hope you have a good time until then, and burn as many figurative puddings as you see fit!
Yours,
Hannah
Congratulations!
(Belated) happy new year Hannah and yay congratulations of the news! Enjoy the cheeses that can be eaten. Seems like France is a good place to be pregnant. ;)