An examined life?: January 2019

Friday, 11 January 2019

Dead Can Dance in Paris in May

A possible highlight for 2019 will be seeing Dead Can Dance in Paris in May. Some years back I joined the mailing list for the official DCD site but have rarely ever had anything from them, so the announcement of a new album and a European tour was a big surprise.

So far I have only heard the new album once and wasn't too impressed by it to be honest. I think the idea of a Dionysus-themed album is not a great idea. Also it sounds more like a Brendan Perry solo album rather than a real Brendan-Lisa collaboration.

None the less, I am really looking forward to the show. We are seeing the Friday show and plan to go up to Paris on the Wednesday and maybe stay till the Sunday so we can also have a bit of a repeat of the Paris trip from the autumn.

This will be the 24th time I have seen DCD in concert and just like 2013, seeing them again is something I didn't expect to happen

The Grand Rex Theatre in Paris - we'll be there on May 10th

Addendum - a week or so later

I have now heard the track "Sea Borne" from the new album quite a few times and have come to like that a lot. Maybe if I ignore the concept and listen to it one track at a time I will enjoy it more!

Ottessa Moshfegh's "My Year of Rest and Relaxation"

This year's reading commenced with the extremely strange "My Year of Rest and Relaxation", bought for me by Daughter for Christmas (though at my request)

This took a little while to get into due to its very strange basic story but I have rather enjoyed it - it could make a really odd film.

I don't read much fiction and a rare that a new book manages to penetrate through to me - I actually came across it in a list of books of the year in The Guardian. And it was the cover that initially aroused my interest. I might be tempted by another of her books.

Thursday, 3 January 2019

A stolen Renoir?

If you go on the website of the National Portrait Gallery in London it says that Renoir's Umbrellas is currently not on display - that's just to hide the fact that it was stolen some years ago and is now on display in our home in France.

It was New Year's Eve and Trafalgar Square was full of revellers. Wife and I were on the roof of the gallery. We broke a skylight and I lowered Wife down, Mission Impossible style. The picture was cut from its frame, rolled up and we escaped back across the roofs.

It was re-framed at a shop in Saintes. I told him it was a fake, so he wasn't suspicious.

Looks good doesn't it?

Paris - Montparnassse

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Bird watching at Minsmere

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Paris - Wife's massage

On day two in Paris we walked many miles, all the way to the Arc de Triomphe in fact.

On the way back, Wife was grumbling about her legs aching. Just round the corner from our "Air bnb" was a massage parlour, with a slightly more refined frontage than you might have expected from such a place. Much to my surprise, Wife decided that her legs hurt so much after our day out that she would like to have a massage.

The shop was actually not long away from closing at 6:00 - which slightly supports the idea that it wasn't such a disreputable place as presumably if they were then they would have been on the look out for the post-work clients, rather than closing. That said, they did offer a "tantric massage" which is supposed to be one of the naughty ones.

So Wife went off with the older of the two oriental ladies there - maybe in her forties - while I was seen by the younger girl, perhaps in the her twenties and dressed in a rather attractive pink t-shirt and matching shorts.

I was tempted to upgrade my massage by £20 and find out what a tantric massage was like, but then I thought that Wife in the next room might not be impressed. Whether the girl who saw me also thought this or not, she was totally professional and nothing unexpected was offered.

Wife was quite impressed by her massage and hoped I enjoyed mine too. Perhaps we'll make it a regular theme when we visit Paris together?