chops abroad: PROCEED WITH CAUTION: The hidden dangers of the saxophone, and pricks who attend literary events

On our third day in Paris, we took a walking tour of the Quartier Latin, and took in some of the city's grander sights. The Quartier Latin is named thus because it is home to the Sorbonne and its scholars, who of course spoke and wrote and taught in Latin in their day. And it's an interesting area to check out, not least because it was once home to some high-profile thinkers and creative types including Picasso and a bunch of jazz cats and daddy-os.

We started the tour at Notre Dame, which is pertinent to my interests as a cultural, but not observant, Catholic, though we didn't get a chance to tour the building. We were, however, approached by some Romany who wanted us to sign a petition to aid the cause of, and I quote: deaf mute homeless orphans. Jesus. And I think my lot in life is bad if I get a pimple the day of a meeting. That said, I am faintly confident that these deaf mute homless orphans may not actually exist and that signing the petition was an elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful ploy to steal my passport.

The other interesting thing that happened at Notre Dame was that we used a public toilette where the attendant's job was to maintain order. She did this by accepting tips and, while you were about your business, shouting quickly! quickly! express, express! which, if nothing else, is a good way to induce stage fright amongst toilet users.

We enjoyed the tour very much, as our guide, Ann-Claire, a student at the Sorbonne, was charming and adorable and thoroughly knowledgeable about the area. Nothing, however, filled us with quite as much wonder and awe as this sign, posted in a pharmacy window:

Now, I am unsure of the translation on this, but have deduced that it offers the wise and sensible instruction that if you are going to have sex with a saxophone (or, heaven forfend, a saxophonist) then please proceed with caution. I would have thought this common sense advice would go without saying, but remember that we live in a world that feels it necessary to warn coffee drinkers that contents may be hot, and thus it appears to be best practice to state the fucking obvious.

One of the highlights of the tour, for mine, was a visit to Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop just by the Seine. It is famous because the proprietor was none other than Sylvia Beach, the long-suffering publisher of Joyce's Ulysses, and the premises were frequented by none other than Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

I hadn't given ol' Ernest much time until recently, as I had dismissed him as a silly old misogynist. But I read A Moveable Feast in the leadup to my trip and loved it, so I am reconsidering my position on the man.

Shakespeare and Co. remains a charming treasure trove of anglopublishing, and a lovely place to visit.

I bought myself a couple of postcards and a Chekhov novella. Because, you know, that's what I do -- read books about the struggles of the proletariat while gallivanting about the world with my girlfriends, footloose and fancy-free. I did feel a mild conflict of interest regarding this proposition while I was bashing down the Chekhov by the pool of our villa in Nice, but found that any uneasiness could be resolved by moving my deck chair either closer to the pool or closer to the garden.

But I digress.

Anyway, my eagle-eyed friend noticed a poster in the shop advertising that Robert Silvers, longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, was giving a lecture the next evening about something or other pertaining to books and writing and his time in Paris, so it was with some excitement that we found ourselves back at Shakespeare and Co. the following day.

It was a warm night, and the shop was set up with three seating areas, including out the front, where Anglophones and Anglophiles were happily enjoying the pleasant late sunshine. Heaven.

I managed to get a seat inside the shop, which afforded me a view of Mr Silvers as he spoke.

It was there that I witnessed the most grandiose display of public wankery I am ever likely to observe.

Literary events do tend to attract A Type. (I should know, I have tortoiseshell eyeglasses.) And I am loath to say it, but book wankers are the very worst of the worst of the intellectual self-flagellators. Book wankers are even worse than middle-aged men who bang on about wine. Crazy but true!

And if you happen to find yourself in Paris sometime, at an event hosted by the New York Review of Books, then it would be wise to take the same sort of precautions as you would if you were spending intimate time with a saxophone and BE VERY, VERY CAREFUL.

I was seated behind a sixtysomething New York expat, who was, for all intents and purposes, the world's biggest knob. While waiting for the speaker to commence, this wanker held forth, discursing over a wide range of ideas but unfortunately none of his arguments made any sense whatsoever. And, more to the point, NO ONE CARED. This all came to a head when he said to nobody in particular: "And of course, he who lives on hope, dies fastest."

By this juncture, everyone within earshot of this prig wanted to poison his glass of Chablis. So it was a measure of immense bravery and courage that a pretty young woman sitting next to me said, in perfect English accented by her native Norway, "I don't agree."

"Excuse me?" spluttered the wanker.

The Norwegian held, very eloquently, that this quotation was absolute rubbish, and that if we did not live in hope that some day things would get better we wouldn't bother to go on living.

The wanker, absolutely dumbfounded that anyone dare question his genius, babbled back a bunch of philosophical bullshit cloaked in horse manure and made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The Norwegian politely explained that English was not her first language and asked if he would remind repeating his response more slowly.

The wanker replied "I gave you a perfectly lucid answer in English, you are welcome to reply in French if you want."

At this point, every onlooker had had more than they could take of this guy's heinous BS and a woman sitting to my left spoke as the Unelected Voice of the People. "You have hope," she said to the Norwegian, "because you are a young woman. He is an old man, that's why he no longer lives on hope."

BAM! I thought, that's the end of that. Thank you, my sane and outspoken neighbour. Onya.

"Oh yeah?" says the wanker, "and what does that make you?"

"I am a tree. I grow apples out of my ears in an orchard in the Netherlands."

I am not making this up.

I am not sure what to say about that, except that I would sooner be certifiably batshit crazy with fruits sprouting from my head than the kind of bloke who goes to book readings to bang on about rubbish and then heap scorn upon anyone who dare disagree with me.

After the hilarity of the book reading (which, I should point out, was really insightful as well as providing extraordinary people-watching), we had a most lovely evening eating cheese off the cobblestones by the Seine in an impromptu riverside picnic. Heaven.