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Sharing bread with Macron

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There is something almost embarrassingly predictable about loving Paris. Everyone does. Tourists swarm it, Instagram has colonized every corner, and here we are again - Rita and I - walking the Paris streets in early April with the giddiness of people who really ought to know better. We have long since lost count of our visits. At some point the city stopped being a destination and turned into something more like a habit. A good one. Not a growth journey, not an opportunity to discover who we really are at depth - just a place where we reliably feel more like ourselves than we do most other places.   This spring we have rented an apartment in the 14th and early today we went by one of our local boulangeries, Fournil Didot, where a baker named Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan - who came to France from Sri Lanka, spent years making macarons, and somehow ended up making the best french bread. In 2026 he has demonstrated his abilities by winning the Grand Prix de la Baguette, which  ...
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The Sky Is the Roof: France's Secret Cathedral

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  Can an entire cathedral be a secret? The Cathedrale de Jean Linard sits hidden in the rolling Berry countryside, near a village so small - Neuvy-Deux-Clochers - that most people drive straight past it without knowing either exists. Jean Linard was a potter. Then he became a sculptor, an engraver, a painter.  When he bought an old flint quarry in 1961, he did what any reasonable person would do: he started building a cathedral in his back garden, ad he kept building it for nearly fifty years, until he died in 2010 He'd been inspired by the Facteur Cheval, a postman in the Drôme who spent thirty-three years constructing a fantastical palace because he tripped over a stone one day and liked its shape. And by Gaudí, who started the Sagrada Família in 1882 and whose church - as you may have noticed - still isn't quite finished. What connected these three men - Linard, Cheval, Gaudi - was simple: they had an idea, and they didn't stop. The stubbornness became the point. Af...
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The Staircase Nobody Optimized

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   We live, we are frequently told, in an age of unprecedented connectivity. Platforms connect us. Networks connect us. A man in Copenhagen can, in a matter of a splitsecond, reach a man in Sao Paulo even though he might not have anything particular urgent to say. This is considered progress and a part of modernity. But Rita and I had yesterday the occasion in the Burgundian village Rogny-les-Sept-Ecluses to stand next to a staircase of stone and water which showed that we moderns have of course not invented the idea of connecting stuff. Someone back in the 17th century dreamt of connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel by making a passageway from the Loire river to the Seine. And here on this hill in Burgundy, at the watershed between the two mighty rivers, is the result of that thought.   By building seven locks pressed together in a staircase up a hillside in Rogny, the boats could ascend the twenty-four metres up from the Loire valley.   Twelv...
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Cold Wine, Empty Streets: Sancerre Before the Crowds Arrives

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  The plan was to escape. This is important context! Nordic winters are long and grey and self-serious, and by the end of February Rita and I had reached the point where the darkness stops feeling atmospheric and starts feeling personal. France, we reasoned, would be different. France in early March would be spring. There would be light. There would be warmth. There would be outdoor tables and wine and the specific looseness that comes from sitting in the sun in a country that takes lunch seriously. And then we rented a small house in the town of Sancerre Sancerre sits on a hill in the Loire Valley and is known, globally, for one thing: its white wine. Sauvignon blanc of considerable reputation. Writers have praised it. Sommeliers have wept over it. Restaurants in Copenhagen, London and New York charge serious money for a glass of it. We looked forward to be living at the source.  Now we are, and all is grey. It is cold. It rains every day. Not the dramatic Nordic cold that...
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What No Moving Box Can Hold: Saying Goodbye to Our French Mountain Home

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Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction. That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us.  He is probably right, actually. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room were not really enough for the task. They were meant to transport objects, but we were trying to pack something else as well - almost twenty years of life lived in this place. The real estate listing described our house as "a charming two-bedroom property with traditional features." It was not wrong, exactly. But it also did not come close. This has not just been our vacation house. Over the years it became something more - a real home away from home, if that is not too strange a phrase.    The rhythm of returning each summer made us feel, somehow, that we belonged here, at least a little. Though we were never full-time residents, the vi...
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Lisbon: Crawling Through Time: Reflections from secret Roman Galleries

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This morning, I crawled through muddy, dark Roman-era tunnels below Lisbon.  The tunnels were carved during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for centuries, they directed underground rainwater while empires above rose and fell. Eventually, they were sealed off and forgotten - to be rediscovered completely by chance during the rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake, which turned most of Lisbon into rubble. Today, the crypts are normally completely filled with groundwater, but they are pumped dry on just a couple of days each year, where only a few visitors are allowed access.   Today, I was among the lucky few.  The only entry to the below is through a narrow temporary shaft in the middle of the busy Rua da Conceição, right between the rails of the 28 tram line. The stairs leading down felt steep and risky, and when I finally reached the galleries, a few lights illuminated the void that had stood in total darkness for more than a Millenium. Some passages were s...
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Berlin: Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

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Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin’s Mitte is like walking into some ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942, is now the home of a rather eccentric private art collection Inside the building’s anthill-like network of corridors and small rooms, the art on display completely changes how you experience the space.  You encounter everything from strange kinetic sculptures to multimedia installations flickering in the dark. Each room opens like a window into a different creative mind, and to be honest, the story of the building itself is just as exciting as the art displayed inside it.   During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand civilians from the nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945, the Red Army used the building for prisoners of war, and it later became an East German warehouse for tropical fruit.  After the wall came down, the empty building was squatted by kids. During the nineties, it became simpl...
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