Idle Thoughts at Easter
Remembering Mum, Dad - and Paris
The slightest thing resurrects memories, especially at this time of year. Mum and Dad were married on Easter Sunday, April 18th, in 1953. Mum died on April 17th six years ago, and every time I see a Lindt bunny, I cry, because it was the Easter chocolate treat she always bought me as an adult. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that what I really wanted was a Cadbury’s chocolate button egg.
I was thinking of Mum yesterday, too, because on Good Friday she would always eschew meat in favour of fish (my brother does the same to this day).
Looking for some fish myself, I passed some trays of oysters, which resurrected memories of my own.
I didn’t have my first oyster until 2001, when I moved to Paris at the age of 42. It was just after 9/11 and I wondered that if I had been on one of those doomed planes, what my one regret in life would have been. It was that I had never lived in that city and the next week I was there – apartment, TV show (originally scheduled for UK filming) – and loving it.
My introduction to oysters was in Bofinger, a restaurant in the Bastille area and where I had recently enjoyed a lunch, courtesy of Channel 4 (it’s all coming back to me, Tracy . . . those endless bottles of Champagne, the Eurostar liquid picnic on the way home . . . those were the days of real PR in the TV industry).
I quickly realised I was not a fan of oysters but found that if I covered them with the onion red vinegar, black pepper, Tabasco sauce and lemon, I could just about get them down. In fact, I might as well have just cut out the middleman and had the drink in the shell.
In my first month in Paris, I lost three quarters of a stone consuming mainly Champagne and oysters; it’s still my favourite diet of all time.