Nice

Friday

Felix Turner

How beer cracked France

Only a fool tries to guess exactly what awaits at a French karaoke bar. But on a Saturday night in Avignon, I wasn’t expecting to find a crowd of twentysomething hipsters drinking American-style IPA and singing “Mr. Brightside” and “Friday I’m in Love.” France, in all its stereotypical glory, has always been a wine country. Edward Lear wrote no limericks about a “young man from Saint-Étienne, who liked drinking Old Speckled Hen” but things are changing. France has the most breweries in Europe and beer is now the most bought alcohol in supermarkets, though if you ask a middle-aged Frenchman why young people are embracing beer instead of burgundy, you are met with the most Gallic of shrugs and a “bof... je ne sais pas.” So, why are they doing it?

beer

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed

From our UK edition

Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself... by digging holes, I would dig holes.’ Josipovici quotes this, and adds that there is a photograph of Samuel Beckett ‘doing just that’ in the second volume of his Collected Letters.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

How I love England — despite the hellhole that is Gatwick airport

From our UK edition

At Gatwick airport, after an hour and 15 minutes in a snaking queue system apparently purposely designed to infect as many as possible with Covid-19, and our three bladders inflated like party balloons, we finally presented ourselves before an available passport control officer. Early fifties, hatless, bald and recruited from the working class, he was the first English person on English soil I’d spoken to for 18 months. I formed the impression of a man who liked a drink. ‘And these two are?’ he said. ‘My grandsons,’ I said, looking at them besottedly in spite of us having lived together in insupportable heat for a week. ‘And you’ve come from where?’ he said. A trick question, surely, the answer to which I had to ponder for a second or two.