Home > The Magazine > Features

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Christmas short story

Humiliation

William Boyd

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

The Spectator's short story for the holidays

I checked into the Hôtel de la Gare and asked for their cheapest room. I was working out a clever, developing plan. You are a writer of fiction, Yves Hill, I told myself, so why don’t you write some fiction? My room deserved its low rate: under the eaves with slanted ceilings, it was graced with a sagging bed squeezed between a chest of drawers and a table with a jug and ewer. The small dirty window was three feet from a chimney crowded with cooing doves (and crusted with dove shit) and a distant view of a washing line. On my way downstairs I noticed a maid airing out two grand rooms on the first floor: wide beds with padded headboards, panelling, painted armoires. I questioned the receptionist: I thought you said the hotel was full? It is: we await the arrival of the English guests, monsieur, he said with an odd sheepish, conniving smile as if I were party to his conspiracy.

I investigated the two brasseries on the Place de la Republique: the Café Riche and the Café Couderc. To my seasoned eye it seemed that the Riche had the better situation (its terrasse warmly illuminated by the evening sun) while the Couderc had the better menu. The Café Couderc even had a makeshift seafood stall where a burly young lad with a first moustache performed the duties of the écailler and was shucking oysters with frowning concentration — flair and nonchalance would doubtless come with time.

I took a Pernod in the Café of the Riche and let the setting sun warm my face. For the first time in a year I felt myself relax, forgot about the ill-named Felicity and her beau and their hideous new union, forgot about the savaging that my poor brave Oblong had suffered, and felt the balm of France seep through me. I sauntered across the square to the Couderc and engaged the young oyster-shucker in conversation. Do you have oysters every day? Nearly, he said with an expressive shrug, they come from Arcachon — it depends on the trains. I went inside, was shown to a perfectly acceptable table, ordered a dozen fines de claires and a bottle of the local Sauvignon Blanc, and began to think about my next novel.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 Next page

More articles from: William Boyd | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff reveals how he secured Rupert Murdoch’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this media titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a city editor

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

Nancy Dell�Olio

Nancy Dell’Olio makes an impassioned case for Keynesian economics as the necessary remedy for the global crisis. It is to the Cambridge economist that we should turn once more

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

Rod Liddle

The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore

IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans reports from the latest IQ2 debate

Diplomatic Notebook

Sir Les Patterson

Sir Les Patterson writes from Australia

Ashley Cole deserved to be booed for all that he personifies

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that the magnificently horrid England defender exemplifies the greed, lack of respect for the fans and whining self-regard that is ruining football

If Miliband becomes PM, I’ll join the right-wing coup to topple him

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is outraged by the Foreign Secretary’s alleged comparison of himself to Michael Heseltine: like comparing a Big Beast to a stumpy little Muntjac deer. Where have all the political giants gone?