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A business trip to Nice this week offered very little time to explore the city. However, I happened to wake early on Wednesday – and caught the sun rising over Cap Ferrat, with the Baie des Anges slowly turning from pink to gold.

6.38am

7.02am

7.07am

Instagram is a free application for iPhone that “ages” your photos before you post them on the web.  Playing around with it today, I documented my trip to an orchestra rehearsal in the late 1970s.

Returning from a rather pleasant informal brunch yesterday, in the 19th arrondissement, a companion and I were entering the métro on rue de Belleville, heading towards Chatelet. I made the quite unconscious remark that we were “going back into Paris“. Which is a ridiculous statement, because we had never left Paris.

This is one of the paradoxes of a city like Paris: when you live near the centre, a journey of 20 minutes to the 19th arrondissment can feel like you’re heading into the countryside. Every part of town, despite being readily accessible by métro, feels distinct and somehow independent from every other district. Living and working here means that you might traverse several of these parallel universes every day.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, Paris is geographically a very small city,  you can walk the length and breadth of the city in around 4 hours. But unless you’re a taxi driver, most Paris residents have never visited the whole of their city.

As a relatively new arrival, I probably know less about Paris than most. But after 18 months, my Paris consists of a number distinct brightly-lit zones centred on metro stations and friends’ apartments,  some fuzzy grey bits in between, and some completely dark areas, which remain utterly unexplored and unknowable.

As most guidebooks will tell you, Paris revolves around neighbourhoods -  quartiers – of which there are an infinite number, because everyone will have a different sense of their own little neighbourhood.  My amateur definition of a quartier is a part of Paris within which you know where all the boulangeries are located: just in case your favourite one is closed, another has run out of baguettes tradition, and your third choice has a queue 20 metres long outside the door.

By this definition,  my own quartier stretches along the Left Bank from the Musée d’Orsay in the west to the far end of rue de Buci in the east, and as far south as Boulevard St Germain. South of Boulevard St Germain is also familiar territory, but I wouldn’t know where to buy bread: so it’s not my quartier.

Similarly, there are other parts of Paris I’ve come to know quite well: the eastern section of the 10th arrondissement, from Place de la République to the Canal St Martin; the streets of the Marais around métro St Paul and Place des Vosges;  rue Clerc in the western part of the 7th;  and a few avenues north of Etoile, heading towards Parc Monceau.  In these parts of town, I know where to find shops and certain cafés.

Additionally, I can also get myself to Fnac Montparnasse to buy bandes dessinées and find my way to Leroy-Merlin at Beaubourg to buy screwdrivers, lightbulbs and glue. But this hardly counts as an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city.

Place de Clichy and most of the 17th arrondissement, the métro 3bis, the towers of les Olympiades in the 13th… all these parts of Paris – only 20 minutes from my front door – remain as mysterious to me as Moscow or Seoul.

This sense of compartmentalisation is reflected in the way the city is administered – surely, only the French could take a small city of 2 million people, and divide it among 20 separate mayors . One mayor for each arrondissement.  Of course there is a SuperMayor of all of Paris, (our friend Plastic Bertrand), but I wonder whether the arrondissement system – created in the rationalist afterglow of revolution in 1795 – remains truly effective today.

Certainly the arrondissements emphasise the sense of separation between different parts of the city, each with its own “typical” resident profile. The 7th, (where I happen to live), is derided as being bourgeois, expensive, full of government ministries and overall, rather boring.  If you have Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry, the stereotype dictates that you must live in the 13th. The 11th is the place to be if you’re a young bobo media entrepreneur. For African groceries, head to the 10th around Gare du Nord and the parts of the 18th around Tati. And the 4th is where you hang out if you’re, well,  gay or Jewish.

Somehow all of these little districts fuse together – with varying degrees of success – to create a conglomerate whole which is a city called “Paris”. Figuring out how it all works (or doesn’t) is one of my constant fascinations.

I feel a little sorry for the tourists who jet in for a week of plastic Eiffel Towers, photos on the parvis du Notre Dame, and takeaway portraits sketched by the artists on Place du Tertre. I’m sure they all have a wonderful time, and tick all their boxes, but they haven’t really seen much. If anything, the problem about Paris is that there’s too much to see, and nobody can agree on what it is that you’re supposed to see, or why it looks that particular way.

Please excuse me, I’ve got to leave now. It’s Sunday, and I’m going to visit Paris  for the afternoon.

Bit of a strange, slightly rushed year, this one. On a personal note, the sense of disjointedness in 2010 has not been helped by moving through three jobs and five weeks of unemployment during that time. And just two weeks holiday: the much-vaunted life of leisure promised by the French social-democratic compact has yet to eventuate.

However, there have been highlights, and many things I should be thankful for. Since I can no longer hold anything in my head longer that five minutes, I needed to look back at my photos for the year to realise what a lot has happened. Here are a few cool things that have happened this year:

Driving to the Western Fjords of Norway

Finding Brussels bathed in sunshine

Performing Beethoven, Schubert and Sibelius with Marc Korovitch and my friends in l’Orchestre des Concerts Gais

Walking the length and breadth of Paris, twice.

Hanging out in Hingeballe with Sigurdór, Sice and their family

Parisian photo safaris with my sister and future brother-in-law (yes they got engaged while visiting me!)

Getting my first glimpse of the Middle East… Abu Dhabi and Qatar

So, all in all, a lot happened in 2010, without really trying. A lot of visitors passed through my apartment, and somehow I improved my knowledge of this strange city called Paris. Thanks to everyone for sticking at it these last 52 weeks, and may I wish you all a very happy and fulfilling 2011, wherever you are.

I managed to get stuck in England this weekend – and once again was able to enjoy snow in Oxford… despite the fact that it took me 10 hours to get back to Paris on Sunday, Saturday was a most enjoyable day to be a weather refugee. Snowmen constructed, snowballs were thrown, and port and mince pies were served in the Middle Common Room at Teddy Hall.

This week, I’ve been in Abu Dhabi and Doha. It was  my first time in the real “Middle East”, and everything was fascinating and occasionally horrifying at the same time. A few days in a country is not enough time to really understand what is going on, but I saw enough to at least provoke a few thoughts.

Most things about the economic boom in the Gulf States has already been written, but to actually see the scale of the development of the UAE and Qatar is quite something else.  I haven’t been to Dubai, but if Doha and Abu Dhabi are merely the “little brothers” by comparison, Dubai must be simply amazing.

Both cities are vast building sites. There’s not just one or two buildings going up, EVERYTHING is going up. The new city centre of Doha has been largely built since the year 2000. Where, a decade ago, there was desert, there are now several dozen immense skyscrapers, and more are rising all the time.

The wealth on display is unmissable – Porche Cayennes cruise the Doha Corniche, Gucci and Prada have shops in all the big malls. And occasionally the money goes into religious architecture: situated in the middle of a vast carpark worthy of a supermarket, Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Al Zayed Mosque is the 8th largest in the world, and is a cacophony of marble, gold and chandeliers worthy of Liberace.

The inspiration for all this pious ostentation is the tomb of Sheikh Al Zayed, founder of the United Arab Emirates, where a mullah sings verses of the Koran over his grave all day. Completed in 2007, the air-conditioned complex is the only mosque in Abu Dhabi that is open to infidels such as myself.

The wealth, of course, has to come from somewhere, and in Qatar, you’re not allowed to forget this.  Posters all over the city proclaim that Qatar produced “77 million tonnes of natural gas” last year, and this volume of production is not likely to fall any time soon. Government geologists calculate that Qatar has 200 years of reserves.

In Abu Dhabi and Doha, I had the impression of being a lot closer to the centre of today’s world than one gets in Europe. Both cities are largely populated by foreigners who have arrived en masse to grab a share of the wealth: in Qatar, only 25% of the inhabitants are native-born citizens, and in the UAE, it’s only 8%.

Whether it’s Australian hospital managers, Filipina hotel cleaners or Pakistani contruction workers, everyone seems to be here because of the money.

One of my taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi was from Nepal: he told me he has three children back home, and travels back to visit them once a year, for a couple of weeks. His hard-earned, tax-free dirhams are putting his kids through school back in his village.

When you, a Western visitor, are staying in 4-star hotels and being driven everywhere in Mercedes, it’s hard to imagine the lives of the immigrants who hold the economy together. At sunset, we saw shadowy crowds of construction workers, crouching on the kerb below their half-complete skyscraper. They were waiting for the minibuses that would take them back to their hostels.

Building skyscrapers in the desert doesn’t seem like much of a life, but the workers seem to be earning a wage, and nobody seems to be complaining – much.

Of course, complaining is not something that is easy to do. The gulf states are dictatorships, and no matter how benevolently the Emirs might rule, the real wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a very few families at the top.

The native Emiratis and Qataris are cossetted by a web of generous welfare benefits that ensure that the status quo is not questioned. And the expatriate workers are there only for a short time, and paying no tax, they hold very little moral authority to ask for change.

Despite some moderate calls for reform (such as this editorial I read in Doha’s The Peninsula on Thursday), the set-up seems pretty firmly fixed in place. The whole situation is strangely compelling. I hope I get to go back again sometime soon.

Travelling for business is a curious activity. Not only do you do a full week’s work, but it must be carried out in 15 different places: trains, airports, taxis, hotel rooms, aircraft and conference hall lobbies. Last week it was Spain. This week it was Germany and Norway. Next week it’s England.

Somewhere along the line, summer has turned to autumn, European daylight saving has ended, and some Chilean miners have been rescued, but this is all just low-level background noise compared to the constant paranoia of missing flights or leaving your passport on the back seat of a taxi.

The paranoia doesn’t quite stop when you get home either… on Saturday morning, I woke up wondering what time my flight was, and asking myself why there were people speaking French in the street outside my window. It took me fully ten seconds for my half-asleep brain to realise I was in my apartment in Paris, and I the furthest I would have to travel that day was down the street to the supermarket.

There are compensations, however. Even travelling within Europe, one does get to see an inordinate number of sunrises and sunsets from plane windows.

Sunrise over Norway, this week.

The camaraderie of the office is replaced by endless games of “phone tag” as colleagues chase your voicemail messages across the continent, always returning your messages while you’re in the air or in a meeting. Finding internet access and synchronising email becomes an almost monastic ritual.

The more I travel, the fussier I get. On planes, I prefer window seats: people won’t be pushing past me to go to the bathroom, and that aisle seat only offers marginally faster exit times at the end of the flight. And besides, the view out the window offers at least some kind of distraction if the document I’m reviewing becomes too boring.

Hotel rooms too, become objects of obsession: for me, ease of internet connection and the availability of an ironing board in the room are current criteria for judging the excellence of a hotel. I’m sure in a few months time, this will change: perhaps breakfast will be my next bugbear: German and Norwegian hotels do well, but Spanish and Greek hotel breakfasts are just weird. I mean, ice cream and chocolate cake? For breakfast?

Sunset over Barcelona, last week.

So if my blog posts seem few and far between at the moment, be assured it’s not for lack of will, but simply lack of time. For the next few months at least, I’m more likely to be 30,000 feet over the North Sea, munching on a Lufthansa cheese sandwich, or dialling in to conference calls from a hotel in Birmingham, or mangling my limited Spanish into a phrase to ask a Barcelona taxi driver for a receipt.

One of the best Brian Sewell clips, ever. It’s from his documentary series Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour.

As a follow up to the previous post, and by popular demand, here is the engraving of St Etienne de Caen and the photo I took of it – almost 200 years and 5 generations separate these two images!

If posts have been few and far between, it’s because work has been very busy… I did however manage to spend some time in Normandy with my sister and her boyfriend a couple of weekends back. While they explored the D-Day beaches, I caught a train from Bayeux into Caen, to chase down a church that was sketched by an ancestor of mine in the 19th Century.

John Sell Cotman (who, I am told, is my great-great-great-uncle, or something like that), undertook three tours of Normandy from 1817 to 1820, sketching many of the notable ancient buildings of the region. It was quite a significant journey for a provincial English artist in the 19th Century – he travelled by ship from the south coast of England, and made his tour of Normandy by postal coach. The results of his tours were published in a book of engravings in 1822.

Chateau de Lillebonne (Seine-Maritime) by J.S. Cotman

I have one of the engravings, and it turns out my engraving is a depiction of the church of St Etienne de Caen, which is the abbey church founded by William the Conqueror in the 11th Century, and it also houses his tomb. During the Battle of Normandy, when Caen was almost completely flattened during weeks of bitter fighting between German and British forces in July 1944, many of the townspeople sheltered in the church for days at a time, and the building survived the battle largely unscathed.

On my way back to the train station, I bumped into the local Caennais, taking to the street to protest the Sarkozy government’s retirement reform plan. It was a Saturday march, so there were many families marching, alongside the usual union members. Despite the rain, the protestors seemed determined to send a message to Paris that they value their acquis sociaux…