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It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.

Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.

Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.

The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.

Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.

I wrote last year about my chance meeting with Leanna Mills and her family in Montpellier. I was particularly moved by their story and have kept in touch with the family since.

With more surgery upcoming for Leanna and her sister Bethany, the family arrived back in France this week. They passed through Paris briefly on their way to Montpellier.

On Thursday evening I caught up with the girls and their father Nic for dinner. Afterwards we went down to the Eiffel Tower for some sightseeing. I’m still not much good at driving a wheelchair, and the evening crowds didn’t make it easier! Their little sister Olivia came with us, and had a lot of fun with the souvenir sellers…

Bethany, Nic, Leanna and Olivia in Paris

Bethany’s surgery is routine but still dramatic – she is getting the batteries replaced for the brain stimulator device that keeps her alive. The technology is slowly improving, and doctors  hope that her new batteries will last longer than two years. Bethany uses a wheelchair, but thanks to continuing surgery she remains fairly mobile and independent.

On the other hand, Leanna is facing a much grimmer challenge. In addition to her primary dystonia, she has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – terrible news for a 15 year-old girl.  Leanna now requires significant care, and the outlook does not look good for much improvement.

Mills Sisters Registered Charity

The Mills family currently need help raising funds to buy a block of land in Newcastle, Australia and to construct a disability-friendly home for the girls. They have a registered charity, and donations are accepted online at their MyCause page. These donations are tax-deductible in Australia.

In other developments, the sisters now have their own website. With permission of the family, I also have set up a Facebook page – so you can follow them if you’re on Facebook, and I hope to post regular updates there as I hear news…

The 14th of July (which NOBODY in France calls “Bastille Day”, by the way) dawned bright, promising a hot day with sun shining benignly down on the amassed weaponry parading down the Champs-Elysées. Shorts, sunglasses, sunscreen and digital cameras seemed the essential equipment to enjoy the day.

How wrong we were. As we took up our position in the roof garden of an office building just a block back from the Arc de Triomphe (friends with high places, naturally), and while snipers from the Gendarmerie stared at us through binoculars, clouds started moving in from the east, looming darkly over the Eiffel Tower.

The storm held off long enough for us to watch the French Air Force roar down the length of the Voie Triomphale, from La Défense to the Louvre. It was an impressive sight.

New Zealand’s airforce consists of a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters, a few transport planes that occasionally drop boxes of aid to cyclone-stricken Pacific islands and a part-time brass band. France has, er, a few more planes than we do:

And then, as soon as the jets got out of the way, the heavens opened. Paris was hit by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. We unsuccessfully dodged the showers and – strangely – found ourselves in a bar in time for lunch. We were wet, but seemed to be doing something right.

L’Ecluse specialise in the wines of Bordeaux. We ignored the bottle of 1979 St Pétrus on their wine list at €1227 and opted for a €25 Château Margaux instead. After drying out over a few glasses and an “Assortiment de cochonnailles” (a plate containing variations on pig), I sensed that the rain was easing and that I should make a dash for the métro.

My expectation of improving weather proved of course to be hilariously and liquidly wrong. As I reached the bottom of Avenue Georges V, another torrential downpour hit. By the time I took this video of a Leclerc tank rumbling onto the Pont de l’Alma, I was soaked to the skin.

The rest of the day was spent drying off, wandering around the Marais in the newly resurgent sunshine, and then heading up the tower of the American Cathedral (yes, more friends with high places) for a few drinks and to watch the fireworks over Trocadéro at 11pm. But that is another episode…

To complement our previous journey from south to north, yesterday we achieved the obvious second objective – to cross Paris from west to east, on foot. From Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes. It took us 6 hours, and we covered 14.2 kilometres.

We ignored the warnings of heatwave, and were surprised by lower-than-predicted temperatures.  A light rainstorm in the afternoon helped keep things manageable. The City of Paris, however, were taking no chances:  heatwave warnings were displayed everywhere on the public information screens.

The journey was documented in real-time via Twitter, but here are a few highlights in images:

Parc de Monceau, a welcome patch of greenery in the 8th arrondissement

Jeanne d’Arc defying the English outside Saint-Augustin (Paris 8e)

A very reasonably priced lunch at Bouillon Chartier

The Promenade Plantée offers a quiet green corridor for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the 12th arrondissement

As we reached journeys end at the périphérique on the eastern edge of Paris, the chimneys got more fanciful…

This was the view yesterday morning from the Pont des Arts, looking east to the Ile de la Cité. There were train strikes and I decided to walk to Châtelet RER instead of braving the Métro. The reward was this sight of the Seine, almost completely motionless beneath a clear summer sky.

Say the words “Forest of Chantilly” and you might immediately imagine one of those cutaway gags in The Simpsons where Homer says to himself  “Mmmmm….Forest of Chantilly“, and he daydreams of prancing through groves of swirly cream trees, grabbing mouthfuls of marscarpone squirrel while blizzards of cherries tumble from the sky.

However, the Forest of Chantilly is a real place: 6,000 hectares of woodland lying 40 kilometres north of Paris on the RER D line, and the trees are not made of the eponymous cream. I went for a walk through the forest on Friday, from Orry-la-Ville to the Château de Chantilly.

The Parc Astérix is situated nearby, and one could almost imagine Obélix hunting wild boar in these woods. But there is little sense of wilderness: the forest is a working source of sustainable timber and is still used as a hunting park as it was in the time of the French monarchy.

In the middle of the forest are the Etangs de Commelles – a series of large artificial lakes built by Cistercian monks in the 13th Century as fishing ponds. Chateaubriand wrote about the lakes in the 19th Century, and today they harbour a remarkable range of birdlife and a large population of water-rats, some of whom sat on the bank, watching me eat my lunch.

Chantilly is a major horse racing centre. On a nearby estate, the Aga Khan keeps half the bloodstock of France.  The forest is criss-crossed by long, straight galloping tracks laid down in soft sand, dedicated to training racehorses. Walkers must take care because these tracks are restricted to horses and their jockeys from 6am to 1pm.

If you follow the GR11 path towards Chantilly, you emerge from the forest at the “service entrance” to the Château.

The Château itself, once home to the Condé and the Montmorency families, is popular with tourists and school groups. The well-groomed parkland is a startling contrast to the solitude of the forest.

From the Château, you can walk around the edge of the racecourse, past the most impressive set of stables you’ll see anywhere, back to the Chantilly-Gouvieux railway station. From there, you can be back in Paris in 40 minutes.

The excellent maps produced by the Institut Géographique National (IGN) make it very easy to put on a good pair of walking shoes and launch into the French countryside. It’s one of my favourite activities: at walking pace, you can better understand a landscape, you can avoid the crowds and make unexpected discoveries.

When I lived in Alsace, IGN maps of the southern Vosges were pinned across my apartment walls. And everywhere I’ve lived since my collection of maps (and walking experiences) has expanded.

These few weeks of rest between jobs end on Monday, so this week has been a last chance to enjoy some parts of the Paris region I hadn’t yet seen.  Yesterday I caught a train from Gare Montparnasse to Rambouillet and set off on a circuit through the Forêt de Rambouillet, one of the largest forests near Paris, 200 square kilometres in size. As usual, I took some pictures.

The Château de Rambouillet was a royal hunting lodge from the 1500s onwards, today it’s a summer home for French presidents. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing reinaugurated “presidential hunts” in the 1970s, and the goddess Diana with her attendant dogs and stags still watch over the park.

Walking out of Rambouillet towards the village of Gazeran, fields of wheat bend in the wind.

Once inside the forest, Rambouillet’s oaks stretch for miles and miles…

This is a forest where Scouts and ramblers make mysterious magic circles of unknown purpose,

A forest where witches might lurk in hidden cottages,

A forest which is empty during the week, save for a few deer and the lone walker.

Even at the best of times, Charles de Gaulle is a historical figure that one can’t avoid in France. More than 3000 towns and villages across the country honour him with a street name. When Paris built the world’s most impossible international airport, there was only one name they could give it. And inevitably, France’s nuclear aircraft carrier bears the name of the man his military school classmates called “The Great Asparagus“.

This week France marks the 70th anniversary of “The Appeal of 18th June 1940“, and so Charles de Gaulle is even more omnipresent than usual – on TV, in newly-minted books, and on metro walls.

A few years ago, I visited the (now closed) Charles de Gaulle Museum in Bayeux, Normandy, and described the exhibitions as “creepy and obsessive”. Now, having lived in France a little while, I’ve come to understand a little better the influence that “le connétable” still exerts over the French nation and its sense of itself.  The obsession is certainly there, but perhaps it’s less creepy than simply necessary…

Whether you like it or not, many aspects of Charles de Gaulle’s “conception of France” form the backbone of the French nation as it enters the 21st Century: strongly centralised government, broad state involvement in the economy and French exceptionalism in foreign policy. For better or worse, every French President that followed him has  had to work within a political system largely conceived by de Gaulle when he founded the 5th Republic in extremis in 1958.

The event being commemorated this week, De Gaulle’s Appeal of the 18th of June, arguably marked the birth of modern France. The speech made by de Gaulle on the BBC that day in 1940 effectively created the Free French forces, and asserted that the legitimate power of the republic now lay with those resisting occupation, rather than with the collaborationist government headed by Pétain.

But in terms of re-establishing the French nation-state, de Gaulle’s stubborness in the face of his British and American allies was just as important as his fight against the Nazis.

Churchill and Roosevelt were constantly annoyed and bemused by de Gaulle’s insistence that France sit at the table of “great powers”, and Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of the monomaniac de Gaulle continued well after the war. In 1964, the General was famously portrayed as a Dalek in a cartoon in the Daily Mail.

Key to de Gaulle’s plan for the recuperation of post-war France was his insistence on establishing a national legend of  Resistance.  This week I visited Mont Valérien on the outskirts of Paris, site of the monument built by de Gaulle to the heroes of WW2, the Mémorial de la France Combattante. It was extraordinary to me to see how a monument that commemorates France’s triumph over fascism could look so, well, fascist…

But while De Gaulle still inspires awe, argument and occasionally derision in France today, there are some who are not scared to paint the Great Leader in a satirical light. Jean-Yves Ferri’s De Gaulle à la Plage imagines a cartoon Charles de Gaulle and his family on holiday at the beach in 1956, illustrated in hilarious and affectionate detail.

In some ways, de Gaulle has become immortal like Abraham Lincoln or Oliver Cromwell, a character who has become historical shorthand for a certain time period and a certain view of the world. Whether speaking on the radio from wartime London, cryptically addressing Algerian colonists with his Je vous ai compris speech, or lying under a sun umbrella on a beach in Brittany, Charles de Gaulle is going to be haunting imaginations for a long time yet.

Geographically speaking, Paris is not a big city. Its suburbs stretch on forever and are home to 11 million people , but the city proper, (just 2.2 million inhabitants), is clearly enclosed with the boulevard périphérique. The city can be crossed, according to Graham Robb “in a few hours” by foot.

On a day-to-day basis, you never realise the true size of Paris while you zoom from place to place by métro, bus or taxi. So a friend and I decided to test the “smallness” of the city by walking across it in an afternoon. We followed roughly the route of Métro Line 4, from Porte d’Orléans in the south to Porte de Clignancourt in the north, with a little meander eastwards to take in parts of the Marais.

If we had taken a direct route, the distance would have been just 9km, however with the detours we walked about 13km. South of the river, we traced the route of Général LeClerc’s 2nd Armoured Division as it liberated Paris from German forces on 25th August, 1944. There is even a monument in the Jardin du Luxembourg to one Jean Arnould, killed while liberating the park from Nazi oppression.

Crossing the river by way of the Ile St-Louis, we dog-legged right to walk through the Hôtel de Sully and the Place des Vosges before following our nose north-west past Place de la République towards the 18th arrondissement.

Climbing over the Butte de Montmartre and down the other side, we arrived at the Porte de Clignancourt four and a half hours after we started out. Paris est à nous!

We made a video: four and a half hours walking summarised in four and a half minutes:

The places seen in the video are, in order, from south to north:

Monument LeClerc, Porte d’Orléans, 14e
Place Denfert-Rochereau, 14e
Hôpital St Vincent de Paul, 6e
Fontaine des Explorateurs, 6e
Jardin du Luxembourg
Beer stop, rue Soufflot, 5e
La Sorbonne, 5e
Cathédrale Nôtre-Dame de Paris
The Seine @ Quai de la Tournelle
Hôtel de Sully, 4e
Place des Vosges, 4e
Place de la République, 11e
Arc de Triomphe de la Porte St-Martin, 10e
Tati, boulevard Rochechouart, 18e
Sacré Coeur / Montmartre
Café La Maison Rose, rue de l’Abreuvoir, 18e
Stairs, rue des Saules, 18e
Traffic, Porte de Clignancourt
Celebrating a successful walk with another beer -  Bistrot la Renaissance, rue Championnet, 18e

We imagine there are very few native Parisians who have ever walked the width of their own city, and it’s certainly not something recommended (yet) in the tourist guides.

There are plans afoot to repeat the exercise later this summer by crossing Paris along an east/west axis – a journey of at least 16 kilometres.  Does anyone want to join us?

More crumbs from the weekend… not only did I visit the Saturday market, I also went to Le Vert Anglais for a burger (according to Ed, the best burger in France, and I won’t contradict him!)

A burger and Orangina under the pine tree on Place de Castellane is a good way to spend a few hours on a sunny Saturday.

The Languedoc summer provides perfect conditions for an outdoor meal of tapas, accompanied by well-selected bottles of Rioja and Pic Saint-Loup in the old town. It’s great to catch up with friends, and after so many months in Paris, it’s nice to remember that the Spanish border is not so far away after all…

My visit to Montpellier coincided with the Comédie du Livre – apparently the second-largest book festival in France – bringing hundreds of authors and BD artists into town.  Fans of all ages flocked to the tents set up on the Place de la Comédie and the Esplanade to get that personal dédicace from their favourite author or dessinateur.

To complement the burgers and tapas, some intellectual nourishment was in order. On Sunday I attended a live broadcast of L’Esprit Public on Radio France Culture, held in Montpellier as part of the festival.

I am fascinated by the particularly French respect for “talking heads”, and the broadcast featured some heavy hitters of the French intello-politico-media-élite: historian and member of the French Academy Max Gallo, politician Jean-Louis Bourlanges, journalist Philippe Labarde, and law professor Dominique Rousseau.

Philipe Meyer played the role of genial animateur, orchestrating the egos and brainpower at his disposal with alacrity and humour.  The topics for the show were the European deficit crisis and reform of the French education system. You can listen here.

The often controversial right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour was supposed to participate in a live debate on Sunday afternoon. Having seen Monsieur Zemmour many times on television I was looking forward to seeing some sparks fly. But for some last minute reasons he was unable to travel to Montpellier for the festival.

Despite Zemmour’s absence, his “opponent” Jean-Francois Kahn delivered a fascinating session on the dangers of groupthink and la pensée unique – Kahn was highly critical of the French media and its role as a critic and commentator.

Keeping up with all that abstract debate was thirsty work – and there is no better way to round off a weekend in the south of France than with a pastis at sunset!