06/08/20 

Ever so slowly I’m getting to grips with Paris and her quirks.  MonoP’ is a smaller version of Monoprix and that’s fine.  Sometimes I only want to grab a peach iced tea rather than a bottle of grenadine syrup.  Similarly, I may choose to spend ten minutes looking at school bags that I wish were not only in my size but also about €30 cheaper! 

The thing I learnt today was actually through misfortune.  I like a Five Guys burger.  They are an American chain that do nice burgers and overfilled chip cups.  Order a medium portion and they’ll give you a medium portion plus, for good (or poor) measure, they’ll also throw in an extra scoop of the peanut-oil fried chips to sit at the bottom of the bag.  I usually empty these on to the opened silver-paper wrapped burger  that I’ve ordered with onions, peppers and jalapeños.  And these aren’t ordinary jalapeños.  They taste fresh and crunchy.  Which is amazing.  Finally, for me at least, is the “soda”.  It’s a 50cl cup to be used with the Coca-Cola machine that supplies many variants of varieties of regular drinks.  You can mix and match as much as you like, creating, they tell me, over 100 flavours.  To top of this decadent decadence of luxurious indulgence, you get to go back and do it all again.  Or go back and do it all differently.  It doesn’t matter. It’s up to you. Except in France. 

Introduced in 2015, the French government made it illegal to supply free refills for, essentially, all the good stuff in restaurants.  This means no more going back for an extra glug of sugar.  Unless you pay.  Now, I’m not sure how much Five Guys charge for their second cup, nor Ikea, but I hope somebody has done something customer-friendly for their customers.  Aside from reduce the level of overweight children and adults.  Let the people make the choice themselves rather than have RFID chipped cups to prevent cavities and sugar rushes. 

The departure lounge of Eurostar was very quiet.  I know I was only the second one there, but for the first hour since the doors opened, we were a party of six.  Separated by many feet in the vast expanse of closed eating concessions.  I had to fill out an online form for the UK government (although it’s looking a lot more like an English government) so they can know my whereabouts.  Again.  It also wasn’t checked.  I know the department of incompetence have a record of it, but to be fair, nobody knows what I’ve put down.  They don’t know if it’s true, if I’ll stick to it or anything.  They simply wanted to know where I’d been and where I’m going to be.  According to me.  I just can’t see anybody being able to check up properly.  I know I’ve been over this already but there is such a gaping hole in this plan that it’s another huge waste of public funds.  I could do a better job of it.  I won’t go into how I’d do it, but let’s agree that it wouldn’t be as bad a funk up as this government and its many departments are doing.  I wouldn’t even charge £252m to do it! 

That’s two lots of exclamation marks I’ve used in this entry.  I don’t think I have used any before today.