27/02/25 17:56

Frog.  I’ve seen on of these before.  In fact, I’ve seen two.  And now this is my third.  I can’t recall the second one off the top of my head, yet it was today, I’m sure of it.  The first was sort of around the corner.  And over the river.  It was by the library that was designed to look like open books but I think had issues with the sun coming through the windows.  Although that may have been the Arab Institute further toward the centre of the city.  It was called, the first one I remember seeing, Frog and Rosbif.  Kind of a slur against both the French and the Brits.  Which is fine.  This one that I’m sat, 4 hours before my bus departs for Calais and then boards the ferry, is at Bercy Village.

Bercy Village, like a designer outlet shopping centre back home, has a more earthly feel to it.  It’s past a park, past some residential blocks and then one straight line, give or take.  Restaurants, bars, clothes, little other bits and a cinema.  No toilet.  Which is why I chose to come into Frog.  I mean, it’s one reason.  Obviously I needed to kill time but the choice of what I presumed to be a bar, followed by a restaurant, was up there on the list.  Next was the cinema.

This multi-laid out pub has brick walls, wooden ceiling rafters and a proper ‘English pub’ bar, not a zinc.  Various screens advertise deals, meals or special events and the staff, t-shirts and black trousers, are running around like lunatics, taking orders, delivering drinks and clearing tables.  If I hadn’t have been a student all those years ago, I would’ve thought that this was a student union bar.  The buzz in the air is just under uncomfortably loud – I’m on my own otherwise I may have found it annoying.  Yet, it feels nice.  This is how I would love pubs to be back home.  I don’t think it is, though.  The ones I go to certainly don’t have this atmosphere.  Maybe it’s because I visit the wrong pubs when I do visit.  Or it’s because I’m not in places where this style of night out thrives.  Or because it’s a bar and not a pub.

The screens are advertising in English.  The menus were in French.  The surrounding tables are French but there’s an American couple at the bar, just out of arm’s length to my right.  I’m sat at a high table with a tall chair.  Just one chair and the diameter is just right, allowing for this notebook, writing tin, glass and bottle plus my DJI Action 5 camera, all to sit nicely without any of them worrying they’ll fall off.