Why do French girls wear All Stars?
You can travel to France by Eurostar. The idea is that you step off the train into a world of gastronomy, shopping and if you're in Lille, even more shopping.
The first thing that I nearly stepped into was a little mound of dog shit, just outside the station. There was more. Every few hundred metres, especially on corners from a variety of calibres, as far as I could see.
Lille is a lovely city and the old part has a real warmth, in both its architecture and its people. But it's a shame that a visitor can't fully appreciate the varied skyline, as the eyes need to be about six or seven paces ahead of the body scouring the pavement for the next little land-mine.
The pavements in the old town are cobbled and this adds to the problem as they provide a perfect camouflage for the dog shit. It blends in so well that it's often just a pace away before the raised profile becomes visible.
But Lille is not Paris. France has the seventh highest dog population in the world. There are over 8,000,000 in France and judging from my last trip to Paris, a high proportion must have at least a second home in the city of lights.
A particularly evil variant of the usual neatly laid pile, is the smudger.
Despite the egality bit, dog ownership is still a bourgeois characteristic. The worst areas for dog shit in Paris are the 7th, 16th and 17th. Things are getting better thanks to the Je Ramasse campaign. But many are too posh to pick up.
The French slang for All Stars means shit-crushers - for a reason.
Better to wear those than something more elegant. Best to avoid that je ne sais quoi between the toes.
And today's title? An abrupt if inaccurate translation that I recall from a French/Australian love match that faltered in and around my flat in Oxford in the 1980s. No kidding.
Where are they now?
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