KRISHNA Léger is confident he is the only person to have smuggled fresh fish into Les Baumettes in Marseille, one of the most notorious prisons in France. With the fish he made bouillabaisse, the famous Marseillais soup. One of his fellow inmates – also from Marseille – said it was the best he had ever tasted…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 20 August 2022. To continue reading, click here.
AT 8.30am on Tuesday 26 January the waiting room of the emergency department at the Lariboisière hospital in Paris was still empty, festooned with signs reading “emergency department on strike” that predate the pandemic but have been left pointedly in place…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 7 February 2021. To continue reading, click here.
Sir Graham Brady, Richard Tice and Toby Young proposing; me, Phil Whitaker and Layla Moran opposing. Online on 28 January 2021 (lockdown obliged). Worth a watch:
WITH the number of cases of Covid-19 doubling every three days in France, the capital is preparing for the worst. In the northern sector of Paris, all 26 beds in the intensive care unit of the Bichat-Claude Bernard hospital are full, and the wards that have been turned over to Covid-19 patients are filling up rapidly. The Paris hospital system works by overflow, and the next in line is the Lariboisière, near the Gare du Nord train station…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 17 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.
IN the long grass beyond the last hut, slabs of greyish-white shark meat dry on wooden racks in the sun. This village, which I’m visiting as the paying guest of an ecotourism company, lacks electricity, has a single fresh water pump and is inaccessible by road. Like many others along the west coast of Madagascar, it looks to the sea for its food, income and transport. Malagasy villages tend to specialise when it comes to marine resources, and this one’s speciality is shark…
This article first appeared in Geographical Magazine in December 2017. To read it in full you have to subscribe.