A wet shave with your brunch, sir?

A wet shave man spends every Sunday afternoon in our favourite place for brunch, the Truc bar round the corner on rue Poteau.

For €10, you can have the whole massage, shave, hot towel, oil experience.

Your wife can enjoy a final coffee and pampering by proxy.

Sunday brunch at the Truc is a bargain at €20, with patisseries, coffee, muesli, pancakes, and a salmon, bacon, or homemade burger main course. We have never managed the pain perdu dessert.

mmm, massage...

mmm, hot towels...

Baby-soft face.

Daniel Craig and Dame Judy Dench for International Women's Day

Check out those stats and tell me gender diversity is no longer an issue.

This week I have learnt...

• That an extra 50cm squared can make all the difference to a kitchen worktop (but so can the loss of an entire drawer).
• That sharing music when you're lazy and usually listen to the same artists can be much less daunting with a fab music-sharing site like Lets Loop.
• That Royal Jelly really is something, with added Vit B even better at boosting both energy and morale.
• That party costumes are best planned more than three days beforehand...

Bettina Rheims, Printemps and the Diamond-Encrusted Eiffel Tower

Photographer Bettina Rheims has provided Printemp's latest windows, with a nine-frame story of diamonds, dresses and deception set in its Boulevard Haussman store. Each frame showcases a different designer, inlcuding Balenciaga, Chloé, Dries Van Noten, Maison Martin Margiela and Valentino, as the model searches for a diamond-encrusted Eiffel Tower in the clutches of a myterious stranger. The exterior, shop floor, rooftops and staircases of one of Paris' biggest department stores play a leading role in the project, but my favourite shot is the mod girl in her stripy tent dress, looking out past her own silhouette.

Much better pictures than my single, rather rushed effort, are on the Journaldesvitrines.com, worth a click through to the full post for all of them.

Printemps, 
64 boulevard Haussmann, 
75009 Paris

Sunday baking

Fruity, nutty sweet bread cake to have with cheese, or maybe for breakfast - in which case we shall definitely call it bread rather than cake, as we don't eat cake for breakfast... And a beef and Guinness stew on the stove. Last week, focaccia, and also the week before, when we had beef and pheasant casserole. And lasagnes and herb and lemon chicken, and sweetcorn mash, and cake. Even though the worktop still needs replacing (yes, madame has noticed it is too short, the idea was to gain space not lose it, please come back and redo it...) having something resembling a properly-working kitchen is bliss after six months.