Isobel's official birthday portrait... 

Isobel's Third birthday today - and she wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower for a treat. As you can see, it was a little cold, but here we are looking out over towards where we live.

Everything was going swimmingly first thing this morning. Isobel woke up about 7 as usual, and we gave her a new DVD my brother had sent to watch while we got a little bit of a lie-in. Then half an hour later or so she came back into our bedroom and opened the rest of her presents. That's when it all started. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was a little overloaded and there was a mega-tantrum. She's usually pretty even-tempered, but this was an eruption that went on for ages. Until we got to the Eiffel Tower, in fact - when everything changed and she was in a lovely mood.

She's currently asleep - so we'll see what happens next. 

The IOC were in town this week 

Here's an interesting article from the BBC about school dinners. the section about France was written by someone I know!

My parents are here this weekend, so Samantha and I took advantage of a bit of free babysitting to go to the Louvre. It's not a place we could really take Isobel, and I feel a bit guilty for not having been there before.

Well, as you can imagine it's huge - and we barely scratched the surface in the time we could decently take advantage of my folks' generosity. But being shallow philistines, we decided that we ought really to go and see the Mona Lisa.

The last iconic painting I went to see was Guernica, which hangs in Madrid. It was fascinating there watching people's breath taken away by the sheer size and power of that painting. People were literally reduced to tears.

It was rather different in front of the Mona Lisa. It's a compelling picture, no doubt about that. But nobody seemed in the least bit moved by it. Instead there was a rather undignified scrum and the constant flash of cameras as people took photos of an image they'd seen a million times and could buy a very nice postcard of in the shop (or indeed just about every shop in Paris). It seemed (and I'm not counting myself out of this) that it was just something people were determined to see so they could cross it off their list. tha lack of emotion was fascinating - and at least as interesting as the Mona Lisa itself. The painting is in a small room at the end of a very long corridor of fairly turgid Italian religious paintings - and some of them were eliciting a bigger emotional response than the one everyone had come to see.

You wonder why, exactly, ths painting is so famous, abnd whether its fame is really justified.

By contrast, the new American, African, Asian and Oceanic gallery (which for my money was by far the most interesting thing we saw in the tiny part of the louvre we visited) was deserted.