Yesterday I saw this laptop bag in Maison de Ville, a wonderful shop a few doors down from my apartment and I just knew I had to have it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day today so went back and bought it.

It’s super green and super gay, but fuck it. I do live in the Gay Marais in Gay Paris and a splash of ostentatious leather in a vibrant colour against my usual muted shirt-and-jumper combination is hardly the most offensive thing that I could do to my innocent Catholic upbringing. So I’m embracing it.

(Also I did ask the shop assistant her advice on colours and walked up and down the shop in front of a mirror seeing which one was best. That is the gayest thing of all).

It’s getting to that time of year where I wish wearing a balaclava were socially acceptable and didn’t just shout ‘rapist’ or ‘bank robber’.

In terms of fashion, what’s so wrong with covering your face up? (It could even make some people look better). I mean, if you can get away with wearing fake PVC ‘oil slick’ skin-tight leggings or humongous glasses despite your perfect vision then where’s the crime in protecting your face from the bitterly cold European winds?

If I can achieve one thing this year — and let’s face it, I’ve so far achieved very, very little — then it’ll be bringing the balaclava back. First task, finding a shop in Paris that sells them.

On an average day in an average town I would estimate (and this is by no means scientific being based solely on personal observations) that around 90% of the people you pass are wearing denim jeans.

Does it not strike anyone else as odd that practically everyone is wearing effectively the same pair of trousers?

The French love English and they love wearing clothes with English writing on, even if it it makes little or no sense. I suppose it works the other way, too, but walking around Paris you notice a hell of a lot of ridiculous T-shirt slogans.

Yesterday a man got on the metro wearing a brightly coloured T-shirt with the words ‘BOYZ IN THE HOOD’ written across it. The word ‘hood’, though, had been blocked out and scribbled across to read ‘food’. How cool. And instead of ‘boyz’ (already notable in its attempts to be cool) the word actually read ‘POYZ’. Uhh.. what?

‘POYZ IN THE FOOD’, read the man’s T-shirt. Any ideas on what that could mean would be greatly appreciated. (I tried of course to take a picture of the man to facilitate further analysis of this formidable piece of rhetoric, but if growing up under Tony Blair’s New Labour government taught me anything at all, it’s that the Data Protection Act 1998 is God).

Other incidences of funny English slogans include a large-framed, well-built black man with a skin-tight white T-shirt with one word written across it in big, black font: ‘GHETTO’.

I rest my case.

Entourage.