C'est la Vie by Jennifer Babcock for April 15, 2010

Yes, tis all part of nature.

…a plastic bag…

Pooper scooper time! “It’s the law!”

EW! Don’t step in the smelly yuck yuck.

Float like a stinker, stink like a bull$&%#@

Yours sincerely, The champ

Oh joy, my sole has texture!

It’s the Circle of Life….

… or something like that.

LoL!

I was half-right, then, there is a dog in it. In the interests of (low) humour, let us hope neither Donna nor Mona is eating chocolate ice cream…

Hey you little mutt… not on the sidewalk!

Then again, though, this is one of the less pleasant aspects of Paris, France: owners of small dogs consider they have an absolute right to treat anywhere they please as le pissoir (their dogs, that is, not the owners) and that one of the most cherished freedoms of French civilization is that le chien can faire ses chiottes anywhere it pleases. And you can’t argue with the owners, who inevitably seem to be female and of a certain age… even when a mutt chose to do its business within feet of the table where i was sitting, its owner pretended she couldn’t understand my French when remonstrated with. Until I addressed the dog directly with “si je te donne un coup de pied au cul, mon ami…” at which she shrieked with horror at the nasty brutal dog-hating étrangere, and jerked its lead a few metres down the street.

My Parisienne friend was impassive. “I thought you British loved animals” she said.

“Not when they’re shitting in the street three feet away from where I’m eating!”

Native Parisiennes are hardened to this and consider it nothing especially repugnant nor out of the ordinary, where visitors will inevitiably end up gagging at least once at the sheer canine turd-fest of the place. (And Paris does have those zippy little vehicles, like a combination of motor-scooter, vacuum cleaner and disposal unit, that bimble aggreably along doing nothing else but suck up the sheer mass of dogturd paving the boulevards.)

So…Mona will impassively carry on eating her ice-cream, perhaps even having a happy memory of home, whilst Donna will be revolted. I just hope that’s not chocolate or coffee ice-cream…

I pick the right time to have lunch.

My wife and I had a phrase we used over and over in France: “Mind the poop!” If you walked with your head high taking in the sights, you were sure to step in something.

There’s an advantage to being stuffed.

That depends on what you’re stuffed with, M Smokey.

You do have brown eyes, you know.

AgProv, you are a piece of something yourself. Paris was a “sheer canine turd-fest.” I guess we see something of ourselves in our surroundings, regardless how nice.