Michael Moorcock's Paris property search

Well-known British author Michael Moorcock has been in town since late September, on the trail of a new apartment where he can easily zip from Paris to London on the Eurostar.

It was John Baxter who introduced me to his work and he also introduced Michael himself at Shakespeare and Co on Monday night when he gave a reading from his new book The Metatemporal Detective. I bought and had him sign the first of the Colonel Pyat books, BYZANTIUM ENDURES. He wasn't performing with Hawkwind when I saw them in the early 90's at Glasgow Barrowlands I think they'd slightly passed their peak anyway.....but not that I would have remembered, I guess that's a common problem for most Hawkwind fans. I caught up with his wife Linda and she regaled me with their experiences of the Paris property hunt......Michael's version can be read in the Financial Times, a short excerpt is included....

"We’re looking for an apartment in Paris. In spite of reports informing us that the price of property has dropped or, at least, frozen, prices here seem to rise every few seconds. Hideous, dark, minuscule basement hovels in Montmartre might even inspire a romantic response, as you imagine a thrice-ruined character from Balzac spending his dying months picking at the thin coverlet on his bug-infested mattress, as he waits hopelessly for some uncaring offspring to knock on the rotting wood of the door."

C'est normale. The real life experiences of hunting down the perfect Parisian property are quite often stranger than fiction.