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My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

Giles Coren

Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
GILES COREN

Dad Everything First Job Laugh Person Taught Time
People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
GILES COREN

Bbc Country Million Paid People Premier Think
I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
GILES COREN

Communist Important Journalist Know More Most Newspaper
My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.
GILES COREN

Battle Call Country Cowboy Dad Else Love Much My Restage Together Watch
Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
GILES COREN

Been Countryside Do Nothing Small
When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.
GILES COREN

Cloth Excite Imagine Movie People Shop Sometime Work Year
Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
GILES COREN

Bring Gratification Instant Knee Planet
Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
GILES COREN

Being Control Have Leave Life One Success Take Thing Word
Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
GILES COREN

Country Course Denied Food Mouthful Nairobi
I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.
GILES COREN

Awful Better Feel Felt Good Mostly Review Stuff Wife Wrote
Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.
GILES COREN

Ancient City Country Environmental Human Idea Invention Live Long Not Predate Since Trouser
When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.
GILES COREN

Country Drive Either Furious Good Innate Separate Taught Unable Understand
My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
GILES COREN

Dad Journalist Novelist One Successful Want
As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
GILES COREN

Car City Cling Desert Driver Father Great Man More Really Without
As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
GILES COREN

Anthropogenic Aware Ban Believer Environment Left Motor Urban Vehicle Wing
People like me make modern life intolerable.
GILES COREN

Intolerable Life Mark Modern People

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

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My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

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