Hello, hello, hello, hello, everyone.

This is the Earful Tower.

I am on paternity leave, taking some time off, while you guys hopefully are enjoying this audio experience from Paris on air, my memoir.

This is Chapter 5.

I won't waste your time.

Let's get straight into the book, and I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 5.

The Earful Tower and a new French president. 5.1. The Radio. Two years had passed

since I moved to Paris and I was in a slump. The news that I had come to cover was getting me down.

There was just so much horror, so much terror.

Since I'd been in the Paris office, there'd been the Charlie Hebdo terror attack,

the November attacks at the Bataclant, the Bastide attack in Nice,

plus a spate of other terror-related shootings and stabbings,

not to mention the horrific German wings plane crash in the French Alps.

News, by its very nature, is often bad, and I was realizing that it wasn't giving me the Paris

experience I'd been hoping for. But it wasn't just that. Working in a small team and a startup

meant a lot of work and not a lot of exploring Paris. Being at the desk from 9 to 6, Monday to Friday,

men I never really had my finger on the pulse of the city for anything besides its news. I didn't

know how busy a Paris cafe was at 2pm on a Wednesday. I didn't know when the garbage men

typically came down my street. I didn't know whether the metro was busy outside peak hour on a weekday.

It was around this point that we had a young intern at the news site, James, who was flat-broken looking for opportunities.

He'd been with us a while and was eager to find a full-time gig.

...