Hello everyone, Oliver G here from the Earful Tower.

And have you ever thought Paris is a compendium of history?

You come here and you're plunged into a whole different culture and lifestyle that goes back millennia.

But you can actually go back to see the roots of it.

You ever thought that?

I'd never thought it.

But there, well, that's my paraphrasing of a quote from the guest you're about to hear.

John Baxter, a long time, a long, long time friend of this podcast.

And I love interviewing authors because I suspect they think about the words that they use.

Often they think about the way that they talk about things in order to write about it.

So sometimes they're very quotable authors because often they've thought things through so

well to perfect it on the page.

So when you ask him a question, they give you a brilliant answer.

And that's what happens in this episode with John Baxter.

If you never heard of him before, he is a longtime Paris resident.

He came here in the late 80s.

He's from Australia.

He hates when I mention the year that he was born and I think

I always do when he's on the show. So I won't do it this time. But I will say that when he came to Europe

from Australia, he, in his own words, spent 30 days chugging across the Pacific on a boat. So that might give

you an idea of his age.

I'm not going to say anything.

...