Rhino's Celebrity Sandwich

Now before you start getting all excited, I must stress that this is a celebrity sandwich in the most literal sense, not another random proposition in the Marais. It is often my wont of a lunchtime, dear reader, to wander down to the Lafayette Maison "sandwicherie" in search of sustenance. In case you're interested, my faves are "Smølt" which is three kinds of Norwegian salmon on what French people call Polar Bread (go figure) and "Indies" which consists of the merest soupçon of tandoori chicken and lettuce, again - bizarrely - on the aforementioned Polar Bread (not very Indian, if you ask me, but whatEVER). But I digress. On Friday, no sooner had I settled down at the "breakfast bar" to tuck into my "Smølt" then I spotted the gentleman above. As a huge fan of French cop shows, I of course recognized him instantly as Didier Cauchy, aka Capt. Jean-Louis Scandella, from the "La Crim'" series. Actually, to be honest, I only recognized him as "that bloke from La Crim'" but still. Imagine my surprise (my italics) then when he came and sat down next to me (ham and cheese sandwich, looked very uninspiring). The whole celebrity encounter would have ended there had the woman opposite us not decided to lean over and say: "I know you... television?" For the merest fraction of a second, I thought she was talking to me, and was about to reply "Ah, yes, although I don't do that anymore, you know," when my neighbour piped up. "Ummm, yes, maybe La Crim'.'" Anyway, it turns out that he's also been appearing in the France 2 summer mini-series "The Secret of the Volcano" which was filmed on the island of La Réunion and where they all got bitten alive by mosquitos etc. Yeah right, like anyone watched that. There was no shutting him up. Despite lots of telly work, he claims that he still can't afford to buy an apartment in Paris, or at least not one that doesn't need a lot of work doing to it, but luckily, the woman turned out to be an estate agent, and, well, it was all very amicable and "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Yawwwwwwnnn. I soon lost interest in their real-estate conversation but have decided that Lafayette Maison is the new celebrity lunch hang-out and it can only be a matter of time before I'm swapping mock-sushi with Johnny Hallyday and Eddie Mitchell (it is a well-known fact that all major French celebrities are 102). The rest of the weekend? I cooked a rather nasty (and not in a Janet Jackson way) tomatoey supper for Sid 'n' Nancy, which we tried to forget by drinking wine, champagne and vodka, and I went to an excellent party on Saturday night/Sunday morning in a very hot and sticky apartment overlooking the Canal St. Martin. I'm still recovering. Onwards and upwards.