Our Man in Paris: the new breed of conspiracy obsessives

Here are two stories that you have probably never read elsewhere.

Monsieur Daniel, who comes from West Africa, has discovered a new kind of mustard, but the French and Italian governments are conspiring to cheat him out of the rights to his own invention.

Mr Wilkinson, though British, has discovered that he is the illegitimate son of a famous, dead French politician. The security service, MI5, has stolen his identity and intends to commit terrorist attacks in western Europe and place the blame on him. However, the French have uncovered the plot. A great scandal is about to unfold...

I have been receiving telephone calls from M. Daniel (not his real name) for nearly three years. Mr Wilkinson (I've changed his name also) is a new addition to my unrivalled stable of journalistic informants and sources.

M. Daniel is a gentle man who asks for nothing more than a sympathetic voice at the other end of a telephone line. I have never met him in person.

Mr Wilkinson is a neat, precise, courteous man, who becomes annoyed when you say that you find his story too far-fetched and undocumented to publish in a newspaper. I have met him a couple of times. Originally, he turned up at the Paris offices of the BBC, next door to mine, expecting to go straight on the 10 o'clock news. There was no reporter available to see him, so he was redirected to me (thank you, BBC).

M. Daniel rings me roughly once a month to update me on his Kafkaesque struggle against the forces of French and Italian officialdom. Sometimes he rings from Paris, sometimes from Bologna. One of my previous assistants thoughtfully provided him with my mobile-phone number. I have since received calls from M. Daniel at the oddest moments: when I have been queuing for bread in Paris; when I have been building sandcastles on the beach in Anglesey; or when I have been weeding my leeks in Normandy.

I am not always pleased to hear from him but, to his credit, he never stays on the phone for long. He is happy with two or three minutes in which to explain the latest twist in the plot. In the beginning, according to the thick file that he sent to me, he had invented a new machine for folding napkins in restaurants. He tried to register the invention in France and Italy. The officials in the patent offices in both countries took down the details and made copies of M. Daniel's elaborate sketches. However, the next time that he contacted them, they claimed that they had never heard of him. Later, they insisted that he, M. Daniel, did not exist. Their intentions were obvious: they were conspiring to steal his invention.

Once, in an idle moment, I checked M. Daniel's story with the French patent office. They claimed never to have heard of him, just as M. Daniel had predicted they would.

For many months, I heard absolutely nothing from M. Daniel. I was beginning to grow mildly anxious about him. All turned out to be well, however. He called me the other day. The French and the Italian governments have caved in, on one point at least. They accept that he exists. However, they are still trying to steal his invention, which now turns out to be a new way of making mustard.

What you have to admire in both M. Daniel and Mr Wilkinson is their energy and persistence. I can see no harm in them: not in M. Daniel, in any case. Both men are just starring in unpublished (and unpublishable) novels of their own lives. M. Daniel's life is a rewrite of Kafka; Mr Wilkinson's is an airport thriller.

Conspiracy obsessives have always existed (as anyone who has worked for a local newspaper will tell you), but there is something rather contemporary about my pair. They seem to be constantly on the move: M. Daniel between France and Italy; Mr Wilkinson between England and France. Maybe they are part of a new restless breed of obsessives, a kind of "Paranoids sans Frontières".

Neglected treats are just a train ride away

Paris is a sublimely beautiful city, surrounded by concentric rings of desolation. First come the dreary and violent inner-suburbs. Next come the drearier and even more violent outer suburbs. Then comes a 60-mile-wide band of chemical-soaked cereals fields, a sort of Gallic Nebraska, punctuated with large forests.

Quite wrong, says Annabel Simms in a new travel book which exhorts tourists to explore the many treats which are only a short train ride from the French capital. Although there is much that is ugly, dull and dangerous to know in the Ile de France – the region surrounding the capital – there are also many neglected jewels: a kind of "Ile de France Profonde".

The strength of Ms Simms' book (An Hour from Paris, Pallas Athene, £12.95) is that it brushes over the obvious exceptions to my cartoon description above. She assumes, reasonably enough, that most tourists will know about Versailles or Fontainebleau and Claude Monet's garden at Giverny. Ms Simms, a teacher living in Paris, focuses instead on 12 relatively unknown places that you can reach by a local train ride from the centre of the capital. How many people realise that there is a medieval walled town, once the third largest city in France, only 75 minutes and €9.45 away from the Gare de L'Est?

I already knew about the lovely town of Provins (pictured), though, to my shame, I have never taken my family there. Some of Ms Simms' other recommendations – such as the Château d'Ecouen, a "Loire" château lurking in woodland under the flight path to Charles de Gaulle airport – were new to me. I suspect that they are equally unknown to many Parisians.

Pop à la carte

Tonight, the singer Sir Elton John is in Paris, inaugurating a series of concerts by pop legends at the Lido, the mildly naughty nightclub on the Champs Elysées. Sir Elton, who will appear alone with his piano, is giving his fee to his two charities, the Elton John Charitable Trust and the Elton John Aids Foundation. Tickets start at €100 (£65). However, there is also a de-luxe option, including a dinner cooked by the celebrated French chef Paul Bocuse. For this you pay €1,800 (£1,200) but you also get an Elton John CD – and a parking place.