Beckett, Beckham and blood

The last time I turned up for a soirée at the Irish embassy off the avenue Foch, I had barely tasted my drink before I had to dash off to the Sorbonne to be tear-gassed in a student riot.

Last night, I kept up my record by failing to stay for more than a quarter of an hour at another function.

It was not that diplomatic bouncers had been tipped off that I am no longer who I was, so to speak, and wished to escort me off the premises into the Parisian night. The embassy, aware of my altered status, had insisted that the invitation stood.

But I had completely forgotten that the occasion, part of a festival marking the centenary of the birth of the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett, included a presentation by les équipes artistiques.

The inappropriate nature of my attendance struck me as soon as I saw the neat rows of chairs awaiting guests.

Earlier in the day, I had been fitted with a MAPA, the very grand sounding Mesure Ambulatoire de la Pression Artérielle.

This Gallic mouthful translates simply enough as a contraption for measuring blood pressure over a 24-hour period.

It feels as if you’re carrying a giant iPod under your shirt on one side, with a strap wrapped tightly round the opposite arm.

But every 15 minutes it explodes into life and, for a few seconds, you become a beeping, whirring social liability.

Bad enough when you’re minding your own business on the Métro, or walking across the Seine to St Germain. Thoughtless and embarrassing if Henry Pillsbury and Xavier Marchand are trying to present extracts from Krapp’s Last Tape, the single-act Beckett play they are currently producing in Paris at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet.

So I made my excuses and left.

MAPA’s 24 hours will be up later today and a man of medicine will contemplate the results. It is as well that the period didn’t start 24 hours or so earlier.

Since Bill Taylor, in a break from self-imposed sniping duties, asked how Acton Ladies got on, I will briefly describe an event that would certainly have produced a distorted mesure ambulatoire.

Nathalie, my younger daughter, is an excellent footballer. Any father would say that sort of thing, of course. But she genuinely is one of those rare players capable of doing things on the field, like Parminder Nagrain's character in Bend It Like Beckham, that people remember.

On Sunday, at a sports ground off the North Circular in west London, she met a corner kick and hit the sweetest of volleys from just inside the penalty area and the ball flew into goal.

It did her team no good in the end, since they lost that game as they have lost all others so far this season.

But a vision of the goal remained with me all the way back to Paris later the same day, whatever momentary impact it may also have had on my blood pressure.