I booked a secret trip to Paris for my girlfriend and me, as a gift for her birthday. I told her to block out the dates but didn’t reveal what we were doing until a week before the trip, when we celebrated two years together. For months, I joked that my anniversary gift would be ‘The Knowledge’: I’d finally tell her what we were doing that week.
The Knowledge was in fact a whole dossier, with all sorts of things about the trip, to make the trip more fun and exciting.
Hedonistic Undercover Trip
To be shifty, and lower her expectations whilst winding her up, I kept asking her random questions that had nothing to do with the trip. For example, I asked her if her car has had an MOT recently, and if its road tax was in order. I also asked if she’d be okay if I were to book a ‘hut’ for us, to be technology-free for a whole week. She said yes, but was very confused. I warned her a few more times “don’t get your hopes up, the ”hut’ might not be super comfortable” and she was always polite and graceful, not really knowing if I was joking or not.
There are loads of inside jokes and references in this Dossier. Backpack is one of her nicknames, because she likes to hug me from behind when I’m cooking. Footlittle is one of mine. She’s also obsessed with Jellyfish, and for years I’ve been calling her a DraDeDu, short for ‘Ladra de Duvet’ (Duvet Thief). Although, months after inventing the word to tease her, she has proved that I too am a DraDeDu. It no longer applies only to her.
I had dug my own hole. By the time I was this far into the concept, with several things already designed and printed, I had to incorporate HUT somehow. I chose acronyms. There’s nothing more bureaucratic and governmental that an acronym. So HUT became Hedonistic Undercover Trip.
I also used the HUT concept in the 3 envelopes: Handover, Understand and Tasks.
The Knowledge
It came in the form of a black folder with 3 black string envelopes and a second smaller folder, like those that used to hold travel documents, back in the day when everything was on paper.
This travel folder had the following contents:
- A zoomed map of the area we’re staying in Paris, covering the 10th and 11th arrondissements
- The four airline tickets we’d use, like traditional boarding passes, as if EasyJet was an 80s company
- 2 sets of business cards with fake jobs – more on that later.
The map was a reduced version of the custom Google map of all the places we should/could/would check out during the trip, including 8 restaurants, various coffee shops and gelaterias, and a few record shops.
The tickets had functional QR codes for the gates, with factual information like date, time and seat numbers, and with some extra funny ones, like diet (snacks for her, gelato for me), and age (late 30s, and ‘almost 50’).
Handover
The biggest black envelope, with a label saying Handover, had menus of eight restaurants in Paris, each accompanied by a photo of its best dish, marked with a red bullseye. I edited the photos to look as though spies had taken them from a distance with tiny cameras: black and white, with heavy film grain. They were all printed in traditional late 20th century photo paper and attached to each menu (or menus, Le Procope has 3 sheets!) with a 1970s salvaged clip in shape of a modern location map icon. I printed each menu in a different paper; different colours, gramatures, glossiness, and even size, with L’ami Jean in a B5 and the Le Chalet Savoyard in a glorious double-sided 300 gsm glossy A3, a pointless exercise as we’re only going there for raclette anyway.
Understand
The second envelope, Understand, contained more photos; slightly bigger than of the dishes, but equally treated. Some showed our hotel, Another showed the classic Art Nouveau Métropolitain sign at Cadet, our local station. It also had a letter, sealed by wax, with the DraDeDu logo, which became an acronym for Drafting, Development and Duties Unit, a governmental secret agency. This letter explained the mission, saying:
Dear DraDeDu operative, agent Backpack,
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to collect information about restaurants, coffee shops, and gelaterias in Paris, to improve our government’s understanding of why France is so much healthier than the UK, and to use this intelligence to reduce the food isolation we’re suffering since we’ve left the EU.
You’ll be paired with Footlittle, an operative we understand you’ve worked with before. You’d be posing as a basic middle class British couple. You’ll fly EasyJet but appear to feel that you’re better than the others in the flight. You’ll be seen having alcohol in most meals, specifically beer and wine, and making jokes about “Brits abroad”, “That’s Brexit for you”, and “Could you imagine this in Bury / Wigan / Edgeley (interchangeable non-pretentious Northern places)”. Make sure you make these remarks within listening distance from other Parisians, so that by witnessing your basic behaviour they don’t discover your true identity and intentions.
Your attire will be fast fashion on the expensive side (think Zara more than Primark) and a pair of good all-white walking shoes, preferably Adidas. Note that since 2024, this department doesn’t have a policy on lengths on socks anymore, just make sure they’re not Happy Socks as some models might be too much for a basic middle class couple that thinks a week in Paris is romantic.
As part of the disguise, we also advise you to go to record stores as you’d be playing a heterosexual couple, and your peer will play the part of basic white man, meaning we needed something for him to be interested in that completely ignores your needs and/or wants. We thought about sports but in France you’d have to be Band A experts in such knowledge, as the locals are too into it and would easily perceive any deceit or pretence. You’ll appear supportive to him, and go to these record stores, but bored when he isn’t looking. During these record store visits, you can use your super smart phone to communicate with us and to upload some findings, but pretend you’re playing some sort of matchy-matchy game or sudoku.
You’ll be judged on the amount of quality food and drink you consume and report on. We’ve identified various places of interest and their dishes that we’d find hard to get information inside our island. We also want to understand more about the Europeans’ ice creams – or “gelatos” – as they seem to have a drastically different effect on people over there. Why do ours make us so inflated? We need this intel.
You’ve been given cards to rate the restaurants, dessert places, coffee and record shops – the latter is just to throw off the scent of your mission, as we don’t need any help improving our country’s musical output. Please fill it up, microfilm it, and send it to us as soon as you end the mission. If you get caught we will deny we want to improve anything in this country. We may also deny any cigs you buy for “friends” at the duty free, even though we appreciate it is a fundamental part of the cover. Good luck and may Lady Di bless you.Understand also came with an A5 menu of a very special Coffee experience in Paris called Substance Café. And, since it requires booking, a weekly calendar with stickers with names of all places we will make reservations, so that we know when to go where. The calendar had more instructions and a priority list for the tasks too…
Tasks
The A6 envelope came with various cards in it, each with a list of places for us to visit and rate from 0 to 5. Paris Restaurants, Paris Coffee Shops, Paris Dessert Places, and Paris Record Shops. There was also a bonus card called Paris Random Shops Bingo, which is a fun game to try to see all the random shops we have in most continental cities, but rarely in the North-West of England; think Paul, Desigual, Massimo Dutti and Parfois.
There are two of each card, so we can rate every place separately before returning them to the agency for further processing…
The Delivery
On our anniversary weekend, roughly a week before the trip and her birthday, I got an actress to play the role of a secret agent to knock on her door and deliver the Knowledge to her. I started work at 6 am that Friday so I could finish by mid-afternoon, meet and brief the actress and hand over the folder. I looked all over south Manchester for anyone willing to do it, and I think I found the absolute best person to do it. It really made a difference.
We changed in a ginnel, and then I hid behind a car, 15 meters away from the house, whilst the ‘agent’ knocked on the door and performed the most amazing delivery I’ve ever seen. The actress was incredible and very funny. My girlfriend was bemused, although she quickly realised I had something to do with it. I watched her accept the folder and disappear back inside with the Knowledge.
Months of secret planning, fake government departments, manipulated surveillance photos, restaurant dossiers, invented acronyms and unnecessarily elaborate stationery had finally made it into her hands. She now knows we’re going to Paris.
