This is the title of one of my favourite books.
It is written by Julian Barnes, possibly an even more obsessed Francophile than I, and consists of a series of short pieces about France.
One of his first articles in the book he calls; Spending Their Deaths on Holiday, which, as anyone who has had the stamina to get through my recent Brassens translation will know, is a direct quote from “Supplique….”
This is an article on three French Chanteurs; Brel, Brassens and (one whom I do not know yet) Boris Vian.
In relation to Brassen’s Supplique he adds a codicil to my piece by telling us that he was in fact buried in the overstuffed family vault, from where “the sea is barely visible and his grave after all less “marin” than Valéry’s.”
But Barnes ends his essay by saying of Brassens
“he was France’s greatest and wisest singer, and we should visit him-spending his death on holiday-in whatever way we can.”

But it was for another piece in the book that I really treasure Barnes’ ability to amuse.
That this is about yet another hero of mine, Elizabeth David, should come as no surprise.
This piece, called here; The Land Without Brussels Sprouts” is about Barnes’ attempt to cook a tomato soup from E.D.’s Italian Food.
Her instructions read that he should peel the tomatoes, cube them, and then “melt them in olive oil”
Here is Barnes reaction;
Melt? Melt a tomato ? Even a chopped one? The implausibility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you are south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just at that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the anxious pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten- minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe.
For several stressful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt”.
Then with a cookish oath I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them…

On the lines of comic writing about food I note with some humility that I have been nominated for an award here.
If there is any one out there who feels pity enough to add their vote to the list they merely have to add my address in the comment box of the listing.