Today, sitting on a bench in town with my French friends (friends from French class, and not actually from France...) we ate soup and macaroons to overcome the overwhelming sense of what-is-the-point-ness we had all fallen into after a lecture in which one and a half people were thrown off the course and the rest of us had been ridiculed and sneered at sarcastically for a French paper we had all apparently screwed up on (although I know for a fact at least two of us did fine).

One minute we were innocently dunking bread rolls, and the next we found ourselves embroiled in an in-depth, almost existential conversation about...macaroons.

What IS a coconut macaroon? Can you get other flavours? If you took the coconut out of the macaroon, would you have anything left? Would you be able to call what was left a macaroon? Where did the word itself from? Named after a person? Maybe the word macaroon refers to the shape of it. But in that case, couldn't one call a football a macaroon also? What IS a macaroon? Why not just call it coconut cake? What IS it? How can people eat things without knowing why it is called what it is? WHAT IS A MACAROON? What if there ARE NO ANSWERS?

The same questions were repeated over and over again. Short of going into Wrights and demanding an answer to our pressing question, we were lost. Surely there is some Macaroon Advice Hotline? Please, feel free to enlighten us all. The comment box is somewhere down there (here I would insert a downward pointing arrow, but my keyboard appears to be lacking in that department).

We eventually abandoned the discussion, and walked back to French with our heads exploding. We contemplated picking out bits of dessicated coconut and throwing them at the teacher if she over-stepped the line of not-ok-ness one more time. We also planned our April Fool's amazingness - i.e. having macaroons on our desks before us all, and claiming we can't see them... or perhaps do a disappearing macaroon trick, in which we move one single macaroon to a different person every time her back is turned, in a mysterious OMG it's omnipresent and perhaps even omnipotent sort of way....but then we remembered April 1st is firstly, a Sunday, secondly, a holiday, and thirdly, the day on which I jet off to see Elisabeth in Norway ...

Please, macaroon experts, I know you're there.