Red, White and Bleu

Marks & Spencer: My Part in its Downfall.

2009-06-29T23:45:00.002+02:00

Should Marks and Spencer announce it has fallen short of its targets this financial year, I fear I may be called to account for my inadvertent contribution to this downturn.

I will attend the Annual General Meeting with three identical woks and a picture of a fourth wok. The former are black steel and have wooden handles; the latter is shiny aluminium and has a glass lid. Small, but important details. Under the arm not carrying woks, I will have a girls' duvet cover printed with sugary cupcakes. More devilish details. I will also carry a guilty look even though I haven't actually done anything.

I am a huge fan of M & S. When the bean counters who run what was Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer's penny bazaar decided to shut the only store here several years ago, they left British expatriates bereft. It's mostly an English thing, but the Frenchman who is, as his nom de plume suggests, French, is also a huge fan of Marks & Spencer. He fell in love with the store, or more particularly, it's underpants, around about the same time he fell in love with me. His love for the shop was consummated after he told me the particular M & S underpants he liked were called "moule-burnes" and sent me off to ask the girl in the men's department for some. It turned out I was asking for "ball-squeezers" or something to that effect. This caused huge mirth among the sales assistants at the time and probably right up until the day they lost their jobs. It was nine years ago but is still a source of hilarity for the Frenchman's friends.

So, I have suffered humiliation heaped on rejection at the hands of M & S but have remained true. In April I ordered a wok from the online store. In the picture it was a thing of beauty, all shiny with riveted handles and a glass lid. What arrived was not. It was black, had a wooden handle and no lid. M & S customer services apologised profusely, said to keep the ugly wok and promised they'd send the right one. The Frenchman, used to the French school of customer relations, was impressed. A week later another black, wooden handle, no lid wok arrived. More calls. Another order. Another ugly wok. M & S not only says I can keep them but has given me a refund of my original order because I didn't get what I wanted. This is generous, but not economically sustainable.

M & S's generosity didn't stop there. A couple of weeks ago another order arrived and at the bottom of the box was a pink duvet set covered in cupcakes I hadn't ordered. I told the Frenchman I was going to phone M & S and 'fess up. He advised me to think long and hard before doing so. It was all very well salving my conscience, he said, but what of the warehouse packer named on the delivery note who was surely going to get it in the neck if I reported his generosity. He might, cautioned the Frenchman, lose his job and not find another because of the economic crisis. It had all the makings of An Inspector Calls. I put the duvet and my guilt in the cupboard.

So that's three woks and set of bedlinen awry on the stock count and I'm just one customer among millions. Then again maybe it is deliberate. Perhaps someone in the warehouse heard the one about the English woman and the 'moule-burnes' and felt I deserved a break.

Taking Le Manneken-Pis

2009-06-22T14:44:00.003+02:00

We had been in Brussels for a metaphorical five minutes and you could have knocked me over with a copy of Libération. A driver stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let us cross. And there wasn't even a red light to make him do this. A man who walked over and dislodged a small paving stone, stopped, picked up the errant stone and put it back in its hole. Then a woman, who seemed to be in a hurry, passed us, saw us looking at our map, retraced her steps and asked if we needed directions. The man in a corner newsagents said I didn't need to spend 10 euros on one of his maps because he would point out the quickest route to our hotel. Another local explained how the public transport system worked and a tram driver patiently directed us to where we needed to go for the right line and stop.

The following morning we had breakfast in a café in the city's biggest tourist area served with a smile and pleasantries and jam, went to the Cocoa and Chocolate Museum where we were greeted like long lost friends and handed a speculoos - those delicious spicy biscuits you get with coffee - dunked in delicious warm melted chocolat, and were given more unsolicited but not unwelcome help finding our way around and discovering local events and sights.

In two days of walking about we did not once step in any dog poo or see one single cyclist or motorcyclist on the pavement, and were treated with utmost courtesy wherever we went (apart from the Beer Museum which was a waste of six euros - even with a beer thrown in - and where they behaved like they had bad hangovers and couldn't give a toss). This wasn't the courtesy of economic obligation, but genuine pleasantness, or so it seemed. The man selling sweets on the main shopping street smiled as he gave directions to the city's department store even though I bought nothing from him. Languages spoken with ease and willingness: French, Dutch, English and German.

The French like to mock the Belgians. Comparisons are made between Paris, the City of Light and Fine Wine and Haute Cuisine and Culture versus Brussels the City of the Peeing Boy and Chocolate and Beer and Chips. It's a form of superiority complex not helped by the fact that Belgians do appear to have an unnatural fondness for garden gnomes. True, Belgium isn't the prettiest capital in Europe, but in spite of the rain and unseasonal cold, it was, for me, one of the most pleasurable to visit. So Paris, time to stop taking the 'pis'?

Cultures and Complexes

2009-06-17T19:30:00.005+02:00

We were invited to La Fille's school for her "evaluation report". I often hear parents in Britain moaning about the number of tests their young children have to take, but I believe formal assessment at three to four years old - as happens here - trumps anything I've heard from the UK.

We also had to go with La Fille and she had to sit in on the assessment. Some French parents who had been through this before had complained this was horribly traumatic for their children and had marked them if not for life, at least for the following week. The parents on the school committee had raised it with the headmistress but she insisted it was part of the "education process" and the children should be there.

So there we were in the classroom sitting either side of La Fille on titchy chairs, the Frenchman with his knees somewhere either side of his ears, facing the teacher who was giving her assessment and showing us the report. One green spot (top marks), and another and another. But what was this? A small orange dot ringed with green. It turned out the orange spot was a small minus for "talking too much" sometime back in the Autumn when La Fille started school. The green ring around it signified that she no longer does this, we learned. This did seem a little unfair as I'd assumed the "evaluation" was of where La Fille is now, not where she was on her first weeks in school, but it was such a teeny weeny orange dot amid a sea of green I let it go. As I said, she is only four years old.

The teacher concluded it was a very good report and told La Fille the green ring around the orange dot showed how she had grown up since she started school. Immediately La Fille perked up. "I don't want to grow up because I don't want to marry with anyone I want to stay with Mama and Papa," she announced. I considered it best to leave before Sigmund the Psi was evoked. Later, walking back from the park with just the Frenchman, La Fille announced she had changed her mind and wanted to marry him.

I thought this a rather sweet story and have recounted it to both British and French friends. The British, without exception, have laughed and said: "Ahh, bless!" Every single French parent has said: "Ah, the Oedipus Complex. (Freud again). Don't worry they grow out of it."

But I wasn't worried. Should I be?

Mean old boiler

2009-06-11T09:58:00.002+02:00

Of course it was too good to be true. We've gone, oh I would say a few months without any water leaking in or on our apartment but experience has told us never to become too complacent. This time it was the boiler (again) and this time it was Nigella who took a hit (again). A couple of beautifully illustrated books on French cuisine that I hadn't yet got around to trying out and the very old French cookery encyclopaedia in which I'd pressed some roses from my wedding bouquet and forgotten to take them out, were also waterlogged. The picture of the chocolate gateau I was planning to make looked soggy and unappetising. I call Monsieur Mustapha. "I'll be over later," he says. I don't know why we don't just put him on a permanent retainer.

Rather than sit indoors with the incessant drip-drip-drip of water from the boiler into a salad bowl, La Fille and I decided to go to the Champ de Mars and have a picnic by the Eiffel Tower. In the time it takes us to get there on the Metro - roughly 15 minutes - the sky has gone from sunny June to grey, chilly February and it is raining. We return home and have the picnic on the living room floor. As I lay out the raw carrots and tuna pasta and plastic knives and forks La Fille puts on her My First Nursery Rhymes CD so the sound of dripping and rain is drowned out. "This is fun," she says cheerfully as we sit on the parquet listening to This Old Man sipping apple juice through straws.

Mustapha arrives on time, as always, and greets me like a close relative; big hug, vigorously shaken hand. It would be true to say I have seen Mustapha more times over the last few years than I have some members of my family. La Fille marches into the kitchen as Mustapha is examining the boiler. She gives an exaggerated sigh and announces: "Encore une fuite d'eau" (yet another water leak), which is precisely what her father said this morning minus the swear word. Mustapha declares the boiler 'fichu' (basically stuffed). From where I stand, this is not necessarily bad news and might, eventually, compensate for the ruined cookery books. The whole kitchen of green and black tiles circa 1950 and mosaic floor the colour of vomit and cupboards that are bloated and wonky from successive floods needs replacing. The Frenchman is someone who never does today what can be put off indefinitely - or at least until next year - but this might be the kick needed. Mustapha repairs the leak but warns we'll need a new boiler in "12-18 months max". He adds: "And you don't want to be doing it in winter." I call the Frenchman to tell him, trying to keep the excitement of a new kitchen from my voice. I also tell him that Mustapha has suggested turning La Belle Belle Fille's room into the kitchen and the kitchen into La Belle Belle Fille's room; an idea that might be worth considering when she goes back to university in September, I say. There is silence the other end of the line.

Later I tell a girlfriend the verdict on the boiler. Just before midnight she sends me a message.
"Funny. I was explaining the concept of 'stepmother' to XXXXX (her daughter) and used you as an example of how not all stepmothers were evil like those in Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella etc. You've given it a whole new twist. Generally, the evil stepmother makes her stepdaughter DO the cuisine; you want to make her room INTO the cuisine. You really should contact Disney about this."

I might just do that as soon as I've finished poisoning these apples.

Channel Hopping

2009-06-09T23:09:00.000+02:00

My ongoing campaign to ensure that La Fille speaks English has taken a blow. Central to my mission, conducted with the zeal of a religious convert, is the great God of expatriate parents, Uncle Walt. Uncle Walt is our saviour; him and the other Hollywood relatives because unfortunately we can't get Auntie Cbeebies (and I'd throw myself under a Ninky Nonk if I had to watch In the Night Garden every day.)

Anyway, the house rule is that films are watched in VO or original version and as Uncle Walt churns out far more children's entertainment than the rest of the world put together, this means lots of English lessons disguised as fun. This is the carrot to my linguistic stick; the reward La Fille gets for persisting with her mother's tongue. I can live with the Disney fluff and political incorrectness, the fairies, the pink princesses and the cute talking animals as long as whatever tosh they are talking is in English.

Then the remote broke down and we had to watch Mulan II in French. A double whammy that made me regret not studying something useful like electronic circuitry. The default language on DVDs sold in France is French. Normally this is no problem; I just go to the audio configurations, flick it to English and voila, even the insects are talking my language. But with no remote the only way to play a movie was to push the play button on the DVD which then launched itself into French. I took the remote apart and cleaned it but it still wouldn't work. La Fille wailed: "Why can't I watch it in French?" Answer: "Because even though she's supposed to be Chinese Mulan speaks English." Retort: "But Mulan's like me, she speaks French and English." I couldn't think of a good response to that so I set about dismantling the remote again.

La Fille flounced off, arms crossed, pet lip jutting. Her parting shot was: "You do what you want. I'm going to the lavatory." The lavatory? I don't know where she got that from and I don't know what I'm worrying about. This girl speaks English better than I do.

Kate Moss's bottom

2009-05-27T00:14:00.003+02:00

British people are the fattest in Europe but also, we are told, the happiest with our weight; the French would say we are "bien dans notre peau" or happy in our skin. Sure. And secretly I'm a skinny supermodel called Kate Moss; so secretly even my mirror doesn't realise. How many tubby British teenage girls are happy in their peau when they realise that unless they starve themselves they're never going to look like the skinny models and actresses in the glossy magazines (who don't look like that either having been airbrushed)? So it's another diet or weight loss pills with side effects you don't want to think about too much (the drug company calls it the "Alli Oops" as if it were mildly amusing, which it is not) or another deep pan pizza. Seeing the swathes of flesh bared on a chilly day in London recently I suspect the pizza and deluded mirror have joined forces. "Does my bum look big in this?" "No dear girl, you look just like Kate Moss. Honest"

I do wonder what those who sit on the Underground and eat their own body mass in crisps, chips, chocolate and McDonalds in five stops on the Central Line and still have time for a Diet Coke, expect. Having said that, I am not sure if it's entirely their fault. Every time I go to Britain I put on weight. Every time without fail; I get back to Paris, step on the scales and I'm two kilos heavier. Not only is it annoying, I just don't get it; in the UK I eat less, I eat earlier and I expend half a million calories hauling bags and La Fille half way up the country to my parents' home and then down again.

This time I bought sandwiches for the Frenchman and La Fille for lunch and an apple for me. I said no to fish and chips and ice cream by the seaside and opted for salad. I refused potatoes and Yorkshire pudding and had extra vegetables, I ate the rhubarb without the custard. Back in Paris, I stepped on the scales: two kilos, give or take a pair of M & S knickers.

When I left the UK nine years ago chocolate bars and bags of sweets were normal-sized. Now the confectionary counters that are in your face every ten paces in London look as if they have undergone radiation on a Chernobyl scale. Then there's the enticing "two-for-one" offers in the supermarket and the obscene cereal boxes as big as houses (because of course it's cheaper to buy in bulk and not, dear customer, because we're trying to encourage you to feed your face even more, oh no, no nooo!) And a large glass of wine? Why not?" One third of the entire bottle in one go.

The "meal deal" on the train out of Liverpool Street was astonishing for the sheer volume of empty calories:

* a sandwich made of slices of bread I could have used as trendy platform soles
* a large bag of crisps
* a chocolate muffin that just screamed for Sir Ranulph to conquer it
* (the healthy bit) the smallest bottle of orange juice I've ever seen outside of a carton.

All that for just £6. A bargain! But let's face it, there's no mirror in the world going to give you a Kate Moss bottom if you eat all that in one go.

Fiddle-de-dee

2009-05-20T00:15:00.002+02:00

If one of my old editors were alive today I suspect he might write the following memo to his staff.

"It is inevitable that the words 'MPs', 'expenses' and 'scandal' may, from time to time and quite reasonably, occur in this newspaper. However, I do not ever wish to see these words appearing next to each other."

I am not sure what more there is to write about this depressing saga; God knows enough real and virtual print has been expended on it to drive even the most ardent bean counting member of ICA (England and Wales) to despair. I cannot get away from the feeling these three words, or their French equivalent (deputé, frais, scandale), would never appear in the same sentence in the press here. The very idea that France's elected representatives should account for the spending of personal allowances or that we should learn they spent it on moats, chandeliers, loo rolls, HobNobs or whatever, is risible enough. Resign? Add incredulity to ruptured spleens and mass hilarity.

There were raised eyebrows a few years ago when food bills run up at the taxpayers' expense by Jacques Chirac when Mayor of Paris, and his wife Bernadette were investigated. The receipts revealed a penchant for foie gras, truffles, organic yoghurt and chocolate mousse. While it was true the £100 the Chiracs allegedly spent on fruit and vegetables and £36 on tea and coffee a day suggested they were doing their five-a-day and caffeine intravenously at the same time, but nothing ever came of it mostly because he was by then president and beyond prosecution.

The Frenchman believes the British row is heading into dangerous territory. He points out, presciently I fear, that far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's Front National, has made a successful career out of claiming, among other things, that the French political system is rotten; so successful he was voted into the run-off in the 2002 presidential election.

But never mind the chocolate biscuits and toilet paper. Call me venal and disgusting but in what privileged parallel universe do people "forget" or "not realise" they have paid off their mortgage? I know interest rates are low, but we're not talking about settling the milk bill here.

Perhaps I should be less cynical. And perhaps I should have kept La Fille at home today after she woke up this morning and announced: "I can't go to school. I've a headache, my eyes hurt, my tummy's sore and my leg is broken."

Man's Inhumanity to Man

2009-05-04T23:05:00.001+02:00

Over the last couple of weeks the French papers have carried pictures of a dark-haired woman in large glasses whose face is etched with unimaginable pain. She is Ruth Halimi, the mother of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisien mobile telephone salesman who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 2006, allegedly by a group of youngsters who called themselves the "Barbarians".

The details emerging from the trial of those accused of Ilan Halimi's murder are truly horrific and should bring tears to the most hard-hearted or tragedy inured. The story has been in some British papers, but bears repeating, in my view, not least because it reminds us of the wide and varied forms man's inhumanity to fellow man can take. Ilan Halimi, aged 23, was lured into a honey trap by a pretty girl acting on the instructions of the gang leader, the court heard. Having persuaded the young man to meet her, Ilan Halimi was then pounced on by the gang. He was, we learned, stripped naked and kept prisoner for 24 days during which his head apart from his nose was almost entirely covered in tape and he was stabbed, prodded, burned with cigarettes and beaten. A ransom was demanded of his family. At the end of his three week and three day ordeal he was dumped naked near a railroad in a Paris suburb; one ear and a toe had been severed and he had been covered with an inflammable liquid or acid causing burns to 80% of his body. He died in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Ilan Halimi was Jewish and apparently snatched because the head of the gang - a Muslim - believed Jews to be rich and instilled with a sense of social solidarity meaning they would be more likely to come up with the demanded six-figure ransom. Arguments, on which I make no comment, continue over whether the murder was motivated by anti-Semitism or money.

What is as deeply troubling as the above details is that there are 27 young people, two of them minors at the time of the murder, in the dock. Yes, 27 - TWENTY SEVEN - people. That's 27 people accused of being involved or having knowledge of what was happening to Ilan Halimi while it was happening not one of whom thought to inform the police or raise the alarm even anonymously.

In 20 years as a foreign correspondent I have witnessed some very gruesome events at first hand. The Balkan wars supplied enough material for a lifetime of horror movies, among them a Croatian village where dozens of mainly elderly residents had been massacred by a vaguely paramilitary group some using chainsaws to cut them in half (better not to dwell too much on the premeditation involved or the physical consequences). There was the Bosnian village where women and children and old men had been herded into the basement of a house, covered in petrol and burned alive their charred skeletons captured in the throes of an agonising death. There were first hand accounts of the Omarska prison camp and Srebrenica, arguably the most shameful act of negligence in post Second World War European history. In another hemisphere there were children in Sierra Leone who had had their ears and noses and limbs chopped off by machete wielding savages who had demanded: "long sleeve or short sleeve" before amputating their arms or hands.

But it is a long time since I have seen or heard anything to make me feel so helplessly angry and cry such bitter, bitter tears as the story of Ilan Halimi. I do not know how Ruth Halimi can bear the grief so profoundly written on her it is almost tangible. She has suffered the death of her beloved son and last week she must have suffered his death a thousand times over as the man accused of his murder swaggered and shouted his defiance and showed not the slightest hint of remorse raining blows upon the mother as he was accused of doing to the son. As Ruth Halimi contained herself, rocking back and forth in her seat in court, the so-called chief barbarian grinned and joked.

I only wish I had something profound and redeeming to say about all this, but I haven't. As a mother and a human being I just feel for Ruth Halimi.

iPhone, uPhone, noPhone

2009-04-27T17:02:00.000+02:00

La Fille and I have been spending the holidays in the UK. We had a lovely time until halfway through the last evening when someone stole my brand new iPhone from a zipped handbag that hadn't left my shoulder or been out of my sight at a friend's party in a restaurant/bar on the river at Richmond. Don't ask me how the thief performed this particularly nasty trick of spiriting away a 16-day old phone inside a case, inside another case, inside a closed bag on the very day my new binding two-year contract came into effect, because I really have no idea. I felt nothing.

I should say that I've been lucky until now; I've never been a victim of a crime before (unless you count being shot at while trying to report from warzones). So I admit I was a bit shaken and emotional. Not hysterical after all it was "just a phone" as someone pointed out, but a bit spooked. The reason for this wasn't just having the phone pinched - and knowing I would have to pay 700 euros to replace it - but the fact that in the early hours of Sunday I found myself in a police station, not sure exactly where I was, without a map to find out, without a taxi rank in sight and without any means of finding out if the Frenchman and La Fille had got home safely or letting them know where I was and what was happening.

I found myself in the early hours of Sunday in a London police station talking to a young duty officer who quite clearly did not believe a word I was saying. It wasn't that he told me he couldn't find any record on his computer of the crime report I'd already made by phone having been astonished to find that Richmond police station closes at 8.30pm on Saturday nights. It wasn't even that he told me there was no evidence of "theft" ("the removal of something from someone with the intention of depriving them of it or use of it," as he pointed out. "Err, exactly", as I replied.). It wasn't just that he was unsympathetic and suggested I'd mislaid the phone, but that he made judgments he had no right, in my opinion, to make. What really shocked me were two comments he uttered during our exchange conducted in the station reception with him sitting about two feet behind a glass screen.

I am going to recount them as accurately as I remember given my state of distress and frustration at the time. At some point half way through our conversation at around 1am he made a remark about "alcohol on your breath". Taken aback I said something like "I beg your pardon," and he repeated that he could smell alcohol on my breath. He knew I'd been at a party when my phone was stolen, I'd told him that, but I didn't deem it necessary to say I'd only been at it about an hour before it was nicked nor that I hadn't drunk anything since, a period of around four hours. I mean, I wasn't rolling drunk so what business was it of his? Then he recounted a story of how someone had come in claiming to have been attacked and had their mobile stolen in the street by two "black men" (his words not mine), when it turned out the phone had been at home all the time. Frankly I couldn't see the relevance of either of these comments except to make a judgment about me and cast doubt on my claim. Everything I said, he shot down. The phone, fully charged at the time, was redirecting to voicemail, I said, suggesting it had been turned off. "The battery's probably flat," he countered. "It was in my bag, then it wasn't and it wasn't on the floor," I said. "You said your bag was zipped, how could it have been stolen?" he replied. "But the police hotline told me they'd put a crime report on the computer and told me to come here for the papers." "Well call them." "I can't I don't have a phone." "Here's the website address." "I don't have access to the Internet either." And so we went on sparring over whether the phone was mislaid or misappropriated until I stopped being nice and said I wanted his name. "It's all on CCTV," he replied neatly sidestepping the request. I wrote down the letters and numbers on his shoulder tabs.

I am ashamed to say that at one point I did say to the officious officer that I knew the Mayor of London (which isn't strictly true though I do know several members of his close family) but I was sorely provoked. On the other hand, I did apologise for being somewhat emotional, an apology he didn't even acknowledge. In the end he flatly refused to make a crime report and gave me a grudgingly written Property Lost in Streets form on which his belief that I was a liar was evident. Despite the property not being "lost" and certainly not "lost in streets", under 'Where Lost' he wrote: "Believed to be..." and under "Circumstances of the loss" he had written "Unknown"; neither of these were strictly true or what I had reported. Later, the phone company took one look at this mealy-mouthed document and refused to put an international block on the phone meaning the thief is probably still wandering around making free use of my expensive property. Thankfully, the female operators on the Metropolitan Police non-emergency line were less judgmental and considerably more helpful and, after hearing my tale of telephone woe, promised to send a crime report. (This is their number should you ever need them: 0300 123 12 12).

Look, I realise being the duty officer in a London police station on a Saturday night cannot be much fun and must involve fobbing off drunks and trying to spot fraudulent claims. What I should have said was women of a certain age with energetic young children who get up early and who are on the last night of their holiday in London have better things to do in the early hours of the morning - like sleep - than hang around police stations trying to convince members of Her Majesty's police force that they are not simply a dozy cow but a genuine victim of crime.

The Rosbif and the Frogs

2009-04-14T11:59:00.007+02:00

I am turning native. I ate frogs' legs yesterday. They were sautéed with a lot of garlic and served warm as an apéritif. This is the French experience, eh?

Not much to it really, psychologically or physically unless you are a frog lover. Or a frog. You'd be hard pressed to get fat on them. For the curious they taste like very tiny chicken legs, though the squeamish might be turned by the fact they are served in pairs still joined at the hip. I worried that La Fille might be a little disturbed by the idea as her favourite series of books at the moment is Frog and Toad. I was ready to explain - though I'm not sure what or how - but there was no need. She was so keen the Frenchman said: "Aha! You are half French after all", as if there might be some doubt about this.

I was with French friends and the conversation turned to other national delicacies; it was admitted that the French do have some very dubious culinary habits. For starters there's Tete de Veau, or indeed the process involved in the making of foie gras, which, is cruel even if the end product is delicious. "Aha, but you English have boiled lamb and haggis," said our hostess. "No, that's not us that's the Scottish," I said.

But there are lines to be drawn with my efforts to integrate. I can say with 100% confidence that you will not find me eating snails or, as I prefer to think of them, slugs with shells. In this case I will make an exception to the rule, oft repeated to La Fille, that one should try something before deciding one doesn't like it. I don't even want to know if I don't like snails.

The Ant, the Grasshopper and the Immigrant Cockroaches

2009-04-02T15:34:00.002+02:00

France's political incorrectness can sometimes provoke quite sharp intakes of shocked breath. Like the chocolate coated meringues some people still call a "Tete de Nègre" or "Nigger's Head" . Like referring to the children of mixed parents as "métis", or if it is a girl "métisse", which translates as "halfcast". Somehow I cannot see the Golliwog row happening in France. Then again I cannot see an English schoolteacher calling one of her pupils of African origin a "Little Monkey" as la Fille tells me her French teacher did the other day, and not being severely reprimanded for racism at worst and insensitivity at best.

It is true, political correctness can be taken too far, but where is the line to be drawn? I received the following email from one of the Frenchman's friends. At the beginning I laughed. At the end I had stopped. The words: "a gang of immigrant cockroaches" made me feel distinctly uncomfortable even in the context of cultural parody in which all the characters are insects. Thinking I might be overreacting - it has been known - or that I'd misread the nuance, I asked La Belle Belle Fille what she thought. She declared it to be too close to the truth to be funny, but didn't seem particularly shocked. I asked an American friend what she thought. Like me, she laughed at the beginning. At the end she said: "Noooo, that's awful." Maybe it's just one of those Anglo-French cultural things; a sense of humour lost in translation. Here's the mail translated.

THE STORY - ENGLISH VERSION

The ant works hard all through the summer heatwave.
He builds a house and stocks up food for winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is stupid. He laughs, dances and plays around.

Winter comes. The ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper shivers with cold and has neither food nor shelter. He dies of cold.

END OF STORY

THE STORY - FRENCH VERSION

The ant works hard all through the summer heatwave.
He builds a house and stocks up food for winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is stupid. He laughs, dances and plays around.

Winter comes. The ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper shivers with cold. He organises a press conference to demand why the ant has the right to be warm and well fed when others, less fortunate than him, are cold and hungry.

Television stations organise live shows showing the grasshopper shivering with cold and include video clips of the ant in his warm house with a table covered with food. The French are shocked that in such a rich country, a poor grasshopper can be left to suffer while others have so much. Anti-poverty organisations protest in front of the ant's house.

Jounalists run interviews claiming the ant has become rich on the back of the grasshopper. They call on the government to increase the ant's taxes so that he "pays a fair contribution". The unions, the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Communist League, the Gay and Lesbian Pride groups organise sit-ins and protests in front of the ant's house. As a show of solidarity public servants decide to go on strike for 59 minutes every day for an indefinite period.

A famous philosopher writes a book establishing links between the ant and the Nazi torturers at Auschwitz. In response to opinion polls the government rushes through laws on economic equality and anti-discrimination. The ant's taxes are increased and he is fined for not having employed the grasshopper as his assistant. The ant's house is requisitioned by the authorities because the ant doesn't have enough money to pay the fine and increased taxes. The ant emigrates to Switzerland where he contributes to that country's economic wealth.

A television report shows the grasshopper has now become fat. He is in the process of eating what remains of the ant's food even though Spring is still a long way off. Gatherings of artists and left-wing writers are regularly held in the ant's house. The singer Renaud composes a song: "Ant, beat it..."

The ant's former house, now a local authority home for the grasshopper, becomes increasingly run down because the grasshopper does nothing to maintain it. The government is blamed for not providing enough money for the work. An inquiry costing 10 million euros, is set up.

The grasshopper dies of an overdose. The newspapers Libération and Humanité comment on how the government has failed to address seriously the problems of social inequality.

The ant's former house is squatted by a gang of immigrant cockroaches.

The cockroaches deal in drugs and terrorise the local community.

The French government congratulates itself on the multicultural diversity of France.

END OF STORY

Crisis What Crisis? Episode 2.

2009-03-25T16:20:00.001+01:00

I want an iPhone. I am not a vacuous follower of fashion - or Steve Jobs - I just want a phone that doubles as a mini-computer when I am working away from home and that talks the same language as my other computers because it's made by the same people. I want an iPhone because it has a virtual keyboard with keys in the QWERTY order as opposed to the AZERTY order of French computers and mobile phones. It may seem a petty detail, but I touch type and AZERTY keyboards drive me to writing drivel and strong drink. The sales assistant at my phone company said the iPhone available in France came with an AZERTY touch sensitive keyboard but could be changed to an QWERTY. He could not guarantee any other phone would do this saying he'd never been asked. Failing this guarantee, I want an iPhone.

In December the French courts ruled that Apple's iPhone exclusive deal with just one French mobile telephone company was against the country's competition laws. The ruling opened the market to all phone companies. There was an appeal against the decision but it was upheld in January.

I am pretty sure that had this happened in Britain the rival mobile telephone companies would have had a stock of iPhones ready to supply to customers who wanted one; if not in December, then certainly when the appeal was decided.

Here in France I am still waiting for an iPhone. The telephone company's website says it'll be available on April 8. The local shop says "sometime" in April. To my astonishment my mobile telephone company even suggested I could go and buy one from a rival operator and it would reimburse nearly all the cost. Of course nobody would put this in writing. When I declined the offer she told me: "Our iPhone will be much more expensive." Not exactly hard selling.

Now some Internet commentators are wondering why France's phone companies have been so slow to stock the iPhones and the conspiracists whether there is any collusion going on. I don't know, I just want an iPhone. I went to my phone shop: "Are you sure you'll have one in April?" I asked the assistant. He shrugged: "Are you sure you want one?" I said: "Errr, yes. Can I reserve one now?" He shrugged: "No." "How much will it be?" He shrugged. "Don't know. You'll have to wait and see."

Collusion? Conspiracy Theory? Or just Crap Service? I don't know, I really don't.

Jumped up justice

2009-03-20T10:22:00.006+01:00

I went for a little manifest yesterday because I am more than a little peed off with the French government this week.

We returned from holiday to discover that the mother of one of La Fille's classmates has been threatened with expulsion from France at the end of the month. She has done nothing wrong but her "carte de séjour" (permission to stay) is not being renewed. The letter informing her that she has until the end of the month to leave the country came as something of a shock as she has lived and worked legally in France for ten years.

It counts for nothing, it seems, that she has her own fashion business on which she stumps up the required taxes and charges and a small shop on which she pays rent, or that she speaks French or that her daughter who she is bringing up alone was born in France, has never lived anywhere else than France and started at a French school last September.

I am not quite sure what more this now anxious and terrified poor woman has to do to fulfil the requirements of "integration" into French society and neither is she. I suspect there is actually nothing she can do because it's not personal but political. Last year the French government expelled a record 29,796 "illegal immigrants". Brice Hortefeux the then immigration minister declared he was "very proud" of this. For 2009 the target is 26,000: this young mum is a number, nothing more. And because she is not what they call a "clandestine" but has been in France legally, worked legally, paid her taxes, schooled her child she is on the administration's books and consequently easy to find and shove on a plane back to a country she no longer calls home and that was never home to her child. And this in France, which never fails to remind the world that it is the cradle of human rights.

But this is France and nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Off I went to manifest. My friends and fellow journalists and I stood on the corner of the street with our banner waiting to join the march at the appropriate moment. We let half a dozen groups go by, we let the teachers go by, we let a small lorry blasting out the Italian anti-fascist song Bella Ciao go by then, because we had waited an hour and the banner was heavy, we decided to join the fray...and promptly broke the unwritten rules of street marching etiquette. So much for solidarity. All I can say is if you are ever tempted to join a French march, make sure you ask permission first. "You can't march here," said one placard waver sniffily. "Go somewhere else. You're pushing in."

Bloody hell. Would you credit it. Pushing in...hmmm, I'll remember that next time I see a French queue.

Carpe Diem

2009-03-19T13:22:00.002+01:00

Having joked about the perils of skiing in my last post, I thought I would add that I feel terribly sad for the family of the lovely Natasha Richardson, especially her two young sons.

Reading the reports I would venture that her untimely death says less about the dangers of skiing than the fact, often forgotten in the hurly burly of daily mundanity, that we all have a very tenuous grasp on life.

As Horace wrote: Seize the Day

"Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what final fate the gods have
given to me and you, Leuconoe, and don't consult Babylonian
horoscopes. How much better it is to accept whatever shall be,
whether Jupiter has given many more winters or whether this is the
last one, which now breaks the force of the Tuscan sea against the
facing cliffs. Be wise, strain the wine, and trim distant hope within
short limits. While we're talking, grudging time will already
have fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow."

Pass the crystal ball

2009-03-17T15:45:00.006+01:00

We went skiing last week. The following was supposed to be posted when I pressed the post button minutes before we left. For some reason, possibly not unconnected to me fiddling with the Post Options, it never appeared. However, never one to let a word go to waste, I am posting it now. We are back from skiing but just call me Zoltar.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
The bags are packed and we are heading off to the Alps for the annual ritual humiliation that is skiing. "Can you ski?" French friends ask with surprise adding: "Are there mountains you can ski down in England?" I reply: "There aren't and I can't." But the smuggies know that already. Of course I can't, I'm English.

It really isn't fair. I said this last year - I say it every time - but it isn't. The Frenchman does no exercise whatsoever and has been skiing about four times in the last 20 years, but he can ski. Of course he can, he's French. The Belle Belle-Fille shuns any kind of sport and yet skis like a mountain goddess, sweeping down slopes with a gentle sway of the hips, her knees and skis perfectly parallel and with minimum effort and maximum grace. I keep fit, I go to the gym, I have a good sense of balance, I used to roller-skate, but the art of skiing well eludes me.

For some reason I have it in my head that I enjoy skiing but when I deconstruct the experience into the sum of its parts I wonder why I have reached this bizarre conclusion.

Here is how it will go:

a) The train will arrive and we will discover we have to pay an arm and a leg for a taxi to the ski resort or wait 90 minutes in the cold wearing our Paris clothes for the next bus.

b) The chalet that looked as if it was right by the ski lifts and village thanks to Photoshop or clever use of perspective, will turn out to be half a mile away. It will not be pretty sloping roofed wooden building with lots of balconies in the middle of the photo in the brochure, but the grey Soviet-era concrete block next to it.

c) We will pay a large sum of good money to be kitted out with ski boots that make us walk like we've got two false legs, skis that will flatly refuse to stay together when on feet, but will snap like piranhas to our fingers when we try to carry them on shoulders and will fail to stay anywhere near each other when stuck in snow outside a bar. We will be given two tall poles that we will be told are very important but that we have no idea what exactly to do with except "plante, plante", which if you are French means sticking them in the snow before executing a perfect turn and if you are English means sticking them in the snow and falling over them.

d) We will clomp through the village in said ski boots that have all the elegance of orthopedic footwear struggling to carry skis and poles and getting hot and bothered to the bottom of a mountain that looks very, very high.

e) The Frenchman will suggest going up very, very high mountain and I will agree thinking it cannot be so very, very high as it looks as there are five-year-old French children coming down it. In fact, five-year-old French children coming down it very fast.

f) I will arrive at the top of the very, very high mountain and shout at the Frenchman accusing him of trying to kill me. I will shout for at least 10 minutes until I realise he is going to ski off and leave me to get down on my own if I don't shut up and that groups of five-year-olds are looking at me before skiing off.

g) After launching myself onto the piste I will find I am heading for the edge of the mountain and have forgotten how to turn. I will panic and lean back - big big mistake - and will go faster. I will fall over.

h) At some point during the first day and every subsequent day, someone coming down the mountain faster but not necessarily better than me, will ski into me, or narrowly avoid me, despite the fact I am wearing a glowing orange jacket that could be spotted from an un-zoomed satellite shot on Google Earth.

i) I will think: "Why am I doing this?"

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

And here is how it went:

a) It was warm and sunny. We only waited 15 minutes for a bus; this was long enough to buy the tickets without panicking.

b) The chalet was in a pretty slope-roofed wooden building. It had a balcony. It was much smaller than it looked in the brochure. It was indeed a schlepp and a half from the main ski-lift, the village, the ski school...and all uphill.

c) We did. We were given 20% discount vouchers but still paid a small fortune equivalent to that demanded without vouchers last year. Blistered fingers on the first day.

d) Spot on.

e) He did. There were.

f) The Frenchman surpassed himself in his attempts to get his hands of my non-existent life insurance. First day, first slope, he "accidentally" went the wrong way and took us down a red competition slope for the second year running. I knew I was in trouble because there were no five-year-olds to be seen. I swear this is the same slope I saw on the recent downhill skiing championships. I shouted at the Frenchman. He looked resigned: "Welcome to the first day skiing," he said.

g) Fell over. One ski came off. (and you try retrieving then 'unlocking' a ski and shoving an orthopaedic boot back into its mechanism while trying to avoid sliding down a racing slope on the remaining ski.) Small mercy: thanks to being on competition slope nobody except the Frenchman witnessed my wimping and whingeing.

h) Yup. And 99% of them were German snowboarders.

i) Verbatim.

We had a fabulous time!

Trust me, trust me...I'm a doctor.

2009-03-11T21:35:00.004+01:00

I am not allowed to give blood in France because I could have 'Mad Cow' disease. This rule applies to anyone who lived in Britain during the 1980s. But now my dental surgeon wants to transplant a piece of dead cow into my mouth. Now why would I agree to that?

I ask him. He says this is the treatment he recommends. I know the sub-text: he is the specialist, I must trust him. "But what exactly is 'bovine material'?" His secretary gives me a glossy leaflet. It explains that 'bovine material' is harvested bone from the carcasses of dead cows farmed in America, which it claims, is perfectly safe. Excuse me, but as the glossy leaflet was produced by the company selling the bone it would say that wouldn't it? I Google "cow bone jaw dental transplant". I find nothing particularly persuasive or dissuasive but decide: "No way", anyway. I will not be surprised if the dental surgeon refuses to treat me when I tell him.

This highlights a big difference between the NHS and the French health service. In Britain doctors jump through hoops to explain everything in great detail and give patients the choice. In France doctors tell you what to do on the understanding that they went to medical school and they know best. I prefer to think that in most cases doctors, having completed years of studies and exams, do know best. And if not best, then certainly better than the vast majority of their patients. Then again, if you were a haemophiliac given contaminated blood in the 1980s in Britain or a child given contaminated growth hormone around the same era in France, you would not agree.

The whole doctor-patient relationship has been further complicated by the Internet that has made us all armchair specialists. It has demystified medicine, science, biology, our private lives, the world, the universe, even nuclear physics. Well, perhaps not nuclear physics. The information is out there, masses of it, most of it contradictory much of it plain wrong. I can Google 'pain in stomach' and come up with anything from indigestion to cancer. The Internet can tell me what it might be; only a doctor can tell me what it is.

To be honest, I don't know which way to go on this one. For years I had a monosyllabic French doctor who refused to let me leave without a prescription for at least five drugs, several of them over the counter stuff like painkillers that I didn't need and didn't take. At the end of every appointment he would press me to take a sick note from work (useless as I'm my own boss). He never explained anything; I was expected never to complain.

Now I have a wonderful friendly but no-nonsense British GP in Paris. She is very happy to explain and reassure and I am confident she only gives me drugs I really need. In the Internet age trusting your doctor is a leap of faith, but I do think she knows best because she has never given me any reason to doubt it.

As for the "bovine material". There's no way it's going anywhere near my mouth. I'm not that mad.

Old Macdonald

2009-03-05T09:32:00.004+01:00

We went to the Salon International d'Agriculture in Paris last week. It's taken me until now to recover. The French, as we all know, are big on farming and food and this is a massive and hugely popular annual event. It is to food and farming what the fashion shows are to haute couture with animals as perfectly groomed as catwalk models only better fed and less skinny.

The whole place was heaving even on a credit-crunch weekday and with tickets costing 12 euros, nearly £12 at current exchange rates. The metro carriage had became increasingly sweaty as we approached and pouring out of the station there were long queues for tickets. My American friend and I reverted to national stereotypes and thwarted several shameless queue jumpers who sidled in front of us by sending them to the back of the line. For our efforts we were treated to some fabulous excuses including: "Oh I am sorry, I was just trying to get a better look at the ticket office".

This year's Salon featuring 1,000 exhibitors from 17 countries and around 4,500 animals attracted more than 670,000 visitors. Once inside we spent our time trying to protect our toddler offspring from being trampled by the crowd and, like good city mothers, preventing them from being eaten or worse, dribbled or peed on, by various penned animals. Thankfully most of the farmers seem to have disappeared for lunch at the moment La Fille chose to do her impersonation of an urban wimp hopping on one foot and yelling "urgh, urgh, urgh there's poo on my shoe" after she trod in a cow pat. (It must be genetic; her elder half-sister once complained she didn't like the countryside because "it smells".)

The hangar-like exhibition halls were manned by no nonsense, ruddy-faced country folk who normally wouldn't be seen dead in Paris unless cattle prodded into coming here to wave angry banners and throw freshly-laid eggs at the Ministry of Agriculture. Last year one lippy paysan insulted the president and was told to "Sod off, you idiot". These are people who, on their rural home turf, are often happier to talk to foreigners than have an exchange with someone from Paris. Here they were chatting, God knows even smiling, to visitors most of whom were Parisiens and couldn't tell one end of an unsheared ovine from the other.

And some of the animals were magnificently weird: we saw sheep wearing hand-crafted coats to stop their eight-inch deep fleece getting dirty, chickens that looked like they were wearing those pom-pom type socks you see on Greek soldiers, cockerels with beady eyes and blood red combs, perfectly symmetrical 101-dalmation rabbits, pedigree dogs including a preened white poodle having a silly haircut and a couple of grumpy donkeys who were clearly not enjoying themselves. Somehow we missed the bulls altogether but we did come across a spectacularly well-hung prize-winning pig. My friend and I giggled like silly schoolgirls and assumed the children who were concentrating on shoving their hands at the animal's snuffling nose, hadn't noticed.

When we returned home, La Fille devoted a page in her school homework book to the Salon d'Agriculture. On the way to school Monday I asked what she was going to say when asked to explain her work to the class. She said: "I'm going to tell them about all the animals, especially the pig with the bizarre bottom." Thankfully she didn't hear me snorting into my scarf. It was one of those rare occasions where I was entirely lost for words.

The Money Tree

2009-02-28T22:52:00.004+01:00

I have been trying to instill in La Fille a sense of the value and cost of things. It started when I remonstrated with her for breaking a toy. It was a small, inexpensive object broken carelessly rather than wantonly and I might have let it go except she said: "Let's buy another one." This made me really cross, so cross I found myself trotting out that hoary parental cliché about money having to be earned and not growing on trees, which just baffled her.

Then we arrived at St Pancras station and I told La Fille I had to go to the bank to get some money. Her eyes turned as wide as saucers as a wad of used notes spewed out of the mouth of the cashpoint machine. "Wow!", was all said. I could see from her expression she thought this was some kind of magic. ("You're right Mama it doesn't grow on trees it comes out of walls".)

Today, I told La Fille I was not prepared to spend my hard-earned cash on the merry-go-round if she planned to sulk her way through every go for no apparent reason. I said this more out of principle than penury - for now at least - but after a brief reprise of my diatribe about money and arboretum she said: "Shall we go to the bank?"

Later reading newspaper reports on certain bosses of British banks and their eye-watering bonuses and pensions it made me think of La Fille's saucer-eyed reaction when my money emerged from the hole in the wall and how, apparently like some bank chiefs, she now believes there is an unlimited supply of free money in this magic machine there for the taking.

Then again, in her defence La Fille is only four years old.

Uncle Walt and The Cold War Mole

2009-02-20T16:09:00.003+01:00

The French do go on about their "cultural exception" and how erudite and educated they are while we Philistine Britons sneer and joke about how pretentious it is and how we just don't get the Gallic obsession with Serge and breathless Jane and films focussing on smoldering cigarettes in glass ashtrays and inexplicable angst, and dialogue punctuated by endless pauses and puffs and pouts on stinky filterless cigarettes and horribly long unreadable sentences like this one. I know; believe me I have sneered and joked and mocked along with the best.

But I should say, to the sound of words being munched and mutterings of having 'gone native', the French do culture exceedingly well, especially culture for children. Their approach is different to ours: they are less inclined towards the mainstream: hands-on museums; wonderfully kitsch 'it's-behind-you' pantomime; dreamy heroines in frou-frou dresses not to mention spangly benighted Princesses. They tend towards the understated, subtle, complex, dare I say it, sophisticated. It tends to be less fun more formal.

Take the wonderful films Kirikou and Azur et Asmar, by director Michel Ocelot for example. As animation goes they are old school and about as far removed from great Uncle Walt and Pixmar's slick productions as they could be without being cave paintings. The plots are the stuff of fantastic fables, the drawings colourful but technologically simple and the characters crudely drawn and two dimensional. And for all that the films are enchanting.

Last week, La Fille's class went to the cinema and I was drafted in as a parent helper. We took our seats in the vast auditorium and I waited for the titles to roll. But before the lights went down, we were introduced to two men sitting either side of the stage in front of the screen. One was behind a set of drums and a variety of interesting percussion including shells and tinkly things and African drums and a tweetie-whistle and the like. The other, to the left, was behind a keyboard surrounded by more tinkly things and a plastic concertina-ed pipe that went whooooooooo when he whirled it around his head. They took turns to explain how they would be playing the 'soundtrack' to the film and to describe the instruments they would be using and what it would mean when we heard the whooooooo sound of a plastic concertina-ed pipe being whirled around. I looked around and expected the 100 or so assembled three to four year-olds to be fidgeting but they were all ears.

The lights dimmed, the film rolled. It was The Little Mole or Krtec, a simple cartoon animal created in the 1950s by a Czech animator Zdeněk Miler. The 1950s are a long way from Dreamworks, but the films were enchanting and the two musicians played along so that their music was a parallel performance in itself. It made me realise how much we take film sountracks for granted and how interesting when the two medium are semi-separated.

La Fille and her classmates, along with the other schoolchildren present loved the film and loved the music as an entertainment in its own right, so much so they broke out into spontaneous beat-clapping several times and were whistling with the flute and cheering with the symbols and tweeting with the tweetie-whistle and whoooooing with the plastic whirly pipe at every opportunity.

It was unlike any other film screening I have ever been to. It was very French. It was absolutely magical. Vive cultural exceptions.

Twist and Shout

2009-02-12T15:45:00.003+01:00

"You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to."

With this epigram, published in 1930, the Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe dismissed and indeed defamed the gentlemen (they were all chaps in those days) of Her Majesty's Press.

This week French president Nicolas Sarkozy also traduced the British press only with less style and considerably less humour when he blamed them for "twisting" his words to suggest he was critical of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's handling of the global economic crisis in his state-of-the-nation interview last Thursday.

Talk about shooting the messenger. If I understand correctly Mr Sarkozy wants us to know that the following, said in front of four French journalists and several million television viewers, was not in the least critical:

1) "Franchement, quand on voit la situation aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni, on n'a pas envie de leur ressembler"...Frankly, when one see the situation in the United States and the United Kingdom one has no desire to be like them.

2) "Les Anglais ont fait le choix d'une relance par la consommation, notamment avec la baisse de deux points de la TVA, on voit bien que ça n'a amené absolument aucun progrès....La consommation en Angleterre non seulement n'a pas repris mais continue à baisser". The English have chosen a relaunch through consumption (spending), notably with the reduction of VAT by two points. We can see clearly that this has brought absolutely no progress...spending in England has not only not picked up but has continued to fall.

3) "Si les Anglais on fait ça, c'est parce qu'ils n'ont plus d'industrie, a la différence de la France."...If the English have done that, it's because they no longer have any industry, unlike France."

Even allowing for translation, even juggling with a few synonyms can this be interpreted as anything other than criticism? So who is doing the twisting. During his interview Mr Sarkozy also spoke of the economic "erreurs" made by Britain. I don't think "erreurs" is open to much spinning or twisting by perfidious Anglo-Saxon journalists, but in case anyone thinks it might be, erreurs = errors, otherwise known as mistakes. Critical, moi?

Fly the Flag

2009-02-10T09:27:00.009+01:00

Why is it that people in Britain are so quick to assume they always have the pooey end of the stick and that life is so much better elsewhere? It's a mystery to me. I know the economic situation is bad, but long before the crunch the negativity was relentless. And depressing. The national self-esteem seems to have sunk so low that any criticism is snatched up eagerly for some collective self-flagellation.

Two recent examples: first there was a French journalist who explained to The Guardian exactly what was wrong with Britain: Britons had lost their way, were up to their necks in debt, only cared about money and had rubbish health, transport, social and every other system. He said we had lost our morality, and lost our way on immigration and crime (Do I hear the tinkle of a large glass house?) "Yes, yes, yes," the cry went up in response. It didn't seem to matter to anyone that the author, a journalist called Jacques Monin has spent only three years in Britain, included only one statistic and only one quote in his article (part of his book called The Shipwreck of Britain), or that he wasn't very specific and didn't mention much outside of London. Still, that's fine; it's Mr Monin's opinion and he's entitled to it. But why did so many rush to agree with him?

Then Nicolas Sarkozy weighed in saying we were basically stuffed, that we don't produce anything, that Gordon Brown was doing the economic crisis all wrong and that the PM's measures, including reducing VAT, were useless. He added that he, Mr Sarkozy, would not be making the same "mistakes". Well, what would you expect? He's the French president and he's there to defend and promote France. "Yes. Yes. YES," came the screams,"See, even the French think we're rubbish and we are."

Both men pressed all the buttons of those who feel Britain is going to a) the dogs, b) hell in a handcart c) down the drain d) worse. Mr Sarkozy's criticism was plucked with the breathless eagerness of a passed 400m relay baton and used to beat Gordon Brown around the head. It didn't even matter that Mr Sarkozy was playing fast and loose with the facts. As Downing Street pointed out to the Elysée Palace, Britain's industries represent 14 per cent of gross national product, compared to 16 per cent in France; not a huge difference. Plus, European Commission figures published in the Telegraph - not one of Mr Brown's biggest fans - show the economies are not so wildly different and even put Britain ahead in certain areas.

But never mind the statistics, what about a bit of national pride? Please. Not nationalism or imperialism or feeling superior or Rudyard Kipling's idea about the English holding the "winning ticket in the lottery of life" or The Sun's "Hop Off You Frogs" stuff, just a "Hang on a mo, it's not ALL bad".

I spend a lot of time in both countries, hence the title and raison d'etre for this blog. I love both for different reasons. There are great things, not so good things and pretty damn awful things in both. They are not always the things you would imagine.

Since President Sarkozy's criticism, the Frenchman - who also spends time in the UK - has been defending Britain to his friends and colleagues. If he can do it, so can you.

The Monsieur's Not For Turning

2009-02-06T23:48:00.008+01:00

A few months ago President Nicolas Sarkozy was telling the French they needed to be emulating the successful Anglo-Saxon economic model. This, he insisted, was the way forward.

Last night President Nicolas Sarkozy was on television telling the French that the Anglo-Saxon economic model was not to be followed and he would be strenuously avoiding emulating it because it was a complete and utter disaster, rubbish, a heap of merde and absolutely not the way forward, or words to that effect.

Wonderful thing hindsight. The only thing astonishing about this is that nobody in France, not the press, the television, the radio, not even the Opposition, the Unions or the Communists, nobody (except the Frenchman) has pointed out this political U-turn.

As someone who is paid in coins and notes bearing Her Majesty's head - or electronic transfers of same - but spends in euros bearing pictures of bridges, pacifists, cloudberries, harps, Spartas, popes, flying swans and owls, I am being crunched.

Personally, I refuse to believe there is an economic crisis in the UK while British people are bidding more for second-hand Mini-Boden coats on eBay than they are being sold new on the company's website. Are they mad or do they have more money than sense?

I rest my case, M'Lud.

A Life of Constant Triumph?

2009-02-02T10:37:00.001+01:00

You cannot keep a good half-French protester down.

La Fille returned from our foray into the mass demonstration and General Strike on Friday and made herself a placard. It even had writing on it. To be more accurate it had a series of letters on it in no particular order. Still, you could say the same of some of the acronym plastered banners waved last week, though La Fille is refusing to say what R T H I L or P O E A M might stand for. If there had been a C or a B or an S, I might have guessed it was a call to arms for more chocolate, bonbons or sweets, but as it is I haven't a clue. Having decorated her paper 'placard' she then glued it to a wooden chopstick she dug out of a kitchen drawer and began striding up and down the apartment. I could have been accused of political indoctrination, though that was not my intention at all, were it not for the fact that she was wearing a horribly sparkly frilly 'princess dress', a silver coloured plastic tiara and matching clip-on earrings as she marched.

A quote from Richard Dreyfuss in a theatre review in The Times, to combat the February blues.

“There are things in my life I have no regrets about. Other things I’ve done, I wince at. The drugs, the arrogance. That stuff. But does anyone live a life of constant triumph?”

The Communist and the Chocolate Factory

2009-01-30T17:00:00.003+01:00

I took La Fille to her first 'manifestation' yesterday. It was not a huge effort as the demonstration passed the end of our road and I thought she might like it - all the noise and hullabaloo - and it would mark and important step in her cultural education. It would not be unfair or racist to say the French do indeed like striding the streets waving banners and yelling slogans that don't rhyme and La Fille is, after all, half French.

It being a General Strike, the police had sealed off the roads well in advance so there were even more motorbikes, scooters and bicycles illegally on the pavements. Within ten paces I was beginning to regret thinking it might be fun as well as educational as in addition to two-wheel hazards several smokers, not paying the slightest attention to where they were waving their cigarette, threatened to singe what is left of La Fille's hair. La Fille did not look as if she was liking her first 'manif', not one little bit, until we headed for Place de la République. Here the demonstration was headed by a lorry decked out with posters and banners of the French Communist Party. Standing high up on a scaffold stage on the back of the lorry were two protestors: one wearing mask to look like President Nicolas Sarkozy and next to him a man in a top hat and tails throwing leaflets to the crowd below.

"Look, look, look," shrieked La Fille, pointing to the Communist in his penguin suit. "Look, it's Mister Willy Wonka."

Ha! Only half French!

Short Back and Sides

2009-01-28T22:15:00.006+01:00

La Fille took a pair of scissors and hacked off her hair while I was on the telephone and not paying attention. This sentence probably says much about my parenting skills, none of it good. Scissors? Telephone? Not paying attention?

I was still on the phone - talking about work to a potential employer - when I heard her call "Mama" from the bathroom. I found her standing in front of the full-length mirror clutching a pair of round-tipped children's scissors (for cutting paper). The floor was covered in locks of her beautiful silky hair. I shrieked, ended the call and stared open-mouthed at La Fille. "What have you done?" I wailed sinking to my knees. La Fille's face turned disconsolate as she realised what she had done. She is nearly four but her hair had only just begun to grow, to thicken, to lose its baby frizz. "How can I put clips in my hair now?" she wailed. I scooped up the shorn hair in my hands. Don't ask why; it is possible that for one nanosecond I thought I could superglue it back on. Guilt does funny things to your head.

I bundled her into a coat and out of the door. We ran to the next but one nearest hairdresser. (I could not face taking her to the nearest because of the time when I cut her hair and made a hash of it.) The two trainees laughed when I explained what had happened. They summoned the salon manager: "We have a new apprentice here," one giggled. Not helpful, I thought as La Fille buried her deconstructed tousled head into my coat. "Why did you do it?" asked the other. "Didn't like my fringe," mumbled La Fille. "Didn't like her mum on the phone," I added. A senior cutter wielding an electric razor set to work. Ten minutes later La Fille looked like a boy. A boy with short hair. Profiting from our obvious distress the salon manager asked for 19 euros (pretty steep for no wash, a quick razor and no dry). Obviously distressed, I paid up without a word.

I feel we made sad sight walking hand in hand up the road, though possibly not as sad a sight as we had made running down it.

"Don't worry you still look beautiful and it'll grow," I told La Fille.

"I don't. I look like a boy," she said.

Every Type of Dubiousness

2009-01-26T13:16:00.006+01:00

Sometimes Paris has a touch of Al Capone's Chicago about it. Maybe things are no better in the UK, but the French capital can make you feel that you have experienced something, if not illegal then distinctly dodgy at best or been royally had over at worst.

First, La Fille needs some new spectacles. We have been through several pairs and no matter the choices we make (frames, non-scratch lenses, unbreakable..) the final bill is always around 220 euros; pretty expensive for something that has to be changed regularly. This time we tried out new opticians and were delighted when, given a choice of frames, La Fille chose ones that were half the price of her current pair. The lenses were also cheaper. We were presented the bill...for 220 euros. The sales girl, or as she was grandly styled the "Ophthalmological Advisor", had added on various bells and whistles, including "special thin lenses" that cost an extra 40 euros. "We didn't ask for them; do we have a choice?" inquired the Frenchman. "No. I only work with lenses like that," she retorted. And why 220 euros? I suspect this is the limit the French health authorities will reimburse for children's eyewear.

Second: the management company that runs our building produced an estimate for work on the foundations and drains. It is for 44,000 euros. The residents asked for two other estimates; not unreasonable given the work and money involved. Also not unreasonable as our neighbour went to the trouble of finding plumbers and organising one additional estimate - this time for 37,000 - so the management company only had to find one more. At this point the architect employed by the management company - and overseeing the project - said he was not prepared to work with the firm that had produced the 37,000 euros estimate nor indeed any other company except the one that wanted 44,000 euros. We stood our ground and insisted on another estimate. Last week this third estimate arrived from the management company. It was a blatant cut and paste of the 44,000 euro bill but with a different firm's name on top and for 48,000 euros thus ensuring we are unlikely to choose it.

Then the friend whose surgeon presented him for a bill for 2,000 euros for an operation he had said would cost 700 euros telling him "It's OK, your mutuelle (a kind of non-profit making private insurance) will pay", called us. "Remember that surgeon...? he asked. "Well I've just discovered he also works at my mutuelle."

While I dig out my cheque book here are some - possibly very unfair - quotes about the Windy City to keep you amused. I have never been myself, so it's a cheap laugh.

"I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago...I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages."
Rudyard Kipling, 1891

"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
Carl Sandburg, 1961

"A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness."
E.M. Forster

"We struck the home trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago - a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago - she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time."
Mark Twain "Life on the Mississippi," 1883

"There was no need to inform us of the protocol involved. We were from Chicago and knew all about cement."
Groucho Marx, pressing his hands into the cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

Mea Culpa

2009-01-23T23:15:00.002+01:00

For those who were shocked and confused...I have made a couple of changes to the post below because a paragraph I wrote as a joke was open to a very unfortunate and misleading interpretation. Sorry. Please do not all rush to book a room in the hotel opposite...I can assure you that the Frenchman is not in the habit of dancing semi-naked in front of our living room window, or anywhere else to my knowledge!

Dancing Queen

2009-01-23T19:39:00.009+01:00

We live opposite a hotel. When I say opposite I mean right opposite: we overlook them, they overlook us from a distance of the size of a one-car one way street and two narrow pavements. If they choose to do so hotel guest can see into our apartment and we can see into their rooms. It can be interesting, but mostly we take no notice and keep well back from the windows. We hope they do the same, but they don't always. Or maybe they are just exhibitionists. Visitors to our flat think it's great fun living opposite a hotel. I always know when someone chez nous has been up close and peeping by the greasy nose prints on the window glass, but that's another story.

Today the babysitter arrived to keep La Fille busy for a couple of hours while I did some boring but necessary administrative paperwork and brought with her a kind of karaoke microphone. I was not familiar with the idea, not being a great fan of singing in public, or even in private, but apparently La Fille had played with it on a previous occasion despite it costing around £200 (just the knowledge of the cost of replacing it gave me heart flutters.) So the babysitter plugs it into the television and the words come up on the screen along with the music and La Fille, who can't read but knows a tune when she hears one, starts singing something entirely unrelated and to a different tune. They seem to be having fun so I leave them to it and go to the post office.

I return 20 minutes later (the queues aren't any better here) to find the babysitter doing the washing up while La Fille, stripped down to her vest and knickers, is clutching the microphone and singing and dancing in front of the television - which is right by the living room window, just overlooking the hotel - to the music of 'Physical' by Olivia Newton John. ("I want to get physical, physical...I want to get animal, animal," warbles ONJ).

Of course it is all totally innocent and La Fille has no idea what the song is and is indeed singing something completely different and in any case the window is closed and I'm sure nobody can hear the music, but I am aware out of the corner of my eye that there are a couple of people leaning out of the hotel windows to smoke cigarettes who might be looking our way. "Why have you taken nearly all your clothes off?" I ask. La Fille, who at that moment has pulled her vest up to her neck. She says: "But you have to take your clothes off when you dance." I glance out of the window towards the hotel and say: "No. No you do not. STOP IT RIGHT NOW."

At that moment a girlfriend rings. I say: "Sorry, I can't talk; La Fille is doing a striptease in front of the entire hotel and we'll have half the perverts in Christendom checking into one-way-street rooms if word gets round. Plus she seems to think you have to take your clothes off when you dance. Where did that come from?" And my friend laughs and says: "Indeed where did it come from? Do you make a habit of dancing half naked in the window?" and I say: "Most certainly not."

Maybe we should just get curtains.

The Queen's English

2009-01-21T00:15:00.008+01:00

My efforts to ensure that La Fille has a grounding in English culture - whatever that may or may not be - before the French bodysnatchers get to work on her, continue apace. Evidence of successes notched up so far:

* La Fille insists on being called Snow White since our trip to the pantomime. Not, you note, Blanche Neige, but Snow White. The Anglophone and the Feminist in me are slugging this one out.

* Conversation between La Fille and her new best friend, the French boy from school. La Fille: "Come on speak English." Boy (wailing): "Mais je ne parle pas Anglais." La Fille: "Yes you do."

* Imaginary discussion between La Fille and one of her dolls in her bedroom. "Shall we watch the television?" Silence accompanying imaginary look at imaginary television. "Oh no there's only football on. That's boring."

* "Mama, please may I have some tomato ketchup in my carrot soup?" (Hmmm. The jury's out on that one too.)

* La Fille: "Can I watch Oui-Oui?" Me: "He's not Oui-Oui he's Noddy. He's a little English boy who lives in Toytown. And his best friend is called Big Ears not Potimarron." (What AM I saying?) La Fille: "Well can I watch Noddy?" Me: "No."

* La Fille: "Bloody hell." Me: "Sorry, what did you say?" La Fille: "Bloody hell." Me: "What?" La Fille: "Bloody hell." I don't know where she got that from.

* After watching the inauguration of Barack Obama together she now says: "Barack Obama" and "God Save America". I realise this is straying from our Sceptred Isle but it is at least English and will serve her well in France until the Barack-adoring French realise the new President of the United States may know where France is - unlike his predecessor - but this does not necessarily mean he cares.

And here endeth the lesson...

2009-01-18T16:44:00.005+01:00

For those in Britain who lament the 'dumbing down' of the education system...

A French friend's brother is an English professor in a French state school teaching 13-14 year olds. The other day he was lamenting the widespread use of internet translations by his pupils. Apart from being lazy and not particularly instructive electronic translations are notoriously unreliable and he was spending hours trying to make sense of homework.

One of his class had submitted an essay on British popular music containing the phrase: 'Elton John collaborated on by helped made green'. What on earth, he pondered, did this nonsense mean? Our friend's brother scratched his head and fretted over the essay for hours. He got on his computer and reversed the search putting: 'Elton John collaborated on by helped made green' into the English to French translation engine. That did not make any sense either. The whole thing became something of a mental challenge.

Suddenly there was an Eureka moment. Of course: 'Elton John collaborated on by helped made green' meant 'Elton John collaborated on Aida by Verdi'. The search engine had taken 'Aida' as a conjugation of 'aider' meaning 'to help' and 'Verdi' as a form of 'verdir' meaning 'to turn green'. Obvious really.

Cluedo Part 2: Parisgirl with the Monkey Wrench in the Kitchen

2009-01-16T15:13:00.000+01:00

There is some deeply bad karma between me and water at the moment and not just here.

Moving on from the numerous leaks chez nous in Paris, we came to the UK and spent a few days with my parents in Suffolk. The first morning I stepped into the shower, turned on the water and shivered as it turned increasingly tepid (sorry I don't do cold showers). I turned the temperature dial. It heated for a couple of seconds then turned tepid again. I turned it up. The same thing happened. I accused my stepfather ("if you're so cold put on another sweater") of switching off the boiler. He insisted he hadn't and suggested I didn't have a clue how to use temperature control properly. I bit my tongue.

We went to London and checked into a hotel for the weekend. On the first morning I stepped into the shower and turned it on. Two icy cold drops then nothing. No water at all. I turned it off and on again. Still nothing. I raised and lowered the shower head. Nothing. I stepped out of the shower and turned on the sink tap. Nothing. I phoned reception. They said: "Sorry, the supply has been cut off. We don't know why." The Frenchman got up: "What is it about us and water?" he asked.

We came back to Paris. The washing machine inlet was leaking again so I crawled into the cupboard under the sink with my trusty wrench and attached the pipe to another tap. The head honcho at the plumbing company that services our building arrived. I had arranged the visit on Boxing Day. He was an hour late. I told him we had suffered nine leaks and two floods from upstairs in the three months since his company replaced the upriser in the building and we had been advised we needed a pressure reducer. As I said "water pressure reducer" I swear he looked at me as if I was a silly girly (a foreign girly to boot) and said: "You don't need a (sneery tone)'water pressure reducer'. Your pipes are old. That's the problem." He then turned on his heels and walked out of the door while I was still talking to him. It was a good job I did not have the monkey wrench in my hand at the time.

I told the Frenchman. He said he'd sort it out. "Do you want the wrench?" I asked. He said: "No, just the telephone."

Fairy Tales

2009-01-13T17:57:00.001+01:00

We've just returned from the UK having discovered that in spite of French schadenfreude over the reported demise of the "Anglo-Saxon free-market" the country appears to be:

a) still afloat
b) not up for sale as a job lot
c) home to people dreaming up cunning ways to get one over the liquidators.

Under c) I include the soon to be jobless Woolworths' shop assistant who told a musician friend that the CD he assumed was going cheap was still £14.99 but "If you give me a fiver it's yours". She then pocketed the money.

While being a Prophet of Gloom, Doom and Destruction is now a la mode, I feel patriotically honour bound, given that markets function on confidence, to buck the trend with a few upbeat, if non scientific, observations.

There was nothing decent left in the sales (except a lovely pair of black leather boots and I bought them). Even Oxford Street had been picked to the bone.

Shops are reportedly desperate to offload stock but a sullen girl in Currys refused to sell me one of the large stack of CD players marked £24.99 because "that was the Christmas price and they are now more expensive." Silly me. I thought shops were legally obliged to sell at the marked price and told her. She ignored me.

When we went to the pantomime ("Oh yes we did...oh no you didn't") on a schoolday evening, it was packed with child-free adults who'd paid up to £20 a ticket.

(And while we are on about the pantomime: Nurse Nelly? What the hell is that all about? I don't remember her from the Brothers Grimm. Who was the bright spark of a child sitting between me and her grandmother who, in that dramatic moment of theatrical suspense in a pin droppingly silent auditorium shrieked at Snow White: "DON'T EAT THE APPLE"? What politically correct Fairy Godperson had the bright idea of changing the wicked stepmother into a malevolent aunt and why didn't the horrid bag say: "Mirror mirror on the wall...tra la la" like she is supposed to. Why, for that matter, didn't the seven vertically challenged persons sing "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go"? And why wasn't Stephen Fry there in person?)

Nearly every single child in the audience, including La Fille, was waving a plastic flashing magic wand or light stick (some both) that had set their parents back a whopping £4 and which, in La Fille's case, was broken simply through being waved before the end of the panto. (And no this wasn't "rich" London)

The brasserie near where we were staying was packed on Friday evening. At one point the queue for tables stretched halfway out of the door.

The nearby hotel was full of Welsh people who, as far as I know still spend pounds and are not euro-rich like the Irish, spending lots and lots of said pounds on overpriced drinks at the bar.

In four days in London I did not see a single beggar on the London Underground. Rarely a day goes by without at least one person asking for a "coin, luncheon voucher, ticket or cigarette" on the Paris Metro. Ditto people living in cardboard boxes on the streets: here I pass two or three every morning on the way to La Fille's school.

So if the French can do schadenfreude so can we. I know, it's not big, it's not clever and it's not grown up but I quote from an article in a left-of-centre French magazine. Under the headline: "This was Swinging London", the piece reports the end of the world as we knew it in the British capital. As evidence of this, it says even the Christmas parties where everyone goes "off their rocker" were cancelled.

It finishes with a quote from London property expert: "I know you French are not unhappy to see the Anglo-Saxon miracle fall from the sky. But don't kid yourselves. The Vieux Continent is always nine to 15 months behind us. Your turn will come."

Or to be really childish: "It's in front of youooooooo".

New Year Revolution

2009-01-04T22:26:00.005+01:00

I love Christmas. I do not like New Year. December 31 strikes me as akin to 52 Saturday nights rolled into one: you are either partying or you are Norma No-Mates. We were partying this year and it was fun, but I still do not like New Year. I don't make New Year resolutions either. I am too late for 2009, in any case, but if I were to be thinking of resolutions - how close is that to revolutions? - for 2010 I already have a few.

* I will not start the year shouting at the Frenchman because he cannot move and indeed can hardly breathe because he fell and hurt his ribs. I will be sympathetic.

* I will not forget that I have put a metal and plastic object into a saucepan of boiling water to sterilise it.

* I will not nearly set fire to the flat because I left said metal and plastic object in a dry saucepan over a full flame.

* I will not then put the scorching pan straight into the sink in a panic thus a) causing much billowing acrid smoke and b) creating a burn mark in the sink that cannot be removed.

* I will not cry over the beautiful Le Creuset saucepan that now has melted plastic stuck solid to its enamel base and will probably have to be thrown out.

* I will not be so angry about all the above that I drag the Christmas tree too hastily through a too narrow door causing it to ping back and poke me in the eye.

* I will not drop the box of beautiful glass Christmas tree decorations marked "fragile" as I put them into storage.

* I will not pour bleach onto the metal object and then try to lever it out of the Le Creuset saucepan splashing bleach on my new t-shirt in the process.

* I will not meet friends I have not seen for nearly four years and then blather manicly at them for two hours because I am so pleased to finally speak to someone in English.

* I will not ever look under the kitchen sink to see if there are any leaks because I will know without looking that at least one pipe is dripping.

* I will not shout at the Frenchman again because somehow the above was absolutely his fault. Nor will I be unutterably unpleasant to him just before I am leaving on a Eurostar giving him a cast-iron reason to look for someone prettier, younger and nicer in my absence.

* I will not wait until the Frenchman has gone to bed then eat all the chocolates his mother brought for Christmas, especially the milk ones which are his favourites, knowing that he won't find out until I'm already on the Eurostar and even then he won't really mind and will still (hopefully) call me in England to say he loves me and will not (hopefully) be looking for someone prettier, younger and nicer.

Take me to your Leader

2008-12-31T14:41:00.001+01:00

A NEW YEAR MESSAGE FROM YOUR PRESIDENT

Dear Compatriots; Frenchmen and Frenchwomen

2008 will be remembered as an historic year for many reasons. It was a year of trials and tribulations for many across the globe, of conflicts, of 'le crunch economique' of raised hopes and shattered dreams and other platitudes for millions of ordinary people who are not the president and do not live in a palace but whose suffering I feel personally. But most of all it was a year about me, me, me.

And it was the year I got to marry la babe Carla.

2008 was the year when certain people who had previously been heard to murmur: "France, that's somewhere in Texas n'est ce pas?", realised what a grande nation we still are. Thanks to me, me, me the land we call France is back on the world map and we can stick two fingers up to the critics who said we were nothing but cheese-eating-surrender monkeys. Thanks to me, me, me the cynics who thought we were fini, kaput, toast, drowned in a lake of second rate wine we couldn't palm off on the British, have been forced to eat their weasly words. Thanks to me, me, me and my stature on the stage mondiale they look up to us once again...especially Carla but me, me, me too when I am wearing my sacré big heels. Thanks to me, me, me La France is, yes, La France.

And do not forget, 2008 was the year I got la babe Carla.

2008 was my first full year as your president. I was also president of Europe and, if truth be known, I am president of the world entièr. It was the year I went to London and met a troll like man called Brown (who thinks he can solve the financial meltdown when his pound is worth salted cacahuètes) and his wife who was lovely but not as lovely as Carla. I also met my royal cousin La Reine Elizabeth II. Carla told me she was more important than the Pope so I should turn off my mobile phone, but as Carla was with me I didn't need it to bombard her with SMSs.

And let me remind you that in 2008 those drooling rosbifs with their stiff upper lips and afternoon tea and bowler hats and Australian wine saw that it was not that Mick or Eric or Oncle Tom Cobbley who got to marry la babe Carla but me, me, me.

In 2008 I stopped the tanks in Georgia, I saved Madame Bettancourt from those lefties in Colombia, I advised Barack; where do you think he got that 'Yes we can' from? Seems familiar, non? Remember my slogan: 'Avec Sarkozy Tout Devient Possible'. And if it wasn't for that Ehud Olmert whose name sounds like une anagramme, peace in the Middle East would have been down to me, me, me too. Still, I am planning to go there right after Carla and I have celebrated our first wedding anniversary to kick his fesses.

As we approach the fin de 2008 you may not be sorry to see it go, but me, me, me, I am not. I have been forced to pass the EU to the Eurosceptique Czechs. I did not want to but the accordian music stopped and I was told I could not unwrap any more layers. I have saved France, steering her through the choppy waters that threatened to send her to the bottom of what the English call the Channel and we call La Manche. I have saved Europe. I am ready to save the world. It's no wonder I am called "SuperSarko" I have asked my friend Karl to design me a special suit with this on the chest and underpants on the outside for when I am on le jog. Karl, whose middle name is Otto, thew up his hands and said non, non it will send the wrong message and Carla thought it would look ridicule but I don't care, me, me, me.

2008 has been a great year as far as I'm concerned. Vive Le President (that's me, me, me). Vive La France!

The Wrench's Prologue and Tale

2008-12-29T14:54:00.002+01:00

I once earned the undying respect of an astonished boyfriend by mending the starter motor on his VW beetle. Some years later I was bought drinks by eternally grateful male colleagues after fixing their battered car in the middle of a Bosnian battlefield using the Swiss Army knife I always carried in my pocket or handbag (until airport security decided it made me a terrorist).

This weekend I did it again.

Monsieur Mustapha our friendly plumber came and fixed the leaks. Watching him I realised I could have done it myself. He was, I thought, a little heavy handed with the pipework given its age and propensity for springing leaks. I winced but said nothing. He added a second washer to the washing machine feed pipe. I said: "The thread's gone. The hose needs changing." He agreed but explained he couldn't change the hose because if he pulled out the machine the rotten cupboard around it would collapse. He stuck in the washer gave it a quick spin, double checked everything and cheerily pronounced us leak free.
Of course it wasn't. You don't live in a 200-plus year-old building commissioned by Napoleon's sister that has not been properly maintained for a large part of the last century - if ever - and get off that lightly.

Not ten minutes after Mustapha left we turned on the washing machine. Drip, drip, drip. "The hose needs changing," I said. To cut a long and boring story short, after the Frenchman emptied and cleaned the crud out of the cupboard next to the machine, I squeezed into it and bent double and twisted managed to loosen the "unchangeable pipe" with the monkey wrench and, yes, change it. It's true the plumber, a splendid but portly chap, could not have prised half his lardy backside into the cupboard and at over six feet tall the Frenchman was similarly handicapped even had he known which end of the wrench was which. We turned on the machine. No drips. How true it is: if you want a job doing, do it yourself.

The Frenchman hugged me as if I'd just performed pioneering heart-surgery. He said in English, and I quote: "What a wife?" I put away the wrench. Respect; it's the same in English and French.

Sodden Nigella.

2008-12-27T16:44:00.006+01:00

On Christmas Day in the morning there we were sitting at the breakfast table recovering from the traditional French Christmas Eve meal the evening before, when my sister-in-law says: "Isn't that water leaking from your boiler?" I check. It is Christmas Day and there is water leaking from the boiler. Water has been leaking from the boiler for a few hours judging by the sodden state of the cookery books below. Delia is sodden, Jamie is sodden, Nigella, Nigel, Madhur, all sodding sodden.

Everyone stands back so I can take a closer look at the boiler. I am the resident DIY-er. The Frenchman offers to get the pipe wrench. Two joints - the in cold pipe and out hot pipe - are drip, drip, dripping. The dripping gets faster every time someone does the washing up or takes a shower. (Do not believe what they say about the French: for my lot, not spending an hour in the bathroom is out of the question.) The Frenchman tells La Belle Belle Fille to keep the showering short (30 minutes is her usual average). I say: "Well, I'm pretty confident I could change the washers, but if it all went horribly wrong...it is Christmas Day." We stick a Tupperware underneath the drips and dig out the telephone number of Monsieur Mustapha our saviour plumber.

This feels like a last straw, but I said that about the last leak two days before Christmas when the washing machine pipe popped off and flooded the kitchen. In the last seven years we have been flooded on at least six times from various upstairs neighbours, had two mains pipes burst in our apartment, and leaks all over the place, some at the same time and almost always at weekends or holidays. These two are the seventh and eight washers to go in the past six weeks. This is more than coincidence or bad luck. Something is very wrong.

Standing in front of the boiler holding sodden Delia in one hand and a wrench in the other I am tempted to hit something. But it is Christmas Day; the Frenchman is looking at me wondering if I'll cry or scream or hit something and, I suspect, wondering who will prepare and cook the large castrated bird we have for lunch if I lose it.

I can hear water plopping into the Tupperware and think of Chinese water torture. This, for no particular reason apart from random thought association, brings to mind a friend who has been kidnapped and is being held hostage in Somalia. I put sodden Delia on sodden Nigella and sodden Jamie, hand back the wrench and shrug. "Worse things happen," I say. Was that a general sigh of relief or the boiler hissing at me?

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE!

2008-12-24T19:05:00.003+01:00

I cannot write more. The in-laws are here and they'll be out-laws if the Frenchman catches me posting. On second thoughts....(only joking)!

Christmas Crackers

2008-12-22T00:25:00.001+01:00

At La Fille's school Christmas Party the headmistress made all the children line up in a group in the playground and sing a few songs. Parents were ordered not to clap between songs, not to sing along, and not to approach their child to take photographs. I did not hear her instructions above the hubbub of excited children and did all three.

The first song was about being 'mad about chocolate', the second about three lambs from a merry-go-round getting lost in the snow. Then the children sang a song about writing to Father Christmas to ask for various musical instruments. One of the verses calls for a request for 'clochettes' or bells that go ting-a-ling-a-ling. La Fille sang 'clochards', which means 'tramps'. In short, La Fille, following in her mother's gaffe-prone footsteps, announced to all and sundry that she wanted Father Christmas to bring her some down-and-outs.

If anyone can send me some good old fashioned English Christmas Carols I'd be very grateful...and relieved.

Pound of Flesh

2008-12-19T21:41:00.002+01:00

The Frenchman is demonstrating a certain schadenfreude about sorry state of the British pound. Evidence: he is now very keen to go to London for the sales.

For the rest of us living in the Eurozone but paid - when indeed paid - in nicker into banks in Her Majesty's realm, it is not good right now; though admittedly not half as bad as having your home repossessed or losing your job. I read that some are saying the currency slide is not an unmitigated disaster for Great Britain Ltd. Certainly the Frenchman is not alone in his rush to cross the Channel; everyone I know and their friends and friends' friends are planning to jump on the Eurostar and do the Christmas and January sales now that their shiny euros go further. That should get things going again.

Here, the Frenchman is not just verging on gleeful but has turned into a living, breathing Shakespearean Shylock. As it is December, I have to cough up my share of our joint income tax bill for last year. The problem is I don't have enough money in my French bank account to do this and I'm not planning on transferring money from the UK any time soon while the euro is at the rate it is and the French bank continues to levy hefty charges for accepting my hard-earned. So my dear husband says I can give him the money in Sterling, but as I point out that's no great favour as the tax bill is in euros and if he wants it in Sterling the exchange rate is still the exchange rate. Aha, he says but he's willing to offer me a "preferential rate"; not you understand the approximated rate at which we have previously done our exchanges and not, admittedly, the parlous current rate, but something in between. Yesterday he offered me one figure; today another, lower one. Then this evening I said: "Shall I just keep the money I owe you in pounds in my bank and you can spend them in London?" and he replied: "Well, that depends on the exchange you're offering." I do hope he was joking but sometimes it is difficult to tell.

So it now appears I'm the Paris branch of the bloody Bank of England.

Not Faire

2008-12-16T17:49:00.007+01:00

It is now clear to me that I have been put on this earth, in this country at this time, to amuse the French. It is a good job I am English and do not have the French hang-up about appearing "ridicule", but even so. Oh Cimon did you really have to point out that what I wrote on the recipe that is possibly going to every parent in La Fille's class is that they could "crap without syrup"? Groan, groan, groan.

Thank goodness I did not spark up the computer until I had returned from making the Chocolate Cornflake Cakes or I don't think I'd have been able to face the class of three-year-olds. Just what did I do in a previous life to deserve this: steal sweets from blind orphan chimney-sweeps? Thank heavens the recipe may not be distributed and if it is it will be on the last day of term so all those Mamas and Papas can have a thoroughly good snigger over Noel and just may have forgotten it by January. Then again, would you forget something like that?

I rang the Frenchman in a panic and shouted at him. "You looked at the recipe why the hell didn't you tell me I was making an arse of myself?" He seemed genuinely puzzled by Cimon's interpretation (Hmmmm. Cimon's latest post reveals this is on his mind at the moment, which might offer me a face-saving explanation) and insisted "Vouz pouvez faire sans sirop" was fine. Then just as I was calming down the Frenchman went: "Oh yes," as if he'd just realised something then said he had to go, and hung up.

Whatever. The sad fact is I have form for this sort of thing. The staff at La Fille's nursery never quite got over me referring to "safe-sex" raisins. I bet it still springs to mind every time they see dried fruit.

I hope nobody tells La Fille. She looked so proud of her Mama making chocolate cakes with syrup this morning.

Back to School

2008-12-15T22:23:00.000+01:00

I have been asked to go to La Fille's school tomorrow and show her class how to make Chocolate Cornflake Cakes. What fun...I think. Her teacher, who insisted the CCCs were really called Roses des Sables, asked me to write out the recipe and, if I had time, do a few drawings of the ingredients because after all the children are only three years old and cannot yet read. I agreed. The Frenchman whose approach is that schooling is entirely a matter for the state and parents should get involved as little as possible clearly thought too much was being expected. "You're doing the cakes, writing out the recipe AND doing drawings," he grunted as I sat down to do my 'homework'.

So this morning I went to school proudly clutching what I considered a beautifully illustrated recipe - in French - complete with drawings of happy faces and details added by La Fille. I returned considerably less proud, with the same beautifully illustrated recipe corrected by the teacher and a gentle suggestion that I might want to do it again.

How humiliating is that?

Here. There. Everywhere.

2008-12-14T18:17:00.008+01:00

We were in London for the last week staying with friends and a major difference between family life in London and in Paris that filled me with a wave of homesickness was suddenly revealed to me: London life is horizontal, Paris life is vertical. It was one of my best friends who came up with the notion over a few glasses of wine one evening. This was after a day in which half a dozen adults - not including the builders - nearly a dozen children and a dog had passed through the house. At one point finding myself in charge of five or six young children (I lost count exactly how many) the doorbell rang and there were another three on the step. I went upstairs to find four of the children in a tepee they had constructed in a bedroom and La Fille punching one of my best friends' boys in the head. He is nine years old and much bigger than La Fille but was clearly too well brought up to thump her back so he was taking a pasting. She seemed to be enjoying herself and he wasn't crying so I left them to it.

Over the wine I remarked to my friend and his wife, who live in a terraced house in a tree-lined street, that their home was like a train terminus with a steady stream of people coming and going, popping in, popping out, popping next door, over the road, over the fence; depositing children, collecting them. It made me think of the close-knit communities of old the demise of which is often lamented in the press and in wistful television series. I hastened to add to my friends that my comment was not a criticism. Far from it; it was an expression of envy. "In Paris nobody drops in on us," I said. It is true. Sometimes someone will ring and make an arrangement, but nobody just drops in for a cup of tea or pops in to ask if they can leave their offspring for half an hour/day/week or so. I have several friends with children in Paris but have never heard anyone suggest a sleep-over. "That's because in Paris you live vertically in flats and in London we live horizontally in houses," said my friend. How right he is, I thought in what was a small, eureka moment that almost made me tear up my return Eurostar ticket.

When my friends and their children and their friends and their children weren't popping in and out of each others houses, they were going to carol concerts at schools - not allowed in France's secular education system, going to the Christmas sales - against trading laws in France, putting up fairy lights in their gardens - hardly anyone in Paris has a garden, and heading for that singularly British Christmas tradition, the pantomime.

And for those who also lament the boorishness and dumbing down of British youth I would like to report that the death of manners is greatly exaggerated. I met two nearly teenage boys - comprehensive school classmates of my friends' eldest son - for the first time when they arrived to collect him for the walk to school. On the morning of the day we were returning to Paris both of them turned and said: "Goodbye. Pleased to meet you." How lovely is that?

A French Tragi-Comedy

2008-12-07T21:47:00.004+01:00

We are in a recession. Everyone agrees on that. They do not all agree on the best way out of it but most people are trying their best. Having said that there are, it seems, some people in what is known as the 'service industry' who do not seem to have noticed that times are tight and call for an extra effort or do not seem to mind or care if they go out of business or - and believe me I hesitate to write this - almost deserve to. These are people who seem to be courting disaster, bringing it on with a 'come-and-get-me-if-you-think-yer-big-enough' fingered gesture by not making any discernible effort whatsoever.

This afternoon, we set off for the Guignols on the Champs Elysées. It is the second time we have attempted this - the last time it was raining so much we gave up half way. This time it was cold, but no rain. The Guignols, or puppets, of the Champs Elysées claim to be the oldest in Paris dating back to 1818. They sell themselves as the "Vrai Guignols" the one and only true puppet show in Paris. This may well be true but it is not enough to attract 21st century crowds I can tell you. We, however, really wanted to go. We really wanted to see this show. Don't ask me why, but we did.

We arrived, hopping with enthusiasm and frozen feet, by way of the Christmas Market that was surprisingly good given the bad write up it has received. En route, we bought La Fille a Peruvian knitted hat - to add to her collection of Peruvian knitted hats - and under great protest a fluffy dog - to add to her collection of fluffy dogs - as well as a pair of cheap but warm gloves for the Frenchman and a pair for me - to add to my collection of gloves all of which had been left at home. We went on the traditional merry-go-round (twice - La Fille voluntarily, me press-ganged) and La Fille took a turn on the trampolines and ate a crepe before we set off for the nearby Guignol Theatre well in time for the 3pm show. At 2.55pm we were outside the shut gate when a man with a mop of white hair and a creased face signaled to us. The Frenchman and I disagree on exactly what it was he signaled; the Frenchman is convinced he signaled that we should wait a further three minutes, I say the signal was the inquiry that we were just three people. In any case five minutes later we were still standing, stamping our feet and rubbing our hands from the numbing, slicing cold. And we were still just three people, which may explain why we were still waiting, standing, stamping and rubbing.

I said to the Frenchman: "If it's just us, let's not go in." Like Punch and Judy shows, their British equivalent, the Guignols are a spectator sport (think, "it's behind you-ooooo!"). They lose much of their fun and purpose if you are the only child present screaming warnings about a monster in one hand to the puppet on the other. Yet less than 100 metres away from the theatre were dozens of children of all nationalities strolling the Christmas market with their parents who were hungry for 'The real French experience'. Clearly most of them had no idea the Real Original Historic Paris Guignols were just behind them.

"Why on earth hasn't the guy leafleted the whole street. It's a captive market?" I asked the Frenchman who shrugged his shoulders. We waited until 3.05pm willing more people to arrive. We were still the only ones waiting.

We sneaked away feeling guilty. Mr Guignol was not behind us. With apologies to Mr Punch... "That's not the way to do it."

Lingerie for Giraffes

2008-12-01T13:28:00.004+01:00

La Fille has decided what she would like from Father Christmas. She seems to be taking the credit crunch to heart because all she says she wants is a toy giraffe. "Great", I said to myself. "Just a giraffe. Not a spoiled brat after all." They she started describing the giraffe and I thought: "Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a real one, Madame?"

She did this to me last year. I had wrongly assumed she was too young to have an opinion on Christmas presents and would be happy with what she was given. Then a couple of days before the Big Day she announced she wanted a Teddy Bear and not any old Teddy Bear but a Blue Bear called Fred. I traipsed around London looking for such a bear answering to such a name and eventually found one. Day saved until a few months later I left Fred on a TGV along with all La Fille's favourite dolls.

So this year it's a giraffe, any colour, any name will do, but it has to have long string legs. Yup, "long string legs". Legs are not good enough. Long legs are not good enough. It has to be long string legs. (Apparently she saw a child in the park clutching such an animal.) I pointed to the photos of real giraffes we took in the zoo and said: "Something like that?" But no. Silly me. Real giraffes do not have long string legs. I did some research on the Internet, I looked in a couple of catalogues, I visited a couple of shops: no giraffes with long string legs. I phoned one of the department stores. Unfortunately just as they answered my brain pulled the plug and down the mental drain went the French word for "string" (corde). For want of anything better I used the word "string". This meant I was asking for a toy giraffe wearing skimpy knickers. The woman on the other end of the phone sounded puzzled, then shocked as I kept repeating "string, string, you know, string", then began sniggering. I made my excuses and hung up. If you happened to be toy shopping in Paris this week and wondered what a group of shop assistants clutching their ribs and rolling around were laughing about, now you know.

Since then I have been playing the Get Out of Jail (and other awkward situations) Card saying she will have to write to Santa Claus and it will depend on whether he can find one. I am good at shifting the blame. This option also allows me to a) buy any old bloody giraffe and blame the Fat Bearded One, b) trot out the old childhood chestnut about "not always getting what you want".

This morning on the way home from school she asks: "Can't we just phone Father Christmas and ask for the giraffe." I say: "He doesn't have a telephone. He lives at the North Pole where it's cold and snowy and there are no phones, no communications, no computers. That's why you children have to send him letters." She gives me one of those 'Oh-for-goodness-sake' looks in which three year olds seem to specialise and sighs: "Wouldn't it just be easier if we bought Father Christmas a telephone?" She's right; it would. Then the Fat Bearded One - or one of his doubles - could tell her himself: "Sorry, no giraffes in or out of lacy lingerie."

Early warning

2008-11-26T23:09:00.006+01:00

Been busy working and had no time to write a full post, but felt I should publish this photograph as a salutary warning to those buying Christmas presents for children, wherever you are.

This was given to La Fille last Christmas as part of a toy "shopping" set. The fact that it has taken me until now to notice the mistake is something else.

Wet, wet, wet

2008-11-24T20:09:00.003+01:00

I feel such a weedy weed. I used to be intrepid, adventurous. I used to boldly go, and even to go boldly to assiduously avoid split infinitives (until someone suggested it wasn't even grammatically incorrect). Now I read Jaywalker's adventures to the circus with her boys in the snow and think: "She describes herself as an 'unfit mother'. What does that make me?" I do not expect answers on an e-card, thank you.

We did try to take La Fille out yesterday, really we did. We decided to go to the Guignols puppet show on the Champs Elysées and perhaps take a stroll down the Christmas Market nearby. We looked out of the window and noticed it was snowing, or more accurately, raining soggy ice but it did not look that wet. We dressed accordingly, though for some inexplicable reason the Frenchman forgot to wear a hat or bring gloves and neither of us bothered to grab one of the half a dozen umbrellas next to the front door. "It's just a bit of rain," he said, as he always does. We jumped on the Metro heading for the left bank of the Seine so we could take a pleasant stroll over the river, but in the 15 minutes it took to get there the drizzle had turned into a downpour. We ploughed on valiantly the Frenchman and I walking around huge puddles, La Fille through them to reach the Seine. It was only 100 yards or so but by the time we on the bridge we were completely drenched. The rain was osmosing up my trouser legs and the Frenchman complained he was "frozen". When La Fille said she was cold I discovered her trousers were making their way to her knees - taking her knickers with them - because I had forgotten to tighten the elastic in the waist. Consequently the bottoms were so soaked they were dripping water into her boots. To make me feel even more guilty she wailed: "It's all my fault, Mama. I forgot my umbrella," as her glasses steamed up under an oversized hat.

We were by now half way across the bridge over the Seine with the Eiffel Tower, half shrouded in cloud behind us, and the coloured lights of the Christmas Market stalls half shrouded in rainy snow in front. The idea of watching a puppet show in soaking wet clothes did not seem a great idea but I didn't want to disappoint La Fille. "Where's the puppet theatre?" I yelled at the Frenchman who was in charge of logistics. "Don't know," he yelled back. "Well which direction?". "Don't know." "What, no idea?" "Not a clue." I said: "Let's go home." I looked at La Fille: "Home?". She nodded. Water ran off her nose and dripped into her sodden scarf.

We came home. Pathetic really.

A Rosbif goes shopping

2008-11-23T12:55:00.010+01:00

So the butcher says to the man in front of me who is ordering a succulent-looking joint of beef that costs an arm and a leg: "You could always do boeuf à la ficelle like the English do." He looks at me. "You're English aren't you? That's right isn't it?"

I reply: "Haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Really"

He says: "Boeuf à la ficelle. That's what the English do with a joint of beef. They tie it with string and hang it in water and boil it." He looks at me again. "Tell him, they do don't they?" By this time the customer in front is managing to grimace and look superior at the same time.

"Well yes, I've heard of boiled beef, though I've never cooked it myself and you wouldn't do it with an expensive piece of meat like that," I say. "We're not completely mad."

The Frenchman interjects. "Shall I buy some Beaujolais Nouveau or do you want proper wine?" he asks. Laughs all round.

I say: "I thought it had all been sent to England."

PS. I should have said (thank you Dumdad): "Not unless it's Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais."

Bottoms

2008-11-22T11:24:00.004+01:00

Went to the theatre to see Molière's 'Malade Imaginaire' Thursday evening. The tickets were La Belle Belle-Fille's birthday present to her father and I got to go too.

There were several groups of schoolchildren some only about ten years old in the audience. Now we know what is on the French syllabus this year. There was much door clacking, jumping up and down and giggling the rest of the audience could have done without, but they were generally well-behaved given that it was not as interactive as the new WoW. They asked questions of their teachers during the interval and led the applause and cheering at the end: in short they evidently enjoyed themselves.

Shakespeare had been dead for six years when Molière, real name Jean Baptiste Poquelin, was born in 1622, but the pair are widely regarded as contemporaries. The plays, plots and characters they created still resonate centuries on: unrequieted love; sibling jealousy; greed; ambition; more greed; wayward children; unreasonable parents, internecine warfare. It's all wicked stepmothers, ugly sisters, bonkers royals, ruthless politicians, avaricious bankers, foreigners - even a few Scots for heaven's sake - and various forms of idiocy from one end of the Complete Works to the other. How much more relevant could it be?

The 'Malade Imaginaire' (Imaginary Invalid) is about a hypochondriac (how French) who arranges for his elder daughter to marry a doctor to have a physician in the family. I even learned the French for "enema" - un lavement. I hope it will never come in useful but you never know. Molière was dying of pulmonary disease when the play was first staged on February 10, 1673. He played the lead role himself and managed four performances before coughing so hard he burst a vein in one of his lungs and shuffled off the mortal coil. His scorn for the clergy and medical profession meant neither priest nor doctor was prepared to attend his deathbed. No chance of a home call in those days either, it seems: fascinating stuff for current exam papers. Shakespeare and Molière came up with some cracking stories. I once saw King Lear (bonkers royal) in modern costume complete with machine guns (internecine warfare) and a gum-chewing, leather-jacketed Goneril (wayward daughter). Great stuff. And if you've never seen actors dressed as trees make Burnham Wood come to Dunsinane, (bonkers and Scottish) well, you haven't really lived.

Perhaps those who decide the content of Britain's school syllabus and judge Shakespeare too elitist or exclusive and the language too difficult, might like to visit Paris and see how French children appreciate classic literature. I don't speak 17th century French, any more than I do 16th century English verse. I had no idea what 'un lavement' was before Thursday evening. Nor, I suspect, did the 10-year-olds, but we had all worked it out by the end thanks to numerous references to "derrières". Anyone who thinks this is elitist and exclusive is, in my humble opinion, talking out of the same region.

Left, left, left, right, left...

2008-11-20T14:09:00.002+01:00

British friends living in France have been asking me to explain what the hell is going on in the main opposition Socialist party. "It's a bit complicated," I say, not knowing where to start. By popular demand here is a cut-out-and-keep aide memoire of the most salient points.

* The Socialist Party will elect a new leader today.

* The 200,000 party members will decide between three candidates:
a) Ségolène Royal, glamorous, failed presidential candidate
b) Martine Aubry, Mayor of Lille, architect of France's 35-hour working week and daughter of Jacques Delors, once the most hated Frenchman in Britain and the target of The Sun's "Hop off You Frog" and "Up Yours Delors" campaigns.
c) Benoit Hamon, a young left-winger who few people had heard of up until now and even now

* Ms Royal used to live with the current leader of the Socialist Party François Hollande, with whom she has four children. She threw him out last year, after she lost the presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, allegedly because he - Hollande that is - had an affair with a political journalist. (Confusingly Mr Sarkozy also had an affair with a political journalist).

* Bertrand Delanoe, the gay Mayor of Paris was a candidate and was mean about rival Ms Aubry - and she about him - before he decided to withdraw. He now supports Ms Aubry.

* Mr Hollande supported Mr Delanoe as his successor. He does not support Ms Royal. This is an understatement.

* Ms Royal can talk for France. And talk, and talk, and talk. During the presidential campaign she appeared utterly incapable of giving a straight, succinct answer. (I followed the campaign and by the end I wanted to saw my wrists with a blunt ballpoint every time she spoke).

* Mr Delanoe, who is very popular among Parisians, had his own Hillary Clinton moment last year when required to support publicly Ms Royal's presidential campaign.

* Ms Royal is the favourite to win the leadership battle decided by a vote of party members, but was booed and jeered at a party conference last weekend at Rheims filled with...party members.

* Mr Hollande, a bespectacled Billy Bunter-ish figure who was right-hand man to Lionel Jospin, the Socialist before Ms Royal to have a go at being president but who was knocked into third place by far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National, was forced to cancel the conference closing speech as the whole event turned into a viper's nest of insults and mutual loathing.

* Ms Aubry is the French equivalent of Old Labour and Ms Royal, New Labour. They do not like each other. This is also an understatement.

* Ms Royal has hinted that it might be a good idea to let Mr Hamon, who is young but Old Labour, lead the party, to thus thwart rivals Aubry and Delanoe.

* If Ms Royal wins it will probably split the party and destroy any hope of an effective opposition in France for the immediate and foreseeable future.

* Ms Royal still wants to be president and wants to challenge Mr Sarkozy in 2012. If her party carries on as it is, she stands about as much chance as I do of leading France.

There we are. Clear as mud I fear.

Mama don't preach

2008-11-18T12:28:00.005+01:00

As I will be on a training course for a few hours on Saturday I have been inspired by Madonna to draw up a list of dos and don'ts for the Frenchman regarding La Fille. Unlike the soon-to-be ex Mrs Ritchie I will be only a kilometer from home and not the other side of the world, but quand meme; one cannot be too careful. (Incidentally, you'd have thought a woman whose religion preaches love and peace would avoid dressing her boys in combat trousers, non?)

So far, I have come up with the following.

1) La Fille is not to spend the day in her pyjamas even if they are 100% natural fibre pyjamas.

2) If I forget or do not have time to leave out clothes please note: orange tights of any fibre whatsoever should not be matched with skirts, dresses or trousers of a fluorescent pink hue. Try turning the light on before you choose clothing. (Oh, and by the way: her clothes are in the wardrobe in her bedroom).

3) La Fille is not allowed to watch Bambi, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or Shrek in French. If these characters were intended to speak anything other than English they would do so and not require dubbing.

4) Do not take advantage of my absence to have a sneaky cigarette next to the kitchen window. (Opening it makes no difference as the smoke blows inwards).

5) Do not say: "Oh it doesn't matter your mother's not here" if La Fille eats with her fork in her right hand.

6) You are absolutely forbidden to leave La Fille outside a public WC while you go inside for a pee.

7) If I should be delayed you will not keep La Fille up late in the evening in the erroneous belief she will give you a lie-in Sunday morning. She will wake up, as she always does, at 7am, but will be grouchy all day. You know this to be true.

8) It is your responsibility to ensure that La Fille is not photographed by either paparazzi or private detectives or the fashion police in orange tights and a red dress on her own outside a public toilet.

Being vulgar

2008-11-16T11:07:00.002+01:00

A guide to etiquette in the UK advises not to clink glasses during a toast, put salt on food without tasting it first or discuss sex or politics at the dinner table. Apparently these are top of a new list of social no-nos.

Oh well, cross the French off the guest list then.

It goes on to advise against such faux pas as: obtrusive underwear; crumpled, frumpy, tarty and lazy clothing; tucking your napkin into your shirt, deemed the height of vulgarity.

Hang fire, some of those stylish Gauls can come after all.

Diners should apparently stick to conversational safe subjects such as the weather, food and nature. Dinner, it says, is never a forum for debate.

No. Sorry, changed our mind. The French definitely can't come.

And if you should - heaven forbid - drop your napkin on the floor, do let the butler retrieve it.

Quoi? Knickers? Nature? Butlers? I'd rather stay at home with a takeaway and a piece of kitchen roll.

One think leads to another..

2008-11-14T14:59:00.003+01:00

It is strange how random thoughts form the occasional cluster.

La Fille stuck the paper poppy I bought her in London in her school book alongside a felt-pen drawing of mamie her French grandmother. She and her classmates are expected to explain their "homework" presumably to stymie pushy parents who do squiddly à la Picasso drawings for them, and I asked her what she had said about the poppy. "I said it was a flower from London," she told me. I asked if she had explained it was for the soldiers in the war (I admit, I coached her) and she gave me a withering look. "The teacher speaks French and I don't know the French for 'soldier'," she said then added: "And I don't know what war means." Fair point, I thought.

Anyway, one thought led to another...and while she was at school explaining her paper poppy, I finished reading David Golder by Irène Némirovsky, whose most celebrated book Suite Française was written just before she was transported from France to Auschwitz where she was killed. Published a decade before World War II, David Golder is a bleak story full of such irredeemably awful people I felt I was being physically mugged as I read it. I had a frisson of sympathy for the main character Golder, but only because he is comprehensively done-over by his beloved only child, a daughter, and as the mother of a beloved only child, La Fille, I am appalled by the idea of beloved only children doing over their doting parents. (It's a solipsistic and intellectually dubious response I know, but I can't help it).

And when I think of Irène Némirovsky I always think of her two daughters Denise and Elisabeth who, their mother having been shipped off to the Nazis' most notorious but by no means unique, concentration camp, find themselves, aged five and ten, being hunted down by the collaborationist French police.

Perhaps it was this subconscious train of thought that led me to look up as I walked through the park huddled into the collar of my coat and notice the memorial for the first time; a park I have visited dozens and dozens of times thus a memorial I have walked past dozens and dozens of times without noticing.

It reads: "Arrested by police of the Vichy government, complicit in the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944 and assassinated at Auschwitz because they were born Jews. More than 500 of these children lived in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris among them 85 of the very youngest who had not even reached school age. In passing read their names. Your memory is their only resting place." There follows the names of 85 children, the eldest of them six-years-old, the youngest, just two months, several from the same family.

And I thought of La Fille and her paper poppy and blissful ignorance of war.

The kiss of anarchy

2008-11-12T14:38:00.006+01:00

The French TGV is truly a wonder of the modern world: slick, streamlined, punctual, reasonably clean and fast. It is not called a 'train à grande vitesse' for nothing. This weekend's trip to Normandy by train was so far removed from my last experience of trains in the UK as to be a civilisation apart.

France first: the pointy nosed - and pointy tailed - TGV (they do look like they are kissing when coupled) left from scheduled platform at exactly the scheduled time. It was full and the Frenchman had been given a seat in front of La Fille and I because we had booked late, but the seats were clean and the middle armrest came up so La Fille could stretch out and sleep. You could have eaten your lunch off the drop-down table. So we did. When the train was about to stop we were clearly and audibly told the name of the station as well as the length of time, in minutes, we would be stopped. There was plenty of luggage space. It was tranquil enough to read and what a blessed relief to be no wiser about our fellow travelers when we got off the train 90 minutes later than we had been when we boarded it. A couple of people took mobile phone calls but whispered and kept them short. Others appeared to have heeded the signs asking for phones to be silenced. Conversations between passengers were discreet. And, and, and...the train arrived on time.

Britain: La Fille and I took a train recently to East Anglia. At the ticket office I asked when the train would be leaving and from which platform. On arriving at the designated platform not two minutes later I found, contrary to what I'd been told, there were no trains leaving. Not one. Services on the first part of the line had been replaced by buses. We jumped on a bus about to leave. It smelled of sick. We arrived at the station part-way in the rain. Just as the bus pulled in the train pulled out. Station staff could not say when the next one would leave. Questions were met with ignorance and indifference. An hour later a train arrived and we were advised to change further up the line. The carriage was British Rail rolling stock, which shows how old it was. There was litter on the floor, the tables were filthy with encrusted food and drink stains. We changed trains. It was the same: the seats were so claggy with God knows what I told La Fille to try to keep her hands off them. (I know, a little dirt never hurt anyone but this was something else). I discovered when I stood up that my seat was covered with short white dog hair that had attached itself to my clothes. Several passengers made and received calls and openly chatted about their private lives in gruesome detail. The guy sitting behind made several calls in which he swore every other word. La Fille asked why he was so angry. When we finally arrived I couldn't open the train door because I couldn't lean out of the window far enough. Our 90 minute journey took more than three hours.

These are not lucky/unlucky one-off experiences. It may not always be so exceptionally good/bad, but this is the general pattern.

Earlier this week members of an anarchist group were arrested and accused of trying to sabotage TGV lines with blocks of concrete. From the news reports I discovered the TGV's pointy nose is not just for attracting other trains, but is designed to absorb much of the impact in a crash and even push aside obstacles on the track. That is why a French anarchist might want to damage or cause chaos on France's TGV network: a British anarchist, if such a person exists, would surely think: Why bother.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning...

2008-11-11T22:11:00.013+01:00

This morning in a small Normandy village we stood, like countless others, and remembered those who never made it home. I find Remembrance Sunday in Britain moving but at least the French commemorate the end of The Great War on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and not, as we British do, the nearest convenient weekend. It does seem almost disrespectful to arrange the day to suit modern calendars and working practices as opposed to the actual day the war ended.

I get very weepy seeing ex-servicemen weighed down with revived memories and clinking medals and thinking about what they and their comrades did for us. "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave life today". Today was no exception. The local pompiers were out in force standing to attention with their shiny helmets in one hand and decorated Tricolors in the other. The mayor read a statement from the minister thanking foreigners who had come to fight and die on French soil in la der des ders (the war to end all wars). When he made particular mention of the British and Commonwealth soldiers, the Frenchman patted me on the back, and I took refuge behind my sunglasses even though it was threatening to rain.

A local bugler played the Sonnerie aux Morts - the French equivalent of the Last Post - and there was a minute's silence. The silence was broken only by a middle-aged café owner who decided to sweep his terrace at that very moment. A small local band played a valiant if somewhat weedy rendition of La Marseillaise. My mother-in-law told how during the Second World War people from the village successfully hid British and French Canadian servicemen from the Nazis in secret mushroom farms. (The Frenchman advises me to be wary of local legends about wartime heroics. He may be right - I cannot find any reference to this - but who knows?) I wished I had brought my paper poppies from London.

After the ceremony, I put a couple of euros into a tin being rattled by an old soldier who, judging by his age and medals, was a veteran of World War II. He takes my hand in both of his. They are worn and weathered, their fading veins like smudged lines on an old battle plan. They are surprisingly warm. He smiles and says: "Thank you. Thank you."

I say: "No. Thank you."

Groundhog Day

2008-11-09T17:23:00.001+01:00

Did I mention we came back from London to find we'd been leaked on again? No, I thought not. There is such a sense of relentless inevitability about it I cannot even raise the energy to scream. If you could be bothered to go back through the posts you would find it has happened, on average, every three months and, mostly, when we have not been here or are asleep. It does it when we go on holiday, on the rare occasions we go out to dinner and in the middle of the night. It does it when our friendly plumber is in Morocco. It is as if the plumbing in this building has a perverse combination of a mind of its own, access to all our diaries and a very personal grudge.

This time the water did not come from the neighbours upstairs, but the neighbour one floor above them. Or, more accurately, the ex-neighbour's place as the elderly owner died a couple of months ago so it was possibly caused by one of her family, which means you cannot really shout at them as they are still in mourning and that wouldn't be very nice or neighbourly. In any case it apparently came from some pipework in the wall so it possibly wasn't even their fault anyway. It was, I was told in a call from Paris to London, "dirty water". I did not ask exactly what this meant. I hope it was sink "dirty" as opposed to toilet "dirty" but I have tried not to think about it too hard. This building must really hate me.

We are going away again this weekend. The Frenchman asked La Belle Belle-Fille who is staying behind to do her best to avoid any more leaks or floods. It was a joke. None of us laughed. I will be waiting for the call.

Bob and Barack

2008-11-07T01:09:00.005+01:00

I hate to mention this but...does anyone think a certain British handyman called Bob might have a good case for plagiarism against Barack?

"Can we fix it?"

"Yes we can."

Sounds familiar?

Zipidee Doo Dah...

2008-11-05T17:33:00.002+01:00

Almost exactly one year ago during a visit by French friends to London the inevitable dinner argument broke out over America. Any Briton living in France will know how it goes...Why are you British so fond of America? versus Why do you French hate America? The widespread anti-America sentiment in France always winds me up but this spat became particularly animated when one of the French friends sneered after I said - and the Frenchman agreed - that however you feel about the United States you have to admit it is the greatest democracy on earth. Our anti-American friend said the French for "rubbish": America was not a democracy because poor blacks had no political voice and elections were all about who had most money. I thumped the table and said the French might be in a better position to give lessons on democracy if their own black and North African citizens were better represented. He stuck to his argument that America was not democratic, the "American Dream" was rubbish and a black man could never be president. This was half way through the two-year presidential campaign when the Democrat candidate had not yet been decided and everyone's money was on Hillary Clinton. It was when Barack Obama was still raising campaign funds with $5, $10, $20 donations from members of the public before, it is true, the big bucks waded in. It was also well over half way through several bottles of red wine.

I said: "Perhaps you are right but at least America has Barack Obama."

And he said: "Barack who?"

Getting Away From It All.

2008-11-04T23:02:00.007+01:00

Sorry for the radio silence, if anyone noticed. We were in the UK and discovered there are still places in the so-called civilised world - ie Suffolk - where you cannot always get access to the world wide web.

We spent the last few days in London where the Frenchman joined La Fille and I and during which I spent more time than I might have wished in a particular café because it was next to our hotel. We ate baguettes and croissants for breakfast and poulet breton and canard for dinner. We listened to Georges Brassens and Jacques Dutronc over red wine and coffees. We were also treated to some Charles Aznavour, which just shows how desperate it was. We were served by staff who were French (apart from one Hungarian). There were cards on the table advertising a Christmas party menu. La Fille grabbed one and said: "Oh look it's Mama and Papa." I was flattered (look at that waist) though the Frenchman said he could not remember the last time his hair was this colour or if he ever had such an angular nose. Note the Eiffel Tower in the background.

I thought: "I am in London. I have paid good money to get away from this."

Beau Jest

2008-10-28T10:04:00.001+01:00

I had a chuckle over the newspaper story about the MoD planning to recruit female Gurkhas from 2009. Apparently they fear an equality suit from Nepalese women unless they agree to let them enlist. I am not convinced recruiting women to fight wars is a fundamental step forward for feminism (in the same way fighting for the right to send your sons down coal mines has always perplexed me). But each to their own.

As a child, the tomboy in me wanted to join the French Foreign Legion when I grew up. I loved the idea of turning up at the gates of the FL barracks in Paris and whispering conspiratorially to the man on sentry duty that I wanted to be let in. I would then be whisked away to be fitted with a white kepi, issued my leather apron, red blanket and axe and taught to march at 88 steps per minute. OK, the pay is not great; not even 1,000 euros a month for a foot legionnaire, but I figured I could go without in return for some twiddly fringed epaulettes. Besides it seemed impossibly romantic - and attractive - that your own mum could turn up at the gate begging to know if you had enlisted and were off to fight for France and, if you didn't want her to know you were there, she wouldn't be told. This was before I became a mother myself. Beau Geste has a lot to answer for.

The Gurkha story reminded me of an announcement some years ago by the French Ministry of Defence that to conform to European equality laws the Foreign Legion would be accepting women recruits. Had I still been a young tomboy this would have been joy unconfined; as it was I realised I couldn't join even if I wanted to having passed the recruitment age. Nevertheless, I thought it might be a wheeze to try, so I phoned up the Legion HQ to ask when women were being drafted.

The commander on the other end of the phone sounded like he was being choked by his waxed moustache when I posed the question.

"Madame. There will never be women in the Foreign Legion," he spluttered.

"But the French government has said...

"Madame. There will never be women in the Foreign Legion."

"Do you mean I cannot join?"

Splutter. "Madame. I can assure you, whatever the French government has told you, there will never be women in the Foreign Legion.

"Well there is this new law that...

"Madame. Do you hear me? Women. Foreign Legion. Never. Ever. Ever."

I'll take that as a no then.

Mad Moiselle

2008-10-24T18:17:00.000+02:00

The owner of a French café called me "Mademoiselle". He made my day. Make that week. I wanted to hug him, except by the alarmed look on his face he guessed and gripped his chipped metal tray as if ready to hit me over the head with it if I took one step towards him. "Mademoiselle"! I haven't been called "Mademoiselle" for years. Look it up; "Mademoiselle" is reserved for "young" women. It means: "You are young". It means the person addressing you has looked, yes looked, and decided, if you are not obviously under 30 that you are at the very least young enough to accept "Mademoiselle" as a compliment and not a lack of respect. If they had the slightest doubt, they would say "Madame" as calling a Mademoiselle "Madam" is less insulting than calling a Madam "Mademoiselle".

"Mademoiselle" is also used for the unmarried but not any old singleton; only the young unwed. This makes it very different to the English "Miss", used for the single of any age but which, after a certain age, transforms its subject into a sniffing, fussy, tragic, sexless spinster - think Miss Haversham, think Emily Dickinson... An unmarried Frenchwoman of advanced years would never expect to be called "Mademoiselle". If she was she would probably snatch that tray and whack the person addressing her over the head. Except, of course, if she is easily flattered, short-sighted and still feels 18 in her head, in which case the "Mademoiselle" is probably sarcastic and the person using it having a bit of a joke. He may, in fact, think she looks something like a small silvery drumfish.

I went to the loo and caught a look at myself in the mirror. "Bastard" I thought.

Mean Streets

2008-10-23T18:05:00.004+02:00

I met my friend whose dog was hit by a pavement cyclist for a coffee this morning. She was breathless and after the 'bises' launched into an account of her most recent pavement confrontation. She said: "You'll never believe it." Apparently, shortly after asking a man if he intended to pick up the cigarette packet he had chucked on the ground, she came upon a dog owner whose animal was, at that very moment, fouling the pavement.

Friend: "Excuse me, you are intending to clean that up, aren't you?"
Man: "No."
Friend: "But that's disgusting."
Man: "Yes, isn't it."

She said: "Can you believe it?" We fell about laughing at the awfulness of it which shows we have not become humourless hormonal old hags. Well not entirely. We spent the next hour ranting - again - about the invasion of Paris's pavements by motorcyclists, cyclists, dog poo and people who drop litter, (with a short diversion for the tale of a rude waiter who refused to accept 20 centimes in 1 and 2 centime coins) until we rendered ourselves speechless. Can you believe it?

We discussed options for combating the daily death threats. My friend is still all for going to see the local mayor and perhaps the local police chief. We considered letting down tyres - alternatively putting nails into or glass under them when parked - sticking an umbrella in their spokes (thank you Jaywalker), kicking them then running away. We agreed that shrieking, manic or reasoned remonstrating and swearing while simultaneously narrowing our eyes have no effect whatsoever and do not even make us feel better. "I try to confine the anger to my head and not let it go to my stomach," says my friend. "Do you think we're getting a bit obsessed about this and making ourselves ill?" I ask.

We 'bise' goodbye. I walk off and dodge a motorcyclist weaving along the pavement while looking back over his shoulder. Can you bloody believe it?

Cluedo Part Two

2008-10-21T11:01:00.006+02:00

With all the skill of a Cluedo detective I have found out who suggested La Fille would be "prettier without her glasses" for her class photo. It was dirty work. La Fille refused to snitch even when offered an amnesty of sweets, ice-cream and lollipops to name the guilty party. Since torture was not an option and dangling her upside down while tickling her feet did not work. I gave up on her. La Fille's teacher was an easy touch; I didn't even have to turn hissy before she fingered the culprit. Under questioning she admitted she had also been surprised to see La Fille was not wearing her spectacles. It was the directrice wot did it, she informed me.

Turns out it was indeed the headmistress in the gymnasium with the camera. Yikes. What do I do now? Perhaps it was a good job I had the weekend to climb down from the ceiling.

"Example is the School of Mankind..."

2008-10-19T11:28:00.007+02:00

There are times I hear the news and realise the slip of water between Britain and France is less a channel than a cultural chasm. This week there were two events: both involved French president Nicholas Sarkozy who is turning into Sam Sam on a mission to save the world, and both seem to have been pulled out of a political drawer marked: Making It Up As You Go Along.

The first was the president's decision to revoke the extradition order against an Italian woman, a one-time leading member of the Red Brigades convicted of kidnapping and murder in Italy. Whatever the pros and cons of the woman's case - and these things are always more complicated than reported - the most astonishing thing was that Mr Sarkozy apparently made this unexplained decision after some heavy-duty lobbying by his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and her sister. Can you just imagine the headlines in the UK if Sarah Brown and family were to use such influence on her husband? Good Gordon, it would be apoplexy all round.

The second was a presidential edict that the next time football fans at a match boo or whistle during La Marseillaise, the game will be cancelled and the stadium emptied. This followed the dissing of the national anthem at the start of a France v Tunisia friendly in Paris; perhaps as some suggested, because French-born fans of North African descent object to its call to shed "impure blood"; perhaps, as other opined, because they do not feel French. It seems to me this dictat will have two sure results: 1) It will become an act of provocation - nay honour - for some fans to whistle during the Marseillaise; 2) Tens of thousands of hyped-up football supporters subsequently denied a match will invade the streets of Paris. In Britain such a ruling would be considered -rightly or wrongly - an infringement of freedom of expression.

Having been elected a "deputy" school governor (the results of the vote have not been announced but there was only one list of candidates) I promise not to let the (non-existent) power go to my head (too much). I solemnly swear to try to engage brain before opening mouth (as often as possible); I will not let the Frenchman influence me unduly in any decisions I am required to make (he has already said words to the effect of: you're on your own, love) and I will not shut down the entire school if a single three-year-old points at the president's official portrait and asks: "Who's that strange (small) man?" But please do not expect me on fund-raising duties the next time there is a France v Algeria match at the Stade de France. I shall be on the Eurostar out of here before the first whistle.

The Eye of the Beholder

2008-10-17T15:46:00.002+02:00

It is Friday so La Fille brought home her school book to do her "homework" - a drawing, picture or collage - over the weekend. In it were photocopies of photographs of children in different classes. La Fille is there. She is pictured without her glasses.

I ask her why she is not wearing her glasses. I have spent two years impressing on her how important it is to wear her glasses. She always wears them. She is not wearing them in the photo. She umms and ahhs, as she does whenever asked about school. Then she says "they" - she has sensed the tension in my voice and will not say who - told her she would be "plus belle sans lunettes" - prettier without glasses.

I am speechless, and believe me, that is rare.

Point de Suspension...

2008-10-15T17:06:00.008+02:00

On the morning of my wedding I went with La Belle Belle Fille to the hairdressers. They had double booked the appointment. Instead of apologising, they made it plain - in the way only Parisians can - they thought this was my fault. After much huffing and tutting, the hairdresser snatched the flowers the florist had prepared for my hair and scolded me that they were not prepared properly. My fault again. She then set a hapless trainee to work on my head and went into raptures over La Belle Belle Fille promising to create the most wonderful, original, knock-out coiffure for her. I wanted to say: "Excuse me, it's ME who's getting married", but I was very, very stressed and worried if I opened my mouth I would cry. That was a few years ago and the hair turned out fine in the end. The wedding too.

This scene flashed back today when I sparked up the computer and discovered what is interesting (the) three readers of this blog, my blog, is not me, my week, my hopes and fears and feelings. No. They want to know about my meeting earlier this week with Jaywalker. "What's she like? What's she like?" squawk the emails. "What's she like?"

Well sorry. I have three minutes and 20 seconds to find a recipe for Chocolate Cornflake Cakes to make and sell for La Fille's school's 'solidarity fund' so you're just going to have to wait...!

Speaking in Tongues.

2008-10-14T13:00:00.002+02:00

Just over one month part time at French school and as I feared La Fille's English has gone Gallic shaped.

She knows better than to speak to me in French if she stands a hope in hell of wheedling success, but the English is coming out all over the place. Before she did not seem to have much problem with the grammar in either language. Now she appears to be translating sentences from French to English. Adverbs and possessives are particularly tricky.

"I would like absolutely for you to buy me a dog black real".

"That is the shirt blue about Papa".

Yesterday she wanted to watch Bambi (sob).

"Why do I have to watch it in English?," she said. "Because Bambi SPEAKS ENGLISH," I said my voice raising from hiss to near hysterical.

What am I saying?

Ad nauseam.

2008-10-11T14:25:00.008+02:00

Saturday morning happenings in no particular order:

*A friend calls in great agitation. Her dog has been hit by a cyclist on the pavement.

*The lift in our building is out of order. The doors are broken. Someone has been sick inside.

*Two winos sit in the children's playground part of an otherwise empty park. They swig from bottles. Children watch.

*The sand pit is full of rubbish.

*There is dog dirt right outside our back door.

*A cyclist on a 20kg Vélib' jumps a red light.

*A motorist ignores a pedestrian crossing.

*Demonstrators march down the Boulevards. The roads are blocked.

*I reflect on my friend's suggestion we complain to the mayor about threats to life and limb on Paris' pavements.

*I think: Good idea. We will fall about with uncontrollable mirth at the very idea next week. Probably in front of the mayor.

*The estate agent is closed. Again.

Madly, truly, politely.

2008-10-08T22:30:00.005+02:00

A close London friend phoned to say she was on the Eurostar and suggested dinner. Did I hesitate? I put a roast in the oven for the Frenchman and La Belle Belle Fille, ordered the Frenchman to take over reading La Fille's bedtime stories, kissed everyone goodbye and went out. Hoorah! I felt like Marty in Madagascar.

My friend and her colleague could hardly splice a word in edgeways (I don't get out enough with English speakers. Actually I don't get out enough stop) but did manage to explain it was a business visit to their company's Paris office. The staff here speak French (they are French after all). My friend and her colleague do not.

Aware of the cultural divide exposed by my previous post I thought some advice on being polite might be useful. I suggested: "It is a good idea to say 'Bonjour Madame/Monsieur/Mademoiselle' whenever you're introduced to anyone and before you begin blathering in English."

The truth is however sniffy the French might be about the American 'have a nice day now' reflex or however hypocritical they perceive it, they have exactly the same formula. You go into a shop or restaurant or office or wherever and you say "Bonjour Monsieur/Madame/Mademoiselle". (After eight years I only recently discovered that just saying "Bonjour" is not enough, which is probably why people are so rude to me). You do your business and exit with a: "bonne matinée/apres midi/soirée/fin de semaine (good morning, afternoon, evening, weekend) or whatever followed by an "Au revoir" (goodbye) with or without a second "Madame/Monsieur/Mademoiselle". The shopkeeper or whoever replies in kind.

I love it, I really do. It may be a verbal tic and it does depend on the other party playing the game, but to me it is the sort of exchange that lifts everyday business out of the curt, mundane and grubby. I love it so much, I reflexively do a version of it back in London. "Good morning" I chirp, followed by a "thank you so much" and "goodbye" (I can't quite bring myself to say "have a nice day").

Sadly, people in Britain seem to view this as a cross between verbal harassment and lunacy. The flicker of fear that crosses faces translates as: this woman is stark staring mad.

Crise? What Crisis?

2008-10-06T11:20:00.002+02:00

Live in Paris and you get used to having a curt "No" barked at you from people who should be trying to sell you something but frankly do not give a stuff. What is genuinely surprising is that they are doing it even now.

Twice in the last few days - in a popular children's clothes shop and a High Street electrical store - I have faced what is, in current circumstances, particularly astonishing rudeness. In both I was about to spend up to 100 euros (£67). I was so fed up by the surly attitude of the staff when I asked simple questions, I put down what I was going to buy and walked out. Both times I thought: "I'll order it online." In a third shop I returned an item because it was too small and was told off by the harpie-voiced manageress because the wrapping was damaged. I pointed out it was damaged when I bought it. "No it wasn't. You damaged it," she said.

What planet are these people from? Have they not seen the newspapers, listened to the radio, watched the television, had a pep talk from their stricken bosses? After a certain Schadenfreude here about the 'American' financial crisis, people have woken up to discover France is not an economic island. "Yes guys, it can happen here," I say in sorrow not smugness. Even in a boom I have difficulty understanding how one becomes so far removed from reality as to not realise that if you are employed by a shop it is in your personal interest to encourage people to spend money in it. If you cannot do it for sensible economic reasons, for God's sake do it for selfish ones.

It truly baffles me. I would not wish unemployment, hardship and misery on anyone so why do these people behave as if they wish it upon themselves?

It's a Long Way to Tiperra West

2008-10-04T09:55:00.004+02:00

Paris: In a park full of French children La Fille, who is yet to enter a sociable phase, strikes up a friendship with a delighful Australian girl. The mutual admiration is forged when they discover they speak the same language.

La Fille stops hanging off my jacket and runs off with her new friend, who, I discover, is a couple of years older than her. They play hide and seek, tag and chase thudding into the sand with much giggling. They walk around barefoot holding hands and stand arms around each other forming an united front against the French children monopolising the see-saw. Then when they secure a place they sit tight and refuse to get off. As this has given the little girl's mum, also a writer, and I a chance to make friends too - and as none of the French mums have noticed the foreign takeover - we pretend not to have seen either.

I have noticed that La Fille has an uncanny knack of spotting a kindred fish out of water. In London playgrounds and even in the Anglophone Caribbean she was able to find the only French speaker for miles around, and possibly the whole island. But this is the first time I have seen La Fille become so firmly and instantly attached to another child. Sadly, it was the briefest of friendships: three magical rencontres in the same park and then time for goodbyes.

The next morning, from the moment she wakes up La Fille starts badgering to go to the park to see her friend. I explain, as gently as I can, that she will not be there. I say: "She has gone home to Australia." Realising that La Fille has not the faintest idea where Australia is I add: "And that's a very long way away, in fact the other side of the world." La Fille's face falls then perks up. "Never mind," she says. "Let's go there anyway. I don't mind walking."

Do the Hustle

2008-10-02T15:23:00.007+02:00

I was pounced on and found myself up for election as a parents' delegate at La Fille's school this morning. I protested. I pretended I did not speak French. I nearly said: "Do you realise I am someone who talks about safe-sex raisins in front of children". I did say: "But I don't even know what 'parent délégué' means." To no avail. My name, my telephone number, my email have been noted. "Can you make cakes?" asked the woman who pounced on me with a wild-eyed look. "Well, sort of," I said not wishing to appear a complete foreign dimwit. "You'll do," she said. Let us pray nobody votes for me.

Then I came home with La Fille and burned the fish fingers while dancing to the marionettes' song in the living room. Fish fingers and puppet impersonations. How sad is that?

Ainsi font, font, font,
Les petites marionettes....et tra la la la la.

I cannot explain why I was dancing to this. I cringe every time I hear it. I once asked the Frenchman why there was this nursery rhyme about toilets (ainsi font = un siphon = a U-bend). I thought the mishearing was quite funny but he looked at me as if I was raving bonkers even after I had explained.

Sad and mad. Would you want me involved in your school?

French Fries at Dawn

2008-09-30T10:15:00.002+02:00

At La Fille's parent-teacher meeting on Saturday we learned there is "lots of aggression" in her class. I am not sure what this means but the plastic giraffe and lion have been banished to an out-of-reach shelf. Apparently the weapons of choice for these oppugnant youngsters are not flick knives and knuckledusters, thank God, but plastic carrots and chips. The teacher, who has 30 years experience, seems to be struggling. Afterwards, the Frenchman, having established that La Fille keeps well out of any embrangle and thus there is no threat to her glasses, is unsympathetic. "How difficult can it be? They are only two and three-year-olds," he says. I, who have difficulty controlling one willful three year old, say nada.

I am not comfortable with three-year-olds being described as "aggressive". I suspect a teacher in the UK would be sacked or severely reprimanded for this choice of words. I would prefer "high-spirited" or "energetic" or "hyperactive", but then that might be because so far La Fille has escaped having her head stoved in by a wild animal or toy vegetable. My French friends say this is evidence of British hypocrisy and political correctness and our growing habit of calling a spade an earth displacing implement.

The French teacher's comments would make lurid headlines back home where there seems to be a hunger for anything that talks Britain down. I was astonished by how, long before credit and crunch and crisis became the new 'c' words, people were so pessimistic and determined to badmouth everything about the country. My theory is it is why nobody will have a word said against France. Tell them it is not El Dorado and they go 'La, la, la, la' with their fingers in their ears. Perhaps is it is a safety valve: life in Britain is crap, let's cross the Channel.

God knows what the UK papers would make of the outbreak of legume rage among French toddlers. Instead they are full of interesting things you did not know you did not know.

*According to a medical group Belfast is the city in which you are most likely to have had a tummy tuck; Chester a face lift; Nottingham a nose job, Newcastle and Bristol (how appropriate) breast augmentation and London botox.

*The cost of cheese in the UK has gone up nearly 50% in the last year.

*One in ten British people would rather go to the dentist than host a dinner party.

*A wedding dress made of rubber washing-up gloves the artist turned inside out is on display at a Cumbrian museum. The curator said: "The work demonstrates both the young girl's dream of a white wedding and the mundane reality of household." No...really!

Homesick yet?

The Word is Out

2008-09-27T14:01:00.022+02:00

Britain has no equivalent to the Académie Française to protect its language and perhaps it does not need one given the prevalence of English. But as someone who loves words, I find the idea that several are on the brink of extinction very disturbing.

Of course words, unlike creatures or plants, can be brought back from the dead. Apparently certain entries in Dr Johnson's 1755 dictionary are making a comeback including: 'fopdoodle' (a fool; insignificant wretch); 'curtain-lecture' (a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed); 'bedswerver' (one that is false to the bed...in other words a deceitful philandering git); the topical 'traveltainted' (harassed, fatigued with travel) and 'wordling' (a mortal set on profit); and my particular favourite 'perpotation' (the act of drinking largely).

However it is with great consternation that I report the threat to 24 words the Collins Dictionary is about to drop through lack of use. Personally I would rather a dictionary contained every word that ever existed and anything less was considered shortened or abridged or concise but there we are. Does anyone care? If they do I think we should start using some of these words and persuade the boffins at Collins that we will not let them go without a fight.

Unfortunately posts like this will not count as the subject is the campaign to save these words. However, if they are used elsewhere in print, broadcast and online before February there might just be a reprieve; a last minute call to the agrestic editor at Collins wielding an abstergent pen ordering him to stay the fatal striking out. I realise we are not saving lives or villages or rainforests or the planet here, and I do not wish to be oppugnant or become embrangled in controversy, but surely the two are compossible. Who knows when one of these nitid gems will serve to illuminate the caliginosity of our caducity and be a roborant in the days when our heards have turned griseous and we have become niddering and fubsy?

You have been warned. Use them or lose them.

Tanks

2008-09-25T10:39:00.007+02:00

The sky looked moody and metallic yesterday so my friend and I took our children to the Paris Aquarium. What a good idea that turned out to be. The place was so welcoming, so well organised, so pleasant and so clean we nearly fell off the high-heels we were not wearing. It is often the case that those who work in the French public services, and that includes aquariums or aquaria or whatever, can err on the side of grumpiness. I am trying hard not to be negative or racist here, but it is so often the case that the Frenchman would be the first to agree and indeed complain about it. At the Paris Aquarium they were to a man and woman, pleasant, friendly and welcoming.

The fish were fantastic. The girls squealed with an almost hysterical combination of delight and fear every time a particularly large ugly mug fixed them with its beady eye and were so excited that one of the crocodiles moved they almost wet themselves. Some idiot had thrown a coin onto the back of one of the crocodiles and it had stuck there; why do people do that? Still, these reptiles have been in the aquarium since 1948 so I imagine they have become inured to the spectrum of human stupidity. Been here more than half a century, seen it all, eaten the t-shirt. La Fille skipped from tank to tank jumping up and down going: "Oh look it's Nemo, it's Nemo, it's Nemo,"..."Oh look it's Dory,"..."Oh look it's the one from Shark Tale"..."Oh look..." as if real life was one big rolling Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks production. Meanwhile, my friend was saying to her daughter: "Oh look it's a clown fish like the one in your favourite book."

There was more astonishment to come. In the corner of the entrance hall there was a café, actually it was more of a large counter, offering salads, sandwiches and drinks. Not only was the man behind the counter extremely friendly, but the food was good and as the sky had cleared we sat outside on the terrace enjoying the tenuous sunshine. Then one of the girls wanted the loo. This is the moment you wonder whether it might be better to find a quiet corner of a nearby street rather than use the public facilities. Again surprise, surprise; modern, super-clean, working loos. Couldn't ask for more really.

On the way home my friend and I laughed like drains over a sign in a local brasserie for "Milkshakes with or without alcohol". She said: "Do you think we could ask for a milkshake without milk?"

Later I told the Frenchman about the aquarium. He seemed genuinely surprised. I said: "Do you know I think those toilets were the cleanest public ones I have seen in the whole of France. You could have eaten your dinner off them." The Frenchman who was in fact eating his dinner at the time, almost choked.

You couldn't make it up

2008-09-23T11:05:00.003+02:00

Nothing to do with Paris OR London...

I was just looking on the blog statistics (a word that it easier to write than say according to British researchers) to find who was reading and from where and came across something very disturbing.

Someone in Denmark found this blog after typing: "smack smack smack bare bottom man in public over mrs knee" into a Google search. I promise I have not made this up. I went down the results this inquiry produced and I cannot for the life of me see any reference to this blog. Phew! I know readers are hard to come by, but even so.

For some reason it made me think back many years to a very funny story told by a good friend and former colleague, working on The Sun, who swore it was true. A woman reader called in to moan and complain about something in the paper and was giving the young newsdesk trainee a hard time. The editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, passing the newsdesk and hearing enough of the exchange to gather what was going on, grabbed the telephone and shouted words to the effect of: "Madam, that's enough. You are banned from reading The Sun. You are banned from buying The Sun. You will never read or buy The Sun again, do you understand?" I'm not sure who hung up first, but a few moments later the same woman rang back. She said: "Excuse me, but does the ban include my husband?"

Answering my own questions.

2008-09-20T11:15:00.004+02:00

It is Saturday, it is sunny and frankly I don't know why I'm bothering because I am clearly talking to myself. Oh well, just call me Alice's new best friend...

La Fille: "I don't want to go to school."
Me: "You don't have to. It's Saturday."
LF: "No, I don't want to go to school again. Not just not today. Not any day."
M: "That's different. You have to go to school. Everyone goes to school."
LF: "But I've been. Several times. That's enough. I don't want to go any more."

Oh dear.

The French have a strange way of trying to persuade their children to go to school. Here is a selection of book titles I have spotted over the last couple of weeks to help with La Rentrée.

"The teacher. She punished me".
"School. I'm not going".
"The Infant School Monster".
"How Stressful for the Teacher".
"A Day Far Away From Mummy".

Blast

2008-09-19T13:10:00.001+02:00

I am not going to wade into the French education system of which I have limited experience. So I am relying on those who know more than I do, like the erudite and unfailingly reasonable Cimon, who comments here, to tell me if the following is what I can expect over the next 20 years.

We have organised our entire month around the first parent's morning at La Fille's school. It was supposed to be tomorrow. It went on the calendar in big black capital letters encircled by a big black jaggedy line. Everything else fell into a subsequent place: a trip to the UK; a weekend in Belgium; a visit to a much-loved friend with a long-term illness. We were told not to bring La Fille so we had to arrange child care.

This morning, not first thing this morning but shortly before midday, less than 24 hours before the planned meeting, I was handed a slip of paper saying it was postponed until next Saturday. There was no explanation for the last minute change. We don't have busy social lives however there is something on the calendar for next Saturday. As it doesn't boast a jaggedy line it will have to be cancelled. But wouldn't you know it the babysitter cannot babysit next Saturday morning. I am trying not to swear.

The Frenchman has been warned

2008-09-19T09:55:00.003+02:00

Paris is especially beautiful in early Autumn. Today was a fine example; one of those near perfect crackly mornings when the sun has undergone some magical alchemic transformation from burnished gold to platinum and is bright enough, but not quite warm enough, for sunglasses...so of course I'd forgotten mine. The city's poor trees forced out of parks and sidelined to stand permanent guard over busy boulevards and rues are still green but their leaves have tell-tale signs of tarnish which means they will soon copper and fall. Window boxes are full to bursting with flowers that no longer smell and have arrived at the point of no return; the metallic air has turned the sounds of the city into tinny chimes signaling the imminent arrival of winter.

It's an uneasy time for wardrobe choices. A summer jacket or cardigan is fine when racing along dragging a child who is late for school but stop at traffic lights and an unexpected whip of air, hanging around looking for the underdressed, will chill you to the bone. This morning I dug out a crumpled wool coat from the back of the wardrobe for the aller-retour to school. It was like running a marathon in a ski suit, even at red lights. Back home was chillier inside than out because the Frenchman had opened several windows before leaving for work on the principle that rooms need to be "aired". I put the coat back on.

Actually it wasn't an aller-retour this morning as I diverted my return via the gym to check out how much it would cost to join. I used to be a member - and I used to go - before I had La Fille and promised myself I'd join again after she was born. Then when she went to the creche. Then after we found a lovely babysitter. Then when she went to school. That's a lot of unkept promises and extra kilos, so I promised myself I would join today. I didn't because it seemed an awful lot of money and I told myself I needed to work if and when I would find time to go before forking out that much.

Autumnal Paris is beautiful but spoiled by the niggling inevitability of winter. From now it will get gloomier and nippier by the day and the mornings will turn from crisp to brittle and the trees from burnished to bare and the chill to a breathtaking, numbing cold. And it will be me, not the Frenchman, taking La Fille to school at the gloomiest, nippiest, brittlest, most freezing brass-monkey time of the day. And I will not be able to warm myself up with a quick 60 minutes of Body Combat because although I really, really love pretending to punch and kick and knee-groin some poor unsuspecting imaginary person, I'll still be dithering about joining the gym. And the Frenchman will still be leaving the windows open even after the central heating has been sparked up and even after I have asked him one hundred million times not to. On second thoughts maybe the extra layer on my thighs might save me from hypothermia and I could practice the Body Combat at home and save the money.

Do as I say...

2008-09-17T19:52:00.006+02:00

A friend used to have a favourite t-shirt with a picture of some fish, a fishing hook and "Three Second Memory" printed underneath. I know it's an urban myth, and deeply insulting to man's earliest ancestors but I need to get La Fille one anyway. She refuses absolutely to tell me what she has done in school. All she was say is "I don't remember". If I am really lucky she will tell me she did a drawing of a dolphin - always dolphins - especially for me. (Even this will 'Papa's picture' as soon as he arrives home.) But that's it. If I say: "You can't possibly have spent the whole morning painting dolphins, what else did you do?", she changes the subject or precociously affects a furrowed brow of theatrical proportions and says: "I don't remember."

It struck me sitting in a chilly, shadowy, pigeon-poo splattered corner of the park today that we know very little about what our children get up to when they are not with us; and even less about what the people supposed to be looking after them get up to. If you meet teachers, nursery nurses, nannies, babysitters face to face they are charm itself. If you see them with the children in their charge they often morph into something entirely different as if some time after you left they nipped into the pharmacy and downed a vial of foaming green liquid.

Today being a Wednesday there was no school. Before France became officially, and tub-thumpingly secular - something you'd never have guessed from the Pope's visit last weekend - Wednesday was appropriated by the Roman Catholic church for children to learn their catechism. I read somewhere the priests chose Wednesday because they thought nobody would go if it was a Saturday. Consequently, no classes on Wednesday but classes on Saturday until now when they too have been dropped. French children do a four day week; you can imagine how easy this is for working mothers who juggle.

We were going to go to the children's monthly reading session at the American library in Paris but first thing this morning La Fille developed fluorescent green snot and started sneezing and coughing. Somehow I didn't think we'd be welcome with other children in a confined space. So I wrapped her up warm and we went to the park. This was not the cleverest of ideas because the first thing she did was take off her shoes guaranteeing day-glo snot for at least a week. Also, it being Wednesday and there being no school, everyone else had decided to go to the park too. This included organisations that look after groups of children on Wednesdays when their parents are working as most are Wednesday being a normal working day. One such party of five or six year olds from an out of school playgroup arrived. The woman in charge organised them in a circle in front of the park gate and began railing at them like a demented silver-haired witch. From what I could guess from the way she was wagging her finger, crossing and uncrossing her hands and sticking her pointy nose centimeters from their faces, most of the French language's most fun verbs were being garroted by a 'ne...pas' (don't) and once or twice drawn and quartered by an 'absolument pas' (absolutely don't). Of course, the kids ran in and immediately congregated in knots behind the bars and ropes to do all the things they'd been ne-pas-ed from doing.

But was she magnificent. Having boot camped her own troops, she then marched in and like a Gallic Boudicea set about the other kids. While we had all mumbled under our collective breath but said nothing about the boys throwing sand she marched right up and turned them all to stone with a single "Arretez IMMEDIATEMENT". When one of her charges ran up wailing because sand had been thrown in his eyes she held him at arms' length and told him briskly: "It's not too dramatic. Keep crying and it'll get rid of the sand." And when one of her boys picked up a fistful of sand, her assistant - a younger graduate from the School of Scaring the Pants off Children - yelled: "Oi, I just told you not to throw sand. Are you taking the piss out of me?" Rules on bad language anyone?

That's Showbiz.

2008-09-15T10:34:00.004+02:00

Not having satellite television I've missed a tranch of British and American culture since I've been out of the UK: The Office, The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Friends, Big Brother, Desperate Housewives, The X-Factor, et al. As a result I have no idea who half the people featured in British newspapers and magazines are or what they have done, if anything. It's like pop music and computers and maths; you miss one step in the evolution or equation and from then on everything is a mystery.

Last time I was in Britain I stumbled upon a programme on 'Daytime TV' that I found very disturbing. It centred on a confrontation between a young girl with a baby daughter, her boyfriend who may or may not have been the father of the child and the boyfriend's two sisters who did not like their brother's girlfriend for various reasons. It was a staged catfight: there were tears, insults, shouting, and an almost breathy anticipation of physical violence. The participants were young and, frankly, not very bright. If they were guilty of anything it was surely the fecklessness and foolishness of youth and a misguided wish to have their 15 minutes of fame at any price. It was truly horrible; pure bear-baiting or as I imagine a public flogging might be.

The highlight of the TV programme, if you could call it a 'high', was the outcome of a DNA test. This was dangled in front of the audience like a piece of bread before a starving man. "Coming right up after the break, the DNA results. We'll find out if X really is the father of x". Television producers say those who appear on the show are volunteers and are helped to overcome their problems as if the production company was an offshoot of social services or some benevolent society. What rubbish. It is entertainment. And it appears people are indeed entertained watching troubled fellow being flaunt how foolish and feckless they can be. There are no heads rolling or lifeless bodies dangling from a rope, but it's still pretty gory and bloodthirsty.

I don't think this programme concept has crossed the Channel yet, but sadly it surely will. When the first Big Brother reality show aired in Holland and then in Britain, the French went all superior and said such low-life "trash" television could never happen in France. It did. Of course it did - it was called Loft Story. It was a huge success.

In 1846, Charles Dickens witnessed a hanging. Afterwards he wrote: "No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious. I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of 'Hats off!' when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a Play...to see the stage the better, in the final scene."

A journalist who witnessed the recording of another of these reality daytime television programmes recently suggests, 162 years on, audiences are scarcely more compassionate towards fellow human beings. Plus ça change, as they say in the land of cultural superiority.

Saturday Night Fever

2008-09-13T21:19:00.021+02:00

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for their is in London all that life can afford."

Comme ci. Comme ça

2008-09-11T22:06:00.003+02:00

On the way to school today we passed several children weeping and wailing. Apparently the second week of school is more traumatic than the first. This is when tiny brains sprout empirical neurons and realise school is not a one-off jolly outing like a visit to the zoo but something they must do again and again and again. Thank goodness they have no idea - yet - that it will be like this for the next 15 to 20 years of their life.

Every parent of every wailing child we passed uttered exactly the same phrase: "Mais c'est comme ça", which roughly translates as "That's just the way it is". My first thought was that this was a little hard. On reflection, I think it highlights another cultural difference between the French and English in that most of the French mothers I know are much more matter-of-fact and less inclined to be soppy or mollycoddle their offspring than we are. This is not a criticism and is, I suspect, a relatively modern cross Channel difference because it reminded me my own mother and her oft-repeated response to wails from my brother and I about something not being fair. "Well, life's not fair," she would declare. She was right of course, but at that age we knew nothing of life let alone its myriad forms of injustice and just thought she was being mean.

The "c'est comme ça" approach seems to work and is less time-consuming, and humiliating, than getting down on your haunches in the middle of the pavement to explain patiently to a wailing offspring why it is necessary to go to school. At the end of this, in my experience, recalcitrant todler is still snivelling and refusing to budge, whereas French Maman has snicker-snacked her child into class and long since disappeared in a clack of heels.

Another big difference is smacking. I do not know a single English or American mother who does it, or admits they do it, which I realise is not at all the same thing. Conversely I have yet to meet a French parent who does not think most parent versus child conflicts are best resolved with a short sharp "fessée" and is more than happy to reveal this. (I have never seen anyone smack someone else's child, but a friend once told me she had seen an elderly woman do just this in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The Frenchman threatens to smack but doesn't deliver though I suspect this is because he is more bark than bite and not because he knows I disapprove and would shout at him. I expressly warned him never to smack La Fille anywhere in Britain. I am ashamed to say, this was seconds after I had given her slap on the bottom when she ran off near a main road in London and frightened the life out of me. Riven with remorse and guilt I noticed we were standing under an enormous poster about reporting child abuse. I was ready to pounce on a woman I though was fumbling in her bag for her telephone when all she was doing was finding a pound for the Big Issue seller. I told the Frenchman it must never happen again because someone would call Social Services and take her away from us. (OK not true, but he doesn't know). "But that would not be fair at all," he spluttered. "Well, that's just it," I wailed. "Life's not bloody fair."

Look at me, me, me Mummy, I'm dancing

2008-09-11T18:22:00.001+02:00

http://www.thebloggersguide.com/paris/london-paris-london-a-tale-two-cities

Lesson One

2008-09-10T00:03:00.003+02:00

There's much chatter here about education reforms and the offer of free "intensive" English courses for French schoolchildren during the summer and February holidays. Apparently the aim is to make sure they are all fluent in what they call here "the language of Shakespeare" by the time they hit the workplace. I was talking to one of France's most respected linguists about this and I could tell he thought it was a really bad idea. He came up with all sorts of cultural, historical, colonial reasons for French apathy and antipathy towards the English language but his trump card was that English is too difficult because it is so idiomatic "How do you explain to someone you can hedge your bets but not hedge-bet" I nodded in agreement because he is respected and obviously very clever and respected for being clever but afterwards, when I thought about it, I wasn't so sure. About the hedging bets that is, not his cleverness.

I think French is quite hard but that's because although I have a deceptively convincing accent - or so I'm told - I frequently say something stupid. Sometimes it's because of faux amis and sometimes because I don't think and out pops something like I am "sur le train" a literal translation of "on the train" when what I mean is I am "dans le trains" or "in the train" and "sur le train" conjures up Charlie Chaplinesque images of me clinging to the roof of a TGV screaming silently while some black and white villain with "VILLAIN" on his shirt and a curly moustache beats my knuckles with a monkey wrench. Then again that's more idiot than idiom.

La Fille will certainly be having intensive school holiday courses in English; with me - or her grandparents - in England. Today's English lesson was watching Mary Poppins. "I don't think this is my kind of film," said La Fille two seconds after the opening credits when she realised there were no lions, zebras, monkeys, mammouths, bees, elephants, penguins, insects, one-eyed mutants or amorphous blobby things in it. "I don't care, we're watching it. It is in English," I said. I am at least consistent. "Besides it's a classic." And it is, in spite of Dick Van Dyke's lamentable accent, the stuffed robin that looked as if it was nailed to Julie Andrews' finger and the moral messages as subtle as silent film captions. A classic, despite being sugary and twee and set in 1910 so you know in a few years Mr Banks will be packed off to a European trench never to return just as he's getting to know his children and Bert will get lung cancer because he keeps sticking his head into belching chimneys and no amount of jolly nanny nonsense will magic these things away.

La Fille soon gave up trying to copy Bert's tap dancing on the 200-year-old Hungarian point parquet, became bored and spent the rest of the film telling me to "shut up singing" and trying to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick. Later as I put her to bed she asked me to tell her the "new words" she'd learned. "Which new words?" I asked thinking Cat, Hat, Bat, Rag, Sag. She said: "The ones you were singing really loudly." (Perhaps she said badly.) "What? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?" "No, no the other one." I racked my brains: the other one, the other one. "Chim Chiminey?" "Yes, that one. Is it English? What does it mean?"

There is a good reason I am not a teacher.

Lost in Translation

2008-09-05T15:35:00.002+02:00

The Frenchman once suggested, helpfully, that when I didn't know the French word for something I should try to say the English one with a French accent.

Anglophones please note: here is a list of English words you must never try this with either at home or anywhere else within earshot of a French speaking person if you wish to retain a molecule of respect and dignity.

I expect profuse thanks, flowers, champagne even. After all, I have looked stupid so you don't have to.

Preservative = a condom
Tampon = a rubber stamp
Aspiration = what a French vacuum cleaner does
Versatile = fickle and inconsistant
Con = female genitalia or bloody idiot
Napkin = a sanitary towel
Occasion = second hand
Sale = dirty
Type = a guy or bloke
Amateur = an enthusiast
Exhibition = a vulgar display
Acces(s) = a fit of rage or anger
Auditor = someone who is listening
Ban = a round of applause

School's Out

2008-09-04T22:18:00.005+02:00

I picked up La Fille from school. I was the first mother through those doors, a combination of flinty English elbows and a Gallic disrespect for queues.

Jab, jab, weave: the first in. Jab, jab: the first up the stairs. I found La Fille sitting with the rest of her class in a line on the floor in the corridor outside the classroom, which had been locked. I know it was locked because her 'doudou' comfort blanket was in a basket inside the classroom and the schoolmistress had to get out her keys to open the door so we could retrieve it. That was a bit scary, but I had expected worse: bruises, bloody nose, broken glasses. It turned out the only child La Fille knew in her class was a boy from play school whose specialist subject had been wrenching off her spectacles and roughing her up (it wasn't that personal as he also duffed up the staff). All her other friends, and I mean every single one of them, had been put in another class. My heart sank. Then it rose and soared with unconfined joy when La Fille's teacher uttered the words: "Oh you speak English? Me too. I am a Franco-American". Glory, glory be, light scented candles and waft the patchouli incense, crack open another bottle of vintage whatever, and thank Murphy's Law that says toast may always land butter side down but with the Marmite on the upside. Give thanks to the Wizard of Oz, I will not be having the conversations I had at the creche when La Fille was barely two years old.

Creche worker: "Your daughter refuses to say 'Merci'."
Me: "I think you'll find she's saying 'Thank You'.
Creche worker: "You are right, she is saying something and it sounds like 'Zhank You' but she won't say 'Merci'.
Me: "She doesn't say 'Merci' because she is saying 'Thank You'. That is English for 'Merci'.
Creche worker: "But it's not 'Merci'.

So La Fille skipped all the way home, said she'd had a "lovely time" at school and that X (the bully boy) was her new best friend. She said she liked school and that the teacher had spoken to her in English. Oh result, result, result. The teleporter has been left open just a subversive fraction. My foot is in the door.

La Rentrée

2008-09-04T09:56:00.008+02:00

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. The gargantuan, omnipotent French education system has lured La Fille into its teleporter. There will be much whining, wailing, whirring of brain clogs until, some 20 years hence, it will spit her out. She will emerge half-woman, half-Republican; a Francophone who warbles to Brel, Brassens and Gainsbourg without looking up the words, thinks Carla Bruni can sing, and considers nursery rhymes like J'ai Faim ("I'm hungry. Eat your fist and save the other for tomorrow. If that's not enough, eat one of your feet and save the other for dancing") perfectly normal entertainment for toddlers.

Yes, the day I thought was too far off to worry about has arrived. La Fille went to school this morning. We managed to sidestep the French shrink, but however much we ran and hid on the Eurostar ultimately we could not avoid Freud and Sartre.

My mission, should I choose to accept it - which I do - is to stop the above happening, particularly, heaven forbid, the Bruni and Brassens bit. To this end I have vowed to:

*Pretend I do not speak or understand a word of French. But only when La Fille is speaking it.

*Force her to watch one Walt Disney classic a day.

*Hide La Belle Belle Fille's Carla Bruni CDs

*Sing Beatles songs very loudly and badly every time her father so much as hums anything resembling French music.

*Read sane and sensible English books like The Cat in the Hat.

Ha! That should do it.

Pablo's Last Stand

2008-09-03T12:58:00.004+02:00

School Day Minus One

La Fille wakes up this morning and wails: "I don't want to go to school. I want to stay stupid."

Pablo's Blue Period

2008-09-02T23:03:00.002+02:00

Three days from La Fille's first day at school and the Frenchman reads her a book about a boy called Pablo who doesn't want to go to school. Why the Frenchman thinks this particular story is a good idea is anyone's guess, but he clearly thinks it is. He points out that book ends with Pablo deciding school is fun, but surprise, surprise La Fille has the attention span of a gnat and was not concentrating to the end.

So yesterday afternoon, less than 24 hours after being introduced to Pablo the reluctant schoolboy, La Fille announces she does not want to go to school. I tell her there is no choice. There follows half an hour of non-stop verbal attrition. Instead of shouting, which is what I want to do but have been trying not to, I give her a choice: "You can go to school just in the mornings or you can go to school all day," I say. She doesn't even stop to consider this. "No, no, no. I choose, and my choice is: I go to school or I stay at home with you and I choose to stay at home with you," she says. I give up arguing.

This morning the "I don't want to go to school" routine starts again. I meet up with a friend and her two girls at the Jardin des Plants and we head off to see what Kiki is up to. My friend tells me her husband - also French - has been reading their daughter, also due to start school on Thursday, a book in which the child character arrives in the classroom on his first day to find everyone, children and parents, weeping and wailing. The book, she says, goes on to describe how pupils have labels put on their wrists 'like goods for sale in a shop' and how some of the children cry so much they're not allowed to have their afternoon snack. She says: "A French friend gave it to me. She said it was a good introduction to school."

We agree it must be one of those French culture things.

More Rocket Science.

2008-08-31T21:43:00.006+02:00

Who: Mother with one young child and lots of bags.
Where: Gare du Nord
When: Last week of August

We arrived at the Gare du Nord to take the Eurostar to London. Passing the double line of cursing tourists queuing for Metro tickets, we discovered the up escalator from the Metro to the main station level was out of order. We struggled up the stairs. On the main station concourse the only two lifts leading up to the Eurostar terminal level were out of order. A sign said they would be out of order until a date in September ten day's hence. Ten days? The escalator leading up to the Eurostar terminal was out of order. We struggled up some more stairs. Two of the Eurostar automatic ticket machines were out of order.

I thought we were on the 10.45am train. I looked at my ticket. It said 10.15am. I looked at my watch. It said 10.10am. I grabbed La Fille, grabbed our bags and ran. The Eurostar check-in machine was out of order. Suddenly someone in a Eurostar uniform piped up: "Don't worry there's another train in half an hour. You can go on that."

I was going to say that getting escalators and lifts and ticket machines to work surely isn't that difficult. But then catching the right train surely isn't either. Mea culpa.

Chicken and Egg

2008-08-23T19:39:00.004+02:00

It was absolutely chucking it down outside (lovely weather for October) and as my friend's newly installed kitchen cupboards were bare she suggested we order a takeaway pizza for lunch. Just one problem; four of the five local pizza restaurants were closed for the summer holidays. Needless to say only the one furthest away was open.

At our local market the butcher, fishmonger, grocer and Italian epicerie are closed for the holidays as is the cous-cous restaurant and the African speciality takeaway. Seven of the ten outlets have temporarily ceased trading in a market that struggles at the best of times. The cheese shop was open but had a fraction of its usual stock and the bread I foolishly bought without thinking almost broke teeth. The boulanger opposite downed shutters several weeks ago. The newspaper kiosk is also locked and shuttered, as is the café bar next door. Paris is heaving with visitors with euros burning holes in pockets as it is every August, while stores, restaurants, cafés and bars have shut up shop until the end of the month, as they do every August.

Last week the French prime minister François Fillon hauled government ministers back from their holidays to discuss ways of giving the country's economy a kick up the derrière. Not exactly rocket science, is it?

Heavenly hosts

2008-08-21T15:25:00.005+02:00

We went to Toulouse for the August 15 Assumption holiday as we do every year. Yes that would be the celebration of the passage of the Virgin Mary into heaven still officially marked with an official day off in a country that is officially secular, but never mind. When we checked in for our own mini ascent into the heavens, we discovered Air France had put us all in different rows. Still, it meant La Fille couldn't see her plane-phobic father's white knuckles or hyperventilating even before we'd reached the runway. "What's that noise?" he all but shrieked at one point. I said: "It's the plane landing." He's the person who runs amok in those plane disaster films and has to be wrestled to the ground by the heroine hostess, slapped around the face a couple of times and handcuffed to the toilet door.

To me Assumption in Toulouse is a very French annual ritual. An indeterminate number of people all known to each other for many years and their families converge on the home of a couple of mutual friends and their two teenage children. The dramatis personae varies from year to year as some drop out and some drop in and friends of friends are invited along, but the core group is made up of usual suspects - one of them the Frenchman - most years. Our hosts welcome all, including those they barely know and those they have never laid eyes on, with limitless warmth, generosity, patience and good humour. Their sons are equally heroic; thrown out of their rooms and forced to sleep in tents in the garden without so much as a Kevin the Teenager scowl, sulk or grumble. At one point the number present was expected to reach 31 humans, two dogs and a rabbit. Thank heavens the copulating slugs didn't show this year, nor several of the expected guests, but even it was a lot of tomates provençales to rustle up.

Here's a list of some of the subjects touched upon over lunch/dinner/aperitif/breakfast during our six-day stay.

*Was a famous French cartoonist fired from a satirical magazine for suggesting President Nicolas Sarkozy's son Jean would "go far" because he was marrying a Jewish heiress being anti-Semitic or exercising freedom of speech?

*Did Britain or America do anything to help European Jews during World War Two?

*Who was worse: Hitler or Stalin?

*Did Ingrid Betancourt suffer Stockholm Syndrome during her six years in captivity in the Colombian jungle? Why did she look so healthy when released when six months before she was reportedly at death's door.

*The Vagina Monologues

*What is making more and more young Muslim women adopt the hijab or headscarf?

*Are women still treated like walking wombs?

*Should action to save the planet be collective or individual? Why should I stop driving when the oil companies do nothing for the environment?

*Why is Britain obsessed with America?

*Why has the swimming pool gone green and why isn't the tonne and a half of environment unfriendly chemical poured in it working?

*Who made The Bayeux Tapestry? Did they have an agenda?

*Why is it bloody freezing when we are more than half way to Spain in August? Is there a hope in hell it will be warmer tomorrow?

*Is it OK to be left-wing and buy the new album by Carla Bruni, aka Mrs President Sarkozy, if the proceeds are going to charity?

There was some shouting and some table-thumping, due more to over-enthusiasm and over-indulgence than anger, and some truly Monty Python "What have the Romans (for Romans read Britons/Americans) ever done for us?" moments. All in all it was mostly good humoured unlike a few years ago when the only subject of argument all week was the European Constitution and the 'Yes' and 'No' camps were so irreconcilably divided I was convinced certain friends were heading for the divorce courts.

I added my tenpenny worth over 1066 and all that and other subjects and admit to thumping the table (once), but nobody was being clever-clever and anyone who didn't feel like joining in didn't have to and nobody minded. There was much hilarity, much wine drunk and much food eaten as well as the usual singing competition. As happens without fail every year in Toulouse, somebody pointed to me and said: "Beatles" to which I, as I do without fail every year, made my excuses, went to the loo and never came back. Some of the French contributions beggared Anglophone belief such as a song containing a line that appeared to translate as: "I dream of spending my life with my arse in the air". Apparently it is a double-entendre about fantasising over air-stewardesses, but clearly something is lost in translation. (Anyone who thinks I'm being unfair about French lyrics click here and read down to Jacques Brel. Thank you Jaywalker.)

The really heated exchanges were saved for a table tennis tournament organised by the youngsters who came up with a devilishly clever timetable of matches that ensured every game involving an adult took place after lunch. "Don't you think that's a little unfair?" asked our hostess, after she lost. "You didn't have to drink," was their response. Game, set and match to the boys.

Waiting for Godot

2008-08-19T13:49:00.003+02:00

We returned to Paris loaded with worldly London goods like biblical mules to find we were being leaked on again. This time it was La Fille's room, which I had foolishly assumed was flood-proof unaware that the upstairs neighbours had installed a second bathroom directly above.

The water was still dripping when we arrived, its trajectory from ceiling to floor broken by La Fille's bookcase and her absolutely favourite books. What else? The drip-drip-drip must have been going on most of the time we were away because Charlie and Lola, Gerald the Giraffe, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Winnie the Pooh as well as Anton and Marie Tatin's Thirty-Six Cats had taken a soaking that had all but reduced them to soggy puffed up pulp, and I'm not talking about the plotlines. Of course these were not only La Fille's absolute favourites but some of her most expensive books as the English ones had been ordered and sent from the UK.

The ceiling plaster has gone all scabby and yellow and looks like over-ripe brie and the polished parquet has turned a dull milky colour. Hoppity the rabbit who took a heroic soaking to spare the others has a disturbing orange stain across his face, but it will probably wash out. The books, however, have so far resisted a blow dry with the hair drier and will have to be binned. This is terrible and La Fille knows it. She loves books and we have instilled in her an absolute respect for them.

We will not only have to buy new books but pay for the flood damage as, under bizarre rules we should claim off our insurance even though it's not our fault. As there has hardly been a six month period when we have NOT been drenched by our neighbours, our insurance company has "fired" us. Worse, even though none of these incidents were our fault no other insurance company will give us cover. Our French bank finally agreed to insure us so long as we paid an exorbitant premium and promised not to claim for flood damage for three years. Hard to believe, but true.

We hammered on the neighbours' door and they said something along the lines of: "Are you sure it's us?" There then followed a conversation worthy of Estragon and Vladimir about whether the water could have come from somewhere else; an original idea as there are no other water pipes but those of our neighbours anywhere within 20 feet of the leak. The Frenchman stuck to reasoning while I was ready to smash someone's head in with a mushy copy of the adventures of a British schoolboy and his little sister. God knows my patience has been saintlike until now: tomorrow I'm calling an estate agent.

Cold Comfort

2008-08-12T23:59:00.003+02:00

No wonder British people are depressed. Wouldn't you want to put your head down the toilet and flush it when it rains through August and you know after that it's just going to turn rainier and colder. In truth, the national malaise has nothing to do with credit, crunches or crises, it's about cumulonimbus praecipitao and its ubiquitous cousins.

There we all were in stringy dresses and micro-thin strappy here-comes-the-sun t-shirts expecting summer. We are Londoners. We are eternally optimistic and snatch hope from the ether. We are waiting for summer. We do not expect the city to morph into Barbados or the Bahamas or even Bognor Regis in its Victorian summer heyday. We are low maintenance sun worshippers. We don't need the full roast, not even a sub mark 2. Just a gentle low grill to take the edge off the omniprescent gloom. Instead we hunch into bitter winds that whip around bare shoulders and ankles and turn the hoped-for golden tan into goose bumps.

There was a moment last week as La Fille and I huddled together for warmth under a pushchair blanket (the only warm thing we could find) on the sofa wearing all the clothes we had with us to watch Monsters, Inc., (she won't watch it alone) when I seriously considered sparking the central heating. Central heating in August? How depressing is that?

Forced to abandon the park and go stir crazy indoors, I bit my mother's head off every time she launched into a "the trouble with this country is..." conversation. "Don't believe all that milk-and-honey tosh about France," I said expounding at length my unpopular theory that there is a reason Great Britain is called what it is. The problem was that with every raindrop that wept hysterically down the window pane I was tempted to agree with her. It didn't help when the Frenchman called and described in detail the seven circles of sweaty hell he was enduring in Paris: "It was so hot last night I could hardly sleep," he said. As he moaned about the heat, I wished death by a thousand pointy icicles upon him.

A few days later he arrived in London put on his linen shorts and predicted optimistically that there would be a change in the 'meteo'. He opened the back door - left it open - and went out to smoke a filterless Gitane. Within ten minutes max his knees had turned a kind of glassy blue colour. He scuttled upstairs to find a pair of trousers. "So it is true what they say about summer in England," he said rhetorically, disappearing before I could think of a pithy reply.

I'm depressed and I don't even live here anymore.

Gone swimming

2008-08-06T00:32:00.004+02:00

London is a curious place in August. It is open, unlike Paris. But it is wet. It is cold. And because it is wet and cold and August, it is bloody miserable. Have I reverse hibernated and woken up in winter? Of course I didn't bring a thick jumper, a raincoat and an umbrella. I thought it was summer. There was so much rain ducks had moved into the puddles on the common. Last evening, La Fille and I huddled together for warmth on the sofa and watched Monsters, Inc. I was a shiver away from turning on the central heating and digging out a water bottle.

Then today as I was walking to the Post Office in a summer dress stomping and cursing the weather, an ambulance sped past, lights flashing, siren wailing. There was a tailback of traffic at the lights, but everyone moved out of its way. White van man pulled onto the pavement. Boy racer edged in behind. The lorry driver who had been going so fast he sent an arc of grey spray our way - maybe he thought it was summer as well - pulled off the road too. Impatient pedestrians leaped back onto the pavement. The ambulance sped onwards to its emergency without so much as a single flash of brake. In eight years, I have never seen this happen in Paris. I thought: It may be cold and wet and miserable in August, but it's damn civilised here.

Gone fishing.

2008-08-03T10:53:00.004+02:00

Paris is a curious place in August. It has always seemed to me odd that a first world capital should all but shut down for a month - it used to be two months - but then I'm not French. Parisians seem to think it normal that it's next to impossible to get an appointment with a doctor, dentist, specialist or even a plumber, builder, solicitor, until after La Rentrée in September. Of course you can argue this is a good thing; less stress, more leisure, slower pace of life et al; all fine unless you need a doctor, dentist, plumber in Paris in August. A couple of years ago a 40+ friend undergoing IVF treatment in those twilight years of dwindling fertility when every minute let alone every month seems to count, was told in June to report back to her specialist in September. It wasn't that he would be on holiday for three months, he explained, but someone involved in the procreation process would be so it wasn't worth starting. She cried all the way home. Her gynaecologist was right. French hospitals in August make the NHS look overstaffed.

In August French newspapers and magazines go into summer mode. Their pages are filled with timeless, repeat features produced well in advance so their journalists can take the summer off. In any case, it is extremely hard to buy a newspaper or magazine since, though the French press is in a sales crisis, most of the kiosks are closed too. Parking in much of Paris is also free, presumably because the traffic wardens are all on holiday, and many shops and restaurants close while their owners head south even though it is the peak of the tourist season.

When I first arrived in France fellow journalists joked how each summer they wrote stories about Paris families dumping granny outside the hospital - even if she wasn't sick - putting the children into holiday camps, kicking the dog out of the car on the motorway and disappearing down south for les vacances. I laughed but thought they were pedaling cheap stereotypes. Then in 2003 Europe had one of its hottest summers on record. In France, a whisker short of 15,000 people died, most of them elderly, many of them left by their families in hospitals and care homes and nearly all of them from a lack of water. Pretty basic stuff. Two weeks later there were still unidentified and in an emergency morgue in a refrigerated warehouse at a food market on the outskirts of Paris. Again, basic stuff: the victims' families had gone on holiday leaving Mamie and Papie behind, had heard reports of the heatwave killing the elderly - they can hardly have missed them because for once the French newspapers, radio and television had some real summer news to report - but had apparently not telephoned to find out if they were all right and still alive.

Sometimes reality is stranger than stereotype: the majority of French people I have met believe they are entitled to go on holiday for large swathes of July and/or August even if it means the country virtually closing down. The peak of this national inactivity is August 15, the Ascension bank holiday, which is odd in a country that vaunts its secular credentials. Having this day off and if possible several either side is the norm. Last year, the 21-year-old son of some French friends doing six-weeks' paid work experience during his 12-week summer break was genuinely horrified when he was told he could have Wednesday 15 August off - it was a national holiday after all - but not the Thursday and Friday afterwards. This meant he could not go away for five days. I fully expected a dossier to be sent to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.

Unlike in Britain where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about who is in charge of the clattering country while Gordon Brown is on holiday, nobody, as far as I know, is standing in while François Fillon the French prime minister is away. They are all away too. Normal service will be resumed in September.

The Dance of the Seven Doo Doos

2008-08-01T21:40:00.004+02:00

We are heading back to London to pack up the place there and mark the end of our year-long cross Channel adventure; not celebrate exactly as the idea of giving up my London bolthole does not fill me with unconfined job. What an adventure it has been. La Fille can now shout at me in English AND French, throw bilingual tantrums and can now say things like: "Oh do stop being ever so very boring," when I go on at her. Before she spoke to me in French because it was easier. Now she speaks to me in French just to annoy me. It's progress. What's more, no shrink in sight.

And never let it be said that I have neglected to educate La Fille in the many and varied facets of English "culture".

The other morning I found her in the kitchen scantily clad with two of her scrappy linen security blankets - known in France as "doudous' pronounced doo-doos - tied around her, one round the chest, the other the waist - dancing in front of the microwave door to Oh I do Like to Be Beside the Seaside. As I said, progress!

Other People's Wars

2008-07-28T21:28:00.033+02:00

For the last week I've been writing about animals and boules and an off-tune accordian player and city beaches... I thought long and hard about writing the following because it isn't about Paris or London - the theme of the blog. It isn't even vaguely amusing and it is probably of no interest to readers who want fun and games from France. Maybe. Maybe not. Apologies, but I had to get this off my chest.

They arrested Radovan Karadzic and I've been raising glasses to this long-awaited if not happy event since a Balkan friend sent me the news by SMS last week. "Dr K picked up" was all it said. Normally, I don't believe in wishing anyone ill but I will make an exception for Dr Karadzic sometimes known as the Butcher of the Balkans, though there were a number of rivals for the title. When arrested, this evil little man, like Saddam Hussein, had turned himself into a Father Christmas complete with bushy beard and "who me?" expression. I expect some youngsters didn't even know who he was and others thought "so what", but lest we forget: this is the man directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people and the worst atrocities and slaughter in Europe since the Second World War. The dry death toll figures still being haggled over, fail miserably to convey the tragedy of Bosnia and of Karadzic's victims. The slaughtered. The tortured. The raped. The women who lost husbands and sons. The children who lost fathers and brothers. The boys who lost their lives. The girls who lost their innocence. The people who lost their homes and personal history. The civilians rounded up and taken by bus to dig trenches to be lined up, shot and buried where they fell. The prisoners starved, tortured and forced to perform unspeakably inhuman acts on each other for the amusement of Dr Karadzic's sadistic foot soldiers. The women and girls raped as an act of power and humiliation. Pensioners chopped up with chainsaws by the same neighbours they'd drunk coffee with, whose sons had married their daughters. The "lucky"; the dispossessed forced to flee with little more than the clothes in which they stood and the "unlucky"; those burned alive in their homes, their charred skeletons twisted in agony like nightmarish models for Munch's Scream.

I met Dr Karadzic, a practising psychiatrist and cod poet in Sarajevo before the war, at the Bosnian Serb military HQ in Pale, the mountaintop town from where he masterminded the siege of the Bosnian capital and its Muslim population. He had foppy hair, a flaccid handshake, pockets full of maps and a tenuous grasp on reality. Even more scary was his daughter Sonja, a small, plump ugly Medusa with wild hair and a penchant for stiletto heels, brassy make-up and inappropriately short skirts. She was the Bosnian Serb press spokeswoman and terrified the soldiers biletted at Pale, of whom one over-promoted and weedy specimin was introduced as her boyfriend. He had the haunted look of a man who was about to have his balls ripped off if he hadn't already. The first, and thankfully only, time we met Sonja ended up inviting me and the photographer to do a Paris Match-style 'at home' piece with her and her ghastly family. The photographer was mortified, thinking she was hitting on him. He was more afraid of her than her spotty-faced soldier boy. She urged me to come saying, without the slightest irony, that I would see how the world had misjudged her father. I remember she was particularly keen for me to see how wonderful he was with the family dog and to show how the animal reciprocated this adoration as if this was the key to rehabilitating his reputation as a monster. Dr Karadzic, kind to (Serb) children and animals? I wondered if this was some kind of clever double-reverse propaganda trick that was not what it seemed, but realised she was deadly serious and just plain bonkers. So bonkers I wanted to do it. I told her I might stand a better chance of getting back over the mountains at a later date to do the assignment if her father would stop the Bosnian Serb artillery pounding Sarajevo and call off the snipers picking people off the streets. She laughed, a mad, deluded laugh that even seemed to unhinge wild nimbus of hair around her over-painted face. She looked like a badly-drawn villainess from a children's cartoon. She said: "Those aren't Serb guns or Serb snipers. They're Bosnian Muslims killing their own people. They blame Serbs to make us look bad." She knew I had driven past the artillery positions, had seen the Serb uniforms, had noted the Serb flags. She is out of her tiny mind, I thought.

It was equally depressing to witness the impotent and incompetent heights scaled by the United Nations. This reached its apogee in Srebrenica but there were other stupendous failures. Few of us who worked in Bosnia will forget how in 1993 French UN troops taking Hakija Turaljic, the Bosnian deputy Prime Minister, to a meeting stood by as Bosnian Serb soldiers dragged him out of the vehicle and shot him dead. In front of them. (After the war, when Dr Karadzic went into hiding, French troops who controlled the area where he was, were accused of tipping him off whenever snatch squads were ready to pick him up.) In the UN's supposed "safe haven" of Gorazde British troops were too late to stop another wave of what became known as "ethnic cleansing". They could not do much even when several of their own men were kidnapped. Their frustrated commander told me the Serbs had overrun the town, summoned local Bosnian Muslims - known as Bosniacs - and told them: "You have 24 hours. Stay or go. It's up to you". Those men who stayed were rounded up and fed to the local sawmill. Those who fled were hunted down with dogs like animals and slaughtered. This experienced British commander looked visibly shocked as he described how he and his men had come across the bodies of Bosniacs who had been crucified with nails on trees as a warning to others. In central Bosnia young British squaddies grew increasing angry when they were unable to prevent bloodshed because of orders from on high that effectively tied one hand behind their back; or more accurately had one hand rummaging in their fatigues for the plastic laminated card they had to carry. This regulation prompt had something like "United Nations troops. Drop your weapon or I'll shoot," written in all local languages and they were supposed to shout this - in all local languages - before even so much as releasing the safety catch on their weapons. Highly trained soldiers with sophisticated equipment found themselves completely stymied if the local drunk pointed his rusty machine gun at one of them - and there were a lot of drunks with machine guns - and threatened to shoot. His comrades were under absolute orders not to fire unless they themselves were directly targeted. Gentlemen's rules of war dreamed up by armchair generals and politicians in a country where every bozo and his bozo dog had a khaki uniform, a kalashnikov and a checkpoint. It would have been funny if it had not been so tragic.

In the beginning foreign correspondents were greeted like saviours. "Help us", "Do something", women would beseech us. They would pull us into their homes to tell us their tragedies while the resident grandma, small scarved figures with faces as round and brown as hazelnuts, sat cross-legged on a scratchy woven rug in the corner of the room grinding, grinding, grinding coffee in ornate brass mills; a seemingly interminable process that would end some time later in the production of thick treacly coffee. We did the only thing we could: we reported, we wrote and day after day, week after week, we filed our stories and pictures. Nothing happened. Over crackly satellite telephones, we were accused of "going native" or taking sides or exaggerating and even turning Bosnia into a media war. God how I wish some of the dreadful stories I wrote had been sensationalised and not true. As the war ground on through the 1990s as relentlessly and interminably as the brass coffee mills, people despaired and became angry with us. They still invited us in for coffee, if they still had some, but the pleas turned to accusations: "Why don't you help us?", "Why don't you do something?". We would sit with the women who had lost their husbands, fathers and sons - in some cases dozens of menfolk in one family - and would hang our heads and cry with them, they in grief and sorrow we in shame. Afterwards we journalists would go off and get drunk on local beer that had a nasty tang of aluminium, which we joked blackly would give us Alzheimers if the Serbs didn't get us first.

Then we all went home and got on with out lives, all of us damaged in some way by the passing of Dr Karazdic's cold, cruel hand over the beautiful land that was once Yugoslavia, though none of us so much as those we left behind who had felt its icy touch.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic brought it all back. For me it was a moment for celebration though the champagne is still on ice until Dr K's henchman turned nemesis Ratko Mladic is under lock and key or under ground.

I never got to do the "At Home" with the Balkan Butcher and his family pet. My newspaper editor decided nobody was really interested. That was the story of Bosnia those days and even now it makes me angry. Western politicians deciding it wasn't really a war and if it was it was someone else's; armchair editors deciding it wasn't a story.

Animal Magic

2008-07-28T14:00:00.004+02:00

School holidays in Paris; it has to be a trip to the zoo. "Yippee! Youpee! Hurray! Hurrah!" trumpeted La Fille demonstrating that even in excitement her bilingual skills know no bounds. "Don't get too excited," I cautioned. "We don't know what's there."

Everyone had declared the Paris parc zoologique to be "a sad place". Of course it's sad, I thought. What do they expect? I mean, when was the last time you saw baby giraffes frolicking in a city centre. Zoos, even the very best, are inherently sad places for sad people who cannot think of better things to do with their children then go see stir-crazy animals that shouldn't be in captivity but roaming the savannah and the jungle and the swamps, but that have forgotten where they come from. In some you have to pay a fortune for such sadness. London Zoo for example charged £8 entry the last time I went and it was only when we had parted with our hard-earned cash and were through the gates we discovered the really interesting animals were either dead or had been moved to the countryside. The thing is, every one of those people who said "Don't go" to the Paris zoo admitted they hadn't been near the place for, let's see, at least 30 years and were only repeating what they'd heard. So off we went for a spot of fact checking.

It was an unpromising start. A big sign by entrance announced that the zoological parc is closing this winter - officially for three years but probably longer - that the elephants and bears had been taken away and that the baboons were not on view because of an unspecified "technical problem". What sort of technical problems might baboons suffer, I wondered? Tail swing malfunction? Perhaps their batteries had run out. Still, entrance was only 5 euros - a snip compared with London - and the zebras, giraffes and penguins were still in situ.

La Fille of course loved it. She is of that wonderful age when all animals are a revelation, even ants. Once I had dragged her away from a tame cat, not one of the exhibits, she squealed with excitement at very ordinary donkeys, domestic goats and shaggy llama. I expected her to almost wet herself when we found the giraffes - a couple of self-satisfied males outnumbered by young mums standing around chewing the cud while their offspring gangled around - but she was more interested in a dozen gigantic fish in some very dirty water. To be honest, this was the saddest part; the general dirtiness. However, what made the entrance fee worth every centime were the various excuses for this. By the penguin enclosure a permanent plastic sign announced that on account of it being the "love season", the area had not been cleaned so as not to disturb the birds. Clearly there had been some complaints about the hippo pool because the permanent sign by it was even better and worth a full and faithful translation.

REGARDING THE COLOUR OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUSES WATER

The water in the hippopotamuses pool is changed (2 times a week) and yet it is still dirty.

In fact, hippopotamuses don't like clean water.

No sooner is the basin cleaned, they go and soil it with their excrement...it's their way of hiding and of marking their territory: they are saying "This is my pool!"

Hmmm. Did the hippos say they liked wallowing in their own poo? La Fille and I stood upwind.

They all came down to Montreux

2008-07-27T19:48:00.006+02:00

Another in the occasion series entitled: Only in France.

Busker outside a Paris metro station today playing (badly) the Deep Purple classic Smoke on the Water...on an accordian. You had to be there to hear it and of a certain age to recognise what it was!