Wake-up call.

It is 6am when our daughter scrambles into bed with us. The clock says 7am but it has not been changed. She is as warm as a lightly toasted brioche and exudes that sweet vanilla smell common to toddlers. I bury my nose in her silky hair. A chubby pyjama-clad arm shoots around my neck. “I lub you mama”, she says. My heart pangs so intensely the pleasure is painful. “I love you too,” I whisper, trying not to wake her father. She turns to him, strokes his cheek and says: “sh tem papa”. Surely even a morning do-not-disturb grump like the Frenchman, cannot resist. It is what you get with a bilingual child; love in two languages.

However dog tired I am, and these days I am usually so tired in the mornings I feel sick, there is no better way to start the day than a two year old’s declaration of love. It is better even than pulling the curtains to sunshine; the sort of alarm call that makes you vow to keep everything in perspective for the next 24 hours. So I try not to be too tetchy when five minutes later she announces: “I veut my lait avec you”, a perfectly symmetric Franglais demand, but a demand nonetheless. This means one of us (and just recently it has been me because of course I do not work any more) has to get up and warm her morning milk. Today she wants her milk at 6.09am. I drag myself out of bed, shove the milk into the microwave on autopilot, sway sleepily for one minute until the oven goes ‘ping’, stumble back to bed and hand it over without a word. Out of the darkness comes a "Zank you". When she was younger and just weaned, I used to hold her in my arms, as she guzzled her morning milk from a bottle, sitting uncomfortably in the bed, rigid back supported by a flaccid pillow, praying she would drink quickly before my spine gave out. Nowadays, she sits on her own and I utter silent prayers for her to take as long as possible. “Oh, just one more minute, one more minute,” I implore. It never works: seconds later she thrusts the empty bottle imperiously in my direction and utters the first of the day’s many sentences starting: “I want, I want” or "Je veux, je veux". They say babies immersed in two languages are often slow to speak. We have not noticed this with La Fille. In fact, as well as French and English she has recently developed a third language that may as well be Greek, Double Dutch and Croat combined for all we understand. I do not have a clue what this babble is, or where she learned it, but I wish she would stop because I am getting it in the neck from her grandmothers. She babbles down the phone to England and my mother says: “Goodness, she is speaking a lot of French” in a voice that suggests this is definitely not a good thing. She babbles down the phone to my French mother-in-law who says: “Oh la, she speaks a lot of English", in a tone that suggests this is not good either. I joke that neither her father nor I know what on earth she is talking about, but I have the distinct impression they do not believe me.

Back to this morning and, half a minute after I have done the milk round, the demands start: “Mama, Mama, MAMA, I wan do sum draring”, “Mama, Mama, MAMA I wan a puzil.. jeux jeux…”. Sometimes I try to ignore her, but she holds an ace.

“Mama, Mama, MAMA. PEE PEE.” This, she knows, is guaranteed to have me leaping out of bed and rushing to find the potty. From there it is just a short walk to the kitchen and breakfast.

Today, the Frenchman, twitches an eyelid and grunts: “Go back to sleep, it’s still night time.”

“Give her a break,” I say. “How is she to know the clocks went back at the weekend?”

The Nanny State

Hooray for the nanny state!

We have found a place for La Fille at the Halte Garderie, a sort of drop-in nursery, in Paris. The way it works: she can go for up to four hours in the morning or up to four hours in the afternoon up to five times a week. Each four-hour slot costs the princely sum of 10,28 euros (£7.15). The place is run by an exceptionally friendly woman and is remarkably flexible. They do not mind her dropping out for a fortnight at a time, and will not even charge us for missed days, if I give them 24-hours notice. Frankly, it is the least I can do. I was keen that, having taken her out of the full-time crèche, she should still have a chance to play with children her own age and this is perfect.

State child-care facilities in France are really very good. The crèche, run by the local Mairie or town hall, cost us 23,75 euros a day (£16.51). It is less for children from large families or parents on low incomes. It, like other state-run crèches, took infants from birth and was from 8am until 6.30pm. Lunch, an afternoon snack and nappies were included. The charges were tax deductible.

Given this, it is hardly surprising that every new French mother’s dream is a place in a crèche. Each adopts her own tactics for persuading the civil servant that heads the Mairie’s committee for allocating places, that her life depends on getting one. Some cry, some ring every day to cry, some picket the offices crying. Mothers who had places advised me the key was persistence and being a pain in the rear. So I rang almost every week for several months and made appointments at which I wailed about having no friends or family in Paris to look after my poor child and would lose my job if she did not go to the crèche (the sad thing was it was almost all true). I delivered this sob-story in increasingly hysterical pidgin French, punctuated with regular sniffs into a damp tissue. After several repeat performances at the Mairie, La Fille was offered a place. There was no explanation of how or why I had succeeded while other parents, whose performance skills were probably equally good and who were probably equally deserving, had not. I did not push my luck by asking.

In London, most state-run nurseries I have found will not take children before they are three years old. Private nurseries I contacted charge between £50 and £60 a day. How can ordinary (ie not wealthy) parents afford this? At that rate full-time nursery care for someone working 222 days a year (252 working days minus 30 days of holiday) comes to around £13,000. One French friend, considering moving to London, refused to believe me until I slapped the glossy brochure for one private nursery under her nose. “What the hell are giving them for that money?”, she wanted to know. “Caviar and silk nappies?”

In Paris, although demand far outstrips supply – only around 25,000 crèche places for an estimated 72,000 under-3s – the capital boasts more than 320 public crèches offering good, safe and affordable child care. The Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe has promised to build more each year and, while it is not happening fast enough for everyone, he is keeping that promise. This is the state behaving like Nanny, but in a positive way.

The Frog and the Rosbif

The Frenchman has come up with some more things he likes about London.

These are:
a) How “sympa” (nice), polite and helpful Londoners are.
b) How numerous and well-equipped the children’s playgrounds are.
c) How parks and commons are filled with kids playing football at 8am on a Saturday morning.
d) The pubs (which are not called something like 'The Frog and Rosbif' as they are in Paris, but have proper names like 'The Queen Victoria' or 'The Bricklayers Trowel').
e) The pubs (again, even though he is no longer allowed to polute the atmosphere inside with his filterless Gitanes).
f) The pubs (yet again)
g) Salt and vinegar crisps.

Talking of Frogs and Rosbifs; I may just get away with England beating France in the Rugby World Cup if England beat South Africa tonight. Then the French can salvage some national pride after being trounced by Argentina yesterday evening, by claiming they were knocked out by the world champions. Mixed marriages can be very complicated.

Smiles apart

There are quite a few French children in our nearest playground in London. Consequently there are quite a few French mothers. You can tell them from the English mothers, Scottish nannies, Polish au pairs and Russian grandmothers because while the others are trailing around after their offspring or charges, the French maman tend to keep their distance. They are usually sitting on the benches or – when it is dry enough – the grass as far away as possible from any children and looking in the opposite direction. They are nearly all stick thin and elegantly dressed (OK so I'm jealous), smoke and have a tendency to toss their heads like overbred racehorses. They are nearly always in earnest conversation with another French mother or on their mobile phone. Often, because they are busy nattering and looking in the opposite direction, they do not notice when their child nosedives from the climbing frame with a “Maman. Regard, Maman”, or when same child is lying on the ground underneath the climbing frame from which he or she has just plummeted, and is not moving. Only if another concerned mother approaches the child to check if they are breathing and not paralysed, will the elegant French maman finally notice and stop nattering. Invariably, she will then stand up and glare the sort of glare that could start another Hundred Years’ War. I wonder if they are the same at home.

This is not gratuitous French-bashing; take a look at a playground near you where there is a Gallic presence and tell me this is not true. There are exceptions but on the whole I have found French mums in Paris and in London to be unfriendly. There, I have said it. In their defence I suspect it is yet another Anglo-Gallic cultural difference and nothing personal. Nor does it apply to French mums in the French countryside who, in my experience, will talk to anyone. When I first moved to Paris, a French acquaintance explained that, "unlike you Anglo-Saxons", the French do not smile at strangers. This was pure hypocrisy on our part, she declared, since there was no reason for us to smile. French people, she added, smile when someone deserves a smile. You have to earn it; as a result it is genuine. So that explained it; the French were not glaring, it was just they were not smiling. Since then this acquaintance has become a friend, and a mother. She is not stick thin, does not smoke and we both like a good natter, so I asked her why other French mothers come across as so unfriendly. She said she had never really noticed. Wishing to remain friends, I dropped the subject, but it is something that still perplexes me.

Like many playground-frequenting parents, I have tended to no few little people who have eaten dirt after going head first down the slide faster than they expected. I have stopped babies scoffing the sandpit and prevented toddlers from running into the path of swings and having their heads stoved in. Last week I stood guard over a disgusting, excrement covered bench in the playground to stop anyone treading or sitting in the mess and, at the same time, phoned the local park’s authority to ask someone to come immediately and clean it up. The two English, one Welsh, and two Eastern European women I headed off from the merde thanked me. The French mother I warned looked at me as if I was personally responsible for it and turned on her elegant heels without a word. I was not expecting a medal, but a smile would have been nice. I think I earned it.