Food, glorious food

I am astonished at how cheap food is in British supermarkets. This has been puzzling me for some time; the paradox that French restaurants are much cheaper than British restaurants when the basic ingredients are so much more expensive to buy in Paris than in London. What started me thinking about this again, was the enormous box containing a full kilogram of cornflakes (yes, I realise French restaurants rarely serve cornflakes, but still) I picked up at the local supermarket. It became a centrepiece during the French friends' visit, mostly because it was so obscenely large it would not fit in any cupboard, so was shuffled from surface to surface always in view. Given their general astonishment at its size, I need not have bothered taking them to the Tate Modern or Covent Garden but should have put it on a table with a sign: 'Box of Cornflakes 2007 - Anonymous'. They had a point. It really was a monstrosity. I only bought it because I thought the boys liked cereals for breakfast. They do but not, it turned out, cornflakes.

Then there are the ever increasingly complicated offers: buy-one-get-one-free, buy-one-get-one-half-price, buy-two-get-the-third-free, buy-three-get-the-cheapest-free. I said to my husband: "Why don't they just make one item, half the price?", in much the same way I used to berate British Telecom sales people who cold-called with: "Why don't you just make all calls cheaper instead of allowing me to ring someone for half the price as long as they're a friend or relative and it's 3am on a Bank Holiday Tuesday morning?". The Frenchman scratched his head: "But then people would only buy one," he said. Exactly. So we buy twice as much as we set out to buy. Do we subsequently: a) eat twice as much in the same amount of time; b) make the double helping last twice the time or c) end up throwing the double portion away because it has gone off?

As someone known to scorn ready-made meals and fast food, I am ashamed to say I was waylaid in Marks & Spencer, while looking for socks, by some three-for-the-price of-two-curries with a couple of two-for-the-price-of-one nan bread and a pack of just-pay-the-bloody-price-on-the-label poppadoms to feed my parents who came to visit this week. As I was heading for the check-out I passed the cakes and was tempted. After all, my mother was looking after La Fille while my stepfather rewired the living room lights, so desserts were justified. I picked up one Swiss roll (priced £1.49) then noticed it had a glowing sticker screaming 'Two for £2'. I picked up a second, put it in the basket, then put it back. "We are not going to eat two Swiss rolls", I decided. But how could I resist paying just 50p more for a second pudding? I snatched a second. Later, the four of us, the chocoholic La Fille included, failed to finish off just one. The other I stuck in a very large bag for my mother to take home, along with the cornflakes.

SOS. Save Our Station

It was a beautifully crisp blue-sky morning so I decided to take La Fille to Battersea Park on the bus. She had declared it to be a "lovely sunny day". Sometimes this statement is a true reflection of the weather; sometimes, given the grey clouds outside, I can only assume she is referring to her mood. This day, it was both so we jumped off the bus near Chelsea Bridge and,wrapped up in scarves and pointy woolly hats, stumbled through piles of browning yellow leaves as she shrieked with excitement and urged: "Run, Mama, run." Later we laid out lunch on one of the wooden tables in children's playground, which, like much of the park, was eerily empty. I loved Battersea Park when I lived in London. I loved the optimistic idealism of the Peace Pagoda, I loved the park's tranquility and detachment from everything around it. I loved feeding the ducks and rowing boats on the lake and I loved watching the wallabies, which have now gone. I especially loved being able to gaze out at the Battersea Power Station nearby, and to salute its defiance and triumph over both the Luftwaffe and the property developers who hoped if left to rot long enough it would simply fall down. Living in France for the last few years, Battersea Power Station has also come to symbolise something else: a return home. As the Eurostar trundled past it I would scan the distant horizon trying to identify the street where I bought my first flat or the pretty bridges along this stretch of the Thames - Chelsea, Albert, Battersea - their twee twinkling night lights since outshone by the wattage from a thousand luxury apartments. I feared for the station's future waiting heart in mouth for it to appear and dreading a day when I would gaze out from the Eurostar window and see nothing but a pile of rubble prepared for another of the dazzling housing developments that have sprouted around the station in stark contrast to its brooding splendour. While millions were being splashed out around it, nobody - except a few dedicated locals - seemed to care what happened to the magnificent centrepiece.

It is a long time since I lived anywhere near Battersea Power Station, but in recent years I have used it as a symbolic point of reference to La Fille. "Look, look," I would say, nudging her like an over-excited child and pointing to the chimneys. "That's where Mama used to live." Even at two-and-a-half she would give me that 'Oh-yeah-tell-me-another-one' look. Now I have left it too late to use this as an excuse to share a family legend with her: that my grandfather carved his initials at the top of one of the chimneys. This was not some staggeringly daring act of vandalism; apparently at the time he was working on the power station designed by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott, who, incidentally, also designed the red telephone box. When I was much younger and took everything literally, I wanted desperately to scale the chimneys - unfortunately nobody in the family knew which one grandad had left his moniker - to find out if this was actually true. I was even once tempted to write to 'Jim'll Fix It' to see if he could arrange a climb for me, but it seemed a tad naff and something you would not want your friends watching on a Sunday evening. As I grew older and accustomed to the the tinkle of shattered illusions I decided I would rather take the family legend at face value. That way, as the Eurostar trundled past Battersea Power Station I could conjure up a picture of my lovely grandad, puffing a Senior Service cigarette, scratching JWP into one of the white table-leg chimneys. As I read about the Queen opening St Pancras station this week I realised with a pang of sadness this is a pleasure I have experienced for the last time.

Shibboleth and still life

We went to the Tate Modern with the visiting French friends. They were horrified by the cost of public transport so bought the cheapest option: one day bus passes, which made getting there a mission and a half involving a circuitous route through parts of South London not normally on the tourist route. It was a false economy; instead of spending half the day steeped in Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism we endured the Gritty Realism of London traffic jams. It took so long to get anywhere near the Tate Modern that in spite of having had breakfast before they left everyone was hungry by the time we arrived. It was decided that Braque and Picasso would have to wait. The teenage boys would have headed for the nearest McDonalds had they known where to find one, but the parents wanted something better though not too expensive (quite a challenge on a South Bank heaving with tourists waiting to be relieved of their cash). We settled on a pub and sat outside where I helpfully pointed out London landmarks including the 'Cornichon', known to locals as the Gherkin building. Luckily they had all finished eating by the time the waiter revealed himself to be a disgruntled French student. He fell upon his compatriots like long-lost cousins: "How are you liking London? Food's not great here eh? I work 55 hours a week and get paid a pittance. I miss France and the 35-hour week and the minumum wage." I kept quiet. He assumed I was one of them. I pondered how much rope to give him, hoping he would feel ashamed at his whingeing diatribe against my home city when he realised I was not. The French nodded sympathetically; they looked at me. "Oh come on, it's not that bad," I said in French, knowing my accent would give me away. The student waiter did not seem at all shame-faced and actually gave a young man's slouchy version of the famous Gallic shrug. At that point, I am afraid I bit the bait: "All I am going to say," I said in French, "is what I say to whinging Brits in France: if you don't like it you can always go home." Even as I uttered the words I had a horrible thought: "I hope I don't sound like a card-carrying member of the Front National."

Tate Modern was a huge success. Everyone loved the 'Shibboleth' crack in the Turbine Hall floor. I made a valiant attempt to translate the leaflet we had been handed explaining what it all meant, while at the same time trying to stop La Fille, who was charging around like a demon (e-numbers in the pub sausages I suspect?) from actually falling into the crevice. The leaflet, which very sensibly advises visitors to "watch your step" describes this work by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo as representing, among many other things, division, racism, marginalisation along with the "brutal narratives of colonialism...and the stand-off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres". Thought-provoking stuff, though most of the youngsters present seemed more interested in contemplating what was inside the crack than what it all meant. The most wonderful, evocative paragraph, however, was the explanation of the history of the word 'shibboleth'. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is 'a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly. Apparently this refers back to an incident in The Book of Judges in the Bible that describes how the Ephraimites, attempting to flee across the River Jordan, were stopped by their enemies, the Gileadites. The Ephraimite dialect did not include the sound 'sh' so in order to identify and kill them the Gileadites put each prisoner to a simple test by asking them to say 'Shibboleth'. Those who could not say the 'sh', and they numbered 42,000, were killed. Terrible, but you have to admit, devilishly clever. I could have tucked these details into a little pocket in my head and gone home happy, but the Cubists, Modernists and Vorticists were waiting on the 5th Floor. I knew I had a limited window of opportunity to interest La Fille, so I dragged her to the first Picasso in the room and began cooing in a way that makes me want to gag when I hear other mothers doing it: "Look at this lovely picture, what can you see?" in my most encouraging voice. But even as I wittered and tipped her chubby face up to examine Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle I knew it was a lost cause. "Games," she said pointing outside the exhibition room where a series of not-uninteresting (the first time at least) interactive games and models have been set up. "Games." And that is as far as I got. I left Tate Modern listening to the others talking about what they had seen, feeling a complete Philistine. All I had done was walked across a cracked concrete floor, gazed at one Picasso (briefly) and helped La Fille turn a knob to change a lens and distort the shape of a model cow inside a box oh, I would say roughly one hundred times.
Still, at least I had the 'Shibboleth' gem tucked away.

Lost Battle of Waterloo

Eurostar is counting down to the launch of its new terminal at St Pancras on November 18. As I write there are - according to the website - just 19 days 9 hours and 23 minutes to go. I wish that clock would stop. I can wait. I do not mind staying on the train to Waterloo even if it takes 15 minutes or even an hour longer.

Forgive me for not cracking open the bubbly. Call me selfish but redirecting the Eurostar to ‘St Pancras International’ is not a cause for celebration as far as I am concerned, however big or bright or beautiful the new station is and despite it having 'The Longest Champagne Bar in Europe'.

Right now I can do Paris to London door-to-door with literally no sweat, even with baggage, pushchair and a toddler insisting I carry her and her Dora the Explorer backpack. From November 18, I will have to cart the above across or under the whole of Central London. I am so depressed and in denial about this I have not yet bothered to work out how it can be done apart from stumping up a small fortune for a taxi. I fear I will be forced underground into that particular circle of hell, the Northern Line, or the awful Victoria Line. On a recent trip, realising I needed to face reality, I asked a Eurostar person how I could get from St Pancras to south London. She looked at me blankly and said it was “up to passengers to make their own way to and from the Eurostar”. Very helpful. Another Eurostar employee said he thought “British Rail” (does it still exist?) was planning a link from St Pancras to the south and south west. He added it would not be built for several years. "If ever," I thought.

Part of the thinking behind putting the Eurostar terminal in north London – the opposite side of the city to the nearest point of France – is to give visitors access to the north of England. The Eurostar website boasts “London and Beyond”, vaunting the accessibility of Rugby, Leicester, Peterborough, Luton and Cambridge. I have nothing against these places, but I would venture a bet that the majority of people on a London-bound Eurostar are going to London to see London. The majority, I said, not all. A large number of passengers are either on business and their business is in London – otherwise surely they would fly – or they are tourists. Tourists may want to visit the north, south, east and west extremes of England, not to mention Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and why not? But most will do so after they have ‘done’ London. I have had countless conversations on Eurostar trains in the last few years and I have yet to meet anyone planning to leap off and immediately head north. As for St Pancras being easier for those in the north wanting to get to France, no-frills airlines are even easier and cheaper.

In Paris, there is a logic to the location of railway stations: trains from the Gare du Nord go, you guessed, north; trains from the Gare de l’Est, east; from the Gare de Lyon, south and from Gare St-Lazare, west. Why, when some Eurostar trains stop at Calais, some stop at Lille, some stop at Ashford and some are going to stop at a new station in Kent called Ebbsfleet as well, is it not possible for some Eurostar trains, just one or two, to stop at Waterloo?

The very thought of struggling across London with that Dora the Explorer rucksack – the last straw - makes me want to lie down exhausted. Why I am ranting when I should be saving my breath?

It is now 19 days 7 hours 55 minutes and counting.

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.

Shoot the Messenger

There are many, many good things about living in France. I regret to say, the French press is not one of them.

From September onwards every year you can lay money on what subjects will be on the front pages of the news magazines in the coming weeks. Every year it is the same: wine, property prices, the Masons (as in funny handshakes and aprons, not trowels and mortar). Wine and property prices, OK, but what can there be to say that is new about Masonic brotherhoods that was not reported the year before, or the year before that? Unfortunately I cannot answer that because I gave up reading the articles several years ago. It is lazy journalism; boring and repetitive.

Equally irritating is the French media's habit of attacking the foreign, usually British, press. Instead of putting their own house in order and addressing pretty basic problems, such as why nobody reads them, French newspapers and magazines prefer to snipe at “les medias Anglo-Saxons”. It is not grown-up, properly thought out or even cleverly targeted against those tabloid publications that might be considered fair game even in Britain. It is more often than not a wild lashing out at the British press in general – ignoring that the British press includes among others the Financial Times and the Economist as well as The Sun and The Daily Mirror (both of which sell many times more copies every day than France's three main daily papers put together).

The most recent salvos came as the French media went into bi-polar spasms of self-doubt and self-congratulation over its coverage of the divorce of President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Cécilia. Of course it tiptoed around the story hiding, as usual, behind the country’s strict privacy laws. (Surely it could have challenged them in this case; Mr Sarkozy is hardly publicity shy?). French newspapers, on the whole timid, over-deferential and prone to self-censorship, printed the story but chickened out on hard statements taking refuge in “rumours” or “speculation”. Last Thursday, for example, the French daily Le Figaro spoke of continuing rumours of a “possible” divorce, while The Daily Telegraph declared confidently that Mrs Sarkozy had asked for a divorce. Later that day a presidential statement announced a divorce had been finalised, revealing the Telegraph, which has one full-time correspondent in Paris, to have been closer to the truth than the native Le Figaro with an entire newsroom of reporters.

British press coverage was criticised as inelegant and prurient. An extraordinary editorial in the current issue of Le Point, a respected news magazine, praised the discretion of the French media: “Voila, a French exception for which we have every reason to be proud when in other countries, notably Anglo-Saxon, the newspapers grub around in the gutters while outrageously hoodwinking their readers", it read. (For the pedants, after taking advice from French friends I have used "grub" for the French verb "se ventrouillent" used in the article but that I could not find in any French dictionary I own.) I am not sure even the most virulent critic of the British press would go as far as to suggest its journalists are, en masse, deliberately tricking and misinforming readers on a daily basis.

Attacks on the British press in the French media? True, it is hardly man bites dog. Newspaper references to Britain are frequently prefaced with the phrase 'Perfidious Albion’, like some involuntary editorial tic. It is true that British tabloids can do Frog-bashing as an Olympic sport, but here snide or sarky Anglophobe comments appear not in the Gallic equivalent of a British red-top because there is no equivalent, but in supposedly serious, respected publications.

The same serious, respected publications, by the way, that decided the French public did not need to know about their former president François Mitterrand's secret double life – ie. mistress and daughter – paid for at the taxpayers' expense. That was his ‘vie privée’ too. Journalists who, it was feared, might break the omertà were bugged and bullied by the secret services. Nothing was written about that either. Paris Match eventually published the first pictures of the president's daughter Mazarine in 1994 when she was nearly 20 years old, but did so only after asking Mitterrand for permission.

I am not especially interested in the minutiae of the private lives of politicians and presidents but I would rather have a press that is but whose excesses are tempered by some of the finest investigative reporting in the world, than a press that neither intrudes nor investigates. As Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s celebrated philosopher-in-chief and a fierce defender of the sanctity of 'la vie privée' nevertheless pointed out in a television debate tonight; it took three days for reports of the torture and abuse of prisoners as the Abu Ghraib Iraqi jail by American military personnel to go around the world. It took 40 years for French torture and abuse in Algeria to be reported in France. Touché.

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.

Glue-says-stair Rod

Silly me. There I was standing in front of the ticket machine at Gloucester Road Underground station clutching a £2 coin and staring inanely. I wanted a ticket to go just three stops on the Circle Line. The button for the cheapest ticket was marked £4, twice what I had in my hand.

FOUR POUNDS for three stops for heaven’s sake. My first thought was that I had come to the wrong machine; the one selling season tickets or all-zone travelcards or annual passes to the Outer Hebrides. For a nano-second I considered asking a member of London Transport staff if this was a mistake. I did not. Firstly, I could not find anyone to ask and I did not want to lose my place at the machine. Secondly, the queue at the nearby ticket window shuffled out onto the street. In the end there was no point. The square button was clearly marked: Single ticket £4.

Since when did it cost £4 to make one journey on the London Underground; how did I miss this spectacular public transport price inflation? Had I known it was going to cost me £4 to go three stops on the London Underground I would have taken a taxi. It would have been cheaper. I could travel the length and breadth of the Paris Metro six times for the same amount.

I paid up, as one does if one can and wants to get anywhere in a hurry, convinced that for this extortionate price the Tube must have undergone remarkable improvements since I last took it. Silly, silly me. The platform was heaving and the next train was not due for several minutes. Parisians rarely run for a Metro because a) it is simply not cool and they have a horror of looking ridiculous and b) because there is almost always another train along in a minute. With the Underground it is imperative you run for the train, ridiculous or not, because the next one will be ages. Then again you cannot run because it is too crowded.

Back in Paris at a party, a friend of a friend who claims his brother drives a London black cab, tells me Londoners have started taking taxis to make short journeys. This makes a nonsense of attempts to reduce road traffic by encouraging people to use public transport. Another friend of a friend says it is entirely my own fault for not buying an Oyster Card, then disappears before I can find out what this is and what it can do for me. I promise you, I have never heard of an Oyster Card.
One guest, overhearing our conversation, suggests dark forces are at work trying to get rid of London’s black cabs. He claims to know this for a fact because someone "high-up's bird’s bruvva” owns a mini-cab firm. It all sounds a conspiracy theory too far and I would have taken issue with him, particularly over the “bird” word, but I notice he has several front teeth missing and he has admitted to being a Stamford Bridge “hooligan” in a former life. I decide, for once, to shut up.

Back home from the party, I wake up my husband to ask how he would pronounced Gloucester Road. I have to spell it out. He says sleepily: “Glue-says-stair Rod”. I feel better already.

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.