La Rentrée

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

Not Reading but Drowning.

Spare us from brilliant ideas that are badly thought out. La Fille and I went to Paris Plage with a friend and her two daughters. I think having a summer "beach" on one of the city's main roads is a fine idea, even though I loathe sand. It's a poor substitute for those who cannot afford the real thing, but Paris Plage is infinitely better than cars. I go every year to support the idea. Every year I really want to give it my wholehearted, unqualified, no-buts support. Every year I am disappointed.

We thought it would be a good idea to take the girls for a swim in the open air pool but when we arrived we told it was only open to organised groups from organised clubs so we'd lugged bags of towels and costumes across town for nothing. Instead, we sat on the man-made beach and chatted while the girls threw sand onto the road and made castles that wouldn't stay up because the sand was silk fine and clean and untained by sea. "It's cleaner than most sandpits in Paris," remarked my friend. Then she spotted a cigarette butt and we mused at what kind of alien stubs out on a fake beach where children are playing.

We then set off down the promenade, wonderfully free of cars and exhaust fumes though not cyclists. I am a great fan of Bertrand Delanoe the Paris Mayor but he has one major blind spot in my view and that is he cannot see that homo sapiens cyclistus may be of the same genus but is certainly not the same species as homo sapiens pedestrianas. (I would put the former rather nearer the neanderthalensis branch, with occasional addition of helmet shaped growth on head, and the latter nearer to the larger brained homo erectus, if you were to ask.)

Dodging the two-wheeled neanderthals, we headed for a spot on the map that looked child friendly and found a handful of bright blue plastic tables surrounded by a dozen bright blue plastic chairs. No toys. No paper. No crayons or paints or even old newspapers. Nothing but blue plastic mini furniture. The two older girls sat down on the blue plastic chairs at one of the blue plastic tables. They stared at the blue plastic. They looked at each other, then jumped up and ran into the path of a speeding cyclist on the promenade who rang his bell and shouted in a Stone Age sort of way..

But what is really, really neanderthal, and I mean utterly bone-head, Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble par exellance is the idea of putting the children's lending library right next to a part of the river bank that has absolutely no barrier, no fencing, no wire, no chain, no concrete, no plastic, no impediment whatsoever to stop a child plopping straight into the Seine and drowning without even trying?

My friend had brought along a pushchair; that made three energetic children interested in books running around near a fast-flowing river, and a buggy between four adult arms. I leave you to work out the logistics and the stress factor.

Our attention was momentarily hijacked by a peroxide-blonde strolling up and down the promenade in a skimpy bikini. "Extraordinary", both my friend and I exclaimed at the same time. I wanted to say: "Excuse me, you know this really isn't St Tropez but a strip of city centre highway," but of course I didn't. I just stared. "Only in France," my friend added before I could.

Les boules! *

We played boules in Provence. What else is there to do of a late afternoon in La France Profonde when the stone-deaf crickets are still beating their tums and there's no water source to secretly divert or bestselling book to be written? We played boules before we had even touched a drop of pastis or local wine and we - that is the Frenchman and I - were still lamentably bad. Our hosts, a retired married couple, played as if they had practised every afternoon for the last six years they have lived in the country, which they insisted they hadn't although the shiny boules were a bit of a giveaway. I played like I needed glasses - I do - and like I couldn't tell the wooden cochonnet ('little piggy') from the gravel stones in our friends' drive - I mostly couldn't.

I am quite proud of my accuracy with an air pistol and have refused many a traumatised goldfish in a plastic bag at fairgrounds and fetes but I couldn't play boules for sticky sweets. I tried to cite my Englishness as an excuse, like I do when skiing ("Listen, there aren't that many snow-covered mountains where I come from.") but it was pathetic. My boules bounced off stones and hurtled off in unexpected directions or rolled twenty feet past the target or landed with a dull thud in the only patch of sandy drive and didn't roll at all. This absolutely did not happen to our opponents' boules. OK, I thought, they know their own drive. But even when I dragged my heels when changing ends to deliberately rearrange the stones and gravel, it still happened to us and not to them. Each time I launched a boule and it ricochet off into the laurel bush I thought of my mother, a trophy-winning lawn bowler, and was glad she was not there to see how her only daughter had failed to inherit a nanogram of her skill at putting a large heavy object somewhere in the same neighbourhood as a small white ball. (yes, yes, mother I know the game of boules is much easier but even so...)

So there we were playing boules, or pétanque as it's sometimes called, trying not to shame ourselves and at the same time trying to avoid braining La Fille and our friends' grandson who thought it immensely amusing to run across the drive the moment 800 grams of solid metal had been lobbed into the air. For some reason known only to the Frenchman who is perfectly well aware I need glasses, he decided that I should be "Le Tireur" while he would be "Le Placeur". This meant I had to screw my eyes up, squint really hard and throw my boule with enough speed and accuracy to knock our opponent's boule out of the ring, leaving the Frenchman to place his boule next to the cochonnet. We would then win. Did it happen? It did not. We lost.

I made the mistake of saying: "Hey, it's just a game," and was looked at as if I'd scattered my marbles as recklessly as my boules. This is France's national sport and would be an Olympic discipline if they had their way. All the flat cap and Gitanes jocularity on the sidelines is an illusion. The celebrated quote by Bill Shankly about football being "much, much more important than life and death" could be applied to boules. Last year a French author wrote a book marking the 100th anniversary of the modern game called '1907 After Jesus Christ: Pétanque'. Games have even been known to end in violence, especially if pastis is involved.

We did win one game after I worked out that if we hurled the cochonnet far enough down the drive, ie. almost into the neighbouring property, our hostess would not have the necessary strength to reach it, though if she hadn't complained I probably wouldn't have guessed. In any case this, judging by the muttering about rules and distances, was clearly not considered to fall under the heading "Being A Good Sport". We were left in no doubt that it was against the boules equivalent of the Queensberry Rules, whatever they might be, even if allowed. It was academic anyway, we still ended up losing. The Frenchman, who normally hates being beaten at anything but conscious of being a house guest, put on his rarely seen Good Loser Face. "It was my fault," he said. "It's just a game," I repeated. Later over a post-match pastis when I had finally uncrumpled my squinty face, he and the couple began a blow-by-blow dissection of the match and I thought, as I have thought a thousand million times before: I will always be a foreigner in France.

*Les boules! = How awful!

A Week in Provence

We've been on holiday in Provence. It was very relaxing and our hosts, friends of the Frenchman, couldn't have been more hospitable. But it was far from peaceful. I'm used to city noise; the hooting and honking and wailing sirens (often police cars filled with hungry looking I'm-late-for-lunch types) and the general hulabaloo of Paris, but I'd forgotten how noisy it is in the countryside.

Around 5am it started; magpies squabbling outside our bedroom window making a bizarre and persistent strangulated noise. I don't know what they were fighting over, and neither did our hosts who have to live with the avian alarm call, but it was the same fractious dispute every morning. Then to breakfast and a briefest moment of quiet before the sun hit the top of the pink laurel bush and the male cicadas began their rasping mating call. What a racket. Talk about making a song and dance about a bit of nookie, but then I suppose they do have short and otherwise uneventful lives. I always thought they rubbed their wings or legs together but apparently they make the noise by flexing the muscles on their underbelly. They can hit over 100 decibels which is one hell of a noise to make while working out the abdominals. Our hosts said the cicadas themselves are deaf but this may be something of a myth. Apparently a French researcher made the pivotal discovery that female cicadas may indeed turn a deaf ear but only to the sound of cannons being blasted at them. Not exactly on a par with Charles Darwin but fun to try, I imagine. If you haven't a cannon handy you can shut them up apparently by staring them out. Since I have a horror of insects I was not about to get up close and personal with one let alone several thousand. The cicadas kept it up until sundown and l'heure d'aperitif - in this case a Ricard and water - somewhere approaching 9pm. Provençales are very fond of their cicadas, known locally as cigales, and call it the Cigale's Song even though it's possibly the least musical thing I have ever heard and even less harmonious than French pop music, which let's face it is saying something. It obviously presses buttons for the insects given their astonishing rate of procreation, though at those noise levels it's no wonder they have hearing problems.

Our hostess has a soft spot for the cicadas and tried, in vain, to persuade me they were "rather beautiful". In the eye of the beholder, I thought. God knows I've spent enough time in enough grim places with enough of their bug cousins to have got used to them by now, but I can honestly say I've never met an insect I'd want to take home to meet the parents.

Revolutions

We celebrated Bastille Day the evening before, marching around a Normandy village where my mother-in-law lives waving candle lanterns to the strains of - bizarrely - The Longest Day played valiantly, if not professionally, by a group of local musicians. It was fantastic. At one point as we walked down La Rue Grande past a magnificent 16th century merchant's house bearing lanterns aloft as the last swooping birds fled the darkening sky, the music stopped leaving just the hypnotic rattle of drum beating and it felt like we were taking part in a medieval witch hunt. Then the Frenchman struck up a jolly little revolutionary song he dredged from his infinite repertoire - something about stringing up aristocrats from the lanterns or lamp posts - and I thought, well, what we are 'celebrating' is not so very different.

La Fille hadn't got a clue what it was all about or whether Marie Antoinette had really said: "Let them eat cake" or had, in fact, said: "Let them eat brioche", which is something else entirely. She was just pleased as punch to be given her own candle lantern and stubbornly insisted on carrying it without help even though the piece of wood it was attached to was longer than she is tall. As we paraded through the streets she almost set fire to several locals whose only offence as far as I could see was that they were dragging their heels in front of us while wearing bobbly pastel-coloured home knit cardigans, which may be a crime against fashion but does not mean they necessarily deserved to be burned to a crisp. (It could, however, be argued that the two motorcyclists who revved and roared their way impatiently through the crowd as we wend our way down the main street deserved to be torched, your Honour.) Thankfully we made it into the park for a firework display before she singed anyone so as they'd notice. After that there were so many kids throwing petards - firecrackers - of various terrifying proportions around, a burned cardie was the least of anyone's worries.

The following morning, on Bastille Day itself, the local fire brigade turned out and with much hooting and flashing and warbling sirens drove the few hundred yards down the main street and back again. The Frenchman reminded us that most firemen outside of Paris are volunteers, so we stood on the pavement and waved and clapped and cheered. We seemed to be the only people doing this and perhaps we were rather too effusive and manic because instead of looking pleased, the firemen looked slightly apprehensive as if we'd just done a runner from the local hospital and they were going to be called out to scoop us up and return us to a secure ward.

In the village and on official buildings - even on a pole outside my mother-in-law's place - there were spick new Tricolors flying and as we drove through the countryside to the station to take a train back to Paris, we passed a little local July 14 event with officials in colourful sashes and uniformed servicemen sporting rows of gleaming medals, like perfectly painted tin soldiers standing to attention by a newly whitewashed flagpole. Back in Paris, even the buses were sporting the national flag. Somehow and sadly, I cannot imagine this happening in London; the French are much less squeamish about ostentatious displays of national pride; viz the Soviet-style military display on - and above - the Champs Elysées on Bastille Day when the president is given the chance to get all his toys out.

We missed all that, but La Fille is still made up about her candle lantern, even more so as she was able to exchange it at the end of the parade for a big bag of sugary sweets. We'll take her to see the tanks and toy soldiers another year.

Road rage

Here we go again...on the way back from the nursery:

A 20-kg Vélib' bike jumps a red light just as we step off the pavement. We leap back on the pavement.

A motorist whizzes the wrong way down a one-way street in reverse. We don't notice as we're not looking the way he is coming. He doesn't notice because he is not even looking behind. We leap back on the pavement.

A scooter rider who has his - unfastened - helmet on the back of his head shouts at us because we don't get out of his way quickly enough. He passes so close I leap into the busy road.

A car is parked on the pavement blocking it entirely. We both leap onto an even busier road.

A man who is clearly not a tramp unzips his trousers pulls out what La Fille calls "a robinet" (tap) and proceeds to pee against the wall as we pass. Where are those splash-back walls when you need them. We cross the road.

A motorcyclist with a toddler (maximum age: 5) riding pillion goes the wrong way down the one way street.

A van is parked across the zebra crossing. As we walk behind it a woman on a mobile telephone jumps the red pedestrian light.

I moan to a couple of French people about all this. Shrugs all round. I say there should be more police. Horrified looks all round. Now they think I'm a fascist. Silly me, I should have known; this is what they mean by French freedom of spirit, non-conformity, refusal to bow to bourgeois rules and customs.

I know I'm supposed to get over it. I know it happens all the time in France and everyone I know has the same story and ha ha, it's another one of those Anglo/French cultural clashes. But, sod it. Why should I accept that sooner or later one of us stands a good chance of being killed or maimed just because some selfish, irresponsible, inconsiderate and law-breaking French twat is exercising his or her right to be a rebel?

I need to lie down in a darkened room.

Never too old.

I have just discovered (thank you Jaywalker) that the tortoise is called Kiki. Even more astonishing is that he is around 120 years old and weighs 250 kg. That's a hell of a lot of giant tortoise to have jump you. Perhaps the female wasn't looking bored just crushed.

I don't wish to name drop but I once met an elderly relative of Kiki on the British island of St Helena (five days on a slow mail boat from Cape Town sharing a cabin with a photographer who was not my husband...that set tittle-tattling tongues going!). This is the island on which Napoleon died in exile. The tortoise is - yes, he's still around - called Jonathan and is thought to be 170 years old. One of his finest moments was being introduced to King George VI who bowed to him. Queen Elizabeth, then plain Princess Elizabeth, was there too.

I digress. All I can say is I don't know what's in the water at the Jardin des Plants but it's making one aging tortoise very happy.