Paris is especially beautiful in early Autumn. Today was a fine example; one of those near perfect crackly mornings when the sun has undergone some magical alchemic transformation from burnished gold to platinum and is bright enough, but not quite warm enough, for sunglasses...so of course I'd forgotten mine. The city's poor trees forced out of parks and sidelined to stand permanent guard over busy boulevards and rues are still green but their leaves have tell-tale signs of tarnish which means they will soon copper and fall. Window boxes are full to bursting with flowers that no longer smell and have arrived at the point of no return; the metallic air has turned the sounds of the city into tinny chimes signaling the imminent arrival of winter.
It's an uneasy time for wardrobe choices. A summer jacket or cardigan is fine when racing along dragging a child who is late for school but stop at traffic lights and an unexpected whip of air, hanging around looking for the underdressed, will chill you to the bone. This morning I dug out a crumpled wool coat from the back of the wardrobe for the aller-retour to school. It was like running a marathon in a ski suit, even at red lights. Back home was chillier inside than out because the Frenchman had opened several windows before leaving for work on the principle that rooms need to be "aired". I put the coat back on.
Actually it wasn't an aller-retour this morning as I diverted my return via the gym to check out how much it would cost to join. I used to be a member - and I used to go - before I had La Fille and promised myself I'd join again after she was born. Then when she went to the creche. Then after we found a lovely babysitter. Then when she went to school. That's a lot of unkept promises and extra kilos, so I promised myself I would join today. I didn't because it seemed an awful lot of money and I told myself I needed to work if and when I would find time to go before forking out that much.
Autumnal Paris is beautiful but spoiled by the niggling inevitability of winter. From now it will get gloomier and nippier by the day and the mornings will turn from crisp to brittle and the trees from burnished to bare and the chill to a breathtaking, numbing cold. And it will be me, not the Frenchman, taking La Fille to school at the gloomiest, nippiest, brittlest, most freezing brass-monkey time of the day. And I will not be able to warm myself up with a quick 60 minutes of Body Combat because although I really, really love pretending to punch and kick and knee-groin some poor unsuspecting imaginary person, I'll still be dithering about joining the gym. And the Frenchman will still be leaving the windows open even after the central heating has been sparked up and even after I have asked him one hundred million times not to. On second thoughts maybe the extra layer on my thighs might save me from hypothermia and I could practice the Body Combat at home and save the money.
Friday, 19 September 2008
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Do as I say...
A friend used to have a favourite t-shirt with a picture of some fish, a fishing hook and "Three Second Memory" printed underneath. I know it's an urban myth, and deeply insulting to man's earliest ancestors but I need to get La Fille one anyway. She refuses absolutely to tell me what she has done in school. All she was say is "I don't remember". If I am really lucky she will tell me she did a drawing of a dolphin - always dolphins - especially for me. (Even this will 'Papa's picture' as soon as he arrives home.) But that's it. If I say: "You can't possibly have spent the whole morning painting dolphins, what else did you do?", she changes the subject or precociously affects a furrowed brow of theatrical proportions and says: "I don't remember."
It struck me sitting in a chilly, shadowy, pigeon-poo splattered corner of the park today that we know very little about what our children get up to when they are not with us; and even less about what the people supposed to be looking after them get up to. If you meet teachers, nursery nurses, nannies, babysitters face to face they are charm itself. If you see them with the children in their charge they often morph into something entirely different as if some time after you left they nipped into the pharmacy and downed a vial of foaming green liquid.
Today being a Wednesday there was no school. Before France became officially, and tub-thumpingly secular - something you'd never have guessed from the Pope's visit last weekend - Wednesday was appropriated by the Roman Catholic church for children to learn their catechism. I read somewhere the priests chose Wednesday because they thought nobody would go if it was a Saturday. Consequently, no classes on Wednesday but classes on Saturday until now when they too have been dropped. French children do a four day week; you can imagine how easy this is for working mothers who juggle.
We were going to go to the children's monthly reading session at the American library in Paris but first thing this morning La Fille developed fluorescent green snot and started sneezing and coughing. Somehow I didn't think we'd be welcome with other children in a confined space. So I wrapped her up warm and we went to the park. This was not the cleverest of ideas because the first thing she did was take off her shoes guaranteeing day-glo snot for at least a week. Also, it being Wednesday and there being no school, everyone else had decided to go to the park too. This included organisations that look after groups of children on Wednesdays when their parents are working as most are Wednesday being a normal working day. One such party of five or six year olds from an out of school playgroup arrived. The woman in charge organised them in a circle in front of the park gate and began railing at them like a demented silver-haired witch. From what I could guess from the way she was wagging her finger, crossing and uncrossing her hands and sticking her pointy nose centimeters from their faces, most of the French language's most fun verbs were being garroted by a 'ne...pas' (don't) and once or twice drawn and quartered by an 'absolument pas' (absolutely don't). Of course, the kids ran in and immediately congregated in knots behind the bars and ropes to do all the things they'd been ne-pas-ed from doing.
But was she magnificent. Having boot camped her own troops, she then marched in and like a Gallic Boudicea set about the other kids. While we had all mumbled under our collective breath but said nothing about the boys throwing sand she marched right up and turned them all to stone with a single "Arretez IMMEDIATEMENT". When one of her charges ran up wailing because sand had been thrown in his eyes she held him at arms' length and told him briskly: "It's not too dramatic. Keep crying and it'll get rid of the sand." And when one of her boys picked up a fistful of sand, her assistant - a younger graduate from the School of Scaring the Pants off Children - yelled: "Oi, I just told you not to throw sand. Are you taking the piss out of me?" Rules on bad language anyone?
It struck me sitting in a chilly, shadowy, pigeon-poo splattered corner of the park today that we know very little about what our children get up to when they are not with us; and even less about what the people supposed to be looking after them get up to. If you meet teachers, nursery nurses, nannies, babysitters face to face they are charm itself. If you see them with the children in their charge they often morph into something entirely different as if some time after you left they nipped into the pharmacy and downed a vial of foaming green liquid.
Today being a Wednesday there was no school. Before France became officially, and tub-thumpingly secular - something you'd never have guessed from the Pope's visit last weekend - Wednesday was appropriated by the Roman Catholic church for children to learn their catechism. I read somewhere the priests chose Wednesday because they thought nobody would go if it was a Saturday. Consequently, no classes on Wednesday but classes on Saturday until now when they too have been dropped. French children do a four day week; you can imagine how easy this is for working mothers who juggle.
We were going to go to the children's monthly reading session at the American library in Paris but first thing this morning La Fille developed fluorescent green snot and started sneezing and coughing. Somehow I didn't think we'd be welcome with other children in a confined space. So I wrapped her up warm and we went to the park. This was not the cleverest of ideas because the first thing she did was take off her shoes guaranteeing day-glo snot for at least a week. Also, it being Wednesday and there being no school, everyone else had decided to go to the park too. This included organisations that look after groups of children on Wednesdays when their parents are working as most are Wednesday being a normal working day. One such party of five or six year olds from an out of school playgroup arrived. The woman in charge organised them in a circle in front of the park gate and began railing at them like a demented silver-haired witch. From what I could guess from the way she was wagging her finger, crossing and uncrossing her hands and sticking her pointy nose centimeters from their faces, most of the French language's most fun verbs were being garroted by a 'ne...pas' (don't) and once or twice drawn and quartered by an 'absolument pas' (absolutely don't). Of course, the kids ran in and immediately congregated in knots behind the bars and ropes to do all the things they'd been ne-pas-ed from doing.
But was she magnificent. Having boot camped her own troops, she then marched in and like a Gallic Boudicea set about the other kids. While we had all mumbled under our collective breath but said nothing about the boys throwing sand she marched right up and turned them all to stone with a single "Arretez IMMEDIATEMENT". When one of her charges ran up wailing because sand had been thrown in his eyes she held him at arms' length and told him briskly: "It's not too dramatic. Keep crying and it'll get rid of the sand." And when one of her boys picked up a fistful of sand, her assistant - a younger graduate from the School of Scaring the Pants off Children - yelled: "Oi, I just told you not to throw sand. Are you taking the piss out of me?" Rules on bad language anyone?
Monday, 15 September 2008
That's Showbiz.
Not having satellite television I've missed a tranch of British and American culture since I've been out of the UK: The Office, The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Friends, Big Brother, Desperate Housewives, The X-Factor, et al. As a result I have no idea who half the people featured in British newspapers and magazines are or what they have done, if anything. It's like pop music and computers and maths; you miss one step in the evolution or equation and from then on everything is a mystery.
Last time I was in Britain I stumbled upon a programme on 'Daytime TV' that I found very disturbing. It centred on a confrontation between a young girl with a baby daughter, her boyfriend who may or may not have been the father of the child and the boyfriend's two sisters who did not like their brother's girlfriend for various reasons. It was a staged catfight: there were tears, insults, shouting, and an almost breathy anticipation of physical violence. The participants were young and, frankly, not very bright. If they were guilty of anything it was surely the fecklessness and foolishness of youth and a misguided wish to have their 15 minutes of fame at any price. It was truly horrible; pure bear-baiting or as I imagine a public flogging might be.
The highlight of the TV programme, if you could call it a 'high', was the outcome of a DNA test. This was dangled in front of the audience like a piece of bread before a starving man. "Coming right up after the break, the DNA results. We'll find out if X really is the father of x". Television producers say those who appear on the show are volunteers and are helped to overcome their problems as if the production company was an offshoot of social services or some benevolent society. What rubbish. It is entertainment. And it appears people are indeed entertained watching troubled fellow being flaunt how foolish and feckless they can be. There are no heads rolling or lifeless bodies dangling from a rope, but it's still pretty gory and bloodthirsty.
I don't think this programme concept has crossed the Channel yet, but sadly it surely will. When the first Big Brother reality show aired in Holland and then in Britain, the French went all superior and said such low-life "trash" television could never happen in France. It did. Of course it did - it was called Loft Story. It was a huge success.
In 1846, Charles Dickens witnessed a hanging. Afterwards he wrote: "No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious. I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of 'Hats off!' when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a Play...to see the stage the better, in the final scene."
A journalist who witnessed the recording of another of these reality daytime television programmes recently suggests, 162 years on, audiences are scarcely more compassionate towards fellow human beings. Plus ça change, as they say in the land of cultural superiority.
Last time I was in Britain I stumbled upon a programme on 'Daytime TV' that I found very disturbing. It centred on a confrontation between a young girl with a baby daughter, her boyfriend who may or may not have been the father of the child and the boyfriend's two sisters who did not like their brother's girlfriend for various reasons. It was a staged catfight: there were tears, insults, shouting, and an almost breathy anticipation of physical violence. The participants were young and, frankly, not very bright. If they were guilty of anything it was surely the fecklessness and foolishness of youth and a misguided wish to have their 15 minutes of fame at any price. It was truly horrible; pure bear-baiting or as I imagine a public flogging might be.
The highlight of the TV programme, if you could call it a 'high', was the outcome of a DNA test. This was dangled in front of the audience like a piece of bread before a starving man. "Coming right up after the break, the DNA results. We'll find out if X really is the father of x". Television producers say those who appear on the show are volunteers and are helped to overcome their problems as if the production company was an offshoot of social services or some benevolent society. What rubbish. It is entertainment. And it appears people are indeed entertained watching troubled fellow being flaunt how foolish and feckless they can be. There are no heads rolling or lifeless bodies dangling from a rope, but it's still pretty gory and bloodthirsty.
I don't think this programme concept has crossed the Channel yet, but sadly it surely will. When the first Big Brother reality show aired in Holland and then in Britain, the French went all superior and said such low-life "trash" television could never happen in France. It did. Of course it did - it was called Loft Story. It was a huge success.
In 1846, Charles Dickens witnessed a hanging. Afterwards he wrote: "No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious. I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of 'Hats off!' when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a Play...to see the stage the better, in the final scene."
A journalist who witnessed the recording of another of these reality daytime television programmes recently suggests, 162 years on, audiences are scarcely more compassionate towards fellow human beings. Plus ça change, as they say in the land of cultural superiority.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Saturday Night Fever
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for their is in London all that life can afford."
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Comme ci. Comme ça
On the way to school today we passed several children weeping and wailing. Apparently the second week of school is more traumatic than the first. This is when tiny brains sprout empirical neurons and realise school is not a one-off jolly outing like a visit to the zoo but something they must do again and again and again. Thank goodness they have no idea - yet - that it will be like this for the next 15 to 20 years of their life.
Every parent of every wailing child we passed uttered exactly the same phrase: "Mais c'est comme ça", which roughly translates as "That's just the way it is". My first thought was that this was a little hard. On reflection, I think it highlights another cultural difference between the French and English in that most of the French mothers I know are much more matter-of-fact and less inclined to be soppy or mollycoddle their offspring than we are. This is not a criticism and is, I suspect, a relatively modern cross Channel difference because it reminded me my own mother and her oft-repeated response to wails from my brother and I about something not being fair. "Well, life's not fair," she would declare. She was right of course, but at that age we knew nothing of life let alone its myriad forms of injustice and just thought she was being mean.
The "c'est comme ça" approach seems to work and is less time-consuming, and humiliating, than getting down on your haunches in the middle of the pavement to explain patiently to a wailing offspring why it is necessary to go to school. At the end of this, in my experience, recalcitrant todler is still snivelling and refusing to budge, whereas French Maman has snicker-snacked her child into class and long since disappeared in a clack of heels.
Another big difference is smacking. I do not know a single English or American mother who does it, or admits they do it, which I realise is not at all the same thing. Conversely I have yet to meet a French parent who does not think most parent versus child conflicts are best resolved with a short sharp "fessée" and is more than happy to reveal this. (I have never seen anyone smack someone else's child, but a friend once told me she had seen an elderly woman do just this in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The Frenchman threatens to smack but doesn't deliver though I suspect this is because he is more bark than bite and not because he knows I disapprove and would shout at him. I expressly warned him never to smack La Fille anywhere in Britain. I am ashamed to say, this was seconds after I had given her slap on the bottom when she ran off near a main road in London and frightened the life out of me. Riven with remorse and guilt I noticed we were standing under an enormous poster about reporting child abuse. I was ready to pounce on a woman I though was fumbling in her bag for her telephone when all she was doing was finding a pound for the Big Issue seller. I told the Frenchman it must never happen again because someone would call Social Services and take her away from us. (OK not true, but he doesn't know). "But that would not be fair at all," he spluttered. "Well, that's just it," I wailed. "Life's not bloody fair."
Every parent of every wailing child we passed uttered exactly the same phrase: "Mais c'est comme ça", which roughly translates as "That's just the way it is". My first thought was that this was a little hard. On reflection, I think it highlights another cultural difference between the French and English in that most of the French mothers I know are much more matter-of-fact and less inclined to be soppy or mollycoddle their offspring than we are. This is not a criticism and is, I suspect, a relatively modern cross Channel difference because it reminded me my own mother and her oft-repeated response to wails from my brother and I about something not being fair. "Well, life's not fair," she would declare. She was right of course, but at that age we knew nothing of life let alone its myriad forms of injustice and just thought she was being mean.
The "c'est comme ça" approach seems to work and is less time-consuming, and humiliating, than getting down on your haunches in the middle of the pavement to explain patiently to a wailing offspring why it is necessary to go to school. At the end of this, in my experience, recalcitrant todler is still snivelling and refusing to budge, whereas French Maman has snicker-snacked her child into class and long since disappeared in a clack of heels.
Another big difference is smacking. I do not know a single English or American mother who does it, or admits they do it, which I realise is not at all the same thing. Conversely I have yet to meet a French parent who does not think most parent versus child conflicts are best resolved with a short sharp "fessée" and is more than happy to reveal this. (I have never seen anyone smack someone else's child, but a friend once told me she had seen an elderly woman do just this in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The Frenchman threatens to smack but doesn't deliver though I suspect this is because he is more bark than bite and not because he knows I disapprove and would shout at him. I expressly warned him never to smack La Fille anywhere in Britain. I am ashamed to say, this was seconds after I had given her slap on the bottom when she ran off near a main road in London and frightened the life out of me. Riven with remorse and guilt I noticed we were standing under an enormous poster about reporting child abuse. I was ready to pounce on a woman I though was fumbling in her bag for her telephone when all she was doing was finding a pound for the Big Issue seller. I told the Frenchman it must never happen again because someone would call Social Services and take her away from us. (OK not true, but he doesn't know). "But that would not be fair at all," he spluttered. "Well, that's just it," I wailed. "Life's not bloody fair."
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Lesson One
There's much chatter here about education reforms and the offer of free "intensive" English courses for French schoolchildren during the summer and February holidays. Apparently the aim is to make sure they are all fluent in what they call here "the language of Shakespeare" by the time they hit the workplace. I was talking to one of France's most respected linguists about this and I could tell he thought it was a really bad idea. He came up with all sorts of cultural, historical, colonial reasons for French apathy and antipathy towards the English language but his trump card was that English is too difficult because it is so idiomatic "How do you explain to someone you can hedge your bets but not hedge-bet" I nodded in agreement because he is respected and obviously very clever and respected for being clever but afterwards, when I thought about it, I wasn't so sure. About the hedging bets that is, not his cleverness.
I think French is quite hard but that's because although I have a deceptively convincing accent - or so I'm told - I frequently say something stupid. Sometimes it's because of faux amis and sometimes because I don't think and out pops something like I am "sur le train" a literal translation of "on the train" when what I mean is I am "dans le trains" or "in the train" and "sur le train" conjures up Charlie Chaplinesque images of me clinging to the roof of a TGV screaming silently while some black and white villain with "VILLAIN" on his shirt and a curly moustache beats my knuckles with a monkey wrench. Then again that's more idiot than idiom.
La Fille will certainly be having intensive school holiday courses in English; with me - or her grandparents - in England. Today's English lesson was watching Mary Poppins. "I don't think this is my kind of film," said La Fille two seconds after the opening credits when she realised there were no lions, zebras, monkeys, mammouths, bees, elephants, penguins, insects, one-eyed mutants or amorphous blobby things in it. "I don't care, we're watching it. It is in English," I said. I am at least consistent. "Besides it's a classic." And it is, in spite of Dick Van Dyke's lamentable accent, the stuffed robin that looked as if it was nailed to Julie Andrews' finger and the moral messages as subtle as silent film captions. A classic, despite being sugary and twee and set in 1910 so you know in a few years Mr Banks will be packed off to a European trench never to return just as he's getting to know his children and Bert will get lung cancer because he keeps sticking his head into belching chimneys and no amount of jolly nanny nonsense will magic these things away.
La Fille soon gave up trying to copy Bert's tap dancing on the 200-year-old Hungarian point parquet, became bored and spent the rest of the film telling me to "shut up singing" and trying to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick. Later as I put her to bed she asked me to tell her the "new words" she'd learned. "Which new words?" I asked thinking Cat, Hat, Bat, Rag, Sag. She said: "The ones you were singing really loudly." (Perhaps she said badly.) "What? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?" "No, no the other one." I racked my brains: the other one, the other one. "Chim Chiminey?" "Yes, that one. Is it English? What does it mean?"
There is a good reason I am not a teacher.
I think French is quite hard but that's because although I have a deceptively convincing accent - or so I'm told - I frequently say something stupid. Sometimes it's because of faux amis and sometimes because I don't think and out pops something like I am "sur le train" a literal translation of "on the train" when what I mean is I am "dans le trains" or "in the train" and "sur le train" conjures up Charlie Chaplinesque images of me clinging to the roof of a TGV screaming silently while some black and white villain with "VILLAIN" on his shirt and a curly moustache beats my knuckles with a monkey wrench. Then again that's more idiot than idiom.
La Fille will certainly be having intensive school holiday courses in English; with me - or her grandparents - in England. Today's English lesson was watching Mary Poppins. "I don't think this is my kind of film," said La Fille two seconds after the opening credits when she realised there were no lions, zebras, monkeys, mammouths, bees, elephants, penguins, insects, one-eyed mutants or amorphous blobby things in it. "I don't care, we're watching it. It is in English," I said. I am at least consistent. "Besides it's a classic." And it is, in spite of Dick Van Dyke's lamentable accent, the stuffed robin that looked as if it was nailed to Julie Andrews' finger and the moral messages as subtle as silent film captions. A classic, despite being sugary and twee and set in 1910 so you know in a few years Mr Banks will be packed off to a European trench never to return just as he's getting to know his children and Bert will get lung cancer because he keeps sticking his head into belching chimneys and no amount of jolly nanny nonsense will magic these things away.
La Fille soon gave up trying to copy Bert's tap dancing on the 200-year-old Hungarian point parquet, became bored and spent the rest of the film telling me to "shut up singing" and trying to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick. Later as I put her to bed she asked me to tell her the "new words" she'd learned. "Which new words?" I asked thinking Cat, Hat, Bat, Rag, Sag. She said: "The ones you were singing really loudly." (Perhaps she said badly.) "What? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?" "No, no the other one." I racked my brains: the other one, the other one. "Chim Chiminey?" "Yes, that one. Is it English? What does it mean?"
There is a good reason I am not a teacher.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Lost in Translation
The Frenchman once suggested, helpfully, that when I didn't know the French word for something I should try to say the English one with a French accent.
Anglophones please note: here is a list of English words you must never try this with either at home or anywhere else within earshot of a French speaking person if you wish to retain a molecule of respect and dignity.
I expect profuse thanks, flowers, champagne even. After all, I have looked stupid so you don't have to.
Preservative = a condom
Tampon = a rubber stamp
Aspiration = what a French vacuum cleaner does
Versatile = fickle and inconsistant
Con = female genitalia or bloody idiot
Napkin = a sanitary towel
Occasion = second hand
Sale = dirty
Type = a guy or bloke
Amateur = an enthusiast
Exhibition = a vulgar display
Acces(s) = a fit of rage or anger
Auditor = someone who is listening
Ban = a round of applause
Anglophones please note: here is a list of English words you must never try this with either at home or anywhere else within earshot of a French speaking person if you wish to retain a molecule of respect and dignity.
I expect profuse thanks, flowers, champagne even. After all, I have looked stupid so you don't have to.
Preservative = a condom
Tampon = a rubber stamp
Aspiration = what a French vacuum cleaner does
Versatile = fickle and inconsistant
Con = female genitalia or bloody idiot
Napkin = a sanitary towel
Occasion = second hand
Sale = dirty
Type = a guy or bloke
Amateur = an enthusiast
Exhibition = a vulgar display
Acces(s) = a fit of rage or anger
Auditor = someone who is listening
Ban = a round of applause
Thursday, 4 September 2008
School's Out
I picked up La Fille from school. I was the first mother through those doors, a combination of flinty English elbows and a Gallic disrespect for queues.
Jab, jab, weave: the first in. Jab, jab: the first up the stairs. I found La Fille sitting with the rest of her class in a line on the floor in the corridor outside the classroom, which had been locked. I know it was locked because her 'doudou' comfort blanket was in a basket inside the classroom and the schoolmistress had to get out her keys to open the door so we could retrieve it. That was a bit scary, but I had expected worse: bruises, bloody nose, broken glasses. It turned out the only child La Fille knew in her class was a boy from play school whose specialist subject had been wrenching off her spectacles and roughing her up (it wasn't that personal as he also duffed up the staff). All her other friends, and I mean every single one of them, had been put in another class. My heart sank. Then it rose and soared with unconfined joy when La Fille's teacher uttered the words: "Oh you speak English? Me too. I am a Franco-American". Glory, glory be, light scented candles and waft the patchouli incense, crack open another bottle of vintage whatever, and thank Murphy's Law that says toast may always land butter side down but with the Marmite on the upside. Give thanks to the Wizard of Oz, I will not be having the conversations I had at the creche when La Fille was barely two years old.
Creche worker: "Your daughter refuses to say 'Merci'."
Me: "I think you'll find she's saying 'Thank You'.
Creche worker: "You are right, she is saying something and it sounds like 'Zhank You' but she won't say 'Merci'.
Me: "She doesn't say 'Merci' because she is saying 'Thank You'. That is English for 'Merci'.
Creche worker: "But it's not 'Merci'.
So La Fille skipped all the way home, said she'd had a "lovely time" at school and that X (the bully boy) was her new best friend. She said she liked school and that the teacher had spoken to her in English. Oh result, result, result. The teleporter has been left open just a subversive fraction. My foot is in the door.
Jab, jab, weave: the first in. Jab, jab: the first up the stairs. I found La Fille sitting with the rest of her class in a line on the floor in the corridor outside the classroom, which had been locked. I know it was locked because her 'doudou' comfort blanket was in a basket inside the classroom and the schoolmistress had to get out her keys to open the door so we could retrieve it. That was a bit scary, but I had expected worse: bruises, bloody nose, broken glasses. It turned out the only child La Fille knew in her class was a boy from play school whose specialist subject had been wrenching off her spectacles and roughing her up (it wasn't that personal as he also duffed up the staff). All her other friends, and I mean every single one of them, had been put in another class. My heart sank. Then it rose and soared with unconfined joy when La Fille's teacher uttered the words: "Oh you speak English? Me too. I am a Franco-American". Glory, glory be, light scented candles and waft the patchouli incense, crack open another bottle of vintage whatever, and thank Murphy's Law that says toast may always land butter side down but with the Marmite on the upside. Give thanks to the Wizard of Oz, I will not be having the conversations I had at the creche when La Fille was barely two years old.
Creche worker: "Your daughter refuses to say 'Merci'."
Me: "I think you'll find she's saying 'Thank You'.
Creche worker: "You are right, she is saying something and it sounds like 'Zhank You' but she won't say 'Merci'.
Me: "She doesn't say 'Merci' because she is saying 'Thank You'. That is English for 'Merci'.
Creche worker: "But it's not 'Merci'.
So La Fille skipped all the way home, said she'd had a "lovely time" at school and that X (the bully boy) was her new best friend. She said she liked school and that the teacher had spoken to her in English. Oh result, result, result. The teleporter has been left open just a subversive fraction. My foot is in the door.
La Rentrée
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.
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.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
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."
La Fille wakes up this morning and wails: "I don't want to go to school. I want to stay stupid."
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, 23 August 2008
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?
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?
Thursday, 21 August 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, 3 August 2008
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.
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.
Friday, 1 August 2008
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!
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!
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