17H10 is multitask time

Here's what I was doing at 17H10 today - I was twittering:


I'd just got back from Ikea and I'd unloaded 120€-worth of things we don't really need from the back of the car:

• a glass jug
• 3 summer-weight quilts (I think they might be made of paper)
• a white lamp shade
• a red quilt cover chosen by E
• a mirror with pretty engraving
• a garland of fairy lights
• filters for the oven hood
• wax for the kitchen surfaces
• a half-price wine rack
• 6 fluorescent plastic plates
  

I'm an overwrought working mama so as I twittered I was simultaneously juggling some other tasks:

• writing an e-mail to thank the colleague in Italy who went to the lost property office at Bergamo airport to pick up my stranded mobile phone and posted it to me.
• consulting the Orange website to confirm that they still (sigh) have no black 16G iPhones in stock.
• getting a load of laundry ready (a sleeping bag and two pairs of Crocs - one pair smells strange because it was worn to a goat milking session).
• wondering about how I might get rid of the chemical smell in our sofas. I sprayed them with cleaning foam yesterday - big mistake.
• mentally scanning the contents of the fridge door and thinking that in just a short time I would be sitting in the garden with an apéritif in one hand and a paint brush in the other (summer furniture renovation project).
• looking for the customer service number at National car rental to see if they'll give me back some of the money they charged me last Friday to top up the tank up at Birmingham airport. I completely forgot to do it myself mostly due to the fact that I was recovering from a panic attack that came on when the sat nav took me into a business park somewhere in England and told me (in a somewhat peremptory fashion) that I had arrived at my destination, Birmingham airport.
  

(This post is an entry in the FuelMyBlog /Tsheets 5:10p.m. competition. Guess what the prize is.)

The Kindness of Strangers

Well, I made it to Bergamo and back .... but only just. Things actually went very smoothly on the way there: car, plane, bus, train, and then a long walk up a hill in viscous heat past a bicycle race. The journey back was a different matter.
The receptionist at the hotel gave me the wrong bus times and numbers and I didn't check her information, so I ended up on the wrong bus. I didn't realise this until we had wasted over an hour chugging through and around Bergamo; had sailed past the airport and were well out into the middle of absolutely nowhere, and this with only forty minutes left until my plane took off. The bus driver looked sympathetic, said no he was not going back towards the airport, no there was nowhere to get a taxi around here, shrugged his shoulders and smiled. I felt sweat trickle down my back and contemplated collapsing on the floor of the bus and crying. In the end, I shouted at the driver to stop the bus and let me off. He screeched to a stop and I stumbled off with my enormous bag.
The only person around was a man carrying vegetables into a grocer's shop so I rushed up to him and explained my predicament using my ten words of Italian, stabbing gestures at my watch and copious repetitions of urgentissimo, urgentissimo! As he confirmed that there were no taxis in the immediate vicinity, he gestured to me to follow him into the shop. Inside, he had a conversation with an older man about, well at the time it seemed to me to be about mozarella, but I now think they were deciding which of them should run me to the airport in the van.
I got there just in the nick of time and just a few hours later was picking the children up from the school gate where I fought the urge to tell all the bored looking parents what an adventure I'd just had in Italy while they were all going about their normal business.
Anyway, thank you kind Italians. I will never see you again since I would never be able to find your grocery store again but you really did rescue me from a horrible situation, and you didn't hesitate for one second. I owe a hapless stranger a big favour.

Myair Myarse

Deborah has just sent me this snippet from today's Telegraph.

Air travel used to be a privileged adventure, but has now become a humiliating ordeal … no matter what end of the plane you are sitting in. Apart from going to prison, no other activity in contemporary life exposes you to such intimidation, ugliness, regimentation, over-crowding and cruel dehumanising as the decision to go to an airport.

By contrast, consider my last trip to Milan: a mere six hours from Paris and you pass Lamartine's haunting Lac du Bourget and go through the terrible mountains besides the Col du Fréjus by just the same magnificent route the Grand Tourists used 250 years ago.

Why did she think I would be interested in this gem of telegraphesque old-fogey wisdom? Because we're going to meet up not far from Milan, in Bergamo, at the end of June. She is going by train, as is her wont, and I'm not. She booked her train ticket a few weeks ago and will no doubt enjoy an interesting trip to Milano Centrale then on to Bergamo.

I, on the other hand, cleverly booked a very cheap flight with Myair, a low-cost company with direct flights from Bordeaux to Bergamo, Venice and Bologna. Unfortunately there was no flight on the Sunday I wanted to travel, but I took a flight on the Saturday instead and roped Deborah into coming to keep me company for a couple of days.

A few weeks ago, Myair contacted me to tell me that all flights from Bordeaux to Bergamo had been cancelled until the end of June. Just like that. My heart fell but after a few hundred hours on the internet I discovered that Myair had actually introduced a new flight from Paris Orly to Bergamo. It wasn't scheduled for Saturdays but I could get it on the Sunday. I quickly booked that flight and a connecting Air France flight to Paris Orly from Bordeaux. Great.

Great, that is until midnight last night when Myair sent me another e-mail telling that they had changed my itinerary yet again. The bad news was that Sunday's flight had been cancelled and the good news, well there was no good news, because all they can offer is a replacement flight on Monday and by that time Deborah will be on her relaxing train trip back home and the conference I'm going to will be well underway.

The only alternative I can find is to maintain my non-reimbursable Air France flight to Orly, forget the Bergamo flight and replace it with a flight from Orly to Milano Linate and then take a bus and then a train to Bergamo. That sounds easy, doesn't it?

The moral of this saga is threefold: sometimes the tortoise really does beat the hare, low-cost always means high-hassle and Myair is a crap airline.

Ouf

According to an article in Scientific American entitled Blogging is Good for You:

[...] lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

I think I can safely say that do not suffer from this mysterious activity in Wernicke's area. Well, that's one less thing to worry about, I suppose.

Crinan

I've just finished Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I like Bill Bryson, I know that some people find his humour a bit facile, his knowledge incomplete and his observations run-of-the-mill, but he really makes me laugh out loud and that doesn't happen nearly as often as you'd think perusing this LOL-riddled internet. Although, to be honest, it's usually more a question of muffled mattress-shaking giggles late at night than real guffaws.

It's an old book made up of articles written for a British paper on the subject of returning to the USA after 20 years away. I suspect that it's the sort of book a lot of us would have in us were we ever to go back to wherever it is we came from (except, of course, that the place we came from doesn't exist any longer, or at least not in the way it was when we left it). We could all wax lyrical about rediscovering the quirky customs of our homelands, endearing habits that we'd forgotten all about; the embarrassment of doing things wrong because things have changed and we weren't consulted. On my last trip to Scotland, I was persuaded to ask for "cash back" in a supermarket thinking it was some sort of loyalty scheme and experienced a moment of blind flummox at the front of the queue when asked how much I wanted. Bill Bryson does all of this very well turning the episodes of rediscovery and panic into high comedy.

Other passages are more contemplative. Here he is, for example, on handing over our phonetic heritage to others. He notices that an old New Englander pronounces the place name Norwich just as it is pronounced in England, Norritch, which is surprising since everyone else in the area says it with the "w".

He explained to me that the village was pronounced "Norritch" until the 1950s, when outsiders from places like New York and Boston began to move in and, for whatever reason, started to modify the pronunciation. [...] That seemed to me quite sad, the idea that a traditional local pronunciation could be lost simply because outsiders were too inattentive to preserve it.

This happens in Scotland too. So for the benefit of posterity and preservation I would like it to be known throughout the internet that the correct pronunciation of Crinan, the village in Argyll pictured above, is Creenan.

That is all.

Footwear

Last week the sun shone for the first time in eons and I (bring out the bunting) wore a dress to work. All winter I've worn the the same black boots with trousers, but unfortunately with a dress they look like jack boots and I look like a lesbian prison warden. In a desperate, last-minute search for suitable footwear, I got down on my hands and knees and scrabbled under the chest-of-drawers until I found a smart pair of shoes I bought a couple of months ago.

These were more than an impulse buy, they were a microsecond whim buy. It happened as I was driving away from my friend Deborah's house with the children in the back of the car. The shoe shop at the end of her street was open and they were having a sale, and lo and behold there was a free parking space right outside the door. I told the children I would be gone for no more than three minutes and threatened them with death if they killed each other while I was gone. Three minutes later, I came back bearing quite a nice pair of black shoes with a little strap and two-inch heels.

You probably think that two-inch heels are nothing, sensible even. But I am no Carrie Bradshaw, to me two-inch heels are like stilts - I wobble around on them uncontrollably, my whole body bending forward to counter the giddiness that the extra height induces. And the pain after about an hour is unbearable - the pain of having five toes squashed into a space only big enough for two, the pain of a dainty little strap digging into the tops of my feet which seem to have got puffier and pinker all of a sudden making my feet look like Miss Piggy's trotters stuffed into Betty Boop's stilettos.

By the end of the day I could hardly walk. I tottered home, wincing with every step, walked in the door, pulled off the shoes-of-torture and slipped into my trusty Crocs. AAhhhh. Ohhhhhh. Bliss. The comfort of that rubber material, the roominess for all of my poor bruised toes to take up as much space as they feel they need, the springiness in the sole, the refreshing air that wafts in through those attractive little holes.

Now, I know that lots of you think that Crocs are the shoes of the devil, and a very fashion-unconscious devil at that, but I love my three pairs and I sometimes even throw street cred to the wind and venture outdoors with them on.

But guess what, my closet Croc days are over because now they're making them with three-inch heels. I'm going to be wobbling in comfort baby!



(I will stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly if I get a hint of any Croc-hate in the comments)

Name that girl

I have a few friends who are currently choosing baby names, so the topic has been on my mind lately.

Not long after I met P, he told me that his favourite name for a girl was Gladys. As soon as he announced this, the trace on my internal incompatibility sensor was jolted into action and jumped right off the screen: in a split second I realised just how deep some cultural differences might run. For him, Gladys (or rather Gladees, for that is how it is pronounced in French) called up images of trendy little girls but for me — and the entire English-speaking world — it meant old ladies who smelled of mothballs and pan drops.

When I was sifting through the detritus in the attic for that vide grenier a couple of weeks ago, I came across a page that I'd pulled out of my old filofax in 2002. It was a list of alternative names that I had come up with for the baby girl gestating in my tummy that year.

I offer it up to any of you who may be having babies this year - unless of course you're more of a Gladys sort of person, in which case I suggest you just skip the pram and go straight for the zimmer frame.

Lois
Ashley
Esmé
Ailie
Clara
Ailsa
Iona
Imogen
Eulalia
Leila/Lelia
Anya

(Oh, and it isn't on the list but we called her Éloïse, in the end. Certainly not Eulalia — what was I thinking?)

This 'n that

I'd better post something now before this whole blog shrivels up and dies.

So what have I been up to for the last few weeks that has kept me away from here? I wish I could tell you that I have been busy writing a masterpiece, or carrying out some ground-breaking research, or taking up an extreme sport, or repainting the house, or training for a marathon, or undergoing tasteful yet very effective plastic surgery. But I haven't.

• I've been greedily devouring the first two series of The Wire and am now well and truly hooked.
• I've also been reading books. Notably, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell — an excellent novel about the scandal of psychiatric internment of perfectly sane people into old age; and Toast by Nigel Slater — a wonderfully evocative book in which the author's memories of childhood food are wound into the story of his early life. (It made me remember the exact feeling of sticking my tongue into a walnut whip and searching out every last bit of the white creamy insides. Yes, he makes it sound suggestive too.)
• I made some excellent banana and cinnamon muffins ...... and some cheese and spincah muffins that had to go straight into the bin.
• I spent a dreich afternoon watching children run around in a frenzied state of over-excitement at the annual school carnival after weeks of anticipation.
• Spent the whole of last Sunday standing outside flogging a lot of old rubbish at a "vide grenier". Made €130 so it wasn't all bad.
• Had an excellent meal at a Sardinian restaurant and a truly dreadful experience at a new Japanese restaurant.
• Opened a new language centre at work (opened as in set-up, not actually cut a red ribbon while wearing white gloves) .
• Developed a fleeting addiction to Scrabulous Blitz and then lost it when I realised how bad I was at it despite a massive investment of time and mental effort.
• Booked a place in Moliets for the upcoming spring holiday.

Six Word Memoir

Ms.Mac has tagged me for the following meme.

1. Write a six word memoir and post it on your blog.
2. Add a picture if you wish.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 4 or 5 others, with links, to keep it going.
5. Leave a comment for the ones you tag with an invitation to play.
6. And link to the original post about the Six Word Memoir meme.

Here is my six word memoir.

From places North, vers le Sud.

I tag Rosie, Lucy, David, and Mausi. I also invite YOU to leave your own Six Word Memoir in the comments box.

What lovely plump legs you have.

37%

I've never really thought about this possibility before, but I suppose that I would eat a friend if I had to. Strangely enough, the quiz doesn't specify whether or not the friends are already dead or if I have to kill them before consuming them.

7 Deadly Boring Things

Rosie has tagged me to tell you 7 random facts about myself. By strange coincidence I did this very thing exactly one year ago today (at least it was today when I started writing this, and it's true that there were only 6 things not 7, but that's inflation for you). A year ago, I had to resort to making things up in order to appear less than boring. This year, I've spent sleepless nights trying to think of seven more riveting factoids about myself and I'm afraid that this is all I can come up with. I think I've mentioned several of these fascinating tidbits already:

1. I have developed several strange patches of eczema over the past few week : one on my tummy, one under my left ear and, since yesterday, one on my right eyelid. I wonder what this means.

2. When I was a teenager I was besotted with Phil Lynnot of Thin Lizzy. If he wasn't dead, I think I might still be.

3. I voted in the municipal elections this morning - one of only two European voters at my polling station.
4. I think that offal is awful but I'm quite partial to a bit of foie gras.

5. I'm scared of most dogs (is it just me, or does anyone else think of Winston Smith's fear of rats when they reveal that sort of information in the internet?)

6. I'd quite like to look like Annie Lennox (in yer dreams, hen).

7. I've seen a ton of films over the past couple of weeks (mainly due to two transatlantic flights). They were: La Môme, Borat, Michael Clayton, Ira and Abby, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, and Le Scaphandre et le Papillon among others. The only one I would really recommend is the last, which is almost unbearably sad, perhaps even sadder than the original, autobiographical, book.

I'm tagging no-one because I think most of you have probably already done this, or something similar recently.

Halo

How evil are you?

On the Theme of the Theme Park

I should always blog a holiday immediately after getting back, otherwise I get caught up in unpacking and doing mounds of washing and the memories fade. And that preamble is an excuse for the following disjointed assemblage of wordy holiday snapshots.

One of the things I like most about going to America is the opportunity to test out my mastery of a foreign language learned largely through the diligent study of TV-series. When I come out with these exotic yet familiar Americanisms, I pause in trepidation expecting people to burst out laughing and say "you didn't really think we said that, did you?" I tried the following out to no discernible mirth:

-Can I get .... ?
-Two cinnamon danish to go.
-I'm good (repeated at least 20 times a day in response to the constant request to know "How are you today?")
-Can we get a cab? (unfortunately I couldn't remember the expression for taxi rank, so had to back-pedal)
-Easy over, please.
-Where can I get this prescription filled?

Ah, yes, the prescription. Z was ill (got ill?) on the very first day and I had to take him to a doctor. The consultation cost $260, the generic amoxicillin was $46. Sicko indeed!

When he was feeling a bit better, we hit the parks and much fun with Disney characters and on many rides ensued. The whole Disney experience is incredibly well organised - transport runs smoothly, help and information are readily available, there is no litter, everything is well maintained and there is generally a lot less tackiness than you might expect. And I'd definitely recommend going at this time of year - we queued hardly at all.

The only shock came when we discovered that there is no alcohol in the Magic Kingdom, not even beer. (In a bar at Orlando airport we were asked for ID before we got out drinks. But it's true that my Mum does look pretty young for her age).

One of the remarkable things in the parks is the number of wheelchairs. There are hundreds of people whizzing around on electric chairs that are available for hire. At first you think how great it is that the parks are accessible to so many disabled people but you soon realise — as they jump out of the seat and practically run onto one of the rides — that most of the occupants are simply lazy gits who can't be bothered to walk around the park.

One of the highlights of the week was Cirque du Soleil in Downtown Disney: a great experience with lots of vibrant colour and movement, fabulous acrobatics and rococo costumes.

By far the most unpleasant person we came across last week was the officous security woman at Gatwick airport who gleefully chucked the children's cough medicine in the bin along with my minuscule amount of contact lens fluid which had already been on three flights. "You're in Britain now", she smirked.

Jetlagged

Disney Mosaic, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

It's half past midday and except for a brief interlude at 3am the children have been sleeping for the past eighteen hours. They had a great time and so did we!

Read all about it

Alisa of The Juicy Life interviewed me for The Great Interview Experiment which came from the Citizen of the Month blog.

Alisa, who is a ceramic artist, lives in Southern California. She and her husband plan to move to France , so it was quite a nice coincidence that she got interview little old me here in beautiful old France.

If you'd like to read the front page exclusive interview, it's over here.

Story of my Life

Or the past couple of weeks at least. It seems that every time I sit down to finish that paper, something lures me back to the internet.
"It is clear that national identity amongst nineteenth century bla, bla, bla"
.... must just check the temperature in Orlando, before I forget.......
20 minutes later, having also checked the prevalence of mosquitos in Florida:
" bla bla bla what Freud called the narcissism of small differences"
... must check that quote on Google Scholar.....
another 20 minutes later having discovered another, much more interesting article:
"a certain slipperiness in their affiliations..."
Oh great, I've got mail. Oh, look a link to a YouTube video...
And so on and so on. Until it's time to pack up and cease all semblance of having been toiling at the keyboard

Epaminondas

Z's reading book this week is Epaminondas - the story of an extremely stupid little black boy (or an over-obedient little black boy, it depends which way you look at it.)

I think I must have read this book at school when I was about the same age as Z. I remembered the passage where Epaminondas arrives home with butter streaming out of his hat.

"Law's sake! Epaminondas, what you got in your hat?"
"Butter, Mammy," said Epaminondas; "Auntie gave it to me."
"Butter!" said his Mammy.
"Epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! Don't you know that's no way to carry butter?

Amazon suggests buying Epaminondas along with "The Story of Little Black Sambo" which I also remember reading at school, before it was banned.

But then I lived on an island where there were no black people and the Pakistanis who came twice a year to sell clothes from the back of a van were known as "the darkies".

Inadequate

We spent the day in the Dordogne today and since spring has come a couple of months too early, we spent some time in the woods picking daffodils. Not the tall majestic ones that tend to adorn roundabouts but the stumpy little ones with pale tissue paper flowers. I would like to show you a photograph of them, but somehow I have managed to corrupt my photothèque by using a more recent version of iPhoto than the one I have installed. I can't quite work out how this happened.
Preparations for Florida continue apace and my main reading matter for the past week has been "Walt Disney World With Kids 2008" which is perhaps one of the most frightening books I've ever read. It informs me that "character meals" should be booked at exactly 7 am. exactly 180 days before the required date. We leave in exactly 6 days. It is also full of advice about booking meals, terror ratings (?) for all of the rides, exhortations to be at the parks at the crack of dawn, tips about vantage points for fireworks shows and parades and something confusing called Fastpass which short circuits queues for the most popular rides but still involves queuing. I feel that we may be somewhat under-prepared.
On one of those sites where people tell you the real, honest, down to earth truth about the hotel you've booked (only what you usually find is that 50% of users say they had a wonderful holiday in this luxurious establishment while the other 50% tell you it was a rat-infested hole run by a MR. B. Fawlty, so really you're no further forward), I discovered that our hotel's pool is closed for refurbishment for the next three months. I'm beginning to suspect that Disney may not be the house of fun we have been led to believe, it is rather the sort of sneaky multinational that let's you come all the way from Europe to sunny Florida and neglects to mention that the hotel has no water in its frigging pool. It's a good job I spend most of my waking life on the internets, otherwise we wouldn't have known until we wandered down in our swimmies. We're arranging a transfer to the hotel next door, only now our 'magical something or other" luggage labels which ensure that we won't have to bother our pretty little heads with our luggage between dropping it off at the airport in Bordeaux and finding it magicked into our hotel rooms on the other side of the Atlantic, have bar codes for the Wrong Hotel.

Interview

I signed up for Citizen of the Month's great interview experiment in which everybody is a somebody. Here's me interviewing Val who just happened to sign up after me. It turns out that we're quite similar - we both have a boy and a girl, we both like to insert three point punctuation whenever possible ... she has just been to see Mickey Mouse, and I'm going soon. Read on.

You have a very busy life, when do you find time to blog?
Who knows! I really just wing it! Whenever I have a brief moment, I try to throw something up there...although it may not be written as well as I would like it to be....I blame this on someone always calling me for something...whether it is at home or work! Another good thing....I have implemented early bedtimes....my son is in bed by 7pm and daughter has quiet time either reading, doing a puzzle, or watching a movie for an hour until her bedtime, at 8pm. This is how I keep my sanity!

You have one of the longest blogrolls I've ever seen. How did you come to build up such a massive collection, do you read all of them regularly or do you drop in occasionally?
I don't really have a large blogroll. What you are seeing is mainly Wordless Wednesday participants....I really need to clean up my page, but again, who has time! And I actually have to add to my actual blogroll since I read a lot more on a regular basis. I subscribe to most in Google Reader which makes it really easy to read daily posts of others.

Would you say that suburban Philadelphia is a good place to bring up children - what would you like to change, what would you definitely not change?
This is definitely not a question for me if you love Philadelphia....I am NOT a city person. I refuse to drive into the city, and when I am there, I am terrified! I like living in the suburbs of Philly, but would definitely make changes such as lower taxes, better school systems, less crime, and more open space. On a better note, the City does offer wonderful sites to visit, like the Children's and Art Museum. I have lived here, within a few miles, my whole life. But I will let you in on a little secret......I HATE THE WINTER....moving to Florida (taking everyone I know with me) is my ultimate dream!

You recently pointed out all of the dangers we expose our children to through television, toxic toys and foods. You've changed to a healthier diet (well done for the brussels sprouts!), are you
planning on changing anything else?
I would love to get rid of the television....except I enjoy it too much!
No real changes on the horizon for us....we are just looking forward to a healthier year. Drink more water, eat more fruits and veggies, no junk food. (Although I hid a can of Pringles, and ate them in my bed last night!)

You went to Disney World in Florida a few weeks ago and I'm going in a few weeks' time. What was the very best thing you did while you were there and what would you definitely recommend not doing?
I LOVE Disney....but my advise...go alone! No, really, it was A LOT of fun! The kids totally loved it, and it was great just to see their faces taking everything in.
My recommendation: take full advantage of the fast pass and get to the park early! The night before, pick what ride or two you REALLY need to go on...then first thing, go to that ride and fast pass it....this will save you a good amount of time! Also, there is a salon in Cinderella's castle called Bibbidi Bobbidi Salon where little girls get all dressed up as their favorite princesses and get their hair and makeup done! It was SO cute! You need to make reservations though, and from what I heard, they book VERY quickly.
There really isn't anything I don't recommend doing....it is all fabulous...I am even planning a trip in November with just my Mom...spa, here I come!
You will have a GREAT time...give Goofy a big kiss for me!

Le Slim

The students have all adopted "le slim" - those skinny, skinny, skinny jeans that we used to call drainpipes (didn't we, or was that just in Penicuik?). This video made me laugh because I have, I admit, sometimes wondered how the young 'uns actually manage to bend their legs in them. I also quite like it because it was shot in Bordeaux (or Bx, pour les intimes) and I recognise most of the places - the tram station I often wait at, the jardin public, a street a bit like mine.... Oh, and if you stick around until almost the end , you get a little tecktonik dancing. It's all the rage, dontcha know.