Vacation Vacillation

It used to be so easy. We would decide where we wanted to go, we’d go to the travel agent’s and ask for the cheapest possible ticket, we’d pack our stuff and head off.
Since those days of carefree travel, two complicating factors have arisen:
1) two little children
2) the internet

The children complicate things because we’re no longer brave enough to set out into the unknown with some money in our pockets but no itinerary and no hotel. We’re not flexible enough to pack our (now voluminous) gear up every day and hit the road in whatever direction takes our fancy. We’re not yet cruel enough to inflict multiple museum, garden and ancient ruin visits on them so there has to be a pool and a reasonable amount of sun. But we are just a little bit cruel, so a children’s club to abandon them in occasionally would also be nice. Of course, we need to be able to see them during the night so two double rooms aren’t an option unless the hotel explicitly encourages child room rampage. No, we need a family room. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the boring, middle class, middle aged, mid-budget, bulging midriff category.

The internet complicates matters because it offers FAR, FAR too much choice for people as indecisive as we are. But I am nothing if not compulsively thorough in my quest for the perfect holiday at the perfect price.

First of all, I use several of the aggregators that bring all of those cheap holidays together, then I laboriously trawl through the individual sites and pick out the packages that are within our budget, seem to suit our requirements and look attractive. Then I work out a very complicated mental logarithmic calculation allocating points for climate, novelty, charter/regular flight, departure point (Bordeaux or Toulouse), amount of blue sky in the photos, proximity of beach (and fifty seven other items). Then we dither for a week or so and inevitably some of the possibilities fill up and disappear.

This time we narrowed it down to Morocco, Croatia, Tunisia or Tenerife.

We eliminated Morocco because both Marrakech and Agadir are fully booked from Bordeaux and none of the packages from Toulouse include family rooms.

Croatia was tempting because it looks so beautiful, but the temperatures are a tad lukewarm in April and again, there are no family rooms.

Tunisia looks like a good alternative to Morocco although it’s not as warm at Easter. So what about hotels? Well, one is 3km from Monastir airport mmmm I hear charter planes droning overhead in the middle of the night. Another is separated from the beach by a “road” no doubt a roaring motorway. But look there’s also one in Hammamet and it’s right on the beach and even has an indoor swimming pool, which would be excellent if the weather was mediocre. Let’s go for that one then. Okay, but wait a minute, if we fly out of Toulouse, we save 500€ in all, that’s quite a lot of money. Yes, but what if the flights are in the middle of the night? How would we manage to get there for 4 am? Oh no, oh no, we just can’t decide. Let's sleep on it.

What about Tenerife then? This looks perfect — regular flight, we can even add on a couple of days at the end; not in a big resort but a nice quiet one; family apartments, fantastic climate with sun practically guaranteed, a lovely big pool and a little one for the children. This sounds perfect.

There’s just one thing — we went there last year.
Are we ready to be THAT boring?

Multitask Breakdown

The post that went with that picture of the blossom got gobbled up somewhere. All I wanted to say was that everyone else was posting pics of spring blossom and I had to chip in with mine. Actually, it's not my blossom, the tree belongs to Sarah and Guy, and although this is the first day of spring, it's raining in Bordeaux.

Losing posts is what comes of trying to multitask in the early evening with two children crying out for printouts of Babar and Narnia colouring pages. I'm also trying to:

Find an cheap holiday in Morocco or maybe Tunisia (has anyone been to Hammamet or Jerba?)

Arrange alternative accommodation for a couple of classes because our usual classrooms are under student siege. I don't like dodging picket lines, but the medicine students aren't on strike.

Make pumpkin soup (the last of the year?)

Fit in a phone call to a friend in Edinburgh. Since I've had free hot running phone calls to almost the entire world, I don't seem to have phoned anyone.

Order flowers for Mother's Day on Sunday.

Get myself psychologically prepared for another mind-numbing session of exam marking.

And all of that while doing the eternal juggling with whites and coloureds, and the waltz of clean dishes out, dirty dishes in. And there isn't a single bottle of white wine in the house and P won't be home from work until tomorrow evening. Wail.....

Prunus blossom

Prunus blossom
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

My mate Einstein

As I may already have told you, Albert and I share a birthday.



Make your own.

Reasons to be Cheerful: Part 44

Big sun in the sky, a side of smoked salmon in the fridge, listening to Jack Johnson, 12 creme eggs (make that 11, no 10), a sparkly turquoise necklace, happy smiley students, cheque in the post, Kenzo perfume, a pile of new books, children being children, me being a muse, birthday cards on the shelf, Easter holidays on the horizon, an early night.

With apologies to Ian Dury and there was just no way I could make it rhyme.

Playing Doctors and Nurses

I think I first read the following riddle, which still seems to be doing the rounds, in the 1970s in the Reader's Digest :

A father and a son were in a car accident. The father went home to rest. The son was taken to the hospital for minor surgery. The surgeon came in and said: "I can't operate on this boy because he's my son." How is this possible?

Answer: The surgeon was his mother.

As children of the '60s we went through all sorts of lateral thinking solutions before we got to that one: he was adopted and the doctor was his real father; the man in the car wasn't really his father but his grandfather; his father had a twin brother; he'd been abducted by aliens. A woman surgeon was the very last thing we thought of.
I'm frankly dismayed by the number of women students of medicine who still automatically and consistently employ the personal pronoun "he" when referring to a doctor and the strange thing is that there are more young women studying medicine than men.
But perhaps it's not all that surprising really when one of the major publishers of medical textbooks is using the image on the front cover of its current catalogue:


The message is clear if stylized: doctors are intelligent men with square jaws who look down on admiring little nurses.
While we're on the subject, has anyone else been reading Dr Crippen's ongoing diatribe against specialist nurses? I don't live in the UK and I have no experience of specialist nurses and I'm more than willing to believe that the National Health Service is slowly being flushed down the toilet, and that the usurpation by specialist nurses of some of the power traditionally held by doctors is somehow part of that process. I refuse, however, to swallow his elitist guff about a group of specialist nurses:

This gaggle of well-meaning women have neither the training nor the intellectual capacity to understand what is going on, and are incapable of making judgements.

Despite Dr Crippen's protestations to the contrary, that to me is sexist language. What do you think?

Today, 8th March, has been declared blog against sexism day. That was my contribution.

Lost Forever

The Sopranos Season Six starts in the USA on March 12th. Goody, goody (or even baddy, baddy).

You may remember that episode of The Sopranos in which Tony bellows at his mother Livia telling her just what a f*****ing useless grandmother she is to his kids. The reason ? He’s just come across an album that she was supposed to fill up with photos and memories for the children and the pages are all still blank. Carmela’s parents have filled theirs up, why couldn’t she ?

I sympathise with poor old Livia.

My children both have hopelessly empty baby albums on their bookshelves. Date first tooth appeared: empty. Photos of first birthday party: blank. Family tree to fill in : zilch. First words spoken : gaping void.

I do have their first ultrasound pictures and their hospital bracelets somewhere (where?) and I did keep a lock of their baby hair — although I can’t for the life of me work out which is which.

I do feel a little guilty about this failure on my part. I mean, I actually bought the albums myself, imagining the fun I would have filling them in, cutting out photos, sticking in little scraps of ribbon and wool that would trigger tender memories years later. Writing down each new bon mot. Somehow, in the whirlwind of the baby years, I just never got round to it.

I don’t have a baby album of my own but my Mum did keep every single birthday card I received until I was twelvish. Some babyhoods, of course, are hyper-documented and I feel even more inadequate when I read Dooce’s latest monthly letter to her daughter. She writes :

Sometimes I go back and read the things I wrote to you in the early months and I realize that I’ve already forgotten half of what happened, and if it weren’t for what I’ve written here I could have lost certain memories forever.

I just hope the children don’t decide on the mafia as a career path when they grow up. Otherwise I may end up as fish food . Maybe I should just burn the empty baby-album evidence now, or maybe I could just make it all up. Do you think they’d mind?

It's a funny old B'sphere

I always used to think that Dooce was a bit of a blogsnob because there was no comments box on her site. Now I know why. Talk about opening the floodgates: she's had over a 1200 comments in about 24 hours and the number still seems to be climbing. It would take a full working day to read all of them but from a cursory glance, I'd say that they're pretty good quality comments too. There's none of that sycophantic "I love your blog. You're so funny" stuff you see on some other famous blogs. Although the whole concept of famous and A-list is obviously relative: I doubt anyone is playing in the same league as Dooce. And she IS funny and I do looooove her blog (but not the photos of the dog, and not really the photos of the small person if I'm honest). Obviously readers want to interact with their blogheros, but on that sort of scale, it's not a conversation it can't be anything other than an enormous, unmanageable, sequential cacophony however civilised and reflective.

I suspect that a lot of people, like Dooce, would like to live entirely off blogging (I'd quite like to make a living entirely from reading blogs, the hours are better). Jason Kottke tried it for a year but is giving up, citing lack of traffic, and inability to build a "cult of personality". Do, I detect a little pique in his post on the subject? Any tension there should make for good small talk in his opening "conversation" with Heather Armstrong at the big Blog thing in Austin, Texas. My advice Jason? Get yourself a baby, buy a dog.

If I was contemplating a writing life based on cult of personality I think I'd go for a newspaper career — same reader expectations, same deadlines, but you don't have to pose for the camera.

And finally, you can blame Boing Boing for this. I'm not 100% sure what smartfilter is but just had to have the picture.



Ooops, apologies, I've just gone back and corrected six typos in that post. Note to self: don't write posts in bed anymore.

Thank God, a meme

Can't think of anything worth writing about unless you'd like to hear about departmental (emphasis on the mental) politics, a very bad Indian meal, or mesotherapy. So I'm grabbing this meme encountered at Badbadbadger's and I'm running with it. You can all fall out now.

I had to change the original instructions because I still can't do scoring out with Mac and Blogger. So here's my own system:

• green for the ones I've read,
• an asterix if I have them on my bookshelf (or in a box in the loft),
• red for the ones I won't read,
• italics for the ones I might read and
• brackets around those I've never heard of.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *(I started this anbd thought it was drivel)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger* (read it when I was 12. Favourite line at the time: "He was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat".)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald*
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling (Read the first H.P., do not feel impelled to read the others. Will my children want this one read to them?)
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Borrowed it from the library and never got round to reading it)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell* (Read it a school)
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller* (Does anyone still read this?)
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (What was i reading when everyone else was reading this?)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Loved it)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding (another "required reading" school book)
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (did I really read this or do I just think I read it?)
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (was given this as a present when it first came out. Didn't finish it for another five or six years)
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
(The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini) Never heard of it, but I like the title
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I felt that there was something dishonest at the heart of this book. In my experience, dead people are dead.)
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown (puleeze)
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
(Neuromancer - William Gibson)
(Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson)
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley*
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis (missed out on this. I think my primary school teacher was reading us Biggles when everyone else was in this fantasy world.)
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (Borrowed this one from the library too and didn't read it. There's a librarian with very good taste in English books at our local library or médiathèque as they like to call it.)
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
(Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman)
Atonement - Ian McEwan *(Liked this one except for the ending. Loved "Saturday")
(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (started, couldn't finish)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Picked this one up in the library last Tuesday and wondered if perhaps I shouldn't borrow it. Maybe I will)
Dune - Frank Herbert (Sat through this at the cinema. Despite Sting's good looks, that was quite enough)

Who chose these book titles and why I wonder? It's a strange mixture.

What big feet you have!

Here are my brand new beautiful brown suede cowboy boots. Whadyathink? And more importantly, how much do you think I paid for them?
It's a pity you can't stroke their chocolatey, soft loveliness.
(I cannot believe I've just spent twenty minutes taking those photos and making them into a photo cloud. I have work to do! Lots of work to do! I must legitimise this waste of time with some sort of pseudo-pedagogical application.)

Suede boot 360 by picturecloud.com

Ingrid Betancourt

I don't think there is any woman I admire more than Ingrid Betancourt who has now been a hostage for 4 years.

A Week in the Basque Country

Just back from another trip to the Basque Country during our half-term break. We stayed in a big old farm house with lots an lots of friends. Apart from us and the florist and the landscape gardener and the neo-hoteliers and the dentist and the doctor and the teacher and the unionist and the school administrator, and the soon-to-be B&B landlady, the house was overun by a gaggle of excited children. During the day we hiked over hill and dale. Lunch was serrano ham and sheep's cheese. In the evening, magret was grilled in the massive hearth and much wine and hilarity flowed at a very long table.

For some reason most of my photographs seem to be of windows.

Day in the Dordogne

notices
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Click here for more....

Talking the talk

I seem to remember seeing a TEFL-type job description somewhere — it may have been for lettori in Italy — that specified that all candidates must be fresh meat. Okay, that wasn't the actual expression that they used, it may have been something more like "linguistically and culturally fresh off the boat". Okay, it wasn't exactly that either, but you know what I mean, they didn't want anyone who'd been living abroad for any length of time and had gone more or less native. And I also seem to remember sucking air in through my teeth in exasperation. Poor people, did they really think that one could forget a language that quickly; become cut off from one's native culture that easily?
Well, no of course you can't, but you can very rapidly feel yourself slipping out of the loop of knowing what people at home are actually talking about (who is this Davina McCall?) and knowing what terms are actually acceptable. After all, when I first moved to France it was still perfectly all right to say someone was handicapped and coloured.
Even more importantly how can I tell which terms are cool.... or should that be hip? When my brother and I were teenagers, I remember my Mum asking us things like "So, is he going with her?" and we would dissolve in disdainful laughter. What a fool she was; didn't she know that you could only say "Is he going OUT with her"? For goodness sakes, wise up woman, we're in the late seventies, don't you know?
Well, I am that woman now. I'm middle-aged and I have the added disadvantage of living in a non-English -speaking country. I think I managed for a while to keep up but got stuck at the "I am so enjoying this..........not" stage which I no doubt picked up from a rerun of Friends.
There's only one consolation: my children probably won't know any better, just so long as I deprive them of any authentic English-language interaction with young native-speakers for the next ten years.

coComment

I seem to remember saying a while ago how great it would be if there was some way of centralising, collating and monitoring follow-up to the comments I had left littered across the blogosphere. coComment looks as if it might be that tool. It's an invitation-only beta at the moment but I ended up with two invites so if you'd like one, leave a comment.
(via pointblog.com)

UPDATE: It's gone

Other things that went well this weekend

Via Lifehacker found an application called Senuti that copied all the music on my iPod onto my PowerBook. Something I'd been trying to do for ages.

Bought a wifi stick on Ebay which should (fingers crossed, fingers crossed) mean that the family Imac gets internet again without us forking out for an airport card.

Discovered that an older cousin who likes to play at being the teacher can keep young children amused for almost an entire weekend.

Got 7/10 playing this word game.

Made Wendy's Linguine and Leeks. Delicious.

Sold the crappiest Michel Sardou CD in the history of French musak and made enough euros to buy a bottle of Tariquet. Fair exchange.

Here we go, here we go, here we go...

Scotland 20 - France
I have suffered through countless painful France-Scotland matches in the past nine years, ever the good loser. Needless to say, I was out this afternoon and missed our moment of glory. Allez L'Ecosse!

The first hour

I’ve asked my class of student bloggers to post about a typical day in their lives and in a spirit of egalitarianism, I had intended to make my own contribution but it turned out to be excruciatingly boring. I’m going to inflict the first hour on you anyway.

The alarm invariably goes off at 7H10 and I invariably ignore it. I get up half an hour later and rush around making coffee and hot chocolate, showering, waking the children up, dragging them out of bed and into hastily selected clothes. I never know what to eat in the morning so I often leave the house with only a couple of cups of black coffee swilling around inside me. I stuff my PowerBook into my workbag.
We walk to nursery school. On a good day the children skip; on a bad day they demand to be carried, sometimes both of them at the same time. Today, Z told me he had had enough of working. I accompany them to their makeshift classrooms; the school is undergoing a prolonged facelift. Some of the other parents say “bonjour”, some don’t bother. I cheek kiss the few I know a bit better. The children slip into their daytime identities.
Then it’s off to the tram stop, unravelling my grubby i-Pod headphones as I go. I usually have time to listen to three or four tracks on the way in. Today, I only got one — an interminable Led Zep number. And this is where I get off.

Oane, tou, sri, for

I give up. Pronunciation is notoriously difficult to teach (and learn) and I spend a lot of my working life correcting the usual "z"s for "th"s and "ee"s for "i"s. Some learners are so convinced that you don't need to pronounce the "h" at the beginning of a word that they don't even bother to write it, so I get this sort of thing to in essays "I ear the bells". On the other hand, they are often tempted to slip an "h" in before a vowel at the beginning of a word, as in "I hate my dinner". It's an uphill struggle and made all the more difficult by the fact that most of the students I come into contact with have been studying English for more than eight years and the mistakes are fossilised. It's really important to be exposed to correct pronunciation models from the very beginning.
It looks as if things are not going to be getting any better. Yesterday, while reading to E., I discovered this handy pronunciation guide in which the blessed Dora the Explorer (she speaks heavily accented English in the French version) recommends that the little people say él-lo for hello, sri for three, and for for four. No, no, no, no no, no, no. Dora is a dunce.

Words

Look! A cloud of commonly used words from this blog. I could even have it made into a t-shirt. Get your own from snapshirts.

Poetry

I'm not a great reader of poetry. I did the usual stuff at school of course: a couple of pieces from A Child's Garden of Verses in primary school, some of the early Scottish ballads, that Tennyson about the eagle and the azure sky, "Timothy Whatshisname goes to school", a bit of Burns, some unfathomable T.S. Eliot,and and even some Verlaine in secondary school. I also attended and enjoyed readings by Roger McGough, Edwin Muir, and Norman McCaig. I remember buying an anthology of poetry for my French course at university but I can only dredge up a fragment of a single line from one poem by Paul Eluard: "debout sur mes paupières". If forced, I could probably still recite a bit of Burns, but that's about as far as it goes and I could certainly tell you more about the lives of Rimbaud and Verlaine than I could about their writing.
Although I own several books by poets, I tend to settle for their prose writing rather than their poetry. For example, although I find the deceptively smooth poetry of Hugo Williams seductive ("If it doesn't look easy you're not trying hard enough"), I far prefer his similarly suave column in the TLS and bought a collection of that prose writing a few years ago. I have also devoured and regularly reread Kenneth White's travel writing, but his poetry books, some of which I do have, just don't exert the same attraction. I have some incredibly poetic books by Kathleen Jamie and Alistair Reid too, but none of their poetry. The Collected Letters of Larkin sit on my bookshelf and have been read in their (occasionally tedious) entirety, but I don't have any of his poems.
I used to think that poetry held so little attraction for me because of my lack of musicality. Or perhaps I just didn't have enough soul. But, a passage from Ian McEwan's most recent novel, Saturday, suggests a better explanation. The protagonist finds that "even a first line can produce a tightness behind his eyes:

"Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely , to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like dry stone walling or trout tickling."

The truth is, then, that reading poetry is a skill that simply takes more time and effort than reading most prose. It's not something you can do properly lying in bed, and subscribing to a poetry blog is no magic bullet either, since the very nature of blog-reading means that one scans them quickly for instant reading gratification. Perhaps poetry podcasts are the answer — there is something very attractive in the idea of effortlessly assimilating the words of a poem whispered directly into my ear from my pink i-Pod as the tram whisks me into work. If it's not in bed and it's not in the tram, the alternative for me is reading poetry in the living-room with the repetitive cadences of Dora in the background: Chipeur arrête de chiper, Chipeur arrête de chiper, Chipeur arrête de chiper..

Silly Virus

Statistically insignificant

In a recent comment about the increasing difficulty of standing out from the crowd, R. Brett Stirling recalls Milan Kundera writing that

"in Socrates day he was maybe 1/250,000th of the population, Lincoln: 1/1,000,000,000th. Each of us? 1/6,200,000,000th."

So here are some more sad statistics that have jumped out at me recently reflecting the unbearable lightness of our being.
The chances are that you will have eight great-children. Of those eight great-grandchildren only two will remember your name. I learned this in an excerpt from The Human Body that I use with students of medicine. They don't find it as depressing as I do. (We learned from the same excerpt that I can except to shed 19 kilos of dead skin during my lifetime. Now that gets a reaction)
And here, for balance, is another statistic confirming, this time, the inevitable heaviness of our (or at least my) being. In a chapter from Atul Gawande's book Complications that I had chosen to study in class today, I stopped at the following piece of information: a review of decades of diet studies

"found that between 90 and 95% of people regained one-third to two-thirds of the weight they'd lost within a year — and all of it within five years."

Again, my class of skinny 19-year-olds weren't as disheartened by that information as I was.

Gastroenteritis

I will spare you the "Streaming Puke Stream of Consciousness" post. Must get back to the washing.

Streaming Nose Stream of Consciousness

Your nose is runnin'/ And your eyes are red / Your head is achin'/ You'd be better in bed/ From the bottom of your fever/To the throbbing in your toes /You've got a cold. Must go to bed. Wonder if some warm Talisker would do any good. When will the winter to be over ? Wish I hadn’t left that pretentious remark in someone's comment box. What could we do this summer ? Maybe one of those house swap things. When will those children go to sleep ? the mercury's rising/ To a hundred and four/You've got a beauty, a bad ass / The mother of them all. What’s the likelihood of swapping our average under-equipped house for a sumptious mansion in the Hamptons? Maybe I'll buy a lottery ticket tomorrow. Picked a book off the shelf yesterday looking for a reference for a student. Book's called « L’Idiot du Voyage » by sociologist called Jean-Dider Urbain. Got in the car to turned the radio on after a couple of minutes realised I was listening to an interview with self-same Jean-Didier Urbain. Now that has to be some sort of sign, I hadn’t looked at that book in at least three years. I'd quite like to go to Cape Breton on a home exchange. The book is about tourists and tourism (as opposed to travel). Wherever we go, we'll be tourists. Tomorrow morning I’m going to order that armoire in the sale at La Redoute. I'm selling a mobile phone on e-bay, looks as thoough it'll go for 1€. Drat. When will those bloody children go to sleep ? Foreign bodies in your Kleenex/ You've got no taste at all/ While your system is dyin'/ the bugs are havin' a ball/ You've got a beauty, a bad ass/ The mother of them all/ You've got a cold I used to love 10CC, I've still got that Deceptive Bends album somewhere. Where? No classes tomorrow and Friday's a "journée morte" at the university: we won't be answering e-mails or phone calls, there'll be no classes. We're protesting against the paucity of the university budget: "la dotation globale du fonctionnement". Shut up please children. I do wonder about these people who land up here through search engines. Tonight I see someone was looking for an English translation of Hubert Félix Thiefaine. I saw him give a concert in Périgueux. The only song I remember is La Fille du Coupeur de Joints. Someone else was looking for "coitus interruption". I wish I could write back and give my opinion. Not a safe option. Today a girl at work told me that her sister had a baby in her flat this morning. She had one contraction, thought I'll just have a quick shower. Had another contraction and an irresistible urge to push. Came out of the shower, waters broke, 15-month-old older child jumped into her arms crying. By the time the pompiers got there the baby had crowned. One more push and she was out. Are house swaps safe? Must go and see if the blogger has responded to my pretentious comment.
Did I mention that I've got a cold?

The Moronic Inferno

Reading The Promise of Happiness, a novel by Justin Cartwright, I come across this paragraph:

"What the net has undoubtedly done is to encourage the loony-tunes to have a voice. There is no moral, educational or documentary standard on the net. It is truly the moronic inferno, with spelling mistakes. Everywhere, people are trying to find meaning in the thinned-out air; they believe that by writing their banal thoughts they are investing them with gravitas; they are proclaiming their destiny."

It's dispiriting, isn't it? And I would like to be able to refute the sentiment but to be honest I know that my own voice, my own banal thoughts are a tad loonytuneque.

Speak to me

According to Geeky Mom it's national delurking week in the USA. I have to admit that I am curious about the mysterious people who drop in without leaving a comment, so I'm making it international delurking week.
Go on hit the "comment" button just this once and tell me why you pop in here from time to time; what other blogs you read and think I might like; make a book/film/music recommendation; point out any annoying spelling mistakes you've noticed; tell me how you think I could improve the blog. Or tell me why you don't like commenting.
If your coming here was a terrible mistake, reveal why you were looking for the words to Hey Lolly Lolly or that "words-per-minute typing test", or a photo of Cap Ferret.

Go on. You know you want to.

I remember

I remember when we flew home after the holidays and my brother and I both had chicken pox and new green coats.

I remember when Mum got a fishing hook stuck in her forehead as we rowed out to sea.

I remember when we flew to the mainland in a plane that was so small that Dad had to sit beside the pilot.

I remember when my brother and I both got bikes for Christmas and the dizzy freedom of riding round and round the roads but going nowhere.

I remember the day Mum gave us some tomatoes and some cheese and let us go on a picnic on the old runway behind our house.

I remember late nights when the kitchen sink was full of sinister blue lobsters, and shiny mackerel about to be gutted

I remember eating peas in the garden and then chewing the pods because I liked the taste of the green juice.

I remember when we waited all night for the boat to Oban, saw it try to dock at the pier in a howling storm, give up, then turn back to the open sea.

I remember skipping across the machair to long white beaches with nobody on them.

I remember the oystercatchers and sandpipers and pewits and black-headed gulls and curlews and arctic terns.

I remember guddling in rock pools, taunting sea anemones and dislodging limpets.

This was inspired by two great posts by Nate and Jonathan.

Category: nostalgia

Four Things meme

When uninspired, do a meme. Nobody tagged me for this but it took my fancy when I saw it on
Michael Bérubé Online

Four Jobs You’ve Had

1. shop assistant in chemist's
2. shop assistant in fruit & veg shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh
3. campsite courier in Brittany and the Vendée
4. conference interpreter

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

1. 37°2 le Matin
2. Sex, Lies and Videotape
3. Le Grand Bleu
4. Urga

Four Places You’ve Lived

1. Isle of Tiree
2. Edinburgh
3. Metz
4. Périgueux

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

1. That Seventies Show
2. The Sopranos
3. Grey's Anatomy
4. Le Zapping on Canal +

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation

1. Alquezar, Spain
2. Nepal
3. Arizona/Nevada
4. Colorado/ New Mexico

Four Blogs You Visit Daily
(I visit all the blogs in my blogroll almost daily, these are the ones that are updated most frequently)
1. Boing Boing
2. The Guardian Unlimited News Blog
3. Metafilter
4. Langauge Hat

Four of Your Favorite Foods

1. axoa
2. curry
3. fajitas
4. lebanese mezze
(and rösti, and my Mum's parsnip soup, and rhubarb crumble, and foie gras, and smoked salmon, and most canapés, and sausage rolls, and oatcakes, and .......

Four Places You’d Rather Be

1. San Fransisco
2. Santa Fe
3. St Kilda
4. Mongolia

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without
(I could probably live without any music at all, but these I like a lot)
1. The Year of the Cat, Al Stewart
2. Crosby, Stills & Nash
3. Live and Dangerous, Thin Lizzy
4. any early Bob Dylan

Four Vehicles You’ve Owned

1. Renault Scenic
2. Renault 19
3. Opel Kadett
4. I've only ever owned three but P. had a Citroën GS when I met him

Four Taggees

1. Sarah
2. Ms Mac
3. Antipo
4. L'Oiseau
and anyone else who lacks inspiration and fancies doing this.

Home Free

I love my ISP. Since 1st January for the usual monthly broadband fee, all of our telephone calls to Germany, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Spain, USA, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Singapore AND THE UK have been absolutely free. Oh, yes and I can watch TV on my PowerBook too.
Now all I have to do is find friends to phone in Australia and all Free has to do is sign up some decent television channels.

Category: ISP

Did you say Happy New Year?

Is it just me (again) or does anyone else find the repetitive and compulsory wishing of health, happiness, and prosperity for the New Year a little creepy? Somehow, no matter how sincerely expressed, all these good wishes serve as a reminder that there are other possibilities; that for some, 2006 will be a year of famine and divorce and illness and redundancy and war and plague and pestilence and bankruptcy and other natural and unnatural catastrophes. (Feeling cheered up?)
Here in France it's not enough just to say a short "Bonne Année", you have to add something along the lines of ...."et tous mes voeux pour vous et votre famille" or "et bonne santé" often followed (especially if you're speaking to someone old and decrepit) by "car c'est le plus important n'est-ce pas, ha ha".
Why do we do it? Is it superstition? Do we really believe that by just expressing the wish that our acquaintances won't be affected by bad vibes in the coming year we will protect them in some way? (What do you mean I have Bodoquin's Gonorrhea, I can't have, Lesley wished me good health last January.) In which case, may I suggest that we do what the Mormons do when they baptise all those dead people and start looking out the electoral registers and wishing a HNY in absentia to every name on there.
I love that scene in Indochine where Catherine Deneuve looks at her beautiful grandchild for the first time and loudly exclaims what an ugly little critter she is, then explains that this is just a way of tricking the gods into thinking the baby's not worth bothering about so that they won't try to carry her off.
So from now, in an effort to ward off all evil spirits, I think I'll be wishing everyone an Abysmal New Year.

Category: new year

Twenty O Six

A very, very happy new year to you all.

I'd like to begin 2006 with a question and an apology. Is anyone else getting an ugly pop-up when they open my page? Even with the Firefox pop-up blocker 0n? Where does it come from? What can I do to get rid of it? Why me? And sorry if this has been bugging you.

The picture above is of me walking through a dark corridor lined with inflated rubber gloves last week. Very symbolic n'est-ce pas?

Category: pop-ups

Seasonal Smorgesbord

(Spot the school-made tree decoration)

Tripping over : doctor’s sets (multiple), Darth Vader masks, Star Wars DVDs, castles, magnetix, fairy costumes, cars, binoculars, pick-up-sticks ……….

Eating : dates, chocolates, wonderful curry made from leftovers (actually better than the original dishes it was cobbled from), foie gras, mini Christmas cake, mince pies and other goodies sent by Mum. An entire side of smoked salmon is no more.

Drinking : Loupiac 1996, Château Maison Blanche (Médoc), Chiroulet, and the occasional G&T

Reading : Kevin MacNeil’s The Stornoway Way (a present from Mum) which is absolutely, definitely one of my best books of 2005. Steeped in Famous Grouse and Hebridean angst peppered with gaelic phrases and the odd unforgettable pun. About to begin The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford.

Watching : trying to find a minute to watch the Martin Scorcese film No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (present from P.)

Being : very touchy-feely at an interactive exhibition called Très Toucher at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Bordeaux this afternoon.

Getting ready for : New-Year celebrations with friends in the Périgord.

Hope you are all having a wonderfully indulgent time too.

Category: Christmas

Where else?

Where else do you get to listen to a dire radio station through tinny speakers for two and a half hours?

Where else do you get a chance to detail your holiday plans to a complete stranger?

Where else would you let someone lather dangerous chemicals onto your skin and then agree to inhale them for thirty minutes?

Where else would you take style advice from a nineteen-year-old Britney lookalike?

Where else would you be talked into parting with 11€ for a bottle of something that is, in all likelihood, no better than the version you could buy in the supermarket for 2€?

Where else does sheer boredom drive you to read every single page of the sort of magazine that you wouldn't normally even consider opening for fear of rotting you eyes?

Where else would you be willing to spend a couple of hours contemplating your increasingly imperfect reflection in unflattering light?

Where else would you allow someone to sit you in a shop window with a towel on your head?

At the hairdresser's of course. I had a great morning.

Category: grooming

Kirikou est vaillant

kirikou
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

What was the first film you ever saw? For me it was "The Sound of Music", (then "Jungle Book" then "The King and I".) On Sunday we went to the cinema with Sarah, Guy and Kepler to see "Kirikou et les Betes Sauvages". I wonder if in x years time when Eloïse blogs (or vlogs?) about the first film she ever saw at the flicks, she'll think it was a good choice.
(The picture is Zachary's take on the storyline, and a pretty good summary it is.)

A clean house is a sign of a misspent life

Deborah, who still doesn't have a blog, sent me some photographs of her place for posting "to make everyone else feel better about the mess in their houses". Well, yes, it is messy but then in the words of a thousand fridge magnets, "Dull women have immaculate houses".

By coincidence, I've just watched the episode in Grey's Anatomy in which Cristina reveals her darkest secret: her apartment is a pit. She doesn't do laundry, just buys new underwear. She never does dishes, she never vacuums. She hoards magazines that she doesn't have time to read but will never throw out. She has nothing in her fridge but water and vodka, and the most important bit..... she doesn't care.

Deborah doesn't really care either, I don't think. She'd give those insufferable Life Laundry people short shrift. To quote another fridge magnet "If a messy house is a happy house, this one is delirious". And Deborah's is a happy house, especially in the summer sitting outside with a glass of Tariquet in one's hand admiring the plants in Deborah's decidedly unmessy terrace garden.

But, despite the clutter and dust in my own house, I do care a little bit — as does Burke, Cristina's boyfriend, he with the surgically sterile apartment — so can anyone tell me, how on earth does one restore the former pristine whiteness of grubby grey i-pod headphones?

Category: housework

Bam-Ba-Lan

Unlike Neil, I haven’t been back to my old home town for a while, but I hear that although it’s got a new-look town centre, underneath it’s really just exactly the same as it was in 1975. So here, to steal Neil’s riff is what I would have been doing thirty years ago on a Saturday (all right, so for him adolescence was twenty-five years ago, but he’s still a child, obviously)

I’d meet up with my friends at the corner of the playing fields and we’d chum each other down into town to our Saturday jobs.

There, I’d spend the day filling shelves and serving flare-wearing customers in Gordon Drummond’s the chemist's. At this time of year that would be mostly puzzled-looking men buying Yardley’s perfume as presents for their wives.

I’d have had sausage roll, beans and chips at a cafe listening to Black Betty (Bam Ba Lan) on the juke box.

The afternoon was spent thinking about what I was going to wear that night (my favourite outfit at that time involved black satin trousers from that temple of high fashion, What Every Woman Wants). At closing time I’d have pocketed the £8 I’d earned for a day’s work .

I’d probably have spent the evening at a Scout Disco. It may have been spotty teenagers swaying to crap music in a wooden hut, but it was the highlight of our social calendar. For me, the evening involved studiously ignoring any boy I was vaguely interested in, surprisingly not a particularly successful boyfriend-baiting tactic.

Or maybe I’d have been watching Dallas at a friend’s house — I wasn’t allowed to watch it at home, proof of my parents’ decent taste, perhaps.

As they say, you can take the girl out of Penicuik but you can’t take Penicuik out of the girl.

Me, me, me meme

Welcome to the 2005 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry and paste it onto a new blog entry that you’ll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish! Leave a comment if you do this.The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.

What time did you get up this morning?
7H10

Diamonds or pearls?
Diamonds, but I'm not passionately interested in either

What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Broken Flowers

What is your favourite TV show?
At the moment, Grey's Anatomy. Last week, Six Feet Under. Probably be back into The Sopranos after Christmas (once I've given P. one of his box-shaped Christmas presents.)

What do you usually have for breakfast?
Coffee. More coffee. No milk.

Favourite cuisine?
Lebanese.

What food do you dislike?
Milk. Offal.

What is your favourite CD at the moment?
I borrowed Les Têtes Raides from the médiathèque yesterday but haven't had time to listen yet.

Morning or night person?
I'm definitely a night person but at the moment I don't seem to be either.

Favourite sandwich?
Fried egg roll.

What characteristic do you despise?
Avarice

Favourite item of clothing?
Red velvet jacket.

If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would it be?
Mongolia

What colour is your bathroom?
A not very successful cornflower blue.

Favourite brand of clothing?
H&M

Where would you retire to?
Several places.

What was your most memorable birthday?
My mind has gone blank.

Favourite sport to watch?
I sometimes find myself mesmerised by curling on Eurosport. Otherwise, international rugby.

When is your birthday?
14th March

What is your shoe size?
39/40

Pets?
None at the moment but as a child I had a cat called Piseag.

Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with us?
Absolutely zilch.

What did you want to be when you were little?
Anything but a teacher.

What is your favourite flower?
Sweet peas.

What date on the calendar are you looking forward to?
Can't see anything past Christmas and New Year.

One word to describe the person who you snaffled this from?
Shutter happy

Category: meme

This is sooo wrong

You're an agitator! Your kids have grown up on the
front lines of rallies and pickets, and chances
are that you boycott at least one company for
its bad business practices. Your kids are
learning what matters to you and how they can
change what matters to them.

What kind of a freaky mother are you?

I really don't know how this happened. I answered the questions as honestly as possible, but no I haven't been to a demo myself for years and the kids have yet to discover the joys of tramping throught the streets all the time wishing they could just nip off and have a quick look in the shops. And no I can't think of any companies I knowingly boycott, except perhaps Macdonalds and I don't boycott them, I ration them. I'll have to find another so that I fit my description more closely. Any suggestions?
Category: quiz

Multitasking

Tonight I'm simultaneously trying to

• Make a pot au feu and apple crumble for some friends who are staying with us. I've just realised that I added the bone marrow at the beginning of of the cuisson instead of the end. Oops. Hope it's edible.
• Decide if this is a good time to open that Chateau Brown 1995 which is burning a hole in the fridge (are we all too tired to appreciate it or would it waken us all up?)
• Work out when the very last posting day for Scotland is if pressies are to get there in time for Christmas (Monday?)
• Reserve a table at a special restaurant for tomorrow evening but La Cape, Le Vieux Bordeaux and Les Cinq Sens are all fully booked.
• Decide whether I should take another paracetamol before I feel feverish again.
• Answer several work-related e-mails that I missed this afternoon because I was Christmas shopping.
• Collate a mega smoked salmon order from friends and colleagues to send off to my brother for reception before Christmas.
• Decide whether or not to actually finish reading "The Devil Wears Prada". Is it worth it I ask myself.
• Decide whether to get a bog standard Christmas tree or a more expensive Nordmann which is supposed to keep its needles longer.
• Refrain from screaming at Z who has just broken one of my neklaces.
• Not thinking about how much it has just cost to have our second, clapped out old Renault 19 fixed.
• Resist blog reading.
• Oh, yes and attend to my neglected blog
  

Category: life

Arcachon on a cold day

Warning

And I haven't even started yet. Make your own totally useless warning label with the Warning Label Generator.

Category: gadget

A bulleted list at last

• I've changed over to Firefox at last and so I can do bold and italics and colour now.... and quotes, and lists too. It's not faster than Safari but it's definitely better for blogging."But we could have told you that ages ago," I hear you cry. "Well, I wasn't listening," I cry back.

• For your viewing pleasure. If you like Yann Arthus Bertrand's photos of the world seen from the sky, this site allows you to browse the photos and download them as wallpaper.

• Things that made me laugh this week: SoWeirdProductions tells us that there are teachers and then there are educators.

• If you love Scottish smoked salmon (or trout, or venison, or game) and you want to buy some online for the Festive season, this is the place to get it: Barony Country Foods. The fact that my wee brother runs the company has absolutely nothing to do with this shameless plug: it really is absolutely delicious.
  

Category: links

Knit, knat, knate

Occasionally, I am overcome by a terrible temptation to conjugate regular verbs irregularly which is okay as long as it doesn't happen while I'm standing at a blackboard with forty students behind me copying down every (wrong) word as gospel truth. I just can't help feeling that the English language would be even richer if I could say things like "I knat you a jumper, do you like it?", or "He store at me as if I had two heads" or "the article was citten by five other authors". Of course children do it the other way round, they go through a phase where all verbs are conjugated regularly as in "I've bringed you a dead snail, Mummy" or "Tu veux t'assiser?" which E. still prefers to "Tu veux t'asseoir?" and I've come to quite like it too.

So, yesterday, when I reread the post just under this one, I paused for a second at the word "seeped" and wondered if perhaps the past tense shouldn't be "sept" as in "water sept in through the walls". The more I thought about it the better it sounded. Why, I wondered, is "seep" not an irregular verb?

Then, by one of those truly freaky coincidences that it is best not to dwell on (dwell, dwold, dwollen?), I stumbled on the answer. Like many people this week, I had just discovered the LearnOutLoud.com site, a veritable treasure trove of lectures and speeches in streaming video. So, late last night I settled down to watch Steven Pinker give a lecture about Words and Rules, and somewhere in the middle my ears pruck up as he explained that we say "keep, kept" but not "seep, sept" because, unlike keep, the verb seep was introduced into the English language after the "Great Vowel Shift" of the mid fifteenth century (before which a double e was pronounced in such a way as to require that -t sound at the end of the past tense.) If you find this sort of think fascinating, and you'd like to know more about Pinker's modified words-and-rules theory, I recommend listening to the whole lecture but if you don't have time to watch the whole thing, there's a short piece by Pinker on the same subject, here: The Irregular Verbs

*Isn't it strange how when one ultra-popular blog mentions a site, it is immediately taken up by lots of others and then everyone bookmarks it with furl or del.icio.us and it popularity grows exponentially. We really need a verb to describe this phenomenon. I suggest "to wildfire" as in "that site really wildfired this week". Whatever the word chosen, the chances are that it will be conjugated as a regular verb like all other recent neologisms eg. googled and spammed. Apparently, the last irregular past tense to be introduced into the (American) English language is "snuck", and that's a hundred years old.

Category: irregular verbs

Facades from the past

There's a nice feature in the online version of the French telephone directory that, for some towns and cities, throws up a picture of the front of the building you're looking for: PagesJaunes : Photos de Villes Here is the first building I lived in in Bordeaux:



We lived in a one-bedroom flat on the second floor with a view of the synagogue right across the road. This was the mid-eighties and everyone was pretty jumpy around synagogues, so on a Friday evening the whole street was blocked off and policemen strutted up and down in front of the building, machine guns at the ready. The inside of the building was nicer than the outside : we even had carpeted stairs. The flat itself was entirely decorated in brown — chocolate brown carpets and chocolate brown hessian on the walls but since we didn't have any furniture colour co-ordination was no problem. The girl next door was a prostitute. P. spent the first few months believing she was some sort of community social worker.

After about five years we moved here.



This time it was little two-bedroom house with a courtyard at the front and a garden at the back. I know it doesn't look like a house — you had to go in that green door and, walk through this building and straight out the back to our tiny house. It had a lovely feel about it, lots of different levels and a very private little garden but it must have been the dampest place in the whole of France. In winter, water seeped in through the blocked up chimney breast in the bedroom leaving huge damp patches that quickly turned black. After about a week, all of our clothes smelled of mildew. Looking back, I wonder how we managed to stick it out for seven years.

Category: houses

...a thousand words

The entire planet seems to be blogging pictures of snow. Dooce has a nice one here We had mini flurry for three microseconds on Saturday morning and since no-one is interested in photos of unrelenting rain, I give you a ....... graph.
This is what happens if you ...... Oh, you know what I mean. ...



What gave you your biggest peak?

Category: web stats

Sweetness and Light

Okay, I think we've established that that recent post was a tad unsporting, so to erase the weasel-me from your memories, here is a summary from the fluffy-bunny me of the blogs I love to read — the ones for which my heart gives a little hop and skip when I see they've been updated. Maybe you can guess who they are without clicking.

This one because I get to vicariously plan a trip to Melbourne, drink raspberry vodka, experience the Swiss education system and because she lives with four men for goodness sake. This one because anyone who simmers her own pizza topping from heaven all day long and inspires hope that perhaps slightly older children are easier to deal with, has to be a good person. This one because I get to vicariously plan a wedding in France (not to mention a hag night), and also drink lashings of virtual champagne in the process. This one because it offers a nice fresh view of living in France, not my jaded and cynical one, and also because I can't sing and she can (and I wish she lived down here because then I could help her find that elusive job). This one because it unfailingly makes me chuckle out loud and reminds me of what it was like to have a tiny little baby without actually having to do the nappy thing and the rocking in my-tired-arms-all-night thing. This one because Scottish humour is the best. This one because I don't have a house in the country but I'd like one, and because taking a photo at the same time every day is such a fantastic concept. This one because I wish I could take photos this crisp. This one because sometimes I'd love to be in my early twenties again, footloose and a fancy free with a mega gift for writing and being funny. This one because it has soul. This one because it's good to witness someone emerge from depression doodling.

I could go on and on. I haven't mentioned the work-related ones: This one and this one , for instance, because these people really think about what they're doing in the classroom/ behind the scenes. This one because translating is not an easy job, and if I had to translate each of my posts into French, I'd never post anything.

Now, when I click my fingers, you will wake up and you will have completely forgotten that I am not all sweetness and light. Click.

Category: bloggers

Imagination Cubed

This is fun. You can draw pictures and invite friends to come and contribute to them. It might be useful in class for everyone to brainstorm simultaneously with words or doodles.

Imagination Cubed

Cutting Back

I spend far too much time reading blogs. I’m sure you all agree it’s a shameful, compulsive disorder. So I’m cutting down. I’m going on a draconian low blog diet. I’m going to have a balanced healthy blogroll featuring only contents that are good for me. So who’s getting the chop? Well anyone who hasn’t posted for over two months for a start (adios most of my EVO chums). There are, however, some more borderline decisions to be made:

UPDATE: I took the rest of this post off because it was mean-spirited and I ended up regretting it.


Category: bloggers

Six Feet Over

Bye bye Nate. Bye bye Claire. Bye bye Brenda. Bye bye David and Keith, Bye bye Ruth..... We've been practically living together for the past week and what a depressing, dysfunctional lot you are, although I loved you dearly. So now it's all over and I'm left wondering :

If I died and P. married someone else (Brenda) and then he suddenly died, would that other woman (Brenda) then become the sole legal guardian of my children?

Right, enough of that, let's move on (as my erstwhile TV friends would say), time to get back to a more reasonable schedule because watching TV series into the wee samll hours, several days in a row does not an on-the-ball teacher make.

Category: TV

Temptation

At last, I have at my disposal the whole fifth series of “Six Feet Under”. Don’t ask me how I got it because I would have to kill you if I told you. Suffice to say, it took a loooooong time. It’s now half past nine in the evening and P’s still at work. I reckon that if I started watching right now I could watch the entire series and still be at the fac for my first class at 10H15 tomorrow morning.
But if I did that I would not be able to :

• Clear up the dinner dishes
• Empty the washing machine (I know, I know, what exciting and debauched evenings I have)
• Put the monsters back in bed after their numerous incursions back downstairs (so they'd have to watch too)
• Mark the forty homework assignments my students expect to get back tomorrow morning
• Read and correct the English in an extremely boring, I mean important article for a medical journal (the one I promised to have done for the beginning of this week)
• Sleep
• Be in a fit state teach anything or even be seen before tomorrow evening

Right, maybe, just one episode then, after the correcting of course, and the other stuff will just have to wait.

Category: television

Five-ish

Weekend Googling

It sometimes feels as if my life could be summarised as a series of google searches. Here then, is my long weekend:

"zoo de la palmyre"
restaurant basque bordeaux
"fête d'anniversaire" enfant
chalet "pierre saint martin"

As you can see, we went to the zoo on Friday.
We didn't find the elusive Basque restaurant that P. had read about but couldn't remember in which magazine nor where the restaurant is nor what it's called. We ended up in a great Japanese place and had tepan yaki for the first time.
Started to panic at the idea of twelve four and five year-olds invading the house next week for Z's birthday party. How will we keep them happy and occupied for two-and-a-half hours and still prevent them from trashing the house?
Wondered if a weekend in the mountains sometime before Christmas might be nice.

What were your weekend google searches? (You'd be amazed at the number of people out there looking for the lyrics of "Hey Lolly Lolly" if my stats are to be believed.)

Category: googling

NaNoWriMo NoThankYou

Today I learned that Flaubert wrote an average of five words an hour, or about thirty words on a good day. I don't know if that's true but I read it in Alexander McCall Smith's novel, 44 Scotland Street which is published in daily instalments in The Scotsman. I receive it in rather less regular bundles through the post and clipped by my Mum because it doesn't appear in the free online version of the newspaper.

Prof. McCall Smith doesn't appear to suffer from this sluggish-writing malady himself as he's been churning out novels at a phenomenal rate for the past few years, at least apace with the aspiring novelists participating in NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. Am I alone in thinking that producing a 175 page novel in one month is a stupid idea? No question of me attempting such logorrhoea in any case because I feel like Flaubert at the moment —definitely a three-word-an-hour girl, and stilted ones at that.

In the absence, then, of any proper writing here, you might like to have a look at How babies are made in Germany; a page I'm bookmarking for when my children ask the inevitable question............... "Mummy, what did Mme Bovary and Rodolphe do exactly?"

Unravelling Videotape

One of my headaches at work is organising a course in medical English for almost five hundred students. Every week, nine different teachers teach twelve different classes in twelve different classrooms on two different sites on three different days. For continuity reasons, everyone teaches the same content. The course is based on video and reading comprehension with medical themes, and the problems are essentially due to the video element. Until this year, we all used videotapes which meant having nine copies of the same excerpt made, making sure that everyone has the right tape on the right day, that the copy is of acceptable quality and then arranging to have videorecorders or remote control systems available in the constantly shuffled classrooms. This year, two of us have opted to use digital versions and plug our laptops into the videoprojectors with which almost all classrooms are now equipped (PowerBook I love you). But the problem remains for everyone else.

A possible solution would be to buy a truckload of video i-pods and little adaptors to plug them into the videoprojectors. They're small and eminently transportable. They could easily hold a year's worth of short video excerpts. And as a spin-off we'd immediately be the envy of our students.
What do you think? Has anyone bought one yet?

Category: video i-pod

All dressed up

This is a bit late, but look who my blog dressed up as for Halloween.




Category: Google

What I did during my Toussaint Holiday. (500 words, for Monday)

This was, I think, our third holiday in Hendaye, an old fashioned sort of seaside resort in the very, very southwest of France, so southwest that you can't get any more southwest. It's a great place for a break, and this time we took my Mum.

First of all there's the beach, long and flat and sandy and safe. We had such brilliant weather this time that we even managed a swim. Okay, that "we" didn't actually my thermosensitive body, but P. and the children had a frolick in the waves. Imagine swimming in the Atlantic ocean in the last week of October. Is that an Indian summer or climate deregulation?

Then there's Spain. For 1€50 you can get a little ferry across the bay to Hondarribia (or Fontarrabie depending on which language you're speaking) and get all tapas-ed out in the many bars and restaurants around the port, stroll up through the old town to the Parador, and then back down to hop on the ferry back to France. San Sebastian, which has to be one of the most fabulous cities in Europe, is only 20km away, Bilbao and its Guggenheim not all that much further.

The more sophisticated resorts of Saint-Jean-de -Luz and Biarritz lie a few miles to the north and inland there are loads of picturesque Basque villages daubed with ox-blood paintwork. Ainhoa is a favourite. All of this set across the backdrop of the Pyrenées. I'm starting to sound like a badly translated tourist-office brochure so I''l stop there.

All in all then, a busy week filled with gastronomic delights (I love chipirons, Basque squid) and non-delights: I'm thinking paëlla made from what looked and tasted like week-old leftovers from the kitchen, yeuch.

Category: Basque Country

No show

Well first of all, I taught all morning then dashed to the station, then sat on a train to Marseille for six hours in one of those old fashioned carriages where three strangers sit facing three other strangers trying to avoid direct eye contact. I was in the middle seat and spent most of the journey balancing my PowerBook on my knees writing the end of my paper and preparing a FANTASTIC KICK-ASS powerpoint presentation.

I arrived in Marseille some time after eight and was held up for ages because of what the SNCF euphemistically calls "un accident de personne" and which actually means that there was a body on the track. I took advantage of this hitch to ingurgitate a dry tuna sandwich and listen to others complain about the inefficiency of the train service which, for once, seemed a little unfair. After a couple of hours, my train to Toulon was cancelled so I hopped onto the fist TGV going in that direction and sank into one of the plush armchairs of a first class carriage complete with electrical socket to recharge my beloved Powerbookbuddy.

From the station in Toulon, I dragged my bag through deserted streets to my hotel. By this time I was exhausted and perhaps it wasn't a very good idea to go out for "a quick drink" after that, but I did, and had a very nice time. The next morning, however, I didn't feel quite so great. Was it a tummy bug, was it some sort of punishment (for mixing my drinks, for eating a tuna sandwich, for being vaguely irritated a careless body was holding me up)? I will never know, I will never tell, but the result was that I missed the whole of the first day of the conference, including my own slot, and nobody got to see my FANTASTIC KICK-ASS powerpoint presentation.

All too soon it was time to get back onto that train and trundle back to Bordeaux. And then it was off to Hendaye in the Basque Country which was the answer to yesterday's question. More on that tomorrow perhaps.

Category: conference-going

Terrible blogger

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I went away for ages (10 days) and forgot to tell you I was going ,never mind organise for someone to come in and turn the heating on, open the curtains etc. Well, now that I'm back, maybe you can guess where I've been? (Experience shows that his sort of challenge is usually the kiss of death to all interaction and systematically results in zilch comments.)

Category: holiday

An afternoon in the country

It's reinvigorating to get out of the city and be bombarded by the signs of changing seasons that seem to slink past us in town. The road from Bordeaux to Castillon-la-Bataille is absolutely beautiful at this time of year. The vines have turned a rich ochre and the air is laced with the smells of autumn — overripe grapes, mushrooms and earth. The sun shines on oblivious to the fact that summer is over; the landscape soaking up the unexpected warmth. We drive through quiet villages on our way to Montcaret and Sarah's house. For the first time I meet someone whose blog I have read and whose daily photos I have looked at and yes, I feel I know her and her family already. The children who know nothing of blogs, like children everywhere also seem to be on familiar terms and quickly get down to the important business of playing and giggling.
I think I need two lives really, one for the town and one for the country. One for dashing across town during Monday lunchtime rush-hour, coming down from the euphoria of a successful first class in one place just in time to start another in a different building with an altogether less receptive group of students and an all but empty stomach. And another life for making quince jelly in a country kitchen with the back door open to the smells of autumn.

Linguistic pitfall

Conversation on the way to school this morning

Me: You can tell it's autumn because of all the leaves on the ground.

Z: A qui je dois le dire? A la maîtresse? [Who should I say it to? My teacher?]

Me : What do you mean? You don't have to say it to anyone.

Z: Mais tu as dit... [Yes, but you said...]

Penny drops.

Me: It's just an expression. "You can tell" means "you can see"....

Category: words

Bibliographiaphilia

At last we're getting round to putting up bookshelves and hundreds of books that I'd forgotten I owned have been dug out of cardboard boxes. It's so satisfying to put all the books by one author together on a shelf, all the travel guides side by side, all the journals in chronological order, all the dictionaries within easy reach, all the trashy novels in a psychedelic cluster. While I was at it, I thought I might as well create an online library too using LibraryThing | Catalog your books online, and while I was at that I thought I might as well add a little dooda on the side (swivel your eyes to the right and look below the Flickr badge, if you please) offering you a random selection from my extensive library. I'm not quite sure why I'm creating the online catalogue. Perhaps if my house burned down it would make the insurance claim easier? Or if I couldn't remember whether or not I owned a certain book and couldn't be bothered to go upstairs and look on the shelves, I could just do a quick search on my PowerBook without moving from my armchair. I've only catalogued a dozen or so books so far, there's still time to turn back. And by the way, this has nothing whatsoever to do with my latest paperback purchase: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (how am I ever going to find time to read that one?).

UPDATE: Actually, after Sarah's comment I have thought of another use for this catalogue. I'm going to chuck out or perhaps even sell a lot of these tatty old books and use the catalogue as a virtual library of the ones I let get away: all of the retentive pleasure with none of the smell and dust.

Category: books

Cummy

I'm going to give a talk about this rather stern-looking person soon. Her name was Alison Cunningham and she was Robert Louis Stevenson's nanny. If her name is familiar perhaps you own(ed) a copy of "A Child's Garden of Verses" and wondered about the dedicatee:

My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—

RLS was a sick child and Alison Cunningham, or Cummy as he called her, fired up his feverish imagination with blood-curdling stories about ghosts and Covenanters. Somehow, I don't think it's going to be a very funny talk. Here's the abstract:

"In 1863, Alison Cunningham accompanied the Stevenson family on an extended tour of the Continent. This was her first contact with life outside of Scotland and she was, for the most part, decidedly unimpressed. The diary she kept during this period was published in book form much later as « Cummy’s Diary»(1926). It has been described by some as « homely » (Skinner) and dismissed as « extremely boring » by others (Davies). This paper aims to reappraise the diary in the light of more recent work on travel writing, highlighting its documentation of the everyday and examining Alison Cunningham’s marginal position as an unmarried woman, a servant, a Scot and a healthy person surrounded by invalids."

Category: RLS

Singin' hey lolly, lolly

The title of this post will only mean anything to you if you are ancient enough to remember that Meri Wilson Classic "Telephone Man" and these fabulous lyrics:

I got it in the bedroom, and I got it in the hall
And I got it in the bathroom, and he hung it on the wall
I got it with a buzz, and I got it with a ring
And when he told me what my number was I got a ding-a-ling

All this to say that I got my wifi card yesterday and within five minutes I had internet in the kitchen, in the hall, in the bathroom, in the toilet, in the garden ........ You get the idea. I may be old enough to remember "Telephone Man" but hey, I'm so funky, I'm wireless. Woo mega Hoo.

Category: wireless