Holiday Diary

8th July: Overheard at the airport; seconds before we reach the meet-and-greet area.

• Mummy, do you love Daddy ?
• [hesitation] Well, no, not in a romantic way, mumble, mumble, I’m pleased that we meet up from time to time and that we can be friends bla, bla, bla.
• Pre-adolescent boy then runs into the arms of his father while the mother turns her back on them and rearranges the bags on the trolley.

9th July: Reading Scotland on Sunday I wonder when we started using the word "project", as in "Zidane was brought up on a tough housing project in Marseille". What's wrong with scheme? Later, reading Allan Bennett’s Letters Home, I wonder when we stopped using the word precinct, as in "shopping precinct".

10th July: It may only be 15°C here in Scotland, but it’s still broad daylight at 10.30 p.m.

11th July: A quick visit to Sandra’s Bazar to buy some batteries. It’s a tiny glory hole — a jumble of hand-knitted baby garments, compost, birthday cards, bird seed, paraffin, plastic toys, garden implements, coloured pencils, bottles of gas, balloons, jelly moulds, balls of string ….

12th July: On hearing a reporter on Channel 4 news announce that "of course, there are less people on the roads today", I resolve that I will no longer mark this as a grammar mistake in student writing. Il ne faut point être plus royaliste que le roi.

16th July: Back in France to temperatures of 39°C, which is about the temperature Z was running for most of the journey home.

The Dialectizer

This is fun (read, this keeps you occupied when you're stuck at home trying not to unpack anything more than a toothbrush). Feed some text into the Dialectizer, choose your dialect and admire the result. I chose cockney.

A couple of monffs ago, EADS announced out of the blue that it were quite simply layin' off 1050 workers in Sogerma, its aircraft maintenance company in Bordeaux. Despite much posturin' by the PM and universal outcry in France, no buyer 'as yet been found and no announcement 'as been made. I 'ave evry sympaffy wiv the workers, I right do, right, but today I'm bloody well sympathisin' frough gritted teeff. This mornin', about 300 workers from Sogerma occupied the runway at Mérignac airport, right, just as the kids and I were about ter go frough ter the bloody departure lounge and cop on a Bmibaby flight. The demonstration only lasted about an 'our and we were quite quickly told the bleedin' airport were operational again. Wen we got the bloomin' the chuffin' security check, however, it turned out that us flight ter Manchester 'ad, in fact, been cancelled. The incomin' flight 'ad been diverted ter Toulouse, and for some reason Bmibaby weren't bringing the bleedin' aircraft hammer and tack up ter Bordeaux. Oh, happy day. After a rush ter the bleedin' information desk, jostlin' ter get the Bmibaby dog and bone number, and a quick call on me mobile, I turned dahn a flight ter Birmingham this afternoon (too far ter drive) but managed ter get us on tomorrow's flight ter Manchester, right? Tears streamed dahn the bloomin' children's faces as they realised they wouldn't be seein' Grandma this afternoon after all. These situations right brin' out the worst in some stewpid blokes, init?Instead of concentratin' on wot the possibilities were and just copping on wiv it, right, one tart couldn't resist shriekin' in English at the poor girl 'oo were doin' 'er Mae West to organise blokes and give out the bloomin' information, that this were "just typical of France." "No, right, Madame" said the girl, "it's not France, it's Bmibaby". "Yes, but it's yor strike! Struth! It's France's fault!" I resisted the urge ter slap 'er. Eventually, right, we unchecked us luggage and got a taxi 'ome ter the house we 'ad left a couple of 'ours earlier.

Nailed to the ground

A couple of months ago, EADS announced out of the blue that it was quite simply laying off 1050 workers in Sogerma, its aircraft maintenance company in Bordeaux. Despite much posturing by the PM and universal outcry in France, no buyer has yet been found and no announcement has been made. I have every sympathy with the workers, I really do, but today I am sympathizing through gritted teeth.
This morning, about 300 workers from Sogerma occupied the runway at Mérignac airport, just as the kids and I were about to go through to the departure lounge and get on a Bmibaby flight. The demonstration only lasted about an hour and we were quite quickly told the airport was operational again.
When we got the security check, however, it turned out that our flight to Manchester had, in fact, been cancelled. The incoming flight had been diverted to Toulouse, and for some reason Bmibaby wasn't bringing the aircraft back up to Bordeaux. Oh, happy day.
After a rush to the information desk, jostling to get the Bmibaby phone number, and a quick call on my mobile, I turned down a flight to Birmingham this afternoon (too far to drive) but managed to get us on tomorrow's flight to Manchester. Tears streamed down the children's faces as they realised they wouldn't be seeing Grandma this afternoon after all.
These situations really bring out the worst in some stupid people. Instead of concentrating on what the possibilities were and just getting on with it, one woman couldn't resist shrieking in English at the poor girl who was doing her best to organise people and give out the information, that this was "just typical of France." "No, Madame" said the girl, "it's not France, it's Bmibaby". "Yes, but it's your strike! It's France's fault!" I resisted the urge to slap her.
Eventually, we unchecked our luggage and got a taxi home to the house we had left a couple of hours earlier.

Quote Unquote

First of all I had to sit a wee test to make sure I could translate football parlance from French into English. I seem to remember that there were some really tricky terms such as "le football", "dribbler", "le goal", "les supporters", and "une pénaltie" but I came with the goods and they gave me the job. It then turned out that my post didn’t involve any actual translating, I was, in fact, to be paid quite handsomely for simply checking the translations of volunteer workers before they were published on the internet. (Did you know that the World Cup functions with people who aren't actually paid anything while the big wigs rake it in?)

I got off to a bit of a bad start during the training day. We learned that the volunteer translators were going to be translating short articles written by volunteer reporters. These novice reporters would get their material by going out to the training grounds in the morning, observing the training sessions and trying to elicit some pithy remarks from the players.

It suddenly dawned on me that we were expected to translate quotes that had already been translated from English into French back into English. So I raised the question of about how we would get access to the original quotes, otherwise, I argued, it was going to be more like Chinese whispers than journalism.

Head of Press Office (or Pompous Incompetent Git, hereafter PIG) : You won’t have access to the original quotes, the volunter reporters will have taken notes in French.
Me : But do they speak any language other than French ?
The volunteer reporters all suddenly find the floor fascinating.
PIG : They get by.
Me : So if a player gives them a soundbite, they’ll quickly write whatever they think they understood down in French, and then include it in their report.
PIG : Yes
Me [jaw dropping] : but then when we translate anything in the quotation words back into English we won’t be using the original words.
PIG : You don’t really believe [drip of sarcasm falls to floor] that everything you read between inverted commas in the newspapers [sneer] is an actual word-for-word quote do you [lip curls]?
Me : Er, y…es.
Press room full of volunteer reporters sniggers.

Although I worked with PIG for the next month, that was the last time I ever spoke to him and I simply made sure that any direct speech in the translations I checked was systematically changed to reported speech.

Football crazy, football mad

France is in the grip of football fever. The tournament started out quite sedately with nobody here really believing in the team’s chances this time round: Zizou seemed to be getting old, Domenech looked like a tired actor in a commercial for pseudo-trendy eyewear and then there was the Djibril Cisse bendy tibia incident in the final friendly (I wonder if that boy's drinking enough milk). After a lacklustre qualifying round, however, things really started to hot up when France beat Spain in the "huitièmes de finale". By this time my friend Sue who was celebrating her 40th the following Saturday, was praying for them to lose (it’s my party and I’ll ban football if I want to, football if I want to). In the end, a TV screen set up just inside the French windows meant that we were all able to mingle and drink and cheer and nibble (did I mention cheer ?) on the terrasse all at the same time, and then we moved inside for the drunken chanting.
So now they are in the semis (see the reaction in the centre of Bordeaux here) and for me it’s all very reminiscent of 1998 really. With three minor differences:

1. Scotland isn’t involved
2. There are no matches in Bordeaux
3. I’m not working in the FIFA press centre

Eight years ago, Bordeaux was invaded by the genial tartan army. The Bordelais discovered how wonderful the Scots are (absolutely everyone seemed to have a story about a Scot they’d met and taken home or about evenings they’d spent partying with men in skirts) and the English residents discovered that, shock horror, Scots don’t actually support the England football team, as many of the "traditional folk songs" being yelled throughout the city testified. The bars all ran out of beer but there was no loutishness. Further south in Toulouse where Engerland were playing, it was a different story.
We partied at night along with the best of them (ah, those footloose pre-baby days, sigh) and during the day I worked as a translator at the press centre.
To be continued ........

Plants Finally Repotted

Just call me Claire (the one from Six Feet Under). You can hockneyize your own photos here.

Let's talk about you for a change

1. On average, 25 of you come here every day.
2. You usually stay for just over a minute.
3. 26% of you are from the UK, 26% from France and 25% from the USA (and 4% are from Switzerland: you know who you are!)
   
4. Only 1.03% of you use Polish as a default language surprise surprise (65% of you speak English, 26% speak French)
5. The majority of you are using Windows XP, 24% use Mac OSX
6. Your browser of choice is Internet Explorer 6 (44%)
7. 11 of you subscribe to this blog via Bloglines
8. A selection of the search terms that have brought you here over the past couple of days:

• I was born too late to a world that doesn't care" (Dozens of you are looking for that. How on earth did I come to be number one for that particular google search?)
• Cummy (needless to say you didn't stay long)
• panaris infection
• how to use the word nevertheless
• écrire sa biographie
• richard armour money poem (who is Richard Armour?)
  
• sopranos quotes empire state building history postage stamp (eat your hearts out because I'm first for that too)
  
• prunus blossom

(Stats are from sitemeter, idea nicked from teacher dude.)

For the man who has everything...

....... except any pride. It's called a daddle and no, P won't be receiving one for his birthday next month. Unless, of course, they bring out a line in black latex.

Another Weekend

Ordered 200 Nespresso capsules on the internet, hope they arrive soon, tremble, shake, quiver. Went to Decathlon/Kiabi/C&A looking for the compulsory black ensemble for Z to wear to his end-of-year concert on Tuesday — concluded that no such thing exists. Ate for the first time ever in one of those restaurants with the lop-sided roofs, La Courte Paille. Not a pleasant experience unless you like salad dressing from a plastic bottle and fake straw as a decorative item. Made a decent tiramisu with whisky instead of marsala. Also made six pots of raspberry jam. Discovered that a Chinese shop around the corner that used to do a great line in plastic tat now has food; made mental note to go back and buy mushroom soy sauce, oyster sauce, fresh ginger, fortune cookies, 50kg of rice, and a rice steamer. Went to a double fortieth birthday party: we all clubbed together to buy the quadragenarians a day of gastronomy and pampering here. Drank Château Bechevelle. Devoured the last half of a French novel (a relatively rare occurence): Ensemble, c’est tout by Anna Gavalda. Spent fruitless minutes racking my brains for amusing things to write here. Hunted in vain for the camera battery recharger. Bought a lot of mostly purple plants (lavender, basil, fuschia, geraniums, petunias, tallpinkwillowyflowerythings). Didn’t plant them. Read the whole of Little Miss Birthday for the xth time and then got E. to sleep with a heart-rending rendition of Flower of Scotland. Slept through England-Ecuador and awoke to find that I had been denied that hoped-for schadenfreude. Was told that the skin on my neck looks "really, really old Mummy."

New sunglasses

New sunglasses
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Too cool to blog. Also thinking about this sentence in waiterrant.net's post today:

A look of consternation struggles to emerge on her taut Botoxed face

Weekend Mosaic

The weekend involved

• an exhibition of the children's "work" at nursery school
• ten wains running up and down the stairs squealing, blowing bubbles in the garden and scattering toys and crisps throughout the house, all in celebration of E's fourth birthday
• a village fête in the Dordogne.

Exhausting.

Too much chaff

I learned a new word in French this week: panaris. In fact, when I looked it up in the dictionary I learned a new word in English too : whitlow. This vicious circle is my punishment for insisting that my students always use a unilingual dictionary first. From their point of view, a unilingual dictionary is often just a big book that provides an incomprehensible definition of a word they didn’t understand in the first place; a bit like getting a great Swahili translation of an obscure Serbo-Croat saying.
Apparently, for those of you who didn't know this already, a panaris/whitlow is a finger or toe infection which is exactly what Z. has at the moment, for the second time in two months. Last time, I followed my Mum’s instructions for making a poultice. The recipe involved milk and bread and soap and baking powder and peeing on toads in the garden at midnight and it worked (okay I made the last bit up)( the bit about it involving urine and amphibians, not the bit about it working). But that was in the winter. The daytime temperature here hasn’t dropped below 32°C for ten days. I can’t send the poor boy to nursery in open sandals with a dog’s breakfast inexpertly wound around his big toe and rapidly turning rancid.
So I googled « toe infection » and was immediately reminded that the internet is next to useless if you just need a bit of practical advice. One of the first hits took me to a site that tells me that infected toes are a spiritual sign of a lack of groundedness:

it may very well be an indication that you are ignoring your lower body and not rooting yourself well enough into the nurturing earth source that is available to us.

Google urgently needs to add a "complete-and-utter-bollocks" filter.

Is this the real life?

This self-indulgent riff was inspired by a passage in "The Accidental" by Ali Smith which I highly recommend if you like the sort of novel where nothing much happens but the writing is interesting and experimental.

Me a name I call myself. I was born in the age of walnut whips and curly wurlies, on Friday it was Crackerjack. I lived in the jungle with my mummy until she was shot by vilanous hunters and dragged off in a net. The hills were alive with the sound of music. In the beginning my grandfather took me in and I slept on a straw mattress in a sweet-smelling hayloft living off nothing but wooden bowls brimful of goats’ milk. I went to a bald king’s palace and danced with complex hand movements and whistled a happy tune. I was the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP and when I wiggled my nose, spells were cast. Penelope Pitstop was my heroine although Christopher Columbus was a very brave man, he sailed across the ocean in an old tin can and the waves got higher and higher and over.
We had midnight feasts with tumblers of ginger beer and tinned pears in the dormitory at boarding school but sometimes the French mistress caught us. I promised I would do my duty to the Queen and help other people at all times. We all lived together in the streets of London where a dirty old man taught us to pick pockets but Nancy saved me. Never before had a boy wanted more, but it was lipsmackin' thirstquenchin' acetastin' motivatin' goodbuzzin' cooltalkin' highwalkin' fastlivin' evergivin' coolfizzin'. We had a dog called Shep. And they called it puppy love, oh I guess they’ll never know…
I lived in New York, I watched the ducks in the park with my sister Phoebe and visited an old school teacher in his apartment. Then, I lived in a house with a crotcheted blanket on the sofa, with my older sister younger brother and two funny but grossly overweight parents — we ate a lot of pizza. My name was Darlene. I was really from Australia and I wore tight black satin trousers with high heels and a pony tail. I went on holiday to Butlins (twice) with a redcoat called David Essex before he became a rock star. Much, much later I moved to a suburb with softer lighting and my parents turned into healthy professionals and I kept a voiceover diary of my so-called life. I spent a lot of time kissing a boy called Jordan Catalano. Is this the real life. Is this just fantasy. Caught in a landslide. No escape from reality. Open your eyes. Look up to the skies and see.

Language Barriers

I mostly speak English to my children. Acquaintances who comment on this sometimes seem to think I am aiming at some future linguistic advantage for them when they enter the corporate world or some top-secret research organisation. I suspect that they don't make the same sort of assumptions about parents who speak Arabic or Portuguese to their children. Obviously however, I speak English to them not to give them a head-start on other children when they learn languages at school but quite simply so that they can communicate meaningfully with me and the rest of their family. [People with teenage children are probably rolling on the ground laughing now at the very idea of meaningful communication with the monosyllabic troglodytes that have replaced their chatty children. Mine will, of course, be different.]

I speak English to them because it comes naturally about 60% of the time. The rest of the time, French comes more spontanaeously either because we’re talking about something they don’t have the vocabulary for in English, or we’re with French speakers and it feels rude to exclude them. And some of the time I hash up both languages in a single sentence which I know you’re absolutely not supposed to do, but I’ve given up worrying about that because that’s the way my brain works now — intermittently.

Perhaps that background partly explains my horror and disbelief at the French government’s latest pronouncements on legalising illegal immigrants and their children some of whom have been going to French schools for years. To avoid deportation the children have to meet three conditions: they must have been born in France, they must have had all of their schooling in France and they MUST NOT be able to speak the language of their native country. It would be hard to think of a more effective way of promoting inter-generational incomprehension, of hastening the disappearance of certain minority languages, and of maintaining the idea that linguistic and cultural diversity is divisive rather than enriching. What hope for language teaching in France with that sort of ethos? What hope for the respect of other ppeople and cultures?

Bah, words fail me.

"I was born too late to a world that doesn't care"

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a little stone house with a deep purple clematis growing around the front door? (This is where we stayed over the weekend — the last of the three-day weekends, sigh)

I can't stop humming Sandi Thom's "I wish I was a punk rocker (with flowers in my hair)"

What exactly does schadenfreude mean? I came across the word in an article in Vogue this weekend. How could I drop it into conversation?

Had my first ever Skype conversation this evening with my old friend Roddy in Ireland. I know, I know it’s so 2005, but it’s new to me and I like it. (It's lezzlesg by the way)

Must remember never to try to cram music, play park, physiotherapist and doctor’s appointments in between nursery and dinner ever, ever again. It can only end in screaming.

Deborah sent me a newspaper cutting today. Sentence I most closely identified with:

Apparently, by the time most babies are weaned they are sucking at least as much Chardonnay out of the local mammary glands as they are milk, as Mummy desperately attempts to re-irrigate the desiccated husk of her post-natal life.

Update on the wifi débâcle: Orange have reimbursed half of the 120€ which is better than a kick in the teeth, I suppose.

Things I ate over the weekend: ragoût d'asperges, framboisier, delicious soupe de fèves, macarons from the market in Sarlat, purée de carottes made from the sweetest carrots ever, leftover foie gras.....

Gifts I was given over the weekend: a Nespresso coffee machine. It's great.

Nevertheless

Reading the Muriel Spark obituaries I came across a passage from her autobiography Curriculum Vitae which struck me at the time I read it but which I had since forgotten. Writing about her formative years in Edinburgh she remembers:

My whole education, in and out of school, seemed to pivot around the word "nevertheless". My teachers used it a great deal. All grades of society constructed sentences bridged by "nevertheless"...I can see the lips of tough elderly women in musquash coats taking tea at McVitie's, enunciating the word of final justification...I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea.

And this in turn reminded me of a passage I thought I'd read years ago in a book by Alastair Reid, Whereabouts: Notes on being a Foreigner. In my memory it was long reflection on the word "nevertheless", but looking at the book again, all I can find is this:

Nevertheless (a favourite Scottish qualification), places embody a consensus of attitudes;...

It's the Caledonian antisyzygy, the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, the fur coat and nae knickers image summed up in one word.
So, go on, what's the best one-word qualification of your national character?

Time Wasting

I've been saving these totally useless signs for a while; so long in fact that I've forgotten where I made them. Except for the first one which came from here.

La Fête des Mères

Back from a four-day weekend in the Landes. All in all it was a pretty mediocre break. The weather was disappointingly cool, the "villa" would have been better described as a hut, and two out of four family members were all drugged-up with antibiotics.

This morning though, as I sat outside on the terrace with a bowl of steaming coffee, I was joined by a pair of hoopoes working across the sandy patch in front of me. They looked oddly overdressed, a little Egyptian perhaps. The mother did all of the hard work, digging up grubs with her long spiky beak and then passing them on to an incompetent youngster, throwing up fountains of sand in the process.

Now it's back to our own town garden and the same young blackbird we left flailing around at grass-level on Thursday. Still not very good at getting off the ground, still a constant source of worry for his musical mother and still a sitting target for the neighbourhood cats.

Always read the eeny weeny tiny print

• Arrive at conference centre to do an interpreting job
• Plug Powerbook in
• Oh joy, there's wifi!
• Drat, it's an Orange network and you have to pay for it
• 10€ for two hours, that's a bit steep
• Work for an hour or so
• Think it would be nice to check my e-mail
• Work a bit more
• Hands start shaking
• Decide to cough up and buy the pass on line
• Wait a minute! They send the password to your e-mail account
• I can't get into my email until I'm connected
• But look! There's another option for people with Orange mobiles
• I've got an Orange mobile
• It must be free for Orange customers
• Try to log on. It doesn't work because I have a pay-as-you-go card
• Brilliant idea. Ask colleague which network he uses
• Orange! Would you mind, bla bla bla... Of course not...
• He dials #125# and gets a password
• I log in to the network with his password
• Easy peasy
  
• (I may have clicked something about accepting their "condition générales de vente")
• (nobody actually reads those, do they?)
• I stay connected for the entire afternoon
• The following day I do exactly the same thing
• The next day my colleague contacts me to tell me that Orange has charged him 121€
• It turns out they were charging by the minute
  
• Oooops
• Today I gave him the cheque

Come in and sit down

I should have done this name change ages ago. It was a bit silly to choose my real name as an address all those months ago. So, now you must all erase my real name from your memories. From now on I will go by the catchy name of : "The-blogger-who-was-formerly-and -naively-called-a-real-life-name".
Perhaps it would have been a good idea if it had been a proper professional blog but self-deprecation doesn't usually buy you workplace kudos.

Authorstruck

Sarah had a great post a while ago about going bright red and stammering when she got to meet an author she admires. I had to leave a comment saying that I have experienced exactly the same awe and mention having a book signed by Richard Holmes and saying not a single word. The silly thing is that, for once, I actually had a good number of reasonably intelligent questions I could have asked him. I was in Edinburgh to do some research on travellers after Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cevennes amongst whom Richard Holmes stands out as most perceptive. But the front of a long queue in a tent at a book festival just didn't feel like the right place to start a conversation.

Actually I've just looked at the book he signed for me, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, and it says "to Lesley", so I must have managed to stammer out my name at least.

And now that I think of it, my experiences of meeting authors have all been rather underwhelming. At the Salon du Livre in Bordeaux a few years ago, during a deserted lunchtime, I strolled past Alain Robbe-Grillet, gazing vacantly over a pile of books and obviously available for conversation. But I walked on by pushing Z. in his pushchair, because despite several years of study I couldn't think of a single intelligent phrase on the subject of the nouveau roman.

There have been others: Michelle Roberts, Janice Galloway, Kenneth White, Bernard MacLaverty. ... I cannot report on a single witty remark, or even a coherent comment, issued from my lips in their presence.

My mum, on the other hand, was recently in a restuarant and found herself at a table next to a double Pulitzer prize-winner. She tells me they had a very enjoyable conversation.

Random gobbets

• I'm vaguely thinking about getting a breadmaker (mostly because I keep seeing recipes that require one on a fellow Bordelaise's blog). Does anyone have any recommendations?

• Memory from a couple of months ago that still makes me giggle. I step out of the shower and E. exclaims "Mummy, je vois tes narines!"( "Mummy, I can see your nostrils!)

• Favourite snippet from Moondust by Andrew Smith: "[He] radiates a weird, goofy anger and always sounds like he's trying to juice a lemon with his sphincter muscles. " (p.201)

• Quote from The Sopranos a couple of weeks ago: "If the Empire State Building represented the history of the Earth, then man's presence would only be a postage stamps at the very top." Quote from Z's dinosaur book at bedtime tonight: "If the history of the Earth was reduced to 100 years, humans would only be present for three minutes."
  

• I have to go from Bordeaux to Nantes for a conference on Friday. I have to be there before 1pm but the earliest I can get there by train is 3H15 pm. Why is that? Look at the map, Nantes is just up the road.
  

Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie

P. hurries the children out the front door for the five-minute walk to school. They’re running late. The door closes and I breathe a sigh of relief, half-heartedly clear up a few breakfast crumbs and put the Dora DVD back into its box. [I lied to my children yesterday evening — I told them that the new Dora DVD from Grandma only has an English soundtrack. In fact, they could watch it in Greek or Portuguese or, more importantly for them, two different versions of French if they (i.e. I) liked). The lie is for their own linguistic good.]

I saunter upstairs and into the bathroom. While I’m brushing my teeth, I hear an insistent rustling noise coming from ... I’m not quite sure where. It gets louder and louder. I open the windows and listen, is it coming from the garden ? No, it’s definitely inside the house. The rustling continues and there seems to be some discreet bumping too. I tiptoe towards our bedroom and the noise gets louder: it’s definitely coming from in there and it’s definitely rodents. I peek in the door from a safe distance but see no signs of movement, no long tails poking out from under the bed.

I’m now terrified. Oh what a panic's in my breastie. I dash downstairs. How am I going to get my things out of a bedroom obviously under siege by several large families of mice or maybe even r……, no, no, no, no, no.

P. is taking ages. He strolls in with a baguette and the Sud Ouest newspaper under his arm. « I think you should take a look upstairs, there seems to be a strange noise coming from our bedroom » I say casually, inwardly shrieking « Help, help, help, we need the pest control people, immediately »

P. goes upstairs, sees nothing in the bedroom, opens the door that leads up to the attic and finds a helpless little house martin* lying exhausted at the bottom of the stairs.

He takes off like a jet fighter when P. opens the window and holds him out in the fresh May air.

* or maybe it was a swallow, or a swift.

The sun rises bright in France

The sun rises bright in France
and so sets he
But he has tint the blink he had
In my ain countree

So drink with me a glass of wine
And sing with me some Scottish rhyme
That I may think of Auld Lang Syne
And my ain countree

The bud comes back to summer
And the blossom tae the bee
But I'll win back never
To my ain countree

The land of sweet Bordeaux
Is pleasant for tae see
But ne'er sae sweet as the land I left
And my ain countree

That's a song by Alan Cunningham (1784-1842) that I, the exiled Scot in Bordeaux, might be tempted to sing, were I the homesick type ...and could I sing. It was written to commemorate the flight to France of hundreds of Jacobites in the seventeenth century, and expresses a poignant and, some might say, characteristically Scottish attitude to exile. There's an enjoyable wistfulness about exile that we Scots are often tempted to overplay, a trait Billy Connolly exploits in an old sketch about Glasgow pubs full of maudlin folk singers wailing on about how far they are fae hame. Excuse me while I have a wail.

Friend's Photo Friday

These statues are on the sentier sculpturel de Mayronnes, south of Carcassone. They are the work of Deborah's daughter, Lucie Geffré, and will be there until the middle of August.
What do you think? I like them.

Tunisia

Not sure if this slideshow is going to work. Is there anything more boring than being subjected to someone else's holiday photos? ("Was that the Wednesday morning darling, or the Thursday afternoon?")



I'm still paranoid about one day stumbling on photos of my children's heads amateurishly stuck on top of naked bodies. But if I know you or your blog, and if you're not a paedophile but still enough of a masochist to want to see the "people" ones too, drop me an e-mail and I'll send you a Flickr invitation to be my friend, please.

We've been, we're back

We're back, we're back and we're very tired. A wonderful time was had by all, of course, despite a few minor hiccups. Here are a few handy hints on how to spice up your holiday:

1. Apply for your passport well after the deadline. Arrange to have it delivered twenty minutes before you have to be at the airport by which time you will be standing in the street hailing all passing vans.

2. Once in the airport, nerves still clattering, encourage your little boy to announce just as you arrive at the security check that he has a toy pistol in his backpack. Aghast, watch said pistol being confiscated by disapproving security people for immediate destruction. Reassure little boy that he will not be going to prison.

3. When you arrive at the hotel try to secure that wonderful big family room that has a fabulous view of the pool, the palm trees and the beach. At 2 a.m. wonder why you didn't realise you would be sleeping (ha ha) directly above the trillion-decibel sound system in the disco below. Only manage to change to another non-vibrating room two nights later.

4. Arrange to have several family members infected with conjuctivitis: preferably the variety in which rivers of yellow slime flow from their reddened eyes day and night.

5. And finally, why not have the bus for the return flight leave the hotel at 1 a.m.? That should ensure that you get back so tired that the benefit of a week of farniente will have been entirely cancelled out.

Photos later.

To pack or not to pack

8H50. We leave for Tunisia at 13H00 and the passport still isn't here. The Embassy told me they were sending it yesterday and we should get it this morning. But then they said the same thing the day before yesterday. I don't know whether to pack or unpack.

10H42 Still nothing. The TNT website says it is "en cours de livraison". I hope that means it's in the back of a white van somewhere near here. I feel sick and stupid.

11H46 It still isn't here but I have to close the computer down. Bye (but maybe not for long).

Weimaraner

If you'd like to have a dog like this, my friends the Bonniers have 11 (eleven!) puppies to find homes for.

Braque Weimar Weimaraner

Where is it?

Make yours here

It's a ho-ho-holiday

For some strange but wonderful reason, I’m on holiday, three days before P. and the children which is why you find me now, at 9H30 in the morning sipping a third cup of coffee in front of powerbookbaby, flitting from site to site in a euphoric state of indolence.

So it's going to be three days of idyllic freedom, if it wasn’t for having to take le boy to the school doctor for his pre-primary visit today slap in the middle of this afternoon. Oh, and having to nervously hang around the letter box just in case UPS delivers said boy’s passport. [Did I mention that major cockup in the Tunisia holiday plans? I only realised last week that his passport had run out and sent in an application to have it renewed last Tuesday, in other words very late (too late?) — so there is no guarantee that it will actually arrive before we fly on Friday. P. and I may end up drawing straws at the airport to see who gets to go.] There is also the small matter of finding a plumber to fix a radiator upstairs that inexplicably fell off the wall bending all the pipework while I just happened to be standing on it fixing a shutter. I also have to go to aquagym every single day in the desperate hope that a few hours of splashing around in the water will erase all signs of a winter of sloth. I also have to fit in a visit to the hairdresser, a run to the Secours Populaire, prepare a couple of classes for the first day back, buy a few t-shirts, do a bit of paintwork in the house, .

Right, time for another cup of coffee I think and perhaps a little daytime TV………

Quais

Quais
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Why when we sat outside having afternoon coffee in wonderful pristine sunshine yesterday, are we huddled inside around an open fire today ?

Why was E sick on Thursday, right as rain on Friday but terribly sick again yesterday and today ?

Why does the author of Moondust, which I’m reading at the moment, bandy technical terms about rocket science and Apollo missions yet explain that V is « the Roman numeral for five » ? Come on, give the poor readers some credit, if we’re reading the book, we’re literate.

Why suddenly 0 peers in 0 seeds when I am so desperate for my weekly dose of Tony and C° (If you don’t know, don’t ask)

Why can’t I get my wifi dongle (love that word, dongle, dongel, dongle) to work on the i-mac upstairs ?

Why is there no surefire pre-holiday diet for people who need to lose a couple of tons in five days before revealing their legs after a winter of pasta and pizza?

Gold Star

When my Mum moved house a couple of years ago, she arranged to have about a dozen boxes full of miscellania that she'd been storing for me in her loft sent over to France. They're now in my own loft.
The other day I was going through one, wondering what to keep and what to chuck out, when I came across one of my very first writing jotters from primary school. I suppose it was my first plog — paper log.
Here's a sample page. You probably can't read the 6-year-old writing so the text is underneath.

29.11.68 Helping Mumy
I oftin help mumy. I yosily dry the dishis and Ronald washis the dishis. Wen I have nothing to do I asc Mumy wot to do for her. At Grany's I wash the dishis and dray them. Sumtim I dust. On Sundy or Mundy mumy is gong to do the spring clining I am gong to help. I aryn with my toy aryn with Mumy.

Can you hear the Hebridean accent in that last sentence?
This time next year, Z should be at about the same stage in reading and writing, at least in French. I can't wait for him to start plogging. I wonder if he'll come up with as many fibs as I did to gain the teacher's approval.

Qu'est ce qu'il y a à la télé?

Everyone agrees that French TV is crap, maybe not as bad as Spanish TV or Italian TV but still abysmal. Among the mind-numbing dross, however, there are some pretty watchable programmes and they make a break from the ubiquitous antiques, cooking, househunting and sick animal offerings on BBC Prime. Here then, in no particular order, are some of the better things on French télé.

Titeuf is a brilliant cartoon for children with a very cheeky hero who frequently refers to his “zizi sexuel” and that’s recommendation enough for me.

Le Zapping is a very short interlude on Canal + that consists of a sequence of vision-bites from all the French terrestrial (and some cable) channels, consisting only of the highlights from what was broadcast the day before: anything memorably bad, memorably funny, memorably disgusting or anything that went memorably wrong. It’s a sort of distillation of TV without the bother of actually having to watch TV.

Tout le Monde en Parle is a sort of chat show presented by the twitchy man in black Thierry Ardisson very, very late on a Saturday night. The guests sit uncomfortably on high stools around a sort of horseshoe-shaped table and frequently give the impression that they’ve been treated to lashings of white powder in hospitality and sometimes make fools of themselves or get into heated arguments. It’s a good watch if you’ve just come in from a night out and don’t want to go to bed yet.

I used to watch Les Maternelles in the morning while I was on maternity leave, when it was still being presented by lovely Maïtena. I liked the décor and the non-preachy way it talked about the things I was interested in then, mainly baby crying (abundance thereof) and sleeping (lack thereof).

Envoyé Spécial is a French Thursday night institution. It’s basically a documentary programme featuring three back-to-back reports. The angle isn’t usually very original and the message is also somewhat conventional, but it’s usually interesting and the voiceovers don’t have that isn’t-science/nature/dumpling-making-fascinating? breathiness that characterizes, for example, BBC’s Horizons.

Friday night brings another institution, Thalassa, a magazine programme about anything to do with the sea. The reports are usually from some exotic part of the world and sometimes the commentary is incredibly naïve and superficial, but there’s still something reassuring about footage of boats.

Apostrophes & Double Je used to be my favourite programmes on French TV. Apostrophes was nothing more than a bunch of authors sitting around talking about their books, but the discussion was led with great skill by the avuncular Bernard Pivot. He then went on to host another show called Bouillon de Culture which wasn’t nearly as good but he also made a series of programmes about mostly famous, non-native French-speakers in France called Double Je which is consistently fascinating.

Strip Tease is a Belgian programme. Quirky mini documentatry films with no sound over. I don’t think it’s on at the moment.

Taratata is a rock & pop music show which is filmed in some clever way that makes it look almost 3D. It brings together some unexpected duos (Khaled and Charles Aznavour for example) and would really be perfect if it wasn’t for the unbearable Naguy who presents it. His interviews with singers you really want to hear speak always consist of him talking much more than the interviewee, often in less-than-perfect English. There is no translation, he does that himself, and when he doesn’t understand, he just makes it up.

I’m ashamed to say that I also occasionally watch La Nouvelle Star, the French equivalent of Pop Stars, on a Wednesday night until P. gets in and says “You’re not watching that rubbish again, are you?” And although I’m not about to admit this to him, he’s right. It’s really, really bad. I can see that, I can hear that, but I’m hooked because it’s so bad that it’s almost art. I want to know just how bad it can get. Last week one girl managed to sing an entire song out of tune on prime-time and that’s what I call unmissable TV.

Listening to…..

I’ve rediscovered the joys of BBC Radio 4. I’m not sure why, but having been a constant listener since I arrived in France, I just stopped listening to English language radio a couple of years ago. Perhaps it had something to do with me discovering some good programmes on France Inter, or maybe it was those unbearably smug people with the home-county accents who squat the phone-in programmes on Radio 4, or perhaps it was because I don’t feel engaged by British current affairs anymore.
Anyway, over the past week or so, I’ve been doing a lot of mindless marking while listening to some really great programmes on the Radio 4 site. The advantage of the internet over the tranny is that you can just zap the boring programmes and listen to the ones you’re really interested in.
I’ve heard about what it feels like to be the "persecuted" English minority in Scotland, ....... I've followed the stages in the development of a potential treatment for HIV by one of the big bad pharmaceutical companies in "Quest for a Cure"; learned about inguinal hernia operations (P has already had 3 which doesn't appear to be a record); been left gaping-mouthed at what actually happens to the clothes we give to charity in "Clothes Line" — did you know that the charities sell them to go-betweens who sell them on to stallholders in markets in Africa? I thought that a needy little orphan was hand-picked to wear the baby clothes I had donated. I've also been learning about serendipidous discoveries in science (rubber for example). I’ve heard Lionel Schriver talking about her book We have to talk about Kevin, decided that I don’t really want to read it but been interested in the fact that she made a deliberate decision not to have children herself because she is too single-minded about her work and was afraid she might neglect a child if she wanted to get a book finished. I’ve also listened to Ian McEwan talking about Saturday and that made me want to read bits of it all over again (I completely missed the James Joyce allusion in the last line). I was surprised to hear just how much Oliver Sacks’ voice and style fitted how I had imagined him (batty professor, nothing like Robin Williams in the film Awakenings)as I listened to him discuss The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I also listened to a documentary about nuns who have donated their brains to science in a large scale trial about Alzheimers. (In fact, Alzheimer’s has been a bit of a leitmotif this week, it came up an the episode of the Sopranos that I watched, and it's also mentioned in McEwan’s Saturday, in a character he based on his own mother. The statistics are frightening.)
This morning I’ve listened to a woman talk about lupus and am, as I type, finding out all about the advantages of opensource scholarly publication in “Publish or be Damned" a programme about scientific publishing and the scandalous cost of learned journals (would you believe it costs £9000 for 12 issues of Physicosomethingobscure published by Elsevier).

Update: it's not a good idea to listen to something interesting as you type, it leads to lots of typos.

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