Saturday Night Meme

Deborah suggested I do this meme which she first saw at Marrickvillia. It's a bit different and after a day of trudging around Bordeaux International Fair it is about as much as I can cope with.

1. PICK OUT A SCAR YOU HAVE, AND EXPLAIN HOW YOU GOT IT
I have several small scars on my tummy from a laparoscopic cholecystectomy I had in 1999. After several nights of pain and sleeplessness, I came to the conclusion that I had gall stones. There were some clues: my Mum had had her gall bladder out, my Dad had had his out and my grandfather had had his out. The first radiologist still managed to miss the 2.5cm gall stone on the x-ray, and concluded that I was suffering from dyspepsia. House he was not. My operation was scheduled for 10th November and I went into hospital the night before. They woke me up at about six, put me in a gown and splattered orange antiseptic liquid all over my tummy. I lay rigid in bed until the doctors came round about 6 hours later and told me that they'd had a long procedure in the O.R. and just couldn't fit me in. Could I come back, not the next day which was a public holiday, but in two days time?

2. WHAT IS ON THE WALLS IN YOUR ROOM?
An abstract painting by a Scottish artist called Alison Auldjo. And some prints.

3. WHAT DOES YOUR PHONE LOOK LIKE?...like a phone

4. WHAT MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO?
My taste in music is eclectic. (Eclectic is the new skinny, don't you know?) At the moment I'm still listening to that damned Mika over and over again. But the musical highlight of my week is whatever Julien does on La Nouvelle Star. He's a genius.

5. WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT DESKTOP PICTURE?
A dandelion.

6. WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?
I would quite like an article I have to finish next week to write itself.

7. DO YOU BELIEVE IN GAY MARRIAGE?
Absolutely

8. WHAT TIME WERE YOU BORN?
In the middle of the night, I think.

9. ARE YOUR PARENTS STILL TOGETHER?
My dad died in 1994. Otherwise, I'm sure they would be.

10. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?
The noisy fan on my Powerbook.

11. DO YOU GET SCARED OF THE DARK?
I don't particularly like being outside at night in the country in the dark.

12. THE LAST PERSON TO MAKE YOU CRY?
I have tears in my eyes every time I read the news about Madeleine McCann. And now I want to score out my silly answer to question 6 and replace it with the wish that she is returned to her parents very, very soon.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOGNE / PERFUME?
At the moment Kenzo's Flower. I also like Guerlain's Champs Elysées.

14. WHAT KIND OF HAIR/EYE COLOUR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?
I really couldn't care less.

15. DO YOU LIKE PAIN KILLERS?
Yes. I also frequently think how fortunate I am to have had my children in the age of epidurals. Overdosing on House MD is making me want to try Vicodin in large quantities. Call me impressionable.

16. ARE YOU TOO SHY TO ASK SOMEONE OUT?
Come back and ask me that question in my next life, because it's just not topical any more!

17. FAVE PIZZA TOPPING?
I like all pizzas except those that include smoked salmon and/or pineapples which I like fine, just not on pizzas..

18. IF YOU COULD EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
I'm not really too hungry at the moment because I went out for lunch today and had a delicious foie frais pané with orange powder and asparagus, a fish trio in broccoli sauce and some strawberry melba.

19. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU MADE MAD?
A person at work. An extremely satisfying experience.

20. IS ANYONE IN LOVE WITH YOU?
I certainly hope so. (P. is nodding his head)

Now it's your turn. Go on, you know you want to.

Miserable

The polls had been predicting this for months but that didn't make the inevitable morning-after feeling any easier to shake off. Parents at the school gate were subdued.

Bonjour. Ca va?
Bof.

Colleagues at work were depressed. Two of my friends are married to Algerians: they are frankly uneasy. I seem to be destined to forever live among people who vote against the mainstream. I lived for years in a Scotland that voted Labour but was subjected to Thatcher. Now I live in a Ségolene-voting South-West France that faces five years of "le petit excité". There were plenty of people in the streets of Bordeaux last night, but they definitely weren't celebrating — they were lamenting. If you don't know anything about Nicholas Sarkozy, think Bush and Berlusconi rolled into one massive ego. Think megalomania. Think increased social inequality. Think friends in big business. Think tax breaks for the rich and diminishing public health care. Think repression. Think America's new lapdog.

I'm off to do what it takes to have my say in five-years' time.

I've been thinking

... or maybe just letting thoughts lap over my consciousness like intermittent waves. I've been thinking about all the things I have to get done this week - reports to write, exam papers to mark, an interpreting job to prepare. I've been thinking about how quickly E. is slipping out of infanthood - when did 4 year-olds start going to slumber parties? And about how taking just one child out in the evening changes the dynamics of the event and makes it much more leisurely and yes, pleasurable. I've been thinking about the city I live in and how much it has changed since I arrived here all those years ago when people paddling in a miroir d'eau on the quais would have been unthinkable. I'm thinking about the summer - Scotland or the Dordogne first? I've been wondering about BookMooch etiquette — isn't it a bit cheeky of someone who'll only send books to "their own country" to ask me to send one to theirs? I've been thinking (and talking) non-stop about the presidential elections here in France: not Sarko, please please please not Sarko. And about the delectable Hugh Laurie and his stubble - is it reasonable to stay up late into the night to watch all those episodes of House MD in a row? Finally, today, I've been thinking about the very yellowness of gorse bushes under a dark sky in that scrubland that leads into the dunes. And through all of this, that pop song insinuating its gnawing way into my mental background - irritatingly familiar and omnipresent but what was it, where had I heard it? I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet sky. It turned out to be Mika's Grace Kelly, first planted in my brain by this man, and I've been listening to it outside my head ever since. Now I need some more thoughts to muffle it.

Thinking blogs

Zoo Mosaic, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Ha. So Heather thinks that I deserve a thinking blogger award. [Insert self-deprecating but nevertheless sincere remark here. Perhaps something unfavourably comparing own level of cogitation to that of the big gorilla guy photographed above, which would at least justify presence of a mosaic of yesterday's zoo photos in an otherwise completely unrelated post.]

I believe that I now get to make my own nominations.

I have to say that all of the blogs in my sidebar are blogs that I like so much that I pounce on them as soon as they are updated. These, then, are just some of the blogs that I consider to be thinking blogs rather than laughing blogs, or gazing blogs, or keeping-up-to-date blogs, or cooking blogs, or learning-handy-things blogs.

Connaissances (will make you think about poetry and science)
Gin and Teutonic (will make you think about this life abroad)
Meanwhile Here In France (will make you think about beauty in things and in words)
Naked Translations (will make you think about French and English)
Sarah's Books - Used and Rare (will make you think about books and bookselling)
Technologies du Langage (will make you think about language and politics)

April 23rd, Foreigners and Aliens

I spent far too much of yesterday obsessively searching for a half-remembered quote from a book (but which book?) on the subject of April 23rd.

My garbled memory of the passage tells me that April 23rd is not only Saint George's day but also Shakespeare's birthday and Dantes' birthday (or perhaps deathday). For this reason, in some countries (which countries?) the date is associated with literature and it is traditional to give the gift of a book on this day (but to whom?).

I didn't give any bookish presents yesterday but I did join BookMooch which I'd been meaning to do ever since Heather told me about it.

While I was fruitlessly skimming though books looking for the elusive passage (I could clearly visualise it three-quarters of the way down a right-hand page), I came across this much more interesting paragraph about the difference between expatriates and foreigners. I've never liked the term ex-pat and in fact I hadn't ever heard it bandied about much until I started reading so-called ex-pat blogs. Alasdair Reid explains what the word means to him in Whereabouts: Notes on being a Foreigner, a book I mentioned in my last post.

[Expatriates] have left their own countries on a long lead, never quite severing the link with home, never quite adapting themselves to their exile, clinging to one another for company, haunting post-offices, magazine stands, and banks, waiting expectantly for money from home, anything at all from home. Expatriates are generally getting their own countries into perspective, to the point where they feel strong enough, or desperate enough, to return to them. Foreigners, conversely, live where they are, leaving their pasts and countries behind them for the place they take root in. In one sense, they are lucky: they are free to enter a new context unencumbered, with clear eyes, and are often able to savor a place in a way that escapes the inhabitants, for whom it has become habit. But however well a foreigner adapts himself to a place and its inhabitants, however agile he becomes in the lore and the language, there is a line he can never cross, a line of belonging. he will always lack a past and a childhood, which is really what is meant by roots.

The picture above which is me à la Modigliani (and yes, I have to agree, I look more alien than foreign) was created here. You too could see what you would look like if you were black/white/asian/a man/woman etc.

Preserve us not from the list-makers

"Oh Lord, preserve us from the list-makers. And then preserve us from those who comment on the lists" says Judith Flanders. This didn't deter me from having a look at the results of a Waterstones survey in which the bookseller asked its staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982 — the date Waterstones opened its first branch. I liked a lot of the books on the list: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime, The Shipping News, The Poisonwood Bible, The God of Small Things, The Crow Road, Snow Falling on Cedars, Love in the Time of Cholera. Some I thought were tripe: Chocolat, Birdsong, Notes on a Scandal, The Da Vinci Code.

I'm not sure how I would have answered. Perhaps I would have included five of these:

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Whereabouts by Alastair Reid
Findings by Kathleen JamieNight Falls on Ardnamurchan by Alasdair Maclean
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
La Route Bleue by Kenneth White
No Great Mischief Alistair Macleod
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

It would seem that I have a penchant for travel books with one-word titles by Scots, preferably called Ala/isd/tair. What about you?

Fave Photo Friday

Holiday Villas in Soulac, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Soulac is one of those old-fashioned seaside towns that you still come across in France. It's about an hour north of Bordeaux and you drive through the Médoc past prestigious châteaux to get there. Although it isn't nearly as chic and fashionable as places like Arcachon and Cap Ferret, there's something about the atmosphere that makes you feel relaxed: dilapidated villas that sit empty for most of the year, peeling woodwork, sandy gardens and weeds growing in the streets, moules-frites on the seafront, grandmothers in sunhats buying fish at the market, children with buckets and spades on the long sandy beach. If we had a rickety little villa there, I'd paint the shutters red.

Anywhere's nowhere

"Where would you wish to go?" she asked.
"Anywhere, my dear." I replied.
"Anywhere's nowhere." said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.
"Let's go somewhere at any rate." said I.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Change of Plan

I wanted to go to the Alpujarras in Andalucia and had saved up A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, the last book in the Chris Stewart series that inspired this hankering. I had even found what looked like a lovely little white house with a pool and managed not to be too dismayed by the fact that all of the houses available for rent in the Alpujarras seemed to belong not to earthy Spaniards but to Brits offering massages and exotic cuisine.

As our departure approached, P. became less and less enthusiastic. "13 hours is a long time to spend in a car with two children. It's Easter week, the roads will be packed. The car's making a funny noise." "Don't be so negative", I said.

But when we looked at the weather forecast, even I had to agree that it was a very long way to drive for rain and mediocre temperatures. So we called the whole thing off and went to the Ile d'Oléron and the Dordogne instead.

And the car broke down on the way there.

Oh, and if you ever want to go to the Ile d'Oléron I have a recommendation for where not to stay.

Think About It

I've almost finished The Girls, a novel about conjoined craniopagus twins. It's one of the many books that my Mum brought me when she came for a short stay last week. She had discussed this one at her reading group and although she enjoyed it, she felt that some of the detail wasn't quite right. Take this passage for example:

Our mother grunted and pushed.
From anus. To clitoris. Her tissue tore.

"I was once a midwife," she told the group, "and that just isn't possible. Think about it."

I am Mum, I am.

Restless

I've just finished William Boyd's most recent novel, Restless. Boyd seems to have morphed into John Le Carré in this story of spies and cold-hearted spy masters in much the same way, now I come to think of it, as Le Carré went a little Boydy in The Constant Gardener and its story of expats in Africa. Talk about transcending the genre but since I'm an admirer of both authors I don't really mind if they want to switch.
I have seen William Boyd a couple of times, once at the Salon du Livre in Bordeaux in an excruciatingly tedious round table on the subject of the English novel, with Derek Raymond a.k.a. Robin Cook (Old Etonian accent in English, Aveyron peasant accent in French), Beryl Bainbridge and another author whose name escapes me (patrician, old, English). And once in the departures lounge at Gatwick, bound for his house in South-West France, around the time Armadillo came out.
Le Carré I have only ever seen on French television, interviewed by Bernard Pivot. He speaks good French which isn't perhaps surprising if he really was a spy before he became an author. One of the things that I definitely didn't buy in Restless was the ease with which the main character speaks Russian at home, learns French as a child and then English as an adult to such perfection that she can pass as English in England — even to her husband and daughter — and American in America.
Here are three sentences from Restless that took my fancy:

1. Agents were "crows"; "shadows" were people who followed you — it was, as she later learned, a kind of linguistic old-school tie, or Masonic handshake.

Because I spend a lot of my working life making sure that people can do other linguistic handshakes properly.

2. ...one of those girl-women who made me feel like a strapping milkmaid or an Eastern-bloc pentathlete.

Because it elicited that yes-I-recognise-that feeling

3. She...lowered her trousers and shitted into the fast water.

Because I can't be the only one who thinks that past tense just sounds wrong.

Resisting Back Passage Double Entendres

The saga of the mouldering wall continues. We're pretty sure it's due to a leaky pipe which carries rain water from our back garden into the street out front and runs the whole length of our living-dining-room wall. The wall is stone and porous; the pipe is probably ancient.
Our insurance man came and had a look and then our next-door neighbour's insurance man came and had a look. They took the standard couple of months to think about it and then they sent a man with a camera to do a videoscopy.
He trailed all of his equipment through the house into the back garden. He inserted a long tube with a mini camera on the end into the pipe and recorded the pictures it sent back on his laptop. Afterwards, in an experience which is as close as I hope ever to come to seeing the insides of my own bowels on a monitor, I got to watch the video footage of the crumbling pipe that lies under the house and the dead leaves and débris that litter the bottom. And just like a doctor, the man announced after the procedure that he had good news and bad news: the good news being that he had diagnosed the source of our affliction, the bad news that the treatment was going to cause major financial haemorrhage.

Tweed Vocal Cords

I had a little post brewing on the ubiquity of characters with British accents in the American series I've been watching. I was going to cite Callum Blue who plays the cheeky cockney alcoholic in Dead Like Me and Roger Rees the new surgeon with a British accent in Grey's Anatomy (the one they're calling McAgra).
I was also going to tell you about how I thought for a long time that Susan's new bloke, Ian, in Desperate Housewives must be played by an American actor who was useless at British accents, until I looked him up on and discovered that his name is Dougray Scott and that he actually comes from Glenrothes and it all became clear — he's an English-accent-challenged Fifer. If you've ever been to Glenrothes, you will already have deduced that Dougray is not his given name, a boy just couldn't thrive there with a name like that.
I would also have mentioned Ashley Jensen the Scottish seamstress in Ugly Betty and how I worry now that when I speak to Americans they may be experiencing the same comprehension problems as her bitchy boss Wilhelmina.
But there's no point now since the BBC beat me to it with an article entitled Best of British. I could have gone to press just as quickly as them if I had teams of researchers doing all that tredious tv watching for me.

3.14etc

Yesterday was Pi day and it was also my birthday but I’ve arrived at an age where numbers and birthdays don’t mix well. I’m on my own with the kids this week, so it was a subdued affair. Had P. been here, he would have whisked me off in a limousine to a secret destination overlooking the sea for cocktails and a romantic dinner. Oooops, do I sense a recent scenario from Desperate Housewives insinuating itself into my psyche as a future false memory?

But I’m not nearly as old as the subjects of 49 Up — the documentary series that has been following a mixed group of people every seven years since they were seven years-old. I’ve been watching the latest instalment and I have to say that the participants all seem a little jaded now. And old.

Perhaps having their lives dissected by millions of TV viewers was an interesting experience when they were young, but now being subjected to that level of scrutiny seems to be an intrusive annoyance for most of them. So what’s the attraction for the viewer? As the 49-year old John says towards the end of the most recent programme, it’s probably akin to the appeal of any reality show only with the added bonus of seeing people put on weight and go grey and bald.

A metamorphosis taking place on one side of the tv screen only, clearly.

Weird, moi?

Jordan tagged me to tell you 6 weird things about myself and here they are:

1. I have seven nipples. This is apparently much commoner than you might expect and I’ve finally got over my embarrassment about it.

All right, that wasn’t entirely true (I do have two nipples though) but do you have any idea how difficult it is to come up with five interesting weird things about oneself?

1. I set my alarm to go off at 7 a.m. every weekday. I never get up before 7.30 a.m.

2. I don’t like milk and most dairy products but I do like Roquefort.

3. I don’t own an umbrella.

4. In summer, I like to sleep with one leg on top of the quilt and one leg under it.

5. Someone once slashed the tyres of my car.

6. I say "anyway" and "however" to fill gaps in conversation.

God, I'm boring. Maybe those of you who know me in real life could come up with weirder weirdness. Please.

Camp Granada

Just when we thought we couldn’t possibly take another grey winter's day, the weather got spectacularly better. As we drove to the lake at Hostens, the car thermometer rose to 27°C. This wasn't spring, it was full-blown summer barging in. Pasty-skinned city-dwellers were out in force at the lake with their picnics and pushchairs and dogs and ice-boxes and mountain bikes, all wearing last-year's bermuda shorts.

It wasn't quite Camp Granada but the feeling in the air was a little like the end of the song:

Wait a minute; it stopped hailing.Guys are swimming, guys are sailing.
Playing baseball, gee that's better.
Muddah, faddah, kindly disregard this letter!

And talking of Granada and very high temperatures [pause to allow you to admire that segue] I’ve just finished reading Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart, a book about living in the arid, mountainous region called the Alpujarras in southern Spain. A few months ago, I heard this this podcast interview with the author and started reading his books about Spain — the others are A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society — in the wrong order. They are very funny.

I am fascinated by books about people giving it all up to live in a shack half-way up a mountain in the middle of nowhere. I think mostly I'm captivated by them because when I read about the deprivations, the enforced asceticism, the long winters and dry summers, I can't help feeling that I've actually had the experience; lived the life. And the more I read about it, the more I've experienced it and the less urge I have to ever actually contemplate doing it.

I have become an expert armchair shunner of city life. Reading Kenneth White's Lettres de Gourgounel, I vicariously spent a couple of years living alone in the Ardèche. Through Gerald Brenan's South from Granada, I paved the way for Stewart and his ilk, living the hermit’s life in an old farmhouse in Andalucia before the Second World War.

Inevitably, however, there comes a point in each book when I realise that rustication and the dry and dusty life are not for me. In Driving Over Lemons that point came with the following passage:

The host of creatures that had moved into the cane and brush ceiling of our bedroom began to breed and multiply, scuffling and skittering not six feet above our upturned and tremulously wakeful faces. As the heat of the night increased, the breeding and multiplying above us became even more frenzied , and soon, as the population soared out of control, we found ourselves spattered with larvae, maggots and other young deemed surplus to requirements. This was hardly conducive to a good night's rest.

A few of my favourite dings

10 things I like beginning with the letter d.

…dictionaries. I like having a whole shelf of dictionaries beside me when I’m writing anything; looking things up from time to time; having my eye drift across the page and finding some other, more interesting word. My favourite is Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, which now I come to think of it is possibly slightly out of date now. I also like being able to flick between a dictionary window and a text window when I’m translating.

… dall. I like making it and I like eating it. The version I make calls for brown lentils, tamarind and mustard seeds.

… drizzle. It rarely drizzles here in South-West France where we either have torrential downpours or days of unrelenting medium-size, medium-force rain. I like the feel of Scottish feather-light raindrops on my face.

… Durango. P and I went to Colorado a few years ago and Durango was one of those towns where everything was postcard perfect: a wide main street, lots of interesting shops and bars and restaurants, even an old-fashioned railway station and a steam train. The inhabitants of Durango are all young and sporty and promenade their children around town in little trailers behind mountain bikes.

… doughnuts so I probably wouldn’t fit in in Durango. Dough, oil and sugar; what a healthy combination.

… dinner parties. I like inviting people for dinner and I like being invited for dinner. I like the informal sort best, where people stand in the kitchen having an aperitif then move to the dinner table and the conversation goes on into the wee small hours.

… drifting from page to page on the internet. In fact, I like this a little too much.

… deer. I like catching sight of them at the edge of the woods in the gloaming and to see them look up warily when they feel someone watching them.

… dandling babies on my knee — my own when they were small and compliant, and also other people’s. Especially babies with

... dimples.

Charlotte gave me the letter d. If you'd like to play, leave me a comment and I'll give you a letter.

Trumpet. Blowing. My own.

Look! I was shortlisted for Post of the Week last week.



(Have a look, it's a great way to find well-written blogs you didn't know existed. And, if you nominate, a way to draw attention to posts you think are a pretty good read.)

All Kinds of Everything

People can sometimes be dismissive at the very mention of the word blog: "what for and how do you find the time?" And to be honest, when people ask me what this blog is about — as somebody did last week — I'm never quite sure how to answer. My life / this and that / things I'm interested in, all sound lame and inadequate.

I don't want to go all meta on you, but as often happens, elements of possible answers suggested themselves over the following days mostly in random things I'd been reading. I serve these snippets up to you fragmented and raw, with no synthesis or mashing together to create a more coherent answer than the title of the Dana song above.

If you are on of those who still think of weblogs as "online diaries" or, as Tony Blair's former chief policy adviser Matthew Taylor put it ...that they are merely packed with a "shrill discourse of demands" and "a perpetual state of self-righteous rage", then you have evidently been reading the wrong ones. (TLS)

Gunn has two young daughters... and she finds that she cannot contemplate shutting a study door on them. Instead, she wishes to situate herself at a desk on the landing where she can hear everything, "the clattering, the quiet, the doorbell, the calls for help, "Mum! Mummy!" And on her landing, she decides, she will "make a different kind of writing altogether... A genre that at this moment doesn't even exist." 44 Things is the result of this manifesto: 44 pieces, one for each year she's lived - snatched from her domestic life...all of which arise from the textures and priorities of her life at home, which, she says, "is a good life, an interesting life and deserves to be written about." (Scottish Review of Books)

Decca was a natural letter writer. Born at a time when it was usual to spend part of every day writing letters, into a family for whom letters were a crucial means of communication, she wrote constantly: to her many friends, ... to her husband and children, whenever she was apart from them; to strangers who wrote to her; and to her editor, Robert Gottlieb. Her letters, in which memories of the past and particularly her childhood returned again and again, are direct, full of energy and laughter. TLS

...all take writing seriously, and hence feel the need to highlight the significance of diaristic writing to ward off the charge of futility, navel-gazing and irrelevance diairists have long been the butt of. .... Writing thus becomes a way of taming the formlessness of experience, a formlessness which prefigures that of death. (V. Serfaty)

10 French Films

Jonathan at Connaissances has tagged me to list my top ten French films so here they are. I'm actually quite surprised by the way this has turned out. I'm quite partial to the intimiste, tortured vibe for which French cinema is famous, but it would appear that a good number of my favourite films are comedies, albeit dark comedies for the most part.

1. 37.2 Le Matin (1986) I love this film. I love the Betty character and her madness, the Zorg character and his patience, and the desperate urgency of their story. See the long version if you can.

2. Le Grand Bleu (1988) Jean-Marc Barr, stillness, depth and that haunting music. Who needs anything more from a film?

3. Harry Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien. This is a fabulous film: hilariously funny at times but also horribly menacing. Harry is played by Sergei Lopez.

4. Beau temps Mais Orgageux en Fin de Journée. (1986) One of those films where nothing very much happens but you remember that nothing for a long time afterwards.

5. Western (1997) Another funny film with Sergei Lopez and his Spanish accent. It's a sort of road movie à la Bretonne.

6. Tatie Danielle (1990) Classic French comedy from Etienne Chatiliez about a nasty old besom who comes to live with her nephew's family.

7. La Vie est un Long Fleuve Tranquille (1988) Another very funny Etienne Chatiliez film contrasting a bourgeois French family, les Duquenois, and a council-house family, les Groseilles. Their babies have been swapped at birth

8. Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982) I'm not a great Depardieu fan, but he's good as the floppy-haired returning soldier who usurps somebody else's identity. Or does he?

9. Le Boucher (1970) This one is a haunting thriller that takes place in the Dordogne and stars Stéphane Audran. (I loved her in Babette's Feast too but apparently that's a Danish film)

10. Un Homme Et Une Femme (1966) Da da da da da, da da da. Perhaps the classic French film?

Ten films really isn't enough, here are some more than nearly made it into my list:
Le Diner de Cons : funny but also poignant.
Indochine : just for the scenery.
Le Fabuleux Destin de Amélie Poulain : although it's now fashionable to say you didn't like it.
Le Bonheur est dans le pré : favourite line: "pourtant le confit n'est pas gras".
Les Ripoux : about two corrupt cops in Paris.
Trois Hommes et un couffin : much better than the American remake.
La Lune dans le Caniveau : .another one with a young Gérard Depardieu
Les Valseuses...and another.
Tchao Pantin : starring the late great Coluche.
L'Ete Meurtrier : for fans of long hot summers and the young Isabelle Adjani.
Léon :Jean Reno before he went all Sarko on us.
Diabolo menthe :Parisian childhood in the seventies.
Le Nom de la Rose : Sean Connery may not speak French, but it is partly a French production.
La Guerre du Feu : one of a kind.
Les Invasions Barbares : much more Canadian than French, but brilliant.
La Femme d'à Côté : I like Fanny Ardant and her deep voice.

We're home!

Back from a few days in the Pyrenees and home suddenly seems obscenely and wonderfully luxurious. Oh, the joys of central heating rather than dodgy electric radiators; an electrical system that doesn't cut out every time we plug in an extra appliance plunging an already gloomy house into complete darkness; a bathroom for four people not ten. My reunion with wifi and the Nespresso machine feels downright decadent.
Also, do you know easy it is to organise two children in the morning rather than six children and their skiing gear? And the best bit: after four days with a one-year-old — gorgeous as he was — my own children seem fantastically mature and reasonable.

Now if only we could have that view of the glossy white mountain tops when we open the shutters here.

Origins

I am from daylight shining through summer evening curtains. I am from drizzle. I am from skiting down polished ice slides. I am from wellie boots and cagoules.

I am from “beamy ups” at the swing park. I am from Blue Peter and Crackerjack. I am from skipping and peevers. I am from knocking on the door to ask “Is she coming out to play?” I am from friends chumming each other down the road.

I am from words like ashet and foosty and girny. I am from Lassar’s paste on scabs. I am from walks in the hills and wind at the top. I am from gulls in the garden. I am from weekends of peat fires with Granny and Seanair in Argyll. I am from a fur coat and a Jaguar. I am from sweet-peas in a vase. I am from snowball fights under sodium streetlights.

I am from the path through our estate to school. I am from Harriers twice a week in Adidas spikes. I am from cross-country running. I am from the smell of cut grass and the compact mud beneath it. I am from Please Miss, Yes Miss. I am from open-plan classrooms and project work. I am from blazer, blue skirt, white blouse and school tie. I am from M&S white vests in winter, and most of summer too. I am from pageboy haircuts and skinny legs.

I am from ice-cream vans and 99 cones. I am from Tunnock’s caramel wafers and pots of tablet. I am from mince and tatties. I am from grated apples and I am from Love Hearts. I am from orange halves dipped in sugar. I am from roasted cheese. I am from school dinners.

I am from badminton in the church hall. I am from the public library. I am from Noël Streatfield books and the Famous Five and Spiggy Hole and Heidi. I am from faraway holidays on sandy beaches. I am from pictures of David Cassidy clipped from Jackie magazine. I am from radio Luxemburg under the pillow.

That’s where I’m from.

Where are you from?

Inspired by Belgian Waffle and a long chain of I am froms.

Red Round the House

Red Round the House, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

I took these photos today for a 24-hour Flickr challenge. That is the the beginning and the end of my Valentine's day celebrations. Woo-hoo.

Yo-Yo

It seems that this week it's all right to blog about dieting so I feel justified in inflicting on you this account of how I lost three kilos, put them back on again, lost them again and put them back on again, all in the space of two weeks.

It all started when I saw this article on 10 common sense diet tips. Before I go any further, I should tell you that these tips were written by a man. That knowledge should have been enough to make me think twice about clicking on the link since it is a well-documented fact that all men have to do is stop taking salt on their chips and they lose 12 kilos instantly.

I perused the ten tips anyway. I didn't like seven of them so I ignored them. The ones I did like were 1. drink lots of water, 2. weigh yourself every single day, and especially 3. don't try to diet at the weekend.

1 and 2 were very effective, I lost weight. But guess what, number 3 is NOT AT ALL EFFECTIVE, unless you want to be thin(ner) only on Thursdays and Fridays. It is especially ineffective if you make banoffee pie on Saturday.

Now, in a last ditch attempt to kick start my metabolism I have resorted to jogging (but only on Sundays). For the moment I feel very much like Gordon:

"...my feet feel at one with the shoe and I can bound forward like a gazelle.. which has recently eaten a hippo."

Wully-Wully

Me : "Suddenly Rataxes jumped out from behind the bush, shoved the little elephants out of the way, and seized the Wully-Wully, who let out a piercing cry."

E (interrupting): Who's telling the story?

Me (confidently and in an effort not to be found intellectually wanting for a second time in one week): An omniscient narrator.

E (dubiously): mmm

Give and thou shalt get rid of stuff

Last week the postman brought me a brown paper parcel full of Chinese cookery goodies — at least I think they’re goodies, I haven’t actually tried them yet. Anne had received a load of free samples and she was generous enough to give the extras away on her cookery blog.

In the same spirit, I’m decluttering my bookshelves this week and giving away the paperbacks in the list below. I’ve already blogged about the difficulty of getting rid of books that are surplus to requirements so this isn’t an act of generosity, it’s housework. If you’d like any of the books just leave a comment telling me which one(s), then drop me an e-mail at lesleygrah@gmailhaha.com (but delete the haha) with your postal address and I’ll post them off to you (or I'll give them to you in person if you live close enough). Don't be shy, ask for several if you need lots of reading material. Don’t send anything in return but if you like, you could get rid of stuff give something away on your blog too. Hey, a giveaway meme!

We are the World, cue swaying.

The Books (They’re not all great works of literature — but some of them are, I just happen to have doubles)

• Moon Dust by Andrew Smith
• Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks
• Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris
• Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris
• The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Crichton
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Kiln by William McIlvanney
• The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
• Death and Restoration by Iain Pears
• Three Junes by Julia Glass
• Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope
• Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  

Shudder

[Mum, you might like just to skip this one.]

Scratch, scratch. Scrape, scrape. Rustle, rustle. This time it is not a false alarm. We have mice.

They're somewhere under the floorboards in our bedroom and they are very noisy. It seems that while we've been watching episode after episode of Prison Break in the comfort of our haven of a bed, the furry critters have been working on their own escape plan UNDER OUR VERY FEET.

We've squeezed poison down all the little gaps between the planks and I even invited some neighbours around yesterday evening provided they came accompanied by their cat. I invested all my hope of every sleeping again in the hunting instinct of their pet.

Unfortunately our feline saviour was visibly shaking as he came into the house. We let him loose in the bedroom and he dived straight under the bed and stayed there for over an hour until we'd finished the apéritif and our neighbours slunk home with their cowardly, useless cat. Back to square one. Scratch, scrape rustle.

Deborah sent me a link to this post in the Guardian about the impossibility of ever ridding onself of mice. Someone in the comments mentions mice repellents which emit ultrasounds so I googled that and trawled through descriptions of thousands of electronic devices. I'm tempted, but friends tell me they're useless.

You know how when anything remotely alarming happens to you people insist on telling you about how much worse it could be / might get. "Ah you're having a baby? I know a woman who was in labour for seventeen straight days and ended up giving birth to a baby with three legs". "Going to the dentist, are you? My cousin got a bug from in a dentist's surgery. His entire jaw rotted off. I was at his funeral just last week." Today at work a colleague told me "Got mice have you? I have a friend who woke up in the middle of the night with a rat on his pillow and the rat bit his face." So please, only comments on infallible tips for total and complete mouse eradication ..........please. I may never sleep again.

Blabla Bullets

I've repainted all of the doors downstairs. Since we moved into this house eight years ago, they've been a deep and jarring red. Now they're a colour that I've known I wanted for months. I have described it to various people who know about these things as "mole-colour", "the colour of a weimeranar dog", and "pebble". Now that all of my doors are coated in it, I realise that it's really just the colour of mud (but very chic and understated mud, I think).

Yesterday we I shopped for the paint with the crowds at Castorama, E. asked, "Maman, qui a fait naître tous ces gens?" (Mummy, who brought all of these people into existence?). I mumbled something about the great mystery that is life.
(Update. On re-reading, I realise that this is not a very good translation. It makes E. sound like a 4-year-old Malcolm Muggeridge. But I still can't think of anything better.)

This week I've been working on an article for an academic journal and out of sheer, unbearable boredom I ran it through the tagcloud machine. Now I'm thinking about just submitting the cloud, it's much prettier and pithier than the article itself.

academic account although atkinson becoming book case clinical course culture described doctors education ethnographic ethnography example experience fact form important knowledge konner language lay learn linguistic medical medicine notes observation pass patient patients perspective process rather school seems sinclair social status students study terms training used words work world year

created at TagCrowd.com

Interloper

I’ve lived here for a long time now and generally I’m pretty much at home in France. I’d say that with a few idiosyncratic tweaks, French culture is more or less my culture*. But yesterday evening I had to go to a memorial mass and it was brought home to me that I’m really just an imposter here.

I’m not a Catholic and church services here are an absolute mystery to me. (My English-speaking Catholic friends tell me that it isn’t much clearer for them). For a start, I have no idea when to stand and when to sit and end up doing everything several seconds after the rest of the congregation. The priest makes some innocuous pronouncement and with no warning the entire church answers in unison giving me the fright of my life. Sometimes they all mumble the same words with total confidence, sometimes they all sing a couple of lines, sometimes they all cross themselves. Meanwhile I’m left fumbling around, surreptitiously glancing sideways to work out what everyone else is doing and and trying to look as inconspicuous an idiot as possible. Usually I have P. with me to prod me in the right direction, but last night I was all by myself.

At least this time I wasn’t fooled into queuing up with everyone else while they waited to take mass – something I’m pretty sure I'm not allowed to do anyway. Last time I joined the queue by accident and ended up having a statuette of Jesus thrust towards my face. I kissed the wee plaster man on the lips – it just seemed like the right thing to do. How was I supposed to know that it’s the done thing to kiss his feet ?

*except for a few obvious exceptions such as:
the consumption of snails,
jumping queues with impunity/letting other people jump queues with impunity
driving gaily through red lights

Brrrrrrrrrr

This post is dedicated to anyone who might have escaped from South-West France to sun and warmth. Just to let you know that we would much rather get our wellies on in the morning, with scratchy scarves and gloves and kick our way through slush to school and work in 0°C, than ride on elephants’ backs and meet crocodiles.

Spoilers

I’ve been wallowing in blissful multiple-episode sessions of Grey’s Anatomy 3, Desperate Housewives 3 and Prison Break 1.

The good news for those of you who follow Grey’s Antomy is that Heather, the girl with the terrible scoliosis seems to be doing fine. I know this because I saw her snogging Edie’s nephew in the back of a car parked in Wisteria Lane.

I’m now waiting in eager anticipation for the episode where Bree discovers that Orson was once called Trey MacDougal and married to Charlotte in Sex and the City.

And as if that wasn’t mysterious enough it turns out that the English teacher in My So-Called Life is also Meredith’s father, and they tell me that he also has a secret life as the President’s brother in a sneaky actor change in Prison Break 2.

There’s something unsettling about all of this inter-series penetration if you ask me [and if you arrived here through a Google search for that specific phrase, hop it.]

Not yet the age of reason

For the equally immature - get yours here.

Fur coat and nae knickers

Remember all that work we had done on the house about a year and a half ago? Well, all has not gone smoothly since then. I'll spare you the details but here are a few key words : leaking pipe, mouldy wall, undulating parquet flooring... So the insurance man came a couple of days ago. He fixed the appointment for 8a.m. This is not a good time for me but I did manage to whip round and get the living room to look relatively tidy. He inspected the suspect area downstairs under which a pipe carries rain water from the back garden along a stone wall and out into the street at the front. Then he asked if he could have a quick look upstairs. "Upstairs? Yes, of course" I squeaked. As he picked his way through abandoned pyjamas, unmade beds and forgotten toys, I felt a surge of sympathy for one of Dr Crippen's patients:

The first patient of the day was an elderly lady with a painful foot. She took off her left shoe and stocking to reveal an inflamed bunion, and an infected in growing toe nail. I asked her to slip off the other shoe and stocking so that I could check the right foot. She hesitated. “Do I have to, doctor”. I said it was helpful to compare the two, and I needed to check the state of her other toes and toe nails. Clearly reluctantly, she took off the right shoe and stocking. Her right foot was filthy. Very smelly. Dirt under all the toes nails. Her left foot was spotlessly clean. She had washed one, but not the other. I pretended not to notice, but she put her hand on my arm and looked at me. “It’s not easy. I am alone.”

Spoils

There's nothing like a long train journey in January to find out what everyone got for Christmas. I spent almost the entire day on Friday in various trains between Bordeaux and Dijon, leaving the house at 5H30 a.m. and getting back at 12H30a.m. - that's a lot of train. Apart from admiring shiny new Louis Vuitton handbags, I also got to sit beside people with hissing earphones of all shapes and sizes. Two young lads walked the length of one train with prized PSPs in their hands, both playing music, both without headphones. A young couple turned on a Nintendo at the Gare de Lyon and didn't turn it off until we got to Dijon. At night, between Paris and Bordeaux as I watched the first couple of episodes of Desperate Housewives 3 and puzzled over that British accent, the guy on my left watched something I couldn't quite make out on his laptop, the guy on my right watched King Kong and the guy in front of me watched Lord of the Rings.
Yes we were all very smug about our Christmas presents. As I got off the train I looked around to see if there was any sign of the homeless person I'd walked past early that morning sitting in the cold and dark outside the station holding a baby wrapped up in a blanket. It's an ill-divided world.

007 and me

How is it that the interior we decked out with cards and lights and decorations that looked so sparkly and festive before Christmas now looks so pathetically tawdry?

Nancy has kindly tagged me for the Five Things About Me meme, so here goes:

1. I have lived continuously in France for almost 22 years which means that this year I will have lived in France for half of my life. (Because, yes, 22 is exactly half of 34.)

2. I have dislocated both of my knees. This is not an experience I recommend.

3. People tell me I'm tone deaf. But I'm not.

4. I have worn contact lenses for the past twenty or so years. I now occasionally need to wear reading glasses on top of my contact lenses, specifically every time I want to read something. I find this somewhat irritating.

5. I once wrote a PhD thesis on the subject of Nineteenth Century Scottish Travellers in France. As you can undoubtedly tell from the title, it's an unputdownable read.

And I'm tagging: Neil, Hairy, Teacher Dude, Magpie and Jonathan.

Blogging Year

Profgrrrl says everyone else is looking back over the year's posts and taking the first sentence from each month. Here are mine and they look pretty representative of the year: a selection of mundane observations, a couple of mediocre jokes, a few unusual vocabulary choices, and a liberal sprinking of fake self-deprecation.

January: A very, very happy new year to you all. (Who did I think I was, the Queen?)

February: 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. (Maybe the self-deprecation wasn't always entirely fake)

March: The Sopranos Season Six starts in the USA on March 12th. Goody, goody (or even baddy, baddy). (I'm sooooo funny)

April: 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. (I'll show you them some day)

May:
The sun rises bright in France
and so sets he
But he has tint the blink he had
In my ain countree
(I'm speechless)

June: 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. (And surprise, surprise I think I've reforgotten it)

July: France is in the grip of football fever. (Talk about stating the bloody obvious)

August: A dozen dozy days in the Dordogne have temporarily (?) rendered me incapable of stringing together anything more than that pathetic attempt at alliteration. (Perhaps I have a future in the flourishing Dordogne expat newspaper industry)

September: A friend tells me that he reads much less during the summer than at other times of the year because he does so many other interesting things when the weather is good. (You could all tell a mile away that that was just an excuse to introduce a list of all the books I had read over the summer)

October: I absolutely love coincidences. (OMG. So do I!)

November: If you get in the car and drive due south of Bordeaux for four hours, you arrive in an area of Spain that is so utterly otherworldly that, well only expressions like utterly otherworldly will do. (I spent a lot of time mulling that one over. Precisely four hours actually)

December : Dear Editor, For several months free issues of your "newspaper for English-speakers in France" have been plopping onto my doormat. (Plopping? And we don't have a doormat)

Random Bullets

Post-weekend musings

If you take small children skating, it's probably best to have progressed past the gripping-the-barrier-
and-shuffling-around-the-edge stage yourself.

Deborah has done a recording for the audio meme. You can listen to it here but be warned she sounds much, much posher than any of the rest of us and it goes completely wonky at the end. Perhaps she'd re-record it if there was enough popular demand.

Why do Ikea sell mattresses and beds that are 80cm wide but never ever have the fitted sheets to go with them?

Saw Arthur and the Minimoys this afternoon. (Why is it called Arthur and the Invisibles in the UK?). It's entertaining if you're six.

Christmas cards almost posted.

I've had this Powerbook for 16 months now and I have never backed anything up. Shock, horror, I know. But now I've got a lovely little external drive which I suspect has quite a few more gigabytes of memory than I have wired into my grey matter. All I need now is a nifty little application to backup automatically (the computer not my brain, I hasten to add. Well, for the moment anyway). Any suggestions?

Oh yes, and if you're ordering smoked salmon from my brother this year, send him an e-mail because the on-line payment facility is playing up. (See what I did there?)

Tomorrow the world

Initiating a piddly little audio meme has given me an immense feeling of power. I recommend it for anyone who feels that the world is not reactive enough to their every whim.
The kind people who have contributed their voices to the expansion of my sphere of influence (so far) are:

Ms Mac
Vivi
TEFL Smiler
And from there to :
Nyasha
Mausi
Alithinks
Frog with a Blog
Robyn
Andy

And before I go, here are a few choice words for you: moist, agenda, vomit, diet, panties, nipple.

The one after which you all unsubscribe

Yesterday evening I went to a Tupperware Party (une soirée tooperwer).

I bought only one item (but it did cost 60€).

I must have been drugged, because I signed up to have my own soirée tooperwer.

You are all invited.

Shoot me now.

News from the Colonies

Dear Editor,

For several months free issues of your "newspaper for English-speakers in France" have been plopping onto my doormat. You can stop now - I will not be taking out a subscription to your newspaper.

a) I don’t seem to be part of your target readership. I’m not a retired major from the Home Counties wallowing in “fantastic weather, delightful food and lovely wine”

b) I’m not interested in "safeguarding my finances" by handing them over to companies with trusty English names like Sibballs or Stanley Gobbons

c) I do not hanker after the services of one of the numerous British plumbers or joiners, or even sausages advertised in your small ads.

d) And I don’t suffer from "Septic tank odour" either which is sadly not the case of many of your readers, if those same ads are anything to go by.

e) I don’t believe that Anglo- at the beginning of a company name guarantees quality (viz Anglopack, Anglocomputers)

f) I’m not looking to import a Raeburn or an Aga

g) The soaring French membership of "Conservatives Abroad" is a source of dismay to me

h) I’m not looking for an Anglican church service either

i) And finally, fascinating as they sound, life is simply too short to read articles with headlines such as:

Mince Pies flying off shop shelves as local shops get a taste for Anglo Specialities

Planning a traditional bumper-scale Christmas lunch ? Check your French bird isn’t too skinny !

That is all.
Lezzles

Heer ma voyce

This temporary excursion into audio blogging was inspired by several things. Partly by a little video by one of Teacher Dude's students, an idea that I'm going to be using with my own students; partly by Ben over at Notes in Spain asking for audio comments on his podcasts, which made me dig out my old Odeo login. And partly, I suppose, by Gordon's comments on the inferiority of video/audio in comparison with writing which I agree with, so this definitely isn't going to be a regular thing.
And now it's over to me suggesting an audio meme.

powered by ODEO
(By the way, making this was easy-peasy with OdeoStudio. So it's over to you and your voices..... )

Piers

On Friday P. and I saw Piers Faccini in concert. This was a major deal since we hardly ever go to see live music anymore. We used to be permanent fixtures at the now-defunct Cricketers — a Blues club on the Quai de Paludate in Bordeaux — but that was in those faraway days before the poison dwarves.

So Friday evening we got our glad rags on, wondering what young people wear nowadays. We needn't have worried, when we got to the venue we soon realised that the audience was about our age - old. They were mostly dressed like us too: bobos obviously.

The tickets said "formule club" but we weren't sure what this meant. It turned out that it meant standing in the foyer of the Rock School Barbey beside the bar but with no tables and — more alarmingly for the over-40s — no chairs.

Anyway, it was a great concert. You can't not warm to someone who walks out into a room full of strangers and sings the first number a cappella. I'm not a great music critic. (The student newspaper at university rejected my only contribution, a dithyrambic account of a Thin Lizzy concert that probably dwelt a little too much on the qualities of Phil Lynnot's leather-clad legs.) Piers Faccini probably has good legs too but it's his voice and gentle aura that hold your attention.

Judge for yourself.

Interpreting drawbacks

Céline wrote an amusing post recently (also picked up by Language Hat). She described what one half of her brain does when she runs into a word that she can’t remember while she’s translating. Basically, it screams things like:

BARLEYBARLEYBARLEYBARLEY OH NO WHAT’S BARLEY IN FRENCH AAAAAAAAARGH

I think I’ve mentioned before that I do some freelance conference interpreting and so this is a familiar feeling. However the truth is that the multi-tasking cognitive confusion doesn’t stop at the screaming. It's really more like having multiple brains than two brains.

If I’m in an interpreting booth and an elusive word comes up, one brain immediately starts desperately flicking through its files to find a direct translation. This can take a while because the files often seem to be in a terrible mess (It's not there, I'm telling you.) Meanwhile another brain may then remember that I actually included this word in a specially prepared glossary in which case it will have to resort to flicking through real paper and dealing with alphabetical order. I might even remember having seen it in one of the documents I used to prepare for the conference (I can see it, half way down the page on the right hand side) which is not particularly helpful. Or maybe I’ll remember that I’ve already come across the word and its translation but in a completely different context and my already overheating brains will have to retrieve and replay a video-memory of what that context was (It was a Thursday. I was wearing that black skirt).

Meanwhile the nanoseconds tick by and new words to be translated keep streaming in ready for processing. (It’s a bit like the ironing, you can’t allow yourself to fall behind — the pile just gets higher and higher).

At the same time I have to be preparing an escape route: thinking about what to do if I just can’t find the slippery translation (Quick paraphrase ! Hollyhocks are really just tall flowering plants, that’ll do). I may have to attract the attention of my partner in the booth to see if s/he heard the pesky word and has a suitable suggestion (pull on partner's sleeve; form quizzical expression with face), maybe even scribble the word down on a pad for him/her to puzzle over while I’m still translating the build up to it. My brains will probably also be admonishing me for not seeing this word coming (you idiot, I told you you should have spent longer preparing last night) or telling me that this is undoubtedly not going to be the last time the speaker uses the word (we're doomed I tell ye). My poor brains may even realise that the entire presentation hinges on this one lexical item in which case, I’ll already be typing the word into a specialist dictionary for use later (How do you spell that again?).

And those are just the straight one-word-for-one-word translations. There are also the words that require careful handling, the ones that slip into my brain(s) through the headphones and set off alarm bells because they appear easy but they’re not: false friends for example or terms that have one translation in one context but something completely different in another.

When people ask me about simultaneous interpreting (and for some reason a lot of people do seem to find it a fascinating party trick) I modestly explain that it’s nothing more than a sort of mental gymnastics. But imagine, if you will, the somersaults (nay the triple saltos) that my brain performed when, having mugged up on an extensive list of appropriate building terminology, I was translating the architect William Alsop and he unexpectedly announced that he found a detail on one of his buildings reminiscent of a foreskin.

PANIC. Lexical networks are instantly fleshed out. At least I know what it looks like, now if I could just find the word. Brain helpfully sends images ... just in time I tell it to put the videos on hold. Paraphrases flood in, unfortunately mixed in with dredged-up jokes (What’s the biggest drawback in the jungle? An elephant’s foreskin. Boom, boom.). ….. I never did quite put my finger on the word prépuce. But, believe me, I’ll be ready for it next time.

Six

Z is truly thrilled to be six today. He sang a little song to himself as we took Grandma to the airport this morning. It went like this

J'ai six ans, j'ai six ans, j'ai six ans, j'ai six ans....

So now it's time to say goodbye to the babyish farmyard pictures I decorated his bedroom cupboards with before he was even born, and it's hello garish football posters, Pokemon cards in every possible pocket and a growing collection of Star Wars tat littering the floor.

If the coming years go past as quickly as the first six, we'll soon be buying him a cap and a pipe.

Back from the Bardenas

If you get in the car and drive due south of Bordeaux for four hours, you arrive in an area of Spain that is so utterly otherworldly that, well only expressions like utterly otherworldly will do. In no time at all you can be walking along drovers' trails through putty-coloured landscapes that are irresistibly reminiscent of the Far West. You can picnic under a blazing sun, sense that someone is watching you, look skywards and spy two creepy vultures on a crag openly sizing up your children. You can kick up dust from the crazy-paving patterns of cracked earth and rub pungent rosemary from the scrub between your hands. You can wonder at the unsettling quietness of the pueblos with their empty streets and houses all squares and rectangles with blank facades.
Later, you can wander up and down the steep streets of Ujué, drinking in the crystalline air and the views across miles and miles of scrubby hills dotted with elegant white wind farms. You might marvel at how so many people manage to survive in such a barren landscape, not to mention a distinct lack of grocery stores. And when you do push open the jangling door of a well-hidden alimentaciòn, all you will find in the gloomy interior are a couple of tomatoes, a few faded packets of dry goods, and massive jars of the local honey. It's a relief then that in the evening you can roll back to the Txapi-Txuri for a wholesome Navarrais dinner and a bottle of the local vino tinto.

(And after all that, you might spend the four-hour drive home mentally composing a blog post with far too many adjectives and adverbs)