Footwear

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Name that girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

This 'n that

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

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

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

Six Word Memoir

Ms.Mac has tagged me for the following meme.

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

Here is my six word memoir.

From places North, vers le Sud.

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

What lovely plump legs you have.

37%

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

7 Deadly Boring Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halo

How evil are you?

On the Theme of the Theme Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jetlagged

Disney Mosaic, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

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

Read all about it

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

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

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

Story of my Life

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

Epaminondas

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

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

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

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

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

Inadequate

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Slim

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

A Week's Worth of Twittering

I didn't really see the point of Twitter until recently - now I see that it's all about spontaneous haivering. When I feel the urge to blurt something out or ask a silly question, I hit Twitter. Better out than in, as they say.

I'm also thinking that this Kwout button I've just added to Firefox could be really useful for instant content creation: prepare for multiple screenshots.

Twitter / lezzles via kwout

Road revenge

When another driver does something really dangerous and ill-mannered on the road, like cutting in millimetres in front of you or overtaking on a pedestrain crossing, do you spend the next half hour dreaming up methods of delivering comeuppance? I do.

My own preferred method would involve no road rage but simply getting out at the next red traffic light, calmly tapping on the window of the car and telling the culprit that I am the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter gifted will infallible predictive powers and that I am very sorry to have to inform him that I have just seen him die a horrible death. It's petty, I know, and needless to say I would never do it but just imagining the scene is catharsis enough.

Fictional characters are more foolhardy and I suspect that novelists sublimate their own revenge fantasies through their characters. Remember the Ann Tyler character who got her own back on a hapless old man who had committed some highway misdemeanour by later speeding past him and pointing wildly at his tyre just to cause him the inconvenience of stopping and investigating? The ploy backfired though, I can't remember exactly how, and the character ended up having to run the man home to his family.

A character in a short story by William Boyd that I read yesterday delivered the following line to a man who had stolen his newspaper, "Next time you have a piece of bad luck, think of me. Because I will be thinking of you." I quite liked that.

Return again, fair Lesley, Return to Caledonie!

As a punishment at school I was once ordered by my English teacher, Mr Broadfoot, to learn a Burns poem of my choice by heart. Being a bit of a smarty pants, I learned this one:

O saw ye bonnie Lesley,
As she gaed o'er the border?
She's gane like Alexander,
To spread her conquests farther.

To see her is to love her,
And love but her for ever;
For Nature made her what she is,
And never made anither!

Thou art a queen, fair Lesley,
Thy subjects, we before thee;
Thou art divine, fair Lesley,
The hearts o' men adore thee.

The deil he could na scaith thee,
Or aught that wad belang thee;
He'd look into thy bonnie face,
And say - "I canna wrang thee!"

The powers aboon will tent thee,
Misfortune sha'na steer thee;
Thou'rt like themsel sae lovely,
That ill they'll ne'er let near thee.

Return again, fair Lesley,
Return to Caledonie!
That we may brag we hae a lass
There's nane again sae bonnie.

I can still recite it, and indeed I frequently do — at the drop of a hat even. Just ask me.

However, the Burns poem that has been most on my mind recently is the one about the crowlin ferlie. I think of that ugly, creepin, blastit wonner every time I have to massage more of that infernal lotion into E's head .

Happy Burns Night.

Bedtime

Every night at bedtime E asks for a story and four songs. Tonight the story is Charlie and Lola's Whoops! But it Wasn't Me for the five millionth time. Half-way into the book, I discover that I have developed a very useful new ability — I can read aloud convincingly without the words actually passing the barrier of registration in my brain - this frees up lots of cognitive capacity for important thinking. While the words coming out of my mouth might be, "I have this little sister Lola, she is drone, bla, bla, drone", the words inside my head fly to much higher planes: "Are there any chocolates left in the box? Maybe I could have just one when I go back downstairs. Did I wash Z's rugby strip for tomorrow or is it lying in a mouldering, muddy heap somewhere? Must go and check. There might even be more than one chocolate left."

The songs are a bit tricker because my reading skills are much more developed than my singing skills. E has eclectic taste in bedtime music. Tonight the requests are for :
1) The Lights of Lochindaal (because it mentions her middle name, Iona)
2) Brochan Lom (Gaelic mouth music)
3) Away in a Manger (a favourite, even in mid-summer)
4) Two Little Boys (I worry that perhaps this old Rolf Harris song glorifies war, especially after googling for that link and discovering that it is (was?) Margaret Thatcher's favourite song. If E ever joins the "ranks so blue" it will be my fault)

There were no chocolates left. And that's a good thing.

Time Machine

I'm averaging about one short post here per week (usually with a glaring spelling mistake in the middle - innumerbale?!) which is pretty pathetic by any standards. So, I'm thinking that maybe stream of consciousness is the solution - free-fall mental drivel, if you like.

Today I got a spanking new iMac at work and all of a sudden the 15'' screen on my PowerBook seemed woefully cramped, but at the same time a bit chunky since I 've been consuming me some MacBook Air porn on that nice big iMac screen. Leaving the power cable for the Powerbook on my desk was undoubtedly an acte manqué - perhaps the first stage in a long goodbye. Tonight, then, finds me sans PowerBook on the same old blue bubble iMac I loved so much when I started this blog. He's almost seven-years-old now, and has been used quasi-exclusively to interact with friendly (but nevertheless weird-looking) little Adiboud'chou and his big brother Adibou of the pointy ears, by two wide-eyed children with sticky little fingers. Having caressed more pliant keyboards for two years, pressing these tacky old black keys is just such an enormous effort for my feeble fingers.
He's slow, and he doesn't know me any more - he doesn't remember my passwords or my bookmarks, he has the 2005 version of all my indispensible applications ...... but he'll do for emergency access to Scrabulous this evening, and maybe the odd twitter.

Intimidating Art

I can't think where the twelve days since we got back from Scotland have gone. But gone they have.

Apart from going back to work, playing Scrabulous, and forking out vast wads of cash to have the car repaired in a dodgy garage in a back street of one of Bordeaux's less desirable suburbs, I've been catching up with blogs mostly. I can't remember which tortuous path took me there, but I found myself of Jeannette Winterson's blog and was seized? shaken? gripped? by a tiny image of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. It is one of those paintings that I thought I knew but had never actually set eyes on. I was a complete Origine-du-Monde virgin, and seeing it for the first time unexpectedly and with no preparation was really quite unsettling. By strange coincidence (for they are always strange, never banal n'est-ce-pas?) that very evening I was reading Julian Barnes' Something to Declare and happened upon a whole section on Courbet. I can only echo his appreciation of lush delicacy of the painting and the intimidating nature of the result, as well as its potency even after years of twentieth-century porn and erotica.

The Barnes book is also good, at least the first third is. The rest of the book turned out to be about the author of Madame Bovary and by the time I got to the end I found myself agreeing with the dyspeptic Kingsley Amis and his anti-endorsement reproduced on the back cover:

"I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert".

Happy New Year and all that

I come from a country where the passing from one year to another is acknowledged with no more than a cheery, throwaway "Happy New Year" on seeing friends and family. It came as something of a shock to discover that in France people feel their new year's wishes are only sincere if they grip me by the shoulders or clench my hand in theirs, stare deep into my panicky eyes and launch into a long and detailed list of the innumerbale positive things — financial, medical, personal, professional, psychological, mechanical etc. etc. — that they wish for me in the coming year. It's all deeply embarrassing, especially my feeble two-word reciprocation: bonne année.
Anyway, consider yourselves gripped by the shoulders. Have a very happy 2008.

Heading North

We're off to the land of smoked salmon. I wish you all a very happy Christmas.

Wordless Wednesday

2007: a photo for every month.

Renault, no, no

I have so far resisted regaling you with the tales of car-related woe that have occupied the last ten days. It started, as these things always do, with a funny sound and the car chugging to a stop in the middle of a rainstorm.

Two breakdown lorries, several hefty cheques, and reiterated protestations of disbelief from a Renault mechanic later, it all came to a head yesterday with the announcement that the car needs a new engine. This is a bit of a blow, to say the least, as it only has 110000 km on the clock.

Since ten days ago I've been biking it back and forward to work, so it turns out that the old adage is true: achetez Renault, vous roulerez à vélo.

And to top it all, this evening, P. pointed out that in telephone conversations with mechanics, I'd been inadvertently talking about the engine being deculotté (having its pants pulled down) instead of déculassé. I'm past caring.

Startled

Two rather alarming things happened to me last week.

I sometimes take a shortcut through the anatomy department to get to my classroom. On Wednesday, as I strode briskly down the main corrider I glanced in an open door. An old man with white hair stared back at me - a cadaver lying on a stainless-steel dissection table. He looked rather startled himself actually.

On Thursday morning, the children and I stepped out of the front door to find that it was still quite dark. A rainstorm was brewing. Just at that moment, a black cloud loomed in towards our street at great speed, getting lower and lower and more and more menacing. It was an enormous flock of starlings.

Books what I read this Year*

The Guardian Book blog recently ran a piece about the ubiquitous end-of-the-year book lists being the result of a universal need to create inventories. Well, I too have been seized by the need and to meet it I am going to inflict on you this list of books what I read (for pleasure not work) in 2007. Or the ones I can remember at least.

It wasn't an exceptionally good reading year to be honest. The best ones are at the top of the list, the bad ones are at the bottom, the middling ones are where you'd expect them to be.

Pay heed and you — unlike Ms Mac who didn't believe me — may save precious hours that would otherwise have been squandered wading through the codswallop that is Mercy.

The Stornoway Way, Kevin McNeil (I adored this book about Hebridean angst)
L'Elegance du hérisson, Muriel Barbery (about a dumpy, thinking concierge)
In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar (haunting)
Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America, Jenny Diski (puff, puff)
On the Atlantic Edge, Kenneth White (I like anything he writes)
One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson (Stories that fit inside each other and Edinburgh)
Hunting Down Home, Jean McNeil (Brilliant novel about an unhappy childhood in Canada)
Digging to America, Anne Tyler (adoption and "expat expat" communities)
Driving Over Lemons, Chris Stewart (Ah, Andalucia)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson (he still makes me laugh out loud)
Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare (the only biography I read this year, and the third I've read of Chatwin)
Restless, William Boyd (will no doubt make a good film)
White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway (growing up in Hong Kong)
Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes (I want to be Frances Mayes or at least live in her house)
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (I liked it despite the plot)
The Girls, Lori Lansens (tour de force novel about conjoined twins)
The Abortionist's Daughter, Elisabeth Hyde (why can't I remember anything about this?)
Miss Webster and Cherif, Patricia Duncker (old English woman meets enignmatic young Arab)
Ensemble, c'est tout, Anna Gavalda (liked the book more than the feelgood film)
Cleaver, Tim Parks (going mad in the snow in Austria)
Runaway, Alice Munro (Didn't realise this was a book of short stories until I got to "Chapter 2")
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, Chris Stewart (more Andalucia)
The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society, Chris Stewart (even more Andalucia)
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris (Funny, especially the father's food hoarding)
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday (strangely old-fashioned characters and not especially funny)
The Dead Heart, Douglas Kennedy (read this in French, put me off kangaroo meat forever)
Europa, Tim Parks (English teachers go on a romp to Brussels - not his best novel)
The Box Garden, Carol Shields (the only Carol Shields I hadn't read - hasn't aged that well)
State of the Union, Douglas Kennedy (just finished this, still digesting))
The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney (elements of Brokeback Mountain in the snow)
Weekend, William McIlvanney (not his best)
Blood in the Water, Gillian Galbraith (detective novel set in Edinburgh)
Mimi's Ghost, Tim Parks (Emotionless Englishman in Italy)
My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult (more thought-provoking than I expected)
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Andrew Smith (non-fiction for astronautaholics)
Touché :A Frenchwoman's take on the English, Agnès Catherine Poirier (quite clever, but more of a collection of newpaper columns than a real book)
The Night Watch, Sarah Walters (probably quite good but not my cup of tea)
Double Fault Lionel Shriver (really boring)
A Piano In the Pyrenees, Tony Hawkes (the I-bought-a-house-in-France genre is tired)
Long Way Round, Ewan McGregor (screams TV-spin-off)
The Queen of the Big Time, Adriana Trigiani (Little House on the Prairiesque)
The Five People You meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom (really sickly sentimental)
Bordeaux Housewives, Daisy Waugh (3rd rate expat chick-lit)
Merde Actually Stephen Clarke (3rd rate expat lad-lit, will never read the prequel)
Mercy, Jodi Picoult (should come with a health warning for Scots)

*that's an obscure Ernie Wise allusion.

Show me the mess in your bag and I will tell you who you are

Princesse Ecossaise asked me to do this ages ago. I have to post a photo of my handbag and what's inside it. So, here's my bag. It's just a cheap one from H&M but I like it because it's soft and expandable with lots of little pockets.


And here are the contents.

Bag Contents, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Thinking about this meme, I remembered one of those '80s-style getting-to-know-you activities for EFL teachers (Rinvolucri?) and felt compelled to try it again in class. The other day, a new class concluded from my bag contents that:

a) I'm probably not very tech-savvy (due to the non-state-of-the art phone, cheeky buggers).
b) I have children (children's clothes shop loyalty card gave that one away).
c) I have sensitive skin (high factor sun cream).
d) I wear contact lenses (the case).
e) I was in Spain recently (tickets for the Alhambra).
f) I'm a cinephile (the cinema tickets. I didn't tell them that in fact we only drag ourselves to the cinema on average four or five times a year).

If you really want to know what the rest of that mess is, click on the photo and you will be beamed to a Flickr page with notes.

So what's in your bags Teuchter, Fraise, Vivi, Mausi and Sarah?

...or perish

Having a research article published is a laborious process. First of all you sweat blood writing the thing and sometimes sweat real sweat presenting it at a conference. Then you submit it to a reputable publication. And then you wait and wait and wait, usually a couple of months. Then the editor sends you the reviewers' comments. The more reviewers there are, the more impossible it becomes to meet their contradictory requests. One may want you to flesh out the theoretical section, another to reduce it, and another wants you to add a whole new section on a different version of the theory that has taken his fancy.

You don't believe me do you? Here are three little snippets to give you a tiny flavour of some conflicting feedback I received this week. Spot the odd one out.

Reviewer #1: This is a well-written and interesting paper that tantalizes and leaves one wanting more.

Reviewer #2 I did find the manuscript to be extremely well written and engaging and the premise logically crafted.

Reviewer #3 The piece is not particularly well written

Aaaaaaaaargghhhhhhhh.

Glug

Five things about me, alcohol and bars.

When I was still at school, I used to go a lot of birthday parties at the Mexican Bar in Roslin (of Da Vinci Code fame). There was absolutely nothing Mexican about it. At that time my drink of choice was Martini and lemonade, or sometimes lager and blackcurrant. I can still taste the cloying sweetness that would build up in my mouth over the evening.

I was sick into a wastepaper basket in a friend's bedroom after one of those parties.

The only alcoholic drink I would ever refuse is a French apéritif called Suze. It is bitter and revolting.

A couple of weeks ago in Spain, we discovered the joys of vino de verano (summer wine). We did that "we'll have a jug of what those authentic looking Spanish people at the next table are having" thing in a restaurant and discovered that "summer wine" is much more refreshing than sangria.

The only alcoholic drink I have ever been unable to finish was one of those massive margaritas they serve you in the USA. We were in Durango, Colorado and it came in a glass the size of a punch bowl with two straws - more like an oversize sorbet than liquid alcohol. The best margarita I have ever had was served in New Mexico in a village that sold "holy chili" because the dirt in the church had magical properties. (America is a country of great contrasts, I tell you).

P and I once spent a long weekend in Istanbul. It was freezing cold and we repaired to the bar of the Pera Palace Hotel earlier and earlier every evening. We wallowed in the opulent, threadbare furnishings and warmed our insides with technicolour cocktails.

I borrowed this meme from Yogamum and I'm tagging you all. Yes, all of you.

Consider Yourselves Genii

The disappearing car

It's been pouring with rain here for two days. Yesterday, I took the children to school in the car for the first time in months. On the way out of the nursery school, I got involved in a chat with two other mothers who work at the university about the current student sit-in; which buildings are blockaded; how long the strike might last, bla bla bla. Then I came home for my customary second cup of coffee.

I got ready my class which (unfortunately) was taking place in an unaffected building, and left the house at 10H30 leaving plenty of time to get to the campus. Which is just as well because when I got out onto the street I discovered that the car had disappeared.

It took me a couple of minutes to realise that through sheer force of habit I had walked home, leaving the car parked on the pavement outside the school for two hours.

Unalike in that respect

My Mum came over for a short stay this week. While she was here, I read her out a bit of an article by Katharine Whitehorn on being a "domestic slut." It had originally been published in the Observer in 1963.

Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become,relatively, the cleaner thing? How many things are there, at this moment, in the wrong room – cups in the study, boots in the kitchen – and how many on the floor of the wrong room?

She also asks if you could confidently strip down to presentable underwear in a changing room at short notice, and argues that a slut isn't something you become, it's something you are born to.

I thought it was hilarious. My Mum looked at me in bewildered incomprehension.

The Andalucia Slideshow

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Postcard from Salobreña #3

1. Tapas #2, 2. Tapas #1
We're going to miss the tapas they bring you with every drink here in Salobreña. Our favourites are the ones above from a chiringuito (beach bar) called Las Flores - something different every evening, but always perfect and savoured as we watch the sun set over the Mediterranean. Tomorrow, it's back to auld claes and porridge.

Postcard from Salobreña #2

The road east from Almuneçar crosses the Rio Verde and slowly makes its way upwards past slopes dotted with almond and chirimoya (or custard apple) trees until, 13 km later, a spectacular vista opens up to reveal Salobreña, a white town tumbling down a hill topped by the shell of its Moorish castle and surrounded by fields of sugar-cane. (The Rough Guide to Andalucia)

What's not to like? (Although we haven't quite figured out how to eat the chirimoyas yet.)

Postcard from the Alhambra, Granada

Did you know that Granada means pomegranate?

Postcard from Salobrena #1

Unfortunately, we didn't get to taste it.

Disjointed

So I should really be packing I suppose because I have a class tomorrow evening until 6.30 pm. and we have to get up at 4H00 the next morning if we're going to catch our plane in San Sebastian at 8H40. This is the cheapest way I could find of getting from here to Andalucia without spending 14 hours in a car. So if it all goes smoothly we should be in Granada before midday on Saturday. It looks as if the weather down there is pretty good; a lot warmer than here anyway, but just in case and since I don't like my skin to touch anything cooler than bathwater, we've taken a villa with a HEATED SWIMMING POOL!

Photos I might have taken this week if I hadn't forgotten my camera: the wonderful stained glass windows in the old chapel I was working in for a conference at in the university on Tuesday. This building is a ten-minute walk from my house and I had never been inside. The conference was in honour of Linnaeus - it's his 300th birthday. The following day I went to the inauguration of "L'Esplanade Linné" in the Botanic Gardens on the other side of the river. Had I had my camera, I would have been able to show you photos of the wonderful bust Lucie Geffré sculpted of the bewigged Swede.

In other news, swivel your eyes round to the right and you'll see that I've added a couple of things to the sidebar. A twitter box, so that you can share in my every thought as it happens and a box of interesting stuff which is really just anything that I come across in Google Reader and think others might like too.

And here's Z's latest rugby picture (we have rooms full of these). It depicts the haka before the match he enjoyed best during the Rugby World Cup. Click on the image to make it bigger, he put a lot of work into the All-Black detail.

Desktop Freeview Meme

Ms Mac has tagged me for a meme that involves me showing you my desktop as it is right this very minute. Lucky then, that I had just cleaned mine up a bit in preparation for projection onto a big screen in front of lots of sharp-eyed students. The wallpaper is a random picture from the Macintosh "plants" set, the image changes every five minutes. At one time, I had my own photographs as wallpaper, but I found that distracting. The files on the desktop are mostly work-related. One of them should be entitled "online discourse" but I see that I have mangled that so that it has become "online disocurse" which sort of says it all. Some of them are things that P. must have downloaded perhaps inadvertently: a "fiche de lecture" for detective novels, two catalogues of sundry items for doors windows and garages (looking for a wide strip of rubber to place over the entrance to our garage under the door — a thing that seems to be impossible to buy). The "Scott" dossier contains files for my last conference presentation, the "Stevenson" dossier is a collection of files for a possible conference presentation in June in Italy. Image 1 is an aborted picture of my screen which I took without having first closed a couple of windows, duh. The dossier enigmatically and unimaginatively called "stuff" contains dozens of torrent files for Grey's Anatomy (crappier and crappier), House (still brilliant), Prison Break (whose head was that in the box?), Ugly Betty (still funny) and Weeds (jury's out). The file in the bottom right hand corner called monster-initial-namer contains this:
So now you know all about my dirty desktop secrets. If you want to see some other desktops head over to

• iRonnie - I Set No Corner
• Thess - Thesserie
• Rebecca - Skippy Heart
• Knoizki - A Dialogue With K
• Beng - Kauderwelch
• Tina - My Good Finds
• Rachel - Heart of Rachel
• Alice - Hello, My Name Is Alice
• Julia - Julia's Books Corner!
• Darla - Nichtszusagen
• Marg - Reading Adventures
• Holly - What Were you Expecting?
• Ames - Thrifty Reader
• Dev - Good Reads
• Rosie - Nobody asked me...
• Gabrielle - Diary of an Adult Runaway
• Jo - Chez le laquet!
• Ms Mac - Ms Mac
• Lezzles - Peregrinations

Now, who could I tag? What about Spentrails, Sam, Princesse Ecossaise, and SusieJ. I'm thinking one highly efficient desktop, one desktop with a tartan background, one with pictures of hunky rugby players and one with secret files on industrial espionnage.
Oh, and I haven't been very good at copying out the exact instructions so you'll have to go back to Ms Mac for those.

Cruel Booker Breastfeeder

I see that Anne Enright has won the Booker prize. I have not read any of her novels but I have noticed her writing in the London Review of Books. I think the first of her articles to draw my attention must have been "My Milk" published in October 2000 just before I had my first baby, so I probably didn't get round to reading it until about Christmas that year. By which time the subject of the article, breastfeeding, had become an all-consuming way of life. There are lines in the article that I quite liked :

...what fun to be granted a new bodily function so late in life. As if you woke up one morning and could play the piano.

but I didn't really get the whole thing, the intellectualising of something that, for me at least, was like falling off a log. I loved breastfeeding: it wasn't painful, it wasn't a source of offense, and it certainly wasn't sexual.

More recently I read a diary column by Anne Enright on "Hating the McCanns". It is provocative and it is cruel — somebody wrote a letter to the LRB the following week saying that it made him hate Anne Enright — but it is also honest. I can't help thinking that I too have been irritated by the "wounded narcissism" and the "corporate-executive" speak that the McCanns sometimes project.

Has anyone read The Gathering?

Movement

I have been gently chastised for not blogging, so here I am jumping back into the blogging movement — that never-ending, burbling stream of drivel.

I have been reading Muriel Barbery's L'Elégance du Hérisson (see side bar) and wallowing in her beautiful prose. The novel is about movement and more specifically precise, fleeting beautiful movements.

My own movement recently has been from Bordeaux to Nantes and back again by train: movement from one city to another, from home to hotel, from family to colleagues, from frantic preparation of a conference paper to the restitution of the paper as a presentation. When I got back from Nantes late on Saturday evening, the house was full of friends glued to the frustratingly staccato movements of 30 men on a rugby pitch - no French flair fluidity there, I'm afraid.

Sunday was spent in Rions, a medieval village - watching the alarmingly rapid movement downstream of muddy water as we picnicked on the banks of the Garonne.

Then there's the planned movement south for our upcoming half-term holiday: flights to Granada are booked, now we just need a car and somewhere to sleep (suggestions?).

I'll resist the temptation to take up the discussion on bowel movements initiated by Sarah in the comments to that last post!

Digital Scan

I'm doing some research at the moment using a Google scan of a book. Luckily, this isn't a page I'm going to be quoting from! (I wonder where one gets those little-fingerless latex gloves.)
A Visit to Paris in 1814: Being a Review of the Moral, Political ... By John Scott: "
"

Burma

I've never been to Burma, but I would like to be able to go one day. Click on the image and learn more about the campaign.

Smoke gets .... everywhere

It seems incredible now but when I first started teaching, students would regularly ask if it was all right to smoke in the classroom. It's even harder to believe that I would invariably acquiesce, just so long as they agreed to sit by an open window.

Why, when I wasn't even a smoker, did I agree to having the room filled up with acrid fumes and students concentrating more on blowing perfect smoke rings than attending to the finer points of English grammar? I can't honestly remember. Perhaps I was more scared of students then than I am now. Perhaps I secretly wanted to be a smoker but never quite managed to get past the nausea. More probably, I had some warped idea about being accommodating and respecting their freedom even when it impinged on mine and I was definitely not keen on the idea of being labelled a puritan spoilsport.

I remembered all of this as I read this passage from Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train

I didn't want to do as I was told, I didn't want to be more comfortable by conforming, giving in, as I saw it to the pressures of an anti-smoking policy that was reinforced by moral imperatives. Very childish. Yes, exactly. I also didn't want to become an ex-smoker, not if it meant that I became someone who tsked and sighed whenever I caught a whiff of smoke in the air. ... It was almost organic, my desire not to be a virtuous , self-righteous non-smoker.

I can relate to this in a non-smoking sort of way. I really organically don't want to be that sanctimonious disapprover either.

But now, as the smokers in France wail about the looming ban on smoking in bars and restaurants without ever really believing that it will come to pass (smoking is already banned in all public places but, this being France, places selling food and drinks got a reprieve until January 2008), I can't help thinking about how much more pleasant it is to go out in Scotland where the smoking ban has been a great success and there's no need to worry about having to become the intolerant tsker that I never thought I would be, as vile smoke wafts up my nose.

So much then for being a right-on understanding non-smoker then. But if only someone would invent a smokeless cigarette, I promise I would be tolerance personified.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Anger Management or Bureaucracy #2

So with all of this bookmooching, I've been getting lots of book-sized parcels arriving from around the world. Unfortunately, I've also got that pesky day job so I'm often not at home when the postman rings (no, just once).

When this happens, I get a little note telling me to go to the post office to pick my parcel up. Not the same day of course — that would be too convenient — the next day. But not if the next day is a Saturday because my agence postale is closed on Saturdays.

Last week, I found the little note on Friday so had to waituntil the Monday afternoon to pick my parcel up. But I got to the post office only to find the door closed with an unapologetic hand-written notice on it. The agency was closed for two weeks for a holiday (!), but parcels could still be picked up at the main Post Office. My blood pressure did a little war dance.

The next day, I got another of those chits and so took them both to the main post office. I queued for the usual eternity and smiled my best bonjour when it was my turn to approach the hallowed counter. I presented my two slips of paper along with a public transport card with my photograph and name on it which I'd dug out of my bag.

"What's that?" said the guy behind the counter as if I'd placed a steaming turd on his desk.
"I.D.", I said.
"No, it's not", he said.
"Yes, it is. Look it's got my name and photograph on it. Is that me or is that not me?"
"It's not a passport or a driving licence. For all I know, you found this card in the street."
"It would be a strange coincidence if I'd found a card in the street that just happened to have my photo on it!"

By this time, I was protesting in rather a loud voice, and peppering the argument with ill-advised asides such as "Vivement la privatisation!". That was stupid, I know from experience that one should never argue — it's best to feign contriteness. People started staring, but the nasty little man wouldn't budge and I left huffing and puffing without my parcels.

I went away for a couple of days after that and forgot all about the parcels. When I got back there was another chit for a third parcel on the doormat, and I thought, great, I'll be able to kill three birds with one piece of ID. Only this time the parcel had to be picked up from, wait for it, yet another post office at the other end of town.

On Saturday morning, I finally got round to going back to pick up the first two parcels. I'd looked out my passport and I was ready to be polite to the self-appointed guardian of my reading materials. He wasn't there, and the parcels were handed over without me being asked for any proof of identity whatsoever.

I haven't been to get the third parcel yet. It's just too emotionally draining.

Bureaucracy schmoorokratie

Yesterday I signed E. up for a new recreation centre. I had to take with me:

• our most recent tax returns
• proof that we live at the address we live at
• an identity photograph
• a document from social security
• an insurance document
• a family allowance document
• a certificate from our doctor
  
• E's medical records for vaccination dates
• certificates from our employers

One of these I had to forge.

Friends

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Go on, befriend me.

I want to ride my bicycle

When I was nineteen, I spent the summer working on a campsite in Carnac in Brittany. I worked for a cheapskate camping company that wouldn't buy its couriers mobylettes which was a shame because riding a mobylette was really the best thing about being a courier. One day I went to a hypermarket in Vannes and bought a bicycle. It was a lovely brick red model with a basket on the front and "Jacques Anquetil" emblazoned in ochre letters on the frame.

At the end of the summer I took the bike back with me to Edinburgh and spent my student years using it on and off to cycle up and down hills in the city. Then I came to live in France and I can't quite remember how, but the bicycle came back over too at some point. I think I neglected it a bit for a while, not because I had learned how to drive (although I had) but because Bordeaux is a compact city and I tended to walk everywhere.

Then I rediscovered the joys of sailing past cars in traffic jams and started cycling to work. But at some time in the nineties my trusty bicycle was stolen from the university garage.

I have a beautiful new bike now, but whenever I see an old one that's just the right shape and the right colour and with the same replacement lamp at the front as my old one, I still do a quick check to see if it says "Jacques Anquetil" on the frame. I'm not quite sure what I would do if it did, run after it and challenge the owner to prove that it was really theirs, as opposed to mine from 10+ years ago?

Edinburgh

While we were in Scotland over the summer, we took the children on the train up to Edinburgh and spent the day sightseeing. The Francoscotlets were underwhelmed but P. and I had a great time, although it did feel a bit strange being a mere tourist in a city I once knew intimately.

The city also kept popping up in things I was reading* and watching.
First in a biography of Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare. Chatwin spent a couple of years in a flat on the Canongate in a "nasty building with a good address". It seems that he hated "the gaunt northern capital" for its strait-laced society, its weather and it's sexual climate. No doubt the antipathy was mutual.

Then I saw a BBC4 documentary called "Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh" during which I discovered that although you can't actually see the South Bridge because building were built backing onto both sides, it is still actually there and you can even visit the vaults underneath. Whole families used to live in this warren of underground rooms (which more or less brings us back to my last post). In fact, Edinburgh is such a many layered, many faceted city that it almost seems to have been built with novels about hidden depths in mind.

Kate Atkinson's "One Good Turn" also turned out to be set in Edinburgh. One of the less sympathetic characters — a festival performer — declares that it's a great city "fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no libido". A discussion ensues about which cities do have a libido - Rio de Janiero, Marseille... But the main character Martin concludes that "it was true that Edinburgh didn't have a libido, but would you want to live in a city that did?"

Well, would you?

* I've changed the LibraryThing widget in the sidebar and now it shows the books I've added recently, so you can see what I'm reading now rather than what I might — or might not — have been reading last year or when I was 18.

Spare rooms

Last week SusieJ wrote about a dream in which she showed her mother around her lake house and discovered that it had nine floors. I left a comment saying that I often used to have dreams about opening a door in our last (small) house and discovering that there were several more rooms that we had simply forgotten about. The dream would always end with a wonderful feeling of relief and a resolution to make more use of the masses of space I had rediscovered.
Now, we live in house with rooms in the attic that we really don't ever use and so I have moved on to dreams about extra apartments in town that we'd forgotten we had - "you know, we really should rent out that penthouse flat we have lying empty in the city centre, the extra income might come in handy."
Then yesterday, I read this post about a man in Turkey who broke through a wall at the back of a house and discovered "a room that he'd never seen,

which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people

Bldgblog points out, with a link to a previous post, that this might be the ultimate undiscovered room fantasy. I knew that some of my friends have had my undiscovered room dream too, (do you?) but when I followed the link and read all of the comments, I discovered (with some dismay, because nobody likes to discover that their fantasy world is, well, common) that it is a well-known phenomenon. One of the comments even had a link to this cartoon:

Slow Wave Live, originally uploaded by ranjit.

But as one of the other commenters sort of says, maybe the internet version of the fantasy is to discover a new site with links that lead to untold reserves of new pages and blogs and and surfing delight. Only to come back and discover that it has all gone 404.

How to go from two cameras to no cameras

Customer service is not something that France is famous for, so when my camera went wonky at the beginning of the summer, although it was still under guarantee, my heart did that sinking feeling thing.

[This is really boring so feel free to skip over this whole sorry story of expensive telephone calls to the incompetent, evasive CDiscount after-sales staff based in Morocco, multiple e-mails, a registered letter, and a registered parcel. This painful process was only relieved by their refusal to give straight answers regularly descending into kafkaesque farce:

"I'll open a file in your name and pass it on to the appropriate department"
"Which department is that?".
"The appropriate one."

All of this effort gave rise to four identical responses advising me to get in touch with Panasonic (when getting in touch with Panasonic was of course the first thing I'd done) all signed by different people. My camera is still at the repairers in Lyon who are waiting for the go-ahead from CDiscount to start repairing it (cost 390€, so more than the camera is worth) because it turns out that the first year of the guarantee is covered by the manufacturer of the camera but the second is covered by the company that sells it to you. Of course that company does everything it possibly can to put you off trying to make that happen. After eight weeks, I finally made a mini breakthrough yesterday - they actually divulged the telephone number of their "Guarantees Department". Wow. I really feel that I am getting somewhere now.]

Luckily, we had an older compact camera and we've been using that since June. This weekend we went to the beach. (On the way there, we passed an gigantic warehouse being built by the side of the motorway. On the side, in massive letters we read CDiscount.) As we trekked through the forest to get to the beach, P. carried a basket and in that basket was a bag and in that bag was the replacement camera. At one point he said, "Oh look, the bag is open, I hope nothing has fallen out."

So now we have, wait a minute let me count, oh yes, that's right, zero cameras.

Any suggestion for a cheap compact (around 100€) that we might buy to tide us over until CDiscount coughs up ....... so probably for another couple of years.

Looking on the bright side

• We spent no sleepless nights tossing and turning in the heat.
• We didn't have to get the fans down from the attic.
• Little time was wasted carrying food and dishes to and from the garden.
• The parasol will see another year.
• No saliva was wasted on having to repeat "Put your hat back on" ad nauseum.
• I have an unopened bottle of Factor 50.
• We didn't have to close the shutters at 8.30 a.m. every day.
• I experienced mercifully few "Do my arms look flabby in this?" dilemmas.
• Only half of the grass in the garden turned yellow.
• This lack of tan will never fade.
  

It's actually very hot and sunny today, as it was yesterday, but it can't last, mark my words.....

Black Gold

In a shady corner of a truffière just outside a little-known village in the Dordogne, a black truffle is slowly maturing under the earth. The truffière itself is well-concealed behind a walnut grove and the truffle's position is marked by a mysterious arrangement of pebbles and sticks, its top just visible under a light dusting of earth. It won't be ready until some time in the autumn.
This is a vey big secret and I must not tell anybody. Shhhhh.

Drippy Dordogne

Is there anything more dispiriting when you're on holiday than relentless rain pounding on the window for days on end ? Dampness invests the whole house with the smell of wet dogs and half-dried clothes. Through another downpour, we gaze longingly at the garden furniture, massive raindrops stotting off the white plastic. The lime tree which is usually a great provider of just the right amount of dappled shade becomes a bedraggled umbrella and its innumerous hues of green turn to uniform kahki. The merguez that were meant to be cooked and eaten outdoors just aren't the same when consumed straight from the frying pan in the fugg of a cold kitchen. Meanwhile, the children start to show signs of cabin fever. Luxurious long-lies turn into simple reluctance to get out of bed to face another day of half-hearted card games.
After one more dismal weather forecast, we decide to come home early.

Scotland this Summer

Just dropping in to water the garden and do some washing on our way back from Scotland and on to the Dordogne. The highlights of the holiday so far:

Best Gardens: Threave near Castle Douglas.

Best Building: Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh.

Best Exhibition: "Consider the Lilies" in Kirkcudbright. (We didn't make it to the Picasso or Andy Warhol in Edinburgh.)

Best find: Kilos and kilos of chanterelle mushrooms.

Best Walk: Rockcliffe to Kippford.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Best Book: Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn

Best sporting event: Putting on the green in Moffat

Most unusual architecture: Samyi Ling Buddhist Temple at Eskdalemuir

Most misleading sign: "Families Welcome" outside a pub. This actually meant that the seedy bar was full of teenage mothers surrounded pushchairs.

Worst meal: Maxie's Bistro in Edinburgh. Dire.

Worst experience on coming home: having lost the ticket for the car park, closely followed by "popping" on the scales.

Best thing in the pile of post: My mini moo stickers. What should I do with them?