Is that you out there?

A few ideas have fleetingly tickled my blogging muscle over the past few days, and then evaporated. Today I saw the ophthalmologist and he told me that no, I was not a good candidate for surgery because visually it's downhill all the way from now on.
He prescribed variable lenses - granny glasses. He also said that I should wear my specs as much as possible and reserve my lenses for when I want to look smart (I think "pour quand vous sortez danser" was his exact phrase).
Also, did you know that there have been no scientific studies into the long term effects of wearing soft contact lenses 16 hours a day for twenty years? I am a guinea pig.
Anyway, I briefly thought about turning those little gems into a far-reaching meditation on the niggling inevitability of the march of time. But I'm feeling a bit too decrepit tonight.

"If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough"

I've been reading Freakonomics and am fascinated by the chapter on cheating among Chicago schoolteachers who, it seems, have had a tendency in the past to correct their pupils wrong answers before sending their tests in to the exam board. The idea of teacher fraud was new to me, but I'm familiar with that of rampant student cheating.

In fact, anyone who has spent any time in a French university knows that students here generally* have a completely different attitude to cheating in exams to anything one might have come across at one's alma mater. Over the years, I've had many discussions about this with my students and it seems impossible to communicate satisfactorily to them the stigma associated with cheating in universities in the English-speaking world. They laugh and argue that cheating is simply a game played out knowingly between examinee and examiner; that passing notes during an exam is a sign of "student solidarity"; that cribs (antisèches) are legitimate reference tools; and that only losers don't at least try to cheat. It makes exam invigilation a tiresome game of cat and mouse.

So we all agree that cheating is bad and certainly not at all comparable to telling tiny fibs through omission to the telephone people in order to secure a new phone. Good, I'm glad we got that straight.

*I'm not suggesting, of course, that every single student in France cheats all of the time. Many students are scrupulously honest.

Pride comes before having to plunge your hand down the toilet

We hadn't been together for very long but he had already become an important part of my life. In fact I depended on him for a lot of things, perhaps too many things. He knew so much, was open to the world and kept me informed of all the latest news, encouraged me to keep in touch with my friends and family, played me beautiful music, kept me constant entertaining company. It got to be that I just couldn't get through the day without consulting him at regular intervals. At night, he was a comforting sleek black presence as he slept beside me. I had shown him off to all of my friends and colleagues and bored my on-line friends silly with talk of his beauty and performance. And then suddenly I felt him slipping away............. slipping away down the toilet as he dropped out of my pocket and into the yellow water.
Bye bye darling iPhone. It was lovely knowing you — and if you want to miraculously come back to life, I'll be here waiting for you.

To Market

Recently, whilst engaged in some pleasant pursuit my enjoyment has sometimes been curtailed by the sudden thought that this activity is almost certainly the subject of a post on Stuff White People Like. As you probably know the title of that blog is misleading - it's not so much about what white people per se like, but about what reasonably well-educated, middle class, middle-aged people who like to think of themselves as socially aware (ie. me) think they should like. In some ways the title of the French equivalent is better - it's called Trucs de Bobo (a bobo being a bourgeois bohemian).

Viz my trip with the children yesterday morning to the market at Saint Michel. There are several markets in and around Bordeaux during the week, notably a rather contrived one on the quayside on a Sunday morning which attracts well-heeled city-dwellers out with their baskets and their poodles for a little local colour. (Rumour has it that the mayor Alain Juppé often has his driver drop him off just round the corner where he unloads his bike from the boot then cycles around the market stopping to shake the occasional hand and make some token purchase.) The market at Saint Michel is nothing like that - it's big and authentic and full of pungent smells and shouting and people pushing and shoving.

Yesterday we made our way through crowds of cash-strapped people doing their weekly fruit and veg shop; women buying vast quantities of pastries in preparation for feasts at sundown (it's Ramadam remember), past tables piled high with mint and coriander and barbary figs, others with many bolts of either very sparkly or very dowdy material; stalls that specialise in Spanish cheeses, hams and chorizo; young men in robes collecting money to build a new mosque; Halal butchers and African spice merchants.

It's all hugely enjoyable and dépaysant, a bit like a trip across the Mediterranean but only a stone's throw from home, and the produce is cheap to boot. Just the sort of thing we bobos go mad for.

But if there's one thing we bobos know how to do well, it's decorticate our own smug little predilections and laugh at them, n'est-ce pas?

Is this thing on?

Shopping for a dictionary at our local bookshop and wondering if this e-mail malarkey actually works. White people like to shop locally of course - more on that later.

I think I can feel a pulse!

Maybe it's time to resuscitate this blog - two posts in three months is a little shabby.

Where on earth did all that time go? I've been looking back at my twitters for those three months to refresh my memory and it seems that:
I took the children on a camping trip to Lacanau and discovered that I the ground is a hard place when you sleep on it.
I did a few interpreting jobs - one of them in a beautiful château in Sauternes, another in a recycling plant, one with Palestinians and Israelis, one with psychomocologists.
I went to Scotland twice - first to take Z for his first solo stay at Grandma's then for a two-week holiday with the rest of the family.
I spent two rainy weeks in the Dordogne.
I volunteered to create two web sites (before realising that I didn't know how to do that so resorted to making two blogs but cunningly disguised them as web sites).
I lusted and obsessed over an iPhone and finally got one in August.
And I took a few photos.

17H10 is multitask time

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


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

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

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

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

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

The Kindness of Strangers

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

Myair Myarse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ouf

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

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

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

Crinan

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

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

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

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

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

That is all.

Footwear

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Name that girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

This 'n that

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

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

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

Six Word Memoir

Ms.Mac has tagged me for the following meme.

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

Here is my six word memoir.

From places North, vers le Sud.

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

What lovely plump legs you have.

37%

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

7 Deadly Boring Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halo

How evil are you?

On the Theme of the Theme Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jetlagged

Disney Mosaic, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

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

Read all about it

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

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

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

Story of my Life

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

Epaminondas

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

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

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

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

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

Inadequate

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Slim

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

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.