Port

We had a walk round Bordeaux's port de plaisance this afternoon. I love old rusty, dilapidated boats and cars and there are certainly plenty of those in the port. There are none of the sleek yachts of Cannes here, just a motley mixture of sorry-looking barges and various other unseaworthy vessels.

In other news, I voted in the European elections this afternoon. I met our next-door neighbour on the way there. He's about eighty, I think. He started off by telling me not to vote for Danny le Rouge because he "put France in the shit" in 1968. The conversation then moved on to the sudden dip in the temperature and he told me about how May used to be the best month for weather in Bordeaux. It's the Virgin Mary's month and people would go out until late in the evening to, well I'm not quite sure what they were doing but something to do with Mary. "There are no more seasons", he concluded. And guess what - this is all due to motorways. Yes, apparently motorways aspirate all the warm air and create cold fronts. Who would have thought?

Some uncommonly common solecisms

I've been perusing the Economist's list of common solecisms and although it greatly pains me to admit this, because I think I'm actually quite good atta de Inglish, I have in fact learned quite a lot. Please don't mock if you picked these things up in kindergarden or if you have ever noticed me using any of them .... repeatedly.

For example, I had no idea that there was a difference between compared to and compared with. Did you?

Compare: A is compared with B when you draw attention to the difference. A is compared to B only when you want to stress their similarity. ( “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”)

It had never occured to me either that there was anything wrong with the expression softly spoken, or the term homosexuals and lesbians. Nor was I aware of the difference between to forgo and to forego (I think I may have been guilty of that crime against the English language here).

Others are more widely known eg. the distinction between less and fewer. Although native English speakers so frequently use less instead of fewer that I no longer correct students for if they get it wrong. There are more important things in life; there are more important things to be taught in an English course.

Certain of these unsayables seem to have been included just to refute American usage. It's true that the American "to protest the plans" has always sounded a little strange to me:

Protest. By all means protest your innocence, or your intention to write good English, if you are making a declaration. But if you are making a complaint or objection, you must protest at or against it.

Others can only have been included to be deliberately provocative :

Scotch: to scotch means to disable, not to destroy. (“We have scotched the snake, not killed it.”) The people may also be Scotch, Scots or Scottish; choose as you like. Scot-free means free from payment of a fine (or punishment), not free from Scotsmen.

I mean, come on: the people may bloody not be called Scotch. Indeed, we ra people refuse to be called Scotch.

I suspect that if any of the sticklers at the Economist who compiled this list were to take a quiz on Facebook they would have an apopletic fit.

Proust Questions

I did this way back in 2005 and used it with my students at that time. I used it again today with a group of teachers and revisited my own answers:

What is your most marked characteristic?
I'm almost always willing to give the benfit of the doubt
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Two beautiful children
When and where were you happiest?
I remember a fleeting moment of complete happiness on a beach in Portugal when I was 21
What is your greatest regret?
I don't think I believe in regrets.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A life with no deadlines
What is your most treasured possession?
My iPhone
Where would you like to live?
Santa Fe
What is your greatest fear?
Death of a child
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Lack of patience
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Cruelty
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Self denial
What is your greatest extravagance?
My computer
What is your favorite journey?
A hike in the Himalayas
What is it that you most dislike?
Rats
What is the quality you most like in a man?
Compassion
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Compassion
What do you most value in your friends?
a well-developed sense of humour
If you were to come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
a sparrow
If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
a human being
How would you like to die?
Well prepared, in my sleep, age 110.

In the Pink

In the Pink, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Anne at Papilles et Pupilles asked for a pink May mosaic. I took these pictures on 1st June - I hope they still qualify.

(The indiviual photos are in my Flickr photostream. If you want to do something similarly trippy, try Picnik's hypnotic tool in the sandbox)

Snippings

Yesterday, I visited the Archives Départmentales. The director had set out a selection of their most precious treasures for us to look at and and I got to pore over this map dating from 1485. It's actualy a portulan: an early vellum sea chart. This is how a Portuguese navigator saw the world at that time (Ireland is massively overproportioned and the rest of Europe is somewhat stunted).

There's something wonderful about being up close to something that old. The most moving exhibit, however, was a thick nineteenth-century register listing all of the babies abandoned at one of the hospitals in Bordeaux. Each baby is described in detail and a little piece of the cloth from the clothes s/he was wearing accompanies the description. Because the register has remained closed for so many years, the colours of the clipped cloth are still bright. Among the hundreds of entries, I noticed a square of shiny green silk, some creamy wool, a coiled piece of gold thread and a length of pink ribbon. All heart rendingly singular.

I wonder what those mothers would have thought as they dressed their babies for the first / last time had they known that hundreds of years later, long after the babies themselves had grown up and died, other women would finger the remnants of those very clothes and wonder what had pushed them to leave their babies on the hospital doorstep.

From Heffalump to Heroine

I promised you snippets and here's one from Andrew O'Hagan in the LRB. I know that Susan Boyle is sooooo last month already, but O'Hagan sums the phenomenon up quite nicely here. (Incidentally Susan Boyle is about the same age as me and she's also from Scotland but that's where the resemblance ends because although she will probably get a good makeover, I'll never ever be able to sing.)

YouTube can make stars out of nobody: it can make them cheap and can make them without permission. The morning after Boyle appeared on Britain’s Got Talent, three people sent me the link to her performance on YouTube. This was happening all over the world. Her success is not difficult to understand: we love to imagine that talent is hidden, and it lives among our deepest fantasies that the least prepossessing, the least styled, the most innocent among us may carry the power to amaze the world. That notion lies at the sentimental heart of showbusiness. Turning defeat to triumph, jeers to cheers, is a piece of schmaltz fans of transformation find irresistible, and most people with an interest in the wiles of human talent are connoisseurs of transformation. Susan Boyle’s journey from heffalump to heroine was instantaneous: it came not merely via her good singing voice, but via the audience’s strong sense of its unlikelihood. The powerful voice came like the uplifting last paragraph of an old-fashioned novel. If you surprise an audience by giving them something they really want they will love you for ever. They will also cry, which is why YouTube shows nearly a quarter of a million lachrymose messages under the footage of Boyle’s triumph.

Read the rest of the article here.

Words, words, words

I'm presenting a paper at a conference tomorrow. Here's what I'm going to say:


Any questions? No? Great. Let's just go straight to the cocktails then.

Seven Spring Melodies

Jonathan tagged me for this Seven Spring melodies meme and I am happy to oblige. But seriously, do people really change what they listen to depending on the season? I don't think I do.

Here's what I've been listening to recently. The first two are easy because the children have been learning them at school and hum them around the house.

• Z. has been learning the words to Claude Nougaro's Armstrong, je ne suis pas noir .....
• E. likes Boby Lapointe's La Maman des Poissons which is all about how kind the mummy fish is to her little ones and ends with the excellent line "et moi je l'aime bien avec du citron"!
• Every time I turn the radio on, I can guarantee that Liberta by Pep's (I'm afraid the apostrophe is part of the name) will come on within about two minutes. It's starting to get on my nerves a bit but it's definitely one of the melodies I'll associate with this spring.
• I've had another album in my earbuds at various points over the past few weeks, the Mauritanian Daby Touré's Stereo Spirit. I associate it with last summer, so it's probably wishful thinking given that it's been peeing it down for the past week.
• My bruv and his family gave me the Jackie Album (Vol 2) for my birthday a few weeks ago. You probably had to be swoony and pre-pubescent in 1970s Britain to really appreciate this CD. It's difficult to choose a favourite track but I'm going to plump for Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)
• ... and Rod Stewart's Maggie May ( although it's obviously not late September and I'm probably a lot older now than the eponymous older woman - the morning sun certainly really shows my age)
  
• And last but not least, Devendra Banhart's Cristobal. It's two years old but it still sounds fresh and .... well springlike I suppose.

I'm tagging you all, yes all seven of you. Happy May 1st!

Blue

There was a lot of blue - blue in the pool and the sea, the sky, the taverna chairs. And some red too - the deep red of springtime poppies. And a bit of black - mostly on the backs of old Greek women preparing for Orthodox Easter.

There was the smell of orange blossom and cistus in the air. The taste of ouzo every evening, sometimes competing with garlicky tatziki or taramasalta.

There were blue glass eye charms too - and we've come back with a few adorning bracelets and key rings.

Because the only downside of always going on the cheapest possible late deal holiday is that you only have a couple of days to look forward to discovering your destination - the Island of Evia in Greece in this case — so you have to make up for that by making the afterglow last for as long as possible.

Yiamas!

Cornaigmore

TourScotland uploaded this photograph to Twitpic today. It's Cornaigmore school on the Isle of Tiree - my very first school. I started Primary 1 here in 1967 and didn't leave until we went back to the mainland four and a half years later.

Just looking at this photograph is bringing back memories of the headmaster Mr McDougal standing outside that lean-to with a great big whistle in his mouth; big boys with tackety boots streaming through the hallway; wet coats, cremola foam and the occasional sheep in the cloakroom; and the perfume of my very first teacher Miss Dodds. The area at the front of the school is the machair which stretches all the way down to the beach - a great place for a game of rounders in the summer.

The school seems to have changed a bit since then.

(Thanks Sandy)

Weekend en Périgord

Back from a great weekend at the Hameau du Sentier des Sources in Sarlat. Good friends, good food, good wine, a little sun, a happy band of children and a clutch of photos to remind us of it all. (Oh, and gariguette strawberries from the market this early in the season to boot.)

Poetry snippet

While looking for something completely different today, I came across this translation by Alastair Reid of a poem by the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco.

High treason

I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history
mountains
(and three or four rivers).

Reid, who is Scottish, says that this so coincided with a poem he might have written himself that in translating it, he felt as if he was writing the original. Although I cannot say the same thing, in modestly copying and pasting his translation, I feel that I am at least endorsing the sentiment.

Blossom

I seem to be a little obsessed with signs of spring at the moment. Don't be fooled by the blue sky in this picture taken yesterday on the campus car park - it was actually extremely cold. After a glorious few days last week, it seems that winter is trying to creep back, but it ain't welcome anymore.

Cranes

This noisy squadron of cranes flew over our house yesterday afternoon on its way north. Which means that spring is definitely on its way too.

Fête des Boeufs Gras

Bazas, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Today we spent the day in Bazas - a small town south of Bordeaux with an enormous gothic cathedral and a unique race of cattle. Every year they fatten the cattle up for five months and then they parade the best specimens through the streets of the town behind tractors to the main square where they are weighed, judged and admired.

We spent the morning ogling their enormous rumps; lunchtime eating the enormous rumps of their defunct predecessors; and the afternoon admiring men on stilts accompany their enormous rumps by now adorned with plastice flowers. Tonight they'll be bedding down in the abattoir.

Pauvres bêtes, one look in their puzzled eyes makes it all seem a bit barbaraic really. It's almost enough to make one want to give up having animals fattened and killed in one's name.

If only it didn't taste so absolutely delicious.

The Dogs

(Thanks Deborah)

Not your average Friday evening

We took in two events on Friday evening. One for the eyes and one for the ears. Actually I was hoping that the first one would be for the stomach too, but that wasn't to be.

I put on my long red, velvet jacket — only ever donned for very special occasions and then only events that take place in suitably dark places lest I should dazzle anyone — and we headed over to the submarine base, la base sous-marine. During the Second World War, when Bordeaux was occupied by the Germans, Hitler decided to build a massive concrete structure to protect his submarines. It's a hideous monster of a thing but difficult to get rid of because it has such massively huge walls and was built to withstand bombing. After many years of not knowing what to do with the site, Bordeaux has turned it into a sort of arts centre - it's filled with water and used to be a museum of pleasure boats but that wasn't much of a crowd-puller.

We'd received an invitation to the vernissage of an exhibition of work by the American photographer Louis Stettner. The rest of Bordeaux, it turned out, had received the same invitation and they were there in their droves, crowding five-deep around the drinks tables, pushing and shoving to get the Franco-American food on offer. We managed to grab a glass of something but gave up on the food when we discovered that the exhibition space itelf was really quiet, and the photographs were wonderfully evocative of Paris and New York when we imagine everything was black & white.

From there we drove to Cenon in the suburbs and had a quick drink before heading off to the Kurt Elling show (I'm never sure what to call these things now - "concert" sounds fuddy duddy, "gig" sounds faux hip). Just in case, like me, you had never actually listened to any Kurt Elling — he's a jazz vocalist. In fact, he's a stupendously talented jazz vocalist with a voice that is like nothing you've ever heard before. And certainly not in Cenon on a rainy February evening.

I was going to say something about him being creative and his voice being "powerful" but I really don't have the vocabulary or the musical knowledge to talk about what I heard, but I know I loved it, so just go listen.

Kurt is in fact a friend of friends (so he's really our friend once removed) and we had drinks afterwards. And I'm happy to report that he's an extremely nice person as well as an awesome performer.

....and if you've been reading closely you'll have realised that on Friday night although I had plenty to drink, I had not a single thing to eat.

...but I'm not so keen on

You didn't really think I was going to leave you on that dithyrambic note, did you?

Here are some of the things about Bordeaux that I detest. I detest the creeping uniformisation of the shops in town. I detest the fact that every single corner lot is now owned by a bank or an insurance company. I detest the snobbishness. I detest the privileged cliques. I detest the general lack of funkiness. I detest the lack of green spaces. I detest the emptiness of August. I detest the prevalent bon-chic-bon-genre. I detest the halfhearted grafitti. I detest the municipal conservatism. I detest the history of slave trading. I detest the fact that people don't speak to each other on public transport. I detest the lack of a really good Indian restaurant. I detest the lifeless rectangular apartment buildings.

And most of all I detest the dog shit that lies in wait on the pavements.

I ♥ Bordeaux

Things I love about Bordeaux. I love the quais and walking by the milky water of the Garonne river. I love the luminous honey colour of the façades that line the quais. I love whooshing through the town in trams with no messy overhead cables. I love the market at Saint Michel on a Saturday morning. I love walking the entire length of the rue Sainte Catherine from the Place de la Victoire to the Cours de l'Intendance, gradually moving up the scale from cheap import shops to expensive luxury boutiques. I love the smell that wafts out of perfume shops. I love Saint Pierre when the restaurant terraces are full and people flânent past on a warm evening. I love the mascarons on the 18th century façades. I love the fact that I know shortcuts through quartiers that I used to live in. I love knowing of high places that afford a bird's eye view of the town's marmalade roof tiles. I love the sedimented associations attached to various eating and drinking places. I love the sparkling air in spring. I love the cobbled streets. I love the bookshop La Machine a Lire. I love the Chartrons and its mixture of antique shops and recently renovated loft apartments. I love the smell of fresh baguettes as the bell tinkles on the way into a good boulangerie. I love cannelés - their taste has grown on me over the years. I love knowing where to look to see a reliably beautiful wisteria in the early spring. I love the miroir d'eau and it's haziness in the summer. I like knowing that Michel de Montaigne and Mauriac and Goya and Hölderlin also liked the city. I love the massive door knockers. I love cycling the wrong way down side streets. I love the area around the Utopia cinema and the constantly changing mass of people milling around before they go to see a film. I love cafés with well-worn tables and chairs, and the ambiance in the Café Brun. I love the Entrepôts Lainé and the modern art that fills them. I love the big fairground van that makes guimauve while the fair is on the Place des Quinconces and the Big Wheel that sits behind it. I love the Monument des Girondins. I love the Capucins market during the night. I love the shared history that allows me to say that the new Zara used to be Bouchara and before that it was HMV and before that it was XL and before that Printemps. I love to think of the Chartrons when Scottish wine merchants lived there.

Bordelaise

The very nice people at Entendu à Bordeaux — Anne-Flore and François — interviewed me and the result is here.

Trying to think of half-decent answers brought home to me just how little I have mentioned Bordeaux on this blog. I'm going to try to put that right in a future post but for the moment here is some photographic evidence of the city's many attractions.

RLS

I haven't got much for you at the moment apart from the fact that Bordeaux was struck by storms and extremely high winds over the weekend — and in an unrelated but far more serious incident — our dishwasher broke down.

But rather than regale you with stories of my disrupted life, I'll tell you about a little group I created on Flickr — The Robert Louis Stevenson group. I was looking for photographs related to RLS for a paper I gave a couple of months ago and found a few on everyone's favourite photo-sharing site, Flickr. But they were scattered all over the place, some were tagged with the author's full name, some with just RLS and some with some wild misspellings such as Robert Lewis Stephenson. So I created the group, then started inviting people to contribute their photos and the pool has now grown to include 255 items. It's not a scholarly enterprise of course - the photographs are disparate to say the least. There are lots of quite ordinary images, snapshots really, of places that RLS once lived: Heriot Row in Edinburgh and Vailima in Samoa notably; scanned pages from his books; photographs of monuments to his memory; portraits and statues of his slender figure. But these photographs are often very personal - showing what it's really like to visit the house at Vailima and then slog up the hill in tropical heat to RLS's burial site or what the front door of the house in Heriot Row looks like from the open top of a tour bus. Some of the photographs too have wildly inaccurate descriptions eg. "Robert Louis Stevenson was born in California...." but that's interesting as well. And then there are the contemporary black-and-white photographs, most of which are held in public collections (eg. at the National Library of Scotland), bodies which more and more often are sharing their old photographs on Flickr. Then the worn old books and the often beautiful illustrations inside them, and the lurid covers and intriguing titles of some foreign editions.

Now, to keep the group going, all I have to do is carry out a quick search on Flickr about once a week for any photographs that might be related to Stevenson, then invite the owners to join the group using a handy little drop-down menu that appears automatically under photographs for group administrators, and it's a strangely addictive and satisfying exercise. I'd thoroughly recommend creating a group if there's anything photographic you're particularly interested in: orange sweaters, cracked teapots, characters from your home village, anything goes. I'm thinking of setting up another one devoted just to pictures of piles of unwashed dinner dishes.

Here are the most recent additions to the group pool:

Flickr: Robert Louis Stevenson via kwout

Show me your online lifestream and I will tell you who you are

An obscure French periodical recently published a piece about Marc L*** which to their feigned dismay has been widely picked up by the mainstream media. (They say they are surprised that the media are more interested in Marc than they are in the article they published in the same issue about the fate of twelve million European Rrom).

The author of the article chose some poor guy at random via his Flickr photstream and made him the subject of what he calls a Google portrait. He culled as much information as possible from the photos about what Marc looks like, his string of relationships, his trips for work and for pleasure, what he does at the weekend etc. From there, he followed him to Facebook and made a friend request. Not everyone realises that if somebody makes a friend request on Facebook and you respond to it —which is exactly what the unsuspecting Marc did — the requestor gains access to your profile for the next month. Bingo: the hack could now find out all about his job (just outside Bordeaux as it happens), his nights out, his friends. He even got Marc's address and his mobile phone number and checked it out. Then he looked him up in the archives of the local newpaper and found out about his past life as a guitarist in a punk band.

The point of the article seems to be to show just how much of an ordinary person's biography can be pieced together from the information that person voluntarily offers up on social networking sites and how much more cogent the information given out sparingly here and there becomes when it is all brought together and synthesised. And don't forget this is a guy who is only on Flickr and Facebook - think of how much more could be found out about the rest of us who blog and twitter and last.fm and generally sprawl out comfortably across the internets.

The next step is presumably to wonder about what somebody malicious might do with that information. Well, they might write a two page biography of you and publish it in a magazine I suppose, then act surprised when you discover the article and immediately ask for all the names to be changed. "You only have yourself to blame, Marc", the journalist protests at the beginning of the article, "you should have been more careful".

I think I'm relatively careful about the information I bandy about when it's related to other people. You can only see photographs of people's faces on my Flickr photostream if I consider you a friend, I don't usually use real names on this blog and just how harmful can it be for Big Bro to know that I used to watch Blue Peter and what I had for dinner. I do run my mouth off frequently on Twitter though - and I think I might protect my updates there (although Gordon reckons Twitter has jumped the shark, so maybe we'll all be stopping that soon anyway).

Ultimately, it's a choice freely made. We choose to leave traces of who we are here and there but we're not so naïve that we don't realise that if anyone was interested enought to piece it all together they'd get quite a big bit of the picture. But so what? In any case, I'll bet I know an awful lot more about people I only have a passing acquaintance with at work, in my street, at my kids' school, than I do about random people on t'internet.

This is how old I am

When I watched Blue Peter, the presenters were called John Noakes, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves.... and Shep was a puppy.

You had to get up out of your chair and fiddle with knobs to change channels.

I remember when getting money out of an ATM felt like engaging in a futuristic act.

Dials on telephones were the norm, buttons were new-fangled.

The first time I ever saw someone using a (gigantic) mobile phone — outside Marks & Spencers in Edinburgh — I did a triple take.

I wrote my MA dissertation on a typewriter.

I spent the first part of my life being driven around in cars with no seatbelts.

I remember when only people who wore Jesus sandals bought yoghurt - and it was all called Ski and came in waxed cardboard cartons.

In my young day, a packet of crips cost two and a half pence

I saw Jungle Book in the cinema when it first came out.

Our method of illegally copying music was to make copies of LPs on cassettes.

Pageboy haircuts were the height of chic when I was at school.

Everything was "magic" - as in "I've got a magic new pair of wedges".

I spent all night listening to Radio Luxembourg under my pillow the night Elvis Presley died.

How old are you?

(Thanks to Belgian Waffle for inspiration)

The times they are a-changin'

Obamicon.me

Locavorism

While I was unwell and wallowing in lack of appetite, I read Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It recounts a year that she and her family spent eating only local - growing their own fruit and vegetables, raising their own chickens and turkeys, and shopping at the local farmers' market in southwest Virginia. I'm a great admirer of Kingsolver's fiction and of her essays but this book struck me as overlong and a bit preachy, and, despite the praise on the cover, somewhat lacking in humour.

The problem with books like this I suppose is that they are bought, or given to, people like me — bobos who are already convinced in principle at least of the need to eat locally and in season, within reason, and we end up feeling that we're being ranted at. If I have the choice between tomatoes grown somewhere in SW France and tomatoes from the other end of Morocco, I'll go for the local ones every time. Super/markets in France rarely offer out of season fruit and veg in any case unlike many British supermarkets which seem to stock strawberries, cherries and aparagus from January to December.

What about you? Are you a locavore or do you think you have a RIGHT to those bananas?

Agley

Oh dear. the best laid schemes for regular snippets are sometimes nipped in the bud by galloping flu. Never fear, I shall return to snip another day.

Happy New Year

Not a very original title, I know, but I really do wish you all the very best of new years.

I have a feeling that for me 2009 is going to be the year of the snippet. If I can, I'm going to post some little snippet here most days (I'm hedging my bets and anticipating my inconsistency already. That sentences originally read "I promise that I will post something here every day").

I was also tempted to make a rash resolution about taking some sort of exercise most days too. I started out quite well today with a bit of swimming, fencing, hammer throwing and athletics, some motor racing and a little light trampolining (oh all right, it was all on the new Wii, but that's still quite tiring for a lazy git like me). I'm not going to make any promises on that front but rest assured I'll keep you posted on any massive increase in my fitness level.

Anyway, today's snippet is a photo from last week in Scotland. This is Kirk Loch in Lochmaben at dusk.


We had a lovely Christmas week in Scotland, with lots of eating drinking and making merry, helped along by the fact that Britain is currently a veritable bargain basement for anyone with euros in their pocket. Long may it continue, I say.

Wordless Wednesday: Best of 2008

A Year of Reading

Here is the annual list of books wot I have read. I've been good at adding books to LibraryThing as I read them, so if you've been an attentive reader you'll have noticed all of these appearing in the sidebar. As usual, the ones I loved are the top, those I didn't are at the bottom and the middling ones are in the ... middle. I'm not providing links this year since due to the recession and because I know you're just as capable of googling as I am.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (pure desolate brilliance)
Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, Nigel Slater (funny, sad and satisfying)
Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H.Lawrence, Geoff Dyer (alternative auto/biography)
A Lie about My Father, John Burnside (a (mostly) bad man)
Fall on Your Knees, Anne Marie MacDonald (vast story set in provinical Canda and another bad father)
Fascination, William Boyd (16 brilllant short stories. Boyd is a master of all things fiction)
Skating To Antarctica, Jenny Diski (memoir and travelogue)
The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald (childhood Canadian detective fiction)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell (Scottish story of old age and deception)
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson (I seemed to read a lot of Canadian fiction this year and this was another good one)
The Other Side of the Bridge, Mary Lawson (provincial Canada ....again)
Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens, Sofka Zinovieff (one of the best "living abroad" books I've read, recommended by Mike of Fevered Mutterings)
The Accidental, Ali Smith (I loved some of the wordy riffs in this book)
Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer (I'm glad I discovered Geoff Dyer this year)
Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered, Geoff Dyer
Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters (homeless but not completely hopeless)
The Smoking Diaries, Simon Gray (He died just after I read this)
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, Bill Bryson (he still makes me laugh)
The Patience of the Spider, Andrea Camilleri (I read about one of these Inspector Montalbano a year - for the Italian food rather than the intrigue)
Quartier lointain : L'intégrale, Jirô Taniguchi (this graphic novel was a present and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt (poponomics)
Saint Maybe, Anne Tyler (one from the back catalogue, as reliable and comforting as ever)
Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe, Nicholas Crane (he walks from Cape Finisterre to Istanbul, with just his two legs!)
The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro (Another Candaina one. Short, sometimes autobiographical, pieces about the past)
The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards (twisty)
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (I'd like to rad more DFW)
Rosengarten, Janice Galloway (a quirky exhibition tie-in about midwifery)
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan (not his best IMHO)
The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton (bits and pieces of non-fiction)
Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin (old friends)
Memoirs of a Highland Lady, Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus (I’m still dipping into this 19th C diary)
The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett (mildly amusing)
The Sea, John Banville (I think I liked this, but I can't remember very much about it)
The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, Shauna Reid (gaun yersel Shona)
Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones (good if you love Dickens. I don't think I love him enough)
Echo Park, Michael Connelly (beach reading)
Arlington Park: A Novel, Rachel Cusk (mildly depressing novel about women in London suburbia)
The Missing, Thomas Eidson (the film is good too)
The Cone-Gatherers, Robin Jenkins (I thought I was going to like Robin Jenkins, but I didn't)
The Pearl-fishers, Robin Jenkins
Something to Declare, Julian Barnes (only for Flaubertophiles)
The Pilot's Wife, Anita Shreve (I think that this might have been the second time I had read this novel, but it didn't make much of a mark the first time)
Chasing Mammon: Travels in the Pursuit of Money, Douglas Kennedy ( a little dated now)
Sorbonne Confidential, Laurel Zuckerman (cf. last post)
Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance, Tom Reynolds (read the blog, shouldn't have bought the book)
Petite Anglaise, Catherine Sanderson (ditto)
Bananas in Bordeaux: Self-sufficiency for Dreamers, Louise Franklin (a blog that wasn't)
Burning Bright, Tracy Chevalier (I've enjoyed some of Chevalier's other novels but I never got to the end of this one)
Longitude, Dava Sobel (I like popular science but I just couldn't get into this)
Treasure Islands: Sailing the South Seas in the Wake of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, Pamela Stephenson Connolly (some people have too much money)

The vast majority of these books were provided by Bookmooch and most of the rest by my Mum - thank you both!

Suck it up at the Sorbonne

A few weeks ago I received an advance review copy of Sorbonne Confidential by Laurel Zuckerman from LibraryThing. Sorbonne Confidential is the story of an American woman in her mid-forties who finds herself laid off from a job in business in Paris, hits on the idea of teaching English as the perfect solution to her unemployment woes and duly signs up for the prestigious agrégation exam to secure entry into the state education system. She then discovers just what a difficult exam the agrégation is and just how French it is.

I did not like this book. I found the carping complaints about the whole system irritating, especially after the discovery that the candidate had failed the exam. I sympathise with a native English speaker who finds the competitive exam route to teaching in France élitist, fastidious and archaic, I really do. I am willing to accept, however, that it is a profoundly French institution respected by the vast majority of those who have taken and passed it and that if you want to be part of the system you have to accept that. Neither do I agree that as native English speakers we are all automatically qualified to do the job of teaching our language.

It's a little unsettling that Zuckerman give no reason for wanting to be a teacher other than the financial stability it would offer her. She seems to believe that her American origins and her voracious reading habits are qualification enough for the job. What she fails to recognize is that education is culture; that language teaching is deeply ideological; that loving to read is not the same as teaching literature. She also makes the wrong choice - the agrégation is a prestigious qualification requiring a robust literary or linguistic background — her background suited her for the more modest Capes. Had she been properly advised, she could have prepared for both, would probably have passed the Capes and ended up with the job security she craved.

I'm not sure about the trajectory this book followed to publication. It appeared in French last year (to mainly positive autocritical reviews) but won't be published in English until next year. Did the author write the original in French? I'm not sure, but some clumsier passages certainly ring like English badly translated from French and there are a few grammar mistakes that would make an agrég jury shudder (eg. "there are no less than six pharmacies") and a piece of jewellery is twice somewhat bizarrely referred to as a "broach". And let's not get into the red-rag question of why "pigs trotters" is not some obscure term unknown to the entire English-speaking world.

I was curious about what Laurel Zuckerman had become since failing the agrégation and writing this book, so I googled her name. I have no idea what she is doing now, other than giving interviews, but I did discover that she is on Facebook and listed as a fan of Valérie Pécresse the minister for higher education who is currently engaged in trying to scrap the concours system - to massive outcry from university teachers throughout France.

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

I nicked this one from Ms Mac. A hundred things I love in no particular order. I tried to make this into a scrolling text but my first version got eaten up so these are really my second hundred.

1. good wine 2. mediocre wine 3. sausage rolls 4. chubby cheeks and dimples 5. Guerlain perfume 6. BBC Radio 4 7. Bookmooch 8. giggling in the staff room 9. the Dordogne in autumn 10. twinkly lights 11. Dr Gregory House 12. fresh sheets 13. thoughtful blogs 14. verbena 15. "I love you Mummy" 16. new words 17. long lies 18. purple velvet 19. bagpipes 20. Taratata 21. a wood fire in our hearth 22. the shape of my iPhone 23. slideshows 24. Bordeax trams 25. interpreting 26 tapas 27. fishing boats 28. silver 29. antiquarian book shops 30. mysterious parcels 31. Frankie Boyle 32. the smell of bracken 33. long walks 34. mulled wine 35. Lebanese restaurants 36.coriander 37. Sunday markets 38. Carl Larsson prints 39. Homes & Gardens 40. sleepy children 41. Talisker 42. cookery books 43. Mastermind 44. speculos 45. travelogues 46. steaming pots 47. attics 48. Devendra Branhart 49. white walls 50. railway stations 51. Hayao Miyazaki 52. Pompom's polar bear 53. long dinners al fresco 54. tablet 55. The Broons 56. chintz 57. peony roses 58. botanic gardens 59. wool shops 60. very old pubs 61. Daniel Mermet 62. Kenneth White 63. black labradors 64. watercolours 65. Spanish villages 66. islands 67. Nespresso 68. very bright scarves 69. squeaky hair 70. reminiscing 71. smoked salmon 72. wooden floors and kilims 73. Indian head massages 74. Highland cows 75. maps 76. hot showers 77. hearing Italian 78. vast open spaces 79. department stores at Christmas 80. collages 81. interested students 82. going off the beaten track 83. libraries 84. black patent shoes 85. Crocs 86. old postcards 87. new places 88. office supplies 89. pizza in front of the telly 90. home movies (but not other people's) 91. babies 92. Richard Scarry picture books 93. hummus 94. RLS 95. biographies 96. Le Zapping 97. windy beaches 98. San Sebastian 99. attics 100. old-fashioned campsites

Sub-total immersion

Until last weekend, we had an eighteen year-old staying in our spare bedroom. Charlotte is the daughter of my best friend in Scotland and her plans for a gap year in Nepal fell through at the last minute due to that pesky Marxist coup. I have to admit that I was a little apprehensive about a teenage girl we hardly know staying with us for a whole month. However, I needn't have worried because she turned out to be the ideal house guest — she was in class studying French all day and out most evenings doing whatever it is that eighteen-year-olds do nowadays. When she was here she was a pleasure to have around.

I was constantly reminded of how much things have moved on since I was eighteen and came to work in France for the first time. In those days (can you hear my voice going reedy and see my body leaning lower over my walking stick?) I used to save up five-franc pieces for my weekly call home from a draughty phone box. Our broadband provider gives us free calls to just about anywhere in the world so Charlotte could call home any time she liked. Apart from the occasional letter, I was out of touch with my friends back home for almost all of the time that I was in France; Charlotte kept in touch with her friends through Facebook and text messages. I used to save up and buy the occasional English-language newspaper, Charlotte could have read any newspaper she liked on the internet. I went home after three months to discover that there were lots of new adverts and series on TV, Charlotte could have watched English-language television to her heart's delight via satellite (had we a satellite dish, hint, hint), cable (had she wanted to suffer through reruns of Dad's Army and The Good Life) and of course copious downloading.

I'll stop there before I get to the "well we lived in a shoebox in a cess pit" line from Monty Python. I suppose that what I'm saying is that it's actually much more difficult nowadays to achieve the total immersion effect in a foreign language.

Charlotte is off to New Zealand next month — I suppose the Maoris have broadband too.

Spot on?

Typalayzer tells you what you're really like......maybe.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://lezzles.blogspot.com is of the type:

The Artists

The gentle and compassionate type. They are especially attuned their inner values and what other people need. They are not friends of many words and tend to take the worries of the world on their shoulders. They tend to follow the path of least resistance and have to look out not to be taken advantage of.

They often prefer working quietly, behind the scene as a part of a team. They tend to value their friends and family above what they do for a living.

Well, I suppose the "not friends of many words" part is correct.

Cartoon

Papilles et Pupilles via kwout

Commenters

This is a good meme that was passed on to me by the Teuchter (what a lovely word Teuchter is). I have to provide a list of the last ten commenters on this blog and then answer some questions about them. They should then do the same thing.

1. Rosie: A Bitch About Brittany
2. Ms Mac
3. Engelsk
4. Lucy : Box Elder
5. Neil: Neil Writes the Blog
6. Deborah (independent commenter!)
7. Le Laquet
8. Anne : Belgian Waffle
9. Frankofile
10. Dick of Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

1. What is your favourite post from number 3’s blog?

I quite like this one - there was a similar one last year I think.

2. Has number 10 taken any pictures that have moved you?

Dick's blog is about words more than pictures. His poems have certainly moved me.

3. Does number 6 reply to comments on their blog?

Deborah still doesn't have a blog but her daughter Lucie who is an extremely talented artist started a trilingual one recently. I give you Lucie Geffré.

4. Which part of blogland is number 2 from?

Ms Mac lives in the Village of the Damned in deepest Switzerland but as I know only too well you can take the girl out of Scotland but you can't .........

5. If you could give one piece of advice to number 7 what would it be?

I'd praise her rather than give her advice - well done lightweight!

6. Have you ever tried something from number 9’s blog?

I'm sure I've nicked something at some time from almost all of the blogs I read - and I'd quite like to borrow Sky, Frankofile's black lab.

7. Has number 1 blogged something that inspired you?

Rosie's posts about teaching music to autistic children are more than inspiring, they are life-enhancing.

8. How often do you comment on number 4’s blog?

I comment on Lucy's blog quite often - usually to say nothing more interesting than that I love a photograph or agree with a beautifully expressed observation.

9. Do you wait for number 8 to post excitedly?

I have to be honest and say that I don't exactly wait excitedly for anyone to post, but when I see a new post from Belgian Waffle in Google Reader my cursor does tend to go straight to it.

10. How did number 5’s blog change your life?

Ha! I could write a book about how Neil's blog changed my life. ......... it would be a very short book.

11. Do you know any of the 10 bloggers in person?

I've known Deborah for a very long time. I have never met any of the others, I would definitely recognise a few of them if they passed me in the street (Ms Mac, bespectacled Neil, Rosie...) and would respond enthusiastically to a dinner invitation from any of the ten!

12. Do any of your 10 bloggers know each other in person?

Rosie and Lucy are friends. Ms Mac comments on Rosie's blog. Lucy and Dick link to each other. Le Laquet and Ms Mac link to each other. Does Ms Mac know Anne? Maybe because her friend Heather definitely does. (Does anyone else miss Heather's blog? Come back Heather.) I'm not sure about Frankofile. Engelsk and Neil are the wild cards in this group.

13. Out of the 10, which updates more frequently?

Ms Mac, I think. (although I miss the daily dose of her 365 photos on Flickr).

14. Which of the 10 keep you laughing?

Neil mostly (who wouldn't laugh at these photos?)

15. Which of the 10 has made you cry (good or bad tears)?

I can't say that any of them have made me cry. Smile. Worry. Frown. But not cry.

Maspalomas

When you book the cheapest all-inclusive holiday ever at the very, very last minute you don't really expect luxurious accommodation, fluffy white bath towels and the best upper sets as fellow holiday-makers. And sure enough, we didn't get any of that in Gran Canaria. But we did get sun. And we did get a perfectly acceptable apartment, a nice pool, edible food, lashings of alcohol on tap and the dunes of Maspalomas. So as I lay on a sunbed reading David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster, thinking that many of the characters around me sounded a lot like people I had seen in Eastenders (there were even two Frank Butchers) — and feeling not a little superior (mostly because of my reading matter rather than any innate class) — I came upon this passage on vulgarity:

But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness and bad taste [DFW is writing about the porn industry]. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over.

So , there you have it — I am proud to have been a vulgar tourist and here is my vulgar slideshow.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

MsMac has awarded me the I *heart* your blog award. I know I don't deserve it because I've been a very irregular blogger for a long time now, but I'm chuffed. Oh, and all I have to do is this eeny weeny meemey thing.

Where is your mobile phone? recharging
Where is your significant other? on a ladder
Your hair colour? a bit like Jilly Cooper's (yeuch)
Your mother? homemaker extraordinaire
Your father? was wonderful
Your favourite thing? a glass of wine at the end of the day
Your dream last night? blank screen
Your dream goal? not to have any goals
The room you're in? study/guest room (madly tidying up for guest)
Your hobby? surfing
Your fear? failure
Where do you want to be in 6 years? France
Where were you last night? here, watching Taratata on TV
What you're not? mean
One of your wish-list items? new Macbook
Where you grew up? Penicuik
The last thing you did? tidy up (sigh)
What are you wearing? old clothes (better ones packed for hols)
Your TV? I think I can hear rugby noises
Your pets? I used to have a cat called Piseag but he's been dead for over 20 years
Your computer? yes, my computer
Your mood? mildly excited
Missing someone? not at the moment
Your car? clapped out
Something you're not wearing? my usual contacts (trying out bifocal contact lenses)
Favourite shop? antiquarian bookshops
Your summer? cool
Love someone? yes
Your favourite colour? blue
When is the last time you laughed? a few moments ago
Last time you cried? honestly can't remember

And I, in turn, nominate Box Elder, Belgianwaffle, and Neil because I love their blogs.

I'm off on my hols tomorrow but I'm going to try to put my iPhone to good use and send you a few photies while I'm away.

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.