No show

Well first of all, I taught all morning then dashed to the station, then sat on a train to Marseille for six hours in one of those old fashioned carriages where three strangers sit facing three other strangers trying to avoid direct eye contact. I was in the middle seat and spent most of the journey balancing my PowerBook on my knees writing the end of my paper and preparing a FANTASTIC KICK-ASS powerpoint presentation.

I arrived in Marseille some time after eight and was held up for ages because of what the SNCF euphemistically calls "un accident de personne" and which actually means that there was a body on the track. I took advantage of this hitch to ingurgitate a dry tuna sandwich and listen to others complain about the inefficiency of the train service which, for once, seemed a little unfair. After a couple of hours, my train to Toulon was cancelled so I hopped onto the fist TGV going in that direction and sank into one of the plush armchairs of a first class carriage complete with electrical socket to recharge my beloved Powerbookbuddy.

From the station in Toulon, I dragged my bag through deserted streets to my hotel. By this time I was exhausted and perhaps it wasn't a very good idea to go out for "a quick drink" after that, but I did, and had a very nice time. The next morning, however, I didn't feel quite so great. Was it a tummy bug, was it some sort of punishment (for mixing my drinks, for eating a tuna sandwich, for being vaguely irritated a careless body was holding me up)? I will never know, I will never tell, but the result was that I missed the whole of the first day of the conference, including my own slot, and nobody got to see my FANTASTIC KICK-ASS powerpoint presentation.

All too soon it was time to get back onto that train and trundle back to Bordeaux. And then it was off to Hendaye in the Basque Country which was the answer to yesterday's question. More on that tomorrow perhaps.

Category: conference-going

Terrible blogger

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I went away for ages (10 days) and forgot to tell you I was going ,never mind organise for someone to come in and turn the heating on, open the curtains etc. Well, now that I'm back, maybe you can guess where I've been? (Experience shows that his sort of challenge is usually the kiss of death to all interaction and systematically results in zilch comments.)

Category: holiday

An afternoon in the country

It's reinvigorating to get out of the city and be bombarded by the signs of changing seasons that seem to slink past us in town. The road from Bordeaux to Castillon-la-Bataille is absolutely beautiful at this time of year. The vines have turned a rich ochre and the air is laced with the smells of autumn — overripe grapes, mushrooms and earth. The sun shines on oblivious to the fact that summer is over; the landscape soaking up the unexpected warmth. We drive through quiet villages on our way to Montcaret and Sarah's house. For the first time I meet someone whose blog I have read and whose daily photos I have looked at and yes, I feel I know her and her family already. The children who know nothing of blogs, like children everywhere also seem to be on familiar terms and quickly get down to the important business of playing and giggling.
I think I need two lives really, one for the town and one for the country. One for dashing across town during Monday lunchtime rush-hour, coming down from the euphoria of a successful first class in one place just in time to start another in a different building with an altogether less receptive group of students and an all but empty stomach. And another life for making quince jelly in a country kitchen with the back door open to the smells of autumn.

Linguistic pitfall

Conversation on the way to school this morning

Me: You can tell it's autumn because of all the leaves on the ground.

Z: A qui je dois le dire? A la maîtresse? [Who should I say it to? My teacher?]

Me : What do you mean? You don't have to say it to anyone.

Z: Mais tu as dit... [Yes, but you said...]

Penny drops.

Me: It's just an expression. "You can tell" means "you can see"....

Category: words

Bibliographiaphilia

At last we're getting round to putting up bookshelves and hundreds of books that I'd forgotten I owned have been dug out of cardboard boxes. It's so satisfying to put all the books by one author together on a shelf, all the travel guides side by side, all the journals in chronological order, all the dictionaries within easy reach, all the trashy novels in a psychedelic cluster. While I was at it, I thought I might as well create an online library too using LibraryThing | Catalog your books online, and while I was at that I thought I might as well add a little dooda on the side (swivel your eyes to the right and look below the Flickr badge, if you please) offering you a random selection from my extensive library. I'm not quite sure why I'm creating the online catalogue. Perhaps if my house burned down it would make the insurance claim easier? Or if I couldn't remember whether or not I owned a certain book and couldn't be bothered to go upstairs and look on the shelves, I could just do a quick search on my PowerBook without moving from my armchair. I've only catalogued a dozen or so books so far, there's still time to turn back. And by the way, this has nothing whatsoever to do with my latest paperback purchase: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (how am I ever going to find time to read that one?).

UPDATE: Actually, after Sarah's comment I have thought of another use for this catalogue. I'm going to chuck out or perhaps even sell a lot of these tatty old books and use the catalogue as a virtual library of the ones I let get away: all of the retentive pleasure with none of the smell and dust.

Category: books

Cummy

I'm going to give a talk about this rather stern-looking person soon. Her name was Alison Cunningham and she was Robert Louis Stevenson's nanny. If her name is familiar perhaps you own(ed) a copy of "A Child's Garden of Verses" and wondered about the dedicatee:

My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—

RLS was a sick child and Alison Cunningham, or Cummy as he called her, fired up his feverish imagination with blood-curdling stories about ghosts and Covenanters. Somehow, I don't think it's going to be a very funny talk. Here's the abstract:

"In 1863, Alison Cunningham accompanied the Stevenson family on an extended tour of the Continent. This was her first contact with life outside of Scotland and she was, for the most part, decidedly unimpressed. The diary she kept during this period was published in book form much later as « Cummy’s Diary»(1926). It has been described by some as « homely » (Skinner) and dismissed as « extremely boring » by others (Davies). This paper aims to reappraise the diary in the light of more recent work on travel writing, highlighting its documentation of the everyday and examining Alison Cunningham’s marginal position as an unmarried woman, a servant, a Scot and a healthy person surrounded by invalids."

Category: RLS

Singin' hey lolly, lolly

The title of this post will only mean anything to you if you are ancient enough to remember that Meri Wilson Classic "Telephone Man" and these fabulous lyrics:

I got it in the bedroom, and I got it in the hall
And I got it in the bathroom, and he hung it on the wall
I got it with a buzz, and I got it with a ring
And when he told me what my number was I got a ding-a-ling

All this to say that I got my wifi card yesterday and within five minutes I had internet in the kitchen, in the hall, in the bathroom, in the toilet, in the garden ........ You get the idea. I may be old enough to remember "Telephone Man" but hey, I'm so funky, I'm wireless. Woo mega Hoo.

Category: wireless

Free

Schoolteachers were on strike today along with most other French public sector workers. I didn't have any classes so I didn't have to decide whether or not to down tools. This meant, however, that when the postman rang the doorbell this morning and thrust an intriguing cardboard box into my hands, three pairs of curious eyes sized it up. Yes, the kids were spending the day at home. It turned out to be the Freebox I had ordered last week. Four eyes wandered away to get up to other mischief. Mine perused the instructions.

You try configuring a Freebox (I'm sorry, I have no idea what the equivalent is in English, someone please help me) while two unsupervised under-fives run wild finding new and exciting things to do in/to the house, whilst beating each other up at five-minute intervals.

Anyway, it works. My PowerBook now has an internet connection. My phonecalls within France are completely free and I have a load of free TV channels many in languages I do not recognise. The number of English-speaking channels has been multiplied by five or six depending on whether you count God TV or Bloomberg, but hey I also get BBC World (hoorah) and SKY News (shudder). Unfortunately we also seem to get a whole swathe of sports channels. I wonder if I could hide them somehow.

That was the good news. The bad news is that using the Freebox means that I can no longer use the modem connection on my other computer. The telephone doesn't actually work yet, apparently that takes up to 72 hours. And when it does we'll have two different lines which seems a bit confusing. Also, the images on the TV are what can only be described as staccato. Or jerky if you prefer. Oh yes, and I'm getting incoming mail but I can't send any. I have no idea why.

So, all in all, I think we can say that this constitutes another resounding success in our series of home improvement projects. Oh, and just wait until next week when I get the Wifi card.

Category: Freebox

Annular Solar Eclipse

DSCN2126.JPG
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Sorry folks but this was the best I could do. I did try taking the photo through an old x-ray but the spark from the flash melted the cellulose in a rather frightening way.

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation: I discovered this site ages ago and have just found it again in my Furl archive. (Why did I choose Furl and not Del-icio-us, by the way?)

"What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? "

Today I fed it what I take to be the take-home message from "Broken Flowers", the latest Jim Jarmusch film and it came up with this:

"The experience more, must come the future propping therefore very those that we are the gift that we have."

Can you guess what the original sentence was before it was mashed up through five sequential translations? (I can feel a classroom application coming on here...)

Let me tell you why I don’t like Wednesdays

A very long time ago, somebody thought that it would be a good idea to give all little French children a day off school on a Thursday. This, so that the week would be cut in two and the little "têtes blondes" wouldn’t become overtired. At some point, perhaps in the seventies, for some reason, Thursday off became Wednesday off. Then, gradually, as more and more parents started to spend weekends at home rather than at work and wanted to spend some of that leisure time with their children, Saturday also became a non-school day and "la semaine de quatre jours" was born. Theoretically, the children who don’t go to school an a Saturday morning have slightly shorter holidays than those who do and nobody seems to mind this. What nobody, ever ever calls into question, however, is the sacrosanct "jour des enfants" - a day originally intended to be spent chilling out at home in a post-second-world-war sort of way. Only it is no longert a relaxing day of rest at all, at least not in our house, and I don't think we're particulalry atypical. For us, it’s more of a running-around-like-chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off sort of day.

If you both work, you obviously have to find some sort of alternative childcare solution for a Wednesday, a complicated task if you don't have grandparents on the doorstep. This is how, a couple of weeks ago, I came to spend over three hours queuing to sign my four-year-old up for a kids’ club with a really good reputation and a very long waiting list. I got him in. He then sobbed inconsolably when I left him on the first two Wednesdays he had to spend there. His little sister, meanwhile goes to her old childminder’s since we felt starting nursery and doing something unfamiliar on a Wednesday all in the same month would be a bit much for a three-year-old to cope with. Neither of these arrangements is free, far from it.

“Aha” I hear you say, “but if you didn’t work, your children would be happy little bunnies playing contentedly at home all day on a Wednesday with you, their paragon stay-at-home mum devising on-tap creative activities and leading occasional cultural outings.” Perhaps. But I don’t think so. Some working mums I know do manage not to work on a Wednesday. From what I see, Wednesdays are the days that mums (why is it almost always the mums?) spend ferrying children from music lessons to judo, from fencing classes to soft play, from ballet to swimming. It’s also the day to which all medical appointments and the like are relegated and some of the hothoused kids are even treated to extra maths lessons.

Since Wednesday is a no-school day it is also birthday party day which is how I came to organise my schedule today so that I could rush back from work at lunchtime to pick Z up, drive him across town, drop him off at a birthday party, kill two hours while he worked on his sugar high, pick him up and drive him and his little friend back into town and arrive just in time to pick little sister up from the childminder’s.

This evening, we’re definitely not refreshed. Roll on Thursday.

Category: Mercredi

Extraordinarily famous blogger

That's me. We were at a party last night (actually, we were at the prolongation of a birthday party our children had been to bacause that's the only sort of party we get invited to nowadays), a couple we know asked, "Hey, Lesley, est-ce que tu as un blog?" Turns out they'd arrived at this here humble blog via a search that threw up a photo I'd posted of oyster beds at Cap Ferret. I'll have to watch what I say in future.

And now for something completely different. Here, via Marco (again) is another political chart. You've got to pretend you're American to do this one. Perhaps unsursprisingly, my profile is very like Marco's and that of all the other people I've seen post this on their blogs. So, next time someone asks me about my politics, I'll tell them I'm somewhere near the bottom right-hand corner.

You are a Social Liberal (68% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (10% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Three Things

I. Make your own stamps. Another amusing thing to do with your flickr photos.This photograph is of a place called Hostens, south of Bordeaux.

Do it at Framer
Via SoWeirdProductions
____________________

II. And here's a quote P. pointed out to me yesterday:
"Selon Pierre Sansot, le pérégrination serait une forme de sagesse. Celle de l'effort, de la modestie et de la rencontre."
("According to Pierre Sansot, peregrination is a sort of wisdom — the wisdom of effort, modesty ad meetings.")
____________________

III And finally, here via Profgrrrl is the fifth sentence meme:
"Rules:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to)
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions."

So here's mine: ".....they all have lives outside of the English classroom."

Must try to remember this. Wish I'd added "interesting" before lives.

PowerBookBaby

2.1 kg of loveliness. We're bonding. Please come back later
Category: PowerBook

If

If:

1) your little boy had sobbed his heart out and clung to you like a koala would you have left him at the kids' club anyway?

2) your Powerbook had been dispatched on Saturday, wouldn't you expect to be cuddling up with it by now?

3) you were putting a drier in the garage, would you get the sort that pumps damp air out into the garage or one that costs more but condensates that moist air?

4) you had watched twelve episodes of Six Feet Under over three evenings, would you expect to be in a slightly morbid state of mind for the rest of the week?

5) overnight, your pink i-pod mini suddenly became yesterday's big thing, would you feel totally untrendy in every compartment of your life?

6) a bloggers' apéritif was being planned in the town where you live, would you be tempted to go along, even if you didn't know anyone?

Category: questions

Gender Genie

Does my voice sound husky to you? Do I talk like a man? Is my tone anything less than feminine? Have you ever been in any doubt as to my sex? No, no, no, I hear you cry. Well, not so the Gender Genie whose algorithms obviously have a major hormone problem. On the evidence of two recent blog posts which I fed into it in my usual womanly way, it concludes that there is a very high chance that I am male.

"Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine,
The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author"

Try it for yourselves, then reassure me (because we girls need lots of reassurance).

Via: Allan Jenkins

Spend, spend, spend

I'm on a spending high. This week several goodies have arrived in the post, namely:

Lost In Translation : watched last night and now back on sale on Ebay.fr.

Six Feet Under - The Fourth Season: Please, please go to sleep children so that we can watch at least two episodes tonight.

A couple of books on:National Identity Perhaps goodies isn't quite the right word for them (and to be absolutely honest I can't actually remember ordering the second one which came from a little bookseller in Springfield, USA) but they will be useful, I hope. And, wait for it....

Yesterday, I ordered a 12'' Powerbook from Apple, as well as a washing machine and a drier (unfortunately not from Apple). I'd like to linger lustfully over the words at the beginning of that sentence and just mumble the rest. Guess which I enjoyed putting in my basket most.
Don't you just love spending money online? No fighting through Saturday afternoon shoppers to see the display model. No unwelcome advice from incompetent sales staff. No queuing at the cash desk. No hard sell for the extended warranty. And you can do it late at night after a few glasses of wine, when values in Euros and Francs meld into one, and budget priorities seem trivial (I'm justifying the Powerbook here, not the washing machine by the way). And after all that's not real money they take, is it?
Is it?

Category: online buying

Chestnuts

Chestnuts
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Borrowed three CDs from our excellent médiathèque his evening:

Al Stewart: Year of the Cat
Bob Dylan : Blonde on Blonde
Simon & Garfunkel : The Graduate

How did my musical taste get stuck quite so far in the distant past? What should I borrow next time to get me out of this time warp?


Category: music

Low resolution

Making new year's resolutions in September may seem a little strange, as Sarah* points out but, believe me, when your life is organised according to the academic year, it really is the only time that anything is ever going to change. After October, we're caught up in a demented rush of teaching, class preparation, meetings, conferences etc. so there's no time for innovation or change. Anyway, here, for what it's worth, is my non-exhaustive list of things that need improvement:

I will not
write down what I did in class on scraps of paper which then disappear and only turn up as screwed up paper mâché at the bottom of my bag weeks later.
I will
buy a(nother) nice new exercise book and keep accurate records of class activities so that I don't have to keep asking students: "Are you sure we haven't already done this?", "As I may already have told you..." etc. ( I may have to think about a similar system for dinner party conversations)

I will not
spend ten minutes in the middle of each class scrabbling around at the bottom of aforementioned bag looking for a marker pen that works so that I can write a vital item of vocab on the board.
I will
lobby for the purchase of new interactive whiteboards for our department (and pigs will hit the stratosphere around about the same time they actually appear.

I will not
take the car to work a) because there is a perfectly good tram line that we are currently paying for, apparently singlehandedly, through our local taxes b) parking is now prohibitively expensive c) because it will do me good to walk a bit d) I now take the children to one place not two and it's on my way to work, so that excuse has been blown**.
I will
therefore be consistently late for any important rendez-vous such as the exam I was administering yesterday — it took me fifty minutes to get from one part of the universtiy to another by tram and bus, a journey that would have taken twelve or so minutes by car.

I will never, ever
consult my Bloglines account while at work, not even at lunchtime.
I will
only read online articles from scholarly journals, and preferably only articles with titles I don't understand (and will therefore spend all free time at home reading blogs without feeling guilty.)

How much more time do you have?............

* I've just discovered that I can't link to my own comments box so you'll have to look for what Sarah said, all on your own. Sorry
** Update on the playpiece dilemma. It turns out that mid-morning snacks are now forbidden in shools as part of France's fight against childhood obesity. It is considered far healthier for a three-year-old child to go for five hours with nothing to eat.

Category: resolutions

False Pretences

I spent yesterday evening wandering around Bergerac looking for a place to eat and wondering where all of the English people had come from. There were noisy families with kids on all of the café terraces, couples aimlessly pushing buggies around the old town, old biddies collapsed on stone benches, young couples looking at restaurant menus and beer bellies queuing for baguette sandwiches. Then it dawned on me: low cost flights from Stansted to Bergerac. Ryanair has a lot to answer for.

I wonder how many hits the last couple of sentences will lead to. I feel a little guilty about the Google search that seems to bring most people to this site. It is "w*ords per m*inute t*est". I've added the asterisks so as not to disappoint even more budding secretaries. I imagine their dismay when they end up on this drivelling blog site instead of the efficient gauge of dactylographical skills they were looking for. Needless to say, they don't hang around for long.

On the drivel front, it seems that the academic year has started. The children have just finished their FIRST week of nursery which has been a great success ie. we managed to get them there on time every day. No seriously, they both had a great time and no tears. I went into work for the FIRST time to prepare for my FIRST class on Monday morning (almost tears). I've done my FIRST interpreting job since the holiday, hence the unfettered visit to Bergerac. And I've made my FIRST list of resolutions for the new year. Bring it on, I'm ready.

Category: google hits