Come in and sit down

I should have done this name change ages ago. It was a bit silly to choose my real name as an address all those months ago. So, now you must all erase my real name from your memories. From now on I will go by the catchy name of : "The-blogger-who-was-formerly-and -naively-called-a-real-life-name".
Perhaps it would have been a good idea if it had been a proper professional blog but self-deprecation doesn't usually buy you workplace kudos.

Authorstruck

Sarah had a great post a while ago about going bright red and stammering when she got to meet an author she admires. I had to leave a comment saying that I have experienced exactly the same awe and mention having a book signed by Richard Holmes and saying not a single word. The silly thing is that, for once, I actually had a good number of reasonably intelligent questions I could have asked him. I was in Edinburgh to do some research on travellers after Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cevennes amongst whom Richard Holmes stands out as most perceptive. But the front of a long queue in a tent at a book festival just didn't feel like the right place to start a conversation.

Actually I've just looked at the book he signed for me, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, and it says "to Lesley", so I must have managed to stammer out my name at least.

And now that I think of it, my experiences of meeting authors have all been rather underwhelming. At the Salon du Livre in Bordeaux a few years ago, during a deserted lunchtime, I strolled past Alain Robbe-Grillet, gazing vacantly over a pile of books and obviously available for conversation. But I walked on by pushing Z. in his pushchair, because despite several years of study I couldn't think of a single intelligent phrase on the subject of the nouveau roman.

There have been others: Michelle Roberts, Janice Galloway, Kenneth White, Bernard MacLaverty. ... I cannot report on a single witty remark, or even a coherent comment, issued from my lips in their presence.

My mum, on the other hand, was recently in a restuarant and found herself at a table next to a double Pulitzer prize-winner. She tells me they had a very enjoyable conversation.

Random gobbets

• I'm vaguely thinking about getting a breadmaker (mostly because I keep seeing recipes that require one on a fellow Bordelaise's blog). Does anyone have any recommendations?

• Memory from a couple of months ago that still makes me giggle. I step out of the shower and E. exclaims "Mummy, je vois tes narines!"( "Mummy, I can see your nostrils!)

• Favourite snippet from Moondust by Andrew Smith: "[He] radiates a weird, goofy anger and always sounds like he's trying to juice a lemon with his sphincter muscles. " (p.201)

• Quote from The Sopranos a couple of weeks ago: "If the Empire State Building represented the history of the Earth, then man's presence would only be a postage stamps at the very top." Quote from Z's dinosaur book at bedtime tonight: "If the history of the Earth was reduced to 100 years, humans would only be present for three minutes."
  

• I have to go from Bordeaux to Nantes for a conference on Friday. I have to be there before 1pm but the earliest I can get there by train is 3H15 pm. Why is that? Look at the map, Nantes is just up the road.
  

Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie

P. hurries the children out the front door for the five-minute walk to school. They’re running late. The door closes and I breathe a sigh of relief, half-heartedly clear up a few breakfast crumbs and put the Dora DVD back into its box. [I lied to my children yesterday evening — I told them that the new Dora DVD from Grandma only has an English soundtrack. In fact, they could watch it in Greek or Portuguese or, more importantly for them, two different versions of French if they (i.e. I) liked). The lie is for their own linguistic good.]

I saunter upstairs and into the bathroom. While I’m brushing my teeth, I hear an insistent rustling noise coming from ... I’m not quite sure where. It gets louder and louder. I open the windows and listen, is it coming from the garden ? No, it’s definitely inside the house. The rustling continues and there seems to be some discreet bumping too. I tiptoe towards our bedroom and the noise gets louder: it’s definitely coming from in there and it’s definitely rodents. I peek in the door from a safe distance but see no signs of movement, no long tails poking out from under the bed.

I’m now terrified. Oh what a panic's in my breastie. I dash downstairs. How am I going to get my things out of a bedroom obviously under siege by several large families of mice or maybe even r……, no, no, no, no, no.

P. is taking ages. He strolls in with a baguette and the Sud Ouest newspaper under his arm. « I think you should take a look upstairs, there seems to be a strange noise coming from our bedroom » I say casually, inwardly shrieking « Help, help, help, we need the pest control people, immediately »

P. goes upstairs, sees nothing in the bedroom, opens the door that leads up to the attic and finds a helpless little house martin* lying exhausted at the bottom of the stairs.

He takes off like a jet fighter when P. opens the window and holds him out in the fresh May air.

* or maybe it was a swallow, or a swift.

The sun rises bright in France

The sun rises bright in France
and so sets he
But he has tint the blink he had
In my ain countree

So drink with me a glass of wine
And sing with me some Scottish rhyme
That I may think of Auld Lang Syne
And my ain countree

The bud comes back to summer
And the blossom tae the bee
But I'll win back never
To my ain countree

The land of sweet Bordeaux
Is pleasant for tae see
But ne'er sae sweet as the land I left
And my ain countree

That's a song by Alan Cunningham (1784-1842) that I, the exiled Scot in Bordeaux, might be tempted to sing, were I the homesick type ...and could I sing. It was written to commemorate the flight to France of hundreds of Jacobites in the seventeenth century, and expresses a poignant and, some might say, characteristically Scottish attitude to exile. There's an enjoyable wistfulness about exile that we Scots are often tempted to overplay, a trait Billy Connolly exploits in an old sketch about Glasgow pubs full of maudlin folk singers wailing on about how far they are fae hame. Excuse me while I have a wail.

Friend's Photo Friday

These statues are on the sentier sculpturel de Mayronnes, south of Carcassone. They are the work of Deborah's daughter, Lucie Geffré, and will be there until the middle of August.
What do you think? I like them.

Tunisia

Not sure if this slideshow is going to work. Is there anything more boring than being subjected to someone else's holiday photos? ("Was that the Wednesday morning darling, or the Thursday afternoon?")



I'm still paranoid about one day stumbling on photos of my children's heads amateurishly stuck on top of naked bodies. But if I know you or your blog, and if you're not a paedophile but still enough of a masochist to want to see the "people" ones too, drop me an e-mail and I'll send you a Flickr invitation to be my friend, please.

We've been, we're back

We're back, we're back and we're very tired. A wonderful time was had by all, of course, despite a few minor hiccups. Here are a few handy hints on how to spice up your holiday:

1. Apply for your passport well after the deadline. Arrange to have it delivered twenty minutes before you have to be at the airport by which time you will be standing in the street hailing all passing vans.

2. Once in the airport, nerves still clattering, encourage your little boy to announce just as you arrive at the security check that he has a toy pistol in his backpack. Aghast, watch said pistol being confiscated by disapproving security people for immediate destruction. Reassure little boy that he will not be going to prison.

3. When you arrive at the hotel try to secure that wonderful big family room that has a fabulous view of the pool, the palm trees and the beach. At 2 a.m. wonder why you didn't realise you would be sleeping (ha ha) directly above the trillion-decibel sound system in the disco below. Only manage to change to another non-vibrating room two nights later.

4. Arrange to have several family members infected with conjuctivitis: preferably the variety in which rivers of yellow slime flow from their reddened eyes day and night.

5. And finally, why not have the bus for the return flight leave the hotel at 1 a.m.? That should ensure that you get back so tired that the benefit of a week of farniente will have been entirely cancelled out.

Photos later.

To pack or not to pack

8H50. We leave for Tunisia at 13H00 and the passport still isn't here. The Embassy told me they were sending it yesterday and we should get it this morning. But then they said the same thing the day before yesterday. I don't know whether to pack or unpack.

10H42 Still nothing. The TNT website says it is "en cours de livraison". I hope that means it's in the back of a white van somewhere near here. I feel sick and stupid.

11H46 It still isn't here but I have to close the computer down. Bye (but maybe not for long).

Weimaraner

If you'd like to have a dog like this, my friends the Bonniers have 11 (eleven!) puppies to find homes for.

Braque Weimar Weimaraner

Where is it?

Make yours here

It's a ho-ho-holiday

For some strange but wonderful reason, I’m on holiday, three days before P. and the children which is why you find me now, at 9H30 in the morning sipping a third cup of coffee in front of powerbookbaby, flitting from site to site in a euphoric state of indolence.

So it's going to be three days of idyllic freedom, if it wasn’t for having to take le boy to the school doctor for his pre-primary visit today slap in the middle of this afternoon. Oh, and having to nervously hang around the letter box just in case UPS delivers said boy’s passport. [Did I mention that major cockup in the Tunisia holiday plans? I only realised last week that his passport had run out and sent in an application to have it renewed last Tuesday, in other words very late (too late?) — so there is no guarantee that it will actually arrive before we fly on Friday. P. and I may end up drawing straws at the airport to see who gets to go.] There is also the small matter of finding a plumber to fix a radiator upstairs that inexplicably fell off the wall bending all the pipework while I just happened to be standing on it fixing a shutter. I also have to go to aquagym every single day in the desperate hope that a few hours of splashing around in the water will erase all signs of a winter of sloth. I also have to fit in a visit to the hairdresser, a run to the Secours Populaire, prepare a couple of classes for the first day back, buy a few t-shirts, do a bit of paintwork in the house, .

Right, time for another cup of coffee I think and perhaps a little daytime TV………

Quais

Quais
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Why when we sat outside having afternoon coffee in wonderful pristine sunshine yesterday, are we huddled inside around an open fire today ?

Why was E sick on Thursday, right as rain on Friday but terribly sick again yesterday and today ?

Why does the author of Moondust, which I’m reading at the moment, bandy technical terms about rocket science and Apollo missions yet explain that V is « the Roman numeral for five » ? Come on, give the poor readers some credit, if we’re reading the book, we’re literate.

Why suddenly 0 peers in 0 seeds when I am so desperate for my weekly dose of Tony and C° (If you don’t know, don’t ask)

Why can’t I get my wifi dongle (love that word, dongle, dongel, dongle) to work on the i-mac upstairs ?

Why is there no surefire pre-holiday diet for people who need to lose a couple of tons in five days before revealing their legs after a winter of pasta and pizza?

Gold Star

When my Mum moved house a couple of years ago, she arranged to have about a dozen boxes full of miscellania that she'd been storing for me in her loft sent over to France. They're now in my own loft.
The other day I was going through one, wondering what to keep and what to chuck out, when I came across one of my very first writing jotters from primary school. I suppose it was my first plog — paper log.
Here's a sample page. You probably can't read the 6-year-old writing so the text is underneath.

29.11.68 Helping Mumy
I oftin help mumy. I yosily dry the dishis and Ronald washis the dishis. Wen I have nothing to do I asc Mumy wot to do for her. At Grany's I wash the dishis and dray them. Sumtim I dust. On Sundy or Mundy mumy is gong to do the spring clining I am gong to help. I aryn with my toy aryn with Mumy.

Can you hear the Hebridean accent in that last sentence?
This time next year, Z should be at about the same stage in reading and writing, at least in French. I can't wait for him to start plogging. I wonder if he'll come up with as many fibs as I did to gain the teacher's approval.

Qu'est ce qu'il y a à la télé?

Everyone agrees that French TV is crap, maybe not as bad as Spanish TV or Italian TV but still abysmal. Among the mind-numbing dross, however, there are some pretty watchable programmes and they make a break from the ubiquitous antiques, cooking, househunting and sick animal offerings on BBC Prime. Here then, in no particular order, are some of the better things on French télé.

Titeuf is a brilliant cartoon for children with a very cheeky hero who frequently refers to his “zizi sexuel” and that’s recommendation enough for me.

Le Zapping is a very short interlude on Canal + that consists of a sequence of vision-bites from all the French terrestrial (and some cable) channels, consisting only of the highlights from what was broadcast the day before: anything memorably bad, memorably funny, memorably disgusting or anything that went memorably wrong. It’s a sort of distillation of TV without the bother of actually having to watch TV.

Tout le Monde en Parle is a sort of chat show presented by the twitchy man in black Thierry Ardisson very, very late on a Saturday night. The guests sit uncomfortably on high stools around a sort of horseshoe-shaped table and frequently give the impression that they’ve been treated to lashings of white powder in hospitality and sometimes make fools of themselves or get into heated arguments. It’s a good watch if you’ve just come in from a night out and don’t want to go to bed yet.

I used to watch Les Maternelles in the morning while I was on maternity leave, when it was still being presented by lovely Maïtena. I liked the décor and the non-preachy way it talked about the things I was interested in then, mainly baby crying (abundance thereof) and sleeping (lack thereof).

Envoyé Spécial is a French Thursday night institution. It’s basically a documentary programme featuring three back-to-back reports. The angle isn’t usually very original and the message is also somewhat conventional, but it’s usually interesting and the voiceovers don’t have that isn’t-science/nature/dumpling-making-fascinating? breathiness that characterizes, for example, BBC’s Horizons.

Friday night brings another institution, Thalassa, a magazine programme about anything to do with the sea. The reports are usually from some exotic part of the world and sometimes the commentary is incredibly naïve and superficial, but there’s still something reassuring about footage of boats.

Apostrophes & Double Je used to be my favourite programmes on French TV. Apostrophes was nothing more than a bunch of authors sitting around talking about their books, but the discussion was led with great skill by the avuncular Bernard Pivot. He then went on to host another show called Bouillon de Culture which wasn’t nearly as good but he also made a series of programmes about mostly famous, non-native French-speakers in France called Double Je which is consistently fascinating.

Strip Tease is a Belgian programme. Quirky mini documentatry films with no sound over. I don’t think it’s on at the moment.

Taratata is a rock & pop music show which is filmed in some clever way that makes it look almost 3D. It brings together some unexpected duos (Khaled and Charles Aznavour for example) and would really be perfect if it wasn’t for the unbearable Naguy who presents it. His interviews with singers you really want to hear speak always consist of him talking much more than the interviewee, often in less-than-perfect English. There is no translation, he does that himself, and when he doesn’t understand, he just makes it up.

I’m ashamed to say that I also occasionally watch La Nouvelle Star, the French equivalent of Pop Stars, on a Wednesday night until P. gets in and says “You’re not watching that rubbish again, are you?” And although I’m not about to admit this to him, he’s right. It’s really, really bad. I can see that, I can hear that, but I’m hooked because it’s so bad that it’s almost art. I want to know just how bad it can get. Last week one girl managed to sing an entire song out of tune on prime-time and that’s what I call unmissable TV.

Listening to…..

I’ve rediscovered the joys of BBC Radio 4. I’m not sure why, but having been a constant listener since I arrived in France, I just stopped listening to English language radio a couple of years ago. Perhaps it had something to do with me discovering some good programmes on France Inter, or maybe it was those unbearably smug people with the home-county accents who squat the phone-in programmes on Radio 4, or perhaps it was because I don’t feel engaged by British current affairs anymore.
Anyway, over the past week or so, I’ve been doing a lot of mindless marking while listening to some really great programmes on the Radio 4 site. The advantage of the internet over the tranny is that you can just zap the boring programmes and listen to the ones you’re really interested in.
I’ve heard about what it feels like to be the "persecuted" English minority in Scotland, ....... I've followed the stages in the development of a potential treatment for HIV by one of the big bad pharmaceutical companies in "Quest for a Cure"; learned about inguinal hernia operations (P has already had 3 which doesn't appear to be a record); been left gaping-mouthed at what actually happens to the clothes we give to charity in "Clothes Line" — did you know that the charities sell them to go-betweens who sell them on to stallholders in markets in Africa? I thought that a needy little orphan was hand-picked to wear the baby clothes I had donated. I've also been learning about serendipidous discoveries in science (rubber for example). I’ve heard Lionel Schriver talking about her book We have to talk about Kevin, decided that I don’t really want to read it but been interested in the fact that she made a deliberate decision not to have children herself because she is too single-minded about her work and was afraid she might neglect a child if she wanted to get a book finished. I’ve also listened to Ian McEwan talking about Saturday and that made me want to read bits of it all over again (I completely missed the James Joyce allusion in the last line). I was surprised to hear just how much Oliver Sacks’ voice and style fitted how I had imagined him (batty professor, nothing like Robin Williams in the film Awakenings)as I listened to him discuss The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I also listened to a documentary about nuns who have donated their brains to science in a large scale trial about Alzheimers. (In fact, Alzheimer’s has been a bit of a leitmotif this week, it came up an the episode of the Sopranos that I watched, and it's also mentioned in McEwan’s Saturday, in a character he based on his own mother. The statistics are frightening.)
This morning I’ve listened to a woman talk about lupus and am, as I type, finding out all about the advantages of opensource scholarly publication in “Publish or be Damned" a programme about scientific publishing and the scandalous cost of learned journals (would you believe it costs £9000 for 12 issues of Physicosomethingobscure published by Elsevier).

Update: it's not a good idea to listen to something interesting as you type, it leads to lots of typos.

Vacation Vacillation

It used to be so easy. We would decide where we wanted to go, we’d go to the travel agent’s and ask for the cheapest possible ticket, we’d pack our stuff and head off.
Since those days of carefree travel, two complicating factors have arisen:
1) two little children
2) the internet

The children complicate things because we’re no longer brave enough to set out into the unknown with some money in our pockets but no itinerary and no hotel. We’re not flexible enough to pack our (now voluminous) gear up every day and hit the road in whatever direction takes our fancy. We’re not yet cruel enough to inflict multiple museum, garden and ancient ruin visits on them so there has to be a pool and a reasonable amount of sun. But we are just a little bit cruel, so a children’s club to abandon them in occasionally would also be nice. Of course, we need to be able to see them during the night so two double rooms aren’t an option unless the hotel explicitly encourages child room rampage. No, we need a family room. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the boring, middle class, middle aged, mid-budget, bulging midriff category.

The internet complicates matters because it offers FAR, FAR too much choice for people as indecisive as we are. But I am nothing if not compulsively thorough in my quest for the perfect holiday at the perfect price.

First of all, I use several of the aggregators that bring all of those cheap holidays together, then I laboriously trawl through the individual sites and pick out the packages that are within our budget, seem to suit our requirements and look attractive. Then I work out a very complicated mental logarithmic calculation allocating points for climate, novelty, charter/regular flight, departure point (Bordeaux or Toulouse), amount of blue sky in the photos, proximity of beach (and fifty seven other items). Then we dither for a week or so and inevitably some of the possibilities fill up and disappear.

This time we narrowed it down to Morocco, Croatia, Tunisia or Tenerife.

We eliminated Morocco because both Marrakech and Agadir are fully booked from Bordeaux and none of the packages from Toulouse include family rooms.

Croatia was tempting because it looks so beautiful, but the temperatures are a tad lukewarm in April and again, there are no family rooms.

Tunisia looks like a good alternative to Morocco although it’s not as warm at Easter. So what about hotels? Well, one is 3km from Monastir airport mmmm I hear charter planes droning overhead in the middle of the night. Another is separated from the beach by a “road” no doubt a roaring motorway. But look there’s also one in Hammamet and it’s right on the beach and even has an indoor swimming pool, which would be excellent if the weather was mediocre. Let’s go for that one then. Okay, but wait a minute, if we fly out of Toulouse, we save 500€ in all, that’s quite a lot of money. Yes, but what if the flights are in the middle of the night? How would we manage to get there for 4 am? Oh no, oh no, we just can’t decide. Let's sleep on it.

What about Tenerife then? This looks perfect — regular flight, we can even add on a couple of days at the end; not in a big resort but a nice quiet one; family apartments, fantastic climate with sun practically guaranteed, a lovely big pool and a little one for the children. This sounds perfect.

There’s just one thing — we went there last year.
Are we ready to be THAT boring?

Multitask Breakdown

The post that went with that picture of the blossom got gobbled up somewhere. All I wanted to say was that everyone else was posting pics of spring blossom and I had to chip in with mine. Actually, it's not my blossom, the tree belongs to Sarah and Guy, and although this is the first day of spring, it's raining in Bordeaux.

Losing posts is what comes of trying to multitask in the early evening with two children crying out for printouts of Babar and Narnia colouring pages. I'm also trying to:

Find an cheap holiday in Morocco or maybe Tunisia (has anyone been to Hammamet or Jerba?)

Arrange alternative accommodation for a couple of classes because our usual classrooms are under student siege. I don't like dodging picket lines, but the medicine students aren't on strike.

Make pumpkin soup (the last of the year?)

Fit in a phone call to a friend in Edinburgh. Since I've had free hot running phone calls to almost the entire world, I don't seem to have phoned anyone.

Order flowers for Mother's Day on Sunday.

Get myself psychologically prepared for another mind-numbing session of exam marking.

And all of that while doing the eternal juggling with whites and coloureds, and the waltz of clean dishes out, dirty dishes in. And there isn't a single bottle of white wine in the house and P won't be home from work until tomorrow evening. Wail.....

Prunus blossom

Prunus blossom
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

My mate Einstein

As I may already have told you, Albert and I share a birthday.



Make your own.