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.

Reasons to be Cheerful: Part 44

Big sun in the sky, a side of smoked salmon in the fridge, listening to Jack Johnson, 12 creme eggs (make that 11, no 10), a sparkly turquoise necklace, happy smiley students, cheque in the post, Kenzo perfume, a pile of new books, children being children, me being a muse, birthday cards on the shelf, Easter holidays on the horizon, an early night.

With apologies to Ian Dury and there was just no way I could make it rhyme.

Playing Doctors and Nurses

I think I first read the following riddle, which still seems to be doing the rounds, in the 1970s in the Reader's Digest :

A father and a son were in a car accident. The father went home to rest. The son was taken to the hospital for minor surgery. The surgeon came in and said: "I can't operate on this boy because he's my son." How is this possible?

Answer: The surgeon was his mother.

As children of the '60s we went through all sorts of lateral thinking solutions before we got to that one: he was adopted and the doctor was his real father; the man in the car wasn't really his father but his grandfather; his father had a twin brother; he'd been abducted by aliens. A woman surgeon was the very last thing we thought of.
I'm frankly dismayed by the number of women students of medicine who still automatically and consistently employ the personal pronoun "he" when referring to a doctor and the strange thing is that there are more young women studying medicine than men.
But perhaps it's not all that surprising really when one of the major publishers of medical textbooks is using the image on the front cover of its current catalogue:


The message is clear if stylized: doctors are intelligent men with square jaws who look down on admiring little nurses.
While we're on the subject, has anyone else been reading Dr Crippen's ongoing diatribe against specialist nurses? I don't live in the UK and I have no experience of specialist nurses and I'm more than willing to believe that the National Health Service is slowly being flushed down the toilet, and that the usurpation by specialist nurses of some of the power traditionally held by doctors is somehow part of that process. I refuse, however, to swallow his elitist guff about a group of specialist nurses:

This gaggle of well-meaning women have neither the training nor the intellectual capacity to understand what is going on, and are incapable of making judgements.

Despite Dr Crippen's protestations to the contrary, that to me is sexist language. What do you think?

Today, 8th March, has been declared blog against sexism day. That was my contribution.

Lost Forever

The Sopranos Season Six starts in the USA on March 12th. Goody, goody (or even baddy, baddy).

You may remember that episode of The Sopranos in which Tony bellows at his mother Livia telling her just what a f*****ing useless grandmother she is to his kids. The reason ? He’s just come across an album that she was supposed to fill up with photos and memories for the children and the pages are all still blank. Carmela’s parents have filled theirs up, why couldn’t she ?

I sympathise with poor old Livia.

My children both have hopelessly empty baby albums on their bookshelves. Date first tooth appeared: empty. Photos of first birthday party: blank. Family tree to fill in : zilch. First words spoken : gaping void.

I do have their first ultrasound pictures and their hospital bracelets somewhere (where?) and I did keep a lock of their baby hair — although I can’t for the life of me work out which is which.

I do feel a little guilty about this failure on my part. I mean, I actually bought the albums myself, imagining the fun I would have filling them in, cutting out photos, sticking in little scraps of ribbon and wool that would trigger tender memories years later. Writing down each new bon mot. Somehow, in the whirlwind of the baby years, I just never got round to it.

I don’t have a baby album of my own but my Mum did keep every single birthday card I received until I was twelvish. Some babyhoods, of course, are hyper-documented and I feel even more inadequate when I read Dooce’s latest monthly letter to her daughter. She writes :

Sometimes I go back and read the things I wrote to you in the early months and I realize that I’ve already forgotten half of what happened, and if it weren’t for what I’ve written here I could have lost certain memories forever.

I just hope the children don’t decide on the mafia as a career path when they grow up. Otherwise I may end up as fish food . Maybe I should just burn the empty baby-album evidence now, or maybe I could just make it all up. Do you think they’d mind?

It's a funny old B'sphere

I always used to think that Dooce was a bit of a blogsnob because there was no comments box on her site. Now I know why. Talk about opening the floodgates: she's had over a 1200 comments in about 24 hours and the number still seems to be climbing. It would take a full working day to read all of them but from a cursory glance, I'd say that they're pretty good quality comments too. There's none of that sycophantic "I love your blog. You're so funny" stuff you see on some other famous blogs. Although the whole concept of famous and A-list is obviously relative: I doubt anyone is playing in the same league as Dooce. And she IS funny and I do looooove her blog (but not the photos of the dog, and not really the photos of the small person if I'm honest). Obviously readers want to interact with their blogheros, but on that sort of scale, it's not a conversation it can't be anything other than an enormous, unmanageable, sequential cacophony however civilised and reflective.

I suspect that a lot of people, like Dooce, would like to live entirely off blogging (I'd quite like to make a living entirely from reading blogs, the hours are better). Jason Kottke tried it for a year but is giving up, citing lack of traffic, and inability to build a "cult of personality". Do, I detect a little pique in his post on the subject? Any tension there should make for good small talk in his opening "conversation" with Heather Armstrong at the big Blog thing in Austin, Texas. My advice Jason? Get yourself a baby, buy a dog.

If I was contemplating a writing life based on cult of personality I think I'd go for a newspaper career — same reader expectations, same deadlines, but you don't have to pose for the camera.

And finally, you can blame Boing Boing for this. I'm not 100% sure what smartfilter is but just had to have the picture.



Ooops, apologies, I've just gone back and corrected six typos in that post. Note to self: don't write posts in bed anymore.

Thank God, a meme

Can't think of anything worth writing about unless you'd like to hear about departmental (emphasis on the mental) politics, a very bad Indian meal, or mesotherapy. So I'm grabbing this meme encountered at Badbadbadger's and I'm running with it. You can all fall out now.

I had to change the original instructions because I still can't do scoring out with Mac and Blogger. So here's my own system:

• green for the ones I've read,
• an asterix if I have them on my bookshelf (or in a box in the loft),
• red for the ones I won't read,
• italics for the ones I might read and
• brackets around those I've never heard of.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *(I started this anbd thought it was drivel)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger* (read it when I was 12. Favourite line at the time: "He was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat".)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald*
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling (Read the first H.P., do not feel impelled to read the others. Will my children want this one read to them?)
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Borrowed it from the library and never got round to reading it)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell* (Read it a school)
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller* (Does anyone still read this?)
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (What was i reading when everyone else was reading this?)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Loved it)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding (another "required reading" school book)
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (did I really read this or do I just think I read it?)
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (was given this as a present when it first came out. Didn't finish it for another five or six years)
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
(The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini) Never heard of it, but I like the title
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I felt that there was something dishonest at the heart of this book. In my experience, dead people are dead.)
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown (puleeze)
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
(Neuromancer - William Gibson)
(Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson)
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley*
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis (missed out on this. I think my primary school teacher was reading us Biggles when everyone else was in this fantasy world.)
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (Borrowed this one from the library too and didn't read it. There's a librarian with very good taste in English books at our local library or médiathèque as they like to call it.)
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
(Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman)
Atonement - Ian McEwan *(Liked this one except for the ending. Loved "Saturday")
(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (started, couldn't finish)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Picked this one up in the library last Tuesday and wondered if perhaps I shouldn't borrow it. Maybe I will)
Dune - Frank Herbert (Sat through this at the cinema. Despite Sting's good looks, that was quite enough)

Who chose these book titles and why I wonder? It's a strange mixture.

What big feet you have!

Here are my brand new beautiful brown suede cowboy boots. Whadyathink? And more importantly, how much do you think I paid for them?
It's a pity you can't stroke their chocolatey, soft loveliness.
(I cannot believe I've just spent twenty minutes taking those photos and making them into a photo cloud. I have work to do! Lots of work to do! I must legitimise this waste of time with some sort of pseudo-pedagogical application.)

Suede boot 360 by picturecloud.com

Ingrid Betancourt

I don't think there is any woman I admire more than Ingrid Betancourt who has now been a hostage for 4 years.

A Week in the Basque Country

Just back from another trip to the Basque Country during our half-term break. We stayed in a big old farm house with lots an lots of friends. Apart from us and the florist and the landscape gardener and the neo-hoteliers and the dentist and the doctor and the teacher and the unionist and the school administrator, and the soon-to-be B&B landlady, the house was overun by a gaggle of excited children. During the day we hiked over hill and dale. Lunch was serrano ham and sheep's cheese. In the evening, magret was grilled in the massive hearth and much wine and hilarity flowed at a very long table.

For some reason most of my photographs seem to be of windows.

Day in the Dordogne

notices
Originally uploaded by Lezzles.

Click here for more....

Talking the talk

I seem to remember seeing a TEFL-type job description somewhere — it may have been for lettori in Italy — that specified that all candidates must be fresh meat. Okay, that wasn't the actual expression that they used, it may have been something more like "linguistically and culturally fresh off the boat". Okay, it wasn't exactly that either, but you know what I mean, they didn't want anyone who'd been living abroad for any length of time and had gone more or less native. And I also seem to remember sucking air in through my teeth in exasperation. Poor people, did they really think that one could forget a language that quickly; become cut off from one's native culture that easily?
Well, no of course you can't, but you can very rapidly feel yourself slipping out of the loop of knowing what people at home are actually talking about (who is this Davina McCall?) and knowing what terms are actually acceptable. After all, when I first moved to France it was still perfectly all right to say someone was handicapped and coloured.
Even more importantly how can I tell which terms are cool.... or should that be hip? When my brother and I were teenagers, I remember my Mum asking us things like "So, is he going with her?" and we would dissolve in disdainful laughter. What a fool she was; didn't she know that you could only say "Is he going OUT with her"? For goodness sakes, wise up woman, we're in the late seventies, don't you know?
Well, I am that woman now. I'm middle-aged and I have the added disadvantage of living in a non-English -speaking country. I think I managed for a while to keep up but got stuck at the "I am so enjoying this..........not" stage which I no doubt picked up from a rerun of Friends.
There's only one consolation: my children probably won't know any better, just so long as I deprive them of any authentic English-language interaction with young native-speakers for the next ten years.

coComment

I seem to remember saying a while ago how great it would be if there was some way of centralising, collating and monitoring follow-up to the comments I had left littered across the blogosphere. coComment looks as if it might be that tool. It's an invitation-only beta at the moment but I ended up with two invites so if you'd like one, leave a comment.
(via pointblog.com)

UPDATE: It's gone

Other things that went well this weekend

Via Lifehacker found an application called Senuti that copied all the music on my iPod onto my PowerBook. Something I'd been trying to do for ages.

Bought a wifi stick on Ebay which should (fingers crossed, fingers crossed) mean that the family Imac gets internet again without us forking out for an airport card.

Discovered that an older cousin who likes to play at being the teacher can keep young children amused for almost an entire weekend.

Got 7/10 playing this word game.

Made Wendy's Linguine and Leeks. Delicious.

Sold the crappiest Michel Sardou CD in the history of French musak and made enough euros to buy a bottle of Tariquet. Fair exchange.

Here we go, here we go, here we go...

Scotland 20 - France
I have suffered through countless painful France-Scotland matches in the past nine years, ever the good loser. Needless to say, I was out this afternoon and missed our moment of glory. Allez L'Ecosse!

The first hour

I’ve asked my class of student bloggers to post about a typical day in their lives and in a spirit of egalitarianism, I had intended to make my own contribution but it turned out to be excruciatingly boring. I’m going to inflict the first hour on you anyway.

The alarm invariably goes off at 7H10 and I invariably ignore it. I get up half an hour later and rush around making coffee and hot chocolate, showering, waking the children up, dragging them out of bed and into hastily selected clothes. I never know what to eat in the morning so I often leave the house with only a couple of cups of black coffee swilling around inside me. I stuff my PowerBook into my workbag.
We walk to nursery school. On a good day the children skip; on a bad day they demand to be carried, sometimes both of them at the same time. Today, Z told me he had had enough of working. I accompany them to their makeshift classrooms; the school is undergoing a prolonged facelift. Some of the other parents say “bonjour”, some don’t bother. I cheek kiss the few I know a bit better. The children slip into their daytime identities.
Then it’s off to the tram stop, unravelling my grubby i-Pod headphones as I go. I usually have time to listen to three or four tracks on the way in. Today, I only got one — an interminable Led Zep number. And this is where I get off.