Rainy Sunday afternoon

It seems to have rained every single Sunday for months now. Today, we decided to go to the Christmas market on the Allées de Tourny. Christmas markets are crap, especially when they make your shoes muddy. So we did a quick detour into a big toy store, then back down to the quayside via the Foire d'Automne and its antique stalls, before walking over the bridge that Tadashi Kawamata designed for Evento, an arts festival in Bordeaux. It's made from windfall maritime pine. The authorities don't seem to be able to bring themselves to have it dismantled.


(All photos taken with my iPhone)

Vacuous

It used to be that if I had a seed of a thought, I'd take some time and work it up into a couple of paragraphs to blog. Now I just pare it down to the bare minimum and burp it out in a tweet. The words I've tweeted most over the past two years are apparently: time, Bordeaux and kids. I'm not proud of that. Oh no.

cloud - lesley graham | tweet cloud via kwout

Climbing Everest. In a day. With no coat on.

I, in turn, have interviewed Leadia from Breeder's Digest. Her answers really made me laugh.

1. You have five children (I bow down to you!), and I have a friend who is expecting her fifth child. What advice would you give her about organising a large family?

Um….good luck??? LOL! Honestly, I don’t know that I’m the best person to give advice since I muddle through life searching for the answer to this question myself. But here goes. You either have to be anal or indifferent. There is no in between – seriously. You have to fully commit to being one or the other. There are tons of domestic goddesses out there who run their families like a Fortune 50 company, but I’m not one of them. I’ve tried out myriad scheduling/organizing/planning methods but ultimately I still get caught with my pants down…. it’s 4:30 and you have no idea what’s for dinner and you have 2 kids to get to soccer practices on 2 different sides of town and ultimately that’s when you get that humiliating phone call where the secretary from your child’s elementary school is calling to tell you that the Girl Scout meeting ended 30 minutes ago and where the hell are you? Indifference allows for more success because if you’re always on time and put-together, the one time you are late and disorganized it’s devastating. When you routinely miss deadlines, forget appointments and are constantly driving forgotten lunches/sports equipment/homework to their rightful owners, the one time that you show up on time or with your shit together it’s like you climbed Everest. In less than a day. With no coat on. For real. It’s that amazing.

2. You live in the American Midwest. What would you say are the advantages and disadvantages of living in that part of the USA?

Well, the Midwest is great if you like flat land, crooked politics, mediocrity, and fattening foods. Seriously, it’s quite possible that I live in the most generic area of the universe. Around these parts “Olive Garden” is considered an ethnic restaurant. Illinois, in particular, is famous for its cruel lack of seasons. We have only two: insanely hot and freaking cold. Winter lasts 17 months on average.

On the up side, the Midwest is home to some of the most genuine and incredibly friendly people you’ll ever meet. I live less than an hour outside Chicago and it truly is the best city in the world. Oh, and since we are less than 30 minutes from the Wisconsin border we are also less than 30 minutes from the largest concentration of indoor water parks in the world, which if you have five kids, is kind of a bonus. And OPRAH! How I could I forget Oprah? If you live in Illinois and don’t mention her you get kicked out of the state. Immediately.

2. In the midst of all of this child-rearing, you somehow manage to find time to study too. I wonder how you do that, and what you see yourself doing in, let's say, five years' time. Will you be a full-time mother or a full-time mother with a job?

((SIGH)) good question. To be honest, I don’t sleep very much. The baby is up by 6:00 a.m. and it’s 9:00 p.m. by the time the older ones go to bed so the hours between 9:30 and 1:00 a.m. are my personal “office hours” if you will. I am totally Type A and I have a need to do everything well all at once which leads to a lot of anxiety and multiple refills on a Zoloft prescription. I always feel like I’m doing 90 things 30% well when I’d rather do one or two things 90% well so I’m trying to streamline. I still can’t decide what I want to be when I grow up. In 5 years, who knows? I might be training to be a vet. The one thing I do try to do is carve out time for me. I adore my family, but it’s so important for them to see that I have an identity that is separate from them and that I have my own interests too. Thankfully my husband is a very patient man.

4. You are a very funny woman - who are your comedy heroes?

Thank you! I tend to love anyone who is witty rather than hilarious and who has a bit of intellect behind their comedy. I also appreciate people whose wit is a little offbeat. And sarcasm -- I adore sarcasm. I love Larry David and most of the cast of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Same for Christopher Guest and his regular cast of improv players – especially Jane Lynch who is brilliant on “Glee”. My husband and I recently watched Wanda Sykes’ comedy special on HBO and I seriously wet my pants. We were both gasping for air. I worked in a comedy club in college as a cocktail waitress and I gave terrible service because I was way too invested in watching the talent! My mother is also accidentally hilarious which I also think is one of the best kinds of funny.

5. You husband manages to get some me-time when he goes off on hunting trips. If you could take a trip too, where would you go, what would you do and who would you go with?

Oh, those hunting trips! How I wish I’d married a stamp collector!

I fantasize about all kinds of vacation scenarios but honestly, it’s hard to get a group of girlfriends together because there’s the husband/children/babysitting matrix to complete and ultimately stars never align. I love to read and that’s a passion that’s had to take a heavy hit thanks to the kids. I’m pretty much reduced to skimming the pages of US Weekly when I’m on the toilet. So…my idea of heaven would be a quiet hotel room, no traveling companions, a stack of good books and absolutely no schedule at all.

6. Tell me one quirky fact about each of your five children.

Oooh, good question. Let me think.

Well of course they are all fabulously cultured, brilliant and attractive!

My oldest, Hayden was nearly 10 lbs. at birth but you’d never know by looking at him now. He subsists on a diet of cold cereal, Hot Cheetos, mac & cheese, and hot dogs. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all. We hope he’ll be back up to his birth-weight by puberty ;)

Weston is my 2nd son. He was such a sweet baby that I nicknamed him my “muffin top”. He’s a massively intense kid now, but the name stuck so now he goes by “Topper” . Weston’s real name resulted from a stalemate between my husband and I over 2 different names. I happened to have read in “People” the week before that Nicholas Cage had a son named Weston and it kind of stuck with me and we went with it as the tiebreaker. So even though I think Nic Cage is kind of a tool, he had a part in naming my son.

My eldest daughter, Eliza talks more than anyone I know. She even talks in her sleep. She also lives in a state of constant bliss. In her world, everyone rides a unicorn, has candy for dinner, and enjoys affordable universal healthcare. We envy her.

When I was pregnant with my youngest son Kellan, I got hit with a massive case of pre-partum depression. It landed me a stint in a 12-week outpatient mental health facility. That kid is the happiest, most content child in the universe. I’m convinced it was all the Zoloft.

My baby girl, Larissa is a miracle. Her odds of surviving to birth and being born “normal” were only 15%. 14 weeks into my pregnancy she was diagnosed with a massive (11mm) fetal cystic hygroma (Google it and get depressed). It’s almost always fatal and if not, it’s a harbinger of devastating chromosomal abnormalities. She’s perfect except for the fact that she still has my DNA…which might actually negate the whole “normal” thing.

Expermimentation

Andy from Blaiser Blog interviewed me for Neil's Great Interview Experiment 2009. I enjoyed answering his questions. Go and have a look if you like that sort of thing.

Le marketing

I recently did a two-day interpreting job on the subject of marketing and brands. For some reason —perhaps post-traumatic avoidance of cerebral overload — after I've done one of these jobs I have usually erased all memory of the content within a couple of days.

The only things I remember about this one are:

a) that marketeting people really admire Apple and will refer to the company's success at least once every half hour.
b) that marketing people like to talk about a "company's DNA" which becomes really, really annoying after two days.
c) that French marketing people like to use English words. I kept this list of some of the terms I translated from English back into English: le story-telling, le buzz, le hypermarketing, le supply-chain, le empowerment, leverager, mainstream, focusser sur, le sourcing, le user-generated content, le slow-wear, l'urban-wear, les malls, un peu hype, la peoplisation, les community brands, challenger, du display, le push, le pull, le crowd-sourcing, votre page rank, l'insight, le storyboard, le couponing, les early adopters, les user labs, and last but not least my favourite: il faut shifter les choses.

Bad plane, good plane

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on this blog complaining about airline companies (eg. here and here and here) ... and here I go again.

My Mum has been over visiting us for the past week or so. As usual, I booked her ticket over the internet and she provided the credit card details. All quite simple really. Isn't the internet wonderful? Except that amateur travel agents like myself should at least read the whole travel itinerary instead of just skimming through it as I did.

48 hours before she left, my Mum looked over her e-ticket and gasped - "but I'm flying from Bordeaux to Orly and then on from Roissy!" Ooops.

I spent most of the following morning trying to get Air France to change the flight to Orly to a flight to Roissy which actually left 40 minutes later, would have avoided my old Mum collectiing her suitcase, lugging it out to the concourse and into a bus then enduring a long, unnecessary bus journey right across Paris while she worried about whether or not she would get off at the right terminal before checking her bags in again. I mean you don't exactly need a degree in logistics to work out which is the most efficient solution, do you?

But no, Air France didn't want her to fly to the airport she was leaving from:
"Le billet est non modifiable et non remboursable Madame."
"And what if I bought a new ticket from Bordeaux to Roissy?"
"Ah non, you can't do that. You would have to buy a new ticket all the way to Edinburgh"

It all turned out all right in the end. My Mum made it across Paris this afternoon, but it did make the end of her stay stressful. And I just can't help feeling that the Air France people actually got some pleasure out of punishing her for my not reading the itinerary properly: much more gratifying for them, I'm sure, than that silly old customer satisfaction thing.

But now for the good airline story. Ryanair announced yesterday that it is introducing a new route from Edinburgh to Bordeaux next March. Woohoo. For the first time in my twenty-something years here I will be be able to fly straight to Scotland without passing through Paris, London, Brussels (remember SABENA?) or Amsterdam. Okay, it may not be flying in comfort, it is Ryanair after all, but it will be cheap and I'm very excited about the prospect of popping over for a weekend and even better, having friends and family pop over to see us. What could possibly go wrong?

Weekend in San Sebastien

Weekend in San Sebastien, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

San Sebastien is only a couple of hours south of Bordeaux, but it's a whole different world down there. I love the vibrancy of the place.

Les P'tits Cageots

Although I enjoy cooking, I don't enjoy the weekly drudgery of supermarket shopping. I find something soul-destroying about walking up and down the same aisles week after week varying the brands I buy just to buck the routine of always putting the same old products in the same old trolley. In fact, I quite often vary supermarkets just to spice up the housewifely routine: one week Simply Market, the next Casino.... I don't even really enjoy going to the market any more: same old stall holders in the same old places.

Readers, I have been freed from this drudgery. A few weeks ago a friend launched a new service called Les Ptits Cageots that bobos of my ilk were crying out for - organic / farm-produced /fair-trade products ordered over the internet delivered to our door at the time we want for no extra charge!

We've used the service three times now and I'm still wallowing in the liberation of it! No more whizzing round boring supermarkets; no more flaccid meat in polystyrene trays; no more impossibly shiny fruit and veg. This stuff comes from small producers in towns and villages around Bordeaux, the Charente and the Dordogne. It's all good.

We feel virtuous because we know we're eating well, giving our kids healthy stuff and supporting a good cause to boot — Les P'tits Cageots is what is known as une association d'insertion which means that it is a non-profit-making organisation that creates jobs for people who really need them and helps them (re-)adapt to the work place. I realise just how self-satisfied that sounds, but sometimes it can be good to be self-satisfied, can't it?

A cageot is one of those wooden crates for fruit and vegetables and that's exactly what our order comes in. If we're short of time and inspiration, we can choose to have that week's pre-selected crate. Perhaps it comes from watching to much Ready, Steady Cook on BBC Prime during my two pregnancies but I actually quite like having set seasonal ingredients imposed on me for the week and making what I can from them. Recently, I've made potimarron soup, oriental lentil salad (recipe from fellow Bordelaise Papilles and Pupilles' site), rougail de saucisses de boeuf (a dish we discovered in La Réunion), pears in red wine and pears in white wine with aniseed. We've had two evenings with friends fuelled by excellent organic wines and the tenderest faux-filet possible on the barbecue — until this week, the evenings were still mild enough for us to dine outside, believe it or not.

If you live in or around Bordeaux, give it a try. I'm sure you won't regret it. And if you do, I'll eat my cageot.

Les Ptits Cageots

Blue is the colour

My favourite colour is, and always has been, blue so I was pleased when Pascale from Paris-Glasgow tagged me to post seven blue things from around my house. Much more pleased than if it had been yellow, or green. Here they are:

I bought this print from Julien Merrow-Smith on his Postcard from Provence site. I love the powder blue sky.


This cornflower blue tunic has been one of the items I've worn most this summer.

The walls in our bathroom are blue (with a worrying grey mould detail in one corner). I bought this clock just the other day.


I have two of these soap dishes. They were a present from friends in the Dordogne. I keep a fine tooth comb in this one.

I bought this book in that second-hand shop in Saint Andrews but haven't started it yet. I'm a great admirer of Jenni Calder's biography of RLS.


This is my keyring, often to be found in odd places around the house. I bought it in Greece at Easter.

We have this patchwork on the wall in our bedroom.

So what's blue in your houses Materfamilias, Mausi, Andy, NMJ, and Princesse Ecossaise?

If we'd had Facebook ...

Thinking about possible status updates if we'd had Facebook circa 1980.

Lesley :

• is listening to the new Thin Lizzy LP - it's beezer.
• is eating a walnut whip.
• is typing this on an electric typewriter - isn't new technology great?
• has a perfect flick in her hair today à la Farrah Fawcett Majors.
• just finished "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull". Deep.
• is going to the Scout Disco tonight. Hope they play A Whiter Shade of Pale for the last slow dance.
• feels sick - had a few too many Martini bianco and lemonades last night at the Mexican Bar in Roslin.

Saint Andrews

I almost forgot to tell you about my weekend in Saint Andrews a fortnight ago. For some reason the only photographs I took over the four days I spent there were all of whisky glasses - which perhaps explains why I almost forgot to tell you about it. Saint Andrews is a fabulous place - all town and no gown at the moment because the students are still on vacation, and we had warm, sunny summer weather on all four days.

I was there for a conference - a great success with plenty of familiar faces and interesting papers. My own paper wasn't booed off the stage so I'm counting it as a success too. Highlights of the conference social programme were a wine tasting with Billy Kay (the author of Knee Deep in Claret, a book I still find fascinating) and that whisky tasting - 5 malts. I also enjoyed a fruitful half-hour rummage through the shelves of a second-hand book store.

We were all accommodated in Halls of Residence which made me feel as if I was eighteen again - those halcyon days when all of my worldly possessions fitted comfortably into one small room; when I could eat what I liked without getting fat. In memory of those days, I partook heartily of the black pudding and eggs and hash browns and bacon, and lorne sausage on offer in halls every morning. Continental breakfasts could do with a bit of beefing up really, couldn't they?

It just so happens that a couple of my old flatmates live in Saint Andrews so I stayed on for an extra day to spend some time and drink some wine with them. Although we've kept up over the past years, and met up for lunch quite often, I hadn't seen their children for a very long time - turns out they're fully grown adults with responsible jobs and cars and deep voices, which was a little disorienting because I half-remembered them in pushchairs. Good job I didn't take them any presents because they've obviously passed the tube of smarties stage.

Bouncing along in my Skecher Shape Ups

This is my first foray into the area of reviews for free stuff, so forgive me if you think I've gone over to the dark side - but hey, free stuff!

Anyway, I got a pair of Skecher Shape Ups in August, just in time for all that walking through the pleasant Scottish countryside we had planned to do. It turned out that the countryside was mostly under three feet of water so I can exclusively reveal that Skecher Shape Ups do not help you walk on water, but they do keep your feet dry as you wade through puddles.

The shoes are described as "stylish". This, it seems, is a matter of opinion and age. My Mum thought they were very "Californian", P. thought they looked comfortable, the children thought they were hilarious and my 15-year-old nephew just shook his head in embarrassed disbelief.

When you first put the shoes on, the initial sensation is one of added height - a bit like wearing platform shoes in the seventies but without the accompanying Bay City Rollers soundtrack. You really do feel as if you're walking on spongy ground.

Off I went to try them out and nobody laughed in the street at my ginormous trainers, proving if proof were needed that 15-year-olds know nothing about style for the elegant aunt about town. They come with a booklet and a DVD which explains that you shouldn't wear them for any more than 45 mins the first time you go out with them. So I bounced along country lanes with the recommended rolling movement from heel to toe for exactly three-quarters of an hour. And I have to say that by the time I got home, I really did feel as if my calves and buttocks had had a really good work-out.

As the days went by, I got more and more used to walking on several layers of sole, and whenever I wasn't wearing them, I felt somewhat diminished and frankly flat-footed.

I'm not sure if Bordeaux city centre is ready yet for Skechers Shape Ups, but I'm ready to try them out on dry land.

Insider

Have you flown with BmiBaby lately? Did you by any chance read the destination guide at the back of the in-flight magazine? Did you notice the name of the "The Insider" for Bordeaux? (scroll down, way down).

Admire my self-control as I resist regaling you with tales the extra money I had to shell out to BmiBaby at Manchester airport twice this summer, despite having provided them with that highly confidential and precious info for free.

I'm hoping to develop an alternative career as an "amateur photographer" (?) and tourist tipster.

Scotland Summer '09

We're back. It was the wettest August on record in south-west Scotland. Really. Flooding, torrential unrelenting rain, lochs turning into seas.

Och well, we had a good time anyway. And it was 35°C here in Bordeaux yesterday, which in my opinion is just as unpleasant as a bit of rain.

16.16 #14-16

This was the first dull day we'd had and P. and I went into Périgueux to buy a few things at Leclerc - notably mugs. Drinking coffee out of bowls for a few days is all very well but after a couple of weeks the novelty value wears off.



This is me working on a 19th C book for an upcoming conference.



This was my last full day in the Dordogne - the day of the village méchoui. Usually this big sheep roast takes place in an idyllic spot beside the river Isle, but this year it was raining so we all crowded into the old school yard.

And tomorrow (well, later today actually) we're off to Scotland for further adventures.

I'm going to try to keep the 16.16 photo thing up for a bit longer but I'm moving it over to my tumblr blog Desultory Notes which I've really only used as an intermittent link dump until now.

16.16 #10 - 13

On day 10, we were waiting for P's four aunts to arrive for crèpes and drinks on the terrasse. E. had put on her best skirt.



These are P's golfing shoes. We'd been to the Domaine de Essendiéras in the morning and he'd done a bit of putting while E had a riding lesson. Most of the kids on the domaine are Dutch and E was the only French-speaker at the lesson but that didn't seem to phase her at all.



Here we are visiting our friend Dominique and his family at their absolutely gorgeous village of stone gîtes, Le Hameau du Sentier des Sources, not far from Sarlat. We'd just had a delicious lunch of cou d'oie farci, which sounds a lot better in French than in English. All of the other photos really were taken at exactly 16.16 but this one was taken a little later because I was actually swimming up and down that pool at the allotted time.



This is Zac in the garden of a little house that his grandparents rent out in Jaillac. We were there to take better photographs for the new, improved website that I'm trying to make them (link later).

16.16 #6-9

This is day 6 and we're visiting one of P's sisters on the campsite that she and her in-laws own and run, Le Camping du Lac in Plazac. The children are spoilt for choice because there's a lake and a swimming pool to jump into. Decisions, decisions. I took this picture from a horizontal position, again.



We stopped in Corgnac to reserve places on the Vélorail for a couple of days later.



E and another aunt on their way up the hill to Château de Laxion. They were probably talking about the car crash we'd just witnessed on the road in. Actually the children only heard the massive bang of it, then P and I ran down the hill to see if any help was needed. Thankfully it wasn't, although there was a little boy in the back of one of the cars who rented the air with his screams of fright. The Château itself was interestingly delapidated and everybody enjoyed the medieval show.



On day 9, we were in Brive visiting my friend Célia and we hadn't quite finished lunch. I was Célia's witness at her wedding in 1987 - the children didn't recognise me in the photograph she'd dug out. Probably because I looked like a poodle.
Célia's son Alex gave Z an electric guitar and made him the happiest 8-year-old boy in the world.

Am I boring you yet?

16.16 #2-5

By day 2 we had cracked out the barbecue and the Macbook.



Day 3 saw us at the Repetto factory shop then Le Jardin d'Hélys an outdoor/indoor art fantasy where I took the Into the Wildesque photo above.



Another day another barbecue.



On our way to the outdoor municipal pool in Excideuil.

16.16 #1

16.16 #1, originally uploaded by Lezzles.

When we went to the Dordogne on holiday, I decided tht I would take a photograph every day at exactly 16H16 and post it to this blog. I stole this idea lock, stock and barrel from my friend Sarah who has been taking a photograph at 11H47 and posting them to her photo blog Eleven47 every day for years.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the Edge connection in our part of the Dordogne was just to weak for me to post anything more complicated than a tweet so I've saved them all up and I'll give them to you in instalments.

This first photograph is of the terrasse on one side of the house. We're lucky enough to be able to use the house next door to P's parents every summer so we're independent but close enough to eat together and the children can wander from one house to the other depending on where there's an open pot of Nutella. The house has this big terrasse which is actually the roof of the garage below, where we eat and watch the village go by - usually to the communal bins which are just across the road. I tend to spend a lot of time reading horizontally on the swing seat.

Dumping ground

Since we last met, I have been to GB twice. Once to drop E off for a week at Grandma's and once to pick her up again. The going was eventful, involving an easyJet flight to Bristol that was two hours late which meant that we missed our "connecting" flight to Newcastle. Luckily there was another one later - but it was also running very late. We got there in the end but much sweat was sweated and much waiting was done at the other end. Thankfully, the coming back to get her was relatively smooth although sleazy BmiBaby did manage to grab £30 from my clenched fist for airport check-in.

Incidentally, while we were sitting on the carpet in the departure lounge in Bordeaux on the first of our long waits, I twittered "Plane delayed by 2 hours. Damn you easyJet" or words to that effect. Within a couple of minutes someone from easyJet had twittered back something about hoping they were keeping us informed. People are obviously being employed to palm disgruntled twitterers off with false concern.

Robots have also been looking out for me. Last week I desultorily searched Locasun for a gite rental in an obscure village in the Dordogne. Since then, my home page on social networking sites has featured a side bar with ads for rentals in said village. I don't find that helpful, I find it creepy.