More English as she is spoke

While we are on the subject of real-life grammar that doesn't follow the rules, here's something else I've been noticing recently: the use of the present perfect in narratives about past events. Now the present perfect is a notoriously difficult tense for French speakers to master and I usually stick to some very simple rules when I'm teaching it. Basically, I tell my students that the present perfect is used to talk about the unfinished past (I have lived in Bordeaux for a long time); something that happened in the past but has an effect now (I have put on several kilos); and to talk about experience (I have never been to Kefalonica). [I'm being deliberately unimaginative. I've often thought that the example sentences I come up with spontaneously in the classroom could be used as a sort of free-association psychological test with very disturbing and perhaps incriminating results]. 
However, I know that many Americans don't use the present perfect in instances where we Brits would expect it; and now it appears that Brits are using it to recount stories that I would normally expect be told using the simple past. So that instead of: 

"He was walking down the road with his pitbull, and suddenly a puma appeared from nowhere and mauled them both."

you might hear:

"He's been walking down the road with his pitbull and suddenly a puma has appeared and it's mauled them both." 

     I think this might be more of a North of England thing, but I'm not sure and I also suspect that it is a way of making the narrative more immediate and real — much like the use of the present tense to recount past events. But I'm not sure. Any ideas? Any whacky example sentences for us to judge you by?

PS. Oh, and if by any chance you're one of my students, sorry I fibbed about those rules being hard and fast but I'll still take off marks if you write a a narrative essay using the present perfect.

Why do they do that?

I'm just back from a flying visit to Scotland made possible by a cheap Easyjet return flight. I'm not all that often in contact with English as she is spoke in natural environments and sometimes I'm struck by how the grammar I teach my students is much more prescriptive than authentic usage (teaching the distinction between less and few, for example, seems to me to be a waste of time since in real life the majority of English speakers don't care/know about the difference). Take this announcement made on the way out by a member of the cabin staff:

We do have a selection of duty-free goods available for sale on today's flight. Bla bla bla. We do have several fragrances from the Givenchy line and we do also have the new Lancôme mascara. Please don't hesitate to stop us as we do come through the cabin with the trolley.

Okay, I'm quoting from memory and I can't remember what the exact products were, but there really were all of those extraneous "do"s. What is that all about? I teach my students that "do" is only used in questions, negative statements and for emphasis. Yet, if any of my students had been on that flight they would instantly have observed that in the wild, "do" is used in affirmative sentences that require no emphasis.  I wish I had recorded the announcement on the flight over, and I actually got my iPhone out ready to do so on the way back but there was none. I really don't know what's going on: the speaker was a native speaker of English and appeared to be ad-libbing from a no-doubt memorized script. Perhaps the "do"s are supposed to make the announcement more formal, or more exciting? Any explanations gratefully received.

Commonplace notes

I"ve been tidying up my office-space this week and have uncovered numerous notebooks half-filled with notes from conferences, classes and meetings; shopping lists; to-do lists; words I intended to look up later; quotes of uncertain provenance, as well as the frankly undecipherable. Here are a few choice pickings.

• "He is Edinburgh's knight in a shiny donkey jacket." [Hero of a detective novel, I think.]

• "The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition." (Robert Louis Stevenson)

• "Il y a plus affaire à interpréter les interprétations qu'à interpréter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre sujet : nous ne faisons que nous entregloser." (Michel de Montaigne) 

• fissiparous 

• Blackbird / Dragonfly / Rose Branch. But also explicit objects. [something to do with Jacobitism. But what?]

• thaumaturgy  

• Learned that an Anglican priest took part in the beginning of the Basque movement. Can't remember name but initials are W. W. [after visiting the Basque museum in Bayonne] 

• Me llamo Lesley. Soy de origen escocesa. Vivo en Burdeos. [Notes from Spanish lessons]  

• nested wet clutch = embrayage à bain d'huile encastré [Notes taken during an interpreting job] 

• Passive pushing v. active pushing?  [Notes taken during presentation by student midwives] 

• Novels are often "loose, baggy monsters" dixit Henry James. 

All right, that's enough. I'm off to do some shredding.

Snapshots from my week.

A black cat coiled on a stone window ledge in the evening sun as I walk home from yoga.

On the walk to school, a stalk of something like ragged robin has taken root in a crack in the pavement: pale pink against grey concrete.

A gaggle of women in the too-hot garden: impossible to concentrate on any one of them.

A friendly thistle glimpsed in the park as I trundle past, again, and again.

Freewheeling past tourists on the Place Pey Berland, their heads buried in guidebooks. The wife reads the useless information out to her husband.

Home after midnight, we four settle briefly in deckchairs in the night cool of the garden.

A telephone conversation with my brother

My brother was in Cambodia a few months ago. I phoned him when he got back.

Me: So you were bitten by a snake?
Him: Yes.
Me: Did you panic?
Him: Not really, because the Cambodians working with us didn't seem too concerned.
Me: Right.
Him: Although, at times like that you suddenly realise that your life depends on people whose English consists of "yes, "no" and "Lady Gaga".

I'm still laughing.

Weekend de l'Ascension

The month of May is a great month for long weekends in France. This is the third in a row, le Weekend de l'Ascension, and we've been off since Thursday when we came to stay with our friend D in the lovely Hameau du Sentier des Sources in the Périgord Noir. Unfortunately the weather gods appear to have a bit of a gob on and it's been more like autumn than spring. Yesterday we visited La Maison Forte de Reignac and lingered beside the big fires roaring in several of the rooms. The only good thing about this sort of weather is that it stimulates the appetite (well mine at least) so we have appreciated the gastronomic delights of the region — and there are many — all the more. So excuse me while I drag myself back to the table for an estouffade de couennes aux haricots blancs.

She runs.

Eight weeks ago (when I was still 49) I signed up for the Up and Running online running course.  And guess what, it really does what it says on the packet - yesterday I ran my first ever 5km without even stopping! (There aren't enough exclamation marks in the typographical universe to cover my amazement at this so I'll stop at one). 

It's been a great experience - the course gradually took me from the very beginnings of plodding, walking, stretching to my present gazelle-like running skills. Over eight weeks, I've run in three different parks in and around Bordeaux, on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh and along the coastal path to the Playa Blanca lighthouse in Lanzarote. Inevitably, there have been a few ups and downs, but there was always advice and support on hand from Shauna and Julia, the wise and wonderful course leaders and encouragement from my fellow alumni. I think that the key for me was the accountability and the camaraderie of the Up and Running forum. Here are some of the fatigue-fuelled ramblings that I subjected my fellow runners to in my post-workout reports.

Workout 1: I underestimated the time it would take to get to the park and had to start the running a bit on the pavement before I actually got there. It was unseasonably hot and the park was full of lovers rolling around on the grass (okay that had no effect on my running, but hey guys, get a room!). I fiddled around with my iphone a lot, worrying that it was going to drop out of my pocket. I had also forgotten that I'd taken most of the music off my iphone and ended up listening to Nick Drake (lovely, but not exactly dynamic) and then a BBC podcast about the death of Prince Albert (interesting, sort of, but not great to run to!). 

Workout 4: It was much cooler today and I wore a big fleece jacket — that was a BIG mistakes of course because I was boiling hot by the end. I also ran to music for the first time having spent some time over the weekend creating a "running" playlist (get me!). I definitely recommend the Black Keys to run, or even pseudo-run, to: they're bursting with funkiness. 

Workout 6: Got back from Edinburgh late last night after four days of a crazy, crazy schedule. However I did manage to fit in Workout 6/24. The friends who were putting me up live right next to a fabulous part of Edinburgh called Blackford Hill, so I got up early on Sunday morning and followed the trail that goes round the bottom of the hill (I'm not mad - I didn't try the steep paths UP the hill). It was an absolutely GORGEOUS morning. We joke a lot about the weather in Scotland, and with good reason, but when it's sunny there isn't a place in the world to beat it IMHO. 

Workout 9: I went to the campus this time where the GPS seems to be a bit wonky but never mind I sorted out the extra 5km it added to the workout once I got home. It was boiling hot again this evening - well it was 23°C and that's boiling hot when your internal thermostat was set at birth to Scottish weather. I had a bit of a problem in the second freeform km because my mouth was suddenly very, very dry and I couldn't swallow which made me a bit panicky, so I stopped running for a bit to sort that out. Because it was so warm I couldn't wear the useful waistcoat with pockets and didn't bring a bottle of water with me - BIG MISTAKE.  

Workout 11: Aw, that was hard! I felt really blagh today, and thought I would never make it to the end of the 1.5 kms, and just as I was about to give up Run Right Back by the Black Keys came up on my playlist:Before she hits the ground / She's going to want to explode / Got to step aside / Never run and hide. Which to my fatigue-addled brain, seemed particularly pertinent (although now that I look at the lyrics, I'm not sure I actually understand what they mean). So, I kept going and made it to the end.......just.  

Workout 12: Aaargh, I'm regressing instead of progressing. This was an early evening workout in a different park (with some really beautiful camelias just past their best.) I had to stop and walk twice during the 1.5 km. (Maybe it had something to do with that glass of wine I had at lunchtime??) 

Workout 13: I started the first 500 m far too fast and was gasping for breath after about two minutes. This may or may not be related to the fact that I had just finished Born to Run and quite fancied myself whooshing across the terrain like the Tarahumara! 

Workout 14: I realise clamping headphones on my ears goes against all the good advice Julia gave about listening to yourself think etc. but I just don't think I am ready for that sort of one-to-one yet. I went back to listening to podcasts today since I find them more distracting than music — believe me, I sometimes need distracting. Today, it was Desert Island Discs with Jamie Callum who made me laugh out loud a couple of times. Anyway, the podcast didn't last for the whole workout and I had only my own thoughts for company (cue sound of wind whistling through the desert) in the last bit of the 1 km. For some reason my brain started riffing on the word bitch, perhaps because I read a crit of a book entitled Run, Fat Bitch, Run a couple of days ago. The premise is that you have to hate your body and malign it, preferably by shouting at yourself standing naked in front of a mirror, to motivate yourself to go out running. That strikes me as a terrible attitude. So, no I definitely won't be reading it. This in turn made me think of that old one-liner "There's a thin woman inside me screaming to get out ..... but I usually manage to shut the bitch up with cookies". Well people I think that just maybe there's a runner in me struggling to keep going when lazy me begs her to stop. Anyway, that's all today from the voices in my head. I'm off to the hair stylist's after my shower, see you all on the other side ....... of my fringe. 

Workout 18: A morning run in the rain. Got drookit, came home, had a hot shower and felt smug (but only because Julia said you're allowed to when you run in the rain). I'm off on holiday to Lanzarote tomorrow so I'm going to be running in the sun baby (and wearing SPF 50 million)!  In the meantime, I have to find a way to dry out my muddy running shoes before I pack them. 

Workout 19: So it's week 7 and I'm in Lanzarote where it's beautiful and sunny but incredibly and invigoratingly windy. Had a fab workout this evening. My times were a bit rubbish (I'll blame the wind) but I wasn't really bothered about that because I was running along a coastal path, towards a lighthouse on an island, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean! How fab is that? Hasta la vista chicas! 

Workout 22: So I stopped running for a week to give my sore heels a bit of a rest and spent a lot of time looking around for advice on causes, treatment etc. of plantar fasciitis. I've become a bit of a PF bore/hypochondriac to be honest. Anyway, I decided in the end that rather than give up running even temporarily I would finish the course even if my heels weren't completely healed (see what I just did there?) because I thought that the benefits of the sense of accomplishment would outweigh the risk of worsening the condition. I also bought myself a new pair of running shoes just in case the old ones were part of the problem. This evening, I headed out to my usual park (Yes, the holiday is over. No more running along island coastlines for me. Sob). And I ran. Not very well, but I ran.  I felt uncomfortable throughout the workout. The shoes didn't feel right, the weather was hot, I felt out of practice: I couldn't help worrying about my poor body, thinking how fragile and mysterious its workings are. 

Workout 24: Wow, I did it! 5km in 38mins 30. I am now the sort of person who gets up, has breakfast, goes out and runs 5km then comes home and bakes a cake. Thank you everyone for all of the support on this forum. Thank you Shauna and Julia for making it happen; for teaching me the power of persistence, the importance of believing I could do it and leading me there gradually. I am a runner!

I really can't recommend Up and Running enough!

Lanzarote

Blogging is a bit like housework in that if you don't do any for a while the task of restarting seems insurmountable. So I'm just going to dive in with a little light dusting in the form of some photographs from our Easter holiday last week in Lanzarote where the weather was five million times better than the incessant rain and grey skies we'd been having in Bordeaux.
This was our second visit to this wonderfully austere place; very volcanic and mineral, with strange cacti and grey-ochre-purple craters, black beaches and green lagoons.

Snapshots from my week

• Driving to Fronsac: an endless ribbon of orange on the skyline seen through rows of grey poplar trees.
• The arrivals and departures board at the station is computerized and silent now, no more clickclickclickclicking as trains move up the list.
• In a brasserie in Paris I wonder at the tourist woman who eats a meal with her hat on, all the while avoiding eye contact with her hard-faced companion.
• A conference of surgeons mills around during the coffee break; purposeful, grey and almost exclusively male. 

Words don't come easy

I don't seem to be very good at words at the moment. I have a long article to completely overhaul before the end of the month and spend long periods fiddling with chunks of text then drifting off, virtually, to look at something less taxing on my brain. I had thought that perhaps in 2012, instead of taking a photograph each day, I might offer up a snapshot in words. In the thirteen days that have already gone by, I have only come up with two. Perhaps it gets easier.

• Fine rain lit up by the lamp of a supermarket car-park; swirling and darting like a flock of starlings.

• As the yoga teacher talks, she rubs her eye, touches her cheek, runs her finger along her lip, pushes her hair behind her ear. Choreography.

365 more or less

I started off 2011 intending to take a photo every day and I managed it ..... more or less. There are still a few photographs floating around that I've forgotten to add to the photoset below and a few days came and  went without me noticing, and then some have been misnumbered. I've enjoyed looking back at them. 2011 was a good year!

Eye, eye.

For some reason my profile picture — the black and white eye — disappeared from the sidebar. It might have something to do with Blogger and Flickr hating each other, I don't know. I had to retrieve it from my hard disk and re-upload it. That was when I realised that it dates back to January 2005, when I first started blogging.

[On a side note, what should we call what I do now? It certainly isn't blogging because that would entail some semblance of regularity. It's more of a start-stop dribble now. Bli-bli-bbling might be a more appropriate term then.]

 January 2005 was nearly seven years ago. My eyes are a bit more crinkly round the edges now. That tell-tale line around my iris has also disappeared. I now wear glasses most of the time because; well because I'm ancient and contact lenses just weren't up to the job any more. In another seven years my profile photo may well feature a zimmer.

Impressionable

I am the sort of person who is overwhelmed by an irresistible craving for crisps if someone opens a packet  in a film; or for a drink if I catch sight of someone in a bar on tv.

That's why it was more or less inevitable that after watching Fat, Sick and Almost Dead the other evening — a film by and about an Australian who lives off blitzed fruit and vegetables for two months, turning his weight and health around dramatically — I would rush out an buy a juicer the very next day.

For the past twenty-four hours we have been enjoying surprisingly delicious juices made from unlikely fruit and veg combinations. I hope it doesn't end up abandoned in the garage beside the bread machine.

I've seen some good films recently #3

Michou d'Auber (2007) This is a sadder version of Neuilly Sa Mère with a young Muslim boy (same actor) being sent to live with a family in small town France (Gérard Depardieu is the foster father) during the Algerian War. Worth watching. 

No Strings Attached (2011) I think this is what is commonly known as a romp. And very rompy it is.


Genova (2008) A lovely film with some beautiful footage of Genoa (beautiful if you like peeling paint and crumbling stonework, that is, which I do). Just don't expect anything very much to happen. Colin Firth looks good.


Bolt (2008) The children had seen this at the cinema when it first came out and wanted to see it again. I made them watch it in English.


You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) A Woody Allen film set in England. Not his best.


Louise-Michel (2008) A very strange French film, but sometimes in a good way. I like Yolande Moreau the main actress and her offbeat social-realism.

From Prada to Nada (2011) Silly, silly, silly. 


Death at a Funeral (2007) One of those British comedies where a family gets together and hilarious chaos with pseudo-meaningful undertones ensues. 


La première étoile (2009) Comedy about a black family from a housing scheme going on its first skiing holiday. A bit better than it sounds.


That's What I Am (2011) Another strange film about not fitting in at high school. The red-headed boy is memorably gangly.


Billy Elliot (2000) I didn't see this when it first came out. I was underwhelmed both by the dancing and the underdeveloped storyline.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (2011) I watched this with Z who has read all of the books. He tells me that the book was better. That's ma boy.


Mars Needs Moms (2011) This is a terrible film. They used some sort of experimental animation technique and it's rubbish.


Juno (2007) Great film. I loved everything about it, especially the quirkiness of Juno herself.


..... to be continued

Doors and Windows of Mallorca

We had a sneaky extra week of summer in Mallorca last week and very relaxing it was too.

Displacement activity

As always when I have a charette as the French say (an urgent piece of work to do before an impending deadline) I find myself irresistibly attracted to the idea of a blog post.

Things on my mind:

I went to vote in the presidential primaries today and was knocked back. The cheek of it! (Apparently us furriners had to register online in July)

I'm reading Franzen's Freedom at the moment. It's very long and I don't don't really care about what happens to any of the protagonists to be honest.

I bought an iPad a couple of weeks ago at the Apple Store in Bordeaux (very sleek, very intimidating). I'm in love with the iPad of course, but so is the rest of the family, so a multi-user interface would have been a useful feature.

I'm going to Saint-Etienne at the end of next week and I'll be in Lyon on Saturday night. On my own. (Anyone live in Lyon? or Lyons if you're British ... very British).

I loved the last series of The Big C, and Weeds wasn't bad either. I can't be bothered watching Grey's Anatomy any more, or Dexter. House is still good though.

Rugby.

365, well sort of anyway.

I'm still plugging away at the 365 Photo-a-Day project. There are some missing from the latest batch below (May - mid-Sept), mainly because I can't be bothered to work out which days are missing and add them, and other days I just forgot. I started using Instagram for these photos on 1st May because it seemed more interesting and creative somehow — okay, in fact,  it was because every one else was doing it.  If you look carefully you should be able to see the children's goldfish Sammy and Danny (they're still alive), my bike, the London Review Bookshop, an memorial to American nurses in Bordeaux, Robert Louis Stevenson's house in Edinburgh, the walkway over the lake for Vinexpo, a few beaches,  a Nordic walking expedition (my new pseudo sport), e tutti quanti.

(Post updated with a more limited selection of photographs because the original attempt went completely wonky)

Le Marathon du Médoc

Last Saturday I got up at the crack of dawn and drove some friends to Pauillac to run in the Marathon du Médoc, also known as the world's longest marathon.

Now, if you're mad enough to slog your guts out running a marathon, there probably isn't anywhere better to do it than in the Médoc because this is a run with a twist or two.

The route takes the runners through the vineyards and courtyards of twenty-three chateaux where, naturally, the refreshments tables groan under hundreds, nay thousands, of glasses of excellent Médoc wine along with oysters, and cured ham, and ice cream and all sorts of other local gastronomic goodies.

And as if that wasn't enough, the whole thing is done in fancy dress. Almost everyone makes some sort of effort except for the odd party pooper in boring old lycra shorts and a running vest. This year the theme was animals so we cheered on cows, ladybirds, zebras, bunnies, pigs —and the odd man  defiantly dressed as a woman — as they hirpled, sprinted and staggered their way back to the quays in Pauillac. The ears were a bit droopy and the tails were sometimes a little less than bushy by the time they got to the finishing line.

My friends Steve and Jim had come all the way from Fife for this, with Alexia to cheer them on. We met others who'd come from even further afield including a mother and her son who had come from Philadelphia just for the weekend, some Swedes, loads of boozy Brits, and a surprising number of Japanese people. There were 8500 very sweaty participants in all.

Despite the very high temperatures, which had just about reached a sweltering 30°C by the end, the Scots didn't give in and take off their kilted cow outfits and, of course, felt duty bound to taste each and every wine. In fact, when they realised they were in danger of coming in under the five-hour mark, they sat down, enjoyed the view, and had a second glass at the last chateau.

Mad, mad, mad. And no I won't be doing it myself next year.

Tiree

As usual we split the rest of the summer between the Dordogne and Scotland.

For the Scotland trip this year we spent a week on the island of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides. I lived on the island for five years when I was a child but I had never been back. I can't think why. Every spartan township; every seaweedy smell; every wheeling bird brought back happy memories of a carefree childhood.

Tiree is heaven on earth when it's sunny - endless white beaches, big skies, rock pools to explore, flat machair to walk across. And when the weather is bad — as it was on the last day of our holiday — it's really bad, excitingly bad, with howling gales and horizontal rain.  It's a wonderful, other-worldly sort of place. Here are some photos:




More here.

Bye-bye Summer

Well I suppose that must be summer nearly over. It's been a good one, apart from a couple of minor mishaps like LOSING MY FLIPPING PASSPORT just before a flight to London. I was heading off to a conference at Saint Mary and the bloody thing (GB passports are the colour of blood, have you noticed?) just disappeared into thin air — pouf! I ended up missing my flight, getting an emergency passport from the nice ladies at the consulate and buying a replacement Easyjet ticket. The conference was worth it though -two days of stimulating talk on the subject of the literary essay from some very clever people. Unfortunately I had to leave just before the end and missed the speaker I most wanted to see, Geoff Dyer. I love Geoff Dyer's writing and if you've never read any of his books, you really should.

The upside of losing my passport was that I then found myself stuck in Edinburgh for a week while E had her course of total immersion in English a.k.a. being spoilt rotten by Grandma. The stay in Edinburgh gave me a chance to do some work in the National Library and, even better, to catch up with old and new friends.

This was a stay I hadn't budgeted for so I stayed in the cheapest place possible - the student residence at Pollock Halls. If you're not too bothered about fancy sheets and chocolates on your pillow, you can't really do much better than Pollock Halls. For a start it's only £28 a night and that includes a massive breakfast - square sausage, black pudding, potato scones, the lot. And then ... well that's it really. You're near city centre and you're right next to Arthur's Seat but it's still a student residence with single beds, shared bathrooms, carpets that have probably been vomited on by countless generations of students, and the lonely studenty feeling of waiting for something better to happen.

That Edinburgh studenty feeling was conjured up again, later in the summer, by the novel One Day which you have no doubt read since I saw it in the hands of at least a dozen people I crossed over with during the summer. (Has anyone seen the film yet?) The passport debâcle turned out to be book-related too - almost as soon as we landed in Edinburgh, I found it in my luggage. I had apparently been using it as a bookmark in a tedious book I had reluctantly brought along to review. Gah.