March 2010
Foreword: It’s 7th March and it’s snowing. Heavy snow, great big thick flakes falling silently in the night. Nice, but hang on, this is the Mediterranean, and it’s March!! A French meteorological website tells me that this isn’t quite so strange: snow has previously been recorded on the South coast of France in March in 1946, 1971 and 2005.
Mooshi is 2.5 years old so we have now been here 18 months. Time for another email update.
The Weather! (once a Brit always a Brit)
I had written that ‘spring has sprung’, but in the light of tonight’s snow I take it all back! I thought spring had sprung as the mimosa blossom is out, the almond blossom is catching up, and the birds and the bees are tweeting and buzzing as if they’re expecting spring. The sun is also getting stronger now. Steve has a brown face from sitting in the garden the other day.
It has been a very long, cold winter. There's something about the winters here that is very Siberian, and maybe my memory is deluding me but weren't English winters warmer? The wind here is very cold, bitter and bitingly cold. This and the fact that the houses are built for comfort in hot weather - high ceilings, tiled floors etc - means that the feeling of cosiness and warmth of a central heated, carpeted home, is lacking. That said, the winters here are much shorter than in the UK and tend to only last 2 - 3 months. Plus the fact that even when it is winter there'll still be the odd day when it is warm enough to eat outside in T-shirt sleeves. Several weeks ago (mid-February) we were on the beach one day and several people were in full summer sunbathing kit!
When the sun does shine we don't need the heating as it pours through the windows making us gloriously warm.
When we were house-hunting here the estate agent told us that it never snowed! Last year, January 2009, it snowed, for the first time in 12 years. And this year we have had snow settle on the ground 3 times! Not surprisingly our move here has been linked, by our neighbours, as maybe being responsible for the climatic change.
And to prove that it really was cold here - I had chilblains - for the first time in my life. Google searches inform me that this is due to the cold and my old age/frailty/obesity/lack of exercise/poor diet and smoking. erm.....so I'm a bit stuck on remedying this... I can’t change my age, I’m not exactly frail, I’m hardly obese, I do tonnes of exercise, I don’t smoke and my diet is already balanced - half lettuce, half choclolate.
Xmas in Sete, again...
Uncle Nick (Steve's brother) came to stay for Xmas and wrote such a vivid account that I shall merely refer you to his website. http://thejoyofsticks.blogspot.com
'We're in the money!'
Well, I am anyway, even if it is at the expense of Steve. Given that my weekly earnings from tennis coaching are 20 euros I felt it necessary to find another way of earning money. So, I came up with the idea of fining Steve 10 euros each time he left the child security gate at the top of the stairs open. Success. I'm now very well off indeed. Fantastic. (Although Mooshi is at serious risk of taking a tumble...)
Faux pas! (or Fawlty Towers...)
We're making headway socially, with the tennis club still the hub of our social life. Since April 2009 there have been new managers at the club, a lovely family (2 boys aged 6 and 10); Mr Tennis is in charge of the courts, grounds etc, and Mrs Tennis is reception plus head (sole) chef. She works from 8.30am each morning, when she takes the non-stop phone calls for court reservations 'til 8pm when the card-playing group of men have shuffled home. And in between these times she runs the restaurant. Before Christmas I discovered that she, like me, had been to India and had retained wistful memories; so I hatched a plan. I would invite her to a home-cooked Indian meal chez nous. Give her an evening away from the club and from her ‘boys’. Mr Tennis could 'babysit'. I discussed this with her and she seemed very pleased with the idea.
A couple of weeks later the day dawned. I made an aubergine and chickpea curry and a dahl and some paratha breads. I got out the best (only) tablecloth and laid the table nicely. Imo even did place names. I was expecting her at around 7pm. At ten past she phoned and said she'd been delayed, but that she'd be here in ten minutes. 7.30pm, no sign. 7.45pm still no sign, so I went and stood by the gate with Mooshi and looked down the road to see if she was coming. A few minutes later I saw four shadowy figures walking up the road. 'That's kind of Mr Tennis to escort her up the road' I thought. They reached the gate, and Mrs Tennis handed me bags of chocolates and gifts for the girls. And then Mr Tennis stepped inside the gate and I realised that they thought that all four of them were coming to supper!!! PANIC - not enough cutlery, plates etc as most were in the dishwasher. The table was too small and the quantity of food was too small, and had I known that Mr Tennis was coming I would have prepared meat as well as he is a hardened carnivore and would be left with cravings to shoot wild boar if all he had had was a bowl of chickpeas. Not to mention the boys who had never been near Indian food in their lives and would have preferred burger and chips. I don't know how I survived the evening, and was too embarrassed to catch Mrs Tennis's eye the next day at the club, but they seemed to have had a good time.
Epilogue: When in France, one addresses people in the vous form until, or unless, instructed otherwise - officially known as 'tutoyer' (address in the tu form). So, this is what I do. Most people very early on in meetings say 'tutoies moi'. Mrs Tennis is one of the exceptions to this and has never invited me to tutoye her (I think this is because she doesn't want to rock my very precarious French-language boat). So I still address her in the vous form, despite the fact I feel that we are on 'good mates' level. So, my theory for the Fawlty Towers cock-up is that as I address her in the vous form that maybe she thought I meant all her family were invited. Live and learn, I guess…
Bricks and mortar
This in itself could be a book, so I will condense it to the bare minimum. Out of the last 10 months we have had builders/workmen in the house for 8 of them! Round Robin no. 2, written at the beginning of September, described how the Project Manager (English) badly failed to manage the project, and so was fired. We continued to use the builders with some success, but also with some stresses. They left us at the end of September. We heard about two builders (also English) available to do the sorts of things we needed doing, and at reasonable prices. I shall call them Bob and Ben. After a long delay in starting the work, in mid-November our house was filled with the happy chatter of Bob and Ben. They are brothers, one is a full-time, experienced builder/plumber/electrician and the other is a policeman on sabbatical for a year, and with tiling experience and an ace handyman. They set to and did so many jobs which had been on my list for eons, but which were impossible to get done due to the 'Mooshi Factor'. (The Mooshi Factor is such that I have started a list of things to be done when she goes to school in September!) Bob and Ben sanded, varnished, painted, fixed and generally worked very hard and did a great job - until personal disaster struck and they had to go back to the UK..... A loss for our house and a gain for my 'to do' list. Brilliantly, they left all their tools and paints etc with us so if any of you visit and want to see my lovely new professional quality work bench, or top class range of saws, do ask! One of the things they were going to do, but didn't have time to, was to paint Imo’s room, and as I'd promised Imo a new room for Christmas I thought I’d better get on with it myself. Imo's room is small, maybe 3 x 2.5m, and was a parchment colour (never having been painted in the 12 years since the room was built). I set to, with Mooshi ensconced somewhere nearby with the most absorbing activities I could set her up with, and started painting. Pre-children I could have done this job (including the loo next to Imo's room) in 2 days. With Mooshi it took 5 whole days and much stopping and starting.
Before the driveway was even clear of Bob and Ben's wake the wonderful 'Denis et ses outils' had been recommended to us. He is a Frenchman from the north who came down here for the sun. He is a handyman extraordinaire. eg we had a radiator which only had a few hot panels, experts came and scratched their heads but none proposed the correct solution to fix it. Denis walked in, twiddled a knob - and bingo - it worked! He's still fixing things for us now. Every house needs a Denis.
So, what has actually been done since I last wrote? Well, we have a beautiful set of stairs up to our sun terrace (it was a death-defying step ladder before) and a huge built-in cupboard for coats etc downstairs. We have lots of painted walls and varnished shutters and doors. We have a whole load of tiny things which no-one would even notice but which are essential (eg fitting of new mosquito screens etc). We also have half a new kitchen installed. We await the arrival of the rest of the kitchen.
The biggest gain has been the opening up of, and use of, the internal stairs. To those of you who have not had the experience of living, simultaneously, in 2 flats, one on top of the other, with a young (pre-walking) child, I cannot convey enough the sheer relative ease of my life now. (Guests who visited pre-summer 2009 will appreciate what I mean.)
'Rats in the loft, what are we going to do?'
A rat skull fell out of our attic one day in January. Charming. The handy Denis said he would investigate the little patter of tiny feet for me, which I had been hearing at night, so he undid the spot lights on the landing, and, lo and behold, a rat skull tumbled to the ground, complete with teeth. As well as a bucket-full of ‘caca’.
Imo's premiers
Imo has had several firsts over the last few months. The most notable being her entry into the writing world and her tennis debut. There's an English magazine here called Blablablah which has a letters page. In December I bet Imo that if she wrote a letter to the magazine then they would publish it. Well, she duly wrote one, and illustrated it too, and sent it off, snail mail, and in January there it was in glorious print. She is quite chuffed.
In January Imo was selected to play at regional (Languedoc Roussillon) tennis trials for 6 & 7 year olds. On a very cold day we drove for an hour to an even colder indoor tennis court where talented hopefuls were whacking the skin off the ball. It was all a bit over Imo's level, but she gave it her best shot (ha ha) and came home having won 7 of the 27 games she played. (Not bad for her first ever go at playing proper games, doing overarm serves and playing against other children.)
Imo has now ventured into the school canteen. It is a brand new building which only opened at the end of January. In order for Imo to eat more like the French (haribo sweets and nutella...?!) we thought it a good idea that she started going, so Steve trotted along to the local Marie (Council) and filled in all the forms, including what my mother's maiden name is (!!!) and enlisted Imo for Thursday and Friday lunchtimes. (They also wanted copies of all our birth certificates. French bureaucracy at it’s best.) The school menu is published a month in advance in a free magazine which gets pushed through all letter boxes. Here are two examples for you:
Mardi 8 fevrier: potage Saint-Germain, jambon grille sauce moutarde, gratin de chou-fleur, fromage blanc creme de marron, galette bretonne.
Vendredi 12 fevrier: coeur de tarte des alpages, saumonette sauce bourride, pommes vapeur, tomme noire, fruit de saison.
Chips it ain't.
Imo has also started having sleepovers with friends. The first one I think she found quite quite traumatic, but she's had a couple since and they went well. We've had some here as well, which have gone OK except for one girl who would not stop talking until 11pm. I don't know why I didn't think of it at the time, but next time that happens I shall just take Imo out of the room and put her in our bed, then the other girl can talk to herself to her heart's content.
The idea of both the cantine experience and having sleepovers is to get Imo in training for Classe Verte. This is a week long 'holiday' in the Alps in May which all her class are expected to participate in, although it is not compulsory. The trip only goes ahead if 3/4 of the class register to go, and at the moment Imo's class is on the magic 3/4 number, so if someone pulls out then it is cancelled which seems a pretty bizarre way to do things but then that's the way it is!! After much soul-searching Imo has decided that she would like to go. I personally think she's too young, but we've tried to make it Imo's decision.
At school Imo seems to be getting on well, and is coping with the shouting (er, that's from the teacher, not the pupils). The other week at ‘going home time’ her class came to the gate with a teacher I didn’t recognise. I asked Imo who she was and was surprised to hear that she was the Headmistress. That's a good example of how it often feels out here. Can you imagine your child attending a school, and not even knowing if the head is a man or woman, or not knowing their name or even what they look like?! I understand maybe 50% of what's being said around me, but that does mean that the other 50% is not 'reaching' me. So, it's sort of like living with scuba gear on under water; there's a lot of blurble blurble blurble and things get missed and misunderstood through the murky waters. (Cross reference with the Fawlty Towers incident!)
Last thing about Imo: I'm pleased to say that she has announced that she is going off pink. It's amazing, when she started school here she wanted to wear skirts, dresses and lots of pink. Now, in a gradual shift of fashion, she wears jeans and T-shirts like her copines, and hardly any pink.
…and Mooshi…
Well, we still call her Mooshi, and she is still very small and very sweet. She's finally grasping language and is coming out with words to make her parents proud, such as her favourite 'woof woof poo' (there's a lot of it about). Her 'au revoir' sounds like the real thing and her counting is getting there: 'two, four, two, four, six'. Well, it's a start. If you ask her her favourite animal she says ‘dinosaur, ra ra ra’. She’s terrified of feathers (quite a common a phobia I think) but haven’t a clue where this stems from. She’s just started drawing people, all very Picasso, and she loves tottering around the tennis court with a brush and sweeping the lines or using the brush as a hobby horse while I’m playing with Steve. She’s with me all the time at the moment, but will start school in September, four mornings a week.
Tennis
Some trees have recently been cut down in a neighbour’s garden so not only can we now hear the ball being hit, but we can see the courts as well from our sitting room. (I think an estate agent would term it a ‘tennis court glimpse’, but it’s good enough for us.) All tennis this winter has been very limited as the weather has not been kind to the red clay courts. Relentless rain and then freezing temperatures. Great cracks have appeared in the courts where they’ve been waterlogged and then frozen. When it is playable Steve and I both play about 3 or 4 times a week, plus I coach on Wednesday mornings.
Kissing…
…well, they're right, all the authors of those books about living in France. The thorny issue of when and who to kiss, and when and who to shake hands with is one I constantly grapple with. Last week there was a tennis match of some calibre at the club, and there were several rows of spectators. It was really anxiety provoking deciding, as I passed, who to kiss, who to shake hands with and who to just smile at and say Bonjour to. This greeting is of such importance, and offence is caused if you fail to do it. Generally, for me, being a lady (if one could consider me such) I'm expected to kiss any other females and shake hands with all but the closest of male acquaintances. This means that at tennis on a daily basis I'm often kissing up to ten women, 5 men and shaking hands with 20 others. The two women who I consider to be my most kindred spirits here forego this greeting - perhaps as they understand that for a Brit it just doesn't rest easy. Even once the greeting has been decided there are still obstacles: if both parties are wearing glasses (which we often are - sunglasses) one party is meant to remove them to avoid clashes. If it's a man kissing a woman then the man removes them, but what if it is two women? I've had the embarrassing experience of bumping noses with people, and now I tend to cling on to them on one shoulder to steady myself so this doesn't happen again. But they do it freehand - a skill I have yet to learn.
…the future?
Well, tomorrow it’s my birthday. I’ll be 42. I’m quite chuffed really, seeing as 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, according to Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.