petite anglaise

Its arrêt de travail season again.

The French take colds very seriously indeed. At the first sign of a sniffle they are generally to be found queueing up at the Dr’s surgery, emerging € 25 poorer, but triumphantly brandishing a Dr’s note instructing them to stay at home for the rest of the week.

Impressive long medical names are used on the arrêt de travail but do not be duped, things are rarely as serious as they seem:

• rhino-pharyngite = a common cold
• pharyngite = a sore throat
• bronchite = a cough (not to be confused with proper bronchitis)
• une grippe = a common cold (not to be confused with proper flu)

A recent advertising campaign by the Sécurité Sociale attempted to curb the over-prescription of antibiotics in France – it seems that the population at large, including many doctors, had not understood that most colds are viruses and antibiotics are therefore ineffective in treating them.

On the rare occasions when I have felt the need to see a doctor in France, I have never come away with a prescription with less than 5 items on it. Including the ubiquitous suppositories. The Dr asked me how many days I wanted to be signed off work. However, as my employers are British, they have little respect for employees who ‘go native’ and milk the system for a bit of extra vacation.

In the UK, the emphasis seems to be on taking turbo-charged cold remedies that have you back at work (if indeed you ever left) in a jiffy. There is a thriving black market in imported Lemsip and Boots cold cures in my office; personally I always smuggle over a good stock of Lockets, and plenty of paracetamol, asprin and ibuprofen, which cost roughly 10 times less in a British supermarket. Unbelievably asprin and paracetamol are only available as branded, over the counter drugs in France.

*sniffle sniffle*

Mmmm. Having said that, I do quite fancy a long weekend…

It’s that time of year again where the pavements are covered in leaves (despite the best efforts of an army of municipal staff whose sole purpose in life seems to be to hoover/sweep/blow them away) and I am obliged to bring the pushchair to a halt every few seconds to pick up a particularly shiny conker for the Tadpole to inspect.

Conkers. I have finally got around to googling them and am no longer confused about how to translate conker into French. The horse chestnut tree is a marronnier. But what the French refer to as a marron is not the fruit of the marronnier at all (those are apparently marrons d’inde), it’s actually a type of edible chestnut. The marron is used to manufacture a 1 part nut to 20 parts sugar, sickly sweet chestnut paste (often found in crèpes), and is also sold in boxes of marrons glacés around Christmas time. There was me thinking that French people ate conkers – but this is apparently not the case.

What they certainly do not do, is thread conkers onto pieces of string and have duels to the ‘death’ with them. At least not according to the Frog (an unreliable source, but the only French person I feel able to bore with all my stupid questions).

A couple

of years ago we were invited to stay with a friend in Hertfordshire who was hosting the annual “Redbourn Conker Tournament” in her back garden. It was a very grand affair, with free-flowing lager and coloured rosettes for the winners in each category.

The categories were:

• natural conkers (untampered with, the current year’s vintage)
• steroid conkers (pertaining to conkers which had been kept from the previous year, baked, pickled in vinegar, varnished or otherwise treated)
• largest conker
• smallest conker
• best fancy dress conker

As I recall I was swaying too much from the lager to distinguish myself in the the first two categories, but I did win a rosette for my conker dressed as Kylie Minogue (sporting a fetching pair of gold hotpants). The Frog gamely gave it a go, but no amount of enthusiasm could overcome his opponents’ accumulated years of playground experience.

There’s one thing can be said for us Brits. We don’t half know how to have fun.

These days I’m often mistaken for a French person, at least over the phone (because apparently I will always ‘look’ English). That is until I make some unforgiveably basic gender mistake. Because let’s face it, you can study a language to degree level, live in the country for donkey’s years, but you can’t re-programme your brain to think that a table is feminine and a glass is masculine. My theory is that when a French person learns to speak, the le or la is learnt as an extension of the noun in question, one cannot be dissociated from the other. Whereas when I learn a new French word, I retain the noun itself, but not its gender. I’m just not hardwired that way. This is the main reason I didn’t feel capable of teaching French. “Please Miss, you just said une verre but yesterday in the book Fifi la Folle said un verre…”

I’m always astonished when I get a gender wrong, for example when shopping, and the person serving me stares back blankly, genuinely not understanding what it is that I want. You would assume, would you not, that if you asked for une éclair au chocolat instead of un éclair au chocolat it wouldn’t be the end of the world? Apparently not. I am generally reduced to repeating my mistake a few more times, in a louder voice, until finally the shop assistant has a flash of inspiration and replies: “Ah oui Madame, vous voulez dire un éclair au chocolat, bien sûr…”

What really doesn’t help is that many words simply have the wrong gender, in my opinion. How can I possibly be expected to get my head around the following blatant mismatches between concept and gender?

masculine: le repassage (ironing), le ménage (housework), le sein (breast), l’accouchement (giving birth), le feminisme…

feminine: une bitte (sl. – penis), la guerre (war), la paresse (sloth, laziness)…

I propose a wholesale revision of the French dictionary and will be writing to the Académie Française forthwith.

I gave in to temptation this morning and bought a pain au chocolat on the way to work. The chocolate was warm and runny and the pastry was so buttery that the paper bag gradually became transparent in places. It smellt heavenly. But I didn’t eat it there and then. No! I waited an excruciating half an hour until I had arrived at the office before tucking in. Why? Not because I enjoy torturing myself, but because in France you just don’t see people eating in public places. It is just not the done thing. If you do decide to snack in public, you must be prepared for some funny looks and even passers-by wishing you “bon appétit” in a sarcastic, disapproving manner.

This is one of the things I think the French have got right. Eating here is something to be taken slowly and seriously: you don’t cram food in your mouth while running down the metro escalator, you sit down, and probably have a much healthier digestive experience as a result. Although many people now use the restaurant tickets their employers provide to buy a take-away lunch of sandwiches or salad to eat in the work kitchen or – if they work in an anglo-saxon company – at their desk, there are still just as many who eat a proper two or three course meal in a restaurant. In some parts of town every second building houses a different café, restaurant, bistrot or brasserie; without lunchtime diners I doubt even half of these would survive.

Snacking between meals does not seem to be part of French culture. Go into any tabac and instead of several square metres of confectionery (as you would find in the UK), you’ll have to choose between a solitary twix, a couple of snickers bars, and a dust-covered kit kat, all housed behind a glass case next to the cashier. Crisps are not even sold in single-serving small packets (nor in appetising flavours). They are meant only as an accompaniment to the evening’s aperitif, not as a between meals stop-gap. Cakes on sale at boulangeries/pâtisseries are mostly the layered moussey type which require the use of cutlery, not easily eaten on the run. You might have noticed that vending machines have recently been introduced in metro stations, but I am the only person I have ever seen buying food from them, on the rare occasions that they are working.

On trips home to England, my eyes light up when I see the tantalising array of candy on the shelves. It seems every chocolate bar I grew up with has spawned five or more different flavoured offspring, or been subtley changed and rebranded as an entirely new product. But maybe there is just too much choice? Sometimes it is all too much and I end up walking away empty handed. And let’s face it, the UK’s growing obesity problem must have a lot to do with our snack culture. I have been known to moan (me? moan?) about how it is not fair that French women are generally stick thin and hipless – but perhaps if I hadn’t been brought up on a diet of Rowntree’s misshapes I too would have an androgynous figure and would not be subject to sugar/salt cravings at inappropriate times of day.

Talking of which, I would KILL for a Cadbury’s flake right now. Or a Curly Wurly…

On the left is the calorific bouquet I had delivered to the Frog’s office on his birthday. I’m now rather popular there, as even the Frog can’t get through 50 Chupa Chups without some assistance.

The Frog adores sweets: packets of fraises tagada are always mysteriously falling from supermarket shelves into our shopping trolley when my back is turned. If he ever leaves me it will no doubt be for his dentist, with whom he is spending increasing amounts of quality time.

As our expedition last weekend to find a suitable present was unsuccessful (he is very fussy), I thought I’d better have something up my sleeve on the day to make up for it. Actually, that makes me sound much less calculating than I really am: my primary motivation was to make him feel guilty that he never surprises me on my birthday… Not that when he thanked me over the phone through a mouthful of liquorice shoelaces he could have cared less about any intended subtext…

Last night we went out for a meal at Chez Georges, the Frères Costes’ über-trendy restaurant on the top floor of the Centre Pompidou. The experience made me remember why I love Paris: there is a marvellous view of the city skyline and all the major monuments are lit up at night. Inside the restaurant the view isn’t unpleasant either. The waiters are very suave, and the beanpole waitresses look like models. There must be a clause in the girls’ contracts which specifies that at least 1m20 of skinny bare leg must be shown at all times. Their outfits would have been more appropriate in a glitzy nightclub – never have I seen so many sequins (except perhaps in Miss Selfridge).

At the end of our meal, feeling I’d overindulged on rich food and bordeaux I asked our waiter for a carafe of water with the bill: meaning tapwater, not the mineral water on the menu at €8 a bottle (which even I know is ridiculously expensive). He looked at me calculatingly and said “de l’eau municipale?” I’ve never heard tapwater called by that name before, but I concede it is a very clever use of the word ‘municipal’, a word which conjures up images of street cleaners, sewerage works and dodgy lead piping and almost made me have costly second thoughts.

Incidentally, I stuck to my guns and got my tapwater, and as you can see I’m still alive, if a little “hanged over”.

We had two power cuts in our appartment building yesterday.

The first at 4 am meant that we failed to get up for work in the morning – the battery in the alarm clock which is supposed to act as a safety net in such emergencies being helpfully flat. Much bleary eyed fumbling for candles and matches and colourful swearing and ensued. Neither the Frog nor I has the faintest idea how to light the pilot light in the boiler, so I was reduced to heating a pan of water on the gas stove for washing purposes and resourceful use of Huggies cottonsoft wipes. I suppose that’s how people washed (minus the Huggies) in the ‘good old days’ when our appartment building was built, as originally there were no bathrooms.

A great start to the day, all in all, arriving late to work, then praying that all would be well when I got home and that the contents of the freezer would not have to be binned. It was thankfully all sorted, so I set about setting every clock in the flat to stop them blinking at me.

Returned home tipsy later that night after a girls’ night out. Ten minutes later the power went off again. As most of our neighbours appear to be pensioners who go to bed at 8pm I doubt any one else noticed, so a drunken conversation between petite and Electricité de France followed, whereby I tried to convince the rather sceptical man on the other end of the line that the problem concerned the whole building so a technician was NOT to come hammering on my door in the middle of the night, but instead should proceed straight to the cellar where the fusebox for the building is located. Under NO circumstances was I willing to go down there in my nightie with a torch – even if it might be a question of just to tripping a switch – it’s a spooky dungeon-like place with earth floors and stone vaulted ceilings and several catacomb like corridors. I always feel like something is lurking in the shadows watching me. And I have no desire to see what nocturnal wildlife it may harbour.

*shiver*

It occurs to me that had the power gone off ten minutes earlier, knowing my luck I would have been stuck in our miniscule lift between two floors until 5am when the power finally came back on, as this does not appear to have a backup supply of any kind. It measures about 1m by 50cm and has floor to ceiling carpeting which smells of dogs and old people, so I had a very narrow escape.

My worry is that I wasn’t around to quiz the man from the EDF on either occasion and he probably just tripped a switch without caring what the cause of the problem might be. So this will probably go on happening twice a day for the foreseeable future. In the middle of my favourite tv programmes, halfway through publishing a blog post, when it’s freezing cold outside…

I’m a pessimist by nature. In case you hadn’t noticed.

Welcome to the fruit of my labours. I have lost count of the hours spent fiddling with css and other things I don’t even pretend to understand, but I think it’s time to give my bloodshot eyes a rest now and just get on with the blogging.

I have tested this site in IE6 and Mozilla Firefox. If you have another browser and there are any display problems, please let me know and I will see what I can do to fix them.

Just a few things are unfinished:

• comments will be coming in shortly from my haloscan archives
• my July posts still need a bit of reformatting to add the images and update the links to other posts on this site
• …and I’ll probably fiddle with the layout a bit more as I’m never satisfied

Incidentally, the photo in my header is the view of Paris from my balcony, taken with my own fair hands . It should also work as a link back to the homepage. I haven’t worked out yet how to incorporate the ‘brit eye’ image from my blogger site into the new layout, but would welcome any suggestions as it sums up what I’m about rather nicely.

I have a problem with the euro. I’m not against the concept of it, in fact I think the UK should adopt it – if only to make it easier for me to pay off my student loan without having to make lots of expensive bank transfers. My problem is with getting my head ’round how much the things are actually worth.

The euro became legal tender in France on 1st Jan 2002, so you’d think I’d have had chance adjust to the ‘new’ currency by now. However, until recently, prices were shown both in French francs and euros. So it was possible to pay in euros, without actually thinking in euros. Yours truly carried on thinking in francs, and probably lopping off a zero for good measure and converting francs to British pounds… This strategy was fatally flawed as I left the UK a decade ago and my notion of what things cost there is approximate to say the least. Do you mean to say a Twix doesn’t cost 13p any more?

These days without the guidance of francs on the price tags I must confess I don’t have much idea how much cash I’m handing over. I tip waiters either far too much or far too little, and the total of my weekly supermarket shop is always a painful surprise. The latter is partly due to the fact that most shops saw the euro as a golden opportunity to hike up their prices and indulge in a wholesale rounding-up exercise, knowing full well that your average customer was going to take a long time to realise that euro cents are worth rather more than the old franc centimes (50c. = 34p).

This admission, coming from a mathematically-challenged person who freely admits to still counting on her fingers, probably doesn’t shock anyone. But I’d quite like to know whether I’m alone on this? Am I?

I tuned into the French girls’ bitchy conversation in the office kitchen at lunchtime today, while pretending to read my book (Stella Descending – Linn Ullmann, brilliant). It went something along the lines of:

“And I told him (boyf) that if he couldn’t be bothered to come over (I gather he was on the other side of Paris at a friend’s appartment and it was midnight) and get the keys, then he shouldn’t have offered to stay in to wait for the plumber in the first place….we argued and I hung up…”

“…and then the next day he wouldn’t come ’round and pick me up for tennis and I had to carry all my stuff there myself so we had another fight and I slammed the phone down on him again…”

“..then he told me that he didn’t have the kids next weekend after all and so we could have gone away and now I’ve made other plans and he is just sooo inconsiderate and I always come last in his list of priorities….”

I don’t know how French blokes cope. They are not allowed to see their friends, have to provide a chauffeur service, deal with tradesmen and take their girlfriends away for the weekend on a regular basis and in return, they get nothing but grief . High maintenance doesn’t begin to cover it.

So engrossed in the conversation was I (usually their discussions are conducted at a not quite audible whisper which is quite frustrating) that I took a plastic cup and microwaved it for a minute instead of putting it in the coffee machine and pressing the button.

I pray they didn’t notice.

There I was reading in the metro on my way home last night, minding my own business and just glancing up occasionally to peer through the carriage window and check I hadn’t missed my stop (which I have been known to do when immersed in a good book).

As I glanced up at one station, craning my neck to see the sign which was way off to my right, I noticed the middle-aged man sitting opposite was grinning inanely. One of his shirt buttons appeared to be undone, and out of the corner of my eye I could see a bit of flesh sticking out of the gap…

Except it wasn’t his shirt that was undone. And not only was he grinning, but also pointing southwards with his fingers.

What is one to do in such situations? I pretended not to have noticed, buried my face in my book, counted the metro stations in my head and then fled without a backward glance.

Dear blog fairy, I have plenty of material. Please don’t put me in awkward situations like that just so I can write about them. Honestly, I can manage without you…

There are not many things I can think of that are nicer than a freshly baked baguette when it’s still warm… Mmm (Miam). No meal is complete unless there is bread on the table in this country, and I think I’d drop a whole dress size if it wasn’t so damn moreish.

When in England, I’m embarrassed by our pathetic attempts at making French bread. Surely it is just a question of following a simple recipe? The things masquerading as baguettes in Tesco are in my experience just long thin loaves of English bread. The true test being that the longer you keep them, the soggier they get.

Anyone who is well acquainted with French baguettes will know that after approximately half a day they are past their best, and if you keep one overnight the only possible use you could have for it the next day is if you want to beat someone unconscious with it.*

Unlike English bread, the important part is the crust. In fact the Frog scoops out the soft middle bit (la mie) and leaves it in squished up balls on the side of his plate. At the bakers you can ask for a well-done baguette or a less well-done one. A word of advice: if you intend to tuck the baguette under your arm in truly clichéd fashion, well-done is better suited to this purpose. Anything else will bend in the middle and dangle flacidly down at both ends.

*ok, I admit I can think of some other uses. My extensive research yielded the following fact of the day: in Ancient Greece, Athenian lower classes (who couldn’t afford expensive dildos) used to make do with baguettes baked in the shape of male genitalia. So there you go. Can’t do that with a floured bap now, can you?

Petite anglaise, strolling carefree through the streets of Paris on a sunny autumn day, casually elegant in her floaty skirt and pale beige mac. (Well, if you must know, she was dashing frantically to the nearest Decathlon sports shop during her lunch break to purchase a swimming cap for the Tadpole, but the rest was accurate).

*SPLASH!!!!!!!!! (or *PLOUF!* if you want to do this the French way)

Petite anglaise swears and gesticulates angrily at the back end of the open-top bus which has just soaked aforementioned skirt and mac. And yes, I do gesticulate when I speak French. It’s compulsory.

Parisian streetcleaners have an ingenious way of disposing of the debris they sweep off the city’s pavements. First, it is swept or blown with a leaf-blower type device into the gutter, and then they turn on special hidden taps – whose existence you would never suspect – in the gutters themselves so that water gushes out along the roadside and carries the detritus far away into a distant drain. Special rolled up pieces of mangy carpet appear as if by magic and are strategically positioned so as to ensure the temporary stream flows in the correct direction. I have no idea where these pieces of carpet come from/go at night but they do not look very hygienic and I wouldn’t like to get too close to one.

So of course I wasn’t just wet, I also had bits of leaves and I dare not think what else all over my person.

Another glamorous day in the city of lights.

My parents are stuck on the last question in the Nether Poppleton Gardener’s guild quiz. Help them win a wheelbarrow by finding a word to link the following:

BACK GLASS CAT

Example: WIRE links LESS FUSE MESH

Stumped, I am.

Tadpole currently has a repertoire of twenty or so ‘words’ in English, if you count various animal noises and things like ‘nanaani’ for banana. Although these words are allegedly all onomatopoeia, I’m sad to say that the French and English simply do not hear the same noise when a dog woofs or a duck quacks.

On the wrong side this side of the channel, dogs go “ouah ouah” (wa wa), ducks go “coin coin” (kwan kwan) and cockerels say “cocorico” – which sounds like it should be the name of a cocktail. Pigs say “groin groin” (??!), birds say “cui cui” and frogs go “coa-coa.” Fans of Gigli (which I haven’t seen) will be interested to learn that turkeys/J-Lo’s say “glou glou.”

So I am having a dilemma: should I teach tadpole the English noises and run the risk in the future of other children at school thinking she is a bit soft in the head? Or do I stick do my guns on this one?

Incidentally gunfire in French is rendered as “pan! pan!” Is it only me, or does that sound pathetic?

The Frog commented the other day that I should flesh out his ‘character’ a little bit. I use the term ‘character’ very loosely indeed, as it’s all been gospel so far. I’m guessing he might now be wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.

I thought I’d start by sharing with you the romantic tale of how petite anglaise and Mr Frog first met: an epic love story involving alcohol, a nymphomaniac and a personal ad.

Many moons ago, when I was ‘working’ as a teaching assistant at the Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle university (which despite the misleading name is sadly not housed in the famous Sorbonne building), my social life consisted largely of going out drinking with the other english teachers.

Sarah* was one such teaching assistant. She liked a drink and was prone to rather promiscuous behaviour. Such as inviting a dustbin man that she found attractive into her flat for ‘coffee’ in broad daylight. And letting a young clochard in for a ’shower’. With the aim of entrapping yet more Parisian males, Sarah decided to publish a personal ad in the Fusac magazine . The exact text of the ad escapes me, but I remember the use of the word ouverte, by which I think she meant open-minded, but of the hundred or so replies she received many seem to have interpreted as “willing to participate in a threesome”.

One evening Sarah brought some of her letters over and we looked at them while over a bottle of wine. One of the letters on her reject pile struck me as rather funny. The writer had cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate his text, including a particularly hideous photo of a moustachioed man sporting white socks with plastic beach sandals whom he claimed to resemble**. This aside, we appeared to have some interests in common. I persuaded Sarah that it would be amusing to call him and arrange to meet for a drink. Maybe he could bring some friends along. So it wouldn’t be like a blind date (or so I told myself).

The three of us met in the Café Charbon and from the moment I laid eyes on his Paddington-style duffle coat, I thought there was something rather nice about him. I also thought he was gay – probably because he was wearing a jumper with a rainbow motif – but once we had established that he was not, the only problem remaining was that Sarah had taken rather a shine to him too.

Casting aside any scruples I may have possessed, I decided to go along to a club night he had mentioned where his friends were dj-ing the following week. Without telling Sarah. She wasn’t impressed and we didn’t have much contact after that, but all’s fair in love and war.

And of course I still enjoy teasing the Frog about why he was replying to a small ad in the first place.

*names have been changed to protect the promiscuous
** thankfully this was a joke

Well I’ve just been weblogreviewed. I think both reviews are very fair but obviously have a soft spot for Yetzirah’s.

On balance I agree with Brent’s criticisms: even though I’ve tried to personalise my blogspot template as much as I can, I’m only too aware of its limitations – particularly the fact that it misbehaves in mozilla – and am in the process of attempting to design something more personal using wordpress…*

In the interests of clarity – as Brent obviously didn’t stumble across the what’s in a name post which explains why this site is named petite anglaise, I’ve added a link to it in the synopsis in the menubar on the right. Read it if you haven’t already!

Oh, and Mr Frog wasn’t too impressed at being called Mr Toad.

But he’ll live.

*Well, actually, I will admit that I only managed to install Wordpress on my future site host at 2am this morning – after going around in unproductive circles for several hours and with blind panic setting in – with the help of a lovely support forum person going by the name of podz who held my hand long-distance and effortlessly made all my problems disappear. Podz, I salute you.

I have yet to meet an expat in Paris who has not had problems with the international postal service. Among the tales of woe are : boxes sent by relatives which (finally) arrived empty or with some contents missing or eaten. Birthday cards which never arrived (presumably targeted as they may conceivably contain hard cash) and magazine subscriptions which had to be cancelled because it was just not worth all the hassle. Thankfully most internet retailers seem to be aware of the problem and Amazon have resent several of my orders by courrier and free of charge.

The problem is that there is incompetence and dishonesty at every link in the delivery chain. Expat fingers were long pointed at the Royal Mail owned international service GLS, who had an appalling delivery record and a unique approach to customer service. Their contract with La Poste has thankfully not been renewed. However, your average package still has to survive inspection by customs workers who might just be feeling a bit peckish when they chance upon your emergency supply of Crunchie bars.

If and when your parcel makes it into the light-fingered hands of the French postal service, it has the minimum wage slaves in the sorting offices to contend with, followed by the army of teenage postie temps (a different youngster delivers our mail almost every day). Finally, there is the ‘courrier volumineux‘ mailbox in the hall of my appartment building which everyone and his dog has a key to. It’s a miracle anything ever arrives unscathed.

Luckily Mr Frog’s baaing fluffy sheep thong was spared.

The last birthday I enjoyed was number 30: I had a big party, knocked back several litres of mojitos, and polaroids were taken to immortalise the event. It was the occasion of my last ‘proper’ hangover, as I realised a couple of days later that I was pregnant. Got very out of practice after that and haven’t properly regained by beer legs since then.

I don’t remember what I did last year for 31. 32 doesn’t feel like much cause for celebration. This year has after all seen me go from Mademoiselle to Madame at the bakers shop. Even though I have no wedding ring. And no-one tries to grope me in the metro any more.

Miss Tadpole woke up on her birthday to a living room full of balloons. I woke up this morning to comatose Frog with hangover and the usual race against the clock to get Tadpole and I out of the door on time, preferably wearing clean clothes. No-one at work remembered. My boss took me out for lunch, but I realised that this was in fact a coincidence as the subject of my birthday didn’t come up during conversation.

As family and friends are mostly in the UK, they sent cards with vague promises of gifts next time I’m over. The card from my mother featured Miffy and was intended more for the Tadpole’s pleasure than my own. Even my present from the Frog – a mini camera so I can post pics to this blog – hasn’t been delivered yet.

So, YES, you’re damn right I’m feeling sorry for myself.

Have a heart: post your worst birthday ever story into the comments below to cheer me up.

Well what with blogger publishing not functioning all day today, I have been keeping myself occupied sorting out hosting, configuring accounts, entering passwords left, right and centre and uploading wordpress. Now I think I’ve hit a dead end waiting for DNS server redirects to be activated. Or something. I only half understand what I’m doing: very steep learning curve involved.

Hopefully the end result will be a more personalised design and a site which lives at www.petiteanglaise.com.

Watch this space.

Walking past the ‘Le Gange’ restaurant this morning on the way to drop off Tadpole at childminder’s, I was overcome by a sudden craving for an ‘English style’ curry. I won’t say an ‘authentic’ curry, because I’ve never been to India or Pakistan and doubt whether what passes for a curry in the UK bears any ressemblence to what the natives eat. I suspect not. But it definitely beats the dishwater one is served on this side of the Channel.

If you order a dish claiming to be ‘au curry’ in a French restaurant, be prepared for a non-descript, creamy sauce to which a teaspoonful of curry powder has been added. The curryhouses of Paris – few and far between as different immigration patterns mean that North African couscous emporiums outnumber them 50 to 1 – are little better. I know because I tried them all in the final weeks of my pregnancy. The helpful midwife suggested sex, exercise, nipple tweaking and spicy food as strategies to force my overdue Tadpole out into the world. Not being able to face options 1 and 2 at that stage, I became acquainted with every takeaway in the city of lights and ate curry morning, noon and night for a week. The Tadpole was unimpressed.

Following this extensive research I can report that:

¤Chicken curry in France tends to contain ‘dark meat’ and bones. Not a nice bit of breast like in the UK. The bones are so small that you have to wonder whether the chicken was underage, or face up to the possibility that you are eating a pigeon or rodent.

¤It is very rare to get anything ‘correctly’ spiced. Despite trying a wide variety of dishes which claimed to be ‘hot’ I never once tasted a curry which lived up to this description. Or that had any depth of flavour. I’m no Madhur Jaffrey, but I remain sceptical as to whether fresh spices ground in a pestle and mortar were involved at any stage in the proceedings.

¤You can’t get a peshwari nan for love nor money. Flavours are plain, cheese (with some sort of dairylea in it, yuck) or meat flavour.

Incidentally, Le Gange claims to offer both Indian and Pakistani specialities. That strikes me as a bit odd. Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought the two countries were not the best of friends?

In case you were wondering, I did also try the tweaking. It did not have the desired effect either, but it kept me occupied.

I have just found a gateway to hell and would like to report its existence to the appropriate authorities. It is located at the Centre d’Animation of the Grange aux Belles swimming pool in Paris.

It all started when the Frog and I decided that we should sign up to do some sort of ‘activity’ with the Tadpole. The childminder does lots of fun things during the week while we are at work, attending playgroups, story time at the library, participating in a fancy dress carnival for Mardi Gras… We were feeling a little bit jealous/guilty that we don’t do a great deal apart from feed and clothe her. So we decided upon bébé nageurs (baby swimmers). It means getting up at some unfeasibly early hour on a weekend, but if that was what it took…

As I am the one who does all the organising in this relationship (find me a woman who doesn’t?) I called the swimming pool in late September 2003, naïvely assuming we could roll up on any given Saturday and join in. “All weekend sessions are full, please call back in June 2004 for information on signing up from September 2004″, said the lady on the phone in a bored voice. I duly called: registration would take place on Monday 6 September from 11 am. A work day. Helpful. I was feeling relatively calm and confident about the whole thing until an acquaintance explained that most of the places had already been allocated to people like her who had already signed up the previous year, so competition for the few remaining places would be fierce. She (smugly) added that it was excellent, fabulous, really worth doing. I was starting to panic now. If I couldn’t get the Tadpole signed up, I was a bad parent. I called the Centre repeatedly to see how bad the situation was and got only a recorded message.

D day finally arrived today. I arrived at 10.15am, inwardly congratulating myself on being 45 minutes early, but as I drew closer to the entrance I saw to my horror that there were was a huge crowd of people in front of it, complete with pushchairs and screaming babies, all holding numbered tickets in their hands.

The French, as you will have heard, don’t do queues. What they do love is a numbered ticket (like the ones you get at the deli counter in Tesco). Mine bore the number 65. Rumour had it that ticketholder n° 1 had arrived at 7am, or spent the entire night there, depending on who you spoke to. As if it were the Harrods Sale. I took a look at the noticeboard and my worst fears were confirmed. Of the three weekend groups for Tadpole’s age group, two were already full. Ten places remained for the last session. 64 people in front of me. It would only take ten of these to want what I wanted…. Should I stay or should I go?

I chose to stay. 10 people went in at a time. And took a long time to emerge. The minutes stretched into hours. I hadn’t come prepared with food, drink or a book. By 1.30pm they had let ticket holders 50-60 into the building. I’d got this far so I was going to grit my teeth and see it through to the end. I warned the man on the door that if I had waited 4 hours only to leave empty handed, I would probably have to be dragged from the building kicking and screaming, wearing a straitjacket.

Happy ending: I signed her up. At 2pm. And arrived 4 and a half hours late to work. The Tadpole will never know the pain I went through to sign her up for this. I can honestly say that it was an experience to rival childbirth.

I have formulated a cunning plan for next year. I’m going to swing by at 7am and take the first 10 tickets, go back to bed and then return at 11.00 and sell them all to the highest bidders.

A friend of mine is starting a TEFL course next week and it has got me reminiscing about my own experiences teaching, back when I was a lectrice d’anglais at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Which is the university version of those French assistants you remember having crushes on when you were at secondary school. I gave conversation classes, took first year phonetics tutorials (despite having no prior knowledge of the subject and being roughly one lesson ahead of my students in the workbook) and generally enjoyed wielding the power that being the only person in a room of 30 odd people who could speak decent English conferred on me.

Oh, and I got to know a few of my students, in the biblical sense.

One such student was Cédric, a second year who was very good-looking. Actually “pretty” would be a more appropriate word. (Digression: what an unfortunate name. Imagine I told you I was dating someone English called Cedric? You’d think I made it up. But because his name was pronounced “Sedreek” it was somehow exotic. Sort of…)

Cédric took to hanging around at the end of class, dropping hints that I might like to go out on the town with him sometime. I accepted. He took me to the Queen nightclub, a well-known gay club on the Champs Elysées. I doubt I’d ever have got past the dragon on the doors if I’d hadn’t been on his arm. The G&T tinged memories I have of that night are of cheesy music, Ab Fab projected without sound onto huge screens around the room, and some bitchy guys shouting “Oh là là – quel gâchis!” (oh dear lord – what a waste!) when Cédric made his move on me. I also distinctly recall him being propositioned by a man old enough to be his grandad.

The boy claimed to be bisexual, but either he was kidding himself, or I was a disappointment. Anyway, the real reason he lured me back to his tiny maid’s room appartment became apparent the next morning. At some unfashionably early hour there was a knock at the door. His father. Whom Cédric did not appear surprised to see. Casually, he introduced me (hungover, yesterday’s make-up still on, sleep in my eyes, totally blind without my lenses in – i.e. not sexily dishevelled like people wake up in films):

” Papa, je te présente *********, la lectrice d’anglais de ma fac..”

I mumbled something incomprehensible, acutely embarrassed. I couldn’t even get out of the bed to shake papa’s hand because I was only wearing a t-shirt.

Meanwhile crafty Cédric had killed two birds with one stone. He could put off coming out to his parents for a little bit longer, and he had convinced his father that he was taking his English degree very seriously.

Sheep in suspenders doing karate, raunchy young wenches in ovengloves baking lasagna, Britney Spears in a fur-trimmed negligé contemplating a mountain of ironing, secret webcam shows saucy antics in the girls’ locker room, bored housewives watching Richard and Judy wearing heated rollers, the kama sutra on ice interpreted by Torville & Dean, George W and his secret harem of Brasilian ladyboys playing golf in Austrian national dress. Kirsty Allsopp’s sex therapist spills the beans about her client’s BDSM fantasies. Fancy a change of career? Free pole dancing and lap dancing tuition here

Sorry. It was purely for my own amusement when I browse the sitemeter stats to see how people got here and using which search words.

A proper post will follow shortly.

I have been living in France for 8 years now and I’m saddened to admit that my English is now showing signs of serious wear and tear. Thanks to intensive use of my well-thumbed dictionary, I do aim to keep this blog free of ‘petiteanglaiseisms’ and spelling mistakes*. In conversation however – especially when tired – I frequently talk utter drivel, or worse, become hopelessly tongue-tied because I can’t think of a perfectly commonplace word in English.

There are some subjects which I’m definitely much more comfortable discussing in French, because my only experience of dealing with them has been in this country. Mostly grown-up things like employment, mortgages and gynaecological terminology. I could wax lyrical about my pelvic floor in French (should you want me to?) ‘til the cows come home, but I’d struggle in English.

The Frog speaks petite anglaise fluently and also makes charming mistakes of his own which I have been known to adopt. The fact that he must unwittingly slip some of my grammatically unsound constructions and invented vocabulary into casual conversation with his English-speaking co-workers is a little worrying, but I hope they find it rather endearing. After all, it’s not his own native tongue he is perverting.

I have no such excuse and also a highly impressionable tadpole to bring up, hopefully to be bilingual one day. I wonder if I owe it to her to sign up for English conversation evening classes?

* I look forward to a veritable deluge of comments pointing out all my spelling mistakes past and present

It’s that sinister time of year when the advertising industry concentrates its efforts on making French schoolchildren lust after all manner of scholastic paraphernalia in the name of la rentrée. This is, in my opinion, a rare example of France actually outdoing the UK on the rampant commercialism front.

In every supermarket and department store in the land you will find aisle upon aisle of exercise books, stationery supplies, pencil cases and rucksacks bearing the latest cool kiddy/teen brand logos. Clothes and sports shops are clearly in on the conspiracy too. The implication being that if your child does not start the new school year with a completely new (preferably designer) wardrobe, an Olympic standard sports kit and a shiny new bag containing the equivalent of half of the WH Smiths stationery department, you are a bad parent and your child will be a social outcast. It’s a very serious business: I have seen mothers nearly in tears because they have left their rentrée shopping too late and there are no more Spiderman ring binders to be had for love nor money.

I’m belatedly understanding why compulsory school uniforms are “a good thing”. French schoolchildren do have a self-imposed uniform of sorts: jeans and trainers. But as your child’s popularity level is directly proportional to the coolness of the brand name emblazoned on his/her jeans and trainers, imagine the guilt you have to live with if you can only afford something from C&A?

French schoolchildren buy all their own books, including exercise books, and then cart them around all day as lockers don’t appear to exist, with the result that every year we are treated to an item on the 8 o’clock news about the dangers of little people carrying rucksacks exceeding their own bodyweight. And they do – because homework starts at the age of six. I wish I was joking. Responsible parents are encouraged to invest in a bag on wheels not dissimilar to your average granny’s shopping trolley. Surely owning one of those is social suicide?

Right now I’m breathing a HUGE sigh of relief that my little tadpole won’t be starting school for another two years (at the ripe old age of three ???!!!?) I need some time to psychologically prepare myself for the soul-destroying experience of going against all my principles and buying her the fluorescent pink Barbie rucksack and matching accessories she is bound to want.