petite anglaise

I note, with some amusement, that the HM Post Office has been rapped across the knuckles for installing fee-charging cash machines in three quarters of its branches. Especially as the offending machines bear a sticker stating that they are free, when in fact only consulting your balance or last few transactions is free. Withdrawing money is not. Four out of ten UK cash machines apparently charge a minimum fee for cash withdrawals these days.

Ten years ago, when I arrived in France, employed as an English assistante at the none too aesthetically pleasing Lycée Raymond Queneau, I recall having to be very careful about using only Crédit Lyonnais ATMs (or DABs, as they are known over here) when I wanted to get my hands on my paltry paycheck. I ranted and raved that this was not, and would never be, the case in the UK, bragging that UK banks had a far superior grasp of the concept of customer service. However, over the past few years, banks in the UK seem to have been taking steps in the wrong direction. One can only hope that the mercenary French banks are not being used as their role models.

On the other side of the Channel we have to pay for the ‘privileges’ of receiving new cheque books by post, having a visa (debit) card and access to on-line banking facilities (a necessity, as I rarely now need to set foot in the horrible 70’s monstrosity that is the Caisse d’Epargne, place Léon Blum). There have been rumours that soon there will be a fee for every cheque written or cashed, and some banks are reintroducing charges for DAB withdrawals. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

Account ’services’ are bundled into a helpful little package (forfait), which every bank concocts to a different recipe, making it tricky/impossible to compare charges between banks. Helpfully, services which I do actually use, like for instance drawing money out in the UK or making international bank transfers, are stubbornly opaque, and not detailed in the convention de comptefrais de dossier (loan processing fee), should you decide to accept their terms. It can be up to € 1,000. The French banks cannot be persuaded to lend you as much as you would get in the UK, as the repayments are capped at 33.33% of your monthly earnings before tax, and you will be expected to repay over only 15 or 20 years. 25 year mortgages exist (but banks are often reluctant to offer them) and 30 year mortgages are simply unheard of. Which is why Mr Frog and I have been priced out of the Paris property market, unless I fancy raising Tadpole, plus future potential mini-Tadpole, in a small broom cupboard.

The French do seem to have a completely different relationship with credit. They generally limit themselves to buying what they can actually afford. I do see this as A Good Thing, given the weight of credit card debt many families are struggling with in the UK, where consumers are constantly tempted to take on more debt and splash out on that three piece suite today (but pay nothing until December 2006).

Supermarkets like Auchan and Carrefour and companies like Egg (who have seriously struggled to convince the recalcitrant French that online banking is the way forward) have gone some way towards changing this mentality recently, introducing store cards which double as credit cards. My bank only offers a direct debit or a deferred debit card, however. Not that I’ve ever been able to actually obtain a credit card here. Several department stores have refused my applications, with no justification forthcoming. I suspect having a entirely blank (or ‘virginal’, as the French would say) credit record in this country and being ‘foreign’ may have something to do with it.

Vive l’Europe!

I recently discovered skyblogs. To my horror. These are for the most part teen blogs and are hosted by shouty French radio station Skyrock. The mothership’s homepage has so much busy flash animation (advertising) that I can’t actually look at it for more than five seconds without triggering a migraine.

It sets the tone nicely for what is to come.

Imagine if you will a blog written entirely in mobile phone textspeak, littered with a few low resolution photos uploaded from a cheap cameraphone, and you are getting to the essence of what skyblogging is. Indecipherable unless you are a teenager yourself, or happen to have a teenage translator to hand who understands all the slang, verlan (backwards slang, or sometimes backwards backwards slang - meriting of a post in itself one day) and teen cultural references whch are thrown into the mix.

The following text was lifted from p-a13 and I reproduce it here along with my attempted translation into French, and then English:

voila sa c théo 1 gro pomé du bahu lol!!! g d cone mdr!! c mon meilleur pote il tro s1pa on c clate tro o bahu enssemble top d lire mdr!!! a+ mek by !!!

Voilà ça c’est Theo un gros paumé du bahut. LOL!!! Je déconne MDR [Mort de rire]!! C’est mon meilleur pote. Il est trop sympa. On s’éclate trop au bahut ensemble. Top délire MDR!! A plus mec. Bye!!

This is Theo a fat loser from school. LOL!! I’m joking LOL!! It’s my best friend. He is too nice. We have too much fun together. Top fantastic LOL!! See you soon mate. Bye.

Other sites abound which are completely beyond my limited translation abilities. Especially those written by French teenagers with North African parents or grandparents, who use a smattering of Arabic words or French/Arabic hybrid slang in addition to French textspeak. At least I imagine that’s what they are.

The skyblog community is so vast that the volume of traffic the most popular skyblogs attract is phenomenal. Take this graffiti blog, for example, where visitors can leave their name and colour preferences and the blogger will create and publish a personalised tague . The site has seen a staggering 132,000+ visits since its creation in February 2005 and the most recent entry attracted 17,462 comments.

However, closer inspection reveals that many of these are a new form of comment spam: fellow skybloggers promoting their own blogs. I suppose I’m as guilty as the next person for having left the odd strategic comment on a high profile site in the hope that I might pique the curiosity of a few of their visitors. Dooce’s daily photo entry is basically a competition to see who can comment first (unfortunately this paves the way for meaningless comments in the vein of “cute photo!”), as apparently pole position on her comments page translates into a not insignificant number of hits on the statcounter. But skybloggers are even less subtle: no beating about the bush, no semblance of interaction, just the blog address.

Vierge Insolente, who from her picture looks like an all too familiar patchouli scented gothette, is one of the few skybloggers I have found so far who forms actual sentences with grammar and punctuation. In her recent farewell post she laments the fact that being in the skyblogs top ten means that no-one actually reads what she has to say any more, most simply dropping by to leave ads in her comments box.

Ce n’est plus personnel, c’est ennuyant… Ne plus être livre d’écrire ce que l’on veut à cause d’une certaine célébrité. Ce n’est pas un avantage d’être dans ce top 100… Du moins dans les 10 premiers. Tout le monde se fout de ce qu’on peut bien écrire, les gens sont un peu égoistes au fond, genre je te balance ma pub et j’en ai rien à faire de tes trucs…

I hope that this isn’t where the rest of the blogosphere is headed. It takes me long enough to delete my trackback spam, without having to start filtering mindless ads from fellow bloggers as well.

Tadpole is nestling in my arms, limp, warm, soft and still half slumbering. I want to bury my nose in her neck and just breathe in her scent for a few minutes. But she has other ideas. She spies daddy through the slits of her bleary eyes. They snap open as if a switch has been flipped, her face becomes instantly animated, chubby little arms reach longingly in his direction.

I surrender the Tadpole, reluctantly.

On the way home from the childminders’, singing songs. Tadpole chants: “va voir daddy, va voir dadDY, va voir DADDY, VA VOIR DADDY!”

“Daddy’s not home yet, he’s at the office,” I explain.

“NON! Pas office! Va voir DADDY!”

There’s no reasoning with some people. “Okay, whatever, let’s go home and see whether daddy is there, shall we?”

Daddy is special.

Who gets up bright and early every morning and proceeds to zip around the apartment hurriedly cramming flailing limbs into sleeves and trouser legs, braving dangerous windmill legs to change soiled nappies, brushing unruly locks, cleaning teeth and supervising the slurping of leftover milk from the cereal bowl (a hazardous manoeuvre which, if badly executed, can necessitate the cramming of small flailing limbs into fresh clothing)?

I do.

Where is Mr Frog while this is all going on?

Cocooned away in a steaming bath listening to his floating radio (with hindsight, probably the most ill thought out gift I ever gave him) with eyes closed.

Who races home from work every evening, cursing metro delays and pelting up and down escalators at full speed, checking the time every other minute hoping that the nanny will not be kept waiting or need overtime pay? Who then prepares a healthy, nutritious (but ready in two minutes in the microwave) meal for the ravenous Tadpole, bathes her, reads several stories and finally sits down to put feet up and savour a much needed cup of tea at approximately 8pm?

I do.

When does Mr Frog show up? At best, in time for one last story. At worst, much later than that. Possibly after even my bedtime.

What do I get in return for my daily labours of love? I’m taken for granted.

Daddy, on the other hand, who has wisely marketed himself as a scarce and therefore greatly prized commodity, is deluged with affection.

It’s a man’s world and no mistake.

I’m suffering from blogger’s guilt.

If I don’t post tomorrow, my site will look forlorn, naked and neglected. The fonts will wilt, a layer of dust will settle on my header image and the disappointment of my regular visitors as they click on, then off again in disgust, will be almost tangible.

Sadly, as I’ll be leaving the parental home tomorrow morning and not arriving in Paris until late afternoon, writing will be nigh on impossible. Which means that, were I a conscientious soul, I would rustle up a little post for you now (Sunday evening) and then press the magic button which makes things publish in the future, with a startlingly convincing timestamp, say 9.04 am.

But it’s 00.05 and I’m just too weary and low (PMT if you must know) to deliver the goods. My apologies. Normal service will resume on Tuesday. You’re all on holiday today anyways, so you should have something better to do than read blogs all day, right?

news in brief

Highlights of Easter weekend: the look on Tadpole’s face when she first caught sight of herself in the mirror wearing pink, fluffy Easter bunny ears (courtesy of great grandma), and the perfect way she pronounced selected Yorkshire phrases (e.g. “ee by gum”) after a short but effective coaching session with grandad.

Just so no-one can accuse me of slacking off today… I did write something, but it’s here instead.

But feel free to comment here, as there are no comments enabled as yet chez expatica.

I bought three hens at lunchtime. Three milk chocolate hens, perched atop three chocolate wicker baskets, presumably filled with lots of little Easter goodies. I haven’t rattled them - in fact I barely dare approach the bag for fear of being overcome by a whiff of chocolate escaping from under the cellophane wrapping and succumbing to temptation. Which is why I am telling you there are THREE chickens. So that I can’t eat any of them between now and Easter Sunday. And if I mumble sheepishly upon arrival that one of said hens got smashed into smithereens when my hand luggage was scanned at the airport, DO NOT BELIEVE ME. Look for telltale signs of chocolate consumption around my and Tadpole’s mouths.

This is, after all, the same mummy who bought gingerbread pumpkins for her daughter and daughter’s playmates at Halloween and then ate all three in one sitting with a nice cup of tea. (In my defence, I thought the ginger flavour might be a bit too potent for 16 month old toddlers.) The same mummy who has bought a Lindt easter bunny, complete with red neck ribbon and dinging bell, with the last two Saturday’s groceries. At Tadpole’s insistence. And polished off each one, after allowing Tadpole to bite off the tips of their ears.

Sadly, the chocolatier I found within striking distance of my office only stocked traditional fare: eggs, chickens, bells, fish and rabbits. I was hoping to find at the very least a frog for him indoors, and some other more original gifts. A little forward planning probably wouldn’t have gone amiss, but somehow Easter has slunk up and pounced on me: the visit which seemed to be permanently several weeks away is now happening tomorrow. I winced at the price tags (yes, they do look home-made and artisanal, prettily wrapped in patterned cellphane with their yellow ribbons, but they also cost rather more than your average Dairy Milk egg.)

I have a vivid memory of a visit to a chocolatier in the rue de Courcelles (17th arrondissement) where I once shopped for Easter fare. I marvelled at the divine smell which permeated the tiny shop, wondering if it was possible to get a seratonin high from just breathing it in, and subsequently got chatting to the shopkeeper about how superior French easter chocolates were to the pre-packaged, supermarket-bought eggs I had known in the UK. The flattery paid off - it never hurts to pander a little to a French person’s innate superiority complex, I find - and the lady offered to show me behind the scenes, around the laboratoire du chocolat where her husband and son worked their cocoa magic. Oh the heavenly aroma which the vat of melted chocolate gave off as it waited to be poured into a multitude of different moulds.

Would Mademoiselle like to taste one of the little fishes?

Mademoiselle most certainly would. Mademoiselle would also like to know if it would be possible to ask for their son’s hand in marriage.

Good gracious, I hope the French don’t think we all do that.

Personally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in trainers and white socks.

I put on my powder blue mac, because spring has well and truly sprung. I find it hard to believe that not two weeks ago there was snow on the ground and the park was closed altogether. Now the trees are covered in delicate white blossom, the birds are singing in a cheerful chorus and I am woken up every morning by sunlight filtering through the shutters.

I stop the pushchair to reach up and pick a blossom for Tadpole to study. She sniffs it cautiously and then sneezes. (Atishoo - an English sneeze. France: nul points, Angleterre: dix points.)

“Knees and toes!” she pleads. Meaning that I’m supposed to sing ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’, her new favourite song. I sing, a little out of breath from pushing uphill. I don’t really care who can hear me, because this exchange takes place inside the little bubble where only Tadpole and I exist, and I see no further than the sparkle in her grey-blue eyes. But I doubt any of the passers by understood the words in any case. Except maybe when I stopped the pushchair and did the actions.

“Encore un! Encore un!” (Tadpole’s way of saying “do it again!”)

I sing it one more time, and then cast around for some other means of entertainment. Deflecting her attention seems to be the only way to get around her stubborn streak and love of repetition. It’s the only solution I’ve found anyhow. I stopped reading books about child rearing the day Tadpole was born and my brand of parenting can best be described as the “instinctive hit and miss technique”. Whatever works, goes.

“I know, let’s do some counting, [Tadpole].” This is something we’ve been working on for the last few days. We count apples in the fruitbowl, toys in the bath, fingers and toes. Most of the time she just smiles while I count. Then, out of the blue, when I’m only listening with half an ear, she will suddenly count all the way to ten on her own. The only sticking point tends to be the number four, which she always says twice for good measure.

“One,” I begin, pointing at a parked car, as we have now exited the park and are on the pavement approaching the town hall.

“Toe, free, four….” continues Tadpole, pointing downwards, I’m not entirely sure at what.

“Four,” she repeats, “five, six, sefen…” She pauses, as though she’s run out of things to count.

There is no shortage of parked cars, so I decide that maybe she’s got stuck, and I prompt: “Eight..”

“Et, nine, ten!” she finishes, triumphantly. I stop the pushchair so I can clap my hands and show my appreciation of her counting prowess. Her finger is still pointing downwards, at something on the floor.

It dawns on me that it was not the cars that she was counting, but the dog poos I was swerving to miss along the way.

The joys of city living.

postscript: Jim from Rennes, who seems like a nice sort of chap, asked me to plug the new single by his chums ‘I am Kloot’ today, Over My Shoulder. Jim, I am flattered that you think I have the power to influence people and make them buy records. Personally I haven’t bought a record since I got cable broadband access in 2000 (apologies to struggling artists!) But I don’t see any harm in recommending that you follow the link above and give it a listen… Oh my goodness! Spot the cute little Tadpole clone in the video!

Am feeling exhausted today. Drained, wan and uninspired.

So I hope you will excuse me for foisting upon you a search terms post. Yes, that old lazy blogging chestnut. It is Friday after all. And I do pay sitemeter a handsome € 5 a month in order to be privy to this fascinating information, so I owe it to myself to get some mileage out of it occasionally.

To whom it may concern:

what does moi mean, in regards to drugs?
I think it means “Me, me, me, I want some, give them to ME”. I can’t think of any other possible explanation. Unless it’s an übercool new name for crystal meth. Sorry I can’t be of more assistance. Try asking metafilter. Metafilter knows everything.

suppository punishment (see also ginger suppository punishment)
Ok, so I didn’t know that ginger suppositories existed, but I do now. I fail to understand how I came to have the dubious honour of being number two on google for this search term, but I’m hoping that after today’s post, I’ll be in the coveted number 1 position.
(update: it worked!)

is the holy grail in the louvre?
Sign up for your own guided Da Vinci Code Tour here! Rates start from € 100 for an hour-long tour, in the company of petite anglaise, during which you may pay your respects to Mary, before taking in Virgin Records, Esprit, Natures et Decouvertes and Sephora.

petite porn
I hope after scrolling through twenty four pages of google results and clicking on every single result you weren’t too disappointed. I can’t decide whether to feel flattered that you chose to stay for four minutes.

how to mummify a tadpole?
???

Now it’s your turn. Make me giggle at my monitor. Please. I need all the help I can get to get through today.

A colleague approaches my desk and I execute a rapid and discreet ALT+TAB.

“Where’s [the boss] hiding this time?”, she enquires.

“Uh, not sure, kitchen maybe, but he can’t be far away,” I reply vaguely, trying to remember if he had told me (as I was only half-listening, while sketching out a blog post in my head). Thankfully I catch sight of the top of his head in the stairwell. I point and say “THERE he is!”

I fight the urge to crawl under my desk and hide. The shame. I just went and used the wrong voice for those last three words.

Somehow they came out in that patronising voice, with exaggerated intonation and emphasis, which I find myself using when I speak to Tadpole.

It’s another of those things that I swore I would never do when I had a child, which fell by the wayside as soon as motherhood was upon me. I challenge anyone to try speaking normally to a toddler. The fact is that they do seem to learn faster if you use emphasis and repetition. And personally when I’m repeating and emphasizing I find it difficult not to adopt an annoying failed actor’s children’s TV presenter’s voice. I often think I sound like a female version of Geoffrey on Rainbow, but it’s frankly enough effort to keep on repeating things in English every time she says them in French, without having to force myself to speak in a normal, grown-up voice as well.

Obviously speaking to an adult in that condescending tone could get me into trouble. I have drawn the parallel before between being a PA and babysitting, but when I greeted my boss on the phone the other day with an over emphatic “how are YOU?”, in what he immediately identified as my Tadpole voice, I definitely took that analogy one step too far. Luckily, being that he is a father of young children himself, he was quite understanding, and not a little amused.

My worst fear now is that the baby vocabulary that Mr Frog and the childminder use with Tadpole will insinuate its way into my French conversations. French toddlers use words like doudou (favourite teddy or comforter), bobo (a place where you hurt yourself), caca (poo), dodo (sleep) and lolo (milk). A bit like saying ‘doggy’ in English instead of dog.

I sincerely hope the day will never come when I say, bleary eyed and yawning one morning at the cockroach/coffee machine after yet another long evening spent in front of a computer screen, “Oh là là qu’est ce que j’ai envie de faire dodo là …”

The only thing more embarrassing than that, would be if I said it in my ‘Tadpole voice’.

I received the controversial form from the social security today: the formulaire de déclaration de choix du médecin traitant.

Unlike the UK, where you are registered with one doctor or doctor’s surgery, who have your file detailing your every ailment from childhood to the present day, the French have always been able to consult whomever they please, whenever they please, as often as they please. There is nothing to prevent someone who is horrified at the appearance of four insolent blackheads on their nose from making an appointment to see a dermatologist directly. Or someone suffering from a mild bout of indigestion from missing out the GP middle-man and opting to see a gastroenterologist instead. No system of referrals has hitherto existed to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not wasted by hypochondriacs electing to visit several specialists for their maladies imaginaires, and soliciting a second, third or even fourth opinion.

The social security system has unquestioningly picked up its share of the tab all this time (the same amount for every patient, no means testing required), while mutuelles, private health insurers, whose policies every worker subscribes to as part of their employment package, pay some or all of the rest. Or very little, in the case of dental work. Serious financial planning is advisable if, say, you need a tooth crowning in this country - you may have to forfeit your holiday plans or that nice Ipod photo you had set your heart on in order to pay the dentist.

The eminently sensible change being wrought by the innocent looking form is that everyone now has to choose a GP to be their first point of contact: their médecin traitant. The only specialists that people will be able to consult without a GP referral are gynecologists, dentists, ophthalmologists, paediatricians and psychiatrists. Other appointments can presumably still be made, but will no longer be reimbursed. Which is very dissuasive indeed.

Understandably perhaps, there is a lot of opposition to this new measure. Old habits die hard, and many people resent having to go and see a GP, who might be a complete stranger, just to obtain a referral to the specialist they have been frequenting for a decade or more.

Personally I’ve never seen a French GP more than once. Depending on where I was working at any given time I tended to see someone close to my office, and I’m very British about ailments like colds that the French invariably to see a doctor about, preferring to dip into my large stock of generic UK supermarket cold cures. Tadpole has a doctor she sees fairly regularly, a GP chosen mainly because the local paediatricians recommended to me were taking on no new patients. She is lovely, and less heavy handed with the antibiotics than most French physicians I’ve crossed paths with, but I have no idea whether she will consent to signing Mr Frog’s and my forms. Doctors are under no obligation to accept everyone, and do not have to give any justification for their refusals. As she happens to be very popular in our neighbourhood, she is undoubtedly fully booked already. The forms have been sent out in three huge postal waves, meaning that people with surnames ending in A - O may have bagged all the available places. Desperate times call for desperate measures: I’ll have to take my chequebook and see if she can be bribed.

Who knows, she may be one of the doctors boycotting the new system in protest at becoming some sort of clearing house and refuse to sign any forms at all.

In any case we now have until July 1st to be ill, visit the doctor and get the forms signed. And if we remain in perfect health, we’ll probably end up making an appointment anyway (at a cost of just over € 20 to the social security system) just to get the signature and coveted inky stamp on the form (the French are VERY attached to their ‘tampons’, and no official form would be complete without several illegible stamps).

If every single French person does this before 1 July, at a cost of € 20 per adult, I think we can safely expect an even bigger social security deficit this year. Thereby defeating the cost-cutting object of the whole excercise, at least in the short term. And creating a swathe of paperwork for the bureaucrats to process.

Atchoum! I feel a cold coming on. Off to the doctor’s I go…

*French for Atishoo! I have actually heard people pronouncing the ‘m’ when they sneeze. I swear.

When I visited our apartment a couple of years ago, arching my back so the agent immobilier would notice the fact that I would shortly be spawning a little Frog and move our dossier to the top of the pile, I was very taken with the hairdresser’s next door.

The psychedelic, rainbow coloured, curvy shop front looks rather like it has been fashioned out of papier mâché. The sign on the door reads “Paris - Ouagadougou - Gif sur Yvette”. The name: Les Intondables, which literally translated means something like the ‘unshavables’ or the ‘unshearables’. Tondre is a verb of which I am rather fond, given that it can mean to ‘mow (the lawn)’ or to ’shear’ (a sheep) as well as to shave your head. A tondeuse can therefore refer to either a small electric razor or a lawnmower.

But the best thing about the funky hairdressers’ is the music that booms out of their shop day in and day out. An eclectic mix which means that you never know quite what to expect, but are almost always pleasantly surprised. I often find myself humming along with a long forgotten track whilst poking around looking for post in amongst the junk mail and other unwelcome debris lurking in my letterbox. (’Fools Gold’ by the Stone Roses was one of last week’s favourites, and I actually sang out loud to ‘Temptation’ by New Order. Do I sound old yet?)

Until last Saturday I had never crossed over the line and danced in the lobby however. As Mr Frog, Tadpole and I emerged from the lift on our way to the supermarket, our ears were greeted with the opening bars of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ by The Smiths and Tadpole’s enthusiasm proved infectious. We are having something of a Smiths revival in our household, as Mr Frog brought his old CD’s back from the Evil’s so that I could put them on my Ipod. Tadpole seems to have taken a shine to Morrissey and enjoys ‘dancing’ (if it can be called that, being essentially arm waving at this stage) to ‘Vicar in a Tutu’ almost as much as to her other current favourite, ‘Head, Shoulders, knees and toes’.

Tadpole span round and round, waving her arms above her head and shrieking her appreciation, wobbling a little as she started to get rather dizzy. Mr Frog valiantly tried to encourage her to move her legs, executing the sort of moves that would make you howl with shame if you saw your dad doing something similar at a pub disco. Meanwhile yours truly was shaking her booty with reckloss abandon and yelling ‘wiggle wiggle? Go on [Tadpole], wiggle your bottom!’ Tadpole collapsed in a fit of giggles. I winked suggestively at Mr Frog (who was now doing his very best John Travolta impression, despite the fact that it did not match the music at all) and slapped my rear. Thank goodness we had the place to ourselves.

Except we didn’t.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I spied a shadowy figure in the stairwell, his silhouette outlined against the sunlight pouring in through the window. The bellowing music and the fact that the stairs are lined with carpet had allowed someone to creep up on us unnoticed.

I gestured to Mr Frog, who stopped mid-pose, looking rather like he was halfway through a spirited rendition of ‘I’m a little teapot’. There was an eery lull in the music - someone in the shop must be fumbling around for a new CD - and even Tadpole went silent, sensing that something was amiss. The man, a grumpy looking gentleman in his fifties with very bushy eyebrows, sidled past, maintaining a buffer zone between the dangerous whirling dervish people and himself, with not even the ghost of a smile. Perhaps he was worried that he might actually catch a sense of humour if he got too close?

When the door had swung safely shut behind him I collapsed in a quivering giggling mass.

It is at times like these that I am glad I remembered to do my pelvic floor exercises.

I wouldn’t like to be inside zoe’s head tomorrow as I think she should by rights have a stonking hangover.

In the other categories: Dooce cleaned up, as did the Gawker Media empire.

I was ‘watching’ the ceremony unfold on IRC (very amusing indeed and not a little suspenseful) and I have a transcript available on request (email me if you want one).

I had such surreal, cocktail-induced dreams on Friday night, that by Saturday morning I was no longer sure which conversations had actually taken place at the blogmeet and which were the warped inventions of my pickled brain.

Sadly I think I really did quiz La Coquette about the virtues of Colgate whitening strips for about ten minutes (my apologies). And for your information, we two were the last standing - but, to be fair, this had more to do with many people having to dash off to catch the last train home to the ‘burbs, and should not be construed as a reflection of their staying power in general.

I arrived at the bar - Klein Holland in the Marais - a little after the appointed hour and was afflicted with a severe case of rabbit in the headlights syndrome as I walked hesitantly over to the large table around which (what I supposed was) our group had congregated. “You’re petite right?” someone guessed, (I wonder why?). I nodded affirmatively. Introductions followed but I remained in a state of shellshock for several minutes and I don’t think I managed to form a grammatically viable sentence until I’d had a few sips of my first cocktail. There’s something very surreal about meeting people in the flesh who are privy to your innermost thoughts, yet have no idea what you look like, or sound like in person (awfully British apparently).

Inevitably, because of the fantastic turnout, I didn’t manage to have a proper chat with everyone present, and for this reason alone we will have to do it again. Iain deserves a special mention for daring to join us at all - although thankfully a couple of bloggers did bring their other halves, so he wasn’t the only male for long. One thing I did notice is that I found it easier to continue calling people by their blog pseudoynms, as the labels seem to have well and truly stuck.

As for me, I felt absurdly comfortable being ‘petite’ and, after referring to Mr Frog and Tadpole by their real names a couple of times, I soon reverted back to using their blognames as well. I think blogging takes place in a sort of Donnie Darko-esque parallel universe, and the blogmeet definitely took place in that other place.

Saturday morning can best be summed up using the term ‘tired and emotional’. Or as the French sometimes say, “j’avais mal au cheveux” (my hair hurt). Mr Frog phoned from the TGV to say that his train would be delayed. I decided to press on to Gare de Lyon regardless and settled myself in a café opposite the station to people watch and eat the closest thing to an English breakfast on the menu: a croque madame. (It doesn’t really come close, but I found it helpful all the same.)

I was impatient to see my daughter again after our longest separation, but it wasn’t until a girl only a little older than Tadpole, with similar curly blond hair, stopped in front of the café window and stared in my direction that the desire to see her started to feel like a physical craving. I waved and smiled at the little girl, and then headed into the station to stake out the platform and start my waiting vigil. When the train finally pulled in, I ran (people who know me well will realise how out of character this is) to voiture 13 and immediately caught sight of Mr Frog. I leapt up the steps and a little warm bundle hurled itself into my arms. Suddenly the floodgates opened.

Granny p (see Friday’s comments) was right. Motherhood and schizophrenia have a lot in common. Some people had commented the previous night that they couldn’t quite imagine me as a mum. And I had been secretly feeling rather guilty that I hadn’t spent the whole week pining. Was it normal to feel gleeful that I could get up a little later, and run errands after work? Was I totally selfish and un-maternal? But as soon as I laid eyes on her, the shockwave hit and it was like being punched in the ribcage.

Last night, vegetating on the sofa in front of a DVD (Paycheck: I like Philip Dick’s novels but I hate plastic ‘Ken’ Affleck so verdict is not good I’m afraid), I felt such a sense of relief and comfort to know that my little girl was sleeping right there in the next room. I could go and peek any time I wanted to, and listen to her gently snoring.

That has to be my current definition of happiness.

I’m all in a turmoil today.

Mr Frog has now departed and is chaperoning my long lost Tadpole back to Paris tomorrow afternoon. In fact he’ll be seeing her in a couple of hours and will be able to cover her soft red cheeks with a multitude of tiny kisses while I sit typing in my office trying (no doubt unsuccessfully) not to feel insanely jealous.

It has been rather odd her being away for so long. I have coped by kind of “switching off”, winding the clocks back twenty months or so to a time when I wasn’t yet a mother. I’m sure I will think that she has changed and grown up beyond belief when I see her again. A whole host of new words will greet me. I will have missed important things, like her building her first snowman. Apparently she has a new pair of fur-lined boots that grandma bought. She is so fond of them that she refuses to take them off at bedtime. I hope they are not too hideous, but nevertheless fear the worst as belle mère and I do not exactly see eye to eye on questions of infant fashion.

The last time I phoned, Tadpole refused to talk at all, handing the receiver back to mamie with a brusque “C’est fini!”. I know I shouldn’t read anything into this, as toddlers are anything but predictable, logical beings, but all the same it was a bit of a slap in the face. Her voice sounded so distant and so, well, French I suppose. I’m looking forward to our trip to the UK at Easter to redress the language balance with a liberal dose of Yorkshire.

But before I get to the tearful reunion at the Gare de Lyon, my stomach is all a-flutter about the fact that I’m meeting all these expat blogger strangers in a bar at 7 pm tonight.

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Who would have thought that there were so many of us, or that some souls would be willing to hop on a TGV to come and meet up. Oh lord, I hope the bar is okay… I hope everyone gets on. I only facilitated the whole thing, like a kind of expat friendship matchmaking service (maybe I should go into business?), but I do feel a teensy bit responsible for the outcome.

And I have no idea what to wear. How I want to be perceived. That sort of highly superficial thing that shouldn’t be important, but IS.

Does my bum look big in this?

If groping or being groped is your thing, you’ll be in seventh heaven on the Paris metro today. My guess is it’s a veritable gropathon.

The French unions have gone ahead with their ill-timed general strike, regardless of the fact that the Olympic Comittee are in town today. Metros, trains, buses, airports, radio stations and the postal service are all affected. Mr Frog had it on (what we thought was) good authority from a station employee only last week that there was no need for him to change his train tickets, as the strikes would be called off at the last minute. Not so. The strikes are very much on, and his train has been cancelled.

I often wonder where reporters find the people they film for the eight o’clock news saying that yes, they have had problems getting to work, but despite this they do fully support the strikers’ demands. I challenge a roving reporter to shove a TV camera and/or microphone in my face. On second thoughts, just give me five minutes so I can look up the phrase “shooting yourselves in the foot” in the English/French dictionary first.

I am however sufficiently in touch with my French side to have opted for an extra long lie-in this morning, using public transport disruption as a smokescreen for my sloth. If anyone asks, I waited patiently for a metro which was not forthcoming before abandoning ship, mixing my metaphors, waking the slumbering Mr Frog and begging him to drive me to work on his trusty steed Piaggio. We weaved (wove?) in and out of the dense morning traffic, a chill wind blowing up my coatsleeves, and I arrived at work a mere half an hour late. The fact that we left home at 9 am is irrelevant.

Upon inspection of the RATP internet site I note that one in three metros are actually running on my line. Shhh! Don’t tell my boss, or Mr Frog, as he has agreed to come and collect me at 5 pm.

When my travel bag finally arrived, I was horrified to see that I had forgotten to pack my Spanish phrasebook.

I do understand quite a bit of Spanish when it is written down, having studied French (and even Latin) in the past, but I am woefully incapable of forming proper sentences which contain important elements like verbs and adjectives. GCSE Spanish, taken ‘for fun’ during my first year of A-Levels, is no more than a dim, distant memory and subsequent trips to Italy have muddied the waters somewhat. Even if I did manage to formulate a question successfully, there was no guarantee that I would understand a word of the reply.

Minus phrasebook, if I saw, for example, a cake in a bakery window and didn’t know what it was called but wanted to eat it (which occurred once approximately every 500 m) but didn’t think I’d be able to see it from the till - let alone point at it - I had to renounce any hope of eating it altogether. My thighs are probably grateful for this enforced restraint, but I found the whole experience very frustrating indeed.

I pride myself on my ‘almost Frenchness’ as I go about my daily business in Paris. I panted through my ante-natal classes in French, not to mention swearing loudly and colourfully at Mr Frog and the angelic midwife throughout the labour itself. I like to consider myself a world apart from the tourists I see every day speaking English loudly and slowly to shop assistants in the Opéra district where I work, giving them disdainful, superior looks and thinking to myself how rude they are not to make more of an effort to speak a few words of French, rather than assuming everyone here speaks some English.

In Spain, however, I became precisely that tourist I had previously despised, just about managing a “habla ingles o frances, por favor?”, blushing all the while, and then lapsing into slow, carefully enunciated, extra-loud English. I might as well have been dressed in bermuda shorts (shiver: it was sunny but very cold) with a large camera dangling from my neck.

I promise I will never give a poor, wretched tourist a superior look ever again (well, at least until next week). Maybe they all simply forgot to pack their phrasebooks, so who am I to pass judgement without being in possession of the facts?

Luckily we had a part-time guide in Madrid, a friend and former colleague of Mr Frog’s, and he taught us everything we needed to know:

una caña por favor

Repeat to fade.

As you know, Mr Frog and I are eloping to Madrid this weekend. Weather permitting. And minus the wedding. Actually I plan to spend some quality time sleeping in, shoveling tapas down my gullet and putting my credit cards through their paces, reminding them of the meaning of the phrase ‘retail therapy’.

Our hotel claims to have internet connections and all manner of hi tech accoutrements, but as I don’t have a laptop, I doubt I will be able to blog before I get home on Tuesday evening.

Feel free to trawl through the archives in my absence (even if on older posts the comments are closed in an attempt to prevent trackback spam). You might find the categories in the sidebar useful.

May I also suggest that you pay a gag reflex a visit, start from the beginning, and read to the end. I can’t read any of Cori’s posts without imagining her story being translated to the silver screen and aired at Sundance to rapturous applause.

And blogmeeters, I will finalise details for Friday 11th upon my return. It looks like we might meet early (from 7pm) to allow for people who need to catch a train/RER home and the bar we choose will have snack options, so that no-one hits the floor before at least 8.30pm.

Okay? Right. Talk amongst yourselves. Nothing to see here…

update: we got here (albeit minus my luggage which arrived ten hours later than I did) and despite it being rather unseasonally chilly, we are still mightily enjoying the change of scenery, lack of pushchair and terrifyingly cholesterol-rich diet. The same, alas, cannot be said for this Spanish-not-quite-qwerty keyboard, which keeps tricking me into putting ñ´s in the most inappropriate places…

Her telephone manner leaves something to be desired.

Tadpole: “Allô? Allô? Allô Allô!”

*beepy sound of buttons being pressed on keypad*

*dial tone*

Okay. That. Didn’t. Work.

The phone rings again.

“Allô? C’est daddy!”

(Tadpole has a habit of talking about what she can see when on the telephone, which can be somewhat confusing for the listener, who doesn’t have a clue why she is saying “car! book! teddy!” in response to “how are you baby?”)

“Hello sweetie, are you with your daddy?”

“Mummy” (or mamie, but I choose to hear “mummy”)

“Yes darling it’s your mummy. Did you have a nice time with daddy on the train?”

“Daddy… mummy”

“Can you hear mummy giving you a kiss? Listen …” *smacky kiss noise*

“Kiss!” *smacky kiss noise* “dabulakibaba lima pussy cat”

“…? Er, can I speak to daddy now? Say bye bye to mummy?”

“NO! Pas daddy!”

*beepy sound of dialing on keypad*

*dial tone*

I give up. Clearly this is one long distance love affair that cannot be conducted by telephone.

I rang in sick this morning.

It was a toss up between calling to say that I would be late, because I needed to help dispatch off Mr Frog and Tadpole to the Evils’, and making one of those phone calls where I try to sound off-colour enough not to work, without overdoing it to the point where I sound like I’m about to expire. In the end I mumbled something pathetic about womens’ problems and having a hot water bottle welded to my midriff. And a headache, for good measure.

Due to the current snowbound status of the French capital, no taxi company was willing to commit to sending us a cab this morning. And I couldn’t really see Mr Frog, Tadpole, a big heavy bag and a pushchair making it to Gare de Lyon without my help. The change of metros at Chatelêt alone, with its kilometres of corridors and flights of wet, slippery steps, would have defeated them. As it happened however, after a brainwave of mine, Mr Frog’s agency were instructed to book a G7 Classe Affaires posh businessman’s taxi, complete with Financial magazines and squeaky leather seats. The Agency switchboard called back while Mr Frog was (still) in the bath, and I was surfing the internet wearing only a towel, trying to find out if the trains were actually running or not.

“Ze good news eez zat zere eez a taxi,” shouted Mr Frog from the bathroom. “But ze bad news eez zat it weel be ‘ere in six minutes.”

Panic.

Five and a half minutes later, I am dressed, coated and ready to go, and I have managed to get Tadpole’s shoes, coat, scarf and hat on. All the while she is watching ‘Dora the Explorer’ and puts up zero resistance. Television is, in my opinion, something which should be used very sparingly on toddlers. But sometimes it can save your life. On a normal day I have to chase Tadpole round and round the apartment - her in floods of giggles, me growing quietly frantic about my lateness for work - before I can get so much as a wriggly little arm into a coatsleeve. Praise be to Dora.

I chaperoned Frog and Tadpole to the station to see them off, so as to be on hand to help keep Tadpole entertained in case of lengthy train delays. Naturally it had been impossible to find out any useful information from the SNCF website, and the phone number that I was given to call just sent me in ever decreasing circles listening to a pre-recorded disembodied lady’s voice which never actually told me anything useful, and finally delivered her coup de grace by telling me that the train number I had entered did not exist.

The TGV was on time, although when it will reach its destination is anyone’s guess. I explained to Tadpole for the twentieth time that daddy was taking her to see mamie and papy so she could play in the garden and build a ‘noman’, but she just smiled at me and held out a crayon for me to draw a picture. I got off the train, and blew her kisses through the window. Her little face fell as realisation finally dawned that mummy was staying behind. I left abruptly, not wanting to see if there would be any tears.

The irony of this whole separation scenario is that Mr Frog and I were supposed to be going to Madrid for four days, sans Tadpole, to chill out, order hot chocolate and churros and spend a bit of time remembering what it was like to be a couple. But as I hear that Orly airport is well and truly closed today, and snow is forecast all weekend, I’m feeling somewhat pessimistic about the whole thing.

Please excuse me while I just go and bang my head against the wall repeatedly.

I somehow managed to cut the umbilical cord which binds me to my computer last night and spent some quality time on the sofa. I watched a film. A slow-moving, thought-provoking film with not a car chase nor exchange of gunfire in sight, which means that I watched it on my own, with only a box of tissues for company. Mr Frog’s reaction to ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ which we watched at my insistence at the weekend: ‘Mais rien se passe dans ton film!’ The last hour was set to a backing track of his gentle snoring. So this time he was banished altogether.

‘My Life Without Me’, (’Ma Vie Sans Moi’ in French) stars Sarah Polley, who bears an uncanny ressemblence to Julianne Moore. It made me think a lot, shed a few tears, and threw my life sharply back into perspective.

Since the beginning of the year, for reasons which are still rather opaque to me, there has been an undercurrent of panic running through my life. From time to time something triggers a full scale attack of ‘can’t get my breath-tummy doing somersaults-everything going fast-pure adrenaline rush’. My concentration has been shot to pieces, my work has suffered and my eating habits have been rather erratic. I can identify some of the things that have been bothering me, but thinking rationally doesn’t really help. The panic feels like a physical thing, out of my control, and telling myself sternly to pull myself together won’t make a blind bit of difference. I’m an emotional yoyo. Mr Frog never knows quite what to expect.

The first time this happened to me, I was eighteen years old. I was on A-Level study leave when my first boyfriend/love/person I knew ‘carnally’ broke up with me. The shock sent me into a tailspin. I was a mess, but I didn’t have time to be, I had work to do, exams to pass that would decide which university I would go to. A nice doctor/family friend prescribed me with some ‘beta blockers’ and everything slowed down to a normal speed. My powers of concentration returned. Everything came good in the end, I got my grades and it was really no more than a temporary glitch in the grand scheme of things. But it’s no coincidence that my classic exam anxiety dream involves discovering that my A-levels are due to start the following day but I am unable to find my revision notes.

‘My Life Without Me’ showed a few weeks in the life of a young mother, Anne, who lives in a trailer in her mother’s back garden with her husband and two young daughters. She learns that she has an untreatable form of cancer and only a month or two left to live. Anne is not the sort of person to waste time raging about how unfair life has been to her, or to wallow in self-pity. Instead she makes a list of ‘Things to Do Before I Die’ in a garish pink notepad. And sticks to it. Without telling anyone. She records a message for each of her daughters for every single birthday until they turn eighteen, while sitting in her car on a break from her job as a night cleaner. She visits her father in prison. She tries to find a suitable woman who might become a companion to her husband and a mother to her children - because she knows that life will have to go on without her. She lives every single instant with a new intensity. It’s a film about life, as the title suggests, not about death.

The Anne character has a ‘pure soul’, she is totally unselfish, un self-absorbed. Everything I am not. I carry around inside of me a negative list: things I want but can’t have, things I’m discontented about, things I want to change about Mr Frog, his job, my job, our life together. All the while I am guilty of not making the most of the life I am actually living.

Time for some changes around here.

I am being followed around Paris by tanned, greased and shaved men with gravity defying buttocks.

Everywhere I turn, there they are: in the metro, in the street outside my house, in bus shelters, where old dears queue up with their shopping trolleys, sneaking a sideways glance when their friends aren’t looking. Given the arctic temperatures we are currently experiencing in the city of lights, such a lack of apparel seems a little inappropriate.

I am, of course, referring to the latest Hom advertising campaign.

In my quest for photographic evidence this morning it was necessary to take a tour of the Hom website (requires flash). It’s not the sort of thing you want to be caught peeking at just after 9 am on your work monitor. Open plan offices are not always A Good Thing. Thankfully my colleagues are firmly ensconced in a meeting room with a large thermos of coffee and I am free to surf to my heart’s content. I thoroughly recommend taking a tour of the 3001 collection if you are in need of a pick-me-up.

Two things in particular disturb me about this advertising campaign. First, this picture.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m unconvinced that transparent, skin-tight lace is something I want to see stretched across a man’s buttocks. Even on this particular pair, belonging to a fine specimen by most people’s standards.

The second thing that is making me feel rather queasy is the window display in this menswear boutique located not far from where I drop off Tadpole in the mornings. The street is pleasant, leafy and lined with village-style shops (bakers, florists, pharmacies and mini-markets), catering to the mainly elderly local populace. Florentin prêt-à -porter sells brands with names like ‘Gentleman Farmer’, evocative of tweed and sensible gumboots. They also provide a tailoring service. Rather disconcertingly however, this picture occupies centre stage in their vitrine at the moment.

I am now haunted by the nagging suspicion that most of the doddery old men dragging themselves with some difficulty up the avenue de Laumière, walking sticks in hand , or hanging out on parkbenches with their cronies, or playing pétanque on the rue Botzaris are actually wearing skin tight semi-transparent tiger pants underneath. Or electric blue shiny ’shorties’ with wonderbra-style built in padding and uplift. Or, perish the thought, g-strings.

So today I am mostly feeling relieved that I do not possess x-ray vision.