petite anglaise

“Are you sure it won’t be too weird, me meeting you and your friends for dinner in Marrakech?” I say, between forkfuls of crispy pancake. Mr Frog and I are having lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant tucked behind the Café Chéri(e) on boulevard de la Villette. Tiny and unassuming, it is nonetheless jam packed, and we were lucky to get a table at all.

“It will be slightly awkward, yes,” he replies with a half smile, “but we can’t not meet up. It’s too much of a coincidence that we’ve ended up both being there at the same time…”

“Well, I’m pleased you feel that way,” I say. “I’m quite nervous about being on holiday on my own, so it’s nice to know I’ll have some chaperones on my first night, at least.”

When I booked my holiday, you see, to neatly coincide with Tadpole’s stay with her French grandparents during half term, I knew Mr Frog was going to Casablanca, but neither of us had any inkling that a weekend in Marrakech was also on the cards. If he was going alone, meeting wouldn’t be odd in the slightest. We often do lunch, with or without Tadpole, or shoot the breeze by email or googlechat. But since our breakup nearly two years ago I’ve barely clapped eyes on any of his friends or work colleagues. They were more his than mine, and I figured I’d relinquished my right to see them. Not that they hate me or anything, and I’m almost certain that Mr Frog badmouthed me to no-one, because that’s simply not his style. But seeing these people after almost two years, after everything that has happened, both in public and in private, it’s bound to be strange.

I try to imagine the conversation we’ll have over pastilla and tajine in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the medina.

“So, Catherine, you’re writing a book now. What’s it about? It’s a memoir, right?”

I blush. “Well, er, meeting this guy for starters.” I point at Mr Frog with my fork. “And then, er, leaving him for someone else, and how we all dealt with that. Among other things.”

Oh yes, I feel sure this is definitely going to be weird.

As I sat on the métro on the way to see some girlfriends yesterday, a bag containing chablis, Nutella and maple syrup wedged between my feet, I couldn’t help thinking back to happier versions of Mardi Gras, and in particular the 2006 edition, in honour of which I threw a pancake party and invited a few friends* from work to my old apartment. It was the first and last time many of them got to meet the man I referred to on this blog as Lover (a pseudonym to which a few readers strongly objected, but I felt then, as I do now, that given just how much time we spent horizontal, the name fit very snugly indeed).

A few days later Lover brought my dreams of an idyllic life together in the Breton countryside crashing down around my ears. I picked myself up, carried on, and so much other stuff happened shortly afterwards that I really didn’t know how to feel anything other than numb for a while.

What this means is that I’ve now been single for almost a full calendar year. It’s a state of affairs without precedent, because after much racking of brains and counting of digits, I can say with absolute certainty that the last time I was single for a Whole Year was in 1988. Although to be fair, at that time I’d been single for a total of fifteen years and was breathlessly awaiting the arrival of my first proper boyfriend.

How do I feel about this? Well, of course I’d rather be happily alone than with someone who was wrong for me. And yes, messing around with few strings attached seemed like fun for a while, but now just strikes me as utterly pointless. As for online dating, I check in to look at my profile from time to time but can rarely muster up sufficient enthusiasm to actually reply to my emails, let alone drag myself out on a blind date.

I know that this year without a special (adult) person by my side has been really good for me, in some ways. I’ve built new friendships, invested a lot more in existing ones and spent lashings of quality time with my daughter. I’m sure I needed to be alone, for a while, and that I’ll appreciate sharing the good, the bad and the ugly with a special someone all the more because of it, when the time comes.

But am I truly happy with this state of affairs? Is single the best thing since the invention of Nutella? Is single the new size zero?

I’d be lying if I said I loved it. Single still doesn’t come naturally to me and I doubt it ever will. So please excuse me while I go and comfort myself with a large pot of leftover nutella, a useful side effect of which is that size zero will never, never fit.

I am going to the prud’hommes (French industrial tribunal thingy) today to contest my dismissal. This is rather unexpected, but my lawyer informed me late on Friday evening that contrary to everything we had been led to believe, my ex-employer’s lawyers had changed their minds about asking for the hearing to be deferred to a later date (and had forgotten to let us know).

Given that I’d been told precisely the opposite a matter of days earlier, it’s somewhat miraculous that I’m back from the UK, have childcare for the day and can attend at all. I suppose, to look on the bright side, at least I haven’t spent the last week feeling apprehensive, which might have put a dampener on my trip to England with Tadpole.

More later…

Update: lawyer obtained a deferral and the case now will be heard on 21 March, which should give me time to actually read the substance of the arguments being made against me and make sure all the facts are straight.

I go to a village pub in Norfolk!!!

While I’m busy, please listen to the following message from our sponsors:

“Traffic’s diabolical,” says the taxi driver, by way of apology when he shows up ten minutes late to take Tadpole and me to the airport. “It’ll take us a good forty-five minutes to get to Orly…”

“No problem,” I reply, as though butter wouldn’t melt. “I’ve allowed plenty of time.” Forty-five minutes will give us an hour for check in, shopping for coffee and pain au chocolat, baggage scanning and temporary boot removal. I am a seasoned traveller. My feathers remain unruffled.

“Mummy, my tummy is hurting,” says Tadpole tugging at her strap.

“I’m sorry honey but you need to keep the strap fastened,” I say, convinced it is simply a thinly veiled escape attempt. Tummy ache is also her strategy of choice when faced with a plateful of broccoli. I know better than to take such complaints seriously.

* * * * * * * * * *

“My tummy is still hurting,” moans Tadpole.

“I’m sorry my sweet, but we’re nearly there. You’ll feel better soon. When we get out…”

The traffic on the motorway is fluid, and after crawling along the péripherique for the last fifty minutes we’re finally nearing the airport. Our driver is busy murmuring sweet nothings to his girlfriend. Or at least I assume that’s who he’s talking to. He’s wearing a headset. The car radio is tuned into Skyrock, a radio station which appears to consist of lots of shouting and very little music. A presenter with approximately two brain cells and a vocoder is calling random phone numbers and trying to frighten any small children who pick up the phone by pretending to be a monster. How irresponsible, I think to myself.

Tadpole coughs an ominous cough.

Some surprisingly efficient reflex kicks in and I grab the water bottle out of my open rucksack and remove the plastic bag I’d wrapped around it as a precaution, mindful of the fact that macbooks and moisture don’t mix, holding it just in front of Tadpole’s face.

Not a moment too soon.

The next ten minutes are spent trying to remove a foul-smelling paste consisting of bile, partially digested cornflakes and curdled milk from Tadpole’s jumper, dress and tights using one mini packet of Kleenex and a small amount of water. Miraculously the driver, deep in conversation, does not appear to have noticed our little mishap.

At Orly we pay, leap out of the cab and dash, heads down, through the driving rain into the terminal building, skidding to a halt in front of the bank of screens showing departure information.

Doncaster 10.15 desks 79-81. Embarquement!

Boarding? But it’s forty minutes until take off? Nonsense!

We dash to desks 79-81. That’s odd, there’s nobody there. Back to the monitors. Which definitely say desks 79-81. Huh? I flag down a nice uniformed lady who informs us that no, the information on the monitor is not incorrect. The reason there is no-one there is that check-in has CLOSED.

I hear a ringing in my ears and feel rather unsteady on my feet.

At the Thomsonfly desk a few moments later a nice uniformed man rings up to see if there is any way he can get the desperate lady with the dishevelled hair and wild eyes and her slightly puke-encrusted toddler onto the flight.

He cannot.

“MumOhMyGodWe’veMissedTheFlightTheyWon’tLetUsOn,” I howl into my telephone. “AndThere’sNoSpaceOnTheNextOneTomorrowWhatAreWeGoingToDo?”

If Tadpole were older she would know that when mummy is hysterical (and yes, I love the etymology of that word, which plants all blame squarely on my womb) she needs to be slapped smartly on the cheeks in order to be brought to her senses. In the meantime, I just have to Get A Grip. All On My Own. Deep breaths.

One change of clothes for Tadpole, one double espresso, several hundred euros and an airport transfer to Charles de Gaulle later and Tadpole and I board a flight to Leeds. I spend the entire journey fighting off the urge to order a stiff drink (lest my readers stage an intervention and commit me to the Priory) and trying not to be convinced that since bad things always occur in threes, my luggage is unlikely to be on board.

“Mummy, can you make me some couettes?” Tadpole pleads.

As I part her curls into two vaguely similar sized bunches, I notice a partially digested piece of cornflake I had missed earlier.

It is heart-shaped.

I am woken by the sound of insistent tapping at my bedroom door. It is 9.10 am on Sunday morning. My clothes are in a sorry heap at the foot of my bed, my head is pounding and the light which floods into my bedroom from the hallway when I open the door sends me reeling back to bed again, wincing in pain.

“I’m really sorry, honey, but I’m feeling poorly and I’m not going to be able to take you to the swimming pool this morning,” I say. Just speaking makes me feel pitifully nauseous; I’m amazed to have managed such a long sentence without mishap.

To her credit, Tadpole doesn’t complain or say “but mummy, you promised!” Instead, she retreats to her bedroom and returns brandishing her (pink) plastic doctor’s kit.

“I going to make you feel better,” she says firmly and takes out the tools of her trade, one by one.

• A bizarrely phallic looking thermometer, which makes me gag when she shoves it in my protesting mouth.
• A pink and yellow stethoscope, which she seems to think has healing properties if positioned just so (on my right nipple) with maximum pressure applied.
• A pair of pink tweezers, used for pinching the patient’s nostrils.
• A pair of purple plastic scissors, with which she pretends to cut my fingernails. (If real, Tadpole’s rather haphazard technique would leave me with nothing above the knuckles.)
• A pink syringe, which she presses painfully into my wrist.

“All better now?” enquires nurse Tadpole, who has finally run out of toys. I make a mental note to look for the pink plastic scalpel, which appears to have gone missing. Also, when I’m feeling a little more coherent, I should try explaining that the implements in her doctor’s bag are for diagnosing what is wrong, rather than healing the patient. But today I do not feel equal to such a task.

“I feel a little bit better,” I say wanly, feeling both very sorry for myself and extremely foolish, in equal measures. I need no doctor to tell me exactly what is wrong, nor where it came from.

“Oh. Well if you’re not better, I going to do it all again.” She reaches for the thermometer.

It is torture, pure and simple, but I can’t help thinking I deserve it, so I offer no resistance.

I took a vow on Sunday. Never again will I drink a drop if I’m supposed to be spending the next day with Tadpole. No amount of fun can ever be worth such pain and self-loathing.

After a bumper post-bathtime recording session yesterday, I now have enough Tadpole tracks laid down to launch her musical career. Better get her myspace page up quick smart. In the meantime, however, I’ll be rationing her songs over several Fridays.

The first in the series “il était un petit chat” is a charming song with a sensible message (cats must listen to their parents) which is sung in the archaic past historic tense. A tense never spoken, only written, which my A Level teacher said there was no point actually learning as long as I was able to recognise it.

Almost every French library book Tadpole has brought home from the school library has been written in the past historic tense, however, a fact which I find perplexing. Verb conjugations are tough enough at the best of times (”papa j’ai ouvri la porte!”) without learning tenses which mummy doesn’t even know.

Enjoy.

I printed out lots of short, easy words today and cut them out. The idea was to make sentences with Tadpole, who can now sound out words quite confidently, and see if she wanted to build a few of her own. The little flaw in my plan being that every time she said the letter “p”, the corresponding gust of wind blew them off the table, so that they fluttered to the floor like early learning confetti.

To overcome Tadpole’s strange reluctance to actually flex her reading muscles, I wisely included a few words which would make her laugh, such as: poo, wee, bum, potty and prout (I’ve yet to find an English word for this bodily function which I like the sound of half as much). Sounding out a phrase like “mummy did a poo on the cat” is clearly far more fun than “the cat sat on the mat”. I am however thankful that she is unlikely to repeat any of these at school, as nobody else speaks English.

How about this one, I said, throwing in a wildcard Yorkshire phrase which she associates with her Morris dancing grandad.

“Eeee Baa Goom” Tadpole said hesitantly.

“Say it a bit faster?”

“Ee bah gum!” she said with a giggle. “Just like my grandad says!”

“I wonder how you’d say that in French,” I said, thinking out loud really, not expecting Tadpole to have an opinion on the matter. She’s been repeating that phrase since she was very small indeed, mimicking her grandad because she can play a whole roomful of people for laughs with these three magic words. But I don’t suppose she’s ever stopped to think what they actually mean.

I was wrong.

“En français, moi je dirais OH LA LAAA!” cried Tadpole triumphantly.

Somebody get this girl a stamp, I think I’ve spawned a certified translator.

It recently came to my attention that a fantasy swear word coined, I believe, by my very good friend in blogging Anna Boat may soon be the subject of a heated debate chez les Prud’hommes.

A comment I took the precaution of removing from my site some time ago has seemingly found its way into the possession of a certified translator, for use in my industrial tribunal case (which theoretically takes place this month, if no-one defers it).

It went something like this:

petite: “I’m thinking of setting up a parallel secret blog named “my boss is a twunt”.

Hmm. Clearly a tongue in cheek play on words which any self-respecting blogger/blogreader would understand as a reference to the famous zed and her award winning blog, no doubt a quip made in response to another comment, although I no longer have the faintest idea of the exact context.

The problem being that the French translator, clearly coming a little unstuck at the sight of the inventive slight, an amalgamation of two words of differing intensity which share etymological origins with the word “ladyparts”, decided to opt for the rather stronger French expletive “enculé” in the version to which he/she put the holy certified translator’s stamp. Unfortunate in the extreme, as “enculé” is a word which has nothing whatsoever to do with “ladyparts”, is the strongest French swearword I know of, and is emphatically not a word I would ever dream of sullying my fair lips with. I think it is fair to say that many layers of intended humour and irony have been well and truly lost in translation.

The upside of all this (aside from the fact that my audience is likely to be interesting for those involved, and indeed for spectators) is that surely it can only be a matter of time before the Académie Française falls in love with the neologism and deems it necessary to add “twunt” to the official French dictionary.

Now there’s an achievement of which I would be truly proud.

On Saturday I hopped onto a Eurostar bound for London town, my destination being the fifth floor bar of Waterstones Piccadilly, where I was meeting a group of people I’d recently got to know in cyberspace. Not just bloggers like me this time, but also published writers, or writers in the process of getting published, all of whom happen to have blogs. We met on a forum, gaily bounced messages back and forth for a couple of months, and then, finally, decided to meet face to face.

Once we’d finished ripping apart the bad literary jokes in the drinks menu (”Tequila Mockingbird” anyone? Some wine from the “Grape’s of Wrath” section?) we got down to the nitty gritty: moaning about authors having little say over jackets (far less input than, say, the buyers at Tesco), talking about how we cope with solitude, the art of procrastination (just why is it that when you find yourself doing the thing you thought you always wanted - i.e. writing for a living - suddenly, scrubbing the inside of the oven seems like the most enticing job in the world?), self-doubt and the highs and lows of the editing process (best editorial feedback story I heard began with the immortal words: “well, it’s just about salvageable”).

I came away feeling prepared for the worst (the horror stories live up to their name), but above all thinking what a nice and reassuringly normal bunch of people they all were. Not intimidating at all, the more experienced among them very willing to share their experiences and wisdom with the novices like myself.

The people whose blogs are completely divorced from their subject matter were fascinated by how I coped with using personal experiences in my writing. “But any negative criticism your book gets, you’ll feel like it is directed at you as a person!” one woman said, looking horrified on my behalf. I know. I think about this a lot, and I’m steeling myself, mentally, for this eventuality. On the other hand, I know that in order to write about events, I inevitably take one step away from them. Who tells a story without embellishing it slightly, all the better to provoke laughter or tears? Nobody can remember entire sentences word for word, so every conversation in a memoir is an artificial construction. Memories are coloured and tainted by what we know, with hindsight, came afterwards.

Later that day, a friend asked me whether I was still in touch with Jim in Rennes and I explained that no, I found it impossible. I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing about him lately, and to do so I found I needed to think of him as a fictional character. Talking on the phone, exchanging emails would have burst my fiction bubble, so I simply didn’t do it. Maybe I’ll resume contact with him one day, when this is all over. Who knows. Luckily I don’t feel this way when I write about Tadpole or Mr Frog, as that would be problematic, to say the least…

I haven’t talked much about my work in progress here, out of some sort of uncharacteristically superstitious feeling that I might jinx it, or wake up and realise the whole thing was actually just a rather pleasant dream. But here’s the deal: I’m working on chapter 25 of 30, hoping to finish the first draft by the end of this month, after which I’ll start the editing and re-writing process, with some input from my editor at Penguin, my agent, my mum, and most probably a few friends whose judgement I value and trust. I haven’t seen a cover yet, and the publication date is hovering uncertainly somewhere between January and April 2008 right now (which could make Christmas 2007 very interesting indeed).

All in all, I think I will be glad when this thing is written, so I can move onto new (most likely fictional) territory and take a much bigger step away from my own life. But as far as “petite anglaise” is concerned, as long as I derive pleasure from recording the everyday, the Tadpole stories, the navel-gazing, this blog will continue to be a part of my life, and my identity.

doodle courtesy of, and © Andre Jordan.