petite anglaise

London is one long ride on an interminable escalator, mopping my brow and frowning at the chunky A-Z, wondering how it is possible for many of my destinations to be so very far removed from metro tube stations.

It is struggling to remember to “KEEP LEFT” in corridors and on staircases which are neatly divided into two halves. Keeping my expensive travelcard handy for when I leave every station to avoid awkward, embarrassing fumbling; a wave of homesickness for my Navigo card and its comforting “DRIINNG!” welling up as the alien “PIINNG!” of Oyster cards echoes in my ears.

In Paris, leaning over the edge of a platform to squint along the tunnel, I can often spy the lights of the next station, and sometimes make out the next one after that. A station is never more than a short stroll away.

I drag my overnight bag along residential streets, plastic wheels rumbling noisily over uneven paving slabs, glancing at my watch periodically to see if I am late enough to warrant making a breathless, apologetic phone call.

I am pathetically grateful to whoever had the foresight to paint helpful hints on the tarmac at every pedestrian crossing, prompting me to “LOOK RIGHT!” or “LOOK LEFT!”, rather than trusting my (apparently continental) instincts and stepping out into the path of a rapidly approaching black cab.

It is in my native land that I am truly a fish out of water: panting, helplessly disorientated, yearning for the familiarity of my French home.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Later, back in the village where I grew up, I creep into my daughter’s bedroom, craving the familiar scent of her warm curls, her damp scalp.

She is unexpectedly awake, sitting up in bed with a welcoming smile. I cover her cheeks with kisses.

“Mummy,” she asks, “are you going to sleep in your bed today?”

“Yes my love,” I reply, “so you can come and fetch me when you wake up in the morning.”

She pauses for a moment; I can almost see her thinking.

“Mummy? Have you got a sleeping bag like mine?”

“No. Mummies don’t usually wear sleeping bags.”

“When I will be a mummy and you will be a little girl, I can lend you this one,” she says generously, gesturing down at her pink gingham pod.

I find this notion of role reversal strangely comforting.

Later, against my better judgement, I slip into the single bed, beside her oblivious sleeping form and let the regularity of her breathing slow my rapidly thumping heart.

On the occasion of my trip to London this weekend - a trip which makes me a very excited girl indeed as I will get to see lots of my favourite people AND eat gourmet fish and chips AND go to Top Shop - I am going to go cold turkey and not lay fingers to keyboard for three whole days.

In my absence, I leave you in the capable hands of my mum, who has kindly offered to moderate comments in my absence.

Soyez sage!

This weekend, I will be meeting the “friends” referred to below. The very idea of this meeting has me in a turmoil.

extract from email from Lover, May 2005

“When I went back to England last month, I was moaning to my friends about Mad French Bird. As they are all nearing or indeed at 40 and in stable conventional relationships, none of them could see what on Earth my problem was with dating a mixed-up 22-year old. Eventually, I said “Look, the person that I REALLY like, the person that I feel completely compelled to, is someone I’ve never seen, who lives in Paris and has a partner and a child. I don’t know her name or what she looks like, but (…) I can’t get her out of my head.”

It is less than a year later, and by some bizarre twist of interweb fate we have been together for several months now. No twenty-two year old is any match for a petite anglaise with her glad rags on.

So, why the inner turmoil? So far, those of Lover’s friends I have met in France have all been lovely people, which bodes well. I do not doubt we will be in very good company.

What’s more, I am really looking forward to getting to know Lover better, as tongues do tend to be loosened by alcohol, and, with luck, some interesting stories about his schooldays in Sheffield will emerge over the course of the evening. And it’s always revealing to see a person in a new context. We all behave differently depending on who we are with, do we not? Among our oldest friends, we get back to the basics of who we really are.

The very Englishness of the weekend is also appealing, as curry and/or fish and chips and/or a full English breakfast are bound to be on the menu. An opportunity to worship at the altar of The Holy Grease. Not to be sniffed at.

But, despite all these positives, I appear to be rather nervous. This I know because when packing for a weekend away, I do not generally make a habit of trying on the entire contents of my wardrobe in front of a full-length mirror. It’s one thing being anxious about making a good impression (and striving to minimise the impression made by my disproportionately large rear, lest it steal all the limelight), but this level of panic (a code red alert) seems a little excessive, even to me.

I’ll admit to being slightly apprehensive that I won’t be able to take the pace (being woefully out of practice at drinking in pubs, all evening long, standing up) and a little uneasy at the prospect that, a few drinks into the evening, I might be an embarrassment, or a little too lairy.

But there are bigger issues here. Will I be a disappointment in some way? How do I compare with the ex-wife that they all knew so well, or the terrifyingly sexy girlfriend who helped him pick up the pieces, post-divorce? One of the most attractive things about an older man is that he knows who he is, and is comfortable in his own skin. The flipside of that coin is that he is bound to have some pretty weighty baggage; excess baggage, which in an airport would cost you dearly. And so I must deal with the ghosts of wives and girlfriends past.

Last, but not least, there is the small matter of the situation I was in when we met, as evidenced by the phrase: “who lives in Paris and has a partner and a child”. Our relationship was born out of the ruins of another. There was all kinds of fallout involved. I have taken my child away from her father, and plan to uproot us both next summer, in order to be with him. When I meet a friend of his for the first time, I sometimes wonder: are his friends simply happy for him, or do they feel slightly uncomfortable with how it all came about? Will they be judging me (as some of my commenters do)?

As usual, my mind is working overtime, creating problems, amplifying things out of all proportion.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I want to be cremated when that time comes, I think the phrase “petite anglaise - she thought too much” would have made a fitting epitaph.

“We’re going to see lights flying in the sky. Very noisy lights, that go whizz! and weee! and BANG!”

“BANG!” repeats Tadpole, waving her arms enthusiastically and managing to elbow me in the chin in the process.

I realise that it is not easy to describe fireworks to a two year old without performing a variety of sound effects, and regret the fact that I didn’t choose to do so in the privacy of my own home.

Painfully aware of the taxi driver eying me incredulously in the rear view mirror, I decide an explanation might be in order, for his benefit.

“Mummy calls the light fireworks, in English. And in French they are called feu d’artifice,” I say, in my best educator’s voice.

“Feu n’artifice! Feu n’artifice!” shrieks the resident parrott.

I thank my lucky stars that this year Tadpole is too young for an explanation of why the effigy of a man called Mr Fawkes is being burned, somewhat barbarically, on a bonfire.

We alight at the British Embassy and make our way to the garden, where the fun and festivities are to take place; I put down my mulled wine and busy myself sending a text message to the very kind reader/embassy employee who invited Tadpole and I to the annual bonfire party, to announce our arrival.

Small children race across the lawn in the semi-darkness, squealing with excitement at being allowed to stay up after bedtime. Tadpole, almost invisible in her black coat, proves almost impossible to keep track of. My insistent pleas to “stay near mummy” fall on deaf ears, and every few minutes I am forced to interrupt my conversation and set off in search of my errant daughter. To think that I used to take for granted the fact that I could look someone in the eye while having a conversation and actually finish my sentences. Those days are, sadly, long gone.

Only bribery in the form of unhealthy foodstuffs provides Tadpole with an incentive to spend a little time with mummy, and I am pathetically grateful to the kind ladies on the barbecue stall for their array of toddler taming quavers, hot dogs and curly wurlies.

When the firework display begins, Tadpole darts over to the mesh fence which has been used to section off the onlookers from the bonfire, and throws her head back, roaring with delighted, slightly deranged sounding laughter. The child is most definitely not afraid. I drop to her level and we make the obligatory “ooh” and “aah” sounds in unison.

For the remainder of the weekend, whenever my daughter talks about the fireworks (approximately once every hour), there is a frightening glint in her eyes, which I have only seen once before (when my mother in law evoked her weekly trips to the town casino).

I try to convince myself that by attending the display, I have not unwittingly sown the seeds of pyromania.

My life is no longer quite so French as it was.

Exit croissants, baguettes and warm goats cheese salads. These days I seem to be mostly eating granary toast with marmalade, bacon (admittedly the streaky, French version which is distressingly inferior) sandwiches with ketchup or HP sauce, or tucking into a nice piece of mature cheddar with some Branston pickle. On my last trip to Yorkshire, I returned with a suitcase bulging with the best that Tesco had to offer. Including 240 teabags.

Exit French cable TV, which for a princely sum currently offers only one decent programme in English per week (Desperate Housewives, at long last), and enter slightly illegal Sky TV at the weekends, so that I can indulge my fondness for BBC2 comedy or Channel 4 drama. And regale Tadpole with such delights as Bob the Builder in version originale. She now squawks “Can we fix eet?” every time she spies a digger.

It feels like by leaving Mr Frog for my English Lover, I have taken one more step away from my original aim: becoming “almost French”.

I wrote last year about how my initial enthusiasm for all things French, which had begun in my first French lesson at Mill Mount Grammar School for girls at the age of 11, and culminated in my moving to Paris in September 1995, had started to wane perceptibly. Where once I had watched indiscriminately whatever was broadcast on French terrestrial TV to “improve my French”, read only French novels and eaten only French food, as a matter of principle, I suddenly found myself yearning for English language and culture.

Clearly I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

It was time, I decided, to cut myself some slack. Living in France didn’t have to mean total assimilation, and indeed, if I didn’t watch out, my mother tongue would ultimately suffer. “Target language deprivation,” as a commenter helpfully pointed out, is a very real phenomenon, and can result in expats speaking a dreadful bastardised version of their mother tongue after a few years away from the mothership. To combat this, I signed up for cable TV and bought English books from W H Smiths. And binged on English culture. I even watched Eastenders religiously for a number of years, although, thankfully, I have now managed to kick that unfortunate habit.

The next step was changing my job, and I swapped a Franco-French office where I had never really felt anyone knew the “real me” for an English company where two thirds of the staff were British, and we all went for beers on Fridays.

Despite all this, at the end of the day, I still came home to a French partner, and socialised with his French friends.

Nowadays all that has changed, and I am faced with the delightful prospect of renovating a crumbling farmhouse, with a huge satellite dish perched atop the roof, greedily hoovering English television from the airwaves, in the British enclave that is Brittany. Eating English breakfasts with my English Lover, and washing it all down with cup upon cup of PG tips.

Somehow, if I ever do get my papers together and apply for French nationality, I rather think the fonctionnaires will laugh in my English face.

Odd things have been afoot in my kitchen.

Over the past two weeks, while my Lover was in town, I changed beyond all recognition. First, I started cooking proper meals (on the nights when Lover didn’t cook for me, I hasten to add, although I never managed to persuade him to cook only wearing an apron, despite much pleading), as opposed to scoffing Tadpole’s spurned fish fingers and sweetcorn, followed by a few crisps or other unhealthy snacks, and washed down with a glass of wine in front of the computer, which is what my diet habitually consists of.

Mr Frog and I didn’t tend to eat together, so I had abandoned my non-wifely kitchen duties long, long ago. Largely because I ate hours earlier, unable to stave off the hunger pangs until he arrived home from work around 10 pm.

But, not only did I cook proper dinners for the past fortnight, but I also found myself baking. Custart tart. Scones. A rather tasty quiche. Carrot cake with cream cheese topping. All very English. In keeping with the extraordinary volume of tea which I was drinking.

Now, I’ve always been a firm believer in the old adage that the surest route to a man’s heart is through his trousers, and emphatically not via his stomach, so I simply don’t know where all of this domestic goddesshood has welled up from.

The bakefest will have to cease, as my waistline is already suffering, but before I turn the page on this worrying episode, I just wanted to share the fruits of my labour with the internet.

I made shortbread biscuits, in honour of Tadpole’s return. We decorated them together.

Do be careful not to drool on your keyboards.

We sang carols outside a friend’s bedroom door, in the halls of residence, accompanied by an improvised shepherd, in the form of a vacuum cleaner wearing a makeshift head dress fashioned out of a tea towel and a roll of sticky tape.

We drank mushroom tea, and you saw furry spiders crawling all over my blue bedroom walls. Meanwhile I climbed into the linen cupboard and peeped suspiciously out through the slats in the wooden door.

You sent me weird, wonderful, nonsensical letters during vacations, and, when she overheard me telling you I loved you on the phone, my mum started to wonder if her daughter wasn’t, in fact, a lesbian.

We went on missions to Safeway, with your shopping trolley, John, and the badly drawn felt tipped pen drawings of Magic Roundabout characters on his belly.

We went to Glastonbury, and each year was slightly more surreal (and expensive) than the last. Although the lemon scented hand wipes in lieu of showers remained a charming constant.

I used to bury my head under my pillow when your boyfriend came round, wondering how it was that sex had to involve rattling every cupboard door and banging into every piece of furniture in your room.

We danced until dawn at Renaissance, convinced that we could see bursts of rainbow coloured sounds and catch them in our hands if we could only move fast enough.

This weekend, we sat in your conservatory, watching our little angels roaming around the garden and occasionally breaking up heated squabbles over favoured toys. We discussed toddler taming techniques and new beginnings over cups of PG Tips and the odd cheeky half of lager.

So much has changed since those university days - the best of my life so far - but you never do.

Thank you for being so unconditionally happy for me.

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.

Christmas hasn’t happened for me yet.

It matters not how expensive the foie gras, nor how crisp and chilled the champagne. These things do not Christmas make. I am painfully aware of this fact after spending a profoundly unfestive weekend at the In Laws’ place.

The Frog is an only child, and this means that around the dinner table on Christmas Eve(ning), when Christmas dinner traditionally takes place in France, were Mr Frog, his parents and I. Tadpole was sleeping. No festive decorations adorned the table, and dinner was, quite frankly, nothing special. Either MIL is losing her touch, or I am not quite so easily impressed as in days gone by when Mr Frog and I first met. The foie gras lacked gros sel to sprinkle on top, the salmon looked rather forlorn without a marinade, or at the very least a wedge of lemon. Main course was a minuscule caille (guineau fowl) and there were no vegetables, only salad. I don’t think the EVILs are fond of the traditional French yule log dessert, bûche, so there was a rather bland ice cream version.

The FIL proudly uncorked his bottle of Pauillac Grand Cru Classé and proceeded to steer the conversation on a familiar tour of all the usual subjects: why Mr Frog and I need to find time to do some sport, why we need to buy a flat immediately, why we shouldn’t go on a wintersun holiday because skiing holidays are healthier, repeat to fade… Any controversial statement was backed up with ‘I saw it on the telly the other day’. Mention of television made me think wistfully of Eastenders’ double bills and other UK delights I would be missing.

Mr Frog manages to remain unruffled as his father tells us to how to live every aspect of our lives. I on the other hand, emboldened by a few glasses of claret, tend to get quite defensive and irritated. Pray tell how Mr Frog is supposed to find time to go a gym when he works 14 hour days and rarely sees Tadpole and I as it is? How can an armchair traveler who has never taken a plane and rarely left France tell me what to do with my precious holiday time? On the subject of buying an apartment, I do agree with him on the necessity to buy sometime soon, except I’d like an attractive flat in an old building, similar to the one we currently rent, and FIL would like to see us in a functional, characterless 70’s block of flats.

The meal was rounded off nicely with the exchanging of gifts. Mr Frog had virtually nothing to unwrap, as he had not yet made up his mind exactly which bag he wanted me to buy for him (a posh rucksack, not a French manbag, I hasten to add), nor which ski gloves he wanted his mum to buy (to keep his hands warm when traveling to work on his Vespa).

I, on the other hand, was spoiled rotten. I am now the proud owner of a waterproof poncho and an electric stapler.

??

Okay. I’ll admit that I have been saying to Mr Frog for quite some time that it is impossible to steer a pushchair and hold an umbrella at the same time, meaning that ferrying Tadpole to and from the childminder’s place in inclement weather can be rather a moistening experience. But there are some things which are just too practical and boring to be given as Christmas gifts. Surely? As for the electric stapler (pink, batteries not included), well, words fail me. The last thing I need on my desk at work is something to remind me that MIL is going a bit loopy as retirement beckons. Mr Frog has one too (blue) and is as perplexed about this choice of gift as I.

Perhaps it can be used as a weapon?

Dear Mum,

I may have criticised your Christmas dinners on occasion (I am referring specifically to my comment that it was ‘a glorified Sunday lunch’, whereas French Christmas dinner was more elegant and refined) but I now take it all back. I’d prefer your overcooked meat, roast potatoes and lashings of veggies any day. No matter how much bickering there might be between my sisters and I, no matter how tipsy dad will get, this weekend has brought home to me forcefully that you lot are what Christmas is all about for me.

Can’t wait to see you all tomorrow!

p.a.

If I tell you that prior to reading an article in Libération this morning, I had not realised David Blunkett was actually blind, would you believe me?

I had seen references to guide dogs in other blogs and just assumed that they were figurative. Clearly I will not be re-inventing myself as ‘petite pundit’ any time soon.

What I think this illustrates, apart from my own ignorance, is that after almost a decade of living outside the motherland, I feel increasingly detached from certain aspects of British life. I read the Guardian when I have time, but most articles about UK domestic politics leave me indifferent. I do still vote in UK elections, or rather my mother does on my behalf, but clearly I am not directly affected by laws being passed, so it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to get worked up about British politics.

Ironically, unless I persuade the Frog to marry me (no change on that front) and apply for French nationality, I am unlikely to ever be able to vote in France, where Tadpole will be educated and where I have been paying taxes ever since I got my first ‘proper’ job. As an EU citizen I can (and probably should) vote in European Parliament elections. For what it’s worth. I could theoretically also vote in French municipal elections, and actually do something about Parisian problems like fouling pooches rather than just ranting about them on this blog. But in France to get on the electoral roll for the following year, you have to get yourself down to the town hall with a pile of paperwork, on a weekday, before 31 December. I have never managed to get round to this. Largely because I cannot afford to waste one of my precious days off on a close encounter of the third kind with a French fonctionnaire.

I must confess that I read the article about Blunkett today in the metro because it was entitled ‘Love Affaire’. Nothing like the prospect of a good scandal to hold my attention. As usual, the French journalist marvelled at the fact that English politicians frequently resign over seemingly minor scandals about their personal lives or isolated instances of alleged corruption, which wouldn’t cause anyone on this side of the Channel to bat an eyelid.

“Une pure comédie ‘people’ comme seule la Grande-Bretagne sait en concocter. Un drame personnel qui s’est transformé en affaire d’Etat, au nom de trois ou quatres fautes de conduite qui ne feraient pas une brève en France.”

The journalist goes on to say that in France for a politician to be accused of corruption he would need to have gone on numerous luxury holidays paid in cash and have several fictitious employees on his payroll.

Which tells me everything I need to know about where my hard earned taxes are going.

The 22nd of December 2001 was a black day for English expats in Paris: Marks and Spencer finally closed down their Paris Haussmann and Rivoli branches.

In a last desperate bid to stock up on crumpets, English breakfast tea and mature cheddar I braved the closing day 40%-off-sale hordes. Anarchy reigned. Protestors were making their anger felt by tearing the wrappers off triangle sandwiches in the food hall and scoffing them without paying. The clothes section looked like a jumble sale. Extra security guards had reportedly been taken on for the day to keep the peace.

Once the store closed, I began to fully comprehend what I had lost. Never again when feeling a bit low or homesick could I turn to English comfort foods like toasted teacakes and hot cross buns to munch in front of Eastenders. There were to be no more properly spiced chicken biryani ready meals. Crispy duck with pancakes, plum sauce and a side order of crispy seaweed was a thing of the past. (Parisian Chinese restaurants don’t seem to serve this, my favourite dish, more’s the pity.) Rice pudding, custard, cheddar and stilton were definitively off the menu. I would have to learn to recover from hangovers without the help of a bacon and tomato ketchup sandwich.

When I first moved to Paris, I started off terribly enthusiastic about all things French. Thus I watched the French terrestrial TV channels, read only (terribly serious) French novels, and ate 100% French food. As the months stretched into years and it was clear that France was to be my permanent home I started to crave a bit of English food, English language literature and television programmes. Nowadays I have gone to the opposite extreme and watch exclusively English/American films and TV programmes on cable TV (apart from the odd good French programme on Canal+ like ‘+Clair’ or ‘90 minutes’) and order English/American fiction via Amazon. I watch Eastenders religiously every night, even when it is going through a bad patch. I read Heat magazine when I can lay my hands on it (even though I’ve never seen the English version of any of the reality shows they harp on about ad nauseam). In my former life in the UK I wouldn’t have been seen dead reading a gossip mag and I didn’t follow Eastenders. I suppose I clutch at any Englishness I can get my hands on these days.

Don’t get me wrong, my love affair with France is by no means over. I just missed my English side a little bit. Especially during the period where I worked for Franco-French companies and spoke only French all day long. My Englishness is an important part of who I am, and I want to preserve it.

And I feel the best way to cultivate this is by eating crumpets and drinking tea.

I did most of my Christmas shopping in the UK this weekend.

This has less to do with the fact that I am arguably the most organised lady in the Northern Hemisphere, and more to do with yuletide hazards such as overshooting airline baggage allowances and dislocating shoulders. I am thoroughly fed up with only being able to buy lightweight, non-breakable presents for my family and then having to cart them across the Channel for our Christmas visit to Yorkshire. This weekend for a four day stay in the UK with Tadpole (but sans Frog) the unwieldy bag weighed in at a healthy 15 kilos. As usual, I only had a couple of changes of underwear, the rest belonging to Tadpole. Steering the pushchair with one hand upon arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport, we then proceeded to do 2 laps around circular terminal 1 (one clockwise lap inside the baggage hall, followed by an anti-clockwise lap outside to reach the taxi ranks) during which I could feel my right shoulder straining to leap out of its socket.

A mound of presents is currently residing (wrapped and labelled, so I don’t forget which is which) at the parental home. But certain aspects of Christmas shopping in the UK made the experience rather less pleasurable than I had hoped.

Firstly, in a trend which seems to be worsening every year, the high street shops have given over the lion’s share of their floorspace to ‘Christmas tat’: arrays of shiny, nasty looking gift boxes, with a pink aisle for the ladies and a black/silver/navy aisle for the gentlemen. You would have to be so uninspired to buy one of these items: everything screams ‘I don’t know you/like you very much/give a toss and I have no imagination.’ But, irritatingly, these offending items were of course occupying the very floorspace where the very thing I was looking for should have been. And was no longer as it has clearly gone into temporary hibernation. Grrr.

In the unlikely event that I did manage to find what I was looking for, I then had trouble paying for it. The UK has finally got around to introducing a chip and pin system, in an attempt to curb credit card fraud. My French (debit) cards all have chips on them (in French such a card is called a carte à puce, as puce means ‘flea’ and ‘dearest’ but also ‘microchip’) and I can’t remember a time since I’ve lived here when this system was not in operation.

But here’s the snag: the UK chip readers don’t read French cards. So inevitably in every shop, the assistant would:

1. try to read the chip with the spanking new card reader
2. get an error message
3. look very puzzled*
4. try again
5. scratch his/her head
6. (optional) ask for another (French) card
before 7. eventually swiping the first card successfully in the old style reader and obtaining my signature.

Explaining that I had encountered the same problem five minutes earlier on a different floor of the very same shop did not speed up the process at all. Instead of proceeding directly to step 7, they just continued to perform the same elaborate ritual. On one instance my card did not function at all and I was obliged to go to the nearest cashpoint and withdraw cash (which of course my French bank will enjoy charging me extra for). In the face of such adversity I had to be very motivated indeed to complete my shopping marathon undeterred. Which is where all the junk food snacks listed in the ‘post’ below came in handy.

The remainder of my Christmas shopping will take place in classy Parisian shops with a backdrop of a bare minimum of tacky Christmas displays and a free gift wrapping service. Vive la France!

Now all I have to do is work out a cunning strategy for transporting all the Christmas presents we will receive in the UK from our extended family (mostly large toys for Tadpole) back to France again. We have a 50 kilo baggage allowance between us and are staying for a week.

Something tells me I will have to make a noble sacrifice and manage without a change of underwear…

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.

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.

Today’s Le Parisien is rather enjoying the story about Brits being asked to adopt a gloomy expression for their passport photos, so that terrorists can be spotted more easily by face recognition software when the new e-passports are phased in from 2005.

Who on earth smiled on their passport photo in the first place? Hardly a natural thing to do in one of those nasty automated booths designed to spring into action as soon as you decide to blink, grimace, pick your nose or flick back your fringe.

Today’s quiz - as there is still a prize up for grabs:

One of the passport mug shots below belongs to a world famous actor and bridge player who head-butted a French police officer in a casino last year.

The other belongs to a terrorist. Face recognition software is thrown by smiling faces. Are you?

Will be airborne in a couple of hours with screaming, wriggling toddler strapped to me and fellow passengers wishing that BMI baby provided complimentary earplugs.

However, it will all be worth it when I get to my destination and unwrap my fish, chips, mushy peas and scraps. ‘Scraps’ would appear to be a Northern delicacy only, as when I lived south of Watford, no-one I met was willing to believe that eating fish shop cupboard scrapings was legal. Southerners have some far stranger practices of their own: curry sauce on the chips, and mushy peas which are the wrong colour (not nearly fluorescent enough). I used to bring the odd can of Bachelors ‘chip shop style’ mushy peas over in my hand luggage, but I have to say that crispy, skinny little French fries just don’t do them justice.

Aahh. I can almost smell them already.

Or maybe the Tadple needs a nappy change?

NB - this bizarre spellchecker integrated into blogger just tried to replace ‘earplugs’ with ‘warbles’? What is a ‘warble’ when it’s at home?

As a Brit abroad, I see BBC Prime as something of a misnomer lifeline. I keep in touch with my “British side” by watching Eastenders religiously four times a week (although I never did so when living in the UK), and happily it is broadcast only three days later than at home. But that is the only good thing I can bring myself to say on this subject.

Extract from the official website:

BBC Prime brings great British entertainment into your home 24 hours a day.

International viewers can watch a diverse mix of the very best from the BBC - from award-winning comedy and drama to ground-breaking documentaries and BBC Learning, plus music, lifestyle and children’s programmes, not forgetting the wealth of celebrity interviews.

Today’s schedule features a wealth of great British entertainment: Bargain Hunt, Changing Rooms, Big Strong Girls and S Club Seven in Hollywood. All shown twice , once in the morning and again in the afternoon. Mildly irritating when you have taken a sick day and planned to spend it horizontal in front of the TV.

Programmes other than Eastenders appear to be caught in a time warp. The Office finally made it to France in May 2004. The big celeb interview on Parkinson tonight is with Emma Thompson, talking about her role in Love Actually. A little past its sell by date I fear.

And then there are the re-runs of re-runs of re-runs, apparently a frequent source of expat discontent, to which the website has the following (defensive) response:

We present a balance of contemporary and classic programmes, something our audience appreciates and as a commercially-funded channel we must respond to. Some of our highest rating programmes have been the classic series such as ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’ and these “old” programmes remain very popular.

This explains why Last of the Summer Wine is being aired every evening. Twice.

One programme on today’s schedule does sound rather intriguing, so much so that I may even tune in at 6.45 am tomorrow:

Salut Serge - Children`s language series featuring Serge le Singe, an animated cheeky monkey who can only speak French and his sidekick Pascale, a know-it-all prim-and-proper parrot who can only speak English. For 5 to 10 year-olds.

Watch this space.