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.
March 23, 2005
March 21, 2005
the counting game
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!
March 18, 2005
misdirected
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.
March 17, 2005
don't talk down to me
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’.
March 16, 2005
les malades imaginaires
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.
March 15, 2005
saturday afternoon fever
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.
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