2007 February « petite anglaise

February 13, 2007

nurse tadpole

Filed under: Tadpole rearing — petiteanglaise @ 10:06 pm

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.

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February 9, 2007

Friday project

Filed under: Tadpole sings — petiteanglaise @ 10:21 am

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.

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February 7, 2007

better than babelfish

Filed under: Tadpole says — petiteanglaise @ 8:07 pm

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.

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February 6, 2007

gros mot

Filed under: Uncategorized — petiteanglaise @ 11:07 am

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.

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February 5, 2007

on writing

Filed under: book stuff — petiteanglaise @ 9:20 pm

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.

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