Return of the cat

From Becky: To make a day out of taking me and Luca to the airport last Wednesday, we went to the seaside at Sausset les Pins. The wind was howling, the waves were crashing on the rocks and the temperature was minus 1. Four days later, while Luca and I caught pneumonia in Iffley churchyard, the rest of the family feasted on seafood at Sausset-les-pins and sunbathed. Hmmph.

Actually that’s a bit melodramatic. Luca and I had a really, really fantastic time at Charlanne and Todd’s wedding, and were in tears more than once (yes, of course I’m sure it was the emotion of the occasion that got to Luca and not the dropped rice-cake). We had a great time staying with Mum and Dad, and then Kate and Adrian, and catching up with family, friends and Sam the Dog. But a detailed description of the trip is outside the remit of this blog. I’m going to limit myself to a few tips on flying with a baby, and maybe just one little photo from the wedding.

So, flying with a baby:

1. Don’t. It’s bad for the environment. Yours sincerely, Mrs Hypocrite.
2. I was impressed with no-frills EasyJet. It cost me £45 including taxes, and the main disadvantage is meant to be the scramble for seats. Not if you’ve got a baby – they let you on first and you choose a place at leisure before the scrum starts.
3. If you want anything to drink, take it in a baby cup. They make you throw away any liquids at security and then charge you a fortune to buy a drink in the departure lounge or on the plane. But if you say it’s for the baby you can take what you like, as long as you’re prepared to taste it in front of them. I don’t recommend Organix ‘Vegetables with rice and chicken’.
4. Do you take a pushchair or a car seat? I took a car seat and checked it in to the hold. It worked really well, except that Luca was heavy to carry around  between check-in and boarding, and there was nowhere to put him while I had a wee or searched for passports. If I’d had a pushchair I could have taken it with me to the boarding gate, but I’m not sure I would have managed that as well as the suitcase on the coach. So no easy answer there – the airports were quite hard work, especially when the planes were delayed, but nothing insurmountable.

It was absolutely amazing meeting Jasper, Cara and Theo at the airport. I’d never been away for anything like that long and I’d forgotten how gorgeous they are. Luca was pleased to see them too – massive grins all round and much excited chatter in the car on the way home.

A festival of sea urchins

My mum and her friend Carolyn needed a lift to the airport, so today we went to the sea urchin festival in Sausset les Pins, a short drive from Marseille Provence airport.

What a fantastic day! The sea was calm and shimmering, the sun was shining – it was too warm for a coat – and there were thousands of people crammed along the quayside eating sea urchins, oysters, or seafood platters. And drinking wine, of course. There were stalls selling all sorts of food – breads, spreads, sweets and cheese. There were stalls selling kitch kitchen equipment, a stage with live music, jugglers wandering about and a brass band.

We sat for hours in the heat with a big plate of seafood and chips, a bottle of wine, and huge grins on our faces. Sea urchins are much nicer when somebody else has prepared them for you, but I think the consensus was that they still weren’t worth the bother. The rest of the festival-goers must have thought differently though. We saw one family with  plates piled high, settling down to eat on the beach. Everywhere we looked there was more and more seafood. Heaven

And then Theo fell in a rockpool, so we stripped him off and left for the airport.

The cat’s away

Becky and Luca are in the UK for Charlie and Todd’s wedding, leaving me to make the most of late mornings and not tidying up after myself. Cara and Theo are easy on their own, and the family centre yesterday morning was a breeze. I even managed to have a play on some of the toys myself.

We weren’t sure how the kids would take being away from Becky for so long (five days), but they’re bearing up remarkably well. Actually, and totally co-incidentally, my mum and her friend are here for the weekend, which has helped.

The current frustration is with the boiler in the house. It is an ancient oil-burning thing that is noisy and smelly – though at the moment it isn’t noisy or smelly enough. It works for perhaps an hour at a time, and then just stops. It needs to be turned off for a while before being carefully coaxed back to life. The boiler repair people are beginning to dispair hearing our voices on the phone. Mind you, at €30 per visit they should be laughing.

Brrr – we’re off out to get warm.

Gallery: Icons and symbols

Here are some images that caught my eye. Click the thumbnails for an explanation of each picture below. (Clicking the picture again shows it slightly larger.)

  

  

 

Loose ends

I wanted to do a post today to boast of all my antics on the ski slopes – about how I raced down a black run riddled with moguls and set the new course record.

But, needless to say, it didn’t happen. We had some neighbours round for drinks the other night and they told us that the slopes are swarming with kids on Wednesdays. Because the schools here are closed on Wednesdays, all the schoolkids go to ski classes. Instead, our guests suggested, we should go on Thursday (today) if the ski report was favourable. Well, it wasn’t favourable, so now we’re going to go on Monday.

While they’re fresh in my mind, there are a couple of loose ends to tie up: both to do with the car.

The first involves the joined-up stupidity of the DVLA in Wales. As previously mentioned, our road tax ran out at the end of December. Because of how poorly we were treated by Direct Line we are now insured by a French company, which doesn’t show up on the DVLA radar. So I called them, at great expense, to ask how I could get a tax disc.

“Oh no,” I was told, “You have to have British insurance to get a tax disc. Let me give you the number of some random insurance broker”.

My blood has been boiling over this issue. After all, all I wanted to do was to give them £150. As it happens, the surprisingly helpful ladies in the Mairie (the council offices) told Becky that there’s no equivalent to road tax in France any more. So, we’ve declared the car SORN (off road) until we return to the UK in April. At which point we’ll undoubtedly have further hassle.

The other car story is to do with the theft of Becky’s handbag. Among various other bits and pieces, her car key was taken. We emptied the car of all CDs and valuables in case the thief happened by – and we had to put the steering wheel lock on at all times. We got a quote from the Toyota garage to see what should be done, and were told that they’d have to re-code the whole car’s security settings, send away for parts and replace all the locks. At a cost of some €850, plus taxes. Oh, and our French insurance has an excess of €400. That certainly wasn’t in our budget.

Luckily, when Becky reported the theft to the local police, they produced the car key and her bank card, which had been handed in by ‘an anonymous personne’. When Becky looked quizzically at the gendarme on duty, he shrugged and said:

“C’etait le voleur” – it was the thief.

Picnic on the hill

From Becky: Another warm sunny Sunday, another picnic. This time on a hill above Manosque, delivering a New Year card to Hilda and Michel on the way. Most of the hills here are woody, but large parts of this one were burnt to the ground about three years ago and hardly anything has grown back. The ground is littered with charred branches. It was arson, and the fire services were on strike so the fire got completely out of control. Still, it was beautiful and we had such a lovely time I can’t resist uploading a couple of photos.

Living in towns, I hadn’t realised before how good children are at finding things to amuse them in the countryside. Cara and Theo can while away wonderful half-hours building ‘bonfires’ (no, they don’t know how to light them and we’re not about to show them), playing ‘guitars’ (branches) and balancing on tree stumps.

Ski-minus-five

Because we’re a bit short of money, and for the experience of doing it, we’re about to register our CVs with a local employment agency. Mine reads something like this: ‘owner-director of UK company and manager of several staff seeks shelves to stack in local supermarket’. Assuming that this approach doesn’t immediately bring all the local employers to our door, I’m going skiing on Wednesday, making today (Friday) ski-minus-five. I’m excited; oh yes I’m excited

This was my birthday present from Becky, and she’s been organising it all. There are enough pistes open at St Jean Montclar to make the 1½ hour drive worthwhile. A skipass for a day and the equipment hire are both cheap, and all I had to do today was to buy some salopettes. Easy!

With any luck it’ll be so much fun for Becky and the kids that I’ll be able to persuade them all to go on a regular basis

Joie de vivre

From Becky: We’ve just had the most idyllic weekend. Since Mum and Dad went on Tuesday, I’d been full of New Year resolutions (tinged with frustration) to start achieving more: find work; give each other more time off childcare; do some research into urban regeneration here. But now I just feel full of the joys of the sun and the beauty of the area. After all, the main point of being here is to enjoy a new place and each other’s company.

It’s been gloriously sunny and warm. Yesterday there was no swimming (bébés nageurs) so we spent all morning at the market, followed by hot chocolate in a crowded pavement café.

Then we all ate galette des rois, a fantastic pastry conconction filled with almond paste and crème pattissière. The traditional little doll was hidden in Cara’s piece (Theo got one when our neighbour Mme Roman fed us galette on Friday). Cara and Theo bickered throughout our evening walk about who got to wear the crown.

Today we went for a lovely long walk across a rocky, scrubby hillside and sat in T-shirts eating a picnic. I was even worried about the kids getting sunburnt. Yes, on 7th January! All three kids slept in the car on the way back and stayed asleep while we sat on a terrace drinking a demi.

And to top it all off, Luca has produced his first tooth and is completely recovered from his horrible cold.

My only regret is that I don’t think my parents saw the area at its best last week because of Luca’s cold, the weather and the bank holidays, but they’ll just have to come back another time.

Hogmanay and St Sylvestre

Picture this: the eve of the Millennium; a remote cottage in the back end of nowhere outside a Welsh coastal village. Population: about 10. Massive bonfire, dancing, music, revelry.

Picture this: first-footing circa 1998; leaving the house in Kingston-on-Spey shortly after midnight with a bottle of whisky and a lump of coal, and singing and dancing in every house we visited.

Picture this: the Champs-Elysées, mid 1990s; fireworks, thousands of people streching all the way from the Arc-de-Triomphe back to the Louvre. Much fun and revelry.

This year, it was all a little different.

James and Lesley were staying with us, and between us we’d mustered a five course feast, two bottles of Champagne, refrigerated flutes to sip from and six REALLY LOUD party poppers. We don’t have a telly here and France Telecom had buggered up our internet connection, so our only communication with the outside world was a tiny, tinny radio that I got in Leclerc for €2.

We went up to the kids’ room at the top of the house for the best views of the street party below, and tried to tune in the radio. It’s one of those radios that has a ’seek’ button and no display, so, without knowing what we were listening to, we sat and waited. There was lots of chatter above the static, but no obvious chime or gong to tell us that we were in 2007. So, when we were sure it was past midnight, we cheered and drank our fizz, and flung the windows open to look out over the thronging mass of jubilant Manosquins below. Yeah, right.

It was so quiet that I half expected tumbleweed to start drifting about. It was so quiet that when we fired off our REALLY LOUD party poppers I half expected people to lean out of the windows and tell us to shut up.

We’ve talked to the locals about this and have various plausible explanations:

1. St Sylvestre just isn’t as big a thing as Hogmanay
2. Manosquins party in restaurants, or over a sumptuous feast at home, and by midnight everyone has eaten and drunk too well to be out gallivanting
3. Only mad dogs and rosbif go outside in the middle of the night in winter

Cara and Theo settling in

From Becky: We’ve been here two months, and I reckon it’s time for a post about how Cara and Theo are coping with their new life. Observations in no particular order:

• They talk about home (favourite topics: Sam the Dog; Grandma and Grandpa; Grandma Linda) but neither of them has once expressed regret at not being there, or anything approaching ‘missing’ something.
• They are doing a lot of pretend play, and it often involves driving/ rowing a boat/ flying a helicopter, not to Oxford, but to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where we stayed for two weeks before we came here.
• I reckon they’re both pretty happy with life and with themselves at the moment. Theo was especially pleased with himself for getting Luca to sleep by putting his finger in Luca’s mouth in the car. “I’m a very medium-sized Theo, and very clever and very good”. This is a parody: at the beginning of every episode of Charlie and Lola, Charlie (the narrator) says: ‘I have this little sister Lola. She is small and very funny’.
• They are starting to understand little bits of French, but very slowly. If you give them something nice to eat and ask, “C’est bon?”, they reply “Yes” or “Mmm”, and if you prompt them, they will both say “Bonjour Madame”, “Merci, Monsieur” or “Au revoir”. Neither of them seem at all phased by being in an environment where everybody is speaking French. If I take them to the family centre and everyone there is speaking French, I tend to speak French the whole time too (unless Cara or Theo start pulling at their knickers, when I revert urgently to English in order to get them to the loo in time). They don’t talk back in French, but they’re not in the slightest bit bothered and I manage to communicate with them.
• They love most of the new food they’re experiencing. They joined in the first bit of our New Year’s Eve dinner – whole prawns and artichokes – and enjoyed all the theatre of it. ‘Do you know what to do to the crevette, Theo?’ ‘Take off its head, take off its tail, take off its legs’. Admittedly, Theo was sucking the butter and vinaigrette off the artichokes without realling eating them.
  
• Contrary to my expectations, they have both been more phased by our visitors than by anything else so far. They have loved having Ilona and Joe here, and then Grandma Lesley and Grandpa but both have put on some amazing tantrum displays and Cara was very sullen and moody at first. Could it be that this sudden link to their other life is too confusing for them?
• Being here has highlighted, for us, how independent they are of other children. They’ve always had each other to play with and talk to, and don’t really have friends at home – just children that they enjoy spending time with. We’re not sure how much this is their age (Linda tells us Jasper didn’t really form friendships until he went to school) and how much it’s a twin thing. They are happy to play alongside other children here, but obviously don’t converse.