The Miraculous Expanding Jumper

The move from Nowhere-on-Thames to Nowhere-in-France went remarkably smoothly, all things considered. Probably the only tricky part was cramming all my thermal clothing – plus a newly-acquired electric blanket - into a tiny bag to beat the budget-airline baggage restrictions. This involved wearing a LOT of clothes, but the temperature was so low on my day of departure that it wasn’t a real hardship. The real hardship would have been getting up if I’d fallen over. I was wearing so many clothes that I would probably still be lying on the floor of Stansted airport departures, waiting for someone to either take pity on me or mow me down with one of those little electric buggy things, had gravity claimed me and dragged me to the floor.

There is something about managing to board a Ryanair flight with all the stuff you packed in your hand luggage that’s immensely satisfying. I was a bit concerned, and had practised, in my mind, exactly how I would strap the electric blanket to my body in the event that I was stopped and told that my hand luggage exceeded regulation dimensions. Frankly, I don’t know why I ever worry. I’ve flown to the other side of the globe for a fortnight with hand luggage, so visiting a house where I’ve already got plenty of clothes for a week is no problem. Except, of course, when the outside temperature has dropped to “arctic” and you’re having to call your thickest woollies into service. 

What I failed to factor into my plans, however, was the Big Thaw and the attendant massive increase in temperature which meant that I had no need to travel back dressed as if for a week in Siberia. This posed a problem, as my big jumper alone filled up all the space which had been occupied on the outbound leg by the electric blanket I was leaving in France. Not only that, but the jumper refused to pack flat. This, despite the use of one of those special plastic bags which allow one to expel all the air and thus condense one’s clothes into a sort of brick.

I eventually managed to cram the thick jumper into my bag, squeezed into a brick in the plastic bag. Sadly, the plastic bag began, only part way to the aircraft, to show distinct signs of no longer wishing to fulfil its role. This meant that as I edged forward in the boarding queue, my sweater and all the other clothes in my bag took it upon themselves to start spontaneously expanding….

I managed to reach the aircraft without drawing too much attention to myself, despite the fact that I was carrying a piece of hand luggage which seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was discernibly growing as if someone was using a bicycle pump on it. I shoved it quickly into the overhead locker, and was pleased that the person who opened the locker on landing wasn’t knocked to the ground as my jumper and other items of clothing broke free from their plastic prison and resumed their normal shape and size before the eyes of the rest of the unsuspecting passengers.

Phew!

Oh yes…I bet you’re wondering how I fared in the cold-weather-one-upmanship competition? Well, it was minus 12^o  for a couple of nights, and below freezing for a day or so, but once I’d lit enough fires, I hardly noticed the cold. However, my trip was not without incident. I shall shortly bring you tales of broken walls, broken fences and a breakdown in international relations..

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye...

Tomorrow I’m off to France. If I ever get there. We’re in the grip of a cold snap. Well, it’s cold to us, but if you live in Siberia, then what we’re currently experiencing would probably have you reaching for a t-shirt and shorts. As it is, people across Europe are locked in competition. The mere mention of the current outdoor temperature wherever you happen to be produces a flurry of “Ha! That’s nothing, it’s minus 27 here and my tongue has just frozen to the roof of my mouth!” “Ha! Call that cold! I had to have my pyjamas surgically removed by the fire brigade this morning because they’d frozen to my body overnight!”

Not to be outdone, I’m heading for my house in the French countryside, where the heating is currently switched off and, according to the neighbours, the fridge has stopped working in protest, because it’s realised that the outside temperature in my kitchen has now fallen below the temperature inside the fridge itself and, being a French fridge, it has decided not to waste its time any further and gone on strike. The internet tells me it’s going to be around -10 to -12 C for the next couple of nights over there, and that the daytime temperatures are unlikely to rise above freezing. I could stay here in the relatively balmy south-east of the UK, where we are forecast a slightly warmer zero to +3 degrees, but then, in the “Who’s the coldest” stakes, I’d be out of contention. It’s a question of pride. Why, even TH has been in on the act. He’s spent the day in Zurich, and the first thing he said as I walked in the door tonight was “It was *&^* cold over there! Minus 10!”. 

Actually, I’m lying. The first thing TH said to me when I came home from work was “Grummmhungbruung”. Or something similar. Owing to his absence in Switzerland, you see, he has been unable to address the problem of his car. I discovered yesterday that his battery was flat, when the nice man from BT came to install our new superfast internet connection. The nice man needed to put up a ladder outside the house, but TH’s car was in the way. I offered to move it forward, which was when I discovered that the battery was flat. So, when I came home this evening at 9.30 pm, it was to find TH outside in the cold, removing the battery from his car so he could charge it. 

So, I’ll be back soon with tales of How I Survived the Cold. Unless I’m recovering from having my pyjamas surgically removed..

Oh, the “Grummmhungbruung” ?? It’s just the way TH talks when he’s holding a torch in his mouth.

The Wrong Kind of French

It’s that time of year….you know, the one where someone from Network Rail  or some BBC reporter stands in a street full of snowdrifts and tells us we’ve got no trains/electricity/gas/sanity because of “the wrong kind of snow” (who knew?). Over much of the UK and Europe, people have been waking up (or even going to bed) to a blanket of white. Most of them seem to have eschewed the idea of grabbing a blanket, hot water bottle or extra firewood in favour of a camera. Facebook is a veritable winter wonderland of “views from my window” shots of whiteness. I am typing this very blog entry whilst gazing out onto my white-ish back garden. Spots of colour are peeking through, though, ‘cos it’s already melting. I’d add a photo but it’s already too late and one person’s snow-covered garden looks very much like another’s, so I feel I’m sparing you.

But I’ve just found out that the snow isn’t the only thing of which we can have a wrong kind. No, apparently, there’s also the wrong kind of French. 

My morning scan of some of the Internet’s vast number of Francophile forums revealed that a number of  people appear to be having problems mastering the French language because, back in the UK, they’d poured their hearts and their money into learning the wrong kind of French. And to top it all, the French haven’t been sent the memo, so they’re being most uncooperative and speaking some lazy colloquial version of their own language, showing no regard for those who have learned proper French as she is spoke.  In a typo sent from heaven, one person complained that her French acquaintances appeared to be speaking “patios”.  An interesting thought, but about as unlikely as a talking conservatory.

I’ve been to this place called Patios, though. And no, it’s not a Greek Island. People aren’t speaking patois as often as they are slang, and I well remember having to come to terms with the realisation that French slang has an alternative word for almost everything. On my first long-term stay in France in the mid-1970’s, I met so much slang that I was initially convinced I’d been sent to the wrong country. After a while, though, it does fall into place. And it’s not nearly as confusing as discovering that your college tutor, happily married to the same woman for a fair number of years, calls his wife “Vous”. Now, if that doesn’t fly in the face of what the textbooks say, I don’t know what does.

Now that I’ve become what might loosely be described as a “teacher” (I admit to feeling somewhat embarrassed to use the term in case a real teacher comes along and I get found out), I do see both sides of this situation. Of course, when we learn a foreign language, we are taught the correct way of using the grammar and of forming sentences with grammatically proper structures. But, as we know with our native language, rules are made to be broken. I’ve just counted the number of sentences in this post that start with a conjunction, for example, and if I was a better person, I might feel shame. But I’m not ;-)

With my adult learners, though, I seem to run into a regular problem. Many have a strong foundation in French, well-remembered from their schooldays. They also have the benefit of maturity and wisdom commensurate with their age. Why, then, do they so often seem to go into some sort of mental meltdown if I tell them that they MAY have learned to say “X”, but that the majority of French people say “Y”?? Sometimes, I will get as far as being able to convince people to use a more relaxed and informal turn of phrase, only to meet them again for the next lesson and find that they’ve reverted to speaking like Louis XIV because that’s what they learned thirty years ago.

There is a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon in one of my favourite French films ever, “Etre et Avoir”,  (To be and to have) the story of a teacher in a single-classroom school in rural France. Originally made as a documentary, it charts a year in the life of this school and its extraordinarily dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to do so. Even with subtitles it’s well worth watching.  It contains the following scene, which goes some way to show that the French do try, very hard and from an early age, to learn the RIGHT kind of French, but unfortunately, the wrong kind of French is deeply ingrained. Meanwhile, this side of the Channel, we’re learning the right kind of French and, if numbers of British migrants to France increase enough, who knows, one day we might be able to save the French language from dumbing down…..

I can’t find a clip of this with English subtitles, and you’ll need to watch it from about 2 minutes 20 into the clip, but the children are using the word “ami” or “amie” (friend) to learn the difference between masculine and feminine noun endings. However, one small boy is NOT prepared to give up easily on using the word “copain”  (mate). He will probably be in his late teens by now (as the film was released in 2002), and actively engaged in confusing well-meaning British people who have learned all about “ami” and “amie”, but are blissfully ignorant of “copain” and “copine”…

Tidying up is bad for your health

 

Visitors often say that my house always looks tidy. I’m not really in a position to judge, but since sons #1 and #2 more or less vacated the premises, I see a small improvement, and also a corresponding lapse in standards when they reappear.  Then there’s the odd (very regular) occasion when the cat brings in a mouse and leaves the bits he doesn’t like at the side of his plate. Only the cat believes that the hall carpet is the side of his plate, so owing to his lack of opposable thumbs or human emotion, I spend a disproportionate amount of time with the Vanish and a cloth, scrubbing at the stains and muttering expletives under my breath.

Visitors, of course, are blissfully unaware that they only have to open a drawer or cupboard to unleash a veritable explosion of clothes, household objects and assorted haberdashery which has been hidden away in order to preserve the veneer of tidiness. I do try to keep things tidy, even when they’re hidden away, but sometimes I just take the lazy option and stuff them into any available space in the spirit of “out of sight, out of mind”. And “out of mind” is usually fine until I start looking for things.

Take last summer, for example. I came back from a couple of months in France to discover that a whole stack of important documents seemed to have disappeared. I didn’t actually blame anyone else, but nor was I prepared to shoulder the responsibility knowing, as I did, that even in my most stupid of moments I wouldn’t have thrown them out. They included my Premium Bond Certificates and the paperwork for a savings account. After giving it a month to see whether they turned up (as stuff usually does, eventually) I gave up and rang the institutions concerned to get copies. So imagine my surprise when I discovered, some 3 or 4 months down the line,  that I had carefully filed them in a new file which had been sitting on the shelf all along. 

And that’s my problem. Over the past couple of months, I have noticed that my ability to lose things has increased exponentially, and my ability to find them has diminished in equal measure. Yet I swear, I put them away with care and some thought. However, my ability to find where I did put stuff has turned into a pastiche of that famous Mastermind sketch by the Two Ronnies where Ronnie Corbett is answering the question prior to the one he’s currently being asked. Allow me to explain..

A few weeks back, I hunted high and low for the installation CD for my printer, as I needed to install it on another computer. It was nowhere to be found, but I did manage to come across the cat’s vaccination record. When, a few weeks previously, I realised I’d lost the cat’s vaccination record , it was nowhere to be found, but I did track down the registration document for my car, the search for which I’d put on hold.  When THAT search was in full swing was when I found the missing Premium Bond certificates…

I am seriously considering beginning the search for a suitable home for the bewildered.

Pottering about, or about pottering

As mentioned in my profile, I have a very short attention span when it comes to hobbies.  As a consequence, I get through hobbies like some people get through underwear. I change them often.  Then again, there are things I do that other people seem to classify as hobbies, but to me they’re part of life.  Reading, for example.  To me, that’s not a hobby. In fact, if you’re going to classify reading as a hobby, then I might as well list breathing as one of mine. And when does cooking become a hobby? And, if cooking, why not ironing?

Anyway, I digress.  I like hobbies where you can make stuff.  However, I guess I’m blessed with a gift that means I can make most things quite easily, so as a consequence I make stuff I don’t really need or have a use for, and then wonder why I did it. Our house is adorned with bits of useless papercraft which, whilst they look very decorative, ONLY look very decorative. They have no real purpose other than decoration, and there’s only so much useless tat you can display without making your house look as though you’ve turned it into a primary school art display.

 About three years ago, however, I met my nemesis. I signed up for Adult Education classes in Ceramics. I was going to make pots! My expectations were initially low, and I managed not to meet them with amazing success. OK, I didn’t make any of those wonky ashtrays that schoolchildren always seemed to bring home when given the opportunity to be creative with clay, but my first efforts were only a little better. And, for a long time, “ a little better” was about as good as it got.  Being honest, I haven’t ever really grown out of the belief that if I turn my hand to something, I will produce professional quality things within seconds, and now I’m twentyteen I should really know better, but my inability to produce my first masterpiece after half a term was a disappointment. Nevertheless, I stuck with it. I began with a lot of hand-built pots, which looked…well, they looked hand built. In fact, most of them looked as though they had been hand built by someone with impaired vision and one hand tied behind their back. So then, after a year of hand-building, I thought I’d try throwing.

 

You may be familiar with the film “Ghost”. I’m not, especially, but I’ve still seen the bit where  Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze make a phallic symbol out of clay on a pottery wheel whilst  listening to “Unchained Melody”. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Not so much for the slightly risqué imagery, more so that you can marvel in wonder that, apart from getting their hands covered in clay, they stay relatively clean. This, in spite of the fact that Mr Swayze has had the foresight to remove his shirt.  Now if I were remaking this scene, I would have them both dressed in wellies, a pac-a-mac and sou’wester, and have all the scenery draped in plastic sheeting.  I came back from most of my throwing experiences covered in clay up to my armpits. My trousers (in spite of the judicious use of an apron and an old towel) generally ended up so covered in clay that, had it set before I got home, I would have looked like I was half-woman, half-statue. Blowing my nose, even several days after a class, I could find that one or both of my nostrils contained enough clay to make a small dish.

Somehow, I’ve not only continued with this hobby, but (after abandoning the wheel for the rather cleaner and more controllable hand building) I’ve finally begun to make some half-decent pots.The main problem I’m starting to have is what to do with them. I have classmates who occasionally join in with local craft sales and manage to sell some of their work, but I’m still a long way off being confident enough in the quality of my output to risk it. I’ve shipped a fair quantity over to our second home in France, in the spirit of “out of sight, out of mind”, but I’m now wondering if we’ll ever have enough guests, either here in N-o-T, or in France, for me to call my increasing number of serving dishes and bowls  into service. I can’t see it myself. 

I leave you with a little example of my vast body of work…

If you wanna get ahead..

..get a hat! Or so the old slogan goes. Frankly, I have yet to find a hat that doesn't make me look like a demented bag-lady or a female Michael Crawford, so I tend to avoid them like the plague, even when, as today, there appears to be a wind blowing round Nowhere-on-Thames which has come directly from Siberia without passing go or collecting £200. I look marginally less like an escapee from a home for the bewildered with my hair being whipped into coconut matting around my head, so I set off for an afternoon stroll into the local metropolis, accompanied by TH, with my head exposed to the elements.

Once we'd arrived in the local metropolis itself, there were, as usual, hordes of tourists taking photos of just about everything and milling about the castle and the shops doing the normal tourist things. Given the prevailing weather conditions, I began to notice the extraordinary range of headgear they were sporting.

Now, I guess that, unless you come from somewhere colder than the UK, you're probably not going to think about packing lots of headgear for a few days' break, so if you decide to buy something once you're here, you may not have the luxury of a wide choice. Even so...

The first person to walk past us was a man, sporting a Sherlock-Holmes-style deerstalker. It sounded as though he was Italian. If, indeed, he WAS Italian, he clearly didn't get the memo about being stylish and casually elegant at all times, for he had actually managed to find a deerstalker lined with grey faux-fur fabric, and had decided to wear it with the ear-flaps down over his ears and tied under his chin. The overall effect was sort of Sherlock-Holmes-with-learning-difficulties.

Putting the "tit" in "titfer"?

                                                   
Then there seemed to have been a massive outbreak of those Peruvian bonnets which look OK-ish on trustafarians with dreadlocks, handknitted jumpers and Doc Martens, but which make Japanese tourists of a certain age look like they're wearing a tea-cosy for a bet. And I'm not convinced that any man over 30 can really pull off a hat with multicoloured faux-plaits. There's something of the transvestite about it.

Would you?

And then there are the Princess-Leia headphone-ear-muff-headbands which make the wearer look like they've got some terrible ear infection, but even worse, make them almost completely deaf. I worry that, when sported by a tourist who tends to forget which side of the road we drive on, this could become a lethal combo.

No, really.....why?????

All I can assume is that these people will get home with their inappropriate headgear and consign it to a dark corner of their wardrobe, never to be seen or worn again. I mean....when Brits used to go on holiday to Spain and come back with those sombreros the size of a manned spacecraft...they KNEW how stupid they looked wearing them, didn't they?