She's in the A Team...

** Warning: Proud Mummy Moment Coming Up**

The Girl took her French A level this year. Nothing unusual in that, of course, except that she's only 14. She has actually spent more time in school in France than she has in the UK and is bilingual but nonetheless it hasn't been easy for her to be in the same class as people three or four years older than her.

Her school has been incredible in embracing the fact that she is bilingual and always going the extra mile to help and nurture her. She and The Boy were both entered for their GCSEs three years early and both achieved A*. She was able to go on to take her A level as she still has French in her timetable. For The Boy, who already had the GCSE under his belt and so wasn't taking it as part of his options, there was no room in his timetable for it. He'll take his next year as an additional A level. If he plays his cards right he may end up with 5 A levels.

She's come up against a certain amount of 'well, it's easy for you' sort of comments but I just remind her to tell them that her journey to being bilingual involved being dumped in a school in a foreign country where she couldn't even speak the language. It's a scary situation to find yourself in at the age of 6.

The school had some reservations about entering her for her A level, not because of the language but because the syllabus is aimed at 17 and 18 year old and requires a level of maturity not always present in someone of her age. She was expected to discuss renewable energy and the cult of celebrity, something that would be quite a challenge in your own language at that age.

In the end, she did really well. Better than really well. She got an A and full marks in all of her papers. I embarrassed her horribly by tearing up and rambling incoherent thanks to her French teacher, who was just as proud of her as I was.

We have been so lucky to get them into such a marvellous school, a blessed relief after her years in school in France where she was forced to take English as a Second Language 'because that's what's on the curriculum, Madame.' The Sixth Formers have taken her under their wing, never once considering her a little upstart. They called her Le Petit Dictionnaire and used her as an extra learning resource, not just with the language but in French culture. I dare say they all have a good line in French slang and swear words. In France they refused to accept that teabag wasn't hyphenated, or that Prince Charles didn't go to Rugby School because that's what their textbook said.

So, at the ripe old age of 14 she already has 275 UCAS points to her name and I feel that something very worthwhile has come out of our time in France.

Dear Monsieur Hollande...

As we go into the second week of  NotTheParisOlympicsYetAgain 2012, I can't help but think that maybe the French president, Francois Hollande, is rather wishing he'd kept his mouth shut when he visited the games last week.

As he joined David Cameron for one of the handball matches, he couldn't help but gloat over France's superior medal tally, rather patronisingly commenting that he would put France's medals into a 'European' pot so us Brits could be proud to be Europeans.

What a difference a week makes. With Team GB sat in third place in the medal tables, comfortably separated from France by a country which eats dog - as one spoof news website said - it is probably Monsieur Hollande who will be begging for Britain's superior haul of medals to be added to his European pot. Smugness never befits a politician and has a funny way of coming right round and biting you on the derriere. 

We don't need to be proud to be Europeans, Monsieur Hollande. We're very proud to be British. Go Team GB!

Were are all zee French medals? Zut alors, zay win ze Tour de France
and now zay whoop our sorry derrieres in ze medal tables

If This is What Equality Means You Can Keep It

The OECD has published it's 2012 Better Life Index, also known as the Happiness Index, ranking countries by the quality of life its inhabitants enjoy. The UK scored pretty well, coming 12th out of 37 countries, ahead of countries like Germany, France and Spain, who came 17th, 18th and 19th respectively, so all those people who left the UK for a better life might be a little disappointed.

Australia was ranked the happiest, good news for my lovely friend Lyndsey, who is emigrating to New South Wales in July (don't go, we'll miss you. I mean, what's happiness anyway?)

Looking at the data for the UK, it was interesting to see that women live longer,are better educated and happier than the men - although despite all the strides towards housework equality, women still do more than double the men. Come on boys, it's time to get to know your Dyson!

For the first time, it also breaks the information down along age lines and while older women are less likely to have a secondary education, the trend is reversed in younger women. 59% of women have jobs, including part-time ones compared to men of whom 72% work but at the same time, they are far more likely to report working 'very long hours'.

Meanwhile, men are 15% more likely to have been mugged and the murder rate among men is three times higher than that among women. And the ones that don't get mugged or murdered have a shorter life expectancy by about three years. At the same time, women report feeling less safe than men so are we just a bit neurotic or is it that 'Daily Mail' effect again?

So, it seems that if we want to be truly equal to men, we'll have to accept working much longer hours, having a higher risk of being murdered or assaulted and live a shorter life. Personally, I'd rather have the housework!

Must be French!

Brick and Mortars - why sometimes it's better just to shut up!

Samantha Brick is at it again. In her quest to become the Liz Jones of rural France, she's now aiming her big guns at her French neighbours. Apparently they took a dim view of her article in the Daily Mail recently bemoaning the fact that women everywhere hate her because she's 'beautiful'. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but suffice to say, my particular eye, when cast in her direction, does not behold a beauty, rather a middlingly attractive, slightly thick waisted middle aged woman with a husband (a French carpenter) who choses her clothes and makes her put on her make-up before breakfast.

In her latest article in the Wail, she, well, wails about how she now gets shunned at the school gates, elbowed out of the way in the queue at the post office and is generally ignored by the women of her village. Worse still, her neighbours are a bunch of immoral, adulterous harridans who would seduce your husband  in the blink of a perfectly made up eye without so much as a 'shove over, sista'. In the trou du cul of rural France? Come on Sam, they may have perfectly ironed housecoats but makeup? Not likely. And having seen photos of her controlling, overweight, balding husband with his70s porn star moustache, all I can say is, they're welcome to him.  Worse still, these same women won't go on girlie shopping trips with her or meet her after work for a cocktail or two. A cocktail? In rural France? It's not London, sweetie.

She goes on to say, Since I wrote a piece for this newspaper expressing how difficult life can be when you are beautiful, my popularity has plummeted to an all-time low in the rural village where I live. (No shit, Sherlock!) Yes, I have received hate mail from women around the world, but none of it as vicious as that from French women. Much of their condemnation is unprintable and I have been stunned at their choice of language.

Really? It seems the French dislike a professional self-publicist just as much as we do. What Ms Brick seems to find hard to comprehend is that sometimes it's just better to shut up. The adage 'there's no such thing as bad publicity' is nonsense, as the German 'Come Dine with Me' contestant found out when her own particular brand of self-publicity turned into a long campaign of internet abuse and hatred. She eventually killed herself.  Gerald Ratner would probably disagree too, and BP, and a whole host of other companies.If the only publicity you can achieve is worldwide opprobrium, then I'd be inclined to keep a low profile.

On the one hand, she may have a point. The website gleeden.com, set up so married people could find someone for a no-strings affair, has just over 1 million subscribers around the world. Over 500,000 of them are French. The idea of the cinq a sept, named for the time slot when the French apparently meet up with their lovers after work, is still alive and well. Where I lived in France, family trees were certainly a tangled old affair with men having fathered children with  a number of different partners and there was something of a revolving door of personal relationships. The problem as ever, with Samantha, is her delivery. There are ways of saying things and she, inevitably, doesn't use them. Instead, she produces a ridiculously shallow tirade, aimed at the women of her own community.

Whatever the realities, Samantha Brick would have been well advised to keep her own counsel. She made a fool of herself last month and she looks set to do it again this month.  To moan about your neighbours then berate them as 'hostile and predatory adulterers' will no doubt result in another round of incoming mortar fire directed Ms Brick's way.

Take coverrrrrrr!

We're all going on a summer holiday

.... well actually we've been but Sir Cliff hasn't conveniently sung a song about returning from your anuual sejourn in foreign climes.  Well I'm sure, dear Reader, you have been wondering at the reason for my cyber silence for over 2 weeks (what do you mean you hadn't even noticed?).  It was that time of the year when we decamp to France so The Girl can do her High Security Music Camp. It works like this. I pay 500 euros and she spends a week in France putting on a musical from scratch, sleeping in a dodgy tent, being fed on cheap food. But she loves it and I love her so I cough up.  It also gives us a chance to catch up with our lovely friends w1.hich is a definite plus even though they are now spread a bit further and wider than before.

People talk about the difference in culture between the French and the English, usually by comparing French High Society to Chavs but let's not go there, but for me, the difference was slightly more basic, lavatorial even.

1.  The toilets have no toilet seats. What in God's name happens to them all?  They start off with them but within weeks they are gone. It's as bigger mystery as the whereabouts of the Scarlet Pimpernel.  Is there a Phantom Potty Seat Pincher?  Is it really true the French women don't get fat so the ones that appear to be just have a stolen toilet seat shoved up their dress?  If anyone has any ideas please do let me know

2.  The toilets have no toilet paper.  The schedule on the wall clearly shows that the toilets were cleaned half and hour ago so where has all the toilet paper gone?  The same way as the seats maybe?  All I know is there is nothing worse, when you are already suffering screaming thigh muscles from hoving above the seatless porcelain pan, to discover the toilet roll holder is empty and you now have to try and scrabble around in your bag for a suitable replacement, the bag which is of course on your knee because...

3.  The toilets have nowhere to hang up your bag.  I absolutely refuse to put my bag down on a toilet floor. Think about it.  It's not the cleanest of places, particularly in France (and some other countries to be fair) but with nowhere to hang your bag you put it down on the floor, then later at home, you put your bag down on the table, then you eat lunch and voila! E-coli

4.  The hand driers don't work.  If I had a euro for every time I've been in a French toilet and found the hand drier to be Hors Service, I'd be living in a mansion in the country.  I do have a sneaking suspicion that it's because post-lavatorial handwashing in France is an optional rather than a mandatory procedure. Just remember that when you go to the supermarket

5.  O.M.G! Shock... Horror.. sometimes you don't even have a toilet pan. Has somebody stolen that too?  The so-called Turkish Toilet (or squatty potty as I like to call it) is supposed to be more hygienic but that's not a theory that has been borne out by my own experiences.  I had the unpleasant experience of going into a toilet in Agen, a relatively bourgeoise town, to find the filthiest toilet I have ever seen.  I instantly lost the desire to pee and headed for the door. The handle was sticky. With what I can only guess. Never mind, I could always wash my hands.... except that I couldn't because there was no sink.

I could possibly be accused of having something of a fixation on Squatty Potties, having blogged about them before  but that's only because they are so universally awful.

But on to nicer things - well not the weather because that was awful for most of the time, I mean, 14 degrees in July? - it was lovely to see some of our dear friends, now all spread a bit far and wide sadly which meant we just couldn't fit everyone in.  It was less of a pleasure to run into the founder members of the local Coven of  Sour Old Hags at the village cafe.  They had already heard of my arrival  ("What? Daily Mail Wylye Girl". Sometimes don't you just wish for a little bit of dementia). They were huddled round a cauldron bubbling over with oeil de gecko and foie de grenouille or I suppose it could just have been a table, with faces like slapped culs - I am so bilingual!  There was an almost audible intake of breath at my audacity then they were desperately disappointed when Monsieur M, who for reasons known best to himself was sitting with them, leapt up to give me a kiss and have a long chat.  I wished them a cheery good morning. They glared at me with mouths turned down like so many dead trouts and stayed silent. No wonder their poor husbands were sitting inside nursing alcoholic drinks when the sun was barely over the yard arm.

We stayed with lovely friends who, bless them, had postponed leaving on their holidays for a day so we could spend time together. As ever the welcome was warm and the conversation lively. They let us have use of their house while they were away in return for catsitting the oldest Persian cat in France, at an impressive 21 years old, although as she has a UK passport the French were recognise her claim.  I won't lie and say I wasn't concerned that she might chose my watch to shuffle this mortal coil and on more than one occasion I stood over her to check she was still with us but I'm happy to say that she survived our tender loving care.  All I can say is I hope that I am that sprightly at 92+ (I can't give you her exact age because the Purina 'How Old is Your Cat' calculator only goes up to 19.

The following day we delivered The Daughter to High Security Summer Music Camp, where, for a significant sum of money, she stays in a municipal campsite in a dodgy plastic tent that resembles a Turkish Bath in the daytime and a fridge during the night, and puts on a musical from scratch, including props and scenery, in a week.  She loves it and we love her so we stump up the cash and off she goes.  It attract students from all around the world, many of whom are at drama school and the standards are high.  This year was the 10th Anniversary so they were putting on a cabaret, with songs from the last 10 years' productions and a gala dinner, but more of that later.

On Monday we went to Agen so I could buy some linen curtains. We stupidly thought we would get something to eat in the evening. In a reasonable sized French town, in the peak tourist season. You'd think wouldn't you.  But no. Apart from the Station Buffet as recommended, bizarrely, by Rick Stein, everywhere was closed. I keep thinking that there must be another buffet in another station because it's average at best and in the evening it is THE place to go to find a lady of the night. It's distinctly seedy.  After two hours of looking we had lost our appetites and in the end we went home for sausage sandwiches.

Next stop Albi. We jumped into our very nice Citroen C5, a free upgrade from Avis, thank you very much, and headed off to some other friends who live there.  They are guardians of a very lovely property which belongs to....we I couldn't possibly say but it's for sale if you've got 1.5 million euros stuffed down the back of your sofa.

We spent a day in Albi. I am in love with Albi. It's a well deserved UNESCO World Heritage Site. Go, go tomorrow.  The Cathedrale de Ste Cecile is wonderful, all Gothic austerity on the outside and serious frou-frou on the inside. And the Jardin de la Berbie behind the Musee Toulouse Lautrec is stunning in an very formal and anally retentive way. Photos... photos I hear you cry. Unfortunately they are all on The Husband's laptop which is in Bulgaria. But that's a story for another time.  Lunch was a steak which had been briefly shown the pan and which was a bit like sucking an open wound but at least the waiter opened our bottles of water between his thighs with great panache rarely seen outside of Thailand.

After three days of great food, conviviality and lots of Trivial Pursuit we headed back to try and fulfil the long shopping list of clothes The Girl suddenly needed and spend a night with some other friends who live among the vineyards of Cahors. Yet more conviviality and great food.  I was asked if I miss living in France. Despite the lovely setting we were in, the answer was still no. I don't miss it. Not one bit.

The following day was show time.  The Girl had had to learn 17 song and dance numbers. One of the choreographers had worked on Fame in the West End and had taught her enthusiastic bunch of amateurs the same routines.  The show was marvellous, the food less so. If you ever wanted proof that food in France can be complete rubbish, this was it.   The starter was tinned peaches stuffed with pate of some sort reposing on a deep bed of grated carrot, very deep.  The main course was Mystery Meat cooked with olives and peppers and watery rice.  Some thought the meat was pork, others lamb, some even tuna. Most didn't eat it. It had a curious smell of baby's nappies.  Hooray for the cheese course, which was at least edible and the tarte tatin, mass produced by still quite tasty.

The Girl was fabulous, making a wonderful Maria in The Sound of Music, a talent she no doubt gets from her mother. It was, no doubt, a very tiring week. The Girl came up to us at the end and promptly burst into tears, half of exhaustion, half of sadness that it was all over for another year. She decided she wanted to stay another night at the campsites so we headed off to our comfortable beds while she headed off to another night being knawed by mosquitos.  I've never really understood the French predilection for siting their campsites around lakes.

The following day was the big trek home. The Husband had been working in Manchester so he had flown out of Liverpool while we had flown out of Bristol. We were all flying back to Liverpool then driving back down to Wiltshire. The flights from Bordeaux leave from Le Billi, a poorly air conditioned metal box which is your punishment for flying with a low cost airline. All the flights were delayed. It was distinctly Third World. Eventually we were called for our flight. The departure gate had about 8 seats. We waited... and waited.... and waited some more. Eventually the Captain turned up, which is never a good sign.  He had noticed a nick in one of the tyres and needed to get an engineer to come and confirm that it was OK to fly.  Thank God it wasn't  lunchtime or we'd have had a 2 hour wait.  We all sat down on the floor. Within minutes, the two couples in front of us were swapping birth stories. Call me old fashioned but give me a good bit of Southern reserve any day.

Eventually, two hours late, we arrived in Liverpool.  You know you're in Liverpool when the woman at Border Control looks like a WAG. Down South they are generally paunchy middle aged men with the pallor of an uncooked sausage.  She was all beehived and eyelinered.

So that was it, another year, another trip to France. Next year I fancy Barbados. France was much as I found it last time. It's a shame to see two local boulangeries have now become franchises and the prices are horrendous.   We bought a kilo of sausages and a cote de porc in the market and it came to 30 euros! And petrol was far more expensive that I pay here in Wiltshire.  I certainly couldn't afford to live there.

Next week we head off to Devon for a  holiday with my extended family. We've never done it before and it will either be a huge success or a terrible disaster. Either way, it should provide some good blogging material!

Mine's a pint!

It's not a good time to be a policeman in France. First, after much pressure and many court cases the government has agreed to enforce the Human Rights Act in respect of the right to a fair trial meaning that from now on, anyone who is arrested has the right to have a lawyer present for the whole of the questioning process which will put a rather swift end to their usual methods of violence and intimidation. Followers of Spiral (Les Engrenages) which is currently showing on BBC4 probably thought the producers were using a bit of artistic licence in their portrayal of the treatment of prisoners but no, that's how it is.

In actual fact judges will still have the power to delay access to a lawyer for up to 72 hours to allow "for the collection or preservation of evidence or to prevent an attack on individuals"  in cases where the crime would be punishable by more than 5 years in prison. The organisation Human Rights Watch. more usually associated with places like Libya and Yemen. has a large dossier on human rights abuses in France and is lobbying the government to take the new regulations even further.  You can read more about the situation on the Fly in the Web's excellent blog.

Now, the CRS, the French riot police have been banned from drinking on duty. Up until now, they have been allowed to have up to 250ml of wine (equivalent to 3 units at 12% volume) or a small beer, served with a meal, but after photos appeared of them during the recent unrest swigging wine and beer straight from the bottle police chiefs have decided enough is enough.

Personally, I've always found the sight of a man with a gun in one hand and alcohol in the other rather disconcerting.  Alcohol, a loaded gun and unemployed, disenfranchised Muslim youths seems a recipe for disaster.  In the autumn and spring months our hillside became France's answer to Helmand with scores of men in hi-vis jackets marching around with rifles and mangy hunting dogs shooting anything with a heartbeat, including from time to time, each other. I would keep the children and animals in the house after lunch, knowing full well that a hearty meal had been washed down with liberal quantities of  gutrot and on more than one occasion I was confronted with a staggering man with a loaded gun and purple teeth.

According to research, 3 units of alcohol will give an increased feeling of happiness - not something traditionally associated with the CRS - but will significantly impair judgement which might lead, for example, pepper spraying children or indeed this , although I suppose you could argue that at least they would do it with a smile on their faces.

They plan to respond in true Gallic style by going on strike. Tchinn!

Mine's a pint!

This week I have mostly been....

having an article printed in the Daily Telegraph Expat Life section. I wrote it a while ago, but sick of all the vitriol that accompanies anything that might be perceived as negative about France I filed it away.

A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with Amodernmilitarymother who has just moved into the area. We talked a lot, as you would imagine, about blogging and writing and she reminded me of the words of Oscar Wilde; "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" so I sent it off. Let them talk about me, does it really matter? No.   So they printed it almost word for word, removing only a few words unfortunately including 'same merde, different shaped bread' (perhaps they thought it was too strong for the sensitive constitutions of some of their readers) and the fact that I went to University in Paris and had lived abroad many times before. The main thing they did was change the title.

I called it 'Moving back or moving on; why the end of the dream doesn't have to be the end of the world'. I thought it was quite clever, they obviously didn't! It talks about why we moved to France, why we left and how we eventually found what we were looking for much closer to home, the 'moral' being if it's not  working out, don't be afraid to take the plunge and move back to your home country - or anywhere else for that matter.   It does, though, go to show how the title of an article can influence it's  'flavour' as I think, with their title about being 'driven' back to the UK, which is nonsense as it was an informed choice, in much the same way that it was an informed choice to move to France in the first place, not that you'd know from some of the commenters who all know for a fact that we 'didn't do  our homework'....<<sigh>>... it reads a bit differently.  Is that the longest sentence in the English language!

I've read one or two of the comments and the tweets - about par for the course bearing in mind the bit in the article about how leaving France is seen as marginally worse that putting kitties in wheelie bins - The expat fraternity, or at least certain elements of it,  has certainly proved true to type - as well a  bizarre argument about someone who may or may not be a Japanese man posing as an Englishman. Don't people lead strange lives!

One of the more recent comments is someone I recognise from a French forum who makes a point of hounding anyone (s)he thinks might be me, such is the pointlessness of his/her life and seems to know more about me than I know about myself, including the fact that I lived in Agen. Umm, Agen was about 30 kms away from where I lived. I did go there a few times but lived there, no. The article he talks about showed two stock photos, one of Virginia Water, where I also never lived, although I did live nearby, and one of Agen.  It's quite sad when people are so blinded by their own prejudices that they don't even bother to read things properly but that's life for you.  Oh, and I've never touched a chainsaw in my life. God forbid, I'd probably chop my own leg off! That was a little flight of fancy by the journalist. I've got a mean axe swing though!  (Edit: I see the comment has now been removed by the DT )

 It's now No. 1 of the 'most read' articles, bizarre seeing as it came out over a week ago and until a couple of days ago it hadn't even garnered a single comment.

Oscar Wilde would be proud of me!