Keir Royale

I am tired, tired, tired.
Tired beyond the distant rigours of night-feeds and toddler tantrum time.

The six, long weeks which polka-ed into view at the end if June, promising a temporary end to after-school clubs, to early morning arguments about football kit, French club folder and ballet gear; those six, long weeks of promise have but a few days left in them.
But that’s a lot more than I’ve got left in me.

I have no more energy to insist -
“Time to brush your teeth and get dressed now” when it’s already 1pm and they may as well wait until after lunch before bothering to go upstairs.

I can no longer pretend there’s a reason to go to bed before 9pm, all I can do is threaten them with -
“School starts on Tuesday and it’ll be back to normal bedtime on Monday night”

I no longer even try to get them out of the house, where Playmobil is their latest must-do-all-day obsession, and into the park.
Let them run up and down the walls to let off steam, it’s all the same to me.

My good intentions to lead them gradually back to school routine, via earlier and earlier bedtimes and short but regular injections of mental maths, have followed the smell of burning toast out of the kitchen window.

They are rebellious, they are rude, they have been sent to bed crying on two consecutive nights.

Such is the result of unfettered family time.

Let the doom-mongers who scream that nurseries are bad for children come round to our house at the dog end of the summer holidays.

Let them see what’s bad for children, and, more importantly, for parents.

But when I complained about the playmobil compulsion, which is taking over every flat surface of the house, Ben retorted,

“Aren’t you glad we like playmobil and don’t want to play on Nintendos and playstations all the time?”

What could I say?

For the second time since I started blogging, I have reason to wish I were doing this anonymously.

I suspect this is frustrating for you to read, as it hints at more interesting, perhaps salacious material hiding behind this “isn’t family life funny” outlet… material which can never be revealed if I want to retain a normal life.

I didn’t think of hiding behind a persona when I set this up, probably because I hadn’t ever read any blogs until I started doing it myself.
Then I realised that a lot of people seem to do it anonymously.

Some do it because they’re writing as fictional characters, some to protect the innocent (I do wonder how my children will feel when they’re old enough to realise their young lives are merely source material for the entertainment of strangers), some so they can be rude about people they know.

It’s too late for me to go undercover now, unless I started running a second, anonymous blog. But in view of the time this one can take up, I don’t think my relationship could take a second.

It would be fun though…

“When my sister came to stay for the summer in our Tuscan villa, I knew I was in for trouble. It wasn’t the fact that she was bringing her new boyfriend that worried me, even though I’d been warned his condition makes coherent conversation virtually impossible; it was the fact that her ex-girlfriend was staying in the next village, with her husband, four children and nanny goat.”

“I’m so sick of the bloody next door neighbours. When they’re not playing hip hop housey-housey rap music loudly enough to wake the undead, they’re shouting at each other in accents thick enough to stand your spoon up in.
And that kid of theirs is on weekend release again. I’m almost tempted to get into a fight with him, just to get him back into a secure unit for a few months. Then maybe I could listen to The Archers in peace again.”

Your challenge is to work out which is the one nugget of truth in those two (mostly) fictional excerpts.

I have been tagged by Jolene to disclose what I like about blogging.

At first I could think of more things I don’t like about it – the time it takes up, the obsession, the feeling that I should be doing something more financially rewarding with my time, the blank looks I get from real-life friends when I mention the once-a-day habit…

But as I’m still doing it, there must be plenty of positives as well.

So - the best things about blogging are –

- the laziness of it. I don’t have to do research, interview people, cut my piece to a certain length, worry about rejection - I can just write about what I think/feel/have just wasted my time doing, and hang it out on-line

- the discipline of writing most days (barring holidays) and learning to think about life as raw material; sort of my family as blog-fodder

- connections made with other bloggers and with non-blogging readers. It’s an odd feeling to know people but not know them, if you see what I mean

- being a part of something global, even if I have joined in so late that it’s probably all about to transmute into something new and far too technical for me to follow

- it’s a repository for ideas I may take up later, and a reminder of things I may otherwise forget.

And now I’m supposed to tag three other blogs so they can reveal the extent of their addiction.

I choose: -

3 kids no job
West Dulwich Life
My Life Now

And the rules are:

1. Answer the question “What’s the Best Thing About Blogging?”

2. Linkback to the person that tagged you

3. Tag 3 people - try to choose British parent bloggers

The guinea pigs are getting the hang of personal freedom – especially Phoebe.

Twice this summer she’s escaped, and was fast, furious and determined not to be caught.

The first time Ben had taken them outside the front of the house to welcome some visitors, when Phoebe leaped out of his arms and scurried under the (thankfully stationary) car.

It took the four of us, plus a neighbourhood child to trap her in some undergrowth.

The second time Ben was returning the two piggies to the run so lovingly constructed by Mike, when Phoebe decided to reject this fine example of carpentry and make a run for it in the opposite direction – into some long grass edged with stinging nettles.

The four of us surrounded her, Mike grabbed her, and then we left her to recover from her ordeal, while Mike rubbed his stings.

At Easter, when they had their first taste of freedom, they kept close to their run and found the courage only to follow each other under deck chairs. This time, they’ve found a little earth cave shrouded in long grass that they dash to as soon as we let them out.

They make longer and longer forays out into the garden, tasting little titbits and sniffing the air appreciatively, and while Sandy’s main method of defence is to play dead, and is thus easy to re-capture for night-time incarceration, Phoebe is crafty and dashes from one hidey hole to another before I can grab her.

Last night I moaned to Mike,
“I can’t catch Phoebe.”

He replied helpfully,
“You will,” showing no signs of coming to help.

I did get her in the end, but not before threatening to leave her outside all night for the foxes.

She didn’t take any notice. In fact, the guinea pigs are becoming more and more like the children.

I’ll soon be complaining about their attitude, their under-the-breath complaints about having to wash their hands, and their reluctance to tidy their rooms…

I had a grandparent moment this week.

I was watching the news, and an item about the climate change protest at Heathrow came up. I listened to the chief spokesperson, who’s young, articulate and committed to the importance of their cause.

And I found myself thinking, “What a waste of time.”

I tried to banish the idea from my brain, but before I’d expunged the thought-crime, it hit me that this was just what my grandparents used to say about the Greenham Common protests in the 1980s.

I never stayed a night at Greenham, but I did go to some of the protest events, and I sent my grandparents a Raymond Briggs book about nuclear war in a youthful attempt to educate them with humour.

I still have the letter my gran wrote to me afterwards, calling it “a lot of nonsense”.

I’m not nearly as old as she was then, so I have even less excuse for pooh-poohing legitimate protest.

I think what has struck me about this protest is that they’re targeting a commercial organisation whose priority is profit, not saving the world from global warming.

While there’s a demand for cheap air travel they will provide it.
It’s up to us to demand less air travel, and to vote for the politicians who have a coherent policy on climate change.

Direct action may be more newsworthy than dull old voting and lobbying, but I’m not sure it’s as effective in galvanising governments into action.

Mind you, my grandparents didn’t even vote.

“Those politicians are all as bad as each other,” was their view.

Perhaps they did have something in common with the protestors after all.

I’d assumed it was just tabloid journalists exaggerating, finding one or two examples and talking them up, to make a good story.

But no. It’s true.

People with sat nav in their cars believe the software rather than their own brains.

Two sets of visitors have failed to understand what we tried to tell them.

Namely –
“There is no street name, it’s just a village. I can give you directions.”
“There’s a new road just opened which won’t be on Tom Tom. I can give you directions.”

Directions were not requested, drivers drove around aimlessly, trying to find the house.

Person-to-person directions have become a thing of the past, which suits me fine as I can’t concentrate on what someone is telling me for long enough to get past the “You come off the motorway at junction 6” part.

But in rural France there is no alternative.

You have to listen for long enough to get to the “Turn left at the bus stop and then take the second right after the big hedge” part.
Otherwise you are well and truly lost.

I was introduced to the unreliable vagaries of sat nav in Hamburg last year.

We were in one car with sat nav, following another car, also with sat nav.

We were guests so we were dutifully following our hosts, assuming they knew a better route than our car’s sat nav, which had been saying
“Turn left, I said left, no not right you idiot, do a u-turn immediately” – or words to that effect - for some time.

When we eventually found ourselves following our hosts through what looked like a container port, we were impressed with the level of local knowledge they’d built up in only two months of living in the city.

Then they stopped, we stopped, and the driver got out of the car and walked across to us, not looking proud of his time-saving short cut.

“Er, I’m not sure why we’re here. What does your sat nav say?”

Our poor little machine was quietly fuming on the dashboard, cross at being ignored and unwilling to give up its secrets.

“We did wonder why it was shouting at us,” I said.

Scenes like this are being played out across the land, leading truckers up narrow lanes they can’t fit through, and motorists through raging rivers that Tom Tom thinks are babbling brooks.

The house we’re staying in is at he edge of the village, and if I’m outside I’m often called upon by motorists to give directions to the nearest camp site, or the nearest town.

It seems the French haven’t yet given up use of leurs cerveaux.

It was my fault.

I should never have considered writing about the comparative merits of Europe’s hospital casualty departments.

Now we’ve visited another one, with Hannah this time, and the news was bad.

She has a greenstick fracture and an arm incarcerated in a plaster cast for three to four weeks – just long enough to show her friends back at school.

We were at a country fair, she was sitting, swinging her legs on the edge of a giant haystack, and seconds later was a screaming bundle on the ground.

When she stopped crying for long enough to speak, we gathered a small child had shoved her off, but by then it was too late to grab him and beat him about the head.

She said her wrist hurt, and as she couldn’t or wouldn’t move it, and she’d cried for longer than ever before, I guessed it was a fracture or a bad sprain.

We went home, wrapped her wrist in icy towels, and I took her to St Malo hospital, leaving everyone else at the house.

As I’m now used to the French queuing systems (nobody tells you which window to wait at, and when you get to the front of the window you chose arbitrarily, you’re told to go and wait somewhere else) I asked the people already there which window to go to first (if only we’d done that at the moules-frites evening…)

We were soon in the capable hands of a doctor who kept tickling Hannah. She was trying to make her laugh, but Hannah wasn’t in the mood to giggle at tickles from a strange doctor.

It was only after the X-ray and a lot of waiting around, when the doctor had delivered the bad news and was wrapping wet bandages around her arm, that she started to cry.

“I won’t be able to move my arm,” she wailed, “I won’t be able to do anything.” She was looking forward to going on more bike rides as she’s just learned to go without stabilisers.

An emergency bar of chocolate stemmed the flow of tears for the journey back, but it took her brother and her cousin to get her out of the car and into the house.

“I’m too embarrassed,” she explained.

Two days later, and she’s adapting to life with one functioning arm.

Making sandcastles takes longer, as does getting dressed, but playing hamsters is still possible, as is chatting to herself and re-assuring her arm that it will be OK.

“Arm-ey thought she was going to die,” she told me, “but I told her she’d soon be better.” (She often talks to bits of herself like this, and her body parts are always female - of course).

For the record, if you’re equi-distant from the hospitals in St Malo and Avranches – go for Avranches. It’s smaller, friendlier and less busy.

An altogether better casualty experience.

“Mummy, that man’s smoking,” says Ben, a sense of outrage tingeing his voice as we sit in a French bar. “He’s not allowed to do that.”

It’s an illustration one of the many differences between our country and this, but one which is soon to be eradicated. French bars go non-smoking in January, but I doubt a change in the law will make an iota of difference to this nation of personal freedom fans.

When I walk past a French tabac, the whiff of Gauloises and paint-stripper coffee takes me back to any one of thousands of similar tabacs that I’ve passed in all my years of coming to France.

It’s reassuring to think such establishments still exist, although I wouldn’t want to spend much time in one. Apart from anything else, it would mean washing my clothes earlier than I might otherwise bother.

Getting off the plane in a foreign country, catching your first whiff of all those alien smells, is one of the exciting sensory experiences of travelling. Even if you stick to Europe, moving between Greece, Turkey, France, Spain, they all have their own particular aromas, and cigarettes have always made up a large part of it.

Now, as we all become more health conscious, what we gain in extra years on this earth will be lost in diversity while we travel around it.

I’m more anti-smoking than many, having never inhaled more than a couple of Consulate when I was about 14, and even they made me choke and feel dizzy.

But I fear a future where all difference is smoothed over for the sake of a California style, organic ciabatta homogeneity, where right-thinking folk retreat in a huff at the merest whiff of a lighted cigarette.

Collectors Gazette (blame Mike) has an interesting snippet of information about past attitudes to smoking.

Apparently at the turn of the 20th century, “cigarettes were even sold at chemists’ shops. Boots sold cigarettes for asthma and catarrh with directions on the back instructing people to inhale the smoke and retain it in the lungs as long as possible… some brands were even recommended by doctors.”

It would be interesting to find out how those patients fared after their diagnosis and prescription fags. After all, leeches are in use again now, after years of pooh-poohing their efficacy.
Apparently they’re very good at cleaning up wounds.

I await the first Daily Mail article to extol the virtues of inhaling deeply on a Marlboro to combat throat cancer.

I’m top aunt – at least for one of the children’s many cousins.

When “the cousins” (so dubbed by Hannah four Christmases ago) came to stay I emerged from my normal role of boring old aunty Cathy to Aunty Cathy said in hushed tones by cousin Livvy.

I hadn’t noticed this adulation, but her mum had.
“Hero worship,” she explained.

Even six-year old Livvy’s big sister didn’t want to risk walking away from me at the local market, as she felt her parents couldn’t be trusted to speak French well enough to survive alone.

And then, over dinner in a restaurant, I achieved the peak of my popularity.

“Guess what I’m calling my e-dog,” says Livvy.

So we all oblige, stabbing around in the dark until she gives us a clue,
“It’s to do with the sky,” she says.

So we start to narrow it down.
“Clouds, rain, sun…” and then I get it, “thunder.”

”Yes,” she says, smiling.

And then later, when her mother asks her what she’s enjoyed most about her stay, expecting her to choose the horse ride, the beach, playing in the garden, learning to ride her bike without stabilisers in the local park…

“Aunty Cathy guessing the name of my e-dog” she replies.

Aaah – at least I’m popular with one child, even if it’s not one of my own.

We’ve noticed a new phenomenon which we’ve dubbed – “the English tax”.

It’s not something newly imposed by the Brits on unsuspecting Johnny Foreigners – it’s more of a “fleece the bloody Rosbiffs until they bugger off back across the channel” kind of tax.

Twice in the last week we’ve been quoted one amount and charged another, larger amount.

First, the man with the tractor.

40 euros, we were told, by another man who cuts the grass for the commune.
60 euros we were eventually charged by the man with the machine on the back of the tractor which not only cuts the grass, but also chops it up into little pieces and spits it out again.

“Quarante pour couper,” he explains, “mais soixante pour broyer.”
Ah, so it’s the grinding that costs.

And then there were les frelons.
Nasty big hornets which had built a nest on the side of the house just under the edge of the roof.

We were warned it would grow and grow if we didn’t get rid of it, and then I started noticing the enormous buzzing creatures munching on the wooden uprights of the washing line.

I was either going to have to wear protective clothing when hanging out the clothes or call someone in to deal with them.

I called, he came in less than an hour. He stared up at the nest, did all the teeth-sucking and head-shaking that he felt necessary to show it was going to be a tough job, then propped his ladder up against the house with all the ease of a former pompier.

He put on his gear, strapped a tank of insecticide to his back and climbed up.

I snapped away, explaining that it was “pour mon blog” and he posed obligingly. Then we all retreated indoors while the hornets flew their last few furious sallies on the disappearing nest.

When he’d finished we re-emerged and he showed us the honeycombed nest made of what looked like balsa wood, presumably made from biting bits of washing line poles and spitting out the chewed up wood.

Inside each hole in the nest was a blubbery, pulsating little pupa, hundreds of potential baby hornets.

Burn the nest, he told us, insecticide doesn’t work on the babies.
And then he asked us for 25 euros more than he’d quoted on his poster.

So there you have it, the English tax, a tax levied on Brits with the temerity to attempt normal service in France.

Mind you, Ben had great service when he came off his bike last summer and needed an X-ray. Much better than the barbaric Spanish clinic where a doctor – I assume he was a doctor – sewed enormous black stitches into Hannah’s chin three years ago…

Casualty departments of Europe - a future post, perhaps.