Keir Royale

Before we moved, Ben said -

“I’ll make just the same mess in Jersey.”

And Hannah said –

“I thought I’d live in Plymouth all my life and now I’m being cut out of it.”

Well, both are partly right.

Ben is still messy and disorganised, and Hannah no longer lives in Plymouth.

But…

Ben spends so much tme outdoors he has little time to make a mess in his bedroom. Which is much easier on the eye.

And in five months we’ve already been back to Devon once, we are heading back again for half term, and will probably go again to repeat our annual weekend camping deluge of last year.

So not quite cut out.

But even though we’re not quite in another country, life is different here.

There are the cars for a start. The last time I lived here it was pretty bad. This time it’s so awful that I’ve bought myself a scooter to save commuting time and parking charges.

I took my dirt-cheap, auction-bargain piece of Chinese jiggery-pokery to Bob’s for a box to keep my lippy in, and he told me it wasn’t roadworthy.

So now I’ve had to book it in for a service.
It’s only a couple of months old, and I bought it to save money, not to add itself to the long list of Things That are More Expensive Here.

And there are the houses.
We’re still renting.
As house prices slip in England, they continue on a relentless upward trajectory in Jersey.

So the ultimate question will be - is life in Jersey worth the drop in our standard of housing?

At the moment, the children would say YES.
I would say - the jury’s still out.
And Blog Fodder would say - a definite NO!!

He’s still adjusting. But he likes the auctions.
They’re e-bay without the irritating technology.

And now our limited storage space is cluttered with bits of old china, derelict TVs and vintage (non-working) phones that he says “were part of a job lot that might do for something.”

I’m wondering what they will “do for”.
Perhaps to make the mess Ben is no longer around to create?

When is it time for a hair-do?

When you can tuck your former fringe behind your ears?

When you have to wash your hair every single day just to make it look half-way decent?
(I apologise to all those people, primarily Americans in my experience, who always wash their hair every day, but I find the concept an alien and unnecessary one)

Or is it when a few amusing “oh aren’t I getting old, tra la” grey hairs mysteriously manage to hook up together to make an entire grey section of traitorous tresses, lurking above your not-yet-frozen-by-Botox face like a foretaste of the grim reaper?

Apologies for the Cold Comfort Farm moment, but it is a traumatic time when your hair starts to let you down after a lifetime of reliable, sometimes even honourable, service.

My time seems to have come.
I need a branchage.
But when can a FTWM snatch the time away from her Mummy-starved cherubs who spend all weekend trailing round after her, whining -
“Why do you have to work so much Mummy?”

Well it’s not that bad, but it is a problem.

I used to get my hair cut when they were at school.

Now I can either get it done on a Saturday, which is sacrosanct Time With the Children.

Or I can take a long lunch break from work, which means I have to stay late which means I don’t get home in time for the sacrosanct Tea With the Children.

So getting my hair cut (and the grey chunk zapped by dangerous chemicals) is the emotional equivalent of telling my children I neither care about them nor want to spend time with them.

Isn’t it?

If I can’t persuade a hairdresser to open after 8pm, when the children are in bed, I will either have to get Blog Fodder to do it, and I think you’ll agree he doesn’t look up to the job, or learn to love an increasingly straggly topping.

If I went for something like this -

I may get away with going just once a year.

Or if I chose this kind of statement -

I wouldn’t need to worry about the children as they’d never speak to me again.

It’s a conundrum wrapped inside a puzzle, masquerading as a “Why the hell don’t you just do it?” question.

Remember this picture?

They’ve struck again.

To be fair, since Blog Fodder’s last rant, which was actually about a different ferry company, HD Ferries have refunded our fare for the cancelled trip and given us a compensatory free trip. Which went well.

But today, amid seas of glass, an hour’s delay ensued.

No word of a why or how long, so I looked up my previous e-mails about the Easter cancellation, and found a phone number. Always difficult in a land where websites rule.

And someone called us back.

“Sorry, we’re running on low power and with another ferry in the harbour already, we didn’t want to risk coming in at the same time.”

Surely a simple thing to announce over the tannoy, to prevent families incarcerated in stationary cars from melting into hot and hopeless oblivion.

But it was obviously too difficult a task, and a ferry load of passengers were left in the dark - metaphorically rather than literally - for an hour before being allowed on board.

And was there a riot?
A confusion of car horns?
A merest toot of a beeper?

Nothing.

Just a ferry full of Brits waiting patiently, caps in hand.

Surely this would not happen in France without a few complaints?
Surely our American cousins would have risen up against shoddy communication strategies?
Surely we must be the quietest, meekest consumers in the world today.

We get the service we deserve, and if we don’t shout about it a bit more it’s not going to change.

Or we could just learn to swim a bit faster?

Technorati Profile

One of my pet hates is the use of the word “haitch” when what the speaker means is “aitch”.

Apologies to those of you who put an “aitch” at the front of the letter “aitch”, but you’re adding a letter that is patently not there.

And now Ben has started doing it.

“All my friends say it like that,” he explains.

“Well they’re wrong,” I say, “and you don’t have to copy them.”

“But I want to be like them.”

Oh dear. Nine years old and a peer-following sheep already.

He’s also started on about wanting a mobile phone, a telly in his room and a laptop of his own which his sister isn’t allowed to use.

Jersey is a more affluent place than Plymouth, and most of his classmates seem to have all these things. Unless they’re fibbing and Ben believes them.

But whether they’re pre-teen fantasists or have each got a multi-media centre in their bedroom, Ben’s having none of these things at the age of nine.

I can’t even imagine who he’d call on his mobile.
His friends?
They spend all the hours between school and tea-time out on their bikes.
They’d have to position themselves at two different ends of the school field in order not to hear each other without the aid of a phone.

His family?
Why would he need to phone us when we’re trying to train him to come home when he’s told to come home, rather than having the option of calling to ask if he can have “just another ten minutes”?

We do need more than one PC though.
Our laptop has just given up the ghost, and my plan is to get myself a spanking new piece of technology and leave the children to share this old dinosaur.
I bought it online while in the early stages of labour with Hannah, and she’s now 7, which in computer terms must make it a relic of a former age.

It freezes regularly and chunters away to itself, happily ignoring all the frantic keyboard commands that it should actually DO something.

But a laptop of his own, kept in his bedroom, is not on Ben’s cards.

We’re having to get used to being the poor relations of everyone we meet here, and I can see it’s going to prompt some increasingly heartfelt arguments between us and the children.

But pronouncing words correctly is free and easy: at least it was, when we were their main focus.

It’s inevitable that we will eventually drop down the pecking order in our children’s hierarchy of people to please.

I just thought we had a few more years yet.

Have you ever struggled to breastfeed a baby while playing football with your toddler… on holiday?

Do you know how many renditions of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” it takes for you to pull the car to the side of the road and weep?

Or have you wondered, like me, whether it’s actually worth leaving the kitchen before your sproglets reach voting age?

I think we’ve all been there, or at least we’ve left the house intending to get there but have given up half way.

How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel is a compilation of many such tales, one of which is from me.

It’s rather long for a blog post, so here is an excerpt from my Car Seat contribution.

The Language of Romance

I’ve always regretted both my parents being English speakers.

How easy it would have been to grow up bilingual if one of them had had the foresight to marry a foreigner.
How many career opportunities it would have opened up to be fluent in one or more extra languages.
I could be working in Brussels right now, simultaneously translating all those important banana shaped edicts for the European Union.

It’s too late for me to achieve true multi-lingual status, but not for my children. Unfortunately I too have opted for a plain old English speaking father for them, and the powers that be in the UK education system have only just decided it’d be a good idea to teach foreign languages to pupils from the age of seven rather than eleven. By the time they start drilling French verbs into the unwilling little brains of British primary school children in 2010, our two will be eleven and nine, far too old to reach fluency this side of emigration.

We need to take linguistic action now, before they reach the “it’s too embarrassing to talk funny” stage. So we decide on a visit to France for the summer. Perhaps if we like it there we can go the whole hog; sell up, move abroad, live like kings on a pauper’s wage, and cram a few more European languages into their ethnocentric heads before their learning capacity diminishes with age.

Just how unimpressed they would be with the idea we couldn’t have guessed, until we set off across the English Channel to Brittany.

We did it on the cheap, using a ferry company we’d never heard of, which obviously balances its books by charging peanuts and providing endless rows of thinly padded, plastic seats instead of proper cabins.

The children enjoyed bedding down in sleeping bags between the rows, but we spend an excruciating night on camping mats in a dingy lounge with twenty or so other people all suffering the same six hours of misery, one of whom had the worst case of sleep apnoea I’d ever heard.

He sloped off early in the morning, leaving the rest of us to muse on the high decibel snoring we’d endured, without respite, all night. We decided, too late for the return journey alas, that cutting back on ferry fares was not worth a night of hell and a subsequent day with our minds wreathed in the fog of sleep deprivation.

The small Breton village we chose scored a big hit with the children. Maybe it was the extra week they had off school – we’d snuck them out early to take advantage of the cheaper term-time ferry fares - or maybe it was the rented house with its enormous garden featuring trees and grass, as opposed to our back yard at home, which boasts paving stones and potted plants and is just big enough for a game of Swingball.

Whatever the reason for their exhilaration, it gave us hope that in just a few days both kids would be conversing with local villagers and playing the French equivalent of tag between the apple trees.

We started our language familiarity campaign by taking them to the playground in the nearest town, Dol de Bretagne, which was filled with happy, laughing youngsters in immaculate matching gear unsullied by mud or ketchup. Still, kids don’t notice things like that, we thought, they’ll soon be playing together despite the pristine cleanliness of the indigenous population.

But every time a friendly French child approached, speaking, horror of horrors, French, our two ran to us in confusion. Five year old Hannah was appalled, despite two expensive terms of after school Club Français:

“Mummy, he spoke French to me and even when I spoke to him in English he carried on talking to me in French. I hate him.”

A bit of local sightseeing didn’t appease their disgust in this unfathomable language. We visited the fairytale Combourg Castle, childhood home of Chateaubriand, a man who, as well as having a steak designed for him, seems to have spent a little bit of time in every town in Brittany, perhaps foreseeing how he could help the tourism industry for centuries to come.

As we trailed round after the guide, consulting the garbled written English translation and trying to whisper it into our children’s suddenly deaf ears, seven-year old Ben complained loudly,
“This is boring. Why is she speaking French all the time? Where are the dungeons?”

It must be said that compared to the multi-lingual, child-friendly audio guides provided by that glorious British institution, the National Trust, Combourg’s lacklustre guide was a rather basic attempt to interpret the history of this lovely chateau.

The children perked up when they saw the cat though. Not a living, breathing moggy that wound itself around their legs in ingratiating feline fashion, but a skeletal, screeching mummified cat which had been walled up alive, thousands of years before, to ward off evil spirits.

It was discovered during renovations and put on display in a glass case, redolent of the dusty museums of my childhood. It confirmed how different attitudes to historic interpretation are in France, and I worried that animal-loving Hannah would be forever traumatised by the mangy apparition. But she was fascinated and edged ever closer to the thing, not quite believing it was dead.

The one French expression the children did master on holiday, despite themselves and with a perfect French accent, was Vide Grenier. Its literal meaning, according to Babel Fish, is Vacuum the Attic, but in Blighty we know it better as the car boot sale, and we came across them everywhere; on the beach, in ancient village squares and, a special treat, a specifically child-orientated sale in Cancale, just twenty miles from our house.

Ben and Hannah added exponentially to their cache of cheap plastic junk, while their Dad became familiar with Brittany’s agricultural tools from the last couple of centuries. It seems the Bretons have had enough of them, so they offload them onto gullible Brits during the holiday season. Mike is now waxing lyrical to anyone who’ll listen about a rusty old chisel type thing that he’s been using to gouge crumbly plaster from our walls.

Despite the minor irritation to our children that the people in France persisted in speaking French, we enjoyed the holiday so much that we started considering a move to Brittany. We huddled outside estate agents’ windows and almost tiptoed into one of their offices, but I saw sense at the last minute and dragged Mike away to the nearest café.

“We could buy a derelict farmhouse and renovate it,” he said, breathless at what you can buy for the price of our Victorian terraced house, “the children would become bi-lingual, we could grow our own veg…”

Then Ben looked up from the steaming hot chocolate he was spooning into his mouth and said,

“I will only move to France if Louis and Silas come with me and if everyone in France speaks English.”