French Gazette Vol 11 N° 3 4 September 1997

Rather like a migratory bird - summer comes to an end, and a letter flies off. Well - gets started, anyway.

Today is in fact an important day in French history: don’t ask me why because I really don’t know, what I do know is that there’s a street in the Opéra district of Paris called “rue du 4 Septembre” (we used to stay there, if you recall, back in the Palaeolithic era when I was working for Allflex) and I assume that if it’s got a sort of commemorative street it must be an important date. On the other hand, I do know why it’s important this year, at least: it’s the beginning of the school year, for Malyon at least (Jeremy starts on Monday).

We met up with another New Zealander, by the way: my sister Alison’s friend Patricia. She married a Frenchman and moved over here about ten years ago, and they live down in the south-west, in the Gers: not all that far from the Pyrenées, if that means anything to you. Anyway, she’s into patchwork and that sort of thing in a big way, so Margo suggested that she come up and stay for a week and raid the shop, and these things were accordingly arranged. So one fine day we all climbed into the car and headed off to Lyon to pick her up from the train station there. The train didn’t get in until mid-afternoon, but we thought that we might as well make a day of it, so we parked at Part-Dieu and took the bus to Parc de la Tête d’Or, which is a very nice and rather extensive park in the middle of Lyon. Apparently it got built there sometime last century at the instigation of a local philanthropist, who thought that it’d be a good idea if fresh milk were available daily for the poor of the city (consequently, a herd of cows were amongst its first attractions) and on top of that, the building work (which entailed moving hills and such) would provide employment so that they could afford to buy the milk.

The cows have gone, but it now houses the municipal zoo, the botanical gardens and a reasonably sized artificial lake which is kept well-stocked for the amusement of the local fishing community. The main attraction for us was the zoo, which has deer and bear and elephants and giraffes and a well-stocked monkey house, where we almost succeeded in losing Jeremy. After all that we headed back to the station and Marks & Sparks for some serious shopping, and it was when I was taking all the bags back to the car that I discovered I’d driven over an enormous screw on arriving in the car park. This pissed me off no end, because changing a tyre in a hot, humid, stinking underground car park in the middle of an August afternoon is not one of my very favourite things.

On top of that, once we’d picked up Patricia we had to get out of Lyon and back home: at this point it was about 5 pm and yes, it was a working day Now normally to do this you just have to find one of the major avenues and blast along that like a dose of salts until finally you reach escape velocity and get onto the autoroute, but given that rush hour was starting and Part-Dieu is not a district I know terribly well and on top of it there were road works everywhere, we thought we’d just follow the signs saying “all directions” until we came across the one that we wanted. What we didn’t know - or had forgotten - is that since July these signs are part of a conspiracy: they funnel cars onto a road you can’t get off, and which eventually spits you out onto a sort of toll ring-road which costs 16F for 10 km! (Which is a bit steep, especially given that large sections of it were still under construction and were limited to 90 kph. lf I have to pay, I want to be able to do at least 110.) There was quite a bit of public outrage about this - understandably so - and fortunately for my blood pressure, the day we’d picked to go through was also one of the days that autoroute employees were letting cars on for free in order to show their solidarity with the oppressed motorist.

After that unfortunate start, things went very well, and the kids adopted Patricia (who is rather older than us) as an honorary grand-mother. Her husband Jacky turned up at the end of the week to take her back home in the car and dropped off a couple of rabbits, a pot of home-made foie gras, a couple of bottles of wine ... we have arranged to head down to see them later in the year, probably at Toussaint.

Other than that, we didn’t do a great deal during the holidays. We’d planned to go off to Peaugres in the Ardéche one day: they have a wild-life park there which is very popular and apparently quite good, but Malyon chose the day before the trip to stand on a bee. She is, like me, rather allergic to bee stings: she had a bit of difficulty walking for a week afterwards. But we did manage to go walking in the mountains: she’s been asking to do that for ages, and I finally got myself organised and went off with her to get some halfway decent hiking boots (as much for protection from snakes as for anything else). At the top of the massif behind us is a lake, lac de la Thuile, and she’s taken it into her head that she wants to walk there. We’ve had a couple of attempts now, but I think we’ll have to wait for next year before we get to the summit (at 1100 metres - mind you, on the last try we got to within about 100m of it, height-wise. Not too bad.) At least we’ve come out of it with loads of blackberries.

11/11/97

Celebrating Germany’s defeat in WW I today (not France’s victory, no matter what they try to tell you): yes, it’s Armistice Day and of course a public holiday. As happens every year, the kids get a little note reminding their parents to send them off to the war memorial for the ceremony, and to depose a gerbe. (“déposer une gerbe”, lit. “leave a bouquet”, but knowing that “gerber” is “to vomit” it’s always struck me as an unhealthy activity. Mind you, Mitterand and Kohl always used to do it together when they could. Makes you wonder - at least, it makes me wonder.) We slept in today, and were having breakfast at about 11 am, so I rather think Malyon missed the festivities.

Anyway, the big news is that we did in fact head off down south to see Patricia and Jacky. It’s about 800 km from here: you can strike out across country on the nationales and departmentales (which takes about 11 hours) or you can do as we did, which is take the autoroute down to Narbonne, across to Toulouse, and then you’ve got about 150 km of fairly busy nationale (the famous N 124) towards Biarritz before arriving at Barcelonne du Gers. We had a very nice trip until about 19:00, when some cretin decided to come around a corner and up a hill on my side of the road. Like most accidents, it happened like a really bad film - in overdone slow motion - and after the mandatory crunch we just drifted across the road (in front of a truck/trailer who managed to stop in time) and wound up at a 70° angle on our side in the ditch on the other side of the road.

Once we’d climbed out of the car and made sure no-one was hurt, I wandered back up the road around the corner to see whether the other sod had bothered to stop or not, and was surprised to see an ambulance parked in the middle of the road - “Hell!” I thought, “they’re bloody quick off the mark! Shame no-one’s hurt!”. Then I got a bit closer, and saw that the ambulance driver wasn’t really in the best of shape, and that the reason that the ambulance was parked in the middle of the road was that it wasn’t going anywhere without an engine, and the engine was in the middle of next week. The fellow that hit us had in fact stopped - not perhaps voluntarily - but having had a head-on collision with the ambulance that’d been following us, he wound up unconscious in a car about a metre shorter than it should be somewhere in the middle of a paddock.

Which really annoyed me, because we had to wait for three hours or so while they cut the car into small pieces so as to be able to get him and his passenger out (neither of them with seat-belts, when will the silly buggers learn?) and I had a cold, and the night air wasn’t doing it any good at all. Once all the victims (everyone but us, basically) had been carted off to the hospital, we had to go to the gendarmerie and give our version of the facts, and then they very kindly took us the last 10 km of the way to drop us off, at about 23:00, at Patricia’s place. (At least, while we were waiting, I learnt why the car didn’t handle too well after the collision. We’d been scraped all along the driver’s side, and the first thing to go was the front left-hand wheel, which was still hanging bravely in there but was no longer connected to the steering wheel.)

Anyway, after that we had a really good little holiday. They have what’s called a “maison de maître”, an enormous old house with about 3m stud and 5 hectares of land, on which they’ve planted - amongst other things - feijoas (which were apparently bought from a French catalogue!). Malyon slept upstairs in an enormous antique bed, whilst we shared a room downstairs with Jeremy ... humbug. Exceptionally in a French household, Jacky cooks (Patricia being more or less vegetarian) and knows the same basic food groups as I (fat, sugar, grease and burnt-on crunchy bits) so we ate and drank really well, what with homemade rabbit pâté, foie gras de canard, rabbit and such-like. And of course, like every region of France (with the possible exceptions of Paris itself and all of Brittany, their locale has its own wine (Tursan, comes in all three flavours of red/white/rosé and isn’t that bad at all) and even better, being the heart of what was once Gascony, has Armagnac.


Despite the lack of the car, we did actually manage to see a bit of the countryside, thanks to Jacky and his trusty old Citroen BX. We made it to Geaune, in the Gers, home of the Cave Co-operative de Tursan (naturally, we were running low on wine, with only a couple of hundred litres in the emergency reserves), to the coast, and to Pau, birthplace of Henri IV, for those who care.

Despite appearances, there’s quite a bit of France that’s not really too far from the sea, and where we were is one of those places. I suppose it’s about 80km going due west from Barcelonne du Gers that you get to the Atlantic: once you’ve done that you can either head left (sorry, south) to get to Biarritz or north to Bordeaux. You’re at the southern end of the Landes, the 100-odd km strip of beach which consists mainly of pine forests (with the odd cork tree thrown in for good measure) and 40m high sand dunes. They have real waves there! Anyway, we clambered down the dunes, ambled along the beach, picked up shells and interesting stones (which, curiously enough, are never as interesting as they were once you take them away from the beach) and poked beached jellyfish until Jacky suggested that the kids might like to wade in the surf. Fair enough, they both loved it and Malyon even stayed fairly dry, but Jeremy took the first big wave as an excuse and threw himself into it, crying “Mine fell over! Boom!”

We let them go on like that for ten minutes or so and then, fearing that the Social Security were going to jump on us for child abuse, though we’d better get them dry and out of the place: Margo had cunningly brought a change of clothes for Jeremy but had left it in the car, so we stripped him off, dried him off as best we could and then stuck his coat on him and Margo’s big eiderdown on top of that. He looked like the marshmallow man, and extremely proud of himself. We finally made it back to the car, got him dressed in something more reasonable, had lunch, and then went for a bit of a walk in the pine trees. It feels rather funny, because the forests are really quite light and airy - a tree every 10m or so, perhaps, nothing like in NZ - but they’ve been like that for 200 years or so, and the soil is about 50% rotting pine needles and 50% holes for you to stick your feet in and hopefully break a leg. Quiet, too - considering the ocean is just a couple of hundred metres away.

Pau is another kettle of fish: reminds me a bit of Geneva, to tell you the truth. OK, there’s no lake, there’s no fountain, it’s not Swiss, generally speaking there’s not much resemblance at all, but there you go. The thing is, the place is definitely solid bourgeois, and all up around the château there are these big turn of the century apartment blocks which rent out at about $1000/m2, and quiet little restaurants in mediaeval buildings where the cheapest fixed menu starts at around $100: the place reeks of old money and discreet snobbery. I said it reminded me of Geneva! Still, quite a nice place for all that - at least to visit.

Anyway, we eventually had to leave, so the insurance arranged a rental car for us (a Mondeo diesel: I hate power steering) and we set off on Monday morning. We had to stop every 15 minutes on the nationale so that Malyon’s stomach could stop churning (not only do Mondeos have power steering, they also have blancmange where normal cars have suspension, so the back end tends to wallow about a bit) but we eventually made it to Toulouse and the autoroute. (Would’ve been nice to have stopped off in Toulouse for an hour or so, it really is very pretty, but we really didn’t have time, we’ll leave it for another trip.)

The truckies were on strike, of course, and open petrol stations were getting to be rare, given that they were blockading the refineries and storage depots. At least everyone else had evidently decided to avoid travelling that day (probably expecting hassles) because the roads were empty and we actually did very good time getting back. Only one slight hold-up around Valence, where you have to get off the autoroute (it stops there) and go round the town on a sort of ring road before getting on to another autoroute: they’d set up what they call a “barrage filtrant” which basically means that cars are let through - on one lane - but the trucks got stuck. This is all very nice, but when you have 5 lanes of cars arriving from the autoroute and getting squeezed into one lane, it can slow things up a bit. Never mind: we arrived - not too late - to a freezing cold house (winter’s set in now) and anxious cats who’d just started to wonder where we’d been.

Incidentally, the house is now more or less fully equipped in computer gear. Not only do we have the PC itself, the speakers, the colour printer ... we now have the colour scanner. That was Margo’s birthday present - on special at Carrefour, 790F or about $200. At that price, I really couldn’t see the point to not buying the thing. Even if it does only get used once in a blue moon. (A bit more often than that, actually. Margo went out last year and bought a bit of software that will take bitmaps and convert them to cross-stitch patterns, and she’s slowly getting people in with their holiday snaps or whatever who’d like to have them done as cross-stitch. For that, of course, you have to be able to scan their photos in ...)

In fact, about all we’re missing (apart from a faster PC, I’ll get on to that) is the microphone and camera for Internet video-conferencing. That will doubtless arrive too, eventually.

Trevor, Margo, Malyon & Jeremy

French Gazette Vol. 6 N° 1 2 janvier 1992

And a Happy New Year to all and sundry!

We really are on the to sixth volume of this thing, aren’t we? Which, according to my calculations, is going to make this the fifth year that we’ve been here. Come the 9th of April, to be exact (around 8:40 am, Paris time, to be even more precise): legally speaking, of course, it was in August. We’ve been saving up goodies since the last letter went out, and here’s one to start off with - remember, you read it here first!

As you are probably aware, the EC is slowly moving toward economic and political union, all of which entails a certain degree of harmonisation of rules, standards and whatnots between the various member states. Driving this procedure is the EC Commission (headed by Jacques Delors, prospective candidate for the French Presidency), which is currently stuck on a very tricky point: what is the right size for a condom? Agreement has been reached (in principle) on the length - 152mm seems to satisfy everybody that’s been asked - but the Italians are holding out on the diameter: they want 54mm instead of the proposed EuroNormal 55mm. I won’t say that the machinery of the EC has come to a grinding halt over this little bone of contention, as it were - that would be rather an exaggeration - but it does rather start you wondering which cretin in Brussells thought it important to set a standard for such affairs. (What about the ones with feathers on the ends? Will black be the only colour permitted? Will they have to be recyclable?) Sometimes you get the nasty sneaking feeling that maybe Margaret Thatcher was right. (Although whenever I start to feel like that I go and lie down with a good book and a hunk of EuroMoines - I am not making this up, it is the honest-to-god name of a type of cheese with a picture of a jolly fat monk on the box, produced - for their sins - in France, from milk of unspecified but European origin and conforming, it seems, to all applicable EuroRegulations. There being none such concerning taste, the cheese doesn’t have any, either, apart from a vague aroma of rubber.)

By the way, the bit about recycling is semi-serious. If the EC lets them get away with it, the Germans have introduced a law which provides that, in addition to the current obligation to collect all transporting material (which means the cardboard wrapped around your new stove when it’s delivered, but not that around your new toaster when you buy it), manufacturers will, in 1995, be obliged to collect all packaging material (that's the cardboard around the toaster) - at, of course, their own cost - and will furthermore be responsible for recycling something around 80% of it. I get the funny feeling that there’s also a clause on recycling the leftovers of the product itself once the consumer’s finished with it, but I’m not too sure on that one.

Christmas was good, thanks awfully for the cards and loot. We’d pretty much given up hope of its snowing, the magic date of November 22 having long since been and gone without a trace of white fluffy stuff down here, when on Friday it finally started. First it rained, then it slushed, then it hailed, slushed some more, and then it snowed. It was going great guns when we went up to St Jean d’Arvey to visit Steve and Isabel that evening, and it was snowing heavily the next day when we went in to market at Chambery. In fact, it snowed so heavily that despite the emergency procedures prepared for the Olympic Games (only another five weeks or so before we stop hearing about it, thank god), the roads leading up to the stations were closed (for fear - justifiably enough - of avalanches), hundreds of holidayers hurrying up for a ski trip were trapped in their cars on the autoroute and thousands were forced to sleep in various railway stations (the SNCF having decided, in its wisdom, to ferry them up as far as possible and then dump them, despite its knowing of the road and track closures). The news was full of interviews with these unlucky folk, and one chap was rather more philosophical than most: “Well”, he said, “last year there was no snow and I got stuck in a traffic jam on the Nationale just across the river, this year it’s too much snow and I’m stuck on the autoroute. Just like old times.” He should be made an honorary Briton.

Meanwhile, up at Courcheval, they were getting things ready for the Games: the ski jump, in fact. There not having been enormous amounts of snow, they’d had fleets of lorries working for a week or so trucking snow from wherever they could find it up to the site - overnight, they had far too much and had to start trucking the stuff away. Some people are never satisfied. Be that as it may, we missed out on a white Christmas anyway: it started raining on Saturday evening, to such good effect that there were floods left right and centre, and by Monday there was no more snow. Shame, really.

I hear that PotatoHead caved in under French pressure and decided not to seek the extradition of that French agent who surfaced in Switzerland. I suppose he didn’t think he had much choice, but if memory serves me rightly (unlikely, but still possible) he wasn’t willing to accept that as an excuse back in the dim distant days when Lange let go of the two we did manage to nab. In fact, I rather thought that at the time he was spluttering about “Selling out the honour of the nation”, “unfit to be PM” (about Lange, that one, I think), “wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t chucked in ANZUS”, things generally along those lines. I guess that times have changed.

In case you’re wondering, we passed a jolly festive season - a quiet Christmas unwrapping the loot under the tree (slightly embarrassing moment there as I’d meant to get Margo’s present on the Monday, alas I got called back into work unexpectedly that day and consequently didn’t get a chance, Margo very kindly refrained from hitting me) and then New Year’s Eve up at Steve and Isabel’s. We did the dinner and Steve supplied the wine; we were in bed by 4 am which I suppose isn’t too bad. What was better was that Malyon, having stayed up with us (she finally fell asleep in the car coming home), was happy enough to sleep in and let us lie in bed till 11 - much appreciated. How was it with you? The usual riots in Queen Street and at Mt Maunganui?

3/2/92

As you can probably tell, time’s gone by. News story of the month is the affaire Habache, that being how the French spell “Habash”. As you’ll be aware, this well-known Palestinian terrorist - or freedom fighter for those who prefer not to call a spade a bloody shovel - turned up in Paris for a medical checkup, having apparently decided to profit from his having neglected to bomb the hospital a few years earlier. His arrival was not exactly kept a state secret, and even if it had been the hordes of CRS thugs stopping all but the semi-dead from entering the place would probably have caused even the least suspicious to start wondering a bit, and the end result was an enormous political stink. Ministers denying everything, senior civil servants resigning in droves, and over all the sound of the French National Conscience being Exercised. Rather futilely, as it turns out, ‘cos despite being placed under preventive detention by the juge d’instruction investigating some minor matters of arms caches, assassinations (diverse) and bombings dating back a few years he got shuffled out of the country and back to Tunis in pretty short order on Saturday night. More denials, more resignations, more cries by opposition politicians for a “full and frank” investigation, and no doubt huge sighs of relief being heaved at the Elysée, Mitterand having been out of the country at the time. Still doesn’t do any good for his popularity rating, which is slumping toward levels previously only attained by Edith Cresson (still Prime Minister) and used-car salesmen.

On to more cheerful matters: the Olympic games. About ten communes are so far technically bankrupt: the worst in sheer financial terms is Brides-les-Bains, which spent something like $100 million on a nice shiny new casino and municipal complex, but in terms of debt per capita it’s probably Pralognan, a village of some 600 souls, which spent an enormous sum to stick up a skating rink (for curling, which isn’t even a real Olympic sport) and discovered that it cost about $400 a day to keep it frozen. The mayor and council which planned the affair have since been voted out. And I really do wonder exactly what Albertville is going to do with the thousands upon thousands of hotels which have gone up in the past year or so: the place is not exactly a tourist trap (despite the presence of the excellent Hotel Million, which serves marvellous food but whose name, unfortunately, is an accurate reflection of its prices), being basically a steel and metal-working town. Ah well, we’ll still be paying for it in 20 years, I suppose. Grenoble’s still paying for theirs, and they were back in ‘60-something.

At least the gendarmerie is entering into the spirit of things. They were staking out the cemetery on Sunday as I went past for a walk, for reasons which are perhaps best left undiscovered (a mundane explanation, which I reject contemptuously on the grounds that it’s important to leave some play for the imagination, is that it’s amongst the best places on our little départementale to put up a speed trap) and I couldn’t help but notice, boldly blazoned on the sides of their Renault 4 (Renault’s equivalcnt of the 2CV, but lacking its somewhat bizarre charm, and incidentally official issue to French country cops) the notice “Ministère de la Defense - Partenaire Officiel des J.O. d’Albertville”. Really sweet - where else would you find the Defence Ministry (through the gerndarmes, them being a wholly-owned subsidiary) sponsoring a festival given over to promoting sweetness, light, harmony and New-Age awareness amongst athletes of all races, colours and creeds? (Don’t even think about the proposed dope-testing for the supposedly female Russian competitors in the ladies giant slalom.)

Arbin is also entering into the right spirit: we got a note in the mail the other day to let us know when the Olympic flame would be passing through the village (17:05, Feb. 7, at the old well at the western end, if anyone’s interested), encouraging those who wish to do so to decorate their windows and illuminate their garden gnomes, and inviting all and sundry to partake of mulled wine and brioches afterward. Suppose it must be one of the more exciting events to occur here since the Revolution, and we couldn’t really let it go by uncelebrated. I’d like to be there, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to manage it - from what I hear they’ll be closing the roads at about 3pm, which’ll make it rather tricky getting the car home.

10/2/92

As it happens I needn’t have worried: got home without any worries at all and went down with Margo and Malyon to watch. Everything went off swimmingly: a few balloons, somewhat ineptly launched by the kids, flopped to the ground with a thud and an elderly jogger set off after the procession, followed by anguished squeals from the thug with the load-hailer imploring him to stop (displaying, I thought, remarkable tact - the usual CRS response to something like that is to hit it with a stick, and the larger the better). Then the souvenir van came along, selling little plastic copies of the torch - doubtless made in Taiwan, which is a bit of a blow for local industry (Edith Cresson, who is toujours Prime Minister, would not be amused) - and that was that.

So we headed off to the salle des fêtes, and the local village idiot went around singing at people (Mme the mayor’s wife came in for a particularly heavy earbashing): a special Olympic song which I imagine he’d composed especially for the occasion, and he accompanied himself on the harmonica. At least when he was doing that he wasn’t singing, which is about the best you could say for it. I suppose there’s one in every village. (I should apologise for saying “village idiot”. The chap is not, in fact, a member of this honourable profession, but is a bio-dynamic evangelical type who unfortunately will insist on opening his mouth when he sings.) It actually reminded me of the bard in the Asterix books, only we were missing someone to tie and gag him.

I don’t know whether you bothered watching the opening ceremonies of the Games or not, but we plopped ourselves down in front of the idiot box for a couple of hours of lethargy. Beautiful weather for it - by presidential decree, I imagine. Let it be said, the spectacle at the end was definitely spectacular - the bungy-jumping ballet in particular was great (I particularly enjoyed the beginning, when one of the dancers got let loose accidentally and spent a few minutes bouncing helplessly up and down, doubtless feeling more and more prattish every second, until her partner managed to grab her) - but the entrance of the athletes was a little on the gross side, I thought. Each team preceded by a girl wearing a goldfish bowl full of polystyrene beads, coming on to the most appalling doggerel I’ve heard in a long time. (A sample, for those fortunate enough to have missed it; “They come from a country far-off and hilly, 3 cheers for the team from the land of Chile” or how about “Its viennent, ils viennent, une toute petite bande, voici les moutons de la Nouvelle Zélande”. I made the last one up, but I could as well have spared myself the effort. They really were as bad as that.) From what I heard it was one of the chaps who does the scripts for the French equivalent of “Spitting Image” who was responsible for the verses, I suppose he just couldn’t help himself.

I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation: after months of grousing (in true Savoyard fashion) about the Games, all the fat German tourists and - even worse - the Parisians who’ll be all over the roads, the cash we’ll be shelling out in our impots locaux for the next godnose how many long years, I’ve been given a couple of tickets to the women’s downhill. Suppose I’ll just have to eat my words, accept that I’m as hypocritical as the next thing, and go off to it. Can’t really miss out on what’ll probably be my first and last chance to go to the Olympics. I’ll take the camera; with a bit of luck I’ll be able to get one or two shots of a few unidentifiable Lycra-encased buttocks hurtling past at unreasonable speeds. They say that the ambiance is marvellous - I just hope it’s not too cold. It will mean leaving here at some ungodly hour of the morning to get up to Albertville, find a park and then grab a shuttle bus up to Meribel, but as it’s Wednesday I have to drop Margo off at the station so that she can go through to Lyon so I’m up early anyway. (Do not start mumbling about my being chauvinist as well as a hypocrite, shoving poor Margo out to work whilst I revel amongst the rich and famous: she was the one who decided she’d rather skip it. And in any case, there won’t be that many rich and famous up there - most of them are as poor and unknown as I am.)

13/2/92

Been, seen, and got away. Lovely weather for it, hot and sunny (good thing I didn’t wear the thermal underwear - as it was a ski-suit was sometimes a bit too hot, although it’s a great help at keeping you dry when trudging through thigh-high snow looking for a quiet place for a quick slash) but somehow I’ve come to the conclusion that skiing is not a spectator sport. I admit that I’m not really a great follower of ski technique, and no doubt a passionate amateur of the sport can happily spend hours analysing and criticizing every second of a descent, but personally I find one aerodynamically-suited blur much like another (only the colours change, really). In fact, I rather regret not having gone skiing instead. (The beauty of the Olympics is that there’s hardly anyone at all on the slopes, apart from the pistes which are reserved for the competitions. Everyone’s either staying away or watching keenly, which means that there’s plenty of room out there.) To be quite honest I was somewhat disappointed - I’d expected something a bit more - well, Olympian. More excitement in the air, a bit of festive spirit, something like that.

Never mind, it was quite fun anyway. Watching the chic and trendy in their fantastically expensive (and apparently unused) ski-suits, knowledgeably discussing the state of the pistes and the chances of so-and-so for a gold - the Norwegians, not at all trendy or chic and whose diet apparently consists of potatoes, gold teeth and prodigious quantities of beer - the average French-person queuing up to buy tickets and getting extremely irate at having to wait 30 seconds to be served (just imagine how excited they were getting after an hour, which was when I spotted them) - other average French-people, trying to see exactly how long they could ignore the person waiting to be served whilst concentrating on getting their nail-polish dried just so, or discussing last night’s extra-curricular activities with their bosom friend at the next ticket counter. (This is a good one, because not only does it block two queues, the total blockage time of those queues is, due to a quirk of conversational mathematics, more than twice that of a single blocked queue!)

And I learnt why the French are rude about the Swiss. It’s not so much because they’re slow, not really because they speak funny (although they do), not just because they come to France to drive like idiots and chase French women (for such is the belief): it’s because when they do come they insist on bringing their cowbells with them. And they make an awful lot of noise with them. There was a manic-depressive-looking type not too far from us, who looked as though he’d be much happier in a bank vault counting ingots, and every time a Swiss skier started off on the run he and his partner would pick up these enormous sets of bells and clang them until she’d got safely to the finish line. Which made for about 90 seconds of 110 decibels each time. I wondered, fleetingly, how they’d sound with the clappers stuck up a pair of Helvetic nostrils, but as the chap had pretty obviously been working out with wads of share certificates in his spare time I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and let him live.

17/2/92

And I take back some of all that. I got another pair of freebies, for the ski artistique this time, and that was worth watching. You know, it’s the one where people launch themselves into space and do somersaults and twists and suchlike before - with any luck - landing without breaking anything. That was up at Tignes on Sunday, so we all went up (except for Cato) and started regretting it, ‘cos the weather was appalling - luckily, once we’d passed the lake just below Tignes we seemed to have climbed above the clouds, and it was beautiful and sunny. Lovely crisp powder, with very few people actually skiing on it, but Malyon enjoyed sliding down on her bottom. Three or four times. It got rather tiring, lugging her up and then running down to catch her. And she made friends with a CRS sergeant and his dog.

Tignes seems a nice place, although peopled - in winter - by members of that strange tribe who like to put a streak of colour-coordinated zinc ointment along each cheekbone and down the bridge of the nose. Never been able to find out quite why, it doesn’t actually do anything, apart from prove that you’re capable of reading Vogue and don’t mind looking like a complete prat.

Incidentally, the French sporting press is particularly bad. At least for coverage of the Olympics. Not content with having the evening news consist of how many medals the French got that day (or nearly got, which is almost as good), it’s pretty much restricted to events in which there is a French competitor - in fact you might be forgiven for thinking that there were only French competitors. When Piquard (or Picquet, or something), the Great White Hope for a gold in the downhill, fell and consequently did not win, did we find out who actually came first, second, or third? Did we hell, none of them were French. All the journalists could think to do was rush up to Picquet (or Piquard) to ask him how he felt, and then conduct in-depth interviews with his fan club to see how bad they felt. Patriotic fervour is all very well, but someone ought to tell the silly gits that it can be carried too far. (Mind you, the spectators are almost as bad. As soon as the French team have finished in an event half the crowd disappears, and when it gets round to presenting the medals the athletes must be feeling pretty lonely. A general lack of the sporting spirit - comes of not being brought up to play cricket.)

Be all that as it may, you might be wondering exactly what I’m doing typing this up on a Monday morning when I really should - in theory - be working. The answer is simple: I had in fact intended to massacre a device driver in an effort to get something to actually work under Windows, had loaded the contents of about 14 diskettes from Microsoft onto the file server, decompressed them all (Microsoft do not, of course, respect their own official guidelines affirming that all Windows products should come with installation programs that are not actively user-hostile, and do not supply one at all - although it must be admitted that yer average user is highly unlikely to be installing that sort of stuff, and the people who do probably deserve all they get) and was just getting ready to type in the magic words (“Shazam!”) when our nice newly installed network carked it. And as I have no wish to go through the whole tedious installation process again (nor, to be totally honest, do I really want all that garbage from Bill Gates polluting my disk drive) I thought I’d wait until it came back to life and what better to do (as most of the good games are also on the network file server, and consequently inaccessible right now) than carry on with this? (That is, by the way, a rhetorical question. Do not bother to write in with suggestions, I have heard most of them before.)

That seems to be about it for this time: I’ve pretty much run out of news and the network’s back up and running, so I think I’ll wrap this up and print it out. Don’t forget that March 18th is St Cyrille, so give a big hello to all the Cyrils of your acquaintance, and for all you Scorpios out there it’s probably a good day to undertake minor repair work, such as changing the spark-plugs on the septic tank. Your lucky colour is plaid, and the lucky Lotto ticket belongs to someone else, so don’t spend

Trevor, Margo and Malyon

French Gazette Vol. 6 No. 2 - 5 Mars 1992

Here I am again.

Well, it’s all over bar the groaning when the taxman calls - the games, that is. Nice to see that New Zealand did get one medal - by a weird quirk of fate that fact actually made it into the news headlines (pretty unusual in itself, given that she wasn’t, as far as we know, French), and as luck would have it I was in the kitchen with Malyon squealing at the time and missed it. Shame, really. Anyway, life’s pretty much back to normal - now they’re grumbling about the fine weather we’re currently enjoying, ‘cos the snow’s melting too soon under the sun and if this goes on there won’t be any left for the Easter holidays, which is when everyone heads up to the slopes to get a last few runs in before summer. Personally, I like the sun - we had about 18° yesterday, which is pretty good for winter.

And I have my name on my first-ever patent application! For a glorified RMS multimeter, but never mind that, I’m still listed as co-inventor. No hope of royalties, of course: the thing was developed and paid for by Merlin Germ, but it’ll be something to tack onto my CV should I ever feel desperate. (“And what do you do in your spare time, Mr Bimler?” ‘Well, apart from my principal hobby - molesting photocopiers - I am coinventor of the Merlin Germ miracle multimeter and am currently developing the Mitterand microprocessor-controlled mousetrap.” Aspiring job applicant is quickly shown the door.)

Got to do a bit of proper wine-tasting the other day, too. We went along to the AGM of the Association des Amis d’Arbin and they’d laid on a professional winetaster and about half a million bottles (at a rough guess, more than half the inhabitants of Arbin - or at least of the old part of Arbin, which is where we live - make wine, bottle it or are otherwise involved in the wine trade, so it’s not too surprising, I suppose) so after a quick bit of general business we got on to more serious matters. It was extremely interesting, but I guess I’m not cut out for the job - I personally find that after the eighth glass or so my poor little nose gets somewhat overwhelmed and confused, and has rather a tough time identifying the predominant note in the bouquet or, indeed, anything at all. (And no, I didn’t actually swill all eight glasses - did it properly, take a mouthful and spit the rest into a spittoon - not like others I could mention.)

We also went out and bought a video. It’s about two years since we had anything on tick, and the strain was starting to tell, so when we went out in search of a new iron we were easily won over by the whispered blandishments of the PAL/SECAM recorders hanging about on the display shelves. They are, unfortunately, more expensive than straight SECAM ones, but also a damn sight more use - to us, anyway. We’ll fmally be able to watch the videos people have kindly sent us. And we won’t have to sit up til midnight to watch films in VO on Canal + any more (unless we really want to, of course). And just in case you’re wondering, we did actually buy the iron as well - a flashy thing with a Teflon base (which is very handy when you want to fry - or rather steam - eggs) which bears a vague resemblance to the TGV.

And just to keep you up to date, our Etymological Research Unit (set up in the hope of attracting a government grant, no luck so far but if it does catch on it could become quite a little money-spinner) has discovered that a “limpet” is in fact a dwarf with one leg shorter than the other. Didn’t know that, did you? Don’t you wish that you too had an E.R.U. to keep you up to date with important world facts like that? It’d stop you looking dumb at nobby parties, you know.

24/3/92

Time has, as usual, passed, and I am starting to get seriously concerned about Malyon. She headed off to the loo the other day with a good pile of reading matter - nothing extraordinary in that, you might think - except that she’d picked out a set of abstracts of World Bank economic reports. I hope we’re not nurturing a future accountant or central banker here. (What, you may ask, was I doing with literature like that about the house? They just arrive, from time to time, the fmancial equivalent of junk mail. Comes of subscribing to The Economist, I suppose.)

And time is still passing at its usual rate of knots, ‘cos it’s now 17/4/92, just for a change. I gather that the French have stopped nuclear testing at Muroroa for a year or so - we had Mitterand on the idiot’s box the other night (looking as though he’d much rather be tucked up in bed with his second cocoa of the evening, but that’s another thing again) and he sort of mentioned it in passing, in between the demise of la Cinq (personally, I’ve no great regrets over its passing) and a discussion of his piles.

First it was bats, now it’s monsters - it seems that a baby, invisible orphaned monster has come to live at our place. According to Malyon, anyway. It’s most unfortunate, but Margo seems to keep standing on it. Or sitting on it when she gets in the car, or otherwise managing to damage the poor little thing. What’s really difficult - it seems - is giving it a wash when it has a bath with Malyon. First of all you’ve got to get it undressed, then shampoo its head, but the tricky bit is soaping its armpits. How many arms do baby monsters have?

Anyway, we had a nice trip to Lyon for Margo’s first practical exam - much to my surprise. It meant getting out of bed incredibly early in order to leave before 7am to be reasonably sure of getting in to the centre of town by 8am, but as it happened navigating around Lyon was easier than I’d feared. There was sod-all traffic at that hour, which probably helped, but basically all you’ve got to do is ignore the signposts they’ve carefully put up to misdirect the casual visitor out into the suburbs, and follow your nose. Malyon and I spent the morning trotting around looking at toyshops (jigsaw puzzles for her, a Mercedes 300 SL for me) and playing in Place Bellecour - which may well be one of the largest in France, but is almost certainly one of the most boring, consisting as it does of a large expanse of reddish gravel enlivened only by an equestrian statue of a somewhat obese Louis XVI and a light breeze fresh out of Siberia with a rather high wind-chill factor.

That took care of the morning - then once Margo’d got out of the place of torture we headed off and had lunch, did the toyshops again and then took in the silk museum, which has some glorious stuff in it. Not that it impressed Malyon very much - she fell asleep halfway through and a good thing too, probably. Anyway, having got through all that we thought we might as well look at heading back home and stopped off to look through IKEA en route - just a quickie, you understand - and came out having spent rather more time and money than we’d intended. Never mind, I’ve at last got a marble slab for doing flaky pastry and croissant dough on.

As those of you who haven’t been living in a broom cupboard for the last few months will know, it’s this month that Microsoft brought out the latest and greatest, all-singing all-dancing version of Windows, version 3.1. (Do not suggest to a Microsoft employee that this implies rather a lot of goes to get it right: they are not noted for their sense of humour. Rumour has it, indeed, that Bill Gates has created a special SWAT team of Basic programmers who, as part of their training, are locked into small rooms with IBM accountants and taught to bite the heads off chickens. Dead ones, I hasten to add - the man is basically a humanitarian.) Anyway, I got invited along to the opening hoopla at Lyon on Thursday, so off we dutifully trotted, Gilles and I, in a Renault Clio stinking of dog. I won’t say the affair was a waste of time, because I at least found out that there was a rather more serious seminar on this morning (to which I went - this time in a Renault 25 stinking of dog), but the highlight of the morning was a video called “Paul et Virginie”, which looked at the start as though it was going to be a low-budget soft-porn movie (even the title is vaguely reminiscent of some of the films that pass late at night on M6): unfortunately it failed to live up to its early promise. Still, I came out of it with le pin’s de Microsoft Windows, which’ll doubtless become a collectors item in time.

30/4/92

Back again after our little holiday, folks. It didn’t really start off all that well: it was pouring down with rain all the way up, there were Italians on the roads, and when we arrived we had to turn the water on. Nothing too difficult there, you might think, and you’re quite correct - you’ve just forgotten one small but vital detail. The temperatures go down below freezing in wintertime, and so if you’re not living permanently in a house you purge all the water from the pipes before going away. Which had been done. We didn’t bother to check that the purge taps - located in the kitchen - had been put back in place, did we? The result was a rather cleaner floor than before, by the time we’d scooped all the water out. (To make it even more fun, the floor of the house is set somewhat below ground level and - Murphy oblige - has its lowest point as far as possible from an outside door.)

Anyway, once we’d got all that out of the way and the fire stoked up Malyon loved it -wandering around outside, getting as mucky as possible in the sandpit and feeding the horses - and so did Cato: a shame the weather was lousy. We should have stayed here, where it seems the whole week was glorious. To top it off I came down with my favorite disease - exploding tonsils - and Margo’s glands decided to blow up as well, so we had to dash off and find a quack on Thursday to pump the pair of us full of antibiotics.

Phillippe came down from Paris to spend the weekend there working on what will, eventually, be his room and didn’t really have that good a time of it either - his actual stay was fine, but the radiator hose split in the vicinity of Nevers when he was heading back home and as a result the cylinder head decided to follow suit, so he’s up for a new engine.

Never mind, despite these little inconveniences it was actually rather nice to get away from it all for a week - and let’s face it, Pesselière is about as far away from it as you can get. Even the roosters seem to have had laryngectomies - the rural calm is only broken by the baker’s van doing the rounds on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and the occasional Air Force Mirage cruising about 50m overhead with afterburners full on, heading down to Marseille to pick up some bouillabaisse for lunch.

In a more serious vein, did you realise that the French are different from you and I? Not just in the little things, such as liking Charles Aznavour and reeking of garlic, but in the ways they think. The tendency - or cultural imperative - to Analyse is a case in point. If Mitterand farts it gets onto the evening news, but not as an interesting fact which is - presumably - worthy of being reported for itself: far from it. It’s an event which must be discussed and analysed in order to bring out its significance, and the guest of the evening (there’s always a guest who’s supposed to comment on the news stories) will be expected to kick in his or her bobs-worth. “Well, compared with previous presidential petés this is quite exceptional, 47 seconds and thus well above the average length -Alain, what effect will this have, in your opinion, on the external trade deficit?” It can go on for hours, and often does.

Hand in hand with this can go a rather surprising cultural insensitivity (the British say it’s arrogance, but they’d be fine ones to talk) mixed with sometimes astounding ignorance. Everyone knows that France is the best country in the world - goes without saying and as a matter of fact the percentage of Frenchpeople who’ve gone off to verify the hypothesis is miniscule - and that, naturally enough, her cuisine is the greatest (following from which, if a dish is not French by birth or naturalisation, it ain’t worth eating). I remember once preparing petits pois a la francaise and being accused of serving up some bizarre Kiwi hybrid, no matter that it’s traditional French food. Maybe it’s genetic, or perhaps it’s just something in the water.

Anyway, it’s Thursday afternoon, the day before May Day - which is, of course, like much of the rest of May, a holiday (note that some low-minded humourists have reported that the French Federation of Labour are pushing for legislation to have the 1st of May always fall on a Thursday, ‘cos then you get Friday off as well) - and I’m sitting here typing this up and generally recovering from a couple of whiskies at lunch time. I have not taken to hitting the bottle hidden in the filing cabinet, we were just cleaning up the bits and pieces left up after last night’s little do, it being the inauguration of the new building we’re in (in fact, it’s the old building with a sort of jerry-rigged outhouse affair tacked on at the back, but it’s a good enough excuse). People were wandering through the place all afternoon to look around - I was left pretty much undisturbed, most people being apparently content with staring at me through the glass. Perhaps they think that NZers bite. (Some do, and with good reason.)


10/5/91

It's now Thursday afternoon, anyway. But time has gone by and we’re already well into May, which probably indicates that I’d better finish this and get it out the door before December rolls around. To cheer you up, summer’s come back to us: we even managed to go off and have a picnic lunch today, which was pretty brave. The only problem was with the cows, who decided to wander over and have a good look as we were getting onto the chocolate gateau and who eventually sort of pushed us out of the paddock. Which was a bit of a shame, as we were getting quite used to being there, soaking up the sun, admiring the view down below, the usual story. Never mind, we stopped off on the way down (I perhaps omitted to mention that we go picnicking halfway up mountains) to look at a friend’s ruin and admire the way in which it is gradually becoming a house before coming home to have a quiet nap.

I found out something I didn’t now before, too. We were vaguely thinking of going off to Strasbourg to see a friend at the beginning of June (even better if we can stop off at Mulhouse to see the Musée Nationale de l’Automobile, a.k.a the Shtumpf collection of Bugattis) so I toddled down to the railway station to find out about ticket prices and such like - imagine my surprise when the (surprisingly) helpful clerk informed me that, as a salaried-type person, I am entitled, once a year, to a 25% reduction for myself and family. All as part of the French obsession with holidays. It works out quite nicely, actually - about $200 for the three of us to get there and back, and we can even get the TGV from Lyon, which really cuts back on the travel time. (Another nice stunt, it seems -Malyon doesn’t pay for her ticket, not being of an age to do so, but if we pay the derisory price for a reservation on the TGV, she can have a seat to herself anyway. Handy to know.) So it looks as though we might be going off to northern parts for a few days. Use up some more of my holidays left over from last year.

So what with that cheerful news, we had quite a nice weekend. We’re still having it, in fact, it being Sunday night. (And before you ask, no I am not at work, I just brought the machine home for Margo to play Solitaire on and get a bit of work done.) The sun’s been busy shining away, everyone is cheerful, there are still tiny green asparagus at the market and the first cherries of the season are out ( although at ludicrous prices - about $30 the kilo) - to top it all off Malyon spent Friday night up at Steve and Isabel’s for the first time ever, which gave us the evening and a fair whack of Saturday in relative peace and quiet. (For the first time ever - or at least since she was born, which feels pretty much like an eternity.)

And there you have us - alive and well and - for the moment at least - enjoying the sunshine. To those of you who are waiting for replies to the letters you wrote months ago, may I just remind you that Rome wasn’t built in a day and I’ll get on to it Real Soon Now, please stop sending the reminder notices. To all and sundry - have a nice winter!

Trevor, Margo and Malyon

French Gazette Vol. 5 N° 4 1 Septembre 1991

Back again, folks.

As those of you who are not currently living on another planet will know, the coup d’etat in Russia has been and gone; gone, insofar as we’ve been able to glean from the French news, largely due to a stem telling-off from Mitterand, the well-known French president of the same name. This leaves only China, the odd nowhere place like Cuba or Libya, and the French Communist Party as the last bastions of Marxist thought in the world, and I believe that the PCF tends to regard the Chinese with a suspicious eye as being rather too liberal. Be that as it may, according to a recent poll 54% of Frenchpeople are of the opinion that Georges Marchais (head of the aforesaid PCF) is a) extinct, like the pterodactyl (with which he has nothing else in common, the pterodactyl having been a rather good-looking bird in its day and in its own way) and b) should resign. 100% of French cartoonists are against this. Largely due to sheer laziness: he’s incredibly easy to caricature, as he can be made up out of off-the-shelf parts and needs no complicated bits (like a neck, for instance).

We’re sub-letting a bit of the flat at the moment - that is to say we’ve got a couple of bats who’ve taken up occasional residence behind the shutters. The only inconvenience of this arrangement (apart from bats being notoriously slack at paying the rent) is that you’ve got to check before you close the shutters during the day, just to make sure that neither of them is currently in. In other respects they’re model tenants, very quiet and they do their own washing, neighbourhood doesn’t smell of couscous, all in all nice people.

Finally got around to checking up with the British embassy on price and so on before applying for British patriality and a good thing too, because it seems that it no longer exists. What I can get is a “Certificate of Right of Abode” through my mother: it basically gives me the right to live and work there without hassles, costs 840 F or thereabouts, and has to be renewed every time your passport gets renewed (for me, in 5 years or so). Margo can’t even get that, not having a British parent - she can, if she can prove a visible means of support, get something which is renewable annually. All in all, it’s a bit of a sod. On the other hand, we’re eligible for French citizenship next year, and neither France nor New Zealand are upset at people having dual citizenship (having two passports might make them think a bit though, but these things can always be arranged ...) and gaving French citizenship plus a French/EEC passport is as useful, if not more so, than the right to live in England alone. I’ll toddle off to the Prefecture soon enough and find out just what the story is: let’s face it, if you have to learn more than two verses of the Marsellaise it’s just not worth it.

Margo said that the people at the embassy were charming and I’m prepared to believe her: they may also have been handpicked as representative British civil servants because when they sent me -as promised, and by return of post - the application forms they forgot to enclose the exact price (despite dire threats on form IM2(A) that every application must be accompanied by the full amount, cash in small denominations please) and then, in an excess of enthusiasm, sent 5 (five) copies of the foresaid 1M2(A) (which is pink) but none of IM2(C) (cack-yellow, usually), which it seems is what I’d have to fill in. Never mind.

Later - three weeks later, to be exact - it’s Friday afternoon and I’m trying to wind down after a hard week’s familiarising myself with some of the more exotic esoterica involved in writing programs for Windows. Not only is my brain throbbing, but my shoulder is giving me merry hell as well: I think I’m getting RSI from shoving the rodent around on my desk. (That, and playing too many games of Solitaire when I really ought to be doing a bit of work.) To top it off the car’s in at the panelbeater’s getting its right rear wing fixed up and it won’t be ready till tomorrow lunchtime, which means walking home again.


30/9/91

And so much for getting down to a bit of serious writing. As you can tell, rather more time has passed than I’d originally planned, but here I am back again, anyway. The car’s back from her visit to the panelbeater (rust and rip removed) and is currently passing the day at the garage for the usual 5000km checkup. Which is rather annoying for Margo, as she’s working today and consequently has to take the train in and out of Chambéry and it’s Autumn, cold and rainy.

And speaking of Margo working, she’s no longer with Europe School, the bi-lingual creche/primary school: the directrice (who is, let it be said, somewhat bizarre in her ideas) no longer wanted her - a) she drank too much coffee, b) she told a child off for misbehaving in the presence of the parents, c) not being English, she can’t speak English properly. The person who is (in theory) in charge of the English side at the school wanted her to stay on, but she decided that for the (miserable) pay it wasn’t worth the hassles that were bound to keep cropping up, so she left. She’s since found part-time work with Cite des Langues, a private school which arranges lessons for all sorts of people: today she’s supposed to be taking a class of hautes fonctionnaires (that’s highly placed uncivil servants to you) and we’ll see how that turns out. Other than that, she’s signed up for a post-grad diploma course at Lyon in teaching English as a foreign language, which means one morning a week at Lyon - happily, the train time-tables seem to fit in reasonably well. We’ll still have to look at getting a second car, though.

In the Extremely Annoying Band of Cons department: la Cinq, perhaps the most useless of the pretty appalling French ‘IV chains (and, incidentally and probably unrelatedly, privately owned by the Bouygues construction - nearly wrote “corruption” - group) had one redeeming feature - they were screening “Twin Peaks” which, as those of you who follow this newsletter will know, we followed in a religious fashion (we nearly came home from Pesselière ahead of time the last time we were there, there being some doubt as to whether or not they could pick it up). I say just one redeeming feature because they are now consigned in my private demonology to the least agreeable of all the circles of Hell (the one with no comfy chairs), as they decided, with no apparent reason (certainly no published one) to stop screening it. After the penultimate 23rd episode. In which Dale Cooper (at least, I think it was he that came back) is possessed by Bob the Killer, who hides behind mirrors. This, when you’re anxiously waiting to find out what happens, is the sort of thing that gets up your nose. (Has anyone over there been recording it? Got a spare copy floating around?)

We’ve bad a couple of visitors in the past months: Vicki Watt turned up from Saigon (or Hanoi, I can’t seem to get the places straight these days) at Geneva at some ungodly hour one Saturday morning, and then Phillippe took a weekend off from looking after the TGV and came down to sample the local wines with us. The only problem we had with Vicki was trying to get through to Vietnam by phone so that she could reassure her husband that she’d arrived safely: it is not the easiest thing to do and I can recommend it as an advanced exercise to students of Bureaucracy 302, Practice & Principles. First of all you have to go through the operator at this end who (with any luck) gets through to an operator in Vietnam who ~ then get through to the switchboard operator at the compound (foreigners being generally isolated to avoid - I assume - tainting the pure Marxist thought of the natives) who, to the dismay of the French operator, speaks neither French nor English. It took five goes, but we eventually made it.

We had a very pleasant time with Phillippe: so as not to derange his habits too much we ate French-style all weekend ie large, long lunches, ditto dinners, each accompanied by a bottle or two of wine and prefixed, naturally enough, with an aperitif. Which makes for not really wanting to do a great deal in the afternoons - it’s a wonder to me that we actually managed to go and visit even the two vignerons we did. We went out for dinner one night too: we found a restaurant (‘La Tête du Lard”, should you be in the neighbourhood) which claimed to do Savoyard cuisine, and thought it’d be a good idea to show Phillippe what it was like. They did, as advertised, specialise in regional grub and extremely nice it was, but not adapted to a night in August - by the time we staggered out we were all sweating profusely, and not just from the effort of carrying round a few kilos extra.

More recently ... as you may know, the French farmer is (it seems) an endangered species but, despite that, extremely altruistic and are particularly concerned that European (and especially French) consumers should not be forced to suffer the agonising choice between buying French beef/lamb/ whatever at exorbitant prices and imported meat of equal or better quality at lower prices, especially as the average housewife, unable to understand the issues involved, would be likely to make a disastrously wrong decision. In an effort to convince the government that people simply must continue to be protected from themselves they march in Paris, slaughter and burn (or slaughter or burn) imported English sheep, demand higher subsidies and generally kick up a fuss. The EC does its best to keep them happy and, in the latest piece of Euro-cretinism has come up with a marvellous idea for placating the Poles, pacifying the farmers and, once again, screwing the hapless consumer. East-bloc beef (one of the few things, apart from low-quality industrial pollutants, that they can produce competitively, it seems) is be allowed on to the European market without having horrendous tariffs imposed to raise its price above that of French beef: it will, however, all be bought by the EC and then re-sold (doubtless at a lower price) to the “traditional” market - Russia. (Or what’s left of it.)

The farmers are still not happy: for them it’s the thinnish end of the proverbial wedge and they can see the day coming when the EC runs out of food-aid cash and is forced to leave some of this foreign meat on the internal market. So they’ll be keeping a pretty strict eye on things: according to a spokeshomme they’ll be following the hygiene side very closely (they’re not totally convinced that the stuff is edible - although it may be alright for Russians) and they’ll be following government and EC ministers very closely indeed on their visits to the countryside - a thought which would worry me considerably were I a minister, considering that the hunting season has just opened.

10/10/91

Here I am again, folks. Yet more distress in France: this time the EC has forbidden Aerospatiale, the (heavily subsidised) firm which is a large percentage of Airbus, from taking over de Haviland, who make small commuter airplanes, on the grounds that it’d give them a near-monopoly position. So not only are the farmers marching and the nurses agitating, but government and industry are yelling about unfair treatment (the Competition Commisioner, Leon Brittan, being British it’s suggested in some quarters that he’s not totally impartial and is trying to do down the French).

We also have the edifying spectacle of politicians of all shades vying to outdo each other in “getting tough on immigration”. Which is short-hand for “stopping Blacks and Arabs getting into the country”. Fair enough, everyone knows that they dress differently, don’t smell the same, slaughter goats in public parks, are lazy, take jobs away from Frenchmen, are always on the dole ... Valery Giscard d’Estaing started the ball rolling when he suggested that the right to French citizenship should in future be limited to those actually born of French blood rather than, as now, being open to all those born in the place. God alone knows how he plans on defining French blood, let alone what percentage of it you need to be considered French .To their credit (and to my surpnse) the RPR almost immediately (small pause for reflection, you understand) disassociated themselves from his statement. Le Pen of course had a field day, remarking that an ex-president of the Republic had at last said what he’s been saying all along: all in all a shabby little business.

On to the good news - it’s Autumn now and to celebrate we’ve all three of us come down with colds. Notwithstanding, Margo and I braved the wintry night air on Monday to go and see the latest Peter Greenaway film, “Prospero’s Books”. Which I enjoyed, although I missed Death. We were actually congratulating ourselves on having - as we thought - seen each and every one of his films until we came across a potted bio hanging up on the wall and realised what a prolific little sod Greenaway actually is.

24/10/91

How time flies. Margo has started going off to Lyon on Wednesdays and is trying to arrange a set of English lessons in Arbin through the Mairie. This came about because the Zanella family (the hairdressers who live below, the ones with the luscious 17-year old daughter) foolishly let Fréderique (for such is her name) go off to England a while back and she returned in possession of an English boyfriend. Which is not, in itself, a bad thing, but the problem is that he speaks no French and the only word of English that Mme Zanella knows is “grandmother”, which you must admit is not a great deal of help when you’re trying to make light conversation over the petits fours. Anyway, Mme Zanella would like to learn English and knows of a couple of other people that would also like to get into it, and it seems quite possible that there’d be a fair bit of interest in such a thing. Now once you start doing too much private teaching on the black, as it were, things can start getting complicated (not to mention entailing a fair bit of running around between various peoples’ houses), and setting yourself up as a ‘travailleur independant’ in order to do it legally costs heaps, so the idea is to arrange the courses through the Mairie, which provides a room, takes the cash, and pays Margo a salary and generally arranges things with the Securité Sociale and all that. At any rate, Mango went off to see the mayor a few weeks ago to start the ball rolling (and he seemed interested enough himself) and he rang back on Tuesday to see if she could come in on Saturday morning, so we assume they’ve reached some sort of decision.

We very nearly didn’t have a cat anymore, by the way. Tuesday night Cato didn’t come home as usual, so we rather assumed he was off practicing being a male cat (something we’re planning on changing ASAP) although, given that the night temperatures are now getting down to zero or below, it seemed a funny time to do it, and then when I got home last night I found that one of the neighbour’s kids had found him limping piteously about and had brought him up to the apartment. We have a friend who’s a vet, so I rang him up, and fortunately Mango had rung earlier to say that she’d got a lift back from Lyon and was going in to Cite des Langues for a meeting, so I was able to get in touch with her and let her know that I’d be late picking her up, then chucked Cato and Malyon in the car and went off to see Vincent. The silly little beast had been hit by a car and fractured his pelvis, so he’s stuck in the apartment for the next three weeks with strict instructions not to do too much moving about. With any luck he’ll at least have learnt to avoid roads from now on.

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself at the moment, having got my little Windows application up and running and hardly crashing at all any more, apart from the odd time when it just seems to feel like hanging the machine. Quite fun getting it all going, really, and I learnt a lot - notably that Windows is highiy unforgiving of even the slightest little error, such as trying to send a message off to a task which doesn’t exist anymore. Usually this leads to the sternly named “Unrecoverable Application Error”, which means in practice that the machine stops dead in its tracks and you have to find the reset button (hint for Windows developers - get your machine fitted with a heavy-duty one -you’ll need it). Which is rather annoying if you have to do it five or six times in rapid succession. The nastiest part is that the debuggers for Windows applications seem to have more bugs in them than whatever it is you wrote, and often hang the machine out of sheer spite before you’ve even got to the point at which you know  that things are going wrong. Ah well, you can’t have everything.

12/11/91

I really am going to finish this today, promise. Cato’s three weeks of bed rest are finished and a good thing too: he’s currently about as popular as rabies. We had a dozen roses delivered on Saturday night, plonked them in a vase, arranged that on the table and so to bed. Next morning ... water all over the floor, roses all over the table, Cato extremely unpopular. Morning after ... more water all over the floor, remaining roses all over the table, Cato within 5mm of becoming a handbag. We decided to let him go out that day. Now all we have to do is get him an appointment with Vincent to get his rude parts removed.

The roses arrived - in an unexpected fashion - because Margo telephoned England for Mme Zanella, in order to ring up Frederique’s best friend to see if she couldn’t ring Fréderique to find out why she (Frederique) was passing her time crying in the bathroom. (The general consensus is that it’s the pangs of first love, and it’ll all pass in time.) Anyway, Margo did this thing and half an hour later a bloke arrived and plonked the bundle of flowers on the doorstep. Very nice of them. (By the way, we had a rather yummy meal at the Zanella’s a while back - at least I did, because Mango came down with a bug of some sort which made her feel ill at the smell of food, a shame as we had honest to god Alsatian foie gras to start off with - to let us meet the boyfriend and give him someone to whom he could say things other than “grandmother”. Pleasant chap, works for British Airways - gets staff reductions which cut the airfare to NZ down to about £150. Boo!)


And dear old Mitterand - having apparently concluded that he’ll not get in for a third term, being that his popularity rating currently puts him slightly behind botulism - has revealed that he’d like a Constitutional Congress after the local-body elections next year to see if the presidential term can’t be reduced from 7 years to 5, said reduction ~, to be applied to the current office-holder, of course. It’s possible, I suppose, that he thinks that if he does get beaten in ‘95 (or whenever it is), like this he’ll only have to wait for five years before having another go. He doesn’t think he’s too old -wants to beat Ronnie in the Guinness Book of Records as Most Decrepit Head of State, I imagine. He’s certainly likely to outlive Edith Cresson (still PM, but no-one’s betting on how long she’ll stay that way) who’s even less popular than he is.

Finally, we’re having to watch our tongues around Malyon these days. I took her in to Chambéry on Saturday to go to the market and - as usual these days - it rained. Never mind. We got the shopping done, headed back to the car and, whilst loading up the boot, got the edge of it on my head and a bucket or so of cold, wet rainwater down my collar. In circumstances like these I am, I admit, sometimes wont to let out an expletive and why not, it’s a perfectly natural human urge - all the same I’m sorry I did ‘cos Malyon spent the trip home saying “Dada bugga! Dada bugga!”, which gets a bit embarrassing. Not so much around the French, but when we have English-speaking visitors around

Anyway, now I have to go off and ring England to see about some cross-compilers I’ like to get hold of and then try to find out (using only a Swiss army knife and a multimeter) why the rearwindow demister doesn’t work. Bye.

Trevor, Margo and Malyon

PS -    I hear that TV3 pulled much the same trick with “Twin Peaks” as La Cinq did here - only at least they had the decency to put it back on, even if it was at 11pm. Three (half-hearted) cheers for la télé néo-zélandaise, three big boos for Bouygues.

French Gazette Vol. 5 N° 3 25 Mai 1991

Only just got the last letter to bed, and here we are again.

We had a busy weekend: open day at Margo’s work the Saturday morning, so I profited from that to go in to the market with Frog and get all the freshly-killed spring vegetables for the week, then back home, bake a tart for the Sunday, drop Frog off with Steve and Isabel, then off to the wedding. Which was a lot of fun, I must say. We left extremely early - at 11pm, in fact - ‘cos we were totally shagged out, but Renaud and Sophie stayed until 6am. Made of strong stuff. Stayed the night with S & I, arrived back home on Sunday morning, picked up the tart and headed off to lunch with Sue and Serge.

Other news: Margo’s glasses broke definitively a short while ago, so she’s now gone back to wearing contact lenses: worked out cheaper that way, especially as hers are an off-the-peg pair, so to speak. And we’ve got a kitten, tentatively called Cato. Mischevious little beastie, Malyon seems to like him. Although she gets awfully jealous when he starts playing with her toys (which basically means anything lying unattended on the floor) and starts telling him off in no uncertain fashion. (She does that when we tell her off, too: called scapegoating or something like that, I believe.)

5/6/91

Tom arrived safely, and we thought we’d celebrate the occasion in a fitting fashion with the first barbecue of the year. Great idea. We got out to Aiguebellette and it started raining - just a little, so we said “Won’t be frightened by a little rain, we’ll just have it under shelter until it clears up ...“. And so we started our barbecue under the convenient little shelter and the sausages were grilling nicely and then the thunderstorm (for such it was) decided to show us what it was made of (which is, in case you didn’t know, mostly wind and water, with a fair amount of static electricity floating about for good measure). As a couple of the littlies seemed to be in some danger of being carried away by the floodwaters swirling about our feet we decided to abandon the premises, women, children and lamb chops first.

Played the same trick the next day, too: we were up at Steve and Isabel’s, looking after the livestock again, and after a luxurious lunch decided to go for a little walk to see a waterfall. (And exercise the half-wit duo at the same time, why not?) Decided to turn back about 15 minutes from the falls, due to ominous rumblings and enormous grey clouds making an appearance, and so we were only about 400m from the gate when someone turned the taps on. (Which didn’t actually matter too much for the first minute or so - the drops were so big and far apart that you stood a fair chance of dodging them.)

Tom’s headed off to Italy for the week now (took the day train rather than a sleeper; I must admit that the stories of people in sleepers being gassed and then robbed at leisure are pretty hair-raising, and some of them are true to boot) and in theory should turn up again Thursday or Friday. He’s using our place as a base for his European travels, which fits in very nicely for all concerned.

And while I remember: we’ve finally bumped into the other Kiwi couple at Montmelian. Or at least, I bumped into the female half of it. I would have walked straight past her into the Post Office (I was posting a letter, yes it was on work time, mind your own business) except that someone wearing a Massey University sweatshirt kind of sticks out a bit in these benighted parts.

In the “Unusual Requests” department - Margo has been asked to write down the lyrics, in English, of a couple of Peter Hamill albums (“Nadir’s Big Chance” and “In Camera”, for those of you interested) so that someone can translate them into Italian. Must see if I can lay my hands on a decent cassette deck so that I can stick them on a tape for us while we’re about it.


Today is a particularly slack day at work, in case any of you are wondering what I’m doing writing this instead of being productive. I did try to be good, spent all morning twiddling my thumbs and polishing my code until it shone, but the fact is I’ve got my current projects as far as they can go without a bit of hardware to run on, and there isn’t any, and everyone else has gone up to Cluses to reinstall a system for Eaton (who make, amongst other things, washing machine controllers and oven timers) and consequently I’ve naught to do. I even tried reading a French computing magazine rather than conduct personal letter-writing in work time, but that soon palls (a bit like having your brain wade through sudsy molasses) so I’ve given up.

12/6/91

One week later ... we passed a lovely weekend; Malyon came down with gastro-enteritis and has been throwing up all over the place and I started to think I’d broken the car. These two facts are not particularly related. The first came about ‘cos there’s a bit of an epidemic going about amongst the sprogs of the countryside, and Malyon doubtless picked it up at the halte-garderie. (Just by the way, Margo is now on the committee, having foolishly gone off to the AGM the other night she got pressed into service.) She’s slowly getting better, actually asked for some bubbles for breakfast. (Kelloggs Rice Bubbles, that is.) As for the car, Tom, Malyon and I headed up to Annecy on Sunday, and on arriving I had to brake rather suddenly to avoid slamming into someone up ahead: managed that alright, but got the rather unnerving feeling that the brakes seemed to be locked on afterwards. We parked and had our look around anyway, then tried to find a garage that could take a look at the brakes - no such luck, you’d think Sunday was a public holiday or something. So we thought “Well, if anything’s locked up it’ll be the front discs ...“ so we jacked up the car and the front wheels seemed to go around without too many problems, so what the hell, off we set - slowly.

Then we stopped en route at a place called St. Felix to look at a car museum - just as I stopped the brakes gave a jolt and came back to normal and a good thing too, ‘cos the rear drums (as it happens) were smelling of extremely hot metal. We ducked into the museum - a bit disappointing, but still, they do have a couple of rather nice cars (a DB-5 and a couple of MGs amongst them) - and then, eventually, found a bar that was open (Sunday syndrome again) before heading back home with nicely cooled brakes. I later found out what the problem was. Alfas have a handy little mechanism for automatically taking up the slack on the brake cables for the drum brakes ... if you brake very hard, very suddenly, it takes up an awful lot of slack, and it doesn’t want to give it back.

17/6/91

Still later ... barbecues seem to have an adverse effect on the weather - something to do with the ozone hole or something, no doubt. I say this because we went up for a barbecue above Bourget du Lac on Saturday night, and no sooner had we got the thing started and the chicken legs sizzling nicely than the thunderstorm came rolling down from the mountains above us, making menacing noises and raining seriously. In fact, the thought of someone calmly enjoying an outside meal seems to have perturbed it to a degree bordering on the extreme: it rained all Sunday and it’s still raining now. A good summer for ducks, so far, and that’s about the best that you could say for it..

Tomorrow Margo’s off to Lyon to see about a course which apparently qualifies you to teach English as a second language. Find out about the hours and (especially) the cost, things like that: been there, done that. They’re not sure if they’ll be offering it (depends on student numbers) but if they do it’ll be about 5000FF, and they’d prefer their students to have adult teaching experience. See what happens. She’s also heading back to the university here to remind them that she exists, should they need any English-language tutors come September (the start, should you not know this, of the new academic year).

While I remember ... I have been informed by the usual fairly reliable sources that the Post Office (or Telecoms Corp. or NZPost or whatever it is these days) is in the process of mucking up all your phone numbers. Would those of you who are still on speaking terms with us please let us know how to get in touch?


5/7/91

Well, Tom’s left to head back to New Zealand, the school year is over for Margo, we’ve been to another barbecue - and this time it did not rain - and I’ve just finished the awfully tedious process of installing Windows 3 on my nice shiny new machine. The Dutch are out in force on the roads again -as are the dreadful Parisians - and in another two weeks we’re off on holiday! Back up to Pesselière to pick up our camescope this time - and see Ian and Marie and Elise, of course.

The weather’s been beautiful and warm for the past few weeks, so last Sunday we headed up to a place called Mont StGilbert for Serge’s birthday party. As the name suggests, it’s a mountain, and when you get to the summit (which takes quite a while, ‘cos the road is very narrow, very twisty and unsealed for the last few kilometres) you find, dug back into the rock, an abandoned Napoleonic fort which looks out over the Maurienne, this being the valley that leads on into Italy. I suppose the idea was to give the army somewhere nice and safe to hide: no-one in their right mind would bother climbing up all that way to fight them, so they could sit there snug and safe for the duration (until they found out whether they should surrender or start a victory parade). Be that as it may, these days it makes a lovely spot for a picnic, and in fact we spent all afternoon up there eating, drinking and not doing very much of anything else, which made quite a nice change. Malyon got herself a sunburnt nose, and Margo’s been a bit tender for the past few days, but that was about it.

As for little Cato, he’s rapidly developing into a right royal little pain - to date he’s devoured two pot-plants, half the sofa and a fair bit of my patience. When he wants to be he’s really nice, but he does have this annoying habit of waking up all bouncy at about 4am and wanting to eat shoes or something, so we have to chuck him out on the balcony until a more reasonable hour. If we could do that with Frog as well life would be perfect.

And as I mentioned, my faithful old 286 machine has shifted off my desk (it’ll probably get cleaned up and palmed off on the next client who needs a PC as part of a system) to be replaced by a shiny new 386 - rather a slow one, unfortunately, and currently possessing only 1Mb of memory, which is totally inadequate for any serious porpoises. But I still managed to amuse myself installing Windows 3 on it - without any of the problems I’d rather expected - and have passed much of my time today drawing little pictures of Kilroy (who wuz, if you recall, here) to act as the wallpaper for my screen. It passes the time of day, and I’ve no great urge to get out there and work terribly hard just at the moment, given that the temperature is about 29° in the shade. Perhaps I’ll have a game or two of solitaire.

We seem to be developing into some sort of Eastern-bloc aid agency these days - we’ve got a couple of Rumanian stagières here working for us now. (Do not confuse these with etagères, which are bookshelves: a stagière is someone who is paid by the state to work somewhere - or more accurately, his or her employer is paid to employ him - as part of their education/integration into French society/payback/whatever). Took them up to Eaton the other day to see some of the sort of stuff we make (about ten of us from Miqro turned up in the end - the poor fellows must have started to think they were being invaded) and had a great old time driving along misunderstanding one another. (What with various French accents, and their habit of sticking English words in from time to time ... I must have seemed a right prat at one point: she mentioned small-talk, and to me SmallTalk is a computer language; I replied - very virtuously - that I didn’t speak it, and it wasn’t till five minutes later that I realised that house-wives natter was the actual subject of conversation. I thought vaguely of trying to excuse myself for being a cretin, but quickly realised that doing so would only complicate matters more - they actually think I’m some sort of village idiot - and decided not to bother.)

Anyway, it’s currently Sunday the 7th, and we’re off on holiday the week after next. It’s been so hot that Cato gets exhausted just rolling over, and twitching is almost too much for him. Until this evening, of course, when the thunderstorm started about 4:30 and has only just let up, and it’s now 10:30 at night. We’ve passed a reasonably pleasant weekend, in case any of you were thinking of asking: Saturday morning at the market in Chambéry, picking up fresh fruit and veg (including a kilo of la ratte , last year’s trendy spud but still good eating for all that) - a bit of a sod really ‘cos I buy so much more at the market (it looking so nice and fresh and all) that, although it’s cheaper, I wind up spending more there than I would if I just went on down to the fruit shop. Then lazing about in the afternoon, followed by a swim at the lake and watching a Kiwi film on Canal +. (“Merchants of Shadow” in the translation, starred Annie Whittle, all about a mad - or perhaps not - architect who wanted to raze central Auckland and replace it with something fit for human beings to live in. If that means anything to you.)

We’d actually planned on going down to the lake again today, but then this thunderstorm intervened so in fact all we managed was going down and getting some picture frames for a couple of photos we had blown up - ones which accidentally turned out so well that we thought we’d stick them up on the wall to be embarrassed. So all in all we’ve done very little, and personally I’m not against that. But just now, les enfants, c’est l’heure de faire dodo and I for one am headed for bed and the arms of Morpheus, being as I am tired and shagged out after a prolonged squawk and the effort of getting up at 6:30 this morning to look after Frog (it being my turn for the dawn shift).

30/7/91

Back again, all fit and bronzed after a delightful holiday. We made it up to Pesselière according to plan, to discover that major renovations were to take place (not according to plan - not our plan, anyway) so Margo spent her time knocking windows out with a sledge-hammer whilst I hid in the kitchen. Where I discovered why it is that the traditional French country house-wife is depicted as a small, bent, rather frail looking little old lady: you would be too if you were preparing three cooked meals a day for ten people.

We took Cato up with us, not really wanting to leave him shut up in the apartment for a week - which meant that our trip was punctuated by cries of “Pipi! Pipi!” from Malyon, and blood-curdling yowls from the cat. He really enjoyed it once we got there, though: spent the first day running around like a mad thing and, as a result, was too exhausted to move the day after. (The very first night Marie got all upset, thinking he’d run off: she’d looked all over the place and couldn’t see him, so we spent ages traipsing up and down the main - and only - street of PesseliIre looking for him before we hardheartedly decided to give up and go to bed. At which point Marie found him sleeping on her bed, which just goes to show.)

Anyway, you probably get the picture: we spent a week eating and drinking too much before heading back home to relax for a while. (We nearly left early, as it happens: Marie didn’t think that the TV at Pesselière could pick up la Cinq, so we thought of rushing home on Friday to catch “Twin Peaks” that night. Fortunately Phillippe twiddled the aerial sufficiently that we didn’t have to take such drastic steps.) Which sort of reminds me that, it being summer, they’ve started screening “The Avengers” again, but in VO this time (ie in English, with French sub-titles) at the ridiculous hour of 10:30 in the morning, during the week. That’s bad enough: worse is that, starting tomorrow, “Monty Python” takes over, and where am I? At work, that’s where. I hope to pick up a cable tonight that’ll hook up the camescope and the TV to allow us to use it as a VTR.

And that’s pretty much it for now: I’ll see if I can’t print this off before getting back to another round or two of solitaire. Bye!

Trevor, Margo and Malyon

French Gazette Vol. 5 N°. 2 8 Avril 1991

Back again, folks.

Well, we were so inspired at the sight of our nicely redone bathroom (holes bogged up, more tiles stuck in, repainted) that we went out and repainted our kitchen to go with it. It now looks awfully Mediterranean - not that there are clots of sewage floating about, and the topless sunbathers are mostly notable by their absence - but it has the walls in a slightly agressive sky blue and the roof in ultraviolent white, which is a bit of a change from the government-surplus shade of “Muddy Cream” it was before. (To be totally fair, some of that was due to the walls not having been washed for a goodly number of years: the original designer “Ivory Cack” had been overlaid by what people in the art trade call a “patina” but which most of the rest of us over here are inclined to call “crud”.) Anyway, we’re now trying to get used to living with the municipal swimming baths.

Things got pretty difficult over here during the Gulf crisis: so much so, in fact, that even vital supplies of imported music were interrupted for some time. Which left us in the unenviable situation of sitting down one night to watch “Les Nuls” and discovering that their “musical” guest artist that night was Boy George. I’d thought he was dead! (I’d hoped, anyway.) But there he was, surrounded by a pack of rather anaemic-looking Buddhists (for so I assume them to have been, although if it hadn’t been for the flowing yellow robes you could have mistaken them for a flock of vegetarian Mormons) chanting about love, peace, living in harmony and the primal path toward reconciliation of the atman with universal oneness. I think.

Anyway, just at the moment the weather’s fine and all the dinky wee spring vegetables are popping their heads out for the slaughter - asparagus, strawberries, all that lot. And right now Margo can’t profit from it, ‘cos she decided to come down with the dreaded lurgy yesterday. Seems there’s not really an awful lot of it about, so she did very well to catch it.

And now for a (mostly) true story, a snippet from the “Faits Divers” column in one of the papers: “Man Injured by Photocopier”. You may well ask how this came about: your average photocopier is a pretty placid sort of beast and, apart from the occasional one which goes rogue and starts nipping the secretary on the ankles as she passes, or eating every second copy, have an excellent - you could almost say dull - safety record. As it turns out, in this case the poor thing was provoked: for reasons best known to himself the man involved wanted a photocopy of his bum. (As far as I am aware there are no branches of the French administration which currently demand such a document, but there may well be a Ministry in Charge of Haemorrhoids somewhere which does. Best perhaps not to ask.) He removed his trousers, therefore, sat on the glass, and was about to stick his one-franc piece into the slot and press the button when he fell through the glass, causing lacerations to his nether parts and leaving bloodstains on what are technically known as the “guts” of the photocopier, the removal of which required the intervention of a specialist from Xerox. A rather sad story, particularly as (so it turned out) the contrast was maladjusted and the required photocopy was unusable.

23/4/91

And, as usual, we’ve fallen a bit behind, so here I am, trying like mad to rectify this situation. Last time I wrote I was boasting about the good weather: you can hear the sound of syllables being munched as I eat my words. Things took a distinct turn for the worse a week or so back, temperatures dropped back into the horrid ones which have a minus sign in front of them, and we’ve even had more snow. In fact, we’re having some now - admittedly more slush than snow down this low. The end result is that (it is claimed) about 90% of the Champagne vineyards have been frost-damaged, the Touraine has been wiped out for the year, altogether ‘91 may be an expensive vintage. On the other hand ... I’m always inclined to take these claims of sudden poverty with a largeish pinch of salt, especially so when you know that the winegrowers are really looking for another government handout disguised as “disaster relief”. We’ll see, anyway. (PS: scepticism is advised. The vines are already putting out new buds.)

Headed off to Grenoble on the advice of one of the secretaries and managed to find the Toys’R’Us shop, which is really good value even if you do have to wade through piles of Mutant Ninja Turtle Dressing-Up Kits and the Complete Barbie Omnibus Wardrobe, which comes with its own DIY bankruptcy declaration for Dad to sign at the checkout counter. Margo found some stuff she was looking for, I finally managed to get my hands on some Japanese acrylic model paints (sure beats cleaning out the air-brush with white spirits, and it dries in 20 minutes) and Malyon would, if she could, have happily gone off with a 2500F Ferrari kiddy-car (none of this pedal-pushing stuff either - the things are motorised). Then the next day we went to the annual spring-time second-hand fair at Chambery (which is sort of a garage sale spread out over the city centre) so that Margo could look at getting stuff for the school. I was sorely tempted by the remnants of an ancient rocking-horse, but what with the price the chap was asking for the bits (the body, two legs and its head, all in pretty bad nick) and the fact that he started off addressing me as “My poor sir, if only you knew the prices these things fetch, you can’t get the wood these days” I decided to forget about it.

More Lyonnais policemen have been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from simple assault (which isn’t really considered an offence by the police, especially if you’re in the Arab quarter of Lyon or Marseilles ... ) all the way up to grand fraud, larceny and extortion. It’s a funny thing, but surveys showing public confidence in the police forces don’t seem very popular in France. Not, at least, just at the moment.

Hands up all those who’ve been watching “Twin Peaks”? Noticed last night that La Cinq had started screening it, so we came in on the second episode. (Normally I don’t bother looking too hard at what’s scheduled on La Cinq: it’s the chain that does low-budget soft-core, Italo-Polish coproductions of “Conan the Inland Revenue Inspector”, cheap martial arts films and early Schwartzenegger. Bad.) So far so good, anyway: I gather that the second series flopped in the States, partly because they couldn’t decide who really killed Laura (artistic differences between screenwriter and director), partly because (it seems) they were so blatant about trying to milk as much money from it as possible, with the “Who Killed Laura” T-shirt, beer mug and probably suspender belt as well, that even an American audience noticed. The other bright spot on the TV landscape is that M6 seem to have acquired the entire “Star Trek” series and have started screening an episode each night. (The gloriously named Canal Jimmy - available on cable TV at Chambéry - has since started screening Monty Python. Pooey.)

Anyway, Margo’s on holiday at the moment (two glorious weeks of vacances scolaires, unfortunately ingloriously unpaid but that’s too bad) so next week we’ll profit from that to head up to Pesseliere for a few days If we sneak out of Arbin at about 4am on Saturday there should be sod-all traffic on the roads for the first few hours at least (which means that if we really want to we can take the autoroute up and go through Lyon, something I normally avoid like a rabid toad), and with a bit of luck Malyon will go back to sleep in the car and stay that way for a while, which gives us that many hours of trouble-free driving. The car’s out of its running-in period too, which is comforting: be able to travel at a reasonable rate of knots.

Then we’ve got a wedding to go to next month: Renaud and Sophie have decided (Sophie has decided, anyway) to finally get married, so at long last we’ll get to see how the French do such things. (From what I can gather from films, it’s much the same as the way we do it, but they tend to go in rather more for piano-accordions as the “musical” accompaniment.)

3/5/91

Sorry for dashing off like that without saying good-bye but never mind, we’ve made it back again. The idea of heading off early worked well in all but one respect: Malyon didn’t go back to sleep. But at least we made it through Lyon without problems, as planned (read “hoped”). Then we settled down into some serious lounging. Apart, that is, from going off cellar-visiting and winetasting on the Saturday afternoon and then doing an antique and second-hand fair “somewhere in the region of” Vezelay on the Sunday. I say “somewhere in the region of” ‘cos it was exactly that: according to the ads it was at Vezelay, when we asked there it was actually at St. Something, not far down that little road just there, when we finally got there we’d done a fair few kilometres and learnt a lot about the local geography. The prices were, as usual, exorbitant: I sometimes suspect that antique dealers are only let out of the asylum on weekends, especially when I see a corkscrew - identical to, apart from being a bit rustier than, the one at Pesselière, admittedly functional - with an asking price of FF200. I did come across one rather intriguing little curio, which I didn’t have time to look at closely: carved ivory, might have been a salt-cellar but I rather fancy its purpose was a little more intimate than that.

Can someone please explain to me, by the way, why it is that people with silly names seem curiously attracted to the world of cinema, where they get stuck up in the credits for all the world to see? Like, for instance, one David S. Hamburger, assistant executive director of “Silverado”. And, of course, the Brothers Broccoli. Or Quintin Radish, stunt-man. (Invented, that one. Sorry.) Whilst on the subject of silly names and things like that, something that really gets up my nose (or, sometimes, tickles my wotsit - fancy, that’s the word) is the way people seem willing to pay a small fortune to place an ad somewhere, but nothing at all to make sure that the ad itself is good or even literate. Noticed this a lot in BYTE, where Taiwanese computer companies pay the GNP of an African republic to get a full-page spread, which they fill with an ad translated (by a half-drunk Swahili-speaking Hungarian) into what could loosely be called English, and illustrated with a mug shot taken with someone’s Box Brownie and developed by Attila the Your-Photos-in-5-Minutes-Or-Else at the local dairy.

All of which leads us inexorably to the publicity handout produced (in 5 languages or so) by the Office de Tourisme of Beaune (of which more later), which advises the innocent English-speaking tourist (if this is not a contradiction in terms) to visit the Chateau of the Ducks of Burgundy. Gotta be worth taking a gander at.

Monday the 29th of April, a black day in the annals of music-lovers everywhere, the day (as it happens, and this is true) of the Annual World Reunion of Bagpipers. Held in Burgundy this year (obviously not too worried about the wine being turned), featuring instruments ranging from the ludicrously simple (ie two straws stuck into a pig’s bladder - what the pig thought of this is not recorded) to an affair which resembles a cross between a pipe organ, one of those machines that goes around putting new tarmac down, and a rather unfortunate road accident. No deaths were reported. The same day saw the signing of a treaty of eternal amity (or at least temporary peace) between France and New Zealand, the X’s being placed on the appropriate dotted lines (after having being vetted by Treasury officials) by Jimbo “Potatohead” Bolger and Michel Rocard, well-known Pretender to the Presidency. According to the French news services Rocard was both conciliatory (apologising - a bit - for blowing up a boat in Auckland harbour) and firm (insisting that France has the right to blow up bits of the Pacific - or boats - if it feels that way inclined), which makes him sound a bit like a blancmange.

Be that as it may, on Tuesday we decided to do some sightseeing, come what may. So we decided to go down to Clamecy, a charming town with Mediaeval bits and the added attraction of one J. (for Jacques) Potts, who makes pottery. (This too, is true. Promise.) Picked the wrong day, we decided, having been blown past the cathedral for the second time, not to mention being soaked to the skin (or at least, the underclothes). So we gave that one up as a bad job, and I decided to fill up the car and then head back to the house. Now generally speaking I do not fill the car at supermarkets, their having a somewhat clouded reputation in the purity-of-petrol department (small floaty bits, origins indeterminate, absence of) but having spent a good half-hour searching - in vain - for a petrol station I gave in. As luck would have it the supermarkets were still open, and weren’t too proud to serve me.

That night Malyon decided to try sleep-walking. I’ve no idea why, I know only that around midnight I looked around the bedroom and saw a white blob in the middle distance (or what passes for it when you’ve been asleep for a while and aren’t too sure if opening your eyes is a good thing, or even what eyes are for that matter) and said to myself “Hullo! There’s a towel hung over the back of that chair, or my name isn’t Norman Furtwangle.” At about that point I remembered that that is not in fact my name and, logic being one of my stronger points, concluded that in that case it probably wasn’t a towel at all. And I was right. It was in fact Malyon, who’d got out of bed (not too difficult, she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor), walked a few paces and then stood there, still holding Nounours (the French-speakers amongst you will realise that this means “Teddy bear”: a big raspberry to them ‘cos what she means by it is her fluffy portable rabbit) and still fast asleep.

Wednesday she decided to try suicide for a change. She managed to loop the curtain cord around her neck, and you should have seen the look on her face when she tried to walk forwards. Margo and I stopped laughing soon enough to be able to get to her before she turned too blue. We picked up some wine, too, as you might expect. Half-a-dozen bottles of Pinot Noir, aged in oak, from Ian’s favorite vigneron, Mr Maltoff, and ten litres of plonk from the same source, with which we amused ourselves by bottling it.

And on Thursday we headed back home. Having a bit of time in hand, and finding ourself in the region, we thought we’d take a quick detour to Beaune. So we hung a left on the D9wotsit, and found ourselves going though villages with names like Meursault, Volnay, Pommard, Puligny-Montrachet -you know, the wine-label ones. Eventually we got there: according to the Guide Michelin it’s worth the trip, but architecturally I found the bit we saw to be rather null and void - I’m perfectly willing to admit, however, that we only spent a few hours there and that perhaps not in the best of circumstances (Malyon having decided to go running on the admittedly picturesque but totally impractical cobblestones and, as a result, fallen and cassé sa gueule - which is one way of saying she fell flat on her face, with the attendant cuts and bruises) so why not go and look for yourselves? All that apart we had a rather nice meal with good wine (what else would you expect) and apart from a few problems getting out of the place (the local Town Planning department being ideologically opposed to road signs) rather enjoyed the visit.

Those of you who remember a bit of your geography will (or will not) recall that from Beaune, to get to Chambery and other points south, you go through Chalon-sur-Saône and then, if you want to, Macon. Macon has the air of being a town founded by camp followers: every second street seems to be named after a regiment. (Or, failing that, a squadron or, at the very least, a colonel.) For instance, Place du 4eme Bataillon de Choc. A nice name, and it intrigued me enough to ask around a bit: according to Renaud (who has, like every male French-thing who hasn’t been able to get out of it, done his military service and who should thus know) this group of elite troops are trained in the arts of disguise and free-form yodelling to the point where they’re able to hide behind almost anything and, at a given signal, leap out, shouting “Boo!” in unison, thus alarming the enemy (whence the name - the 4th Shock Battalion) and provoking one or two second thoughts as to the wisdom of his current course of action. (You expected perhaps a retreat? They’re good, but not that good.) They’ve never yet been proved in combat - even during the Gulf crisis they were held in reserve - but all of France sleeps the sounder for knowing that they’re there.

It was whilst musing on these and other points that I forgot to take the turning to Bourg-en-Bresse, which was rather silly of me. In fact it was even sillier to have gone through Macon in the first place, I could have turned directly toward Bourg at Tournus and avoided Macon and cut a few kilometres off the trip, but there you are, I forgot. In any case, we promptly dived off the N6 (which was bent on taking us to Lyon, where we emphatically did not want to go) and into the complex system of routes departmentales, communales and - ugh - forestières which makes navigation in the French countryside such an interesting affair. We managed to escape, pretty much as planned, at Amberieu, from whence it’s a doddle to get down to the autoroute and home. Although should you ever decide to do it, follow the signposts toward Grenoble, rather than Chambery, unless you’re a dedicated amateur of the pictureskew. No matter which you take, you’re probably doomed to spend half your time behind a Belgian furniture removal van, following a Danish septic-tank cleaner who, himself, is following an extended Dutch family who, with friends and relations, are taking fifteen or so caravans on what feels like a walking tour of France. Don’t bother overtaking: a) you can’t, b) there’s no point ‘cos two kilometres further up the road you’re going to bump into the same situation, just lie back and enjoy the scenery.

Somewhat later ... it’s next week now, which is rather nice because it’s a two-day week: Wednesday and Thursday being holidays (Armistice 1945 and Ascension, or something along those lines) we get Friday off as well which is all remarkably nice. So we’ve a lovely long weekend which we plan to pass at St Jean d’Arvey, as Steve rang up last night to see if we could house-sit for them while they’re away on holiday in Spain. It was then that he sprung a small surprise on us: not only have they two floppy and rather cretinous dogs (which we knew about) but also two doubtless equally cretinous lambs (about which we were not totally in the dark) and several chickens (which came as news to me, at least). So we’re going to play at being farmers (in the broadest possible sense) for a while.

17/5/91

Been there, done that. You really all ought to try it some time: nothing like getting up at the crack of dawn to take a pair of half-witted Labradors for a good hour-long walk up a mountain. It’s even better when it rains. Not only because you then get rained on (and rain is wet), but also because Allie and Pip, who together can just about muster up the intellectual capacity of a cockroach, take it as a heaven-sent opportunity to roll in the mud and then leap all over you. Then there’s the question of the chickens, whom I suspect of developing psychopathic tendencies. Malyon loved it anyway: dogs to stroke, chickens to chase and sheep to try and feed. Only one sheep now, ‘cos the other one got savaged by a dog the day we checked out and had to be put down: rather upsetting for Steve (and, of course, for the sheep). Sunday we’re going round for lunch: roast lamb’s on the menu.

The more clued-up amongst you will have realised that Michel Rocard has just resigned to pursue other interests (ie, the Presidency, next time it’s up for grabs) and the rumour-mongers would have it (with, to all appearances, some reason) that he didn’t fall, he wuz pushed. By Mitterand, no less. Suitable recompense, no doubt, for signing a treaty of everlasting friendship and cooperation with the perfidious Kiwis. The news here is full of it, even down to the usual in-depth analysis (we don’t seem to be able to escape it) of the President’s speech (only 5 minutes, 31 seconds this time - yes, they really did time it) announcing the resignation and the appointment of Edith Cresson. Be that as it may, France has stolen a march on New Zealand by appointing their first ever female Prime Minister: rather a back-handed compliment to Margaret Thatcher on Mitterand’s part, really. Roll over, Jimbo: Ruth Richardson wants your seat!

Anyway, tonight Margo has gone off with Sue to see some modern ballet at Chambery: next week I go off to see “Measure for Measure”, in French, directed by the rather Germanic Peter Zadek. We’ll see whether I manage to understand what’s going on. Other news: we’ve decided to buy a camescope. Rather than pick one up in France (where, in the usual attempt to protect state industries, ie Thompson, from the indignities of competition with the perniciously efficient - and quality-obsessed - Japanese, the absolute minimum price you can pay is about $2000) Margo’s parents have promised to get one in NZ, from whence it’ll be express-delivered by Ian and Marie when they come over in July. Which I suppose means that we can’t really avoid going up to Pesselière again, ‘cos they’re unlikely to come all the way down here. So eventually those of you who haven’t managed to make it over here might get to see where we live.

OK, tomorrow we’re off to Grenoble again to see an exhibition of Celtic artifacts at one of the museums and try to pick up a wedding present for Renaud and Sophie, but just at the moment I’m listening to a CD of odds and sods by Jethro Tull from the past 20 years, so I’ll sign off here. If anything really fascinating crops up in the next few days I’ll let you know: otherwise, it’s ciao for now from us all -

Trevor, Margo and Malyon