News from my sister. When we spoke on the phone last night she told me of the plans for her week off work. Her twin girls (now just two years old) are ready to sleep in real beds rather than cots. They are also starting potty training. The reward for each pee in the potty is a star and after 10 stars they get a pair of Winnie the Pooh pants...... Neither my sister nor my brother-in-law can remember the last time they weren't tired. They went to the cinema for the first time in two years to see Casino Royale. They are planning an extension to the house - a playroom, an extra bedroom, an extra bathroom, a "mud room" (there is lots of mud in South Wales).
News from me. I've bought a new faster-than-lightning laptop. I went roller blading this weekend and still had to use Mr L as a braking system. I bought a new table in the Habitat sale. I'm going out for dinner tomorrow night and on Saturday night. I'm going to try the new swimming pool on the river Seine on Friday evening. I re-arranged my living room and decided to sell my books. I played the French version of Monopoly this weekend.
That's all
I have too many books. If I lived in a mansion with a library and step ladders to reach the floor to ceiling shelving, my books would be dwarved by the size of the library, but I live in a one bedroomed 50 square metre flat. There is also the question of several boxes of books quietly gathering dust in an attic in Bristol.
I used to think that shelves of books looked warm & inviting, that they were a good conversation starter and that they made me appear well educated and intelligent - now I know that they take up lots of space in small flats, that the last conversation prompted by my book collection was on the names of the Famous Five and their dog and that I have no need of shelves of books to appear educated and intelligent (hah!).
I have half-heartedly looked into my options for getting rid of them - selling on Amazon (far too much hassle in view of the average queuing time at French post offices), selling them in one job lot on Ebay (not many takers for a collection of 300+ books in English in Paris), giving them to a charity (see Ebay problem) or giving them away to friends (it would take too long to get rid of them).
Other anti clutter measures include converting my CD collection into MP3 files and buying all future music as downloads. Hurray! No more ugly CD 'storage solutions', just a pretty computer screen.
So, over 300 English language paperbacks going free to anyone who can come and collect them - don't worry, there is no Enid Blyton in the collection, just lots of recent bestseller type stuff ranging from Salman Rushdie to Anne Tyler to J M Coetzee to Minette Walters... and lots more inbetween.
A list of some of the things I did over Christmas and New Year:
- feasted on shell fish
- did not go rollerblading on Christmas day
- lay sick in bed with tonsilitis on Boxing day
- went to an NHS walk-in centre and was refused antibiotics
- did not touch a drop of alcohol between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve (apart from a very small glass of sherry)
- finally got antibiotics but not for the tonsilitis, for a nasty infection that left me looking like Elephant Man
- installed broadband internet for my sister
- went to a New Year's party where at 3am we couldn't leave because there were ambulance men in the bedroom where all our coats were (they weren't invited guests...)
- slept lots
- didn't blog
Happy New Year!
I've just bought a flat near Bordeaux.
Happy Christmas to me!
The French government runs a scheme whereby private investors pay to reduce the housing shortage in France - basically you invest in a property which is let for a minimum of 9 years and you get massive reductions in your tax bill. So I am now (or shortly will be) the proud owner of a two bedroomed south facing appartment near Bordeaux which won't actually be built until 2008.
Every year with my family, we go through the ritual of asking each other what we would like for Christmas. Sometimes my sister and I agree on what we will get jointly for other family members and then I forget and buy something separately. I struggle to think of things that my family can get me and have to bite my tongue to stop myself from saying heretical things like 'I'd rather you didn't bother, it's just too much fuss, bah humbug....'.
Then this week whilst on the phone to my Mum, I had a mini brainwave for what she could get me for Christmas.
A set of shell-fish cutlery.
Yes, I have reached the stage in my life when the only really useful thing I don't already have is a set of implements for cracking langoustine and crab claws, for squiggling winkles out of their shells and for separating oysters from their pearly grip.
Does this make me posh?
I have just sent a text message which reads "All toothpaste inside tube". This is not as obtuse as it may seem.
I have a highly refined palate for toothpaste and cannot abide all these minty fresh sparkly whitey stripey varieties. A few years ago I discovered fennel flavoured toothpaste, which used to be stocked at Boots in the UK but now can only be found in health food shops in trendy hippy type places. I have yet to find any in France. So a friend of mine who lives in a trendy hippy place just down the road from a health food shop, in the UK, has kindly sent me a couple of tubes in a jiffy bag. The tubes escaped investigation by the anti-terrorist squad and arrived today, chez moi, whole and bursting with fennel freshness.
If the internet had smellovision, you would now be wondering if someone nearby had drunk a little too much pastis......
I read several blogs of non French people living in France, or British people living abroad, and I'm conscious that a great deal of my experiences as a foreigner in France are similar to the experiences they write about on their blogs. Click here for a selection, Heather, Waffle, Petite, menace, KE, Sunday, oiseau, antipo. I'm afraid that I can't really come up with an original slant on the 'Brit abroad' theme, somewhere along the line these bloggers and myself have pretty much covered all of the following : falling in love with a foreigner, frustrating customer service, what we miss and don't miss about back home, foreign bureaucracy, bi-lingual kids, not being able to vote, falling out of love with a foreigner, dog shit on the pavement, favourite restaurants, bookshops, problems making real foreign friends ......
I think that after 4 years in France, and over 3 years of blogging about it, it may be time to stop thinking of my blog as a 'Brit abroad' blog, and think of it more as just 'my blog'. After all, I have never once seriously thought about going back to England, my life is now here. I like it.