Grassed off

I cut the grass today, having only cut it two weeks ago. The trouble with grass in Spring and Summer is that once you cut it, it grows again, in a furious game of catch up - 'I must be the length I was before, I must be the length I was before,' is its repeated mantra, and, more often than not, it succeeds, and often exceeds.

Cutting the grass chez nous is a truer phrase then 'mowing the lawn'; the latter implies there is a lawn to start with, a nice, measured and refined variety of grass that knows when to slow down, that enough is enough, that it is time to await the trim reaper before allowing itself an extra growth spurt. Here, in the damp conditions that exist beneath our soil, it grows and grows like nobody's business. Indeed, if we had a business like our grass, we'd be very successful.

Nor for us the neatly defined patch, to be mowed within inches of its life into serried stripes, though I sometimes envy those with such a geometrically configured space of herbage. Ours is a raggle-taggle garden, randomly treed, with humps and bumps and holes, curves and swerves and branches of trees in the way, 'neath which one has to duck to achieve the maximum reach of the arm holding the mower. In such a garden, it's always a delight to hear the screams of delight of the discovery of the hidden grove, soon followed by the screams of pain as the hidden nettle patch is discovered immediately thereafter. Good job we know where the hidden growths of dock are to be found, dock leaves being a much quicker, efficacious and less pungent solution to nettle stings than vinegar, despite the green stains left in their wake.

I don't like cutting the grass. More to the point, I don't like the preparation. We have two large dogs (on the whole, lovely, two Labrador brothers, two years old), penned in by a ground level electric wire and battery-powered collars, so they cannot escape the grounds in order to chase cars, tractors and other agricultural machinery that passes by (you know what's coming, don't you?). Of course, they do what they have to do within the confines of the wire, which means in the mowable area, so I have to go round with a bin bag and a rubber glove before I mow, collecting the various deposits. I have, however, learnt a useless bit of information; that dogs can't digest sweetcorn any more than we can. Nor cotton, having discovered that Youngest was not to blame for the disappearance of my freshly lauindered hankie for a blindfold for the kittens (don't ask).

In the play I have just done there is a line: le nez dans une crotte de chien, elle refuserait de reconnaître l'odeur* I, cutting the grass, frequently had no option but to recognise it. As I walked along pushing, or sometimes being dragged behind, the standard petrol mower (no swish ride-on here with our mangled patch) I inevitably came across some of the aforementioned deposits that I had missed in the preparation phase, usually just as the mower passed over them and as the grass-catcher needed emptying. And it doesn’t matter what age they are, the pong is still the same once the dried crust is broken (sorry for this scatological interlude).

Abandoned toys are also a hazard in the long grass, as they spin off into the borders. Many are the one-legged Action Men about the garden now, staggering from perilous mission to perilous mission: “Quick, men, hop this way, it’s that nightmare helicopter again!” Unarmed, unlegged and dangerous, or at least very annoyed. Their jeeps and Land Rovers, too, painted with camouflage paint; you only know you've hit one when you hear the blades complain as they hit it and you see it spinning off to the side, often one wheel the less. And while sticks and stones may not often break my bones, mild injury to uncovered parts of the anatomy is always a risk as they are encountered and shot out at great speed. Always cut the grass in wellies is my motto.

It has to be done, though. Eldest is coming back from her Polish trip tonight and we would hate her to think that we had done nothing in the way of garden maintenance since she left, albeit less than a week ago. It is also true that the longer it is left, the longer it takes to wrestle back into some sort of semblance of tidiness. And, despite not liking the cutting of it, there is great satisfaction in seeing the end result, the taming of the wilderness.

I have discovered that the French expression for a well-kept lawn is un gazon anglais, gazon being French for lawn. Here, the grass is far from being anglais, so we see it as another effort at integration into French life. And, having said that, I’ll cut it there.

Kissy kissy - mon dieu, is that the time?

We went to a school do the other night, to see the video taken by the teacher of the recent week's trip with Middle's class to a nature centre elsewhere in Brittany. It was due to start at 8.30pm, so we got there just before, being punctual English-type people, but in the manner of many things French, 8.30 came and went, and people were still arriving. I hasten to say that we were not the only ones to arrive on time, there were plenty of other parents there before us so it's not just an English thing, even if all events do start late.

On arriving at gatherings such as this, one is obliged to do the rounds of people one knows, giving bisous (kisses) and handshakes to the women and men respectively in my case (I don't yet know any men well enough to bisou, except for my father); UPL is entitled to bisou both men and women, being a woman herself. Occasionally you find yourself doing the greeting to people you don't know but only recognise, simply because everyone else is doing it too. However, the unspoken rule, in Brittany, anyway, is that if you have seen and greeted someone earlier in the day you don't repeat the procedure: in that case, the meeting/greeting scenario is bisou, bisou, shake, oh, je t'ai déjà vu, shake, bisou etc. Except with women of a certain age, with whom you exchange handshakes the first time you meet or are introduced (men and women alike), though subsequently you might be allowed to kiss them, and women in a professional situation, with whom a handshake is de rigeur, unless you know them as a friend.

They say that French employers are often pleased to hire English people because they don't waste ten minutes every morning at work saying hello like this, but I think if one is trying to integrate into a society one takes on the habits of the local populace as much as is permissible and accepted, and the first time someone does it to you it gives a very warm feeling of acceptance, even though, to them, it is just a matter of course.

There are also unwritten and often incomprehensible rules/guidelines as to how many kisses you give, and sometimes even the French people we know seem uncertain. Generally, it seems to be a single kiss if you see each other regularly, right cheek to right cheek, and two if there's been more than a couple of days between meetings, but today, for example, I stopped after one with a friend and then had to quickly recover and repeat the procedure as she turned her other cheek for a second. There are also occasions when 4 is deemed acceptable (high days and holy days, for example), but apparently it is the norm in some other parts of the country, so I suppose it's 6 at special times for them. And it takes a few times to learn that the lips don't touch the cheek, it's the cheeks that touch and the kiss is in the air, but not as exaggerated as the 'mwah mwah' air kisses of the Dahling set.

The French learn all this at school, as it is taken as read, from Maternelle upward, that you kiss your friends and classmates, and even the teachers, and whenever an adult meets a child to say hello, you kiss them, whatever the sex. Boys stop kissing each other at about the age of 9 and begin shaking hands, although they carry on kissing the girls, but good male friends often go on kissing each other for the rest of their lives, and I think with men it's two. It's also interesting watching adolescent girls kissing each other goodbye at the end of the day (and they are an exception to the once a day only rule); in the middle of a conversation between two of these, a third will come up, there will be mutual cheek-brushing beteen them and the third will leave, but at no time does the conversation between the first two cease and there is not even a meeting of eyes with the third. It must be said, though, that amongst female teenagers the bisou is not always shared with those outside a group.

It did occur to me once that one possible explanation for the relative lack of violence amongst French youth is that it is difficult to be on permanently bad terms with someone whose hand you may have grown up shaking every school day of your life; you may not like them very much, but it is the done thing to shake their hand, so you carry on doing it.

There is also the practice of total strangers coming up to you and shaking your hand; in a bar, for example, when a customer enters he often circulates among everyone already there, shaking hands and bonjouring. They're much more tactile people, the French.

Anyway, after that long diversion, the video of the week's trip finally began at 10 to 9, even though late arrivals turned up until after 9 o'clock. And in the near dark as we were watching the video, they, too, made their way around the assembled viewers, doing the thing.

What does it all add up to?

As I said in yesterday's blog, Eldest is off to Poland tomorrow, a result of her abilities with language and winning a school competition tied in with the Comenius Project. We're proud of her and her languages, she's doing 4 at lycée: French, Spanish, Italian and, of course, English.

Maths, however, is not one of her strengths, nor is its relative, Physics. This is much to my chagrin, as I used to like maths at school, particularly the advanced stuff, calculus, trigonometry, differentials etc, and it was really satisfying to get the right answers and realise how you got there.

As a subject, it has its own language, but that is not a language with which she is at all fluent. The other day she came home with good news and bad news: the good that she'd got 19 out of 20 in an Italian test; the bad that she'd only got 1½ out of 40 in a Maths test. 1½ out of 40! That's only 3.75%. I tried to restrain my horreur, but it was difficult.

Then, I got to thinking about it. She wants to be an actress and/or writer when she grows up, and is in the process of doing a Bac L (Baccaulauréat Litteraire), which will enable her to go on to train to be an interpreter, which is the other 'fall back' option, should she get sufficient marks in the 'L' subjects of languages and geography/history. Her tutor seems to think that she will be able to achieve that, and is not overly concerned about her Maths and Physics results - he says that they all (the teachers) realise that mathematical areas are not her forté, but as long as she keeps trying and showing willing, she will get what she's after.

And, the plain truth of it is, what is the point of knowing how to plot a vector or solve a quadratic equation when you're working in a field that doesn't use or touch on maths at all? She can do basic calculations, knows her times tables and will always be able to find a solution to a mathematical problem, either by using a calculator, or, more likely, by asking someone else. So what is the fuss about maths?

Perhaps the educational establishment thinks that stressing maths (and stressing out kids who are taking it and not doing well) will exercise their brains, thus making them more receptive to other thoughts and ideas; I don't know, but it does, on sensible reflection (difficult for me as a maths-loving parent) seem rather a waste of many people's efforts.

Some people have got it, some haven't, but when it comes to choosing a profession, if you don't speak Maths, you're not going to go for something that needs it. Which, I suppose, is why students are allowed to drop it as a subject when they get to the French equivalent of the Upper Sixth, the appropriately named Terminale. And for Eldest, that year can't come soon enough - only one more school year to wait.

The cost of living inFrance

Did what could be described as the weekly shop today, though bought a lot of things that we wouldn't have bought had we been in the UK still. The whole lot came to around 150€, which included several bottles of wine, the most expensive 1,80€, the cheapest 74 centimes (about 50p), some barbecue meal stuff (ever optimistic in what the French down the south of France refer to as 'the green', because it's so damp and rains a lot so it's very lush) and various cheeses. You know you live in France when there's a choice amongst nine different Camemberts to make. Oh, and a DVD, Monster House, as Saturday night's movie night for the family, though Eldest is staying the night at a friend's.

On Monday she's off to Poland for a week (DON'T tell Madame Grognonne!), courtesy of the Comenius Project, a 'thing' (for want of a better word) involving high schools in England, Germany, France and Poland, where there is a competition amongst students involving a written and oral presentation, to choose the 10 or so representatives of each school to make the trip to see other schools in the scheme. She was one of the lucky winers at her lycée, so is heading off on the pre-financed trip with various French classmates, and we are very proud of her, as indeed we are of all three of our totally bi-lingual offspring. Only gripe is that she has to be at school for 3.30am on Monday to catch the coach which, being French, won't arrive until 3.45am at the earliest, so I will be taking her to school then staying awake and up until I start work at 6am. AND I worked today, so that we can have next Friday off, to fait le pont with Ascension Thursday.

Odd that all of the UK's Bank Holidays seem to be only Mondays, whereas here if the day of the holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday they have the day off on that day and very often the day between that holiday and the weekend as well, thus making a 4-day weekend. Mostly in May, I have to say, though there are a couple later in the year. It's a hard life, sometimes, but that's one of the costs of living in France.

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Write? Or not.

If I could write as fast as I
Could think, then I should surely try
To put on paper all I think
And drown the world in floods of ink.
But thinking is a quicker skill
Than writing is, and so I will
Attempt to write my very best
And hope I don't forget the rest.

Very dispiriting surfing around the other blogs and noting the different styles of writing. I'd like to be able to write like that, I think, as I read, inwardly chuckle sometimes, and outwardly laugh (at the Dog and Cat diaries, which to be fair isn't a blog, but funny, nevertheless). Is it worth me carrying on? And before anyone rushes in to say, in this mutual appreciation society we have today, of course it is, yes, I know, I will carry on. Everyone's style is different; some are funny, some are straightforward, some are overly-enriched in the adjective department, some are remarkably lucid and straight to the point.

And thank the various gods for the backspace and delete buttons. There was a time when I might have written, for example, "sorry to crap on about this, no, I mean carp on, though the other sense is just as appropriate", but these days, I would have spotted the slip, Freudian or not, and gone back and corrected it. I haven't this time, partly because I've used it as an example, partly because both senses are true: it is a lot of crap to go on about, and I do carp about it occasionally.

Please note, this is nothing to do with chicken plucking, or NOT plucking chickens. Not plucking chickens is something for another day.