Bag,box. . .Box,bag 2

The youngest son of our next door neighbour in France, Lenny (after Lenny Kravitz) has his birthday in February. Just before we came back this last time to the UK, we gave him a copy of Bob the Builder, in English. Matteo, the older brother who is ten has been learning English at our village school for a few years. Lenny is just starting, so the two have been reading Bob the Builder together.

We had an email from their mother Isabelle a couple of days ago. Lenny has fallen in love with his Bob the Builder book and insists on sleeping with it. If told ' no you can't', Lenny starts wailing. He has a unique wail, which steadily winds-up until finally at full throttle, Lenny achieves air raid siren quality.  But it doesn't last long. The family have a neat way of dealing with him. Lenny is very ticklish and has learnt that it's impossible to wail effectively and laugh at the same time.

I have a book that was given to me when I was more or less the same age as Lenny is now, by my Aunt Hester, who like the rest of the family lived in Henley. She was for a long time, the local and much-loved school teacher. Her gift to me was The Wind in the Willows or in French, Le Vent dans les Saules.  I don't know what Aunt Hester would have made of my primary school English teacher, the formidable Mrs Chester. I can see her clearly in my mind's eye - sturdily built, 5'5" (1m65) and shrinking, very short wavy white hair and probably in her late 60s. Mrs Chester had asked us each to bring in a favourite classic novel and to find a short passage from it so that if she called our name, we could read out loud to the rest of the class. I took along The Wind in the Willows and was immediately informed that this book was not a classic. Guess who didn't get to read!

Regardless of whether The Wind in the Willows is or isn't a classic, I always loved the story and continue to read it once a year as it gets close to Christmas. There are wonderful moments in it, funny, scary, poignant and joyful.

I'm clearly attached to it and probably will remain so.  
But not enough to want to sleep with it.

Bag,Box. . .Box, Bag 1

An adventure in itself - packing. The perfect op for a sort-out and interesting discoveries.  
The 'lost world' of the airing cupboard has revealed one pair of knickers and three odd socks. Odd in the sense that they've lost their partners, rather than them being bizaare.

I'm wondering if 'Odd sock' syndrome is the true indicator of our decadent western life style. It's certainly an enduring problem. When did it begin exactly, this overly abundant, luxuriant supply of socks, that has lead to the callous indifference towards the individual? One sock goes astray leaving the other condemned to life, unloved, in the dark of the airing cupboard - sometimes for years.

'Odd sock' syndrome was something that annoyed my uncle. He was one of those brilliantly brained, ( in his case, a rocket scientist who worked for the British government) not mad, but certainly a charismatic individual, who I adored and who could be perplexed by the intricacies of domestic life.

He'd be somewhere or other during the week and returned home at the weekends. Every time we visited, the house seemed to have become an extension of his lab. I think my aunt found solace in the W.I.  However on one occasion, things went too far.  They lived in a five storey house in Henley- a nice expensive property by the river. My aunt finally lost it, when she returned from a shopping excursion to find my uncle had cut large holes in each of the floors, so that he could do a velocity experiment for his latest 'drop test' theory!  

Despite his wizardry with things scientific, my uncle could never understand how a pair of socks could be put into the washing machine and at the end of the cycle, only one came out. This was researched in some detail, with the holes in the floor doubling up for a 'washing socks' experiment, which also involved two washing machines being placed in the drive, with their cables neatly threaded back through the letter box into the house where they were plugged in and turned on.  Unlike his rockets the sock experiment was a disaster.

In the end for his peace of mind, my own and everyone else's, I gave him a sock holder for the washing machine, in the shape of two feet - left and right. Each sock was poked through a hole which held it in place while being pummeled, rinsed and spun. Between them, the feet could take five pairs of socks. Never a sock was lost in that household ever again.
A remarkably cheap solution in comparison to the repair costs for the floors.

Almost Cravantaise. . .

Just three weeks away from our move to France now. The idea that had been lurking in our heads for a while,  was then firmed up April 2013 and rolled out over the last twelve months, is almost a reality. Feels quite strange.

Think it was the photo of the house up on the estate agent's website last week that helped it all to sink in - along with all the paperwork. There's quite a bit of it. Very interesting, which is just as well, as there's no alternative but to do it. Some had to be put in place over here. Others we can't complete till we're over there, one of which is a paper in French and English. The French authorities have to stamp it first,  then they send that section along with the English section back to the UK for completion. As we're coming back for a week in June, maybe if they pull their finger out and get it done in time, we could bring it back to the UK for them. Save them the cost of a postage stamp - in these days of austerity and all that. 

We're now on the landlord register as we're letting our house out while we're away. We've also finally accumulated all the birth certificates and marriage certificates (across several generations!) that are needed for our residency cards. Mike was straightforward as he had most of this information already. But being adopted, I had to get a copy of my original birth certificate as well as my adoption certificate, because all my names are different from when I first arrived in the world. Then my adoptive parents birth certificates and their marriage certificate. It's practically a whole new filing cabinet and articulated lorry to get that pile across the channel. Anyway it's done.

The car received the full treatment yesterday, with a major service, tyre change etc., and all the headlights were replaced to meet French requirements. A legal necessity if your staying longer that three months I believe, or may be it's six. We've held on to the original British headlights, which we'll store so that when we come back, they can be put back. That was a painful bill.  Fortunately red wine bottle to hand from Fabrice Gasnier- the sounds of cork popping, wine poured into glass and then a taste, and Mike had fully recovered. The last thing to do on the car is when we get to France, where we must register the car for a French number plate.  But have all the paperwork now for that. Tax paperwork is all in the system. Phones, internet connections, postal redirection. There's loads of detail. Almost there, but not quite. Mike is downstairs working on the next batch.

'Reckless' the house elf

On a serious note, I've been having problems with the staff. I think the staff - otherwise known as 'Reckless the house elf' - has had a turn, or perhaps hasn't fully recovered from the cost of the car service. He's been behaving both badly and strangely. 

Yesterday afternoon I was making a batch of lavender ice cream, which I admit is particularly delicious. I turned away briefly from the freezer container in which I had just placed it and suddenly noticed movement. A long arm with spoon attached, was attacking the ice cream and had left a hole. The photo of the culprit was taken shortly afterwards and the expression on the face says it all. Then this morning, he emerges from just having a shower, holding an umbrella.  

Dear readers - do you think I should be concerned, or should I just open another bottle of wine?

Are you still proud to be British?

I've always felt uneasy with this collective noun approach.  Britishness is a complex and contentious subject and depends on who you're talking to.  What is it exactly? Put someone English, Irish, Welsh and Scots in the same room who know their histories and pose them the same question, then spice it up with tales of Empire and colonialism, some stories perhaps from say Bradford, the experiences of representatives from pressure groups for the socially excluded, and the perspectives would likely be different. A variable ideology.  Along with tolerance, language, landscape, creativity, inventiveness, self-depracation I'd of course have to include marmite. 

I was asked this question the other day over coffee with friends. A simple little question -  one that gets thrown at you from time to time, and which you try to answer within a two minute time-frame, to avoid appearing to 'hog the conversation'.  Clearly my subconscious didn't rate my reply. Because here I am wide awake at 5.30am with it leaping about it my brain. Sad case really.

There wasn't one thing in particular that triggered the question. May be it was something as simple as our imminent move to France for a few years. We'd actually been discussing the second world war's continuing ability to surprise. May be Britishness during war or that war in particular is easier to define. But in any case as Anthony Horowitz put it in a Telegraph interview about the return of Foyle's War, 'there were still stories to tell', which is why the production team jumped at the chance of some more episodes. 

Also  Shetland had been on tv just a few days previously. Based on Anne Cleeve's book - Red Bones  The Shetland Bus was ultimately at the heart of the mystery, which I knew nothing about but as the link reveals, was a vital and dangerous boat run with Norway. Then we moved on to  Peter May's Lewis Trilogy, Annie Proulx and Tony Hillerman, all of whom are authors for whom a wide-open landscape establishes a powerful influence on their storylines.  There's also been something on the BBC website in the last few days about Australian Nancy Wake, otherwise known as the white mouse, who led an escape ring and was a member of the Maquis against German occupation, and whose ashes have just been scattered in the village of Verneix. Last year while we were in France, we went to see an exhibition in Romorantin-Lanthenay, about an hour away from us, and walking around came across the town's war memorial. One one side were listed all the British agents with their code names, who had been working alongside the local resistance. Never seen that before, anywhere. 

Then this morning there was something on the Beeb about 'What Japanese History leaves out'. Mind you there is a difference between what is deliberately left out and what remains simply overlooked. I was never aware through school, despite History being a main subject for me, that it was the British who created concentration camps, during the Anglo-Boer war. It took marriage to Mike and meetings with his South African relatives for me to discover that painful episode. 

May be self-reflection should be added to my list. Good things. Bad things. There are so many aspects and conflicting values surrounding Britishness. All I know is that ultimately I can't see myself living anywhere else. If successive governments and the Commission of Racial Equality in various papers can't define it, sure as hell, neither can I.

I never knew that

A Theatre Dictionary was posted by a friend a few days ago, via Prosound. It's a poem that cleverly relates the contrasting terms and their meanings that the language of theatre incorporates.  Fortunately Mike and I spent some time working in the theatre, so it's been a laugh reading it.  But for anyone who's not used to working in that environment, it's probably totally confusing. However it served to remind me of a moment back in the late 60s.

I was living down in East Sussex and had been sent to a local drama school, in part to encourage me to speak 'proper'. I so enjoyed myself that it became my main interest as a teenager, and it was here that I met a poem called  The Sleeping Bag. I had to learn it for a voice exam - a fun poem to recite but quite tricky. The first few lines go like this:

On the outside grows the furside; on the inside grows the skinside.
So the furside is the outside and the skinside is the inside.
One side likes the skinside inside, and the furside on the outside.
Others like the skinside outside, and the furside on the inside. If you turn the skinside outside, thinking you will side with that side, then the soft side, furside's inside, which, some argue, is the wrong side. . .

There's more, but I've put a link to the poem below.

What no one ever explained and I clearly couldn't be bothered at the time to find out, is that this humorous poem was written by Herbert Ponting F.R.P.S. a professional photographer, who was expedition photographer and cinematographer for  Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and the South Pole (1910-1913). I literally only found this out a couple of days ago. Ponting captured some of the most enduring images of antartic exploration and is generally regarded as a pioneer of modern polar photography. Given his working environment the words become very powerful and poignant. The poem was included in the 1948 film  Scott of the Antartic, but perhaps was inspired by the sight of Scott's team wriggling laboriously into their sleeping bags, as depicted in Ponting's classic documentary The Great White Silence. Restored and shown by the British Film Institute in 2011, I've attached a review of the showing. It's clearly a masterpiece, which I'm now hoping my nearest and dearest might be encouraged to buy me for my birthday!!HINT!!! HINT!!!HINT!!!

A Close Shave

This blog isn't about sheep.  But I have included a photo of some sheep for any fans of the four legged ruminants, which was taken at West Dean, West Sussex this morning.

As with all Aardman Animations, the characters have been well named for the adventures they're about to embark on. Young 'Shaun' is a case in point. It isn't always so for us humans.

The business of names and naming was something I read about a few months ago in an online French publication. I then put it to the back of my mind and completely forgot about it, until yesterday when the subject re-emerged in of all places, Chichester Cathedral. The article was called Le droit à changer de prénom. An interesting piece, which discussed the pros and cons of whether offspring/children should have the right to change the first names they'd been given by their parent(s). Careful research showed how different cultures and the families within them, went about choosing names for a new arrival. There were several examples of where the first name was changed as the child grew up and reached a key stage of development in his or her life.

I have occasionally thought how nice it would be to change my middle name. It isn't bad - Mary. I just don't happen to like it very much, whereas I do like my first name and wouldn't want to change that. Mary was also the 'family' name. So given that significance, I've never done anything about it and being my second name, it was something I could live with, as it was seldom used.  Even so, my naming was very much a 'close shave'. My mother had been determined - I shudder at the thought and please, try to keep the laughter below Richter scale levels - to call me Primrose Rosemary!  Fortunately my Dad wouldn't have any of it - yeah for Dad! - although quite where he got the idea of Hilary from, I don't know. But I'm very glad he did and very glad I was named at least from my point of view,  with my names in the right order. If it had been Mary Hilary,  I might well have become the subject of the article!

The notion that someone should have the right to change their first name if they don't like it, is a real sign of our times.  Can't imagine it was an option in the 1800s. While ambling around inside the cathedral yesterday afternoon, Mike called me over to have a look at a gravestone from the same period that had been laid into the cathedral floor. Two sisters. The first one was called Anne. Straightforward. Nothing untoward. Have known and do know a few, some with an 'e' at the end and some not. Then underneath Anne came her sister.  Theopilania! For goodness sake! What had she done wrong? Anne and Theopilania. It's not easy to say. 'Hello I'm Anne and this is my sister - Theopilania'. Oh dear.

Intrigued as to the meaning, I did some research on the internet. There appeared to be no such name. Rather flippantly, the suggestion was made that perhaps there had been a spelling mistake. Having taken down all the details of ages etc, I had another look on the internet this afternoon. And guess what! According to the records that are available on line in the public domain, there had been a spelling mistake. Not once but twice.  The records show that Ann was spelt without an  'e' as in the cathedral spelling, and poor Theopilania was really meant to be Theophania - a rather interesting name from which Tiffany originates as follows: Old French for Tifaine or Epiphany which is from the Ecclesiastic Late Latin, Theophania (Epiphany/Manifestation of God).

What a turn up! Why weren't the mistakes - if they were mistakes - ever rectified?
Hairy stuff this name business and presumably it's too late to do anything about it now.
Suddenly Hilary Mary seems fine to me.

Curiosity killed the cat

Being a Leo with insatiable curiosity this is a concern. I hope to be around a while longer!
And even though I'm not really into astrology, I do recognize that I have always possessed a strong desire to 'find out'. Right now this is a particularly useful characteristic to have. . . forms for this and forms for that, in France, and forms for this and forms for that, in the UK. But at least we'll be legal. 

 A Uni friend of mine put up a quote on FB the other morning (via True Activist) by Albert Einstein - 'I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious'. As Jackie said after she'd posted it, 'what's good enough for Al is good enough for me'.  Which reminds me. There's a great track by Paul Simon off his 'Graceland' album called 'Call Me Al' and a ridiculous video of it on you tube with P.S. and Chevy Chase that'll definitely raise a laugh on a rather grey day.

Here we go. One thought leads to another. So now what's sprung into my mind?  Famous people called Al. Who to start with? A 1930s gangster or a 20th/21st century politician. Hard choice, but probably Al Gore is the more decent human, so he can take pole position, rather than Al Capone. Who else? Well there's Al Pacino, Al Jolson. Al Green. Al Jarreau. Al Foster toured with Miles Davis as his drummer. Al Dubin wrote the lyrics for amongst other things 'Lullaby of Broadway'. Al Jardine - Beach Boys, sometimes referred to as 'the lost Beach Boy' as he was the only one who wasn't a 'Wilson'. Probably there are more. Some smart arse on the internet came up with Al Qaeda.

This cat had better watch out!