Souvenirs, souvenirs...

Photo courtesy of reddman


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Reading Colin Randall’s post about package tours over on Salut! reminded me of the time my mum and I went on a day trip to Boulogne.

Mum had spotted an advert for the trip in the local paper. The coach would be picking people up from various towns around North Shropshire, including ours. In an effort to rouse me from the depths of despair (it’s a long story), Mum offered to treat me.

So the following Sunday night, Dad dropped us off at the bus station. It was bitterly cold and the sound of our stamping feet echoed eerily around the deserted car park.

“Do you think we’re the only ones going?” asked Mum, peering into the window of the dark, empty and locked office building. “Perhaps they’ve forgotten us…”

“Don’t be daft,” I said. The manager was my ex-boyfriend and he definitely wouldn’t have forgotten…

We shuffled round the bus station for about half an hour until Mum decided to ring the said ex-boyfriend to see what had happened. It was getting late.

“Oh,” said Steve sleepily, when he finally answered. “Sorry. We must have forgotten you. Don’t worry – I’ll send someone to pick you up.”

This time at least, he was true to his word. Twenty minutes later, a coach rumbled into view and the driver – a mournful, short-sighted chap – climbed down a tad unsteadily and squinted at us.

“Forgot yer, did they? Lucky I was in when Steve called – I’d only just got back from the pub. C’mon then – off we go.”

Recklessly, we followed him on to the bus. It might have seemed rude to sit at the back of an empty coach, so we sat near the driver, to keep him company.

“Now then…” He fumbled with various knobs and levers, “um…yeah…that’s it…um…” and the coach lurched violently backwards towards the exit.

“Could yer just guide me out?” he shouted, above the grinding, squealing noise. “’aven’t driven one of these fer a while.”

“Oh…why’s that?” I shouted back, perhaps unwisely. “Have you…Left! Left! No, TURN LEFT!”

Now, I can’t swear to it, but that concrete gatepost might possibly have been breathing in as we reversed into the street. I could be wrong, of course, but the sensation was tangible…

When he had located first gear, the driver turned round to answer my question:

“Well, I used to be a driver, like, but I got the sack, see. Wrote one of their buses off… doing this as a favour, like.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “Is this the right way?”

Mum and I ought to have been desperately worried at this stage and there was still time to leap out and run for our lives. Instead, we had to duck behind the headrests of the seats in front so the poor man couldn’t see how hard we were laughing.

Once out of town, the coach gathered speed – the driver had got the hang of it now, and the Shropshire countryside was flashing past the window in a blur.

“’ave to put me foot down a bit,” he said, “if we wanna get to Hilton Park Services on time.”

Nodding, we clung to our arm rests. Getting there uninjured would be OK by us. Really it would.

A roundabout loomed. Hmm. Tricky one.

“M6, M6…can yer see the sign? ’ere?…no, that’s not it…er…ooh…yeah, why not?”

The coach veered off on to a dimly-lit country road and continued for about five minutes before screeching to a halt next to a mysterious row of lights on the verge.

“Eee – that was a bit close,” muttered the driver who had made us get out to have a look. The coach was teetering on the brink of a four-foot deep trench. As we giggled nervously, he frowned and scratched his head:

“This canna be the way to the M6. Dunno ’ow I’m gonna turn round, though.”

I can’t remember how we did turn around but somehow we made it to Hilton Park Services in time to catch the proper coach. Saying our goodbyes with tight, bright smiles, we watched with an indescribable sense of relief as the driver finally found his way out of the car park and disappeared into the night.

Boulogne was far less exciting. It was midday and it was raining. We sat in a café for quite a long time pretending to be French then tried to find something to eat that wasn’t Fish and Chips or Welsh Rarebit.

As the afternoon drizzled on, it dawned on us that the shops weren’t going to open at all because it was Monday and half-day closing. We had to be back on the coach by four so we made a mad dash around Monoprix, the only shop that was open, then another mad dash down to the port where the ferry was waiting to take us home.

As our fellow travellers congratulated themselves on having bought three zillion bottles of beer or whatever, we contemplated our own hasty purchases: two cans of Elnett hairspray and a giant jar of Dijon mustard.

And I do sometimes wonder, even now, if that poor bloke ever found his way home…

Living in an Acronym

Well, I’m slowly getting back to normal (relatively speaking, of course) and having finally retrieved my laptop from the depths of one of the many cardboard boxes that are still cluttering up my new flat, I have decided to catch up on my writing…

Yes! I am now the proud locataire of a council flat just fifteen minutes’ walk away from my place of work. And about time too: it took three years of filling in forms, writing begging letters and getting to know people who knew people who knew people…three years of sobbing hysterically into answer machines, pleading impoverishment/indigestion/insanity and threatening to plant a bomb in the housing offices (nah – made that one up) before they finally relented and gave me one.

Council housing is called HLM which stands for Habitation à Loyer Modéré – housing at a moderate rent. The first HLM were built for workers who came to the towns during the second industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. At first, these workers were housed in shoddy ‘rabbit cages’ built by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Crime and disease were rife and of such concern to the philanthropists of the day that steps were rapidly taken to improve the state of worker housing.

The first of these was the creation of the Société des Cités Ouvrières (Society for Worker Cities), founded in Paris in 1849 by a group of such philanthropists. With financial help from the government of Louis Napoléon, they built the Cité Napoléon with the aim of housing ten thousand workers and their families in clean, affordable blocks of flats in every district of Paris. It was never finished and still stands on the rue Rochechouart, as one of Paris’ lesser-known historical monuments. One of the reasons for its failure was that it was hardly much better than the ‘rabbit cages’ it was supposed to replace and would, according to moral reformers, encourage the spread of sexual immorality and – horror of horrors - ‘socialism’. It did, however, pave the way for later cités ouvrières built during the Second Empire.

Since then, social housing has undergone numerous changes. In the nineteen-fifties, there were more white-collar workers living in HLMs than there were manual labourers, the majority of whom were living in inferior, insalubrious private housing. During the sixties, huge tower blocks, known as barres, were built and for the next decade, the percentage of ouvrier tenants increased. From the eighties, the occupants got poorer and poorer and today, they make up the majority of tenants.

Living in an acronym does have its advantages. My HLM is in a ZUS (as opposed to a ZAC or a ZUP) – that is, a Zone Urbaine Sensible which is a euphemism for a trouble spot. This means that local government spends a lot of money trying to make the place look nice. My sweet little flat has been renovated and now boasts a wooden balcony, with a view of the Vercors mountains (I also have a view of the Chartreuse mountains from my kitchen and the Belledonne mountains from my bedroom). I have double glazing, under floor heating and a brand new bath tub. I was also given wallpaper (which I could choose from a limited range), paste, paint and plaster which launched me into a frenzy of DIY. I’m rather proud of my efforts, I must admit – apart from the bit of paper I stuck on upside-down and the mysterious gaps near the ceiling.

Even the cat has lent a helping paw. Unfortunately, she doesn’t understand that the stripping had to be done before I put the new wallpaper on.

I can’t show you a photo of my newly-decorated flat as someone has nicked my camera but if any of you are in the area, please let me know and I’ll invite you for tea and show you around. Oh and bring your toolbox – I’ve still got a few shelves to put up…

Marseille soap and other fiction

I haven’t written anything for a while simply because I have horrendous stuff going on at home and my brain has just packed up its neurons and left.

So…I’ve been watching a lot of mindless television. I don’t watch telly usually – I don’t even own a set. However, I can get a few channels on the computer and for the past few weeks I’ve been sitting in front of various émissions with a glazed expression on my face (so I’m told).


One programme I admit to being fond of is Inspecteur Derrick. It’s not even French – it’s German. The title music is great – DER DER! DER DER! DER DER! DER DER!…di da di da di daa, da da da da, di da da – (hope you got that) and the seedy seventies’ atmosphere, all orange and brown geometric patterns, Formica and men in polo neck sweaters, stirs up memories of a simpler time. Derrick is a rather unattractive but charismatic policeman while his sidekick, Harry, has perfectly blow-dried hair. Together, in beige gabardine raincoats, they weed out the criminals of Munich with a mixture of psychology, meaningful facial expressions and a total lack of humour. I just love it…


Another programme (that I do not admit to watching) is Plus Belle La Vie. Set in a district of Marseille, this could be compared to Eastenders – except that it’s nothing like Eastenders. Everybody is beautifully dressed and coiffed and even the students live in luxury flats with designer furniture. The people who live in the quartier Mistral are prone to being kidnapped with alarming frequency and when they’re not being kidnapped, they’re committing adultery, taking drugs, discovering they’re gay, losing their memories and…oh, I can’t be bothered. You get the picture.

Yet in the midst of all this trauma, they still find time to pontificate on the issues of the day: homophobia, racism, religion, the environment, the recession - it’s all there. And even though the actors sound as if they’re reading aloud from a political manifesto, I suppose it does make a nice change from “Rickaaaaaaaay”!



Now I come to think of it, all the soap operas in France are unrealistic. I remember Hélène et les Garçons, a series from the early nineties about a group of students. These students also lived in luxury flats, wore designer clothes and spent most of their time drinking strangely fluorescent beverages in a café or going to the gym. I don’t remember ever seeing them revising for exams or having spots or hangovers. Sous le Soleil, however, was a soap opera set in St Tropez so you’d expect everybody to be rich – even if they were waitresses in a snack bar on the beach.

So why is there such a difference between the English soap operas and the French séries televisées? Perhaps it’s because the English are basically a nation of nosey-parkers and watching the lives of ordinary working-class people on television is akin to peeking through the net curtains at the neighbours. The French, on the other hand, are an altogether more gregarious bunch so other people’s lives hold no mystery for them. They prefer escapism, preferably with a designer dress and a yacht or two thrown in. It’s also something for them to aspire to…

That’s enough thinking for today. I’m exhausted.

Now, what’s on telly? Hmmmm. Le météo…great. I do love a good piece of fiction…

French Bred

Just a little plug for a great book by Frédéric Guarino called French Bred.

Frédéric was born and raised in Paris. He moved to the Boston area in 1988, following his American wife, knowing very little English and even less about American culture. Along the way, he learnt his new country's language well enough to feel comfortable writing again. Now a divorced father of two, he lives in Medway, Massachusetts, runs his own business and somehow found the time to write "French Bred", his first book.

This is a wry look at the French...from a Frenchman's point of view - which makes a nice change!

I've put the link in the side-bar under "Favourite Views".

Brilliant title too, I think...

Holiday Plans

The winter school holidays are nearly at an end here in Grenoble. France is divided into three school zones: A, B and C and the holidays are not at the same time because otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough room on the mountains for all the skiers (the entire population of France – except for me - goes skiing in winter).

I had far more exciting plans. I was going to go walking for two hours every day, lose five kilos, clean the house and work on my novel, A Stitch in Time.

Of course, I fully expected a few hiccoughs along the way although I hadn’t anticipated the drunken teenaged boy that my daughter and her friends had selflessly picked up – literally – and brought home to sleep it off on my sofa. I startled him in the kitchen the next morning as I shuffled to the loo in my nightie. As he stared at a point somewhere beyond my left shoulder, he explained to me that he had cleaned up nearly all of the vomit but that he’d run out of washing-up liquid.

I shuffled back to bed.

The cat disappeared. Now, I have never considered myself an animal lover. I like animals well enough as long as they belong to other people but you won’t find any calendars with photos of kittens on them in my house. However, my cat is different. She is an intelligent human being who just happens to have fur, pointy ears and a silly name (my daughter named her Sugar). For three days, I wandered around the quartier shouting for her like some deranged fan of The Archies and I even knocked on a stranger's door and asked if I could look in their garden. Sugar eventually waltzed in through the cat flap at four o’clock one morning without so much as an apology. She treats this house like a hotel, that one.

Then my youngest daughter dyed her beautiful black hair – and several towels and a bath mat - bright orange.

Oh, and my middle daughter decided to go to London with a couple of friends for a few days.

“Where will you stay?” I asked, prising my eyes from the online newspaper article I was reading about the most recent fatal stabbings in that city.

“Oh – we’ll find somewhere when we get there. Bye.”

Of course, she’s just turned eighteen so she can do whatever she wants, as she likes to remind me two or three times a day. But she probably didn’t count on missing the plane back. Or running out of money. My wonderful sister – who has a demanding job - immediately arranged train tickets for all of them to her home in Eastbourne and promised to drive them to the airport the following morning in time to catch the early flight. Sisters are great. Teenagers and cats, on the other hand…

To see me through these crises, I resorted to piles of jam sandwiches and bowls of porridge washed down with litres of sweet, milky coffee. I’ve put on five kilos. Of course, I couldn’t go walking for two hours every day because all those sleepless nights meant I was getting up at three o’clock in the afternoon.



But I did get some work done on my novel. Once I’d checked my email, read every single one of the British newspapers online twice, played Solitaire, checked my email, phoned my mum, read all the adverts for Losing Tummy Flab, Earning Money From Home and Tree Consulting (found that one on my blog) and checked my email, I wrote three paragraphs of chapter seventeen and deleted two.

I wonder why you’re supposed to call it a work in progress, though?

Soldes out

According to mental health experts, January is the most depressing month of the year. In France this is because of les Soldes (the Sales) – at least, that’s my theory.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the word solde was a slang word used by cloth merchants to designate off-cuts that were sold at – um – cut price. The word comes from the Italian, saldo and means ‘balance’ as in bank balance.

Well, thanks to the festivities, my bank balance has shrivelled like a burst balloon while my cheques are bouncier than ever. So what bright spark decided that this was the perfect time of year to induce shopping frenzy in the pecuniary challenged?

Simon Mannoury, that’s who. In 1830, he opened Paris’s first department store, Le Petit Saint-Thomas, in rue du Bac. He had plenty of great ideas: he was the first to mark prices on his goods, he invented mail-order and he even brought a donkey into the shop for the children to ride on. Fortunately, that idea was shelved pretty quickly.

Photo Eau de Paris

Monsieur Mannoury also introduced the concept of Soldes. In order to liquidate stock at the end of the season, he sold everything off at reduced prices. Of course, this was very popular but I do wonder if he had any notion of what he’d started…


In France, les Soldes are regulated by law and must begin and end on dates specified by the government: for example, the current sales period began on 7th January and will end on 10th February. Winter and summer Soldes last for five weeks each and shopkeepers are allowed to choose two other weeks during the year, as long as they are not too close to the main sales period.

But all that doesn’t really matter to me. By the time I’ve saved up enough money to go to the sales, all that’ll be left will be a couple of acrylic tank-tops in a colour that doesn’t go with anything, a few dozen tan panty-hose and a job-lot of mysterious kitchen utensils that I never knew I needed.

Although you never know. And they are very cheap…

Name that king!

Louis the Lazy



On this day in 898, Charles III, known as Charles the Simple, was crowned King of the Franks. I was relieved to discover that at that time, ‘simple’ meant ‘honest’ rather than 'stupid' but it got me thinking about the other nicknames the French gave to their kings.

Whereas the English named their monarchs ‘the unready’ or ‘the glorious’ or ‘the peaceable’, they didn’t often resort to personal insults, like the French (unless you count William the Conqueror who was also known as William the Bastard – but I have a feeling that wasn’t meant to be an insult and anyway, he was French).

I mean, fancy calling your king Charles the Fat, Charles the Bald or Charles the Mad! Not to mention Louis the Stammerer, Louis the Lazy, Louis the Quarreller, Louis the Universal Spider and - my favourite – John the Posthumous (perhaps he was just very quiet).

Still - what can you expect from a people who call the heir to the throne a dolphin?



BONNE ANNEE!