Faire un tabac; Make a tobacco. (Be the toast of the town)

Okay so it's been about a week since I updated this, if I'm honest then I've just been being lazy. I'm fully recovered from my nasty French flu but I was tired as after it, so got lots of fresh air, have been walking the dog, reading my book and just chilling out.

I left my last blog just before the weekend so thats where I'll start it! Saturday I headed off on an adventure to Val D'Europe to do some shopping and it's been ages since I visited there! Took me an hour to walk to Disney (it's still exciting I can do that, cutting across the fields and looking ahead to see space mountain in the distance) then hopped on a bus from chessy and 5 minutes later voila! I swear the place is bigger than I remember it and it has EVERYTHING. I fell into Auchan and came out 20€ lighter...but had nearly a weeks food shopping and some stationery...what is it with new stationery why is it so exciting to buy, why is a stationery aisle always so appealing?! Anyway I mentally spent several hundred pound in there but left as I had to haul it all back home still.

Few piccies for those who have never seen it, this place is mere minutes by RER/bus from Disneyland.

One of the entrances:



Inside:



More inside....





A little music whilst you shop...



There is way more to the place than that, there's a whole other floor, an aquarium a massive food court, an entire outdoor street known as 'the village' which is a massive seconds designer outlet and not many people know it's there... It's awesome I get to live in a lovely very French village in the middle of nowhere but for entertainment I have Disneyland and for shopping etc I have this place right on my doorstep and central Paris is 30 mins away should I fancy it! Ideal location, I'm a very lucky girl and I know it right now.

One of the things I haven't mentioned here before is the Graf in the area. The french love their street 'art' and even in my sleepy little area these treasures are present (sorry picture extravaganza today people!)

Here kitty kitty... (there's also a tiger randomly on the wall a couple of streets away)



Photographing me photographing vous...



One of several cats (I found a new incredible one today will get pics up soon!!!)



Interesting...



It's everywhere!!!

Anyway that was Saturday. Sunday got off to a very stupid proper blonde start. Alarm went off at 04:15am ready to switch on the computer, turn on expat shield and log onto ITV (thank you expat shield for allowing me to watch UK tv!!!) and watch the Wales match... Just one rather stoopid problem. It may be 04:15am and kick off is at 04:30am, but that is UK time and I'm in France!!!!! So it's only 03:15am in the UK. Anoyed but awake I switched on the coffee machine and read my book whilst dipping in and out of watching this years Olympia for an hour and then the match started. When I had watched Wales win I got up went for a small run myself with a few basic squats, lunges and press ups thrown in before heading back to shower and watch England win! Awesome start to the day.

Once the matches were over i headed over to Esbly to the Brocante and to pop to Zoe's for an aperitif and a catchup after. Now Brocantes are fascinating. It is basically a car boot/garage sale but the whole town empties all the rubbish from their houses and sells it on the street or outside their house, as opposed to flogging it from their car boot in a muddy field somewhere whilst charging you for the privilege of sloshing through the mud to look at their aforementioned mentioned rubbish. I strolled over the canals to Esbly wondering if I'd find it going on anywhere obvious (the one the week before in my village was a teeny affair and got rained off) but sure enough when I got to Esbly what gave it away was that normally Esbly high street is like a ghost town, maybe the usual guy with his glass of wine sat outside the local bar (yup he's there, even at 7am!) the guy smoking outside his tabac store and some tumbleweed drifting past, but today...

Esbly high street in the grip of a Brocante!!



They really do sell anything...



It was fabulous wondering round perusing the stalls there was some fab stuff! You have to haggle too I was told, often you can get it for half what it's marked at. You have got to remember at these events though, you are in france and the french are not spatially aware (actually they just dont care) and if they walk into you it's officially your fault so you get jostled through and you have to deal with it. This is them, they aren't british, I'm not in the uk, they're not super rude they are how they are the same way that Hugh Grant epitomises us English people (bumbling and apologetic and wondering why the rest of the world aren't as polite as us) Someone once said that if abroad you could always find the British people in a darkened auditorium by just working your way along the rows treading on peoples toes until someone apologises to you...

Anyway the atmosphere was fab on a sleepy Sunday morning meanwhile let it never be said that the French dont stereotype themselves over the whole French bread thing:



Yep they do it all the time, you know you are near a boulangerie, the number of people passing you with baguettes under their arm increases. Speaking of French bread did you know the word baguette basically means three things. 1. That I can't remember (useful I know) 2. French stick (obviously) 3. If you go to a Chinese restaurant and ask for a baguette you'll get chopsticks...

No wonder I'm finding it to so hard to learn French (asides the fact my friends out here are English, American, Irish and south African...) it's even more of a wonder when my bilingual housemate tells me she once counted 54 variations of the SAME verb.

So post Brocante I popped into see Zoe who along with her husband filled me up with the loveliest food as they always do, allowed me to chase the chickens, amused the boys on the trampoline and played with the dogs

Silly soppy boys...



before heading home along the canals to walk off the food and especially the amazing strawberry Flan we had for afters.

Zoe had told me of this little workout area just off the canal which was on my route home so decided to check it out as having walked that way several times I couldn't recall what she was on about. Sure enough I came across first this sign which is a grafted map of the route:



Then there are signs telling you where to rest and jog:



And then mini obstacles on the path!







Fabulous!!! So been using them initially in the morning but lately the light has turned almost overnight and the mornings are suddenly extremely dark now...rubbish.

The next night I was out walking Sasha and exploring a new part of the canal when I acme across more signs!

Suggesting stretches:





Some chin bars just off the path:



The canals here are beautiful and so these are an amazing addition to a jog! I love the scenery out here you get the most amazing fauna and flora, came across these very beautiful flowers growing wild



And it turns out in France they didn't get the memo that these were rare...



Turns out the grey Squiggles are the rare ones here... Beeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaauuuutiful!

Any who it's not been all play. Actually yes it has but that's besides the point. I do also have to work. Sometimes. Apart from today during my 15 min break between class change over, it was super hot so i was sunbathing down at le stade, watching the little lizards scurrying about and thinking how much I was hating being me. Damn any minute now a bunch of children are going to turn up and we are going to play for an hour....I'm getting paid for this *smug mode*.

This week I've been teaching throwing which is pretty easy going however if you asked my friend Shawnee who I spent half an hour throwing an American football round with pre-fitness training with the aigles de meaux American football team...he'd laugh. But I am apparently starting to throw less like a girl and getting a good spin on the ball. When he's not ripping into me for being a sports teacher. Annoyingly I could have gone to Disney with him tonight to play golf but I had parents evening, although parents evening is fun, especially the couple of hours respite I had during which Michelle and I popped to the boulangerie in Montry, bought pastries and flopped on the grass in a mini park to consume and discuss our lives. Is the little moments like that I enjoy the most!

It's just as well from next week life gets way more hectic... I have to do 2 extra dance and drama workshops after school from then so a lot more planning is involved from next week and I got a taster of the work that is cut out for me in running these on Wednesday when I did a dance workshop with some of the children in the afternoon. Some of the girls who signed up for it really surmised me, until we started the class then I realised they had thought dance was the easy option and had just come to be able to jump around without structure... When they discovered I had a routine for them to learn and perform to the others an hour later which required them to listen and learn their easy afternoon get out clause bubble was well and truly burst and they'd missed out on plan B which was a nice easy afternoon of arts and crafts...that'll learn them. But it's not my job to let them mess about therefore it wasn't allowed. I can be quite tough on them but you have to be and so far I've had reports from parents saying everything from the lessons are good (from children who never say that about sport), to their favourite, to the best lesson they ever had...so it's working somewhere down the line!

Anyway that's pretty much it for the week, not my usual tone and lots of pics but it's been a recovery week so my brain isn't up to scratch yet. However it's almost the weekend for which so far the plan is I am heading into Paris to watch the rugby Saturday morning, then I am spending the day in Paris before going to see Excalibur at le stade du France with friends Saturday night, a few drinks in Paris then home. Genial!

Bon soirée

Karen xxx

avoir un chat dans la gorge ) (lit: to have a cat in your throat): to have a frog in your throat

So I'm now feeling a million times more human again thank god! I honestly felt horrendous start of the week, it was awful! There's been a lot of hacking and coughing as it hit my chest but I've soldiered on (yeah I know okay break out the violin) but you can't be poorly when running after children all day and everyone has been soooo nice! I crawled out of bed one morning to find this 'soothe your throat' kit set up for me in the kitchen from the landlady...



And then there was this genius pressie to cheer me up found by Michelle



Fabulous!!!

Voice is still hanging in there...just! although very nearly lost it today as the kids were especially fractious and trying to make yourself heard in a big open space is not easy! Someone with a particularly cruel sense of humour designed this timetable and saw fit to make Friday afternoons a 2 hour lesson with the CP class (the youngest in the school...) Every session with the younger years I use 'heads, shoulders, knees and toes'. This has been a massive succes as it has been filtering back to the parents who have been asking me about it at the school gates...

"ah my leetle guuurl sez they 'ave beeeen learrrrneeeng a song, sum-seenk about 'eads and shoulderrrrrs"

My initial thought was a suspicious gangster style

"why who wants to know?!"

Turns out They LOVE it (the parents and kids do) Good shout :)

But this Friday...not so much love.

heads, shoulders, knees and etienne please stop that...
heads, shoulders, knees and Pierre stand by me....
And eyes and MARIE!!! and mouth and Matt..
Heads, Jean, pay attention! Knees and toes....

I felt like Joyce Grenfell.

Quite a lot of extra curricular going on this week as we prepare for the upcoming workshops. In France schools are almost like a daycare for parents I mean the children at our school can be there from 08:30 til 7pm and asides normal lessons there are English enrichment classes (supplementary English lessons in addition to normal English lessons) and soon to be added to the timetable will be workshops. These are extra curricular but also held in English. We sat down and discussed what workshops Michelle, Christian and I would be offering and as of the end of September I will be running dance and drama! (of course).

Also this week on Thursday night we had the first of the parents evenings, where the parents come in and we present to them the programme for the year. The English department line up looked like the start of a bad joke as there was Anne who is Irish, Chris who is Welsh, I'm English and Michelle is South African... What an international bunch we are and only one country away from populating the school with the entire British isles. Christian spoke about the English plans for the year, Michelle spoke about English and History, Anne English enrichment and me...the only non French speaker had to talk about sport as for me the next year will see athletics, ball sports, dance, gymnastics and finally orienteering. I have a busy year ahead! The parents were all very keen to know I would NOT be speaking any French to their children as they want them surrounded by English (absolutely no worries for them there!) and the talks went well. I had an interpreter (good work to that woman I speak at a rate of knots!) but generally despite my liveliness I think the French understand me pretty well...
I speak mostly franglais and mime! Drop in French words when I know them, English when I dont and hand gestures otherwise... Luckily for me. In fact the fact I'm so animated amuses them no end so I've been getting on just fine.

As we had a good few hours between end of lesson and the start of parents evening Chritsian, Michelle and I all took ourselves for a walk into Montry, grabbed a fresh baguette at the local boulangerie and some cream cheese and headed back to school for our 'supper'. Very civilised. We aren't actually but it sounds it. Also this week Michelle bought us another little pressie...



Yes sir you can now get mcvities in France!!! Although cheeky beggars the advert says
'C'est Anglais, mais, c'est Bon!' which translates to 'it's English, but, it's good!'

I also found cadburys milk and WHITE chocolate fingers in my local! Now if someone could please come visit me and bring me a packet of chocolate hobnobs... there's nothing wrong with french biscuits, I mean they are super generous with the chocolate but there's nothing quite like your old familiars. Although for a fitness person I'm keeping my food as healthy as possible BUT with working in a school there are far too many biscuits and cakes going round...

Everyday when waiting for the children to come out for their first lesson i have my coffee with the school secretary (theres always cake in that office too) and I have to laugh as in this particular room is a board filled with postcards, mostly english ones and these 2 are at the top together;



Both my former homes!!!

Anyway back to parnes evening.... I can absolutely promise the parents their children are getting English, I'm picking up some useful words and phrases for clarification and reinforcement purposes but that's it. The most important words for my job are: écouter, asseyez vous, régardez-moi, avancer, en y va (that's what it sounds like anyway!) allez and STOP!!! To put all these words in English and one sentence it would be: stop, sit down, look at me, listen, off we go, keep moving... MOVE!

obviously if the children are talking to me Then i can understand them quite often by the tone of voice and child's hand actions and facial expressions so I can work out what they're asking me...and mostly the answer to the question is 'NO' as it is basically

"missssss can we....?!"

I'd recognise it in any language. But if they want to whinge then they can do so "en Anglais s'il vous plait je ne comprends pas" is my usual answer. If it was something serious or urgent then yes we'd forget finer points like talking to me in English but 11 times out of 10 it's just children being children :)

I think the best was one young boy in English enrichment... I understand he finds any excuse not to complete his work in usual English lessons and so my supplementary lesson was going to be no exception. Basically he was trying to say he couldn't work because his throat huuuuurrrrrttttt. This was after I'd croaked my way through 'i can sing a rainbow' 5 times so I pointed at my throat said "moi aussi" and pointed out luckily his hand and his throat weren't connected so shouldn't impair on his work too much. No he hadn't finished by the end of class so je suis desolee.....DEVOIR! (homework...) hey you gotta crack down now.

I have to say English enrichment class makes me feel like a grown up all of a sudden (about time I guess) I'm stood there with a piece of chalk in my hand at the front of the class and they are all (for the most part) hanging on to my every word. Im transported back to my days in primary school only now theres a role reversal and it feels like no time has oassed at all. On Thursday later as I was sat in the English room marking their work I felt a lot like you did when you were very little and playing 'teacher' with your friends, sitting round marking each others drawings and scribbles and writing 'good' or 'great effort' and a smiley face to back it up. I still feel like that little girl.

Despite having felt rotten it's been nice to be out In the fresh air, the weather has been pretty hot this week so have been outside where possible and due to the surrounding woodland have so far been joined by a deer, a lizard and woodpeckers for sessions this week :) actually there's an abundance of woodpeckers, more so than any other bird in fact! You regularly hear the shrill call from the trees but generally they are pretty elusive. Also see lots and lots of jays out here! Jays are simply stunning and whilst I occasionally glimpsed them in Devon the french jays are a lot less shy than their prudish British cousins. With british jays it's almost like they know they are that beautiful so never let you look at them for too long...



The children are really getting into their sports lessons and you know it's a job well done when they exclaim they can't believe the lesson is over already as it went so quick and one little boy said he'd rather do another hour of sport than go out to play at midday when I told them session was over and it was lunchtime! Praise indeed. If you start them young you can get them just right so right now it's all about making fitness fun and helping to make it a part of their lifestyle, exercise should NEVER be a chore. This week for the younger children I used the butterfly effect which involved a cone drill of walk, jog, run (they had a choice depending on the direction they took) with the cones laid out in a butterfly shape to get them to experiment with different speeds and explore their stamina! Then each child has a butterfly with the instructions on and off they go! (the end of term curriculum plan involves orienteering so this is a GREAT early introduction to that for them!)

Butterflies for each child:



On the desks ready for them after lunchtime!



They design their own for added fun! You give them 5 minutes and it becomes serious business this colouring in. The slightly older children got stuck in and for 5 minutes there was nothing but the scratching of pencils. The teacher and I kept calling or their attention and reminding them to breathe.... The littlest children however (schools youngest) take a lot longer to do things, in fact half of PE can be taken up just trying to organise them! When they had their butterflies there was a lot of whispering as colour consultations went on round the room, some got their pencils out and sat there meticulously co-ordinating them and lining them up perfectly straight and patting them down so they all lined up and god forbid one of them wasn't as sharp as the others (Michelle learned this for art in her first week, ensure all crayons are SHARP because the children will obsess over it and spend the entire lesson if possible lining up at the bin, sharpener in hand ensuring they are sharpened adequately to their standards). Those little ones who were colouring in though rather than planning it in their heads were elbows up, Tongue poking out of one corner of their mouth and the air was filled with the scratching sound of a crayon that was in danger of being ground through the paper and into the desk...

A selection of finely designed butterflies/papillon:



The butterfly!



Everyday should definitely have some colour and a LOT of laughter.

Anyway I'm heading into the weekend...but first I gotta get someone to move over...



Kxx

Ne pas être dans san assisted (Lit; To not be in ones own plate) I'm not feeling myself today.

Well not a lot has been happening this week in fact i am mostly just floating through it because as they say en francais... Je suis malade!!!

That is right I have a rotten stinking cold. That's all it is, a cold, but it's not actually it's man flu. Last time I was ill was when I had swine flu back in January and so this is a shock to the system. I was warned...working with children you'd get all their bugs! Fine well let this be the end of it. I'm immune now as far as I'm concerned!

Thanks to my colleague Michelle for sending me this gem to cheer me up!



So yes I have been doing my 2 mile walk and back every day and sweating my way through the sports lessons (this week my lessons have been about running...so I've been legging it around with the children and of course they get excited about running so it gets noisy and then I have to shout... of all the weeks to be doing this!) but my voice held out for English enrichment lessons, we have been doing colours so it lasted for several rounds of 'I can sing a rainbow' and now I'm somehow halfway through the week so it's all good. Oh and I took this pic today:



At school in French lessons we were always taught about 'l'hotel de ville' (the town hall) well they never said anything about le 'Mairie' which is in the picture. This is like the village hall if you like, every little village round here has one and it looks like Disney commissioned them. Sums up the area perfectly, it's so pretty!

The weekend was lovely well the Saturday was, Sunday was day 1 of 'maybe it's hay fever? Maybe I'm allergic to something in the trees? I shall just rest for a day and then it'll be gone I'm sure'.

As the weather has been threatening rain last couple of days I have been able to use the gym rather than go out on the stade and I have to say I don't think this is too bad a place to spend my day...



Although today was different, today I wasn't teaching sports so much as supervising activities so the afternoon involved me, a microscope and all the little boys tripping over themselves to find stuff to examine under it. I managed to start off well enough with holding their interests by finding acorns, conkers, leaves, a dandelion clock bud, mushroom, flowers.....static stuff that stays exactly where on the Petrie dish you out it so it can be examined accordingly. Then arrived a ladybird, a slug, a grasshopper, a centipede...and please god no.... Oh yes finally they found a spider. Got to love little boys. I was very good natured about it you can't let them know these things aren't in your list of favourites so spider was dealt with the same way I dealt with a slow worm I was once handed. Now I don't have a problem with slow worms, they're beautiful creatures, but I think the boys who gave it me hoped I had.... "oh no look it's playing dead!" (whilst thrusting it in my face) all they got was me gently removing it from them and saying "yes boys probably because it is almost literally scared to death now put it back..."

Cool points won. I wasn't about to lose cool points over the spider :)

Anyway Saturday was l'rentrée!!! Which is the start of the school year welcome picnic where teachers, students and parents all come together. It was 29 degrees and just a perfect day! Everyone bought some contribution, there was food and drink aplenty!

Hungry?



Chilling in the shade



As I've said before the food is wonderfully healthy out here and so the Tavel was filled with cold meats, cheeses, fresh fruit and veg and homemade food using very fresh ingredients. It was amazing!

It was great to meet all the parents and everyone was very enthusiastic to meet the new sports teacher and I was made to feel extremely welcome. Some of the parents spoke some English but a lot didn't so I'm getting proficient at franglais and mime!

After the picnic Michelle, Chris and I decided we weren't ready to head home and so hopped onto a bus outside the school and 10 minutes later hopped off at the Disney Village. We wanted to watch the rugby so the Sports Bar was the best choice and as my friend Shawn (who is my native American guardian angel! Navajo to be more precise...) popped in to say hi before heading off to be chief sitting bull in the wild west show for the evening we were able to get a hefty discount on the round! Thanks chief. Good times indeed.

I love that the beermats in my local pub are these...



It reminds me you should never give up on your dreams, sometimes you may stray off the path a bit, I know I did big time, but I didn't realise I had til I found myself suddenly back surrounded by so much of what I have spent years wanting! It all seemed so easy, to the outside world I look pretty lucky... But the years it has taken, all the tiny steps I had to take which built up and built up until finally I gathered enough speed to leap! So it may look like what I did was easy but trust me it started a long time ago. Never give up, if you want something bad enough, whatever it may be, start today and never lose faith. You will get there.

Before we knew it it was very dark and after 8pm at night and the other two had to be heading back to Paris so I decided to walk home...which ended up taking about N hour as I got lost somewhere cutting across the fields and through the woods, but it was such a beautiful night, well lit by an incredibly bright moon and really hot so it was one of those warm fuzzy nights that feels like you ar,e on holiday and I feel so happy with the way things are at present I may as well be :)

Don't get me wrong I'm very much missing many people who are a big part of my life old and more recent, as every day passes the reality of not being able to see them so much or quite so easily is starting to sink in, but i speak to them all the time, love doesnt feel distance and it's beautiful here and so are the people so when I found myself laughing till my sides hurt Saturday without so much as glancing at my watch or my phone I just know everything really is ok. I also received this from a friend last week and I have to say I love it!



A big thing that helps also is the job. Working with kids is I am so far finding out...awesome! To Spend my week seeing the world the way they do is just life changing and refreshing! Things are so uncomplicated to them. Since the beginning of term there have been new additions to the school and in some cases the new children don't even speak much French if any so have little to talk to the other kids about. However I could not tell you which children were the new ones in the class without having had them pointed out to me. Children just accept. I know they haven't been on the planet long enough to have had the experiences we as adults have which can jade us into not accepting new people quite so readily, but all the same they are all included! They play like they've known each other for years, when pairing up for sports or splitting into groups for dance; the new children were encouraged straight in by all, you'd never have known the day before they weren't even a part of the class and the little boy who doesn't speak a word of French somehow gets by playing with the other children all day, he doesn't seek to join in their games they include him in theirs. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the adult world had this level of trust, acceptance and tolerance without question.

I feel I am going to learn a lot from these little dudes

Karen x

Aller au charbon. To go to the coal (mines). To do something very difficult.

Well it's a Friday night, I'm quite sure the rest of the world is preparing to party and a few weeks ago in London so would I have been, but right now I have a lead, a dog, my walking boots are waiting for me and I'm going for a hike on this lovely warm evening. If I had a choice I wouldn't have it any other way. This is me.

So I made it, I survived my first week and what a week it's been. I must be mad. I would never have believed I could do this but do it I have and it's been quite awesome, tiring but awesome!

I'm lucky my work colleagues are just a little bit fab, Michelle should be moving in with me any day now so there goes the neighbourhood (only once have I been greeted by the stern look from the headmistress on account of one of my notoriously loud cackles errupting in the corridor one afternoon) the head of English is probably going to have been sent grey by micheele and I come Xmas but they are honestly awesome the pair of them although our conversations when we are sans children are staying a closely guarded secret locked in the classroom with us never to be repeated on here, honestly far too much laughing and consumption of tea goes on, which brings me to the next topic...we now have proper tea in our classroom!!

What gives it away that this is the English department??!! (check out the super grown up stitch and tinks mugs on the right there)



On account of understanding how wonderfully rubbish the tea out here is (the yellow lable Lipton stuff) we now have a box of Barrys tea from Ireland and some Typhoo! So thanks to Anne and Zoe for providing us with a decent caffeine supply.

Have been having much fun with the French language and my lack of, firstly I have learned i may get myself into a whoooole heap of trouble if I try and turn English into French as it just doesn't work that way. In innocence I have said

"je suis excitées!' (I'm excited!) and....
'je suis facile!' (I don't mind/I'm easy!)

Both could apparently get me into mass amounts of trouble with the opposite sex and as my one male friend told me 'je suis facile' is mostly likely to get the response 'okay you want f*** now or later?'

I nearly died...

Also there's my Coventry accent getting in the way. Generally in cov we drop our 't' sound it's very lazy so when I asked a young boy the other day what he was painting:

'qu'est c'il y a?'

I got the response

"mon grand-Peres voiture, c'est un quatre-quatre"

Ooookay it sounded like he said 'cat-cat' so i asked the lovely Melda one of the schools English speaking assistants what it meant.

"huh??? What did you say???" she said when I confidently repeated the word to her and asked her what it meant. Slightly more uncertain with myself I said it again...'cat cat! What does it mean?!'

"where on earth did you hear that???"

Highly confused I said 'well I just asked him what he was painting (gesticulating to the young boy) and he replied' "mon grand-peres voiture c'est un cat cat!"

Melda burst out laughing and said "aaaaaaah un quatre-quatre a 4x4!!!" this made sense I just hadn't heard him pronounce the 'rrrrr' on the end (the French do that, it's okay for them to lower their voice and make the word inaudible but when you do it....) however thanks to my cov accent I pretty much missed off the 'T' so all Melda heard was me saying 'un ca ca' which essentially in french school speaking terms means 'going for a poo' e.g
"miss un ca caaaaaa s'il vous plait!!!"

Epic fail.

That asides communicating to the kids hasn't been too bad, even the teensy ones who speak next to NO English at all I have been able to get through to. Luckily I'm quite a physical person, my mum is REALLY gesticulative so I grew up thinking waving your arms around when you are talking is normal. I remember when I was little I assumed this was something you'd learn to do as you got older and so I used to practise when having conversations with people; I'd be chatting and waving my arms round like a conductor to some invisible orchestra, I even wondered if like sign language each movement went with what she said, where did she learn these mystery arm movements and what did they mean??!!. I didn't realise it was just something that developed, my mum did it so I felt the sooner i started the better.

As it turns out so are the French. Like Italians they use their hands, they wave their arms everything is Big and expressive so the children are clearly used to this and therefore it makes my job a lot easier. They pull faces, they make noises, every conversation is almost choreographed it is a joy to watch and the kids are so descriptive about everything! At the moment they dont grasp that I haven't got a clue what they are saying to me (which is probably just as well) but I don't need to. They chatter away to me (about what I have no clue) in their cute little French voices pouting and smiling their way through their sentences in a very exaggerated form of the mouth position the french adopt to sound their words and I don't need to understand the words, their facial expressions and their gestures tell me everything I need to know and more often than not they are just chit chatting! So a simple smile, shrug, laugh or pfffft with a shrug or head shake is all that is needed and they are always happy with the response and acknowledgement. Years ago on holiday in the South of France (years I'm talking when I was 7 so about 2 decades ago, dear lord...) I made a german friend called 'zoe'. Now I had no idea what she was saying nor she I, neither of us spoke the others language but we happily spent the entire day together as kids do chatting and playing on the beach. Sometimes the words just aren't important and they say 80% of human communication is non verbal.

The kids are also a great tonic for me, I have been battling some personal demons for a few days and whereas before when I was in the gym whilst I was able to bounce around and greet people with a cheery "hi" even on my lowest of the low days where i felt absolutely worthless, if the sadness was there it was there, I could hide it but it'd be on my mind and somedays I was almost like a zombie.

Soon as the children enter the stadium or line up for me outside their classroom...that feeling vanishes, your thoughts drop away to nothing, it's incredible. They bounce in and so you have to be on them straight away, focussed, all eyes on me watching whilst I wave my arms around frantically and pretend to be a rabbit, or mime that I want to see them landing on their feet and not their bottom thank you very much... Spending an afternoon playing football and collecting conkers is brilliant for anyone it's a treat to see life the way a child does again, everything is so much more clear cut! I once read that if you need advice; just once, ask a 5 year old. They don't see the complications in life we do.

Where I have been living all week:



Le stade! My domain...



I realised this afternoon how crazy this job is and even more crazy is how Did I come to have it? and how soon everything changed for me! One minute I'm a PT working 1-1 with adults and now here I am teaching 20+ children sport and also English. To stand in front of a class writing on the board and teaching them sentences and marking their work.. (Asides trying to grasp the French language I also learned this week that writing on a board using chalk is definitely a skill. I don't posses it).

I never saw this coming it's like being a proper grown up all of a sudden. The 5 week period from deciding to go for it and actually arriving here last week seems so many light years away and all the troubles between then and now, the limbo, the waiting, the stresses, the problems....gone! It was a whole other life, one I'd didn't comprehend how unhealthy it was until I got here and now can breathe and feel myself again. Yes its exhausting but oh my word rewarding! I did wonder after day 2 how id cope doing this all the time i mean i was shattered (one friend kindly looked at me when i answered my skype on wednesday and went 'woah you look knackered!' yeah cheers...') but now at the end of the week I feel energised and good to go, just like Michelle calls me 'the energiser bunny'. It would be understandable to be knackered after all its 18 hours a week running round teaching Sport, 4 hours teaching dance, 3 hours standing up teaching english, then at some point once Disney organise my rehearsal time add to this some extra hours which will involve learning how to shoot big guns and galloping round on horseback and of course then there's the 2 mile walk to school and back everyday...I'm being very good and making sure I eat right and get a good amount of sleep in preparation! If my body's going to work properly through that lot it is vital I am fuelled right! C'est tres important.



Someone text me asking for some info recently back in the UK and so whilst the children were on break (gutti!) I text back to say "sure will send it when I'm not up to my ears in 6 year olds pretending to be kangaroos". I laughed out loud when I read it back and instantly felt kind of guilty as knew there was no way the person on the receiving end of that message was having anywhere near as much fun as I was!

The children have generally been pretty good I've clamped down in the first week, no prisoners have been taken and no bad manners tolerated as it's best to set the rules early. It's tough I have a curriculum to follow and so the boys with their 'miiissss can we play football today?' has had to be responded to with 'nope it's athletics til October then you have football after that!!!' I have also had 'when we going to do proper sport like football....' so there was a quick franglais lesson on how athletics IS sport.

I'm thinking just wait til After Christmas when they have to do dance...

They have all learned my stopwatch is not a stopwatch it's an amulet of doom which is set to 1 minute when I have them sitting down properly for a minute of COMPLETE silence. Yu should try it it's very hard and that minute is a long time, especially when I reset the time for slouching, whispering, playing with the velcro on their trainers....ooh it makes me sound like such a bitch ;) Only had to do this once though and now when I hold the stopwatch above my head they shut up on the spot. Good trick ;)

I wasn't all harsh though I let them play games towards the end of the week and now have also learned that tig is called 'le chat' and you aren't 'it' you are 'the cat' so there you go.

Right anyway Sasha is lying on my bed looking thoroughly bored so it's time for a W-A-L-K.... For le CHATS!!!! or maybe a .... SQUIRREL!!! (was watching Up the other day, such a beautiful movie...POINT! ha)

Losing the will to live...



Tomorrow I have a 2 hour meeting in French (whoop) at 10am then at 12pm it's le r'entree (schools welcome picnic) then who knows what the weekend will bring! I do know I feel a lot more relaxed than I have in ages but I have my sports, my countryside, my wildlife, (Sasha, oh to have an animal in my life again is amazing) the great outdoors; I mean in the last week I have seen deer on my sports field (kangaroos in my gym), foxes, ferrets, a wild boar, my daily flattened hedgehog (it gets more steam rollered everyday poor thing) and an abundance of bird life! Out here something happens that I haven't seen for years and that's the starlings! At 6pm they all group together in the trees twittering at a deafening volume for a good 10 minutes and then all at once...complete silence before they launch themselves into the sky in a big thick well organised big black cloud all moving as one. I remember this as a child in the midlands all the starlings sitting on the aerials of the houses in my street, the noise of their twittering is incredible, then the silence, then there's the rush if thousands if tiny wings and the sky fills with these amazing aerial displays of togetherness like black fireworks as they take off to roost at dusk. It takes my breath away every night.

So I'm off with the dog back out into the great outdoors, I'm definitely a country girl at heart even if i was born and raised in the city, now all I need to make my life complete is to get in some horse riding and being back on stage...

Which reminds me I should have a meeting with Disney shortly!

Bon weekend!

Karen x

SE FENDRE LA PIPE. To break the pipe. (To laugh.)

Sooooo I'm still alive. Just. I have never had a job with so many nerve wracking first days in all my life!!! I'm now sat here chilling with a kir (champagne with a drop of creme de cassis) I'm not an alcoholic I swear it's just that out here the alcohol is the same price as water which would explain why wherever I go no matter what time it is if I am offered a drink more often than not it involves alcohol! Anyway tonight there was a celebration in my house so the champagne is from that, plus of course there was bread and pate... It's a hard life. As usual it was 3 Frenchies et moi celebrating round the impromptu candlelit table but I LOVE sitting and listening to them talk and for the most part I'm starting to understand what they're saying, not to mention where I would normally say English words and phrases such as yes, hello, goodbye, ok, thanks, I'm fine, how are you, good etc etc I find I'm automatically speaking in French! Even with the children I'm supposed to speak in English but if they don't understand it helps to be able to say the two languages side by side and so surprised myself by being able to say to them phrases such as listen, watch what I'm doing, no talking, in a line, hurry up, everybody, be quiet, follow me, do you understand, ok... (ha the usual!) in both languages with next to no thought so I'm not doing too horrendous but it still seems a long way off. Although my friend whose little boy is at the school has informed me that the children think I'm Spanish/Italian, but then the Parisians think I'm Asian descent! I've heard that before I guarantee I'm pure English! Although my mum informs me my granddads family fled France during the Hugonot revolution and went to Ireland where one became a ballad singer (is ancestor may explain a LOT!) and another became the mayor of Cork, so after all these years I discovered I am just a little more exotic than the black country/welsh I thought I was :) i also had an ancestor go down on the Titanic but he was a steerage passenger so don't get too excited. Just our luck... Anyway enough ancestry I think it's my hair, they are fascinated with my hair out here and half the little girls have already had their hands in it...

Anyway first days... My first day as Thursday last week (which was sans les enfants) that went fine, then there was the first day avec les enfants (Monday) which was tiring but fine. Then there was my first day actually TEACHING les enfants. I'm actually writing this on the night of that day, it's over, done, I survived! Phew.

Although don't get me wrong even on my way into school I was imagining falling in front of cars and all sorts anything that could happen between here and getting there that would get me out of it! Now that may sound drastic but you know sometimes when you sit down and imagine yourself doing something? Well I couldn't even begin to remotely visualise or imagine standing there in front of a group of children teaching sport. Until tonight.

I'd be lying if I said it was easy, I start at 09:30 so the children have already had a class with their main tutor before they come to me and so I got there at 09:00 (I hate rocking up last minute I like mental prep). Went down and checked the stade (running stadium) mentally thought about the lessons for the day some more, triple checked the walk time to and from the school-stade and then headed up tothe school to wait in the empty corridor surrounded by all the coats and bags for when the children came bursting out the classroom and were left in my care. I have to say the wait felt akin to bengsat. In the dentists or how you feel when someone's having a baby and you are waiting for the news... That apprehension, nervousness...possibly excitement.

My first class was very much trial and error I mean there was only so much I could plan having not met the children and having also never taught a bunch of French children when I don't speak French. Worse my first 2 classes of the day were the youngest years in the school so there English is pretty much nil! There were things I had planned which they couldn't get or completed faster than I had allowed for but that's ok until you try you don't know! Also there were times I merely had to remind myself that it wasn't that they weren't listening but that they couldn't understand me so rather than feeling despondent at their blank faces it was up to me to be clearer in my explanations which when I finally got it right was rewarded with a nice burst of happiness as they were happy they got what I wanted them to do and I was happy that they got what I wanted to do. Win win.

The stade is massive and I planned to just work on one portion. One teacher recommended that a previous sports teacher made any children who were naughty do a lap whilst they continued with the class. I agreed d'accord...except it became pretty clear that the children were fascinated by the track and actually WANTED to do an entire lap. So there went that idea, however I discovered in the afternoon after I ran a lap of it with the older children at their request (and their PE lesson was 2 hours long... 2 hours can you imagine??!! I couldn't but somehow survived that too) they discovered a lap of the stade was rather tiring, therefore all future classes can begin with a lap and once they know it really isn't all that. Much fun it will set the bench mark for "you misbehave?" off you go see you when you've done a circuit...

AnywY enough school for now I'm going to backtrack. It was a great weekend that saw me getting out into Paris on Sunday with my friend Jean-Charles. We went to the 13th arondissement (the Chinese district) and had an awesome lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant nd also I was introduced to this native drink:



It was almost like a desert it was really sweet and had sweets in it, very interesting!

We had a good drive round Paris (driving round Paris has to be one of the scariest things EVER there are no rules, I always joked if I ever got a car I would TOTALLY go for a drive round the Arc de Triomohe at the infamous 'Place de l'Etoile' (which incidentally is the only place in the world you aren't insured, if you have been to Paris I guarantee you stood there for 5 mins at least watching the traffic and either waiting to witness an accident or filming in the hopes of getting something worth £250 on you've been framed) but having seen some of the quieter roads.. Maybe not. The French have this crazy 'priorité à droit' rule, I believe something like 1800+ drivers die a year defending this rule! Basically in a built up area a car on a road or already on a roundabout MUST give way to a car that wants to pull out onto said road/roundabout who will be coming fast and not looking because it's their right. Comprends? No me neither.

After seeing the sights of the 19th and 13th I headed back to Chessy to meet an old schoolfriend and her husband who were here on holiday, haven't seen her for about 15 years so it was awesome to catch up and go for something to eat in the Disney Village before heading home ready to start dying inside about Monday.

Not before 3 of us were beaten by 'The Elvis' however:


The view from the bus stop, awful huh? I hate living here :)



I didn't sleep much Sunday night, when I did I mostly hoped I wouldn't wake up and woke up pretty much on the hour every hour... Then if course when my alarm went off I just wanted to switch it off and get more sleep but I got up, very zombie like showered, got my paperwork together and started out on my journey to school. It's a lovely walk perfect for calming me down however it's all uphill:

Part 1: I know it doesn't look like much of a hill especially to my Torquinian friends but TRUST me this bugger is gradual and goes on forever and then snakes off round a corner.



Oky then just when you think you're at the top, this snakes off up and up and up too! Again annoyingly looks flatter in this pic than it is I swear!



Okay the hills aren't as bad as torquays but after a year in flat London it's a shock to the sytsem.

As it was day 1 with the children really wasn't that bad! We saw class after class mainly to introduce ourselves and make sure they bought all the necessary equipment for English from their 'fournitures scolaires' list sang some songs, played some games (SUSSED out who you would need to keep an eye on and who seemed good!) et voila the day was done! I was on lunch duty and the children generally are supposed to speak English with me but the vast majority of CP class (year 3 in the UK) don't speak any English at all so when I was at lunch and they were excitedly asking me questions in frnech and I corrected them... Well they COUDN'T ask me in English so it was either employ a good English speaking child or listen really hard. I actually surprised myself at how much I understand, because they are small they very carefully pronounce their words and I noticed the way they shape their mouths when they speak it's very pouty apart from 'e' sounds when they really pull their lips back to like a smile so this helped with pronunciation. Because they are little and uncomplicated I got asked basic questions like where I was from and my name and do I have any brothers and sisters... Good start! However then I came across the older children who will be off to big school next year, these guys are basically tweenagers so before I'd even been introduced or had a class with them I was getting yelled at across the playground

"miss he looooooooooovvveeeeessssssss yoooooooooouuuuuuuuu,"
"miiiiiiiissssssss do you have a boyfrieeeeeeeeeeend??!!"

Oh joy hormones. I'm pretty sure worse is yet to be asked....

So I went home Monday night with the same headache I had Friday but I'm not sure if this is child or lack of caffeine related? The tea out here is sooo weak and I got used to living in Starbucks in London so there has been little to compare here!

Anyway day 1 done I decided that as I was well prepped as I could be for the classes Tuesday then Monday I couldn't turn down the offer to go along to a training session with the Aigles de Meaux American football team.



These guys had to do a 45 minute jog before they even started their fitness session so my mate who is one of the coaches decided I could learn how to throw and kick an American football whilst we were waiting! It was a great night, it was good to watch some sportsmen at work, it was great to have a throw and kick around and I just love being on the sports field it's such a positive and energising place to be! Plus me and 20+ guys... Who am I to complain. It was brilliant listening to all the commands in French and I find myself understanding more and more. Still not great at speaking it but I recognise so many words now which is a great start!

Almost forgot there is another reason why my job is AWESOME see the pic below... Well the yellow bits are when im on holiday and I'm getting paid for those:



I got back late, finished the days emails to friends and then went to sleep somehow as knew that Tuesday was going to be the biggest challenge. Which brings me up to today!!!

This morning seems like a year ago when i strolled through the gates and into school with my ipod shuffle on as usual and as i rounded the corner the theme from Kill Bill started to play .... Very very apt.

I had the 2 youngest classes in the morning then what is UK year 5 in the afternoon who I have to say were an absolute dream which is just as well as I had a 2 hour lesson with them!!! 2 hours is a lot! But I did it, so managed 4 hours of teaching PE and then a 45 minute English enrichment class and then I was pretty much ready to die, or at least I thought my legs might drop off, honestly the curriculum dictates athletics till October so I'll be legging it around doing running and jumping and throwing til then and then 4 weeks(maybe less) from now workshops start! Now I'll be teaching dancing for these soooo add an extra 45 minutes of dancing onto today and you'll have just an average day at work! Wowsers I'll have to make sure I take extra good care of myself but there's a real sense of achievement with 20+ young children high fiving you and getting them to move in new ways and seeing them achieve things physically they may never have tried before. Watching them learn new things and running round playing with them and being all enthusiastic watching them bounce around after you, it's exhausting when they've gone but the satisfaction of flopping down in the grass with them and everyone giggling after legging it round for nearly 2 hours and looking up at the sky on what was such a gorgeous afternoon, I felt this massive sense of achievement & long may it last. I love my walks home too, it may not be so pleasant in winter but everyday I walk through those school gates and look over at Disneyland, then I stroll home past the terribly quaint and very pretty stereotypical provincial French properties in these picture book perfect tiny very french villages and through the French countryside, stopping at the boulangerie for my fresh baguette knowing paris is but 30 minutes away and usually listening to a spot of Rufus, with songs such as 'le coeur de Parisian' 'complainte de la butte' and 'I'm leaving for paris' ringing in my ears I can't not smile to myself. Life is what you make it.

Anything is possible

Karen x

PRENDRE LE TAUREAU PAR LES CORNES. Take the bull by the horns. (To face a problem.)

Ever get the feeling you are flying by the seat of your pants? I do.


I have just spent 2 days at school, 2 days which both started with 2.5 hour meetings held entirely in french and as the only non French speaker in the room... This wasn't easy (although we had A tray of hot fresh pain au chocolates and croissants which makes a change from digestives to chew on and my other very english habit which really stood out was i was sat there with my tea with...milk in it!!!)actually you can tell which is the English room it's the one with the tea making equipment. As soon as we discovered that there was only one kettle in the whole school the entire English dept. (Michelle, Chris and I basically) got to it and in came the kettle, teabags, sugar and milk. I kind of think Michelle and I are going to be the naughty ones of the school as we both have a penchant for giggling (although I have it on authority I don't giggle I cackle-loudly) and not only do we share a love for Disney we were the ones sat there drinking our tea out of Disney mugs!!! I have my tinker bell and she has stitch! Plus of course as we work by Disneyland we know people will think it's perfectly acceptable to see 2 people stood at the bus stop in winter wearing our stitch Santa hats which we both own (I already love this girl!!).

The infamous stitch ears which WILL make an appearance at Xmas:



Back to serious stuff; I have finally been handed the curriculum with a few days to go and may i say the 23 page document is entirely in french also... I have however learned more French words! Probably not terribly useful ones but more is good and the French are having a hard time pronouncing my name too. Now when learning French there's the whole hacking and gagging that is the 'r' sound I am really struggling to get my head round.

I thought I'd got it down and so when in the coffee shop the other day I swallowed my courage (you feel so self conscious!) and like a local walked up to the counter like i was born here and ordered

'une americano s'il vous plait'

No one needed to get out an umbrella, the end of the word didnt get stuck, i got it all out, it sounded fine, I had done good. I managed to spit the r of a-meh-cchhrrrrr-I-cano quite nicely and it must have made a change for the assistant as every other person in there appeared to be from up north of the UK and so were ordering in English with northern accents and here was me ordering it in her native Tongue, spitty R sound and everything except the words 'americano' did not appear on the screen in front of me as she input my order but 'caramel frappuccino' seriously I don't think my attempt was THAT bad, maybe she misheard me...

I'm trying!!!

Anyway, school is bliss we had 2 typically stinking hot days (the first all week) and of course we were holed up in the classrooms both days arranging things for the coming Monday and battling spiders... Seriously because we are in the woods there is no shortage of Arachnids. To make them seem friendlier I have even tried naming them after Harry Potter characters based on something Michelle one of my fellow (also new) English teachers said. The first one we found was massive and she took one look at it and said "it looks like something out of Harry Potter!" so I named it Aragon, we quickly removed Aragon and promptly found Hagrid living up a corner (he will not be moved though he's sticking in his corner) any future small ones will be Ron, hermione and Harry, we found a member of the black widow species which sadly ended up squashed but not before he was christened Malfoy. One of the other teachers thought he found a cockroach to make a change from the spiders but he reported it promptly fell off the side and landed in a web. This makes the spiders useful for something then! Ayway I am painting a horror story of the place, it's not some entomologists wet dream I swear (google it)it's a really sweet little school located nice and privately in the middle of nowhere although it only takes me 20 mins to walk home (it's all downhill too which is a bonus but I'm dreading the walk up!!!)but the settings are lovely so here are some piccies:

Peacefully located in the woodlands



Apparently we are located in the grounds for hogwarts (random chateau there are lots of these about)



Also appear to border with narnia



the playground PRE leaf clearing



Ah home from home the sign on the classroom door :)



Thursday & Fridays task, filing this lot...



May I also say the food out here is much much healthier than in the UK and if I'm eating at school I am actually getting pretty decent food!

Your choices:



The Hors d'ouevre choice



Plat garni (main) baked fish, puffed wheat and navette (turnip) with a poivre (pepper) sauce.



Dessert choices!!



I have been awesomely good and getting cheese and fruit and leaving the cake on the shelf (dammit)

Now I briefly mentioned my colleagues earlier so I'll mention them again, I'm very lucky! We all met for the first time round my franglais guardian angel zoes house on the wednesday night when we had a lovely get together PRE our first day at school. Everyone bought little bits and we had bread, cheeses, meats, pate, this amazing dessert and some champagne to toast whilst we still all have our sanity at the start of the school year. It was a very international table, Patryjca there was Zoe who is self described as; nearly Scottish initially, chris and i both english, who is polish but speaks everything including Japanese, Michelle who is south African origin and her boyfriend Chris who is a mix of everything but sounds American/Scottish without ever having lived in either of those places! (I think one of his parents was Austrian and he was raised just about everywhere). Eventually the conversation turned to accents and Michelle with her south African accent said she realised as an 'English' nanny she had to be careful when the French boy she was looking after started instead of saying he had 'fish' for tea was saying 'fush'. We soon turned to the French accent (Thierry zoes husband was the only person at the table to defend the country...) and asides there trouble pronouncing 'Karen' because of the hacking and gagging they do on the 'r' and in France the letter 'r' is next to never followed by a phonetic 'e' sound (if the adults are struggling god knows how the kids will find it!) the other letter that troubles them is: H. Michelle said for ages she couldn't get her head round it. The family for whom she worked as a nanny had a French driver and one day he turned to her in the car and said (insert own French accent here...)

"I am angry"

So she said she asked him why?! His response:

"because I 'aven't eaten since breakfast!!"

So 'angry' actually was 'Hungry'. Think about it.

The following day It really made me giggle to myself when one of the teachers turned to me during the meeting at school and said

"Karrrren een the beginning eet will be art"

Yep she's right it will be hard ;)

After 2 days at school which saw me doing a LOT of homework after hours (2 hour long PE lessons to prepare for...2 hours??!!) Friday night I put myself to bed with a massive headache. I know once I have a couple of weeks under my belt it will be fine but right now it's really nerve wracking, there's lots to remember, you can't judge or plan much till you have met the kids and it's all pretty stressful right now but I suppose stress is like a rocking chair it gives you something to do but doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. I always tell myself this and one day I may even believe it. I just have to remember I got the job, I got myself here, I survived some rough times over the last couple of years so this is something new, cats always land on their feet and I'll be fine because I always am.

Anyway my next and last hurdle before the kids was a bank account! However first things first I donned my sexy calf guards and went for a run!

My 2XU's hopefully keeping my shin pain at bay!!



I believe this view is an awesome start to the morning, it smells good, looks good, the birdsong here is amazing so no need for iPod you just feel alive!! I have to admit I'm a country girl at heart



So run complete I was all set for Saturday morning with my appointment at BNP in Esbly with the lovely Anne taking me and acting as my proof of address. Now I love Anne but like I said before she can talk! So I'm not sure it normally takes an hour and a half to open an account but that said there was a hell of a lot of paperwork!

See all the paperwork? That's mine...



French banks paperworks aside are easy, you have to pay a monthly fee for your debit card (carte bleu)like an insurance if you lose it, also I got a choice of check book size, I get something called a RIB no. (which is basically like your account number for when you start a new job) a 0-500€ overdraft allowance as standard which is free for 15 days if you use it, the opportunity to have money paid for using your card debited from your account at the time you pay for it (tout de suite!) or in one lump sum on an agreed date at the end of each month and also a facility that allows you if you don't have the money on the spot to pay for something to buy it anyway and spread the payment over the next few months (apparently French ladies use this for the sales...)

I declined the monthly options and no matter how much they offered me an ISA I declined this also. I have one in the UK I never use is my argument there!

Anyway this whole thing was done with anne as my translator. It's hilarious when she talks to me she often gets confused and drops French words into her sentence but so too when she speaks in French does she do the reverse and drop in English words! She was acting as translator but there were an awful lot of times when she was merely gassing with the bank manager and then they'd pause and look at me and she'd say

"so what do you think." or "which do you want to go for"

I had to remind her I had no clue what the lady had just said and she was meant to be interpreting for me, or the best was when she turned to me and started talking in French...

"um Anne...wrong language!"

The bank managers English wasn't great so when Anne had to pop out to the car to check Sasha was okay we mostly sat there in silence. We tried to sustain a franglais conversation for as long as we both could before we both couldn't stop laughing and decided to wait for Anne to return. After 10 minutes I popped out to see where she had got to to find her gassing with her neighbour in the street....

Love this woman!

There was a sad moment when the bank manager brought up visual records of her signature for her account on the computer screen and the first set contained her and her ex husbands signatures as a joint. This completely took her aback and upset her deeply so afterwards we popped out for a coffee. The signature was from the day they both landed in France and opened their first account in the country together, she could even sit and describe the way he used to tail off one of the letters in his surname when he did his signature. It doesn't matter it was years ago or that she no longer loves him, that's not the point.

"silly really" she said "but it was so unexpected"

Not at all silly not even in the slightest, with only just going through the final stages of divorce myself and still dealing with the end of my last relationship with a guy who i loved more than anything and who to this day, says breaking up with me is the biggest mistake he has ever made and he regrets it every day (not that you'll see him doing much about it) I felt her pain there.

When someone goes from your life however they go, a small part of you goes too. That little wound will always remain and sometimes if it's touched, it's sore. There's also another pain though that comes from when you split from your partner; as is so often what happens in the mans case they instantly just pick up with someone else (I thought women were meant to be the needy ones!) and the pain of this is the most unbearable thing in the world. To sit back and watch them with someone else like you never existed and to witness this new woman basically becoming what once was you, in your home, your bed, going with them to what were your places when you have barely even left the building. I have been through this twice myself now with both my last relationships and both times the new girls pretty much let the door hit me in the ass on the way out and for me the last one is still incredibly raw (i went to what was my old local shop in London only for the guys in there to say "aaah we havent seen you for ages how are you? We miss you! Your ex he has a new girlfriend now yes? We see them in here!" ouch!!! I only went in for some juice and half a dozen eggs! And yeah I'll take a pound of heartache too whilst I'm here...) and you hope it gets easier with time; but here 20 years on this woman still feels the pain of that which just goes to show how cruel a process it can be and how scarred a heart can be left. I don't want that to be me so I'm trying. I'm here aren't I :)

People think life is ruled by money, I'd say it's love. In some form or another it is love that makes the world go round and someone's love or lack of can dictate our mood, our situation, present and future and the power of it should never be under estimated and those who choose to wield it in the wrong way are possibly the cruelest of them all. But when it's good isn't it the greatest :)

Anyway that's a bit of a heavy note to end on!!

So I'm signing out, have spent the afternoon at zoes eating far too much cheese and drinking wine and eating fresh baguettes and also drinking that lovely mint squash stuff they sell out here (syrope de menthe yummmmm) commiserating with poor dobby who is wearing a cone of shame having been neutered and basking in the French countryside in this most amazing weather!

Let's see what tomorrow brings, I understand it may be my friend Jean-Charles on his scooter and some Paris shenanigans but we shall see, either way it'll need to be something fun as after that...school starts!! AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

Peace out

Kxx