Big nose strikes again

Hurried notes on god and football

2007-05-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

I've carved enough space for four countries in my overcrowded heart: Australia (the country where I was born and spent my life until five years ago), England (where the remnants of my ancestors are lying about), France (my current home) and now, Portugal (H's country).

I've already talked in this blog about our trip around Portugal last summer.

I spent last Sunday in Little Portugal, in a suburb of Paris where H's parents live. There’s a little Portuguese bar right near the entrance to his parent's block of flats. A bar well-lit by the television and well-hung with the smells of well-oiled men and fish, and burnt coffee.

Portugal was a poor country - this has been changing steadily since it joined the EU - and a massive part of its population has migrated. Many of these immigrants live in France.

When I first met H. he played down his Portuguese origins. Although of course he did tell me that both his parents are Portuguese, it was uttered in an airy, offhand way, never taking on any solidity or any substance during our courting days. He presented himself in his French birth suit and with his heavy French accent there was no reason to doubt his Frenchicity.

Growing up in Paris it wasn't uncommon for him to be mocked for being Portuguese. Ahh to be Brazilian, now that was cool: samba, big hair and football stars; but Portugal was considered a nation of concierges, to be Portuguese was to clean boots, peel potatoes, to be a dirty-worker. I guess H sub-consciously played down his Portuguese roots because he was so accustomed to derision.

But I probed further, having just come out of a relationship with someone very French, I was keen to explore other terrains. I wanted the pauses in our conversations to be swept away by hot winds from the south and filled with images of blue and white tiled cities smoking in an orange heat.

Casa H, the television sits alight at one head of the table like a particularly loud and talkative guest, who speaks decibles higher than everyone else. The conversation around the table sways in and out of Portuguese and French, everyone nodding at me for confirmation, not realising that the conversation has moved to the Atlantic ocean and I’m flapping around unable to understand, pulling Portuguese vowels out of my ears, my throat parched by H’s father’s porto and his mother's bacalhau. His mother empties the contents of her jewellery box and her medicine cabinet on the table for me to admire and his father shows me his stocks in case of war: a dozen radios and a hundred clocks.

This Sunday the television was switched to the Portuguese station, the entire day devoted to Football and Fatima. It was the 13 May, when thousands upon thousands of people collide and unite in Fatima, the anniversary of the day when the Virgin Mary is believed to have first appeared to three shepherd children in this place. Every day is football day in Portugal.

The two things that make this country's heart beat. The spectacles of religion and football draw the crowds. We watched everyone standing around waiting for Mary to appear, or apparently the next best thing, the pope. But they were both no shows. Even though the pope had rsvped he failed to come to the party. Mary is a diva, so unpredictable.

But now for the football. And then news on the kidnapping in the Algarve. Which brings us back to football and god. Everyone is praying for the safe return of Madeleine. Portuguese footballers (little gods) are appearing on television and asking if anyone knows anything about her wherabouts, please report it.

It took me a while to decide god probably doesn’t exist (well at least not in any of the shapes given to him by religion), a bit longer than with santa clause. I still occasionally catch myself whispering a little prayer at night out of old habits and checking under my bed for apparitions.

I’m always surprised when friends or acquaintances who I didn't realise have those tendencies say “you’ll be in my prayers” or "i'll pray for you".

"Oh? Really? That's nice, makes me feel loved."

All these people praying. Pray away. It's a bit like, whatever works for you, tiger. If I could genuinely pray I’d probably be less scared of death and have less existential moments. But i'm enjoying coming to terms with acceptance of a limited existence and instead of giving thanks for the opportunity to live, I prefer to just feel thankful, which steers me into action in the here and now.

I think I'll go and eat worms

2007-05-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

I’ve been too drunk to write lately. The kind of drunk with so many blanks that you forget what words look like. The kind of drunk where if you sew all your patches of blank together you’ll have a blanket.

The kind of drunk where you think everyone you know hates you, because you can’t remember if they like you. And to fill in the blanks you imagine what you might have done to make them hate you. Perhaps you did a ploppy in their wicker chair. Lay on the ground naked and screamed that you’re melting can somebody lick you all over. Vomited on their chandelier.

Finally my brain was leaking neuroses, so I've turned it off. I feel like being numb for a moment.

I’m always batting for the wrong team. With the conservative Howard government eating up the power for the last million years in Australia I’ve become accustomed to that, I guess.

But here in France for my first Presidential Election I was overcome with positive, against the odds kind of hopes. Here I am, barely integrated, a scab half hanging off the country’s knee, and last weekend my heart was all chewed up with nerves. Would the favourite lose the election? Just for once.

And over in Portugal, another country close to me, would my napped kid get found?

It was a pregnant weekend, waiting for the waters to break. Saturday we went to Père-Lachaise cemetery, not seeking anyone famous this time, just trying to shoo the day away. Deep in the green-grey, no one around, we chased cats from grave to grave, my shiny shoes
covered in some dead person’s riff-raff, worms and dirt. We were killing death, waiting for news.

No news. Portuguese secrecy laws won’t give us any leads on the missing girl. The surveys still say Sarkozy leering ahead.

Sunday the whole city is tip-toeing around us. We walk to the 17th to a brocante to look at other people’s worm-ridden belongings, and then on to the 8th and down down down to the 1st. Truck loads of authority everywhere on the Rue de Rivoli, police guns poised, pompiers hoses ready to shoot.

We hide out in a Japanese restaurant where no one looks like they care. I’m surprised at how much I care. And then the message comes through on my phone. Yes, he won. Easily. No news on the girl.

No cheering in my quartier. But no boo-ing either. As if we’re still waiting. For a better result.

My locals are all scowling this week. About the Sarkozy regime. I’m in a bar with too much noise and light and any space that is left is filled with the shouts of karaoke. One of my companions turns to me and says vehemently: "What are we doing here? I hate this place. Look. It’s full of people who voted for Sarkozy."

"But you didn’t vote!" I said.

He didn’t vote. I’m at a table with four people all with full voting rights and not one of them voted. They say that they had faith in neither of the candidates. I say, "but don’t you get it? You HATE Sarkozy MORE. It feels like together nothing is possible anymore!" I’m probably drunk so obviously not eloquent.

On my way to the toilet a guy grabs me and says: "Who did you vote for?"

"I can’t vote", I say, "and you?"

"ROYAL."

We high five each other, but I’m seeing double now, so it's more like a high ten.

Back home my favourite footballers who couldn’t win the World Cup are pleading to whoever has her to give the little girl back. "Come on, against the odds, just give her back would you!" I slur.

I just want to eat worms.

Peut-on se vouvoyer?

2007-04-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

"That you should so soon have succumbed to this assault upon your senses, so easily have been carried captive by the mere delights of eating and drinking and dressing, I should not have believed…Indeed I see it all now, to be merely the effect of a little cerebral derangement produced by the supernatural effort you made in crossing the Channel." Mary Walsh James to her daughter Alice James (who had moved to Paris)

When I moved across the Channel from London to Paris just over four years ago, rather than a supernatural effort, it was more like:
Monday: Work,
Tuesday: Boozing and snoozing,
Wednesday: Nothing much going on, might move to Paris,
rather than the culmination of a lifelong dream or even a five year plan.

In fact, I was a little bit scared of the French: their language (I purposely studied German at school), the way they dressed (Emmanuelle Seigneur's tight red dress in Polanski's Frantic) and their men (my French boyfriend scared the bats out of me).

Growing up I had this notion that the French were just a little bit too fancy for me. A little bit too formal. Here's an extract from my old blog where I talk about this:

The French weren't very prominent in my part of Sydney. There were no French bistros where you could walk in for a casual bifteck and frites. Dinner at a French restaurant meant project management. Everything needed to be assembled for the occasion. You had to make a reservation, sculpt your hair into a chignon, wear a spankingly well-cut dress. The French restaurants were all about ducks with fancy quacks and you were trapped inside rigid courses, broken up by digestive sorbets.

I didn't know any French people (except for the ghosts of my family who floated over to England with the Norman conquests) so my only real insight into French culture was through French restaurants. And the formality of the French restaurants where my family ate, with their subdued lighting and onion soup so clear and still you could see your reflection, contrasted greatly with the Italian places where you could go for a quick pizza or spag bowl, sans reservation, or the local Chinese place where you had to bellow over the clang of trolleys and the clonk of chopsticks in order to be heard.

The following diary entry which I squiggled on the Eurostar on my way over to Paris doesn't give much indication of my feelings. I seemed to be sitting backwards, looking at what I was leaving rather than where I was heading:

"1 February, 2003

So I’m leaving England and all its promise.

After a book swap with a ginger man on a late night train which landed me in Canada Water, followed by goodbye noodles which dripped down my face with L and L at the local Vietnamese restaurant, I find myself en route to Paris, with a few more enemies then when I arrived in London, and maybe a couple of new friends."

French was waiting for me at Gare Du Nord, snow flakes on his coat like melting dandruff, ready to show me the food market in our new quartier. We walked around the streets where over the next year I would smile, and lose my hair, and become every shade of pink from the cold and sadness and from the sun and from falling off a vespa and kissing someone tightly.

Within a week I'd been assaulted by Paris, or rather, I assaulted Paris. I took it in my arms and for about six months I gave it a long, sleazy grope. I was a vegetarian but I ate blood and drank guts for dinner, spearing dead animals on a regular basis and downing pints of calvados. I shopped and dimmed my colours. I started using little spoons to spread my jam. The baguette became the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But I was reluctant to embrace the social niceties of every day life in France. Those endless bonjours, bon après midis and bonsoirs for all the unknown madames and messieurs. These were formalities that tried to mask the fact that everyone was littering the ground with clutter (there will be no tidy towns award for Paris), and that you could hold the door open for someone while that someone turned into everyone, and the door could rust in your hand as no one felt socially nice enough to take it from you.

At first I used the informal tu for everyone, that casual Australian way of being friends with someone after one minute (and then having to keep your eyes down and avert your step whenever you see them again, until the end of your life).

But lately I’ve really learned to love the formal vous. I like the way you can control a relationship with a word. Presumptuous boys on the street start to tu you up and down and you can just pull up the drawbridge and dig a moat by responding with vous.

I now like to start things with a vous, in any context. It's like waiting for someone to say "I love you". The day you tutoyer is something to look forward to - best not to rush these things.

Vous is a way of saying: respect man. I like what you do.

I’ve lately just been vous-ing everyone. Even people I used to tu.

The song Lady Marmalade and its line "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?" would lose its thrill as a potential proposition from a stranger if it was "Veux-tu coucher avec moi (ce soir)?" And I like the ambiguity in this vous, perhaps the proposition is directed at more than one person.

Bloated up with life

2007-04-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been lugging around pieces of the life of Simone de Beauvoir for the past couple of months.

She has steered me in certain directions at various points in my life. I read Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) about ten years ago and decided it was probably a good idea to break up with His Apeness, the boyfriend of the moment, because I didn’t want to be tied to his thoughts and housed in his shadow. When I read De Beauvoir's Les Mandarins and flicked through her letters to Jean-Paul Sartre, I decided a relationship's endurance might just involve re-assessing monogamy, rolling over and making room for more people in the love-bed, with all its complications. (But I like sleeping diagonally and this is hard enough to master with just one other person in the bed.)

But it's only recently I've started to read her journals and her comprehensive memoirs. And so, for a few months now I’ve been meaning to trace my way to all her old haunts in Paris, hunt down apartments on the rue de Rennes, perhaps begin with her grave in Montparnasse cemetery. But i've been a bit nervous about beginning there, which is probably why I’ve put it off, shuffling the plans to go there each weekend, when it is just a direct metro line from my place. All this shuffling reminds me of my nervous energy shuffling Uno cards in Kraków in 1995, my inquietude before going to see the Auschwitz memorial.

Why such nervousness about seeing her tombstone? I think because she lives with me at the moment. Her love of life explodes out of the pages of her memoirs and frightens sloths out of their trees.

I'm drawn to the way Simone de Beauvoir used life. Mopping up all the words in every conversation. Darning holes and re-using life, and using it some more.

She left her tracks all over the place, whether it be exploring every patch in the French countryside, placing blistered espadrilles on every rock, or seeping ink on to page after page, squeezing hands and thighs long into the drinking hours. Her little birdie prints were everywhere, in every season, from 9 January 1908 to 14 April 1986.

It was the date of death that scared me. The idea that she (not her work which of course lives on) could be dead. This person so bloated up with knowledge and memory, so alive in her history, dead. All her verbs have dried up.

Like the grave of Francois Truffaut, the shared headstone of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre is a simple stone, befriended solely by a bunch of wrinkled flowers, not far from the main entrance to the Montparnasse cemetery. It's not at all like Serge Gainsbourg's grave, which is all tarted up with headless dolls and earless earrings and lipstick and panties and whatever someone happened to have with them and left there because they felt it might say: "respect, man".

I stood for a bit at De Beauvoir's and Sartre's grave, trying to connect her life with this stone face and thinking about how Sartre pissed on Chateaubriand's tomb at Saint Malo in defiance of what he saw as its "false simplicity".

A tourist briskly passed and ticked it off her "list of things to not bother thinking about but to take a photo of", yelling: "I took a photo of that philosopher-guy's grave, Jean-Pierre something!", before saying: "is Jim Morrison here somewhere too?"

Sorry Simone, you must get that all the time. Sartre, I know who you'd like to piss on.

Then we tried to find Brassai's grave and I walked around with that old sensation that always hits me in a cemetery, the incredible feeling of being alive, as though here the sun was hitting stronger against my skin and I could see my pink arms darkening like cooking bacon. The birds shouted louder than ever as if to compensate for all the voices that had been covered in earth. Every part of my body beat with the desire for immortality, or in the worst case scenario, a well-used life.

A nation of sexpots

2007-04-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

I see quite a few of the many French films released in France each week and I’m always curious to see which of these get released in Australia.

Since living in Paris I’ve become addicted to those French films about sentimental relationships in Paris, which generally involve infidelity (apparently in a pre-STD age), as well as people with low-paying jobs living in elephantine apartments in the beaux quartiers, and usually one character who works as a restorer of some kind (for example of old art works or furniture), or if we want to take the point a little further, as a restorer of lives (psychiatrist, counsellor etc). Several characters lives intercross and tie themselves in knots; it is like a big game of twister. There are many such films released each year but I hardly ever saw them at the cinema in Sydney.

I especially like going to see films with Emmanuelle Devos because even if she often plays a similar character it is only similar in the sense that it is always a quirky character, and because she has an engaging mouth just begging for some big ears to listen to her. I also like films with Isabelle Carré because she either plays an off balanced character or has to balance someone else's offness.

But from what my father tells me of the French films showing in Sydney now, one thing seems clear: forget Emmanuelle and Isabelle, if a film has Audrey Tautou in it, it will be released in Australia. Or if it features Daniel Auteuil - who fits easily into the short, big nosed French guy box (with a small breathing hole for his nose to poke out).

I guess I didn't watch enough French films on television back in Sydney because it seems that besides the obvious sixties icons and Audrey and Daniel, before I moved to Paris, a lot of contemporary French actresses and actors, talented or not, didn't exist for me. They were completely concealed in the mellow shadows of Sacré Coeur. But now I see Sylvie Testud outside chez Coquelicot, nibbling on rancid pain raisin, letting sultanas fall to the ground like rat droppings. There is Gérard Darmon sporting his Costa Smeralda tan and miniscule violet sunglasses on the rue Lepic, pretending he doesn't love me. And then an unverified Jean Dujardin (it might have been another French actor I always get him muddled with, or perhaps the guy from the post office) on my street, smiling at me from the safety of his vespa.

As well as good, clean fun with Audrey Tautou and Daniel Auteuil, the other types of French films that primarily seem to get released in Australia are the kinds of films that bolster the idea of France as a sexy nation, especially the idea that French women are unbridled sexpots, putting out at the nod of a head. This is kind of a funny notion when you actually live in Paris and you see that here it is “anglo saxon” women (sexpats) who have this reputation, well at least a reputation that they get drunk a lot and drop their pants regularly as a corollary of that.

I remember a French film that I must have seen about eight years ago in Sydney which certainly bolstered this notion of the French sexpot, although I can’t remember the title at the moment and quite frankly i've already spent enough time fossicking around the AlloCine website in the last half hour so you'll just have to trust me on this one. In this film an older, sexy woman (I can’t even remember who the actress was) had a very passionate relationship with a much younger man. But the most memorable moment in the film was when, for whatever reason he broke up with her, and in a fit of vengeance she came round to his house basically to fait caca on his doormat before squelching into the night. The Sydney audience was in raptures: oh la la, the French sure know about dirty sex.

I imagine Haneke’s La Pianiste got the thumbs up for release in Australia too for its overt representation of French female sexuality, and I’m predicting the film I saw yesterday, Anna M, will also be out there, as Isabelle Carré regularly has her hands down her pants.

Of course I think it is great that female sexuality is portrayed in French films, and as I’ve said in an earlier post, especially the sexuality of older women. I just think it’s a shame that too often in these films the female character has to be frayed with madness, as was the case in Anna M, (incidentally Isabelle Carré plays a restorer of old books in this film), Betty Blue ("37°2 degrees le matin" is the French title) and La Pianiste.
Her unrestrained sexuality becomes disorder, rather than valid expression.

Bumper UK edition

2007-04-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

Try as I may to pluck out the relevant answer, I can't work out if I like London or not (anymore). I'm not sure if what I feel is nostalgia for a time gone by: that time back in April 2001 when i'd reached my Nadir (a valley as barren as a steppe and populated by deaf and mute gnomes) and I escaped from Sydney to London for a month's holiday.

Perhaps now I enjoy the contrast to Paris. For example, in London you can find loads of bars where eating is banned and drinking is turned on high (I'm convinced creative conversation withers on a full stomach).

But there are things about London that I don't like (anymore). The shops corrode everything that I find good about London. Walking along Portobello road the other day, under a sky scratched with grey and dirt, I was depressed by the constant clinking together of shops with money exchanging hands. There are too many shops. Or perhaps it is my memory which is tainted by all those weekends when I lived there with French and all we did was consume. When he pushed me into his void (or rather I willingly jumped in) and then threw a whole lot of stuff he bought on top of me: paint brushes he would never use, solar powered torches, snow umbrellas etc

I take a right off Portobello Road and ten back streets later i've seen the abodes of Victoria, George, and Edward, and patches of grass so scarce in Paris. London is beautiful again.

And then I'm horribly in love with the English, when they are nice to me, or when they speak French to me with charming aplomb. But not when they say "get out of the way woman" because there are too many people in London and no room for my jutting elbow.

We ate in a French restaurant oddly enough. My friend's stormy girlfriend came along and the dinner table was shrouded in rain clouds. I worried about whether the English waiter was a rude bastard or whether i've just forgotten the dry crackle of English humour (even though I pass most of my spare time watching English comedy re-runs).

He's just a rude bastard, my friend said. And he won't even speak French, I pouted.
And the champagne tastes suspiciously like champomy.

I guess what I can't tweeze out of me is whether if I didn't go to London every once in a while I would miss it.

I passed over fifteen pounds in a butter smeared brown paper bag to someone at Eurostar and convinced them to let me take a train home two hours earlier than I'd planned. When I was back on the train looking at my reflection in the window (for all those people who keep googling me to ask if big noses can be attractive or cute - they most certainly can!) I couldn't figure it out. Don't I love London's madness? Its work ethic? Its boozey tits on the table nights? Its crush of people from every-country? Yes I do. I love all that stuff. Why can't I stay there for more than a day anymore?

The English countryside thumped by, rabbits and squirrels at the side of the train track waved their tails, and I had a tote bag full of crumpets on my lap. And I thought, yeah I like London, a lot, in theory.

An older crowd

2007-04-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Dylan Thomas

As I mentioned in my last post, I love going to the cinema alone. Although last week when I went to see a film at the Archipel cinema on the Boulevard de Strasbourg I was a little too alone, the only person there to watch the film. It was just me and the projectionist. I was highly conscious of my interaction with the film. I felt he could hear my merest smile and see the clouds which formed around me with my merest sigh. And then there was the awkward moment at the end of the film when the credits roared over the screen and I turned vaguely in the direction of the light and waved goodbye to him: you can turn it off now, I’m going.

I like there to be at least a couple of other people in the cinema and I mainly like an older crowd, which you tend to get if you go to the afternoon sessions. The other day I was pleased to be sitting not far from a giant mole infested man, probably in his seventies, who vocally expressed his distaste at the films previewed, and the advertisements (although he kept a polite silence during the actual film). Normally I read a book through the twenty minutes of advertisements before the film but I loved his critique, a critique he’d earned through living years of life and cinema, ce n'est pas drole, ce n’est pas intelligent. He voiced my private contempt for advertising and films which aim at the lowest common denominator audience rather than raising the bar a little bit higher and leaving stretch marks on people's minds. I don’t believe films should act as a divertisement. For me films are art; they should add something to your life, not take you away from it.

More and more I enjoy the company of a much older crowd. Maybe it's because I'd still rather be taught than be a teacher. Or because I’ve been a daughter, sister, friend, enemy, girlfriend, niece, nymph, vamp, but never a grandchild, as all my grandparents were deceased before I could meet them. As I move through my thirties, a white hair spied and dyed by a discerning hairdresser gives the first indication that one day, I too, will be old.

I’m always annoyed when people refer to old people as "crabby". Often what may be viewed as crabbiness is rebellion rather than conservatism. I saw my aged comrade at the cinema as rebelling against the homogenisation of society, with all the raging wisdom of someone who has had enough time to think and to have a history.

A book I read a while back has stayed with me. In Bertrand Vergely's Voyage au bout d’une vie he discussed the last years of the life of his elderly, dying mother and his search to find suitable care for her and how this search reflected Western society's neglect of the old aged. There was a line in his book which I noted, which i've heard before: that in Eastern culture the older you get the more beautiful you become, but in Western culture it is the opposite.

In Eastern culture the older crowd has traditionally been respected as repositories of light-giving knowledge and wisdom, whereas in Western culture they are labelled "crabby" and left to die in the black.

Alone! Alone!

2007-04-04T03:05:00.000-07:00

The "Alone Alone!" that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence.
Alice James

I like going to the cinema alone, sitting in cafes alone, walking alone, shutting out the world that tries to slither under my door and sitting at home...alone. But living in Paris, because of the boyz in the street so ready to become boyz in the bar, sitting in cafes or bars alone, even walking alone, sometimes isn't an enticing option. The cities I lived in before were more welcoming in this respect. In both Sydney and London I found less eyes straying quizzically towards me, less loose nods beckoning in my direction whenever I sat alone, reading or puzzling in a bar or cafe.

One vivid memory of aloneness gone awry was a trip I took to the south of Spain six years ago. I'd gone to Seville tanked up with adventure but within a couple of hours every heavy orange about to fall from its tree, every grain of dust on the road, every trickle of the Guadalquivir river, confronted me and reminded me of my solitude. Seville was not a city made for the solo traveller. People moved in large groups or families, laughing together, loving together, trying to die together. I saw only one other person alone in the few days I was there, a worn out guy, who looked away.

I sat in a cafe marvelling at the juxtaposition of slabs of meat and coffee, but odd stares, possibly hostile stares, pushed me out on to the street, like my solitude was too loud for them. Instead of sitting I walked in parks, discreetly scoffing churros. I walked a lot in an attempt to escape my aloneness. The more alone I was the more I felt people were together. The sky was too blue and the air too fresh. A woman pressed a palm leaf in to my hand and told me I will one day have two bambinis.

I tried to call British Airways but I got cut off. I took a cab to the airport but BA was closed: "Come back tomorrow" the sign said.

Hungry, I was too afraid to face the crowds again so I bought a can of spaghetti and ate it cold in the windowless room of my one star pensione. On my way back two French guys with leering, yeasty smiles had invited me for beer in their room next door. They tapped on my wall to tempt me over. I took pain killers and slept but I awoke garnished with ice. The spring day had become an icy desert night and I had no warm clothes, no warm body.

The next day in the glare without sunglasses I took another cab to the airport: "Get me out of here!" The first flight out of there was in two days. So I took a bus to Granada, anything but Seville. On the bus people in twos chatted together about the Alhambra, everything that they planned to see. The distant Sierra Nevada and the beaten up earth disappearing under the wheels of the bus made me feel calmer.

But once off the bus, aloneness beckoned to me from the nearby snow-tipped mountains.
I headed in the direction of the Alhambra but faltered - I'd have to let it rot. I ate something with tomato in it and twenty minutes after my arrival I got directly back on the bus to return to Seville, which I'd now promoted to home.

Back in Seville I hid in my room, read, imagined a hostile world beyond the doors, waited, and left.

Cagey thoughts

2007-03-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of those filler news stories reported direct from the animal kingdom - unruly child climbs into gorilla pit, lion hugs trainer or alternatively bites tamer's head off, lion and tiger mate to form the liger, and captive baby polar bear rockets to fame. The animal as spectacle draws me in every time.

When I mentioned to a friend who lives in Australia that I was going to the zoo last weekend he said:

`Paris Zoo is it? I imagine elephants stuffed into tiny art deco curly wire cages.'

It's true that the Zoo de Vincennes is quite different from Taronga Zoo in Sydney, which was revamped a while back to make it more "humane" for the animals. In search of zootopia, Taronga's outdated cages were replaced by enclosures, measures were taken to make it difficult for humans to have direct eye contact with the captives, and a great deal of care was taken to ensure the animals' enclosures resemble their natural habitat.

The zoo at Vincennes has an old world feel about it with its heavy reliance on cages and lack of animal-roaming space. The plentiful supply of nains - miniature hippos, miniature horses and miniature giraffes, made me think of ornaments rather than living, breathing, needing animals.

But many of the cages were empty. And in this ghost zoo it seems the solution to the problem of how to make zoos more comfortable for the animals has been dealt with simply by not keeping animals that are perhaps going to be uncomfortable.

As we walked under a sky bloated with grey crowds passed rows and rows of empty cages I felt far from depressed. There had been a sign at the entrance to the zoo listing all the animals we wouldn't be able to see. No big cats, no bears, no elephants stuffed into tiny art deco cages. And I was relieved that they wouldn't be there to pander to my desire to see a spectacle. The more reading I do about zoos, the more wary I become as to the educational value of keeping animals in captivity. In Dale Jamieson's Against Zoos he says:

Edward G. Ludwig's study of the zoo in Buffalo, New York, in the International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems for 1981, revealed a surprising amount of dissatisfaction on the part of young, scientifically inclined zoo employees. Much of this dissatisfaction stemmed from the almost complete indifference of the public to the zoo's educational efforts. Ludwig's study indicated that most animals are viewed only briefly as people move quickly past cages. The typical zoo-goer stops only to watch baby animals or those who are begging, feeding or making sounds. Ludwig reported that the most common expressions used to describe animals are 'cute', 'funny-looking', 'lazy', 'dirty', 'weird' and 'strange.

And I was one of these zoo-gogglers, in a reverie over the lazy seal who couldn't get it together to go for a swim, the funny-looking penguins, the dirty hippo blowing water bubbles. But when I got to the arctic wolves I had to turn away from the spectacle. I turned away from their silent gaze through the bars, the indifferent pigeons eating dirt on the ground not far from their majestic paws, their snow white fur highlighting the absence of snow in a steadily heating Paris. So wrong. An Arctic Wolf in Paris. As we moved away, H said, `the thing I don't like is that we get to go home now, and well, they are still here'. A `bit of a larf' for us, a lifetime for them.

There was a frisson of excitement in the monkey pit when ten or so monkeys lined up on the edge of the moat, staring at the spectators. Seeing that humans share a large proportion of their DNA with chimpanzees, I couldn't help feeling ill at ease, and hopeful, that this may be the beginning of a barricade, that we might be witnessing the stirrings of a revolt.

While i'm sitting writing this in my apartment, my cat scratches at the window and lets out a disgruntled meow. With the arrival of Spring he is no longer satiated by the wind up mouse that doesn't sweat, the plastic red spider that doesn't bite. Even if it means spending the afternoon supervising him I know I've got to let him outside to stalk-pounce-drool-bite, to feel like a cat again.

Passing gloom

2007-03-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

The day has cracked open and oozes morning air. Bruises are blooming all over my body, my long straight hair is curly, and a passerby dodges my chlorine sneeze as I make my way home through the haughty silence of the ninth arrondissement. It's only 8 am and i've already banged and bonged my way forty times up and down a Paris pool, listening to muscles I'd forgotten could speak. Nothing like an early morning battle to fight a passing gloom.

And battling your way in a straight line, up and down a Paris swimming pool, and even just getting safely from the pool to the change rooms, is no small feat.

Paris pools are full of people just there for a flap. And these flappers can boogie underwater and blow bubbles and what not in any lane they wish. It doesn't matter how slow you are, you are free to swim with the fasties. French égalité at its finest?

It wasn’t like that in my hometown Sydney where all the lanes of the pool were
clearly marked: super fast swimmers – freestyle only, fast swimmers – still freestyle only, medium to rare swimmers, backstrokers etc, and a big penned off area for `people just here to get wet and flap around'.

Not only were the lanes signposted but they were patrolled to ensure people respected the signposts. Official looking swimming guards timed swimmers in the fast lane – if you weren’t fast enough, you had to high-tail it out of there to a more suitable lane. Timers had no qualms about shouting out your speed in front of a full pool.

At my Paris pool there is only one lane that has any markings, it says that it is for
rapide swimmers, but no one takes much notice of this. You often find people with floaties dilly-dallying about here. Being a die hard free styler, the swimmers I hate most are the breast strokers. I’m quite a fast swimmer (by French public pool standards anyway) and trying to overtake these frog-kickers, invariably oblivious as to how less-than-rapid they actually are, without getting socked in the head with a foot or a loose body part is near impossible.

I get on better with the other freestylers, That is, except for Le Phoque. A large, slippery man who swims dead smack in the middle of the go and return lanes. When he slaps against me, which is so often that I am beginning to suspect his intentions may not be entirely honourable, he slips over me like a seal and the sensation of having been sealed up remains with me until I am well and truly showered.

The danger is not just in the water but out of the water as well. Over-friendly Maitre Naguers, remarking my accent when I cry out in pain, sidle up to me in that French man spies foreign girl kind of way, and despite my matted hair, goggle-marked eyes and evident pot belly, ask me to perform all kind of acts for them, usually the first thing that pops into their water-logged heads. Sometimes they just ask me out for coffee, but one once asked me to translate Jack le Ripper for him in exchange for swimming lessons. I was less disturbed by the content of the text he wanted me to translate than that he thought I needed swimming lessons.

Blame it on the March Hare

2007-03-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been feeling gloomy this past week, a passing gloom, but a gloom nonetheless.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice finds a small cake in which the words “Eat me” have been written with currants. So she eats the cake expecting something astonishing to happen, because lately all kinds of hocus pocus has been going on. To recap: she sighted a rabbit wearing a waistcoat rabbiting on about being late, and so she followed him down a hole, discovered an underground world and drank a potion which made her shrink. So she thinks if she eats this cake something weird and wacky will happen. But in fact, when she bites the cake, momentarily nothing happens.

`But Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.'

[perhaps if she'd tried a hash cake from one of those cafes in Amsterdam before, she would know that that there is usually a delay before things start to happen after one eats cake]

I guess this is a bit like Simone de Beauvoir must have felt in her early hanging-in-bars days. In the first volume of her memoirs: Mémoires d'une Jeune Fille Rangée where she describes her rebellion against her petit bourgeois and catholic upbringing, her cousin Jacques tells her that `you just have to hang out in the bars, you just have to be there and something interesting always happens'. But when she first escapes her vigilant mother and hangs in bars from Montmartre to Montparnasse, grand things just don't happen, there is no hey presto magic. She sips on her gin-fizz and nothing happens.

I was spoilt for quite a while in Paris with fanciful events and coincidences crashing into each other, clouds making significant signs at me and gargoyles whispering prophecies. And now. suddenly, I’ve been walking out on the street expectantly trying to conjure up magic, and nothing happens. So it all seems quite dull and stupid, this existence.

I mainly blame this current lack of magic on March. When I lived in Australia I always hated March. Nothing and no one was born in March. The dead leaves and dead days hurt my heart, as did the last voices leaving the water on Sydney's slowly wintering beaches. The plunge back into an early black sky used to always fill me with a sense of foreboding.

Of course here in France i've been flipped upside down, with March signifying the end, not the start, of Winter. But this year's spooky early Spring, with its sunshine on bare trees, gave me that old feeling of doom. And then when I read the UK news today saying that the scary spring is going to retreat and

Wildlife experts said animals such as moles, bats and hedgehogs that woke early from hibernation could be at risk of starvation because of the snow,

I couldn't shake my gloom.

Hanging out with dead men

2007-03-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

On days when I’m feeling hot-breathed, clean-boned and immortal, I don’t mind walking around the cemetery at Montmartre. I meow at the silent cats guarding the tombs, watch old graves crumble away to make way for new inhabitants, and look at the photos on some of the headstones and think, `you were once alive, how did this happen to you'.

A couple of weeks ago we visited the grave of Francois Truffaut. A stylish grave for a stylish man. Just a flat, black headstone, with his name and span of existence. No fanfare. No angels trumpeting his successes. There were some flowers and a note from a fan, but none of the hullabaloo you find around other celebrity graves in Paris. We were the only people there. There were no weeping hippies blowing out poems, no lovelorn graffiti like at the grave of Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise cemetery.

The simplicity of Truffaut's headstone contrasted with the whopping bust of Karl Marx towering over his grave in Highgate cemetery in London, this monument to individuality going against all his collective theory. Well at least Marx's grave is not in the elite part of Highgate cemetery you have to pay to visit.

My favourite dead men are buried all over the world. As I mentioned in my previous post, all the novels in my top ten (which doesn't contain ten novels) are by dead men - although admittedly William Styron is just freshly deceased:

Of course there are many other novels I’ve loved in my life, but for the moment, no other novel has shaken enough skin off me to add to my top ten. [This little exercise in cutting and pasting book covers has reminded me exactly how much I prefer the plain French editions to the covers of books in the English-speaking world which make every book look cheap and nasty].

When all your favourite novelists are dead you lose all hope of having the opportunity to exchange ideas with them [or of them publishing another novel]. Back in London I remember that trickle of excitement when I read Martin Amis’ Rachel Papers followed closely by London Fields – a contender for my top ten and he is alive! Devious thoughts beetled around my brain. Maybe we can actually exchange ideas. I'd been a faithful fag hag to Proust for so long, listening to him soliloquising over Ritz cocktails, and I’d been such a good listener to Tolstoy never saying a word while he chanted on and changed his mind about oh yes, oh no, maybe I do believe in god now after all. Perhaps Martin Amis will let me speak.

And then...a beetle of hope. I saw that Martin Amis was going to be speaking in North London, answering questions [listening!] and signing his latest book. And then, the beetle of hope was squashed. It was like Question Time in the British House of Commons. The nondescript Mr. Amis, with deaf ears, promised to pass my neatly prepared question on to his publishers.

Maybe I should just give the guy a break, do him a favour, put one of his books in my top ten. After all, sometimes when I duck down the road to the local epicerie to buy milk I haven’t put on my social face and I can’t construct a sentence. Squeak replaces speak. But geez Martin, you weren’t going out to buy a kipper and a lager down at the local minimart, you were showing up to talk about your book. Couldn’t you have at least been charismatic, a little less drab, maybe even a little taller, a lot funnier and more overtly intelligent?

Living authors can be so disappointing. I imagine living readers probably are as well.

Resurrecting women

2007-03-09T03:09:00.000-08:00

After farewell drinks on my last night in London before I moved to Paris, I was giddy on the London underground, my head full of feathers and soft objects, and I struck up a conversation with a random passenger, as I’m prone to do.

We both had books under our arms – what are you reading? I was reading one of Anais Nin’s journals, pink and fleshy, and full of desire. "Hey" I said, popping open with enthusiasm, "why don’t we exchange books, we could start a thing where random strangers exchange random books on the tube. Simple, here i'll have yours and you have mine."

I’ve always been against the idea of books treated as stagnant objects, left on shelves, sometimes unread or only knowing one reader. French wrapped his books in plastic and half-opened them when he read them to protect the pages from germs, only catching the words on the left side of each page. He used to harangue me about my well-travelled books, covers crumpled and words sweating off the pages. Your books are bringing down the value of our bookshelf.

When I moved from Sydney to London I left several boxes of peeling books with my friend and said "read them!" I probably could have stored them in my parents' attic, but for me books are meant to be read, to circulate, not left to gather mould on a shelf, and certainly not to be burnt at 451 degrees farenheit.

But despite all my enthusiasm for the book exchange on the London tube, the next day I slightly regretted the swap. I’d been right into the epic proportions of the love story between John Erskine and Anais Nin and here I was with a waif of a novel, a size zero. I put it aside and forgot about it.

But earlier this week, drinking pansy wine in a bar full of empty chairs, with purple-stained mouth I was lamenting to a friend that all the novels in my top ten (which doesn’t actually contain ten novels) are by dead men. I love women’s politics and history, their philosophy and their religion. I love their journals when they talk about the process of writing fiction (and the process of sleeping with other writers) but why don’t I like their fiction? I’m a woman. I like my fiction.

You should read Jean Rhys, my friend suggested. And he reeled me in with her Paris novels. A 30-something woman in the 1920 somethings, drinking and ageing, elbowing out all those men who were standing at the bar novelising about being down and out in Paris.

And I remembered that the book I received on the tube exchange was Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea and I found it dying on my book shelf last night and resurrected it. According to the little biography at the start of the book, after a brief success with her novels about Paris and London, Jean Rhys disappeared for about 27 years (although I'm sure that this plunge into obscurity, the 20 odd years of death attributed to her by the men who gave awards and published, were in fact living, working years for her) and was "re-discovered" with a stack of short stories, and then Wide Sargasso Sea.

I read it last night. It isn't underfed - it's a natural waif, starting and ending in exactly the right place. I guess what drew me in was its unsettling balance between plot and style, something I’m trying to achieve in my own writing at the moment. She pushes us to the outskirts of language, we're happily sinking into the fragrant marshes of her beautiful style, and then she beseeches us to follow the plot again because it is going to take another twist: someone is dead, someone is going to have sex with the maid, someone is going to perform some black magic.

But best of all after reading it, I felt inspired. To write, to speak, to do everything. And now I’ll happily let the book go on the Paris metro, for anyone who has a book to exchange.

Cramped conditions

2007-03-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the world feels tinier than an undersized pygmy shrew's brain. When I look at so-called entertainment news that gives twenty-four hour coverage of the aftermath of Britney Potter shaving her head, when I look at what people are reading on the metro and it's so often the same old Harry Spears book, I'm not surprised, yet I vomit from surprise.

The world is a-bubble with interesting books to read, including those from the deep past which you haven't read yet. It is brimming with unprocessed people, all kinds of people, with all kinds of features, bottle-nosed thoughts and droopy ideas. There is so much diversity and yet everyone is crowding around the same old people and the same old books.

At the zoo everyone is around the penguin pit. I can't breathe. I can't move. I'm choking on little kid's fumes and the frazzled beard of the man in front of me and I can't see anything. There's plenty of space over in front of the water-hogs but of the 300 or so animal species at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, penguins are always ranked in the viewing top ten. But why? Because two people stopped to tie up their shoelaces so some other people thought something interesting must be going on over there. They were followed by more people with the same idea and so on until there is a whole crowd trying to spot the penguins, although in fact the penguins' enclosure is closed for renovations and meanwhile the waterhogs are having an orgy.

Let's face it, penguins, cute as they may be, are fashionable. With films like La Marche de l'empereur, Happy Feet and Farce of the Penguins, splattered all over the world, I wasn't surprised when the latest issue of Australian Geographic featured a story on penguins.

What about rorquals? what about chinese water deer? what about muskrats? What about pine martens? what about badgers? what about PYGMY SHREWS?

Ok I admit it, I'm just listing animals from the book I've been reading called Fauna Brittanica and perhaps all these animals are especially interesting to me because I come from the Southern Hemisphere and I've never actually seen some of these animals in the flesh. But really, it's good to know that there's a lot more going on in the wild than penguins shaving their heads and appearing nude in plays.

Doing stuff for money

2007-02-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

I was just looking at the small biography of an author included at the start of one of her novels. It said that before she was a writer she worked as an icecream driver, a funeral parlour assistant, and a riddler (person who turns the champagne bottles so the sediment collects in the neck of the bottle), among other wacky jobs. You have to wonder how long she actually spent at each of these jobs just to list them on her quirky c.v.

I’ve been doing stuff for money for a long time now. When I was a child I used to make odourless liquids using food colouring and crushed ants, and I'd bottle these laboratory blues and raging reds, label them "perfume", and sell them to kindly neighbours.

My first real paying job was as a sales assistant in a lollipop shop, at the age of 14 and nine months, the legal age for children to work in Australia. I was like a kid in a candy store. Customers would ask where they could find candy dentures, liquorice bullets and king size jelly cobras and I’d just stand there, unable to speak, my voice blocked from exiting my mouth by a pile-up of jelly beans. Every Thursday night and Saturday morning I ate away my working hours. As well as wearing a bright yellow cap, red shorts and a smile, I also had a sugar lump belly from too many sweets. Six months later I swapped this job for bookselling in the hope of fattening my brain with reading.

One of the book shops I worked in was located in a decrepit shopping centre in a suburb of Sydney where people have long-forgotten how to read. Julie, who looked after the shop during the weekdays, spent her time in the back room doing yoga or chatting to friends on the phone while little kids ate the bestsellers and stray dogs dribbled over the cookbooks. But this neglected book shop was a dusty paradise for me. Being on the virgo cusp I’ve always had a love of organising. Every Thursday night I came in to that shop and arranged, inventorised and alphabetised everything. I even lined up the cup o noodles Julie kept behind the counter in alphabetical order by flavour (beef before chicken etc).

Shelving books in a library was equally fulfilling. I find that humdrum jobs, if done in moderation, can in fact unleash a herd of creative thoughts and send them stampeding in to my writing.

But I lasted one night as a pizza delivery driver. I was the only girl in the parlour. I sat around watching telly in a room full of boys who smelled like pepperoni and tickled me because I was a girl, waiting for my turn to hit the road. Fast Craig whisked in and out, taking all the ready to go pizzas and boasting about how many tips he got from big-breasted waif girls (probably pizza loving old ladies). You were paid according to how many pizzas you delivered but because of Fast Craig (and because I got lost en route to my first customer) I only delivered one pizza. One pizza minus deduction from my pay of the cost of one bottle of coke which exploded in the customer’s face because I accidently dropped it on the ground, doesn't equal a whole lot of dough.

When I moved to London it was a bit like starting again, returning to these odd jobs of my adolescence and early adulthood. I’ve posted a couple of posts about some of my early London jobs below.

An unloveable mongrel called shawn

2007-02-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

This post is set in the epoque after I returned to the Mother Country (England) from my native Australia, but before I moved to the Old Dog (Paris).

When I was straight off the boat from Australia, my first job was as a Saver.

It sounds glamorous I know. A Saver of Souls. A Saver of Lives. A Saver of cats stuck up trees.

But no, I was a Saver of CVs for a recruitment company located in a pre-gender discrimination law, pre-sexual harrassment in the workplace, time warp.

I got all miu-miu-ed up for the first day of the job, my very first job
in that difficult hotpot we call London. I was dressed in my most spic and span suit but as
it turned out I didn’t need to glam it up, no one even raised an eye when I walked in.

And so, explained my South African trainer in her jolting accent, you check all the potential candidate's details are at the top of the CV and then you save the CV as a word file and then as a text file.

Yes I see, and then?

And…that’s all.

Ok there was SOMETHING fun about saving CVs into text and word files. I got to see
some really creepy CVs. Some were almost love letters to the recruiter, others were borderline begging. Lots of people included their photo (this seems to be the done thing in France but it is definitely not the done thing in Australia and I think it is not so common in England) so I had to let out tiny chuckles when I saw photos of boys (yes, boys!) and girls prancing around in their bikinis. They were applying for jobs in IT.

I am proud to say that I saved a lot of people from
the trash can. We were given strict instructions to delete anyone who came from
anywhere that was not in the European Union who didn’t specify they had a visa to work in the UK. Some of the folks from India wrote such nice, sensible letters about why they should get the job despite their lack of work permit, that with one swoop I saved them (as word and text files). After all, i'm from the ex colonies too, I know exactly what it is like scrounging around for a work permit in unforgiving Old Blighty.

There were about 25 of us on one side of a big room, saving away. Across a river of undesked carpet, on the left bank of the room, were the Bridgers. Their exact role remains
a mystery to me but I guess they were bridging some kind of gap between the savers
and the Almighty Recruiters. All I know is that they considered themselves a cut above us lowly savers, like the girls who dance topless at the Moulin Rouge consider themselves a cut above the girls who tuck their boobs under sequins and dance the cancan.

I was unluckily placed near the unloveable mongrel Shawn, who, unlike me, wasn’t temping and had been working there for five years and miraculously never moved on from Saver to Bridger. His hobbies included (all in a loud voice so all the savers and even the bridgers could hear) – ranking the appearance of all the girls in the room from Very Hot to Very Dog, discussing his sexual escapades with a girl who had worn the same g-string three days in a row, exchanging ideas with his nondescript but shawn-like cronies about why the girl sitting next to me, a quiet philosophy student looking for an easy pound, had worn the same trousers all week (Shawn seemed to have an eye for girl’s fashion faux pas) and talking about who was going to get the old high-ho from the company at the end of the week for not saving enough CVs.

Yep, Shawn was in cahoots with the Manager and in this environment where professionalism had been packed in a little box and chucked out on to Regent Street to be trampled on by heavy heeled londoners, the manager for some ungodly and unprofessional reason confided in Shawn before she fired or hired anyone.

And Shawn was a professional Dobber who told her if someone went to the toilet too many times, took a phone call on their mobile from their dying grandmother or wore the same pants too many days in a row.

Now I can’t even remember her name, but lets just call this manager Susy because that was probably her name, although I was required to call her Miss Susy. Miss Susy's claims to fame were rising from the ranks of company receptionist to Head of Savers, talking loudly on the phone about who she was going to fire that week, telling Shawn whether the new girls she was hiring (after she'd finished firing) were cute or not, and telling anyone who would listen about how many beers she'd put away the night before (I’d like to make it clear now that I have nothing against binge drinking if it is done with style but if you knew Miss Susy you’d know that she was more of a tits on the table, vomit dribbling down the chin kind of binge drinker).

First day on the job (lucky for me Miss Susy started her new role the same week as me) she gave us a list of all the forbiddens – no eating at your desk, can’t be more then one nano second late in the morning, no talking, no whispering, no laughing (except if you are shawn or liked by shawn).

Anyway, you may have guessed by now, but I was one of the people who was getting fired after four weeks of saving. It might have been because I was accused of computer sabotage on my second week of the job. Apparently someone had managed to delete all the CVs in the entire company database that had been saved the previous month and Miss Susy shouted me down about this saying that the sabotage had been activated from my computer. Of course I pleaded innocent and they had to accept that as they had no hard evidence against me (lots of people used my computer at lunchtime) and they have that thing embedded in the common law about letting all those guilty people go free rather than one innocent person being convicted. I wasn't guilty but I couldn’t help thinking I wish I had come up with the idea to sabotage the system and somehow point the finger at Shawn.

I was also a lousy saver. I’d get caught up reading the CVs. All these CVs peopling my inbox with characters from all over the world made fascinating reading. I also spent a fair bit of time correcting spelling and grammar to help the candidates in this cut-throat world of job-hunting. I don’t think I ever made the daily saving quota.

The day I got fired, Miss Susy didn't pull the trigger. She passed the buck by putting me on the phone to my temping agency who said “it is nothing personal, shawn just doesn’t think you are hot enough” or something like that.

I was a little shaken up about this. I was back to no money in London as opposed to some money. But I also left that chamber for the last time letting out tiny whoops of joy. No more sexism in the workplace, no more gender specific language, no more school mama caning me for being a nano second late and no more oppressive office air. I was out on the street with the Hari Krishnas now. I used to hear them singing when I was stuck up on the sixth floor breathing Shawn's fumes, but now I was with them.

When I still lived in London I sometimes used to go back to that same street. I'd look up at that sixth floor window and think about Shawn up there fashion policing the girls and winning prizes for being Saver of the Year. He must be nearing long service leave for Saving now. His name is probably spelt more fancily, like Sean, or maybe Shaun, but for me he will always be Shawn.

Wrapped in gold

2007-02-25T06:19:00.000-08:00

After I was sent a-packing from my job as a Saver under false accusations of computer sabotage (and because the Chief Saver didn't fancy me), it wasn't long before I scored my second job in London, cutting out cardboard animals for one of the cities most prestigious law firms.

More prosaic than the job title "Saver", my new title was "Paralegal". My actual role was to cut sheets of black cardboard into appropriate sized pieces and tape them over the relevant sections of documents as indicated by the Legals. Meeting minutes, memorandums etc - those nuggets of evidence that weren't admissible in court - were to be concealed from the prying eyes of the other parties to the case. Sometimes I'd leave a saucy little gap in my taping to try and tempt them into a peek.

It was better than the stiff-backed world of the Savers. I lounged in a luxurious sixth floor office with regular visits from a tea lady bearing plates of gold-wrapped chocolate biscuits. I shared my world with another ex-colonial law graduate, a New Zealander also suffering working visa restrictions at the hands of the Mother Country. We passed the days overeating and making crooked giraffes and curly tailed pigs out of black carboard and gold paper, heating up the room with our unused brain activity.

At lunchtime I hobnobbed in sandwich bars with dry-cleaned souls carrying bristling briefcases. Several times I came across fellow law graduates from my university in Sydney who had hit the big time working as solicitors in London's top firms. These were law graduates who had studied law in the appropriate manner. Unlike me, they hadn't decided after two weeks that this degree wasn't for them, yet still hung about because they were programmed to finish what they start, from sandwiches to law degrees.

They would ask me politely where I was at?, and i'd say the name of the law firm - not mentioning my job title, or how many giraffes i'd created that morning - and their eyes would say "wow", and their lips: "well done", while their hands patted me on the head. I knew they were thinking, how in the hooligans did this wayward creature who never came to class get to be working in one of the biggies? And i'd just stick around and finish my sandwich.

Tony Gatlif kiss me anywhere you like

2007-02-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

In my early vixen period I was the kind of person who would correct the spelling errors and problems with syntax in love letters and send them back to where they came from. I once didn't speak to a boyfriend for a week because he sent me flowers at work (and because he had a pus-clogged pimple glistening on his chin). I once received a mysterious Valentine's day card which said simply: "Bet you dont [my italics] remember me, but I remember you Pinochiette". I spent years trying to find the author of that missing apostrophe who never dared come forth. One sentence and he/she/it couldn't get the grammar right.

Of course things have changed since those dark days. Bring on the flowers now. I dine on flower petals and chew their stalks. I love to let loose the scent of flowers in my dull-aired flat which is sealed off from the world to keep the cold out and the cat in. And after four years in Paris, exchanging mangled English and French words of love, I've become accustomed to grammatically incorrect love.

In the spirit of February 14 I've posted below a snippet from my old blog about the language of love, and I'd love to devote the rest of this post to one of my greatest loves, European cinema, more particularly French cinema.

I met some film students a couple of weeks ago, a German and an Italian, who have come to Paris to do five weeks study of French cinema as part of their overall university degree. While I was extremely positive about the current state of European cinema, they dismissed the German, French and Italian film industries as scabby dinosaurs and instead they believe the US is where it is all happening.

The German guy kept saying that the French don't seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the idea is not to bore the audience. I was adamant, barking like a terrier, that in most French films it's exactly the opposite of boring because you don't have to follow set plot points, you don't have to look at your watch and think, well we still have to go through a re-building montage and then reconciliation and one person has to save one world before the film finishes. No, instead the film just ends suddenly and keeps on turning in your head. Men and women (women in particular, because they get to be all sorts of things beyond the devastatingly beautiful/middle-aged neurotic dichotomy they are granted in Hollywood) are free to roam outside structure. And don't go talking to me about Coppola's "Lost in Translation". Because. I've said it once. And I'll say it again. It was an ok film but it wasn't that great. The French are constantly releasing films just as subtle, and just as good, and not making such a hoo-ha about it. Subtlety is the welcome norm in French films.

Interestingly enough, when I probed these film students as to what recent French films they have seen one of them said `L'enfant' (poor old Belgians, yet again someone mistaking their frites for someone elses) and then unable to name anything else, he started mumbling something about Godard!
Godard - did he release a film last year?

I hope to talk in more detail about some of the great films I loved and saw in 2006. However, after watching Nanni Moretti's Journal Intime this weekend - there is one scene where he imagines going to the house of a film critic with copies of her reviews and force feeding her this over-flowerised drivel - I don't have the guts to attempt it right now. So for the moment I will just leave you the following images of ten of the great European (mainly French admittedly) films that I saw at the cinema in 2006, and encourage you all to see them, before it is too late for us all.

Je t'aime my darling gargoyle

2007-02-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has been one half of a bi-lingual love story knows about the linguistic mishaps that arise in day to day communication.

For example, an eavesdropper whose ears are too small to hear all the sounds might think I know less about music then I actually do:

H: Hey you know that old band “Colonzey Gong”?

Me, uninterested, just some boring French band I’ve never heard of:

“no don’t know 'em”

H: Yes you know them!

Me: No I don’t.

Look here...he googles (the internet is always alight at my place)

Oh Kool and the Gang!

H. recounting a conversation he had when he went to see, what he assures me was a post hard core band, the other night:

"And so then I started talking to the other photographer there
and she said she photographed the Madonna concert the other week, so I said
`oh I didn’t know Madonna was in Paris' and she said `Not Madonna, Modonney!'
She was saying Modonney so I felt really stupid but that music was loud!"

Blank look from me: "Who is Modonney? Is he French post hard core as well?"

H: You don’t know who Modonney is??!

Google again: Oh Mudhoney. Right yes.

But when I'm speaking in French, often correcting H's French because it doesn't correspond with the way I would say it with my Australian accent, I've found that i'm more free n easy with the language of love.

I'm not much of a kissy kissy person in English. One Australian friend complains I’m
not very liberal with my “xx”s in correspondence and that he has counted every x I’ve ever signed at the end of my name and put them in a little treasure box (one x on his birthday in 1997, and three xxx's when I wanted something in 2005). But here in France, the ritual of hello-kissing people you don’t know has transposed itself into my emails and I'm now more likely to put bises at the end of my correspondence.

However, I still find "je t'embrasse!" quite frightening. When French men speaking in English decide to translate this as: `I kiss you' (as they often do) it sounds like a blessing, the kind of phrase that should be reserved for when your long white dress is billowing in a persistent breeze and you lean down and kiss someone on their forehead before they go forth to discover a new planet - "I kiss you, now go forth and conquer".

In English if a boyfriend called me "dear" I'd biff him one, but in French I quite like being someone's chérie, like I'm full of sugar and spice and all things nice.

And then there is that whole “I love you” thing. Some of the boys I’ve been with have been the types who have been champing at the bit to say "I love you" after two weeks. This bores me senseless as it means that after that you have nothing really to look forward to except for the first time he says "I hate you, hope you get pecked to death by bored pigeons".

In English I shy away from saying I love you, it seems like too much of a deal clincher. But now that I’ve been given "je t’aime", I'm much more hardcore about it: "Je t’aime! Je t’aime!". I guess it's because I still don't feel comfortable enough in French to feel any real affinity with the language so for me saying "je t'aime!" is as easy as saying "aussie aussie aussie oi oi oi". Saying "I love you", however, remains post hard core.

There are of course constraints on giving free reign to your passion when you aren't operating in your mother tongue. I remember one time before I could understand French when I composed a particularly saucy text, rampant with soft English innuendos, to my French boyfriend who hadn't yet dusted off his English grammar books and he wrote back with: "I think about some good stuffs too".

Marie Pinochiette

2007-02-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

When I went to a hairdressing salon in Sydney on my recent vacation, my hairdresser was curious about the coiffeurs in Paris. She had never been to Paris but she had heard all sorts of tales about dogs with powdered bobs and chic parisiennes at the zenith of style, and so she thought that it was inevitable that the salons that snipped and trimmed these fashionable canines and women must be rather fancy.

`No, they are just like here', I said, mainly just to curtail the conversation because I abhor talking to hairdressers, especially on Mondays. But, as she was holding the scissors and clearly wanted me to come up with something, I added: `except that they don’t automatically condition your hair after washing it'.

`What the pickles! Kylie, did you hear that?' she called out to a co-worker, `get this, in France, they don’t condition your hair after washing it. Oh my gawd! How can you get a comb through unconditioned hair!'

`Well you have to ask for them to condition it. And they charge extra.'

`Bloody hell!'

`I know. I was brought up to wash my hands regularly, never to talk with my mouth full and always to condition my hair after washing it. It was really a culture shock for me.'

We then marvelled for a couple more minutes about how weird the French are, and then she said: `I bet you miss Australia'.

The other day when I was at my local hairdresser I thought of other things that, if I'd been so inclined, I could have told that Sydney hairdresser and Kylie. Perhaps it is just a general French distaste for multi-tasking, but every time I go to my parisian hairdresser, I feel like I catch a whiff of the ancien regime.

There is a rigid hierarchy among the staff that goes beyond manager and trainees. I'm transported to the Court of Versailles where the way you dressed exhibited your rank, for example, the longer the train of a woman's dress the higher her rank. At my coiffeur it's black and white. The manager wears a distinctive courtly black, whereas everyone else: the stylists, colourists and hair-scrubbers, must be dressed in unbecoming baggy-white shirts. As if to brand her as a yet more lowly species on the social ladder than the non-manager stylists, the colourist wears a little vest over her white shirt, branded, appropriately enough, with the word "colourist", in case her surgical gloves and the little trolley of dyes she wheels around isn't evidence enough.

They fawn over me like Marie Antoinette in her heydey (perhaps this may have something to do with the fact that it's not uncommon to tip a hairdresser in France), but in the same way that there were strict regulations as to who had rights depending on rank to dress and undress Marie Antionette, here invisible rules dictate who can condition my hair and who can blow dry my hair and who can pass me the magazines. The manager won't just give a simple blow dry but will cut and blow dry, the colourist can't touch the scissors or the magazines but she can wash hair as well as colour it, and then the lowliest of all, the simple hairwasher can offer me a coffee and take my coat, but she doesn't seem to have phone privileges. This means even if she is the nearest to a ringing phone she'll continue with her important task of dusting the shampoo while the phone boils over.

I've been drinking and dreaming so much lately that I don't know anymore what is real and what isn't, what happened and what didn't, what is past and what is present. Am I Marie-Pinochiette?

The stylist, with a wary look to check her manager isn't listening, leans in close to me and says conspiratorially under the click of her scissors: `you know it would probably be cheaper for you if you just bought a bottle of conditioner and took it home with you rather than getting us to condition your hair here.' Instead of giving her a haughty response that of course I already have a bottle of conditioner at home, I nod and think back to that final part of Marie Antoinette's life when she was imprisoned in the Tower. During this period, under the guise of dressing her hair, well-wishers from the outside world passed her potentially useful information, unbeknownst to the watchful guards.

De-bunking deliciously bed-rumpled Frenchmen

2007-02-06T04:31:00.000-08:00

My friend sent me this quote from an article by Jacqueline Maley in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

"There are certain truths every woman knows intellectually but which she does not really learn until she experiences them first-hand.

Skinny jeans look good only on someone whose body shape resembles a whippet's. Pretty much everything tastes better deep-fried. Yellow is a very unforgiving colour.

But the most difficult truth, the truth most sweetly painful to learn, is the one about Frenchmen, that no matter how handsome, no matter how nonchalantly unshaven and deliciously bed-rumpled they are, they should be resisted, for they will always break a lady's heart."

On closer inspection, the article is a tongue-in-cheek look at the way Australians supposedly wholeheartedly support their entertainment exports in their foreign romances, particularly when things go awry.

The Australian population apparently rioted when Tom Cruise dumped Nicole Kidman if we are to believe the Australian press and, as it was too painful to think that he could possibly have left our golden girl for a talented European, in the end we just blamed it on him having his brain transplanted by Scientologists.

The SMH article goes on to say that bed-bogged Olivier Martinez's alleged cheatings on Kylie Minogue are "nothing less than an international incident. Sanctions should be opposed and products boycotted".

Of course the idea often implied in the press that Oliver Martinez's reported infidelity is somehow linked to his being French (and therefore oversexed, unfaithful and snapping off hearts) is the stuff that looney tunes is made from. It reeks of the scurrilous pamphleteers of Marie Antoinette's day, depicting her as the wanton and unfaithful Austrian. Infidelity is foreign. But no, Olivier Martinez is just part of the universal struggle against monogamy that men and women of all nationalites are engaged in.

However, spurred on by the image of a "deliciously bed-rumpled" Frenchman, I rummaged around in the old files in my computer attic and found some old posts, half-eaten by dust mites, which I boxed away when I moved my old blog late one night. They recount some incidents in my relationship with a Frenchman. But needless to say, I was largely disappointed. In place of bedroom eyes I had well-scrubbed ears. The posts depict no heavy odour of love. There are no savage descriptions of charming and ultimately heart-crashing amour. I've posted them below.

Patriotism rolled up into little balls

2007-02-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

The recent winds in Paris have been tearing apart French flags. I noticed one yesterday at Place de La Republique which had lost its red band and was rebelliously pecking the air like a blue and white flycatcher.

This mangled flag got me thinking about patriotism and my old beau French.

In the first part of our long and winding relationship, French and I were living in London.

During this period French was a mighty and forceful advocate of all things French.

If, for example, I was preparing a salad and I left the lettuce in big pieces, because in Australia we have great faith in the ability of people to use utensils and therefore give them the choice as to how they wish to upload the lettuce into their mouths, French would say “no no no, in France we don’t do it like that, we cut it into tiny pieces, like this, see, that’s how its done in France and that’s how it should be done everywhere else”.

Sometimes, trying to be helpful, I'd wash his clothes for him and then roll his socks into little balls before putting them away in the drawer. One day, speaking in such grave tones I thought perhaps I was finally going to be given the old high ho, he said “you know Pinochiette, if you don’t mind I’d like to do my washing myself, because you see in France we don’t roll socks into little balls like that because they get crushed. You need to just put them in the drawer as separate entities."

Of course it was here that I realised that his overwhelming pride in France was in fact blurring the fact and fiction of what people actually do in France and that the law against rolling socks together was enacted by him and corresponded to his own world view that socks, like people, are better off single.

Voyage à deux

2007-02-04T03:58:00.000-08:00

I've got a crush on the south of France.

The first French friends I made in Paris are all originally from various places in the south. These southern friends are "expats" in a way, fiercely denying any ties to those arse-hole Parisiens. They wear bright colours and flaunt shirts with embroidered flowers in defiance of the muted tones of parisiens. They open themselves right up as if to distinguish themselves from the parisiens concealed behind closed shutters.

Down south, Summer is just the way I like it. The air crackles and pops like it does in Australia and you are impregnated with the heavy stench of the juices of insects and worn out flowers. If you reach out and touch the coast you can throw yourself into a swimmable sea.

I started thinking about organising another trip down south again when I watched Two for the Road this weekend. Usually I watch Audrey Hepburn films just to admire her wardrobe but this film was bigger than her wardrobe.

The film is the story of an English couple whose relationship is about to shrivel up and fall off. They take a trip by car from Calais (I guess), to the Côte d'Azur. On this voyage we weave in and out of several other road trips they have taken in France, including the time they first met when they collided in the French countryside. We see how their relationship has evolved in pace with the way that they have social climbed. We feel sad when we see how happy they were before, in contrast to the bat cave of lies and disappointment that their relationship has now become. But in the end we're not that sad because we realise that their love has reached a new level and can stretch even further to accommodate their changed selves.

I just had a rummage through my archives and found a little diary entry of my own voyage à deux when French and I took a road trip down south for my 30th birthday. It highlights the way that an ill-matched middle class couple, who have never been out in the fields working with a hammer and sickle, can waste time on trivialities:

"We drove gung ho from Paris to Lyon, only stopping for sandwiches in an ant-filled ditch by the road. Then, after a day of nibbling on each other's nerves, we had a fight because, for no sound reason, I wanted to go on a tour of Lyon's Opera House. Because of this desire to see the Opera House, French wanted to break up with me.

But he changed his mind three minutes later. I didn't say "yes, we're back together" or "no, we're not" for the sake of peace over my Salade Lyonnaise. But although things were half patched up between us, we didn't say bonne nuit to each other that night and this led to hostilities over the white bread and nutella spread the next morning. This already sombre mood was aggravated by a dearth of croissants.

But then in medieval Avignon, after I made several snide remarks, we were reunited in a thunderstorm in a little park on the hill, watched by two sniggering goats.

Then everything fell apart again in Aix-en-Provence when I refused to pick a restaurant for dinner. What followed was a whole night of breaking up and crying (me) and me attacking everyone with a pair of nail scissors (me being the main victim).

The next morning when I insisted on being dropped off at the nearest train station, French kidnapped me and took me to Nice. And there everything changed because there we have the sea and you can swim and it's pumping-and-mad-and-hot-and you can eat big juicy capers and Socca.

That day was my birthday and it was all about me and champagne and beautiful parks on promontories. So things were in top shape.

And then there was yesterday: the seven hours slog in the car back to Paris with sporadic arguments and boredom and reminiscing about what a nice holiday it was, with everyone forgetting about those nail scissors and our lack of complicity.

Lethe-wards we sunk."

Reading with gusto

2007-01-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

My bones are creaking and my teeth have been jangling from the cold, but I've been having a riotous time these past few days, reading Simone de Beauvoir's Journal de Guerre.

In the past I've questioned the merit of recording everything you do, eat, think, every day - there is already so much information circulating electronically and on little bits of paper. Even now I sometimes feel reluctant to post on my blog, to put something else out there in that big junkyard of broken up thoughts and crumpled second hand information.

In any case, in my diaries I've always favoured recording sentiments over - got up. fed cat. blew nose. But I'm so glad Simone de Beauvoir did this.

How well I can see Paris back then in 1939/1940, the first year of the Second World War. She describes the bars and cafes where she wrote and drank and exchanged ideas. Of course there are the obvious ones like Flore, the Dôme, and the Deux Magots, but she also talks about a cafe called Versailles that reminds her of cafes in the provinces, Milk Bar, Capoulade, the Jockey which the owner has modelled on the dance halls of Seville, and on and on. Because she didn't have a telly or the internet she was always pub crawling.

I should of course pause to say that this was a difficult time for Simone (separated from both Sartre and Jacques Bost), tearing open their daily correspondence, unable to work on her novel due to the uncertainty of the war, feeling like she was in limbo.

But she diligently records all. The films she saw, the clothes she bought. She was so proud of her yellow turban. She even mentions when she was in Alsace clandestinely visiting Sartre, that some soldiers noticed her turban and said when they saw her they felt like they were back on Les Boulevards, the turban being the pinnacle of parisian fashion in this epoque. It was also known as a cache-misère because it concealed your head on a bad hair day. The years between us feel so few when she describes in detail the hues and cuts of other women's outfits, when they look good, and more interestingly, when they look moche.

And oh how well we feel we are in Paris when she describes how "no" doesn't really mean "no". When she is trying to obtain a permit to go visit Sartre she well understands that if you push and poke someone a bit "no" becomes "yes", as she found on her hunt to snare the relevant bits of paper necessary to negotiate the French bureacracy. She even notes that her future reunion with Sartre and ultimate happiness are based on the caprice of a civil servant.

Of course she also describes the food she eats, details so often left out in the condensed moments of film, television and novels, and you get the impression she is eating all the time, when in fact it's just three meals a day. She certainly eats with gusto: sausages and ham and eggs and veal with weighty sauces.

However, when it comes to her more intimate life, the adventures in the love-bed, her details dry up. I'm just up to the bit where she goes to visit Sartre in Alsace and they spend a night in a glacial winter bed together. She doesn't comment on this night and I can't help wondering if this has anything to do with what she once said about Sartre:
"a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed".

A clowder of cats

2007-01-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

Irene Nemirovksy could only have been a dedicated admirer and observer of cats. I refer to the clowder of cats slinking through the chapters of her final novel Suite Francaise. Most noticeably Albert, the family cat, pounces from the pages in one chapter devoted entirely to him and his prey, whereas some of the minor human characters are confined to several paragraphs.

Albert the cat is part of the wartime exodus from Paris in June 1940. Having suffocated between the buildings of Paris for most of his life, under the wary eyes of skanky city rats and hustler pigeons, war brings him the opportunity to lick the country air and all its bounty. Late one night he evades the sleeping wriggles of children and plunges from the window of the house in the country village where the family have stopped to rest en route to the South of France. He is a sensory fur ball, egged on by smell and sound to commit all kinds of savagery.

Later, drunk on blood and feathers he heads home under the eye of the night. Planes slink stealthily through the beating clouds, sniffing out their prey. Albert is back inside, warm and purring before the night is broken up by yowling bombs falling from the sky and setting the village alight with pain.

Hearing an undecipherable noise which sounds close, I look up from this chapter to study the ears of my cat who is reclined on the couch across from me, one paw placed dandily in front of him. He gives me a bored but loyal look. His powerful ears haven't registered any abnormality - no flat ghoul trying to slither through the crack under the door. I watch him a bit longer to confirm also that the low rumbling sound beneath my bed is just the regular creepy sound of the after-hours metro carrying banshees from one empty station to another, and not the beginnings of an earthquake. But my noise meter gives the all clear and I return to my book.

All the guides on cats that I've read say that cats make perfect pets for children who are afraid of the dark because the warmth and tickle of a cat's whiskers makes you feel peaceful. Since I've had my cat I'm certainly a lot calmer. I now manage to fall asleep before the witching hour, and if necessary, I can blame the noises on him. Things that bump and scratch in the night are no longer the transparent undead. At least in my own head, those noises are probably just my cat.

Speaking to a friend the other day she was saying how she doesn't particularly like living alone.
I love living alone! I said.
Well, that’s because you have a cat.
And it’s true. When you have someone who sleeps on your head and drools in your lap there is no sense of being alone.

It’s not the first cat I’ve had. There have been others. But those were family cats. In my diary I’ve duly noted that my last cat died at the same time that one of my formative relationships disintegrated. Two great loves dead in one searing week.

My current cat arrived in my life heralding the birth of a relationship. I’ve posted the relevant post from my old blog below.

Tools of love

2007-01-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

How did your parents meet? This is generally a safe, cross-generational question (most people have parents who met at some point, even if it was just to fleetingly rub noses) which I like to ask people and which I am genuinely curious about. Among my generation more often than not the answer is either at work, I dunno, or it was arranged by their parents.

Nowadays when I ask new acquaintances of my own generation how they met their current partner/squeeze, particularly expatriates, quite frequently the answer is online. Whether they were actively seeking love/friendship via an online dating service or in a more passive way (she saw an online advertisement from a guy who dog-sits and asked him if he could look after her pups while she took a package deal to the Dominican Republic. It turned out that he was the [re]incarnation of Solal des Solals so she cancelled the trip to help him look after her puppies who were, after all, still quite young and a bit of a handful).

When people ask me how H. and I met I’m reluctant to say online. It's not that I'm embarrassed about online meeting. Gone are those Sydney days when the internet was still quite new as a tool for meeting people - those days when my sister in-law was saying that internet thingy is never going to take off. Back then the internet was predominantly the domain of deception. Those were the days when, although I never photoshopped my nose (mainly because I didn't/don't know how to use photoshop), short boys didn't do me the courtesy of refraining from standing on chairs in their photographs. They were the carefree days where the people I met via the internet omitted to tell me before our first meeting that they just had a recent brain explosion or that when they said they were an artist they just like painting those little toy soldiers in army greens, and that's all they like doing.

Lately at least I've found the internet to be a little more honest - ofcourse people are often a slightly off-kilter version of their online persona, but they are generally only a mildly dirtier version of the spade they said they were.

I moved to Paris when I was christmas cake, that is, past the age where I could walk out on the street and toss a ball to someone and their act of throwing it back to me meant that we were friends. Working from home I didn't have the platform of a parisien office in which to meet people and, being far from where I studied, I didn't have the backdrop of friends from school or university. As I don't even have a decent horse and carriage to go from house to house leaving visiting cards, here the internet has been a useful tool for widening my circle of friends.

One English friend who moved to Paris before the days of the internet and was freelancing from home says: "You don’t know what it was like Pinochiette. Those were dark days. I was forced to treat the Champs Elysées like Les Rambles in Barcelona, strolling up and down hoping to make contact with another form of life. I used to meet American boys who were pretending to be French, and I used to pretend to them that I was American. It was all very confusing. Much more confusing than now with the internet when everyone is much more upfront."

Technically H. and I may have met as the result of a random click and add on his profile as part of a `recruitment' drive - back in the days when my English comrade-in-fun and I organised Funster Fridays. These were bubbly nights where we invited a whole lot of strangers from our online community out for a drink, and we sat back and watched as their profiles were flooded with light, and names and vital statistics became circles of flesh standing askew in a bar.

But I think that H. and I really met through my cat.

When I was thirteen years old I begged my mother for a pet dog. But although my mother was very giving and allowed me to have enough rabbits and guinea pigs to fill a barn, I could not, must not, would not have a dog.

For the most part, I didn’t really want a dog. I just wanted a prop for meeting boys. Trapped behind the walls of an all girls catholic school it was clear to me that my only way to meet boys would be dog walking. He might be walking his dog too or he might be just walking along feeling the lack of a dog. He'd be drawn to me by the light of my golden retriever. This loveable pedigree would be a mere tool for ensnaring a boy.

In the best of all possible worlds, after the boy had taken the bait and petted my dog (presuming my dog was the friendly type who didn't frighten the boy away by gnawing his hand or Cujo-style drooling), he'd be forced to enter into conversation with me where I'd finish him off with my wit. Like lassie or the littlest hobo, the dog would be be free to go and aid another lovelorn catholic girl.

After my click and add, H. and I remained acquaintances. Perhaps when, on a whim, I emailed him to say I was looking for a cat, I was subconsciously harking back to these days when I saw domestic animals as a means of tying the bonds of love. But I think I really did just want a cat. I described briefly, but exactly, the kind of cat I wanted: it must be a boy, black with white paws.

H. texted later: "My friend who lives on a farm has some kittens looking for a home. One is a boy. Black with white socks and a stamp on his nose."

When I went to collect the kitten from H. it was as if with the force of having a little bundle of fur depending on us, we were seeing each other for the first time. As I held my loveable mutt with his overgrown ears and big look-after-me eyes, he looked back and forth from H. to me and it's as though we were being introduced for the first time: H., meet Pinochiette. Pinochiette, meet H.

Can't repeat the past old sport? Why of course you can!

2007-01-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

I don’t like the sounds cricket makes - the love signals of the bat attracting the ball, the click, the clop, dead airwaves filled by the noise of the sun, and then, worse, the low murmur of the commentator. But these sounds are linked with my childhood summers, the background soundtrack to hot days running in and out of the house.

I learned the rudimentary rules of the game from front yard cricket. I was invariably the fielder, my brother - the batter, my father - the bowler (when I questioned my father recently as to why I was only ever given the role of fielding, he said without a pause: well we probably let you bat once but we saw you weren’t any good). In any case, I had the riskiest position as my brother batted from the top of our sloping driveway and I was stationed on the road, dodging cars while I waited for the ultimate howzat! I'd always been quite good at Frogger.

Although the word cricket might come from the old French criquet, living outside the Commonwealth I certainly don’t hear it talked about much anymore. And as for the summer clips and clops, probably the nearest sounds in France are those of petanque, and they don’t even come close.

But holidaying in Australia in December it was hard to escape the hoo-ha over Australia’s win against England. Despite all those expert, bare-handed catches of my childhood I still remain fairly ignorant of the terminology and rules of the game, as well as about how to hold a bat and bowl. I’m generally quite curious about many things, but a combination of the sounds cricket makes and the wedding-whites worn by the players – I've always been a fan of off-white, leaves me listless.

When I complained to one of my male friends about too much cricket, he recounted that when he was at his new girlfriend’s place recently he turned on the tv and was aching to switch on to the cricket. She said "you can watch the cricket if you like". But he didn’t want to dent her with a bad impression at such an early stage in their relationship, make her think he was just one of those cricket guys. In the end, after he'd been ogling the ballroom dancing for half an hour she said "actually I'd prefer it if you watch the cricket".

This reminds me of early in my relationship with H, when my shadow would pass over the computer and he'd quickly flick away the open web page. I found this a bit disconcerting, after all, search engines can lead us all kinds of places. Later I saw that it was just an online Portuguese newspaper. I assumed it was like most newspapers – with news, entertainment, sport. It’s only when I was diagnosed with World Cup fever last June and H found out that he has a girlfriend who, as well as liking high brow dresses and pretty literature, also likes talking football, that he came out and admitted that the newspaper he looks at every day is dedicated solely to football.

Then he lamented that unlike Portugal, France has no culture of football and that the French only talk about football when France is playing and mainly just during the World Cup. Point taken – when I was in Portugal out of the season, nearly every bar had a television playing a match, and if there was no match on in the world they just showed re-runs of the matches of the 1970s or beach football or ice football or snow football.

Since the World Cup I'm afraid H has found me to be rather French in my relationship with football. Although he tries vainly to keep me updated on the moves and shakes in the European football clubs, for the moment I remain as listless as I am with cricket. Without any countries to support I can't re-find the passion I had in some of the posts from my old blog, which I've re-posted at this juncture.

Choreography of sharks

2007-01-10T06:28:00.000-08:00

They have been letting off the shark alarms in the Australian press. For the last few days I've been reading culture of fear headlines which gasp about the increased sightings of sharks in the waters just off the coast of Eastern Australia, with Harry Mitchell of the Australian Aerial Patrol in Sydney saying there has been a "clear increase" in shark sightings over the past five years. There are claims that the sharks have been lured to Sydney not by its reputation for the best seafood restaurants in the world, but by the over-heating planet's warmer waters, a claim disputed by some marine researchers.

Since the late 2006 coup in Thailand and the recent bombings there, we've had story upon story aimed at convincing us that Thailand is the most dangerous place in the world - for example the other day in breaking news we heard that a random boy accidently electrocuted himself in a Bangkok hotel. In the same vein, since last weekend's shark attack when a 21 year old girl was killed by a bull sharks in murky waters off North Stradbroke Island's Amity Point (murky waters and the name Amity would keep me out of the water), the shark space in the newspapers has been escalating.

Among the panic pieces, I read that last weekend at my old beach - Bronte Beach in Sydney - they let off the rusty shark sirens and everyone had to flee the water because someone spotted a shark, which they described as resembling a seal.

The hunt for the killer of the girl at Amity Point reads like the hunt for England's Ipswich murderer, with headlines such as that of ABC's news online: "Three sharks suspected in fatal attack". Inspector Peter Harding is quoted as saying that they are trying to find the sharks, and then, rather frankly although with a hint of uncertainty, he says: "If we found them I suppose we would try to retrieve them and to see if they could have any body parts I suppose."

There are in fact quite a few people who have theorised over the years that sharks have serial killer tendencies, such as shark expert Hugh Edwards:

"How do you explain, for instance, that prior to 1934 there were no shark attacks on Sydney beaches north of Sydney heads. But in the next two years there were five attacks, four of them fatal, between Manly Beach and South Steyne?"

It's true that Australian attacks by Great Whites, especially in South Australia, seem to run in series.

When I read a comment in the Sydney Morning Herald today that, in view of the recent influx of sharks, politicians "were united in saying something must be done about them", I had a sense of foreboding, knowing full well what threatened politicians have been capable of in Australian history. Looking back I saw the headline "yellow peril" with its consequent White Australian Policy, and then the headline red peril flashed before me - Australia's fear of an influx of attacking communists which led it to the futile war in Vietnam.

Then I remembered what could perhaps be seen as the grey peril - the mistaken fear during the 1950s and 1960s that grey nurse sharks were dangerous and so large numbers of these sharks were massacred by spear fishers making these sharks a critically endangered species today. For the record, despite their menacing appearance, these docile, raggy-toothed sharks mainly feed on what I like to feed on in Sydney: fish, stingrays, other sharks, squids, crabs and lobsters, and like me, they are not known to attack humans.

Marine biologists dispute that there is currently any increased risk from sharks. Marnie Horton, the curator of fish and sharks (I like her job title) at the marine park Seaworld said to the Sydney Morning Herald: "There's huge pressure on sharks these days. If anything you would expect that sightings would be decreasing."

There is a lot of data that there are far fewer sharks than what there was 10 or 15 years ago. Also with the demand for shark fin in the Asian market, and the increased value of this product, a lot more people are targeting sharks, particularly the larger sharks.

Peter Benchley's book Jaws, which was made into the 1975 movie of the same name, is the story of a Great White shark. It plays on the idea that sharks actually enjoy eating humans, although research shows that shark attacks on humans are more likely a case of mistaken identity - such as mistaking a human for a seal (in the same way that people mistake seals for sharks) - than an attempt at genuine dining. Humans are hardly considered to be haute cuisine. Benchley later said of his novel: "What I now know, which wasn't known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh."

I know that there are 180 species of sharks in Australia and of these only 10 are potentially dangerous to humans - and most of the time, as with stingrays, this if only if you go around poking about in their affairs. However, a few years ago when I went snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef and someone in the snorkelling party gleefully sirened: "reef shark!" and everyone swam in her direction to spot the shark before it shied away, I swam in the opposite direction, treading above the well lit coral floor, feeling nips and tugs at my feet whenever I accidently passed over a dark, sea cellar.

Last time I visited Sydney Aquarium, after coo-ing to Tiger sharks and Lemon sharks and positively cuddly Port Jackson sharks, I made firm plans that should I ever find myself standing next to a child at an Aquarium who I could teach things, I certainly wouldn't be scaring them with shark attack anecdotes. No, instead i'd be giving them neat little facts and shark conservation kits with I love rubbing sharks' bellies badges.

But then I reflected and thought that one of the most thrilling parts of childhood was being scared - of the eery eye of a cyclone, of the possibility that the Virgin Mary may look back at you from the bathroom mirror, that the the upstairs telephone might ring when you are home alone, or of what may lie beneath the surface of the ocean.

Along the coast of New South Wales there are apparently shark nets on 551 of the beaches. However, nature Conservation Council marine networker Megan Kessler says: `an aerial patrol is much more effective than shark nets. And up to 40 per cent of sharks are actually caught on the inside of the net, so it's a common misconception that the nets physically prevent sharks from approaching the beaches. What they do is catch sharks and unfortunately, they also catch harmless sharks and other animals such as dolphins and turtles.'

When I was a child I'd heard people speak of that - that sharks are often found inside the shark net, that is, on the side of the net where we were swimming! For me that was the ultimate delicious fear. It corresponded with my childhood fear provoked by the film When a Stranger Calls where the police trace the prank calls for the young babysitter and the man who has killed the kids has been making the phonecalls from upstairs, inside the same house as her.

I watched the film Open Water last weekend, based on the true events of an American couple who went diving in January 1998 off Port Douglas in Australia. They were left behind by a tour boat when the diving operator miscounted the members of the dive party, and no one realised they were missing until two days after the dive. As their bodies were never found we can only speculate as to what went down exactly.

What I liked about the film is that although it emphasised the terrifying vastness of the sea and the little mysteries beneath its surface, unlike films with blood-hungry, unconvincing sharks like Jaws, the sharks were portrayed realistically. Although the sharks made their presence felt after the first couple of hours that the couple were stranded, it was only after twenty hours or so of the couple floating at sea, when they had become so dehydrated and weak, and in a sense they had become fixtures in the ocean, that the sharks did genuinely attack. They were now de-humanised and just part of the food chain. The film destroys the myth that all sharks have a malicious intent but keeps alive the delicious fear of potential danger.

Even better was that the film used real sharks. The sharks were choreographed by the film-makers throwing a group of them meat - this way, then that way - to get them to move through the water in whichever direction they were filming.

A fuzzy pumper Christmas and other tales from the South

2007-01-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

'twas the first Australian Christmas i've had for five years...

My first Christmas away from Australia was spent getting drunk on drinks I never drink: shandies, and sherry, and eating an inebriated trifle. It was at the family home of my English friend Lara, a converted gamekeeper's lodge in the south of England. After watching some ladies in the local pub try to stuff other people's husbands into their christmas stockings, Lara and I sat before the twinkling television, with snoring mothers and dogs, listening to the arfing of the neighbours in the manor house and badgers scrambling around in the network of tunnels beneath the lodge. We were weighed down with drunkenness, too drunk to laugh, eating a dessert of bananoffee (the trifle - one part trifle, ten parts sherry - had been more like an apero than dessert).

The year after that I had yet another family Christmas in Tunisia, and then for the last three years I renounced the extended family Christmas, in favour of quiet Christmases in Paris.

In Europe Christmas is flipped upside down for me. Here we speculate as to whether it will be a white Christmas whereas in Australia we hope against a scorching Christmas of bushfires and drought.

Although it's different for my Australian friends of other backgrounds, my English grandmother and vague family claims to castles in Cornwall dating from the Norman conquests, mean that my christmases have indeed been very English, with an Australian twist.

During my childhood and still today we harked back to old England by exchanging cards with snow covered houses and angels draped in winter coats. Australian Father Christmas (Santa) is based in the North Pole, rather than say Antartica or somewhere more local like the Pacific Islands, and persists in sweltering into town in his camp, wintery get-up - although of course you do see funky Santas wearing thongs (as in flip-flops – what you may call thongs we call strings).

In 40 degree summers we were summoned from the swimming pool to drip inside and sit before a steaming table of turkey and cranberry sauce, red hot hams and puddings. Everything hot to match the temperatures outdoors.

When I was a child the Christmas period signified the end of the school year and week upon week of summer holidays. And of course there was the glorious moment of present-receiving: Les cadeaux! Les cadeaux! I have one early memory of receiving the fuzzy pumper barber shop, a dream fulfilled, only to have the dream blackened that very same day when I received a second barber shop kit from a much loved uncle. Tears came smashing down my face, and all the world, so ready to judge me, was convinced that I was brattish and greedy, crying because I wanted another present, not two of the same thing. But the real reason I was crying was because I didn't want dear uncle to feel sad, and what followed that was twenty odd years of feeling misunderstood. My psyche was clearly damaged then.

As I got older of course Christmas changed for me, less excitement over the presents although my uncle’s annual fifty dollars to get wasted on New Years Eve was always a treat

But then uncles died, children grew up and moved away to Paris, and now there’s a new generation of kids to be misunderstood.

Although the turkey stays put, my mother has started introducing food to suit the climate: seafood and salads and pavlova.

While Australia may not have a santa equivalent of its Easter Bilby, at Christmas we are visited by a native Australian beetle, appropriately named the Christmas beetle, mainly because they emerge from hibernation at this time of year. They then hang around until about February, during which time they mate, lay eggs and then die. And according to my source they can strip whole trees to a ragged mess in a feeding frenzy, not unlike the feeding frenzies of humans during the festive season.

Just on a small tangent, while I was reading about Christmas beetles I also came across the rhinocerous beetle, Xylotrupes ulysses australicus, which grows up to 60mm. I'm now officially a fan. As the information says:
From late December through to February, the males aggregate in huge masses on poinsiana trees in the suburbs of Brisbane - perhaps one in every 100 trees will be targeted. As the males do battle and try to push each-other off the branch, they scare their opponents by making loud hissing squeaks.

If you've spent any time in the suburbs of Brisbane you may find this description applies to humans as well.

There's also Christmas bush – bright red trees that blossom at this time of the year. According to official government sources:

There are many native Australian plants in flower over the Christmas season. A number of these have become known as `christmas plants' in various parts of the country, including christmas bells, christmas bush and the christmas orchid.

When Europeans first arrived in Australia they were delighted that they could pick wildflowers resembling bells and bright green foliage covered in red or white flowers to use as Christmas decorations. This was a huge contrast to the bare trees and dormant gardens they had left behind in Europe.

Clouds of Frangipani dust drifted over rain washed streets this December in Sydney, and after five years away I appreciated the natural decorations more so than before. My mother was startled by my level of excitement when I spotted a noisy miner nesting on the hills hoist on Christmas day.

Remind me

2007-01-03T21:23:00.000-08:00

I've been reading other women's diaries for years - the fluorescent life of my teenage sister in the 1980s, the fleshy, pink pages of Anais Nin's lifetime of journals, the depressive, literary recordings of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, or, as is currently the case, Simone de Beauvoir's Journal de guerre. But on my recent visit to Australia, I read my own diaries.

When I left Sydney five years ago I entrusted my diaries - commenced at the age of eight - to a friend, not so much because I had confidence in his high moral standards which would prevent him from having a peek, but rather I trusted he would restrain himself due to complete and utter disinterest.

December 2006, Sydney, we arranged to meet up in one of our old drinking bars. He was late and from my second-floor corner of Oxford Street I watched the nightly migration of the flying foxes in the grey-swept sky as they made their way from the trees of the Botanical Gardens up to Centennial Park (apparently there are better night clubs up that way). After the one-kiss greeting Sydney style, my friend handed me a backpack full of diaries which had been catching mould in his family bathroom for the past five years. Are you sure you'll be able to carry that home? It's rather heavy, weighed down with neuroses.

Back in my suburban bedroom in the family home where lots of those words were written, I began to read.

Sometimes it was like reading the diaries of a stranger as characters in the pages had been forgotten and I had to text around to friends: who was this? what was that?

Sometimes it was like watching a film or reading a book with an unconvincing character who can't see something which is bleedingly obvious to the audience. There were pages and pages about someone buried in my first year of university called Andrew (a veritable cherub if we are to believe the descriptions of his cherry-stained lips and crown of ringlets) who was so clearly in to me: "He was waiting near the fountain at uni and he said to me `I thought you'd come past here - do you want to have lunch?' But I don't think he likes me". "He said I looked really pretty today. But I don't think he likes me." "He said he likes me, but I don't think he does."

Needless to say, nothing ever happened between us. I was straight out of an all girls catholic school and apparently new to the workings of the male mind, as well as very insecure. But there was something refreshing about this innocence. Going back to my first years of teenhood I found an amusing entry:

"I had a slightly spooky experience on the way in to the city today. I was sitting alone in a train carriage except for a man sitting across from me with his front teeth missing. He kept looking at me. I don’t know for sure that his look was sexual, but I guessed it was."

And? And that, apparently, was the spooky experience.

Naturally the diaries change over the years, with the latter diaries of my mid-twenties more closely resembling the me of today, but there seems to be a recurrent theme in them all. I was always fat (just quietly: I was never fat), a crop of pimples was always threatening my sanity, I longed to be prone to vigorous exercise (to lose the fat), and I often said things along the lines of: I am a pile of dirt and I must clean myself. Apparently my psyche was also damaged.

Sitting in my old room among florals and bears I started forgetting who I am now and started to feel that the characters waking up on the pages still exist for me now as they did back then, that I could walk out the door and find them all again. I started sending sentimental texts to anyone I could still contact. I was determined to construct a time machine. It reminded me of that Royksopp song:

"It's only been a week,
The rush of being home in rapid fading.
Prevailing to recall
What I was missing, all that time in England

Has sent me aimlessly,
On foot or by the help of transportation,
To knock on windows where
A friend no longer live, I had forgotten.

And everywhere I go,
There's always something to remind me
Of another place and time"

In it for the long haul

2006-12-30T10:21:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time a dilettante English lad smuggled a sentence or two about everything in his carry-on luggage and sat next to me on a flight from Sydney to Japan and didn't stop talking. He then nabbed the room next to me in the airport hotel in Tokyo so he could tap codes on my wall overnight - waited for me in the hotel breakfast room so that he could bag the seat next to me on the plane from Japan to London - and chewed my ears off followed by the rest of my body fat so that by the end of the flight I was a pile of bones. Ever since then I always try to avoid the long maul.

When I take my seat on the plane for a long haul flight I’m always really careful to avoid saying a word or making eye contact with the person next to me. The first few minutes may well determine your relationship for the rest of the flight and an unplanned greeting, a random question, may lead to twenty-two or so hours of conversation.

So now invariably I find myself seated next to a stranger whose origins and life journey I can only guess through quiet clues for the nine or so hours between Sydney and Asia and then the thirteen or so hours between Asia and Paris. It's usually only in the last five minutes when we’ve lived, landed, watched each other’s personal tv, and smelt each other’s food left to stagnate in open, sleeping mouths, that I dare open the lines of communication: where are you from? Oh you were visiting your son in Sydney – bon bon – ok, Bonne Fête. Saved from swapping travel tips and becoming penpals with her son.

For my latest long haul flights I was lucky to escape the casse-pieds, and except for one guy placed next to me on the Sydney to Hong Kong flight with wormish tendencies and toothless baked otter breath, I was left alone. I don’t know how anyone can speak, or drink alcohol, on planes. I become so dehydrated that my voice dries up.

I recall one particulary youthful flight from London to Dehli where everyone was completely trashed on bloody marys, changing seats and swapping sacred cow stories, and all cheered and vomited vibrantly when the plane landed. I sometimes feel compelled to applaud. After feeling vulnerable in the sky for so long, the spectacular landing in Paris the other day on an invisible fog swamped runway was the dramatic culmination of hours and hours of awakeness, and I clapped politely with the rest of the voyagers.

I can’t sleep on planes. I get weird on the long haul. Watching movement. This time around I watched In the Mood for Love four times, even though I’d seen it before. I watched it in different ways: first with its haunting music, then with the sound down and my ipod playing Bowie tracks with one particularly cringing moment when Little China Girl came on. Then dubbed in German. Then with no sound at all so that its deep colours jabbed at my eyes and I wanted to scream out: This is the greatest film ever made!

During the first nine hours I decided that life was all about being wild and I’m just going to live a party girl life, late nights and lost days. I swapped planes in Hongkong and was tempted from the airport window to disappear into the polluted mist - there's something incredibly romantic about the early morning mountains of Honkers (as it is affectionately dubbed by long haul Aussies). The last time I actually left Hongkong airport was when I was four years old and living there, streaming down back alleyways with my mother when I suddenly disappeared. She found me minutes after, nabbed by a sabre-toothed man who wanted to sell me his rugs, over estimating the buying power of a western four year old.

Back on the plane as the clock sweated out the hours and I could count the drip drop of the seconds as the plane left Asia behind, my condition deteriorated. Correspondingly I lost interest in being a party girl and decided life was all about quiet nights in a bath, combing my hair, general personal hygiene and food that wasn’t laced in aeroplane sauce.

On the screen before me I watched the plane follow a well dug path between Sydney and Paris. After we'd passed over Tashkent I started to feel like I was on the home run, and once on Russian territory my usual worries surfaced, inspired by memory clippings about planes accidently shot down. Out of Russia, ticking places off one by one over the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, Hamburg - where we could make an emergency landing if necessary - and there she is: Paris.

No real emotions about seeing Paris again. No flutter of I'm back home. As I said to a friend when he asked me last week how does it feel to be back in Sydney? It’s like I’ve lived here all my life and like I’ve never lived here before and the two cancel each other out so that in the end I just feel nothing.

Your Paris

2006-12-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

The lifestory of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had enough smashing and crashing together of love, tragedy and good poetry to keep me interested for many years so it wasn't too surprising that last night I decided to watch the dvd of the film Sylvia. Gwyneth Paltrow, with her penchant for English dinner parties as opposed to American discussions about work and money around a table full of food, was appropriately cast as the expatriate American poet Sylvia Plath, reciting, writing and chewing on poetry in the bars of Cambridge, in London and under the thatched rooves of the English countryside. Daniel Craig's blossoming muscles and dyed black hair made him a passable version of Sylvia's big, dark, hunky boy, Ted Hughes.

But the film was a series of plots points (boy meets girl, boy and girl write poetry but girl has writer's block whereas boy wins prizes, relationship falls apart, girl writes good poetry, girl kills herself) strung together to create little more than a string of fake emotions, egged on by overly romantic music. The film was lacking in genuine dialogue between Sylvia and Ted, and if we hadn't already read all her diaries and all the biographies about them we might be wondering why everyone in the film was saying they had a love like no other (although in one scene "Gwyneth" did make "Daniel Craig" a full English breakfast after she suspected he had probably been cheating on her, so I guess that's real love).

More disappointing was that although the title of the film is Sylvia as opposed to Sylvia and Ted, the film begins with the meeting between Sylvia and Ted rather than with Sylvia's previous life in the US. As if to say that Sylvia's life was nothing without Ted, whether as her husband or eventually her betrayer.

The good that did come out of watching this film is that I revisited Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, the organ-bursting poems that he addressed to Sylvia for 25 years after her death, and I came across the poem entitled "Your Paris". Bearing in mind he was referring to a time when they visited Paris about ten years after the Second World War, I'll quote what he says of Sylvia:

"Your Paris, I thought was American
I wanted to humour you
When you stepped in a shatter of exclamations,
Out of the Hotel des Deux Continents
Through frame after frame,
Street after street, of Impressionist paintings"

and of himself

"My Paris
Was only just not German. The capital
Of the Occupation and old nightmare
I read each bullet scar in the Quai stonework
With an eerie familiar feeling"

This got me thinking about something I wrote in my old blog about everyone having their own version of Paris:

When friends and family come to visit me in Paris, they each lead me somewhere new, giving me their customised Paris.

My father's Paris is wartime Paris. Part of the reason for this might be that his uncle was killed during the First World War, buried in a stark field adorned with a practical cross, somewhere in Normandy. With my father we visit Les Invalides, La Musee de La Resistance, the Memorial of the Shoah. We stop for any plaque that pronounces someone's cause of death as war, and we scrutinise the streets for tombs of unknown soldiers that he might recognise.

And then I thought about how my Paris is constantly changing. In the four years I've lived here the quartier that energises me continues to shift, the people and places I frequent form and re-form. Endless taxies have transmogrified and become walks on blisters. I plan to write a series on some of my Parises, but for now I'm just going to post below a couple of pieces about Paris from my old blog, which I think belong here.

Paris on a stick

2006-12-09T04:38:00.000-08:00

The first time I ever visited Paris was in 1995 as part of a couple of smudged and tatty pages of the Big Book of Pinochiette in Europe. Before arriving my head was a-mess with half-formed expectations for which I was mainly
indebted to Polanski’s Frantic (with my usual problems distinguishing between reality and fiction): yes, in Paris there would be intrigue and leather clad women slipping around on the roof tops. I’d also tucked my head in to protect myself from the derisory blows I was to expect from waiters as outlined in National Lampoons European Vacation.

In the end I’m not sure what Paris was really like because I tucked my head so far into
my book that I couldn’t get it out again, but it did seem that the waiters were talking
about boring things like café and soufflé and not the size of my nose or about me being a big-breasted and clumsy anglo saxon.

One night I was rushed to a hospital with a fit of homesickness. At the hospital I was accosted by one of the many drunks that the French police, out on a law enforcement binge, had slapped around with remnants of the napoleonic code and rounded up for blood testing. On learning that I was Australian he got down on his knees and apologised on behalf of the government of France, and in particular Jacques Chirac, for the bombs: "Oh Australienne we are very very sorry about the bombs". Lets not forget that this was 1995 during the period when France was conducting nuclear tests at Moruroa atoll in the pacific ocean and Australians were penning all kinds of catchy ditties against the French Government's actions.

The second time I visited Paris was in 2001 and this trip was directed by French, who was responsible for both the production and lighting. This was just a week after I met him and therefore a weekend which was pregnant with the possibility of being lip-bashingly romantic.

Once on the eurostar I was satisfied when I looked at our reflection in the window to see what a winningly handsome couple we made, but without skipping a beat French produced an eye mask and earplugs. At first I giggled politely at what I saw as French’s outlandish humour but soon realised he was for real and that he was planning on sleeping for the three hour journey. Once more I was going to find myself speeding in to Paris with my head in a book.

We stayed in the apartment of one of his friends, with sweeping views across the cemetery of Montmarte. French gave it his best shot to steer me from "wow" to "wow" in a 24 hour tour of Paris and I felt a bit like Jenny in that advertisement they show at the cinema where our representative anglo opens her eyes a notch wider at every suggestion from her romantic frenchman who tells her all the wonders he is going to show her in Paris, including fairyfloss in the shape of the Tour Eiffel (proof that advertising is wasted on me in that while I can remember the ad having seen it a billion times I have no idea what product they are advertising).

I was a bit worried about the party we were going to “make” that night with his French friends. I was expecting all the girls to be dressed in tight red dresses and look like Natasha Kinski and I was simultaneously relieved and alarmed to see I’d fallen in to the hole of what seemed to be the football jersey crowd who favoured looking like you are leaving rather than arriving.

After making the usual polite conversation about kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee I was pleased to see that, rather than sipping daintily on shandies, everyone got completely wrecked on properly proofed alcohol and danced all night. It was when we stumbled out into the pink in the wee small hours of the morning that I had my first feelings of genuine affection towards Paris. In Nabakov’s autobiography Speak, Memory he talks about how he associates places with colours. This is something I’ve always done too. While Sydney is a definite mustard yellow and London is as grey as old socks, Paris is for me the sugary pink of fairy floss or the equally poetic French way of saying it: la barbe à papa.

Unhappiness is a funny thing

2006-12-08T04:59:00.000-08:00

Even if you haven't read all of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and haven't had the adulterated pleasure of reaching the final volume - where everything hots up, where sexuality bubbles and flows, and everyone comes out of the closet, I'm sure you know all about the madeleine scene at the beginning of the book.

In this scene Proust (or M as he likes to call himself) dips a madeleine into his tea before eating it, and this action, and the ensuing flavour of the soggy madeleine, transports him back to his childhood. Involuntary memories are triggered:

The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane …. and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.

I had a similar experience with my morning coffee the other day. With sleep-infested eyes and a hangover from allergy-combating tablets, I wasn't paying my normal meticulous attention to detail when I fired up my Delonghi coffee maker. I could see the resulting coffee was not up to my usual standard but I was too bleary-bodied to care.

The coffee was hot milk. Weak as Larry on a weak day. I was suddenly transported back to when I first moved to Paris and I didn't have my Delonghi, when I had no choice but to start my days with the café crème they dish up in Paris cafes, like drinking milk that's been out in the sun too long and stirred by the cat's tongue.

This was a time when I was lack lustre. When I was out of step. When my colour scheme was all wrong. With my mind's eye I see a grey-faced girl who ate without appetite, stuffed herself with madeleines to try and fill an undetected void. I'd spend hours in the department stores buying badly fitting garments with bows in the wrong places that now lie in a heap somewhere in my wardobe, nothing but nests for locusts.

The funny thing is that at the time I didn't recognise I was unhappy, at least not consciously. It's only when I sip weak coffee and remember this period that I realise that I was dejected. At the time I think I was fooled because everything was ostensibly in place to be happy. I was living in Europe with a completely new climate, landscapes and crannies to explore. I had enough money so that I only needed to work sporadically and I was free to spend the rest of the time shopping, sitting in cafes and searching for friends online.

My hair started to fall out and I was convinced it was a sinister force, a curse had been placed upon the house of Pinochiette. The doctor ruled this out and diagnosed stress. "I'm not stressed!" I argued with him. How can I be stressed when I have absolutely nothing to worry about? I said, kindly pointing him in the direction of various fatal diseases he might want to check my symptoms against. But he was unyielding and a couple of doctors later I had to ask myself: am I stressed? am I unhappy?

Parc Monceau reminds me of my recovery period. Admittedly it was during the spring time that I used to go there, when the sun was bursting out of its socket and the air was filled with the crackle of birds stomping on branches, so this may be one of the reasons why I remember this as a period of re-growth. I stopped shopping and instead I sat in the park and read. I bought a coffee machine and I started the days with a strong coffee.

Notes on noses

2006-12-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

It might appear prudent, if not altogether necessary, to commence by vindicating the Nose from the charge of being too ridiculous an organ to be seriously discoursed upon. But this ridiculousness is mere prejudice; intrinsically one part of the face is as worthy as another...
George Jabet, Notes on Noses, 1852

This post has been written due to popular demand.

Although my blog is certainly supported by the physical size of my nose, which enables me to sniff out a good story - not wishing to cut off my nose to spite my face - i'd like to think that my blog is located outside the discipline of nose-ology. I'd like to think that, in fact, my blog tells of the ex-splat adventures of a 30 something (thirties are the new twenties) Australian woman in Paris and beyond and reviews my life (books, films, love and thoughts).

But a quick look at the google searches that have landed people in this blog makes me think otherwise. Just a few examples:

"big greek nose", "big nose actors" "nose keeps growing" "big nose French guy" (I know a few if you want me to introduce you) "big nose cure" "big nose solution" "big nose males" (once again, I can help you with this) "the nose gets bigger as you get older" (yes, it does) "she had a big nose" - yes she did indeed. My nasal history is as follows:

I've been through many phases with my nose. When I was
a sloppy girl of six, the equally sloppy six year old boy whose
arm I used to stroke during dark classroom moments called me
"big nose" to my face (and i'm sure my nose heard).

Then as I grew older no one noticed my nose except me but nevertheless
I kept all my lunch money to save up for a future nose job.
I got super skinny from lack of lunch but I never quite got enough money together
and my nose stayed firmly intact, twitching all over my face.

My nose then disappeared for a while and it was in my early twenties
that it became an object of desire. Boys liked me not DESPITE my nose
but BECAUSE of my nose. Apparently this oversized gadget on my
face was sexy.

In my later twenties my nose became less prominent,
one wouldn't say petite but one wouldn't refer to me as "the girl with the big honker". Now that I am 33 it has suddenly started to grow again.

Unfortunately there is no happy ending to this story so far. I haven't yet saved a bundle of burning cats from a flaming house in the dead of night because I was the first to smell the smoke with my All Mighty Nose.

Lately my memories of childhood are becoming stronger and stronger. I think there is a correlation between this and my ever-growing nose.

It is certainly great to see that people are interested in their own and other people's noses. Recently actresses such as Nicole Kidman have worked towards giving greater exposure to noses: in the re-make of the television series Bewitched she showed us that noses can be not only charming but imaginative, and when she played the role of Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours sporting a largish (i've seen bigger) prosthetic nose, she did much towards raising the profile of noses all over the world.

Eyes get to wear make-up to enhance them, noses just get covered in concealing powder, losing all their shine. And as for the discharge that trickles and clogs the nose, this is one of the last taboos. Provocative modern art has been known to use real-life faeces, but where is the public display of good old-fashioned snot? Isn't snot art too? No, apparently it is best quietly banished to the tissue and discreetly discarded. Even the nose's power as a musical instrument has now been forgotten, with the act of blowing the nose no longer an art form. I refer to a passage in Le Mesangere's Le Voyageur de Paris:

"Some years ago people made an art of blowing the nose. One imitated the sound of a trumpet, another the screech of a cat. Perfection lay in neither making too much noise or too little"

People are always writing songs for the eyes of their beloved, or include "nice eyes" as what they look for in a love match, but what about the nose?

George Jabet, although not known for his modern views on sex and race, describes some different types of noses. There is, for example, the straight nose which is supposed to denote a refined or artistic personality. And apparently for women the power of this nose might reveal itself in artistic needlework! [Oh Jabet, you are such a card.] Then there is the hawk nose, the self-evident cogitative, the snub and the celestial noses...but he fails to talk about the whopping big bunger of a nose and what kinds of qualities we can expect from someone equipped with one of these.

And it seems that you lot are not just curious about noses, you want to know about big noses and how to cure them. Does size matter? Today's society certainly seems to favour regular features and the smaller nose, but that's just the current fashion. For example, back in Marie-Antoinette's day the aquiline nose was still considered socially acceptable. And you know, fashion is retrospective.

Aside from the obvious "cures" such as plastic surgery, nose-binding at birth and frying the wing of a bat during the witching hour, there is no cure! So I'll leave you with these encouraging words from the biggie of the big noses, Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac:

A great [that is HUGE] nose indicates a great man [And woman of course]
Genius, courteous, intellectual
Virile, courageous

The safe car

2006-11-30T02:30:00.000-08:00

During my Jungian phase I went to see a psychologist with the aim of taking notes about her. No one recommended her to me, I must have just found her in the yellow pages or something.

I was immediately ill at ease when I entered her office and saw that placed any which way on a chair in the corner were about twenty beady-eyed, patchy teddy bears, who looked like they had been chewing each other's ears and licking each other's fur every time they were left alone in the dark. Their bellies were popping open with pain from hearing too many weighty secrets. One of them, a rose-coloured runt with sad holes for eyes, was sitting upright in a seemingly uncomfortable position, a paw caught under the heavy legs of an obese bear. I walked straight over to it and moved it to a more relaxed position over by the window, saying apologetically to the psychologist "he looked uncomfortable".

How does that make you feel?, the psychologist said through the haze of boredom that hovered around her making her hair dull and brittle and giving her words a lifeless timbre.

"A bit ill at ease I guess" I responded, how does it make you feel? After all, you have to work with them looking at you like that...

But she wasn’t going to let me tinker around in her mind and toy with any feelings of guilt she may or may not have in relation to the crowded conditions of the teddies. Ignoring my question she started compiling my dossier. I kept trying to re-direct her from delving into my inner recesses to a more interesting conversation - her opinion on Jung’s theories for example. But she was a wall when it came to intellectual insight so I never went back to her.

According to her, the reason I was ill at ease had nothing to do with the teddy bears but was in fact because I'd recently changed apartments in Sydney and moved out of what she called a safe house, a place where I felt at home. Apparently I was feeling vulnerable because I just hadn't spent enough time in my new flat or with my new flatmate to feel safe. I needed to inhale the new smells and reciprocate by rubbing my own smells all over the place. It's true that I can't say that wherever I lay my hat, that's my home. I need time to adjust, like most cats I guess. It was the kind of stuff you study in psychology 101 or that the vet tells you.

I personally think one of the safest houses I’ve ever lived in was, in fact, a car. And it only existed in my imagination. I remember that one day in 1986 on my walk home from school I was accosted by my older sister and her friends, red eyed, wailing and clinging on to one another, informing me that because the US were bombing Libya, Colonel Gaddafi was going to blow up the world. Apparently he was going to switch the button from existence to non-existence within hours. We said long-drawn out goodbyes to one another in the tomato splattered dusk and I went home and wriggled around under my bedcovers, waiting for the bomb to drop and imagining a place, a safe house.

My safe house was a revved up version of our family car and it was invincible. All my family and an assortment of my pet rabbits and guineapigs (and teddy bears of preference) would pile inside. We could drive wherever we wanted but the car, with all my most loved inside, would be protected from anything that took place outside. I took refuge in the notion of this safe car on many a dark night (it was kind of like counting sheep to fall asleep - I spent a lot of time thinking about who would go in the safe car, seating arrangements and general car hygiene). Naturally over the years new people were added to the improved safe car model.

I guess my choice of a safe car rather than a safe house was fuelled by a desire for movement and travel combined with the desire to have a space where I feel, well, safe. I wrote quite a few posts in my old blog on places I've lived and I think they fit in here, so i've posted them below.

The witching hour

2006-11-29T04:36:00.000-08:00

As well as having the fear of waking up to find a stranger looking at me and being afraid of fear itself, like many people, I also have a fear of change, although this is not a fear which can't be overcome.

When I moved from London to Paris, in order to minimise the changes that would be involved, I vowed that I would continue to go to my London hairdresser. Every time I needed a feather cut or a fringe, I'd hop on the Eurostar to go and see Hans in Soho and listen to his tale of two cities and why he prefers London hair to Paris hair. Of course after two such trips i'd started to ease myself into Paris, and I decided that it was simpler to visit a hairdresser over here. Hans is probably still fuming and snipping his scissor-hands in the air for exclamation: "Why doesn't she come back? They don't know how to cut hair over there!"

After I'd been living in Paris for a while, I felt change was nigh again, the witching hour was upon us. Even though it was well and truly over between French and I, in order to make the impending change seem like it wasn't really a change, I set up a loveless cohabitation.

"See", I explained to French, "it's like nothing has really changed. We'll just continue to live together, except you are free to date tall women if you like, and I don't have to ring you and tell you where I am..."

But slowly I moved my body and its objects from our shared bedroom to the study (French's tall woman wasn't so keen on him sharing a room with his ex). And after I accidently brushed my hair with her comb (I found black hairs in my comb, I heard her whimpering on the other side of the wall), French gave me a gentle nudge in the direction of the door.

Even then, like a child clutching on to her blankie, I tried to stay in French's aura.

"The apartment upstairs is for rent, I might take that. We could be neighbours."

"You couldn't afford it!" he scoffed (nevertheless, he looked a bit nervous). But he was right. So I started scouting the nearby streets for any old place to lay my head so that I could still eat exactly the same shaped baguette every morning. But to no avail. Bad-breathed gods were blowing stifling winds of change, and I was swept in the direction of the nearest arrondissement.

I'd been warned that flat/studio hunting in Paris was going to be difficult. In fact, I didn't have too much of a hard time. The place I live now was the first I saw - something about its old world feel and the idea that if any ghosts lived here they would be the unsociable type - attracted me to it.

One proprietor further up the hill tried to get me to rent her closet with the selling point that it's two minutes walk from the Sacre Coeur. When I said no thanks, she barred the door with her body and baring craggy teeth demanded that I tell her why I didn't want to rent her place.

"Because I saw another place four minutes further down the hill for the same price, and it's bigger and has less orange, fluffy carpet."

She gave me a disdainful slap with her eyes and said: "Four minutes further down the road is not Montmarte, it's Abbesses."

"It looks and smells like Montmarte!"

But she made me agree to consider her place before she would let me go forth into the world again. As I was leaving she called eerily down the staircase: See you soon Pinochiette, which left me with the fear that she'd put a spell on me and that I would end up renting the closet.

In the end the spell didn't work. It was a toss up between a flat which had one entire wall of window devoted to a close up view of the Sacre Coeur so that if anyone entering my flat doubted I was living in Paris I'd have the proof, or my current flat which has a bath. No choice: who needs the Sacre Coeur when you can lounge in a bath. I'm a bath kind of girl which is one of the reasons why this book, which pays homage to the bath, is one of my favourite books.

I've already discussed in an earlier post how finally having a [b]room of my own was so important to me. It was in the early days of living in my new place, when I'd finally faced change, and I used to dance from room to room - doing a handstand in this corner, a pirouette over there - filling up my own space, that the hands of the clock ticked over and I had to face yet another of my fears.

It was a stinking August night, the building where I live was drained of its inhabitants. I was sleeping in the silence, broken up by the soft mutter of distant drunks entering through my open first floor window. In my dream someone was fiddling with the lock on the door of my flat. This noisy dream woke me and I saw my curtain moving. Wow, that's some wind! The curtain moved aside to reveal the human face of the wind. A twenty-something, unidentified man was standing there, in my bedroom.

Without hesitation I started to scream, layer upon layer of screams, like with each scream I was hitting the stranger in a different part of his body. He didn't stay around to hear my symphony. He was out the window before you could say Larry and I just kept screaming for John and Yoko, for headless jelly babies, for whatever reason I could think of to scream.

When he'd climbed back to the ground, as if to say, I may be an intruder but I haven't forgotten my manners, he called out: "ca va?"

To which I screamed "Non, je vais appeler la police!"

And he disappeared in a puff of screaming.

The hour of this visit, four in the morning, became the witching hour, and although my window which opens on to the street is always kept firmly shut now, it took me months after that incident before I could sleep before dawn.

A [b]room of one's own

2006-11-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

I was changing the sheets on my bed the other day and I noticed that they are banana-yellow. This puzzled me. Why have I got banana-yellow sheets?

If they were sand-coloured it would be understandable - they would fit in with
the whole Beach House ambience I’ve tried to create Chez Moi: my sea-blue quilt splashes over me as I sleep, and in winter I naughtily turn up the radiators full blast so that I can walk around my apartment in my bikini, a straw hat shielding me from the lamplight as I gently water my mini palm trees.

But these banana-yellow sheets just aren’t me.

And then I remembered that French and I used to have sheets like this. It seems that what must have happened is that when I finally decided to clamber out of my shackles and find a place of my own (a bed of my own), I could still feel the hot peppermint breath of French burning up my neck and like an automatism, I bought the kind of sheets that would best suit his tastes.

I guess I had an uninteresting power relationship with French: It was him who decided everything and I just went along with it, happier-than-Larry to be living in Paris.

Designated bedtime was much too early for a night-owl like me, but because French had to go to the office the next day and because if I read a book in the other room the crinkle of the pages turning would keep him awake, I’d find myself obeying the call to sleep and smothering miserable hoots in my pillow.

The apartment was decorated according to his tastes. The kitchen floor was swept with his brooms and in the anti-clockwise direction which is often attributed to the direction water goes down a sink in the northern hemisphere but the opposite of my southern hemisphere ways.

I was a prisoner in this apartment. But I’m not giving you a soggy story about a poor little bourgeoisie who pricked herself on hairpins while undoing her chignon, and who was imprisoned in a spacious apartment overlooking a Monoprix stocked with fancy ready-to-eats.

No, I was imprisoned inside myself. This was not the fault of French, who despite being an interesting character study is not a bad person. It was just that the particular dynamics that were born from the smashing and grinding together of French and Pinochiette quashed my normal initiative, passions and taste for anything sea-related. My roars were imprisoned deep inside me and all that could escape me were feeble squeaks.

When I finally had the courage to leave French and move to my new place, my current home, I unleashed my lioness within. Those first few days in my apartment I remember opening the cupboards and looking at all the objects inside, my things, touching the newly-bought broom, my precious, mine, mine, mine (the kind of mentality that keeps capitalism kicking).

I was over-joyed to be able to close the door and sit in my very own (rented) space (although admittedly the first day I moved in my bathroom was leaking and due to some French glitch, instead of hosting a plumber, I had two truckloads of dashing pompiers stomping around in my bathroom complaining that I didn't have any coffee and writing official reports on how many pompiers it takes to stop an itsy bitsy leak).

In France, and many other places, as late as the 1960s women couldn't open bank accounts without their husbands' permission. I find myself lucky that I live in an era where financial independence and intellectual freedom are a possibility for me and where I have managed to forge a space for myself, like Virginia Woolf's metaphorical and physical room of one's own.

On the weekend, while thinking about all this, I came across the sculpture by Mâkhi Xenakis called Les Folles D'enfer in the gardens of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

This sculpture is a memorial. In this place Louis XIV locked up what him and his cronies saw as the "undesirable" elements of society - poor people. Later, the general hospital became a hospital for women and I found this information on it:

At the end of the 17th century, according to the uses of the era four categories of women were emprisoned there. "Bad" adolescents were kept enclosed in the "Correction" section, with the idea that they could be rehabilitated. Women labeled as prostitutes filled the "Common" section. Women who had been imprisoned with or without sentences were quartered in the "Jail," and inhabitants within the "Quarter of the Insane" were those who usually had been sent there by their families. In 1679, the institution housed 100 women who qualified as "mad" and 148 women with seizure disorders. By 1833, the numbers had increased to 117 insane women under treatment, 105 insane women labeled as sick, 923 women with mental illnesses characterized as incurable, and 266 women with seizure disorders. (Charcot Library Archives, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris)

I also read a review of the sculpture which mentioned that here, in the sculpture, the women are finally liberated. I'm not so sure. They are cordoned off by rope and there is a sign that says ne touchez pas which makes me think that, even in art, they are still imprisoned and segregated.

Time reframed

2006-11-27T01:56:00.000-08:00

Francois Bon has held creative writing workshops in French prisons and schools, among other places. In his book Tous les mots sont adultes he tries to get students to start writing by delving in to their memories to create an inventory of places they have slept. Here is my inventory of places I have lived (a much simpler task than places I have slept).

The first house I don’t remember living in was a late sixties, red brick and smallish house in a middle class suburb of Sydney. One morning my mother couldn’t find me - her two year old mouse - and apparently I’d toddled over to the neighbour’s house and invited myself for tea and some squeaking. How's that for anecdotes.

Not long after that, we moved to a slightly larger, equally red brick
house about four blocks away. Summers were hotter back then and I see the years spent at this house through a veil of kleenex. That soft air of childhood, hanging out with the
neighbourhood kids and playing our own brand of games, all specially packaged just for us.

When I was seven years old my parents upgraded again to a two-storey four-bedroom,
three-bathroom house in a fancier part of the suburbs. The red brick was discarded like a rusty pair of flares for an imposing chocolate brown, spanish style house which had all the mod cons including the biggest bedroom for Pinochiette the spoilt, and a swimming pool which would become the location of a million smurf dives [Throw all your smurfs in the pool, dive in and she who collects the most smurfs wins].

This house of my dreams where I spent the greater part of my adolescence later became the house where all my nightmares are set up until this day. If, for example, I have a nightmare that someone is axing someone to death in the shower (not that I have such nightmares that often) it takes place in this house.

And then kicking and squeaking, when I was 17 years old, old enough to piss off if I didn't like it, we moved to a smaller house in a less fancy area. Gone were the spanish arches, nudey statuettes and bubbling fountains. Here everyone was a lot closer together, physically rather than emotionally.

The suburbs began to give me the plink (form of depression which stems from monotony and derives its name from the sound a tap makes when it drips against the sink in the dead of night - plink, plink, plink) and I left the wide brown land for Europe.

I travelled around Europe for an extended period of time and I was in and out of hotel rooms
my nose deeply ensconsced in Tolstoy's War and Peace. I didn't see much of all the cities I visited but I did read a lot of books.

I remember my first little home in Europe was a sagging hotel in Athens where my travelling companion and I holed up for the summer, worn out and happy, avoiding cockroaches like cracks in the pavement. And then he dropped me off in a hotel room in Patras, somewhere in Greece, and promised to be back in two days while he visited his big, Greek family. Two days became a week. I was naïve and scared of an army of boys called Nikos on vespas who wanted to have coffee with me. I spent the week hiding in my room reading all of Kundera’s books, eating cold spaghetti out of a can and popping travel sickness pills in an attempt to sleep off the week.

Of course there were so many other rooms on that trip, and I’ve travelled much more since then, but those rooms in Greece, my first lick of Europe, lurch forward in my memory, begging to be spoken about.

Back in Australia I finally escaped the suburbs and moved deep into the city with a bunch of other uni students. Apparently our particular terrace house used to be a brothel which explains the persistent late night buzzing at our door. There were four bedrooms in this house but we only actually used three of the bedrooms. One of us continued to pay rent although his room remained empty - this young poet was working up the courage to ask his strict Croatian-Australian parents if he could move there. His room became a kind of shrine to the absent. At parties, due to its open spaces, lack of light and furniture it became an alcove for lovers, a place to rest for the stragglers, while its carpet hosted the puke of a tribe of drunkards.

After the demise of the terrace house in the inner sydney - our young poet friend gave up the hope of escaping from his parents while they were still paying his way and my bank balance was less than zero - i moved back home to finish my studies. Studies completed, I left so my room could be converted into a guest room.

My room in the new flat was tiny and it had bars on the window to keep the night time ghoulies out, but it was right next to the beach. My flatmate was a theologist surfer with the noirest of humour, he knew how to twist my giggles into fully-fledged laughs. I was too timid to use the kitchen to cook or to share meals with him so I’d quickly scoff down tofu burgers on the way home so as not to disturb the pots and pans. Now I was finally a woman, living out of home and paying my way, a woman crouching in her bedroom in the dark to hide when her flatmate had guests, but a woman nevertheless. Everything was green and blue in that room and it's true that I did spend a lot of those two years underwater in the sense of what was going on in my life, but it was a pleasant sensation, like I had a breathing apparatus.

One day I got too big for my underwaterworld and I moved to another flat up the road
from the beach with a good friend. The flat was light and airy and there were no bars on the window but my bedroom was a beat for huntsman spiders. I used to find them, rather conservatively I thought, making out on my bed. I found others who were a little bit more risque fondling each other right bang in the middle of the room. Huntsman's aren't poisonous but they are fat and hairy and look like they should be poisonous.

Two years later I packed my dirt up into tiny boxes and shipped myself over to the Mother Country. In England I spent three months lolling on the floor of my friend's swish bachelor pad in East London. After three months on the floor, my newly met French boyfriend popped the question: "do you have broadband where you are now? Because if not, you should move in with me." And so I took a minor stroll on the compass and ended up in North-East London living in a mini mansion. I think the red walls of this house made all of us mad after a while. Me certainly, French undoubtedly and even Derick, our hibernating, canadian flatmate. I love red walls but I wouldn't do that kind of thing again.

When we moved to Paris I wanted to live in Belleville, on the east side, like in London, where there’s music and there’s people who are young and alive. But French found an apartment on the conservative west side. After a year the blonde wood floors of the apartment were covered with dark hairs, both his and mine. Our hair was falling out from the stress of the bloodied words which passed between us.

So one fine day several Junes ago, I took 16 metro trips (aller-retour) and carried all my possessions to the flat on the hill in the 18th arrondissement in Paris where I bask now, a slice of the sea in the city.

Two very obvious things that were prominent for me when doing this exercise: I've had the good fortune to never be homeless and the memories of the places in my life are invariably connected to the people who have passed through those places.

Shredding the news (it is good for worm bins)

2006-11-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

I didn’t read an Australian newspaper for my first four or so years in exile. It's only recently I’ve started to sniff around in Australia again, sticking my big nose in where it might not be welcome.

Friends in Australia are always lamenting that the almighty Sport dominates the news there. Forget the arts, its sports people who sing, dance, write and paint the best.

I remember the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, drinking sticky pink sea breezers and waiting with the rest of the country for Juan Antonio Samaranch to say that it was `the best olympics ever'. It was early in the morning in France when he said it. Did you hear it? I've asked lots of French people. No i didn't watch it, they reply, I didn't hear that, but the beach volleyball looked good - those Brazilians are hot. What year was that?

Australia isn't one of the big decision-makers on the global stage, it isn't a G8 country. It's a small-big country (small on the population, big on the desert) looking for approval and it is perhaps through sporting prowess that Australians try to get the clout and recognition they can't get politically. Looking in the newspapers over here - I see Ian Thorpe’s decision to quit swimming made the news.

But apart from that, not much else - Australia rests quietly in the United States' penumbra. A firm lackey of the US it makes the news as a terrorist target due to being one of the allies of the United States. Australia's Prime Minister is likely to appear in a photo alongside the US President with the caption: George Bush and "unknown civil servant".

After sporting news - cricket updates and the like - probably the biggest news Europe receives about Australia is news about Australian "entertainers". The death of the crocodile hunter (perhaps because he gave the world a stagnant quirky-cliched image of Australia that didn't make anyone have to think or change their ideas) was news. Also in the world news was Mel Gibson getting done for intoxicated racial slurring - although Australians who used to be so quick to claim him as an ambassador of Australia when he seemed so promising back in the days of Mad Max: "They say people don't believe in heroes anymore. Well damn them! You and me, Max, we're gonna give them back their heroes!" were very quick to say "He is American!, he wasn't born in Australia" [no he just grew up and was educated in Australia]

In the same way that Australia relies on its sporting heroes to give it recognition on the world stage I think it relies on its entertainers as well, with Australians having a bloated sense of pride in their acting exports. I've found myself pointing out all the Australian actors in Hollywood to H (some he doesn't recognise because they've expertly disguised their accents). With all those Kidmans and Crowes, gone are the days when you have to rummage around for Australian oscar winners, ummm, errrr, well you know, an Australian won the oscar for best costume designer three times! But I don't really care about oscars. As H was quick to point out "you're really proud that Tom Cruise married Nicole Kidman aren't you? Me, reddening: No, i'm prouder that Heath Ledger is dating Michelle Williams from Dawson's Creek, I replied.

The link between business and government is old news. But the link between entertainment and government, or rather celebrity and government, still astounds me. I remember during the race riots in Sydney last year when Australia's Hollywooders were flown in to Sydney to calm the social unrest, Cate Blanchett making a special appearance to speak about racism with a poise and charisma none of the Australian politicans could muster.

Ok, celebrities getting involved in politics is rather common now. But what about when politicians have to get involved in celebritics. When I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald last week I saw that interweaved among the fait divers and entertainment and sporting news which seems to make up the bulk of national news, an Australian television hosts' wife had died. She used to act in some Australian soaps as well. Of course it was sad, she was young and positive, and the couple were in love.

However, people die every day from wars supported by Australia (John Howard has most recently noted that the war in Iraq was "not a disaster" - yet another thing he isn't about to say sorry for in the near future), and I found it strange that because of the links between vote-getting and celebrity supporting, both the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition party were expected, and indeed did, give public condolence statements even though they didn't seem to know the couple personally. Perhaps most telling was when the opposition leader got the name muddled and rather than offering his condolences to the television personality, he offered them to Karl Rove, yet another lackey of the Bush regime.

An ibis in Paris

2006-11-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

I like to mark time. To circle dates and point out moments in the past to anyone who will listen. It's five years today since I left Australia for the Mother Country. Five years since I wore a cotton winter coat, grabbed a suitcase full of clothes for a slightly fatter body and a lime (just in case – there have been so many historical cases of scurvy on voyages between Botany Bay and England).

A while ago I was listening on the radio to an Italian guy, a dancer, who has been living in France for the last twenty years. He was saying that for him and other expat friends of his five years away is when you start to make a choice: should I stay or should I go.

Looking around at some expats I know it has been a bit like that. They hit the five year mark and they pack up all their accumulated artefacts (oversized ornamental hippos bought in Portugal etc) and go back to where they came from. They fold up a life within weeks, carrying it "home" in excess baggage.

Whether this anniversary will have the same effect on me remains to be seen. Sometimes I catch the tiniest whiff of Australia on a spring day in Paris. My nose is the sniffer dog of history. I react to the smell and sniff out the traces of my past sewn firmly into secret pockets or lying at the bottom of an unsettled stomach. I think what it would be like to go back. I've grown to love the cold winter which tinkles, to love Europe as a bloc and a well-studied mannerism. It doesn’t feel worn out yet.

I'm pleased with my own relative exotic status in paris: pleasantly exotic rather than out of place. As I wrote in my old blog:

Considering that in Australia I always felt a bit out of place, not sporty enough, a strange dark, bookish character sitting up a tree watching everyone else participating in life.

I’ve been reading Australian newspapers lately and I came across a newspaper blog on the Australian white ibis which can be found roaming freely in Sydney's parks. An animal behaviourist, Ursula Munro, has been studying ibises for the past five years and believes the "east coast cities have become a last bastion for the species in a time of extreme stress".
Apparently Sydney councils have been exterminating the birds and destroying their nests because they are seen as pests (or perhaps not sporty enough).

According to the blog "Before the 1980s ibises were rarely seen in coastal cities such as Sydney and the appearance of the odd straggler generated excitement among locals". But the blog posed the question whether Sydneysiders believed that ibises should be protect or culled and I was surprised at the viciousness of many of the readers' responses, many of them advocating mass execution.

At the risk of being “just an expat” and being dubbed the Germaine Greer of the ibis debate, I left my own hoity toity deux centimes' worth:

I live in Paris and I recently visited Le Jardin des Plantes, a small zoo in the 13th arrondissement. Having grown up in Sydney and grown accustomed to seeing ibises roaming free near the Botanical gardens and at Circular Quay, I was surprised to find that ibises featured as an exotic bird in this French zoo, a bit like having a parisian pigeon in one of the enclosures at Taronga Zoo.

French friends who have visited Sydney with me have been charmed and surprised by this unusual bird strutting around the harbour foreshores, which does indeed add character to Sydney - so important in this world where the arrival of global chain stores means that all big cities in the world are starting to resemble one another to the detriment of diversity.

I'm surprised at some of the venom in the comments above - as if something so trivial as a bird trying to steal your sandwich is a reason for mass killing and annihilation of the species.
As someone commented above - be glad that the city can at least support some wildlife. One of the things I admire about Sydney is that the creation of a big, modern city has not completely destroyed all signs of nature and that sydneysiders still have the opportunity to live among animals.

Boyz in the bar

2006-11-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

A while ago I was speaking with an English male friend who lives in Paris and he said to me:

"The problem with the girls I pass on the street in Paris is that they don't look at me! In England I used to feel like a handsome fella because girls would actually make eye contact with me and I'd feel they were giving me the ogle of approval. In France I feel like a suited monster with a briefcase".

Let's leave aside the evident question arising from this statement, that is, why my friend needs a girl to make eye contact with him in order to feel pretty. And let's also acknowledge the fact that if girls don't look at him it might be because he blends with the crowd because if he did resemble a monster, girls probably would look at him, as the juxtaposition of a monster with a briefcase would be an unusual sight and attract many onlookers.

I'm merely using this quote as an example of numerous comments i've had from, mainly boys, both French and from other backgrounds, who say that the problem with the girls in Paris is that they are reserved, `closed off', and don't make eye contact.

If that's the case, there's no need to wonder why. I've already talked about this in my earlier post on boyz in the street. I've found that if you make eye contact with this sector of boydom -these boyz in the street whose life is dedicated to harassing lone women - more often than not this is interpreted as though you are up for sex and biscuits behind the bins, right that minute.

Hence you don't make eye contact with anyone and `innocent' boys like my friend suffer low self-esteem.

I arrived in Paris as what you may call an open person, my wide eyes bumbling over every building facade, studying every face, ready for chance encounters and conversations with other forms of life who could potentially contribute to my little, but growing, collection of knowledge. A little over three years later I now pass a lot of my time studying the ground to avoid eye contact. I think I've changed my behaviour to shield myself from the boyz in the street and I don't like this one iota.

In summer I enjoy shedding some layers. I like to feel free to wear a short skirt if I want. But now if I am going out walking on my own, day or night, I find that my wardrobe is dictated by the boyz in the street. I now find myself strolling about in sacks, hesitating to wear something that I think might draw further attention to me, even if it's what I normally feel most comfortable wearing. Instead I cover my breasts with a protective armour like I am going out to battle.

I try different techniques for dealing with them. Lately I have just been saying absolutely nothing, quashing my natural tendency to curtsey and be polite when someone addresses me. A boy I passed the other day leered at me and said "bonjour", letting escape some further opinions on my body and I didn't respond, forgetting the incident within a nano second.

But sure enough, further down the road, at the fruit market as I was squeezing a melon to determine its ripeness, I felt his hot tobacco breath against my ear and my pursuer said:

Vous etes très timide où vous ne parlez pas Francais?

For him the only possible reasons I might not want to speak to him are because I am shy or because I can't speak French!

Forced into a response by his insistent proximity I said: "non, c'est plutot que je ne veux pas trop parler avec vous".

After my fairly benign rejection he started to spit derogatory remarks at me, so what started out as his praise for the beauty of my face which apparently he believed could launch a 1000 ships or at least a supermarket brand of perfume, ended with him placing a curse upon my kennel. You hardly want to go behind the bins with someone as fickle as that!

One unconscious `technique' that did seem to work the other night was when I went to the Australian bar to watch the football. Havi was working, so in a last minute decision to watch the match I slipped into the bar on my own.

I arrived at the bar a little bit early, found a seat and started reading my book.

Even though I was holding the book up to my face like a pair of sunglasses to protect me from the radar of lone boyz, a boy broke off from the stools at the bar and started dancing about in my personal space, throwing questions at me.

I toyed around with the idea that perhaps it was just a matesy thing, we're both here to watch the match, we can talk strategy and tactics. But his opening: "Where are you from? Australia? Oh welcome Australia!", followed by his disappointed look when he found out i've been living here for more than three years (less chance that I think he is exotic) and his fly-ridden comments about my beauty were less than promising.

When the match started I was so transfixed I completely forgot he was there -although I vaguely remember a voice at my ear attempting to tenderly explain the foreplay.

At half time, when I removed my eyes from the screen, he excused himself promising to be back soon - and he never came back!

I looked down at my book which was opened up to the chapter entitled "Pussy Power" and reflected on how here I was, a girl alone in a bar not holding on to her boyfriend's hand and asking questions like: "oh what happens if the goalkeeper gets a red card, do they have to play without a goalkeeper?" (admittedly a question I asked H yesterday while holding his hand) but a girl genuinely interested in the match on her own terms. Perhaps because this boy had a chance to put me in context: to see beyond my meat, to see that I was an independent character who reads about the power of the pussy and has opinions on football, he realised he could not objectify me, got scared and ran away. Perhaps my show of independence was a strength not to be reckoned with.

Of course there may be any other number of reasons why he left - perhaps he thought it was pas la peine to wait until the end of the match and go through the rigmarole of harrassing me and that it would be much quicker to go to a peep show up the road.

This reminds me also of something that happened to me in Sydney quite a long time ago. A boy on the street came running after me and gave me some worn out and creased line, accompanied by an old piece of paper with his cell phone number.

Before I had the chance to say anything, he was running off. So I flipped open my phone and rang him straight away:

"Hi"

"Hi" (suspiciously, out of breath) "Who is this?"

"The girl on the street who you just gave your phone number too!"

Alarmed, shocked, stuttering: "Oh I didn't expect this..."

"But you gave me your phone number ya dingbat"

"You're not a crazy stalker are you?"

He couldn't believe that I'd actually called him so he started questioning my sanity, which says something about the success rate of boyz in the street and how well they actually cope when the woman starts to act upon them.

Of course after the initial shock that i'd actually phoned him wore off and he was safely hidden behind some bush he started to get all cock-sure again. So I made some some polite excuse about having a husband and an old dog to feed and rang off.

Magical Mystical Tour

2006-10-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

When I was holidaying in London in early 2001, I went to see a tarot reader. After a thoughtful harrumph and a quick fiddle with the cards, he shuffled a few phrases: You aren't from here. You don't want to leave London. You'll be back. Very soon.

He was right. Within months I was living there.

Ok, with my quirky accent and cotton winter coat I was clearly someone who didn't come from those parts. We conducted the reading behind a souvenir stand in touristic Covent Garden, speaking above the tinkling of a trillion london bus keyrings. Tourist = on holidays = probably doesn't want holiday to end. May even come back.

I love seeing tarot readers. The cards are mere props. Over the years my tarot readers have acted as an army of psychologists for me. They are much less expensive than professional psychologists and many times I've managed to have an "off the cards" talk with a tarot reader which has equipped me with the necessary boot in my thought patterns for whatever I may have to kick through. Although that is not always the case.

In New York when I was in one of those re-building periods of my life, I saw a sign: "Tarot Reading - Five Dollars".

After climbing a staircase in need of a creak, a door opened and through the smog of incense I greeted a woman. She was wearing a scarf around her head and the hoop earrings considered mandatory among some "professional" tarot readers.

Behind her was a sign that read: "Three questions - five dollars/Tarot reading - twenty dollars".
"Oh", I said, remembering that I'd just moved into my new place and I was now a fully-fledged rent payer so I needed to save my pennies before they hatch, "What's three questions?"

She grabbed my arm and stained me with a yellow-eyed stare, so yellow that I thought her liver was in her brain, and hissed dramatically: "Forget three questions, you need a tarot reading".

"Nah, I can't", I shook my head, starting to turn away. She leant against the wall and began to ooh and ahh like a poodle in pain, and I thought of Basil Fawlty, who pretends to have a bit of shrapnel in his leg from the war, whenever he wants to prevent people from doing something he doesn't want them to do.

"You alright?"

"It's just that I can feel your darkness", she moaned.

I now recalled a soothsayer from yonder days in Sydney, a homeless woman, who, when I was standing not far from her, said to me: I know that evil walks the streets but do you have to stand so close.

My curiosity was piqued by the word darkness and what now seemed to be a persistent theme in my life and within moments the tarot reader had me in a windowless room, sitting at a table of what appeared to be half-eaten tarot cards. She spoke with a heavy eastern european accent which I think was an artifice to make people believe she is authentic. But I had the impression that it was a flimsy (and in any case unnecessary) prop. Like in one of those courtroom dramas where someone makes a loud noise, lets off a gun or whatever, to make the person who has lodged a false claim for insurance because of a neck injury, suddenly turn their head, I felt that if I placed an angry spider in her hand she would no doubt start to scream and swear in a broad New York accent.

"Do I get to ask three questions?"

"Well that was one already. Just ask another one inside your head, or else you'll upset the room. Don't worry, it will be answered in the reading."

Sorry room, I said, looking around at what was more like a closet.

She had an interesting tarot reading technique, that is, she didn't actually look at the cards that I'd carefully selected at her command. She just nursed them in her hands and explained to me matter of factly that I have a lot of darkness because there are lots of people around me who envy me and want to do me harm.

Suddenly my life was getting exciting. Oh yeah? I said happily, why do they envy me?

I don't know, she shrugged.

I tried to get her to explain whether the darkness surrounding me was actually other people's darkness or if darkness, provoked by the dark forces who want to do me harm, was emanating from me.

She avoided the question but confirmed that things were fairly dark. Then she offered to burn my darkness away...for another twenty dollars.

"I'll keep my darkness and the twenty dollars. My darkness is rather becoming, don't you think?"

She shook her head as if to say "the kids of today".

"What about my question? It wasn't answered!"

"Sorry but you just asked another question so you've used up all your questions now," and she dismissed me with a wave of an incense stick.

As well as being a tarot reader groupie, I've also dabbled in giving tarot readings of my own to friends and acquaintances and I'd like to think I've given some fairly spot on readings.

I've often fancied myself as having special powers. Once in the heat of a sweltering tarot reading, where the cards were like a mixed bag of lollies full of all my favourite colours: success, love, creative heights, I babbled to the tarot reader: so do you feel something special about me - like I have a power?

She scrutinised me for a long time and then said "No".

"But I think you have some kind of, how do you say, inflammation at the moment don't you?", she added.

La Californie: Hollywood's black beast lives on the Côte d'Azur

2006-10-30T04:30:00.000-08:00

My general preference for French cinema over American cinema stems from my desire to see women and men free to roam outside structure, to be transported out of the niches they are placed in our society which is far from being progressive.

And the middle-aged woman is the bête noire of Hollywood films. Women of a certain age are often portrayed as neurotic, sexually and emotionally desperate and somehow dirty so that male viewers hold them in contempt, young women snigger, thirty-something women quake in sagging boots, and middle-aged women feel indignant at their beastly reflection in this distorted, carnivale mirror. French films are much more likely to portray middle-aged women in strong, sexy roles that make both men and women dream.

This even goes down to something as core as lighting. In mainstream, American cinema if a middle-aged woman must be shown as anything but pathos-evoking (or "just a mother"), she is likely to be shown in soft wrinkle-erasing light, the scars of life are removed so that she appears ageless.

But in France, when it comes to celebrities, the French aren't as prone to prostrate themselves before the altar of youth. Being in the limelight in France means showing wrinkles as a celebration of life and not erasing all traces that you have lived for longer than twenty years. Here, in the magazines devoted to celebrities, they will put one of their older actresses, wrinkles and all, on the cover. No question of photoshopping. Because that's how it is, you get older, you get wrinkles but it does not mean that you are washed up, you are still beautiful and celebrated.

Oh sure, you see wrinkles in English-speaking nations' magazines as well, but it's not `by the way she has wrinkles', usually it is in a special about wrinkles and offers tips on the kind of injection she (I say she because adherence to the cult of youth is primarily thrust upon women) should get to decrease these. It's merely so we can all have a good cackle at her for not being perfect.

In so many Hollywood films if you are passed the "age of consent", to use the Japanese expression: you are christmas cake, starting to crumble, and by default you must be neurotic and feeble.

That’s why I was disappointed with Jacques Fieschi's La Californie. Although the title of the film was chosen for other reasons, I think it was aptly named in the sense that this film was closer to Hollywood-style than your average French film.

Maguy (played by Nathalie Baye) is soaking rich, in her fifties, whiling away very long days in her huge house on the Côte d'Azur with an eclectic mix of friendly parasites: her personal hairdresser (gay ofcourse: it was beyond the limits of this film to have a male hairdresser who isn’t gay or a gay, male hairdresser who doesn't like going to night clubs and "making parties", or for example, to include a role for a gay butcher) and his boyfriend, her drinking buddy Katia (Mylène Demongeot) and two strapping lads -Mirko (Roschdy Zem) and Stefan (Radivoje Bukvic) best friends who escaped their country “in the east” after the crash of communism and now operate as chore-boys and gigolos for Maguy.

The story begins with the arrival of Maguy’s daughter Hélène who she hasn’t seen for ten years (Ludivine Sagnier always to be applauded with feet and hands for her versatile roles) who wants to borrow money from her mother to start a business venture - an independent book printing shop in Paris.

Hélène and Stefan promptly fall in love, leaving us to flinch as Mirko, the third wheel, froths with violent jealousy and dissatisfaction with his own impotent and useless life, and just as promptly as it began, destroys the relationship between Stefan and Hélène.

Maguy, pattering about her home wearing tailored African cottons, caught up in endless petty squabbles as the household chokes on the fumes of ennui and alcohol, is clingy and needy when it comes to Mirko - trying to control him through her money (that old idea that nothing in a middle-aged woman could attract a younger man - and hey, mirko's not that young - except money).

Other characters in the film hold her in contempt. Her daughter calls her mother a "pute" when Stefan admits he slept with her several times and even Mirko himself refers to her as a prostitute. Correctly speaking money did change hands, but when calling names it's probably best to remember who was paying who for sex. At one point Mirko refers to her as "dirty" and that he doesn't know how he can keep having sex with her, this old notion that middle-aged woman must quash their libidos (or else cop a load of abuse) and resign themselves to the fact that they smell like mothballs and polyester sweat and are therefore completely unattractive to even the ugliest of men.

Right up to the violent end of the film Maguy is portrayed as hysterical and ridiculous and we can't help feeling that beyond a certain age her life was a pointless exercise: best just to cover her with a drab blanket and forget about her and check out what's happening with the young people. Mirko's "suicide" in a dark street at the hands of the mafia seemed somehow heroic, compared to Maguy's domestic murder in the soft lighting of a home she rarely left whilst in the middle of a hissy fit - what are they trying to tell us? it was all for the best?

Lesson 1: If you pour boiling water on ants they scream

2006-10-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

Entre Les Murs is a frank and colourful novel about the education system in France, narrated by a bored teacher of the French language. He recounts the day to day brouhaha of a classroom of teenagers in a parisien school. The book creates some interesting, if neat, parallels between the way that teachers are shaped by the system in the same way as kids - their way of interacting at staff meetings often echoing their pupils. But perhaps most importantly it looks at the way that the French language is spat out by the kids, the way that it is used outside the grammar books. Of course all this is very interesting for someone studying the French language.

The book bloated me with memories of how much I hated school and also my own early days learning French.

After a couple of months cowering around Paris asking shopkeepers for "un of that" and "une of this", I enrolled in a French class at a community college full of Russians. I would have loved to have engaged in the general comraderie and nattered to them about literature and history. However, here the bridging language had shifted from English to French and as I couldn't speak any French I found myself spluttering around in troubled waters, pulling fish bones and unsightly vowel sounds out of my hair, trembling from cold and fear. It took two lessons for me to remember "school sucks", and I decided that home schooling (so that I didn’t have to make any effort other than open my door) was the way forward for me.

I selected a random "french teacher" from a magazine for english-speakers in Paris.
He was in his forties and smelt like he had been sleeping in his cupboard on a pile of bat dung for the last year. It turns out that he was not really in it for the money, or for that matter to watch a debutante come out into french society and pirouette her way to advanced grammar. No, what he wanted was to improve his English with a "long-haired dictionary" ... and I was an easy target.

After ten minutes of speaking French my brain would become as soft as baby food and when I was in this vulnerable state he would start to feed more and more English words into the conversation until we would be conducting the whole lesson in English. I'd be saying "yeah in French you probably say it differently" and then he'd explain in English how you'd say it in French.

Evidence that he had no idea of my level of French was when, after three lessons, he brought me a gift "for you to practise reading french": The Big Book of Ants – 2,000 pages on everything you need to know about ants (no photos). Not really the kind of thing you offer a beginner to practise french, particularly a beginner who had never expressed any interest in ants, although I certainly was starting to feel antsy about all this wasted time and money.

One fine day I had a personal revolution and deposed this misguided antophile. I decided once again to try leaving my house for lessons and so trekked across town to the home of another random french teacher.

This guy lasted one day. His first error was to make me take my shoes off and replace them with his old slippers. I soon found out the reason for this is that he “likes Japan”. But on further probing I realised that he was just one of those people who likes manga and knows that they have those vending machines in Japan full of used school girl’s underwear and so he has therefore decided he “likes Japan”.

But forcing me to take my shoes off and having no substance weren't his greatest sins. The problem was the biscuits. He’d put a couple of biscuits on the table in an attempt to make his place look welcoming and not like a sex den for students of the french language, but he never offered me one. Oh I didn’t want one - they looked kind of stale and a bit wet - but they were just there and I couldn't take my eyes off them. Just the fact that he didn’t know how to offer biscuits to a guest who was wearing his old slippers made me know I could never go back to him.
Now I have a female french teacher who comes to my place once a week. It’s more of a conversation than a lesson. We have lots of similar interests and we talk like mad women about books and films. The problem is that it is working out so well between us that it is becoming a little embarrassing - I’m starting to feel like I’m paying her to be my friend. Yep, she’s one of my best friends in France and I pay her.

She’s from an older generation and with her I learn old fashioned expressions like Il tombe des cordes, kind of like saying "it's raining cats and dogs" rather than saying "it's raining shit and bricks". She gives me the language of the drawing rooms.

When young pinochiette sweeps a room

2006-10-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

When young Pinochiette [sic] sweeps a room
I vow she dances with the broom

I'll hit you right away with it: I'm rather fond of cleaning, although not when it comes to downright scrubbing. I prefer dusting, a light yet fulfilling sweep, and arranging.

The quote above comes from a poem by Nancy Byrd Turner which I read when I was younger than Larry. [Note: Larry is a fictional character and any resemblance to anyone real is mere coincidence. He will appear often in my blog and he is used as a yard stick to express extremity of youngness, oldness, fatness etc.] It’s a poem about a little girl (that was in the days when boys were given blue shovels and girls were given pink brooms) who has been ordered to sweep by unseen gods and, using her broom as a dancing partner, she jigs, capers, and whirls through the house until it is clean.

I used to like this poem even though I found the subject matter dull as doughnuts (or Larry if you prefer). I liked it because our young sweeper extraordinaire was called “Pinochiette” and even if we didn't get our kicks the same way, at least we had the same nameday.

So I was thinking about this poem the other day in the context of my current life and I found an editorial review of it which says that the poem “captures the enthusiasm and imagination
children can bring to the most ordinary task”.

Lots of feminist writers have talked about how there is no creativity in cleaning
and how throughout history women have been assigned repetitive tasks lacking creativity whereas transcendent man (usually called Larry) has been allowed to go wild with a paint brush and climb new heights of creativity.

Obviously I’m all for division of labour with women and men both sharing the task of vacuuming the cat hairs out of the laptop ventilator and removing the kitty litter
from the cracks in the floorboards, but I think we can't accept that there is no
creativity in cleaning or we're just going to get depressed. Cleaning and household chores are
a big part of life for many people and the repetitive nature of the tasks can feel futile. Why wash the dishes when I'm just gonna have to wash them again tomorrow? Can't I just throw the plates in the bin and buy new ones like that rich rapper guy who is keeping capitalism on its feet?

Nancy (if I can be so bold as to call her by her first name) has the right idea - we need to inject creativity into these tasks the way kids do. But Gaston Bachelard also says a thing or two in
his book Poetics of Space. Now I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment
and I read this book many moons ago, so I’m just going off the top of my head and will accept no responsibility for any acts of cleaning anybody commits as a result of reading the following, but very basically: Bachelard talks about cleaning as being a creative act in the sense of making things new. When you clean something you are changing it from the state it was in before and ultimately creating a new bath tub, your very own work of art.

I think we all need to read that book (again) and have a think about how we can transcend cleaning, like other great thinkers such as Nancy Byrd Turner and Gaston Bachelard have done.

Just one last comment, while writing this post I was thinking about the mundane task of withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine. Well I love doing this in France because when you choose the english language option you get a message on the screen which says “please wait while we are preparing your money”. It makes me think of a chef behind the machine preparing a veritable feast of money which I am going to receive on a plate with a side
helping of hot money sauce.

War of the Walks

2006-10-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

Often I see clusters of people on those guided walking tours around Montmartre. I watch as the different tour groups clash together in a bottleneck on Rue Lepic, wondering if perhaps a hapless Amelie fan tracing the steps of her idol from the Amelie cafe to the Sacre Coeur, is going to get disorientated in the mosh, and find herself walking away with the wrong tour party on the sex and dragons tour through the brothels and strip clubs of Pigalle.

I think back to my own foray into chartered walks when I was living in London. My mop-headed sleuth friend decided it might be interesting, criminologically speaking, to take the Jack the Ripper tour around London's east end, run by a company called London Walks. Quite liking the idea of being spooked in the London fog, one evening I tagged along with him to the appointed meeting place, somewhere on the banks of the Thames.

London Walks seems to have the monopoly on walking in London. If you're going to walk, London Walks will show you how to do it. When we arrived we realised that what we thought was going to be a cosy, night promenade with one or two other people, was in fact going to be an efficiently operated walk in rows of ten (a bit like the distinction between chatting and conversation we would definitely be walking not ambling). Mild-mannered gore-seekers would finish as objective scholars of this nineteenth century whodunnit, which mysteriously pokes out of the history of London's east end.

At least forty or fifty people had assembled for the walk, and as we watched the cruise ship of people set sail down the road in the direction of the murder sites of Jack the Ripper's victims, we had doubts as to whether to bother following.

Below the voices of the departing crowd, we heard a `psssst psssst' and turned to see a portly man in his mid-fifties, dressed in sweaty clothes, with straggly greyblue hair and eyes which seemed to be stinging from alcohol or knowledge. He was holding above his head a torn and sweat-stained sign that said "The Real Jack the Ripper Walking Tour, over here", with an arrow pointing down at himself.

"Come here, quick", he said with a fearful glance over his shoulder to make sure the gods who operated the London Walks weren't watching. "I'm not supposed to do this," he explained, "it's London Walks who have this timeslot and the authorisation to take a tour from this point, but i'm a direct descendant of Jack the Ripper."

"I thought they don't know who Jack the Ripper was?" I said.

"There are theories," he swiped my words out of the way like they were belligerent wasps, "and mine is the definitive theory and I am the authority on the truth, a truthsayer. Plus with my walk you get to visit one extra murder site for one less pound!" Then he began to rant that London Walks was the Mcdonalds of walking: "like fries and shakes and sundaes, they are all made from the same substance, just cut into different shapes and sizes. All of the London Walks are the same, just packaged differently."

As the London Walks group was now gone, heading towards the belly of the East End, a couple of fresh-faced American girls and a few other wannabe walkers who had arrived late, assumed that this guy was the tour leader for the London Walks of which they had read such spankingly good reviews in their guide books.

As we commenced our tour I noticed yet another even more crumpled man standing nearby, feebly holding a post-it note with the words: "The REAL Jack the Ripper tour over here". The war of the walks.

Perhaps alarm bells started dinging for the other people in the tour party when our tour guide produced a dirty old scrap book full of, well, scraps - scraps of paper a bit like vegetable peelings with words scurrying across them written by a hasty pen, as well as haggard newspaper clippings. "I'm a ripperologist," he said proudly, "a true Ripper scholar. I've written a book on who did it, why he did it, how he did it, he explained as we walked down endless dark east end streets. One woman's scrap is another man's authority.

I guess I don't remember most of his theories, I was just content to be walking and exploring in the dark. But our guide had a lot of theories on Jack the Ripper and a lot of theories on London Walks and a general desire for its demise. Apparently as well as being a Jack the Ripper expert he was an expert on east end botany, beachcombing the Thames, and a whole host of other specialisms which were monopolised by London Walks, the daddy of walking.

My quiet harmony was disrupted when a drunken guy hanging out the door of a pub tried to physically attack our unruffled tour leader (who was really just an eccentric and passionate ripperologist rather than a malicious ghoul), accusing him of disrespecting the dead and us of being morbid for going to look at the sites where working women had been murdered. I started to feel uneasy. Always interested in history and walking around in the dark, i'd never seen my curiosity as disrespect.

Already jittery from the near death of our tour guide, things took another unruly turn down a black alley. Our guide grabbed one of the fresh-faced girls in the darkest point of the street and used her as `volunteer' victim to demonstrate how Jack the Ripper committed a lust murder in this spot, vigorously aiming his plastic knife in the direction of her groin with relevant sound effects, while the unimpressed (and downright frightened) girl's face glowed white in the dark.

Things could have gone awry there, but our bold tour guide's pace started to quicken and it appeared his interest in ripperology had started to wane when he vaguely indicated another dark bridge in the distance `there was a murder over there', before hurrying us all into what now manifested itself as the ultimate and most important goal of the tour - a beer at the pub en route.

Over a pint and his provided snack of sultanas and cheese (which he cut with the same plastic knife he had used for his earlier demonstration), we came to the conclusion that people who go on Jack the Ripper walks aren't necessarily the most socially skilled or don't necessarily have anything in common. About six of us, wannabe ripperologists, were just worn out mouses, with nothing to say. Until someone made the mistake of mentioning London Walks and our guide went hurtling down his favourite tangent, cursing and spitting out sultanas to punctuate his words.

Is swooning still fashionable?

2006-10-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

It seems that in Jane Austen’s day love used to have a much more debilitating
effect on the body. Oh of course I’ve been love’s little fool many times and my body has been subject to all kinds of minor mishaps: shaky voice upon meeting with a Him, inundated with stomach-butterflies when I hear the rustle of my phone in my pocket, tear it open – will it be Him?

But it seems that those vast distances that had to be covered by carriage in order to be reunited with a beloved were much more conducive to swooning than the time it takes for someone to respond to a text. Maybe I'm just not looking around enough - but do people still swoon?

Ingrid Bergman was a highly skilled swooner.

After watching her in Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli I have reconsidered tailored pants as a viable `around the house’ option. She also wears her nose with a great deal of finesse but despite the promise of the dvd cover she doesn’t swoon very much in this film.

Here we find her in a displaced person’s camp after the second world war when
everyone wants to get away from Europe and go somewhere starting with `A': Australia,
Argentina, Anywhere but Europe. Her application to go to Argentina is turned down, so when
a boyish Italian who has just been un-soldiered asks her through the camp’s barbed wire
fence if she wants to marry him and see his big volcano, she agrees, out of desperation
more than anything else.

It turns out his big volcano is on the island of Stromboli and so Ingrid,
with her well cut voice and modern ideas, finds herself martini-less and
on a desolate island that has been deserted by anyone who could could get the hell out of there. The few inhabitants include a pack of conservative old women who grimace at her because she is different, a husband who `doesn’t understand', and a volcano that keeps spitting hot lava at her.

Ingrid makes some tiny efforts to understand her husband - once she goes to see him on his fishing boat - but this is merely a ploy by the filmmaker to show us a spectacular and detailed tuna fishing scene - and doesn't succeed in bringing them any closer together.

In desperation Ingrid tries to seduce the local priest, but much to our disappointment he resists her impressive lechery and so, after splashing around in the sea a bit with the lighthousekeeper she convinces him to give her enough money to escape from her husband/the island.

The problem is that in order to do this she has to pass the furious volcano, which seems to be even less fond of her than the other inhabitants of the island. In the final scene we are left with an anguished Ingrid crying out to god, covered in volcano dust and encircled by vultures. I guess we could say that the volcano is phallic society preventing a woman from having a room of her own, or perhaps its a symbol of her own personal explosion. We certainly hope it isn't meant to be divine retribution for not wanting to hang out on an island without books for the rest of her life.

One of the main problems with this film is that they never showed anyone eating. Eating is such an important part of life and it just gets creepy when no one eats. I thought it was supposed to be neo-realist. Also there wasn't enough swooning. People should swoon more.

You look like a varanus prasinus

2006-10-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

In Paris sometimes I feel like I’m an actress walking around the artificial set of my film (I’m certainly famous, the only problem is that no one realises it). Beautiful buildings press up against me. Trees line the edges of streets. Flowers are confined in their pots on window sills. The rest of nature is cordoned off in parks. Everything in its place – lights, camera, action.

On a visit to my native Sydney earlier this year after having been away for two years, one of the things that I noticed with my eyes cloudy with European winter, was the way that in Sydney nature has not been put in its place. There vegetation won’t be tamed to stay in pots and parks and can be found creeping all over the buildings, sprouting through cracks in the road, coiling around the wheels of your car. The copy on advertising billboards is covered cheekily by vines and weeds sprout through office keyboards.

Often when I put my hand into my letterbox in Paris without looking to see what’s inside first, I think to myself how I would never do that in Sydney, where who knows what deadly spider might be partying in there, ready to bite my big party pooper hand. In Paris the only spiders I’ve ever seen are spindly household midgets, the kind of spiders that couldn’t harm a jelly baby and which are, in any case, quickly gobbled up by my cat.

Of course although Australia has fourteen species of lethal snakes, including the Taipan-the most poisonous snake on earth- and a whole tribe of lethal spiders, it’s not like
when you grow up in Sydney you carry around anti-venom in your purse.
But when I lived there, accidently sitting on a blue-tongued lizard, huntsman spiders making out on my bed and fat cockroaches (the likes of which have never visited Paris) running up my leg, although scream-worthy events, were common occurences.

But something they have in Paris which they don’t have in Sydney is
Reptile’s World.

The name of the shop makes me swallow a giggle, like Toy World or something, for me it conjures up images of a supermarket where people wheeling trolleys browse around, adding a snake to their trolley, some turtles, some Varanus Prasinus and so on. But really it's just your average reptile shop.

I visited the shop recently and I am officially a fan of Varanus Prasinus. I’m certainly not one of those lizard-girls who walk around with lizards on their shoulders or poking out of their handbags, but these goggle-eyed green lizards, which climb trees with a dancer’s agility, won my winnable heart. They reminded me of about a million people I know.

But it was depressing to see a large iguana in a cage not much bigger than him (the sign said `not for sale' and I’m hoping this means that he’s just resting there for a day before he takes off on a package deal to the Caribbean).

I'm addicted to visiting zoos and peeking in at pet shops because it gives me the opportunity to be near animals I don't normally get to see. But when I see big, animated dogs trapped inside tiny glass boxes in those pet shops on the quai de la Mégisserie or tropical iguanas packed into cages in cosmopolitan pet shops I get teary and question whether I should actually visit these places.

I was just reading an article saying that reptiles live twice as long in captivity. It makes me think of what Woody Allen says in the film Annie Hall.

He recounts the conversation between two women where one says `Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.'
The other one says, `Yeah, I know; and such small portions. '
And then Woody says:
`Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering,
and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly'.

I think about that iguana stuck in a cage, full of loneliness, misery and suffering... and he gets to live twice as long!

When a stranger calls

2006-10-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

I spent my childhood quaking down to the tips of my little yellow rain boots whenever the telephone rang.

For this fear of telephones and the sounds they make, I can thank the film When a Stranger Calls, which I saw at the impressionable age of six or seven. For those of you who haven't seen the film, the horrorgraphy is as follows: young and pretty babysitter hasn't checked the children. She receives phone calls from a stranger asking her if she has checked the children. She doesn't check the children but rings the police who trace the calls and they say (this line still gives me the heebie jeebies) "we have traced the calls and they are coming from your house". Yep, the stranger is upstairs and he has killed the kids.

This film shaped my life in that I took up dog walking for extra dosh rather than babysitting, and I felt safer on the streets than inside my home.

I am still scared of phones now but as I don't have an upstairs anymore I'm scared for other reasons.

I'm scared when the phone rings it is going to be one of those people from my past who I have long since given the old high ho but who pop up every now and again like rusty jack in the boxes and expect me to be in exactly the same spot that I was years ago, still wanting and needing the same things.

I am also scared it is going to be one of those double vitrage people. I'm wondering how much of a demand there is for double-glazing in Paris. More people have tried to double glaze me in the last year than they have asked me directions to the Moulin Rouge. These used to be long conversations but i've learnt now to let the magic word locataire flutter from my tongue - "sorry, I rent!" and there is nothing left to say except bonne journée, although some hang around a bit longer despite the icy winds coming from my voice.

I also receive a whole host of calls from people wanting to change my internet connection. In order to avoid these terrifying phone experiences I’ve started to, quite simply, not be me:
Could I speak with Mademoiselle Pinochiette?
Nah, she's not here at the moment
Well when can I speak with her
Ummm…she is only here between 2am and 3am Friday and Sunday mornings

So I hate phones. But when a stranger texts, well that’s ok.

Les Annees Folles: Growing up catholic

2006-10-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Growing up catholic I didn’t have fears of ghoulies under the bed and I didn't think that an innocent splutter in the dark was Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th coughing up blood and water outside my window (although admittedly I tried not to be the perpetrator of too
many practical jokes because we all know that it’s the fun-loving joker who gets killed first).

No, my big fear was Virgin Mary. I think I’d read too many christian comic books about saints where they didn’t even try to be funny “what did one saint say to the other?”
“Virgin Mary appeared to me the other day!”

So I was fixated upon the idea that Virgin Mary was going to appear to me and I was
mind-blisteringly terrified. I used to pray every night “oh please God don’t let Mary
appear to me. I’m sure she’s a nice girl and everything and she looks very becoming in blue but no no no I really don’t need to see her”.

Exiting the shower I’d expect the steam on the mirror to vanish and Mary would be serenely smiling back at me and then she'd say "boo!" Maybe if she didn’t have such a good reputation she would have been less scary. But all that bit about not having sex or going through the motions of child birth gave me the heebie jeebies.

I steered clear of grottos, but in the end my perversity reared its head
when the time came to choose a confirmation name (the tradition was to choose the name of a saint) and I chose none other than Saint Bernadette of Lourdes - the young lassie who Mary made a guest appearance to in the grotto.

[Incidentally, I was also too scared to be good because I didn’t want to die and only the good die young (although I think Billy Joel was largely to blame for this fear), but at the same time I tried to be meek in the hope of inheriting the earth (which I think used to be worth a fair bit before we started plundering it)].

Anyway, speaking of Virgin Mary, I went to the
Museum of the 1930s to see an exhibition of Tamara De Lempicka who is one of my favourite artists and I saw for the first time her portrait of the Virgin Mary. In evidence that my fears have long subsided I'm actually considering buying a print of it - in typical Lempicka style she depicts a "jet set" kind of Mary.

If you are as interested as me in the way that Mary has been depicted in art throughout the ages, I suggest you get your hands on this book: Alone of all her Sex; the Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner.

Mrs Mademoiselle

2006-10-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

If you take me apart the way you would take apart a matryoshka, you will find that some of the little versions of me are mademoiselles and others are madames. [Although admittedly sometimes I just have vodka inside me like my representative doll in this photo].

The "mini me" that pays my bills is a madame whereas the "me" who skips through paris clamouring for violet-flavoured icecream is a mademoiselle.

Like in english speaking countries with the titles "miss" and "mrs", marital status determines whether i'm a mademoiselle or madame for official purposes. But in my daily interactions with strangers, who am I?

People size you up and judge your age before branding you with a title, "madame" generally considered the safest bet for any girl beyond puberty. But of course this is relative. For the truly old, I’m always mademoiselle, and to tiny tots bullied into social niceties by their parents, I’m mostly madame.

After I had a sleepless night recently, everyone was madam-ing me like there’s no tomorrow. But on the days where my skin is freshly white direct from the teat of a cow, I can hear them crying "mademoiselle!" in the streets.

My title is of course related to my comportment. If I enter a shop squeaking and hunched I'm likely to be coaxed out of my nut house with a "Bonjour Mademoiselle". Alternatively if I stride on in, tearing up the room with my authority, I’m Madame.

I saw a film called Mademoiselle a couple of years ago which highlights this idea of comportment. I must have been at a low point in my life because I managed to get to its end, despite the film's obvious banality or pehaps because of this.

It was the story of a married woman with two kids, clearly a madame in the eyes of society, who goes on a 24 hour love binge with a man she meets at an out of town work conference. The next morning when they are in a brasserie about to say goodbye forever, the waiter brings our heroine an espresso and says: “would you like sugar mademoiselle" and we ooh and ahh and remark how the juices of love have injected her with new youth-giving vitamins. She excuses herself and skips off to the bathroom to admire her new yummy mummy self in mirror, but alas, when she gets back her lover is gone (obviously bored at the idea of having to repeat the same phrases over and over about her being the best lover ever) and she slumps into her chair with dismay.

Our waiter bustles on to the scene, proud that although he only has two lines he has the most poignant line in the film, and he says in a big voice: “voila l’addition madame". His ill chosen words immediately zap her back to the drab world of madamehood, her face creases in conformity to her re-appropriated role, and she realises that her lover has left the table covered in crumbs and hasn't paid the bill.

Perhaps there is also a bit of old world morality in the way that someone chooses to address you. For example, boys who approach me in the street always call me mademoiselle as a way of showing that even they, the ultimate personal space invaders, wouldn't stoop to steal "someone else's woman".

The Modern Doctor

2006-10-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

When I'm sick and I let out feeble meows, French friends suggests I pop some pills which I can obtain from one of the many pharmacies planted on the streets of my quartier, taking up valuable tree space (I think for every chemist in the 18th arrondissement there should be at least one park). For a common garden variety flu – bed rest, sans medication, is my usual solution.

However, when I’m not sick with the flu or a cold, I go to see doctors a lot. I guess I might be what you call a hypochondriac. But don't worry, I’m “out”. I’ve admitted to the world that I am
one. I've been like this since I was a kid. I used to watch this Australian tv show called A Country Practice (mainly because I was a fan of the dashing doctor played by Grant Dodwell) but whatever disease they focused on that week, I’d come down with it the next week: alzheimers, cat scratch fever, you name it, i'd be manifesting signs of it before you could say "Larry". Reading 19th novels didn’t help either – if we count the amount of times I’ve diagnosed myself with scarlet fever, tuberculosis and scurvy.

I've given up googling symptoms of illnesses, that's a start. But today I decided to see if I could find a cure for hypochondria so I looked at what The Modern Family Doctor (1928) had to say about hypochondriacs. It says that:

If the minds of these patients are deeply probed they can be found to have had all healthy inclinations starved and withered, and to be like unweeded gardens in which envy, hatred, malice, and spite have been allowed to flourish, and they are so self-absorbed that there is no room for outside interests. These patients have no kindliness of heart, no love of country and no generosities, and if they have any friends at all they have no real affection for them....history for him [Sic] has no meaning, and literature no existence...

That got me angry, because if anything exists for me it is literature.

Anyway, the Modern Family Doctor's solution was to take up religion.

Once when I went to a doctor in France and produced my petit papier with my lists of symptoms, the doctor looked at me with scorn, felt the beat of my unkindly heart, and gave me a healthy reprimand telling me to go forth and live, or at least weed my unruly garden.

But my current doctor is a dear about it. I went to see him recently for a tiny
white spot which had set up camp on my face.

"So you see I’m here because of this white spot. It’s probably just a pimple."

He takes out a little light and looks at it “yes, it’s just a pimple”.

Embarrassed pause where we both realise there’s nothing left to say and I’m gonna have to hand him 25 euros for telling me I have a pimple.

But he’s a resilient old thing, so he quickly whipped out a pen and drew a picture of the pimple, adding detailed pus and started to explain to me about sebum. That took about 50 seconds so then he added a little bit more detail. He drew my fingers squeezing the pimple and says “see if you squeeze it like that, it takes longer to go away”.

Then he screwed up the drawing and threw it in the bin and I went home to read
some literature, feeling a hell of a lot better.

Boyz in the street

2006-10-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'll recount something that happened during my day to H. and he'll say:
"Who said that to you?"
And I'll respond with: "Oh just a boy in the street" .

You know who they are, and they know who you are, or at least they think they do.

They are gloomy parisien shadows leaning against the walls, skulking around the boulevards, walking two by two or operating solo. There is a nest of these boyz in the street at Place de Clichy and they have devoted their life to harassing what they see as loose n easy anglo saxon women.

Their eyes tear away your muted clothing and see right through to your inner pastel boob tube.
You rest your baby blue eyes on them for a nano second, the way you would look at a wheelie bin or a street post, and they see it as an invitation for sex and biscuits back at your place, or better still, right there behind the bins.

They are always approaching, but they are most active in spring. They pretend they don't know that you are foreign and ask you in French the way to the Moulin Rouge even though you are standing under it. Even if you reply in perfectly gendered and conjugated french, tied up with a nasal sounding bow, they invariably ask you "where are you from?, which is quickly followed by an invitation to coffee, to "make" a private party with them, or the seemingly benign but disconcerting: "Can I talk to you for a bit?"

It might be ok if it was just to discuss their dermatological problems or recent root canal work, but invariably what follows this request to chat is a list of adjectives strung together like fake pearls and meant to articulate that you are the most beautiful anglo saxon (i mean woman) who has ever walked on the streets of Pigalle, which climaxes in a request for a kiss.

It's not particularly flattering considering these mecs meander from woman to woman giving each the same formula: me man + you woman = sex behind the bins. Of course foreign women are considered juicier and easier prey as most french women wouldn't even bother responding.

I handle it a lot better than when I first came to Paris and I was still a well mannered young thing. Thinking I had to be polite to everyone, especially because they are French (and therefore sophisticated and hang out at the blue parrot night club), I'd find myself politely thanking a boy for saying i have a nice arse or being incredibly apologetic that i couldn't stick around to give them little butterfly kisses all over their face.

Of course we have this phenomenon of boyz in the street in Australia too. But they are generally in trucks shouting out something about the shape of your tits and then speeding away quick smart before they have time to hear the shape of your retorting obscenities. I guess I should be thankful that the `flirting' in the street here is a bit more civilised - an offer of coffee and a potential exchange of ideas, even if that exchange is just seen by them as a means to a very quick end.

Paris Ahem

2006-10-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

Watching Paris Je t'aime, a collection of short films by different directors set throughout the twenty arrondissements of Paris, I couldn't help wanting to interrupt, to butt in with my ideas for the stories.

Of course when you live here you have your own sense of the city and you feel that given the chance to choose any place in one arrondissement of Paris and shoot a five minute film, you would have done it differently. "Oh I wouldn't have chosen that spot" or "I would have chosen to shoot in the tunnels underground, not just the metro, but the place where the police uncovered an underground movie cinema a couple of years ago, to show that Paris is not just about what is on the surface." I couldn't help furrowing my brow and wondering: Do these directors know Paris well enough? And how well is enough?

With the opening film which took place in my nook, I immediately saddled my high-horse and no no no no nos started slumping out of my mouth. I feel that there is so much in Montmartre that is particular to Paris, which I haven't seen anywhere else in the world: old shops like my local cordonnier or old style bars with zincs like the Petit Montmartre, or the Bar Jaune where the only real drinking options are beer or shots of whiskey. Places like this would have served as good backgrounds, although I can personally envision a politically charged love scene in the anarchist bookstore or a sensual grape squashing scene up in the vineyard.

I was disappointed that the director used the problem of trying to find a parking spot as the story backdrop, particularly when you need to walk to most of the interesting places in Montmartre. In the end all we had to indicate that it really was Montmartre is that the car seemed to be parked on a slope, and at the end of the film we are given a parting glance of the Sacre Coeur.

In a few of the films I had to remind myself that I was in the cinema and stop the cicada, ever ready with his fiddle, from coming to dance a jig in my brain. These were the films that were really just obese cliches. Yes, yes, overall Paris Je t'aime did take a step away from the romantic cliche of Robert Doisneau's Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, so why replace this cliche with other cliches?

I'm sure there was a lot of referencing and homaging going on which I missed, but just because we are amid the Asian community in the 13th arrondissement, must the woman in the hairdressing salon be a sexy kung fu artist who can quickly flip to a demure stereotype in order not to upset the status quo and scare away the boys?

The vampires were worringly unoriginal - a boring revamp of Adam and Eve, with one less apple and more tomato-blood. Woman locked in her role of temptress. I was really hoping for the director's sake that it wasn't actually a film but an advertisement, and I was waiting for the she-vampire to cut the biting and invite Frodo for some champagne and marron glaces at Fauchon.

As for the dying woman with the red trench coat (who i'm sure has done quite a bit for next season's fashion in Paris - as well as attachable fur tails as a hot upcoming look, I now predict that we will be drowning in a red sea of trenchcoats), I couldn't help feeling that the message behind the film may have been that if you are a middle-aged woman, the only way you'll be able to woo your wayward husband back from his cliched relationship with an air hostess, is by catching a fatal disease.

I felt the film with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara as a divorcing couple was one of the most genuine stories, snugly played out in a typical Paris bistro. We see that though with time past love becomes a dull ache like a dead rat in the stomach, if we are once again confronted with that person from our past, the ghost of that dead rat can start to gnaw at the walls of our stomach again. We see how the playful dynamic between this couple who used to be so close and still know each other, revives in the form of dried up flirtation.

I also liked the piece about the relationship between Natalie Portman and `the blind guy'. It was more like a beautiful, rhythmic poem than a film, or at least a catchy pop song. It showed how love, stretched over a period of time, plays itself out against many, many backdrops, from the laundromat to the swimming pool.

I wanted to biff the rigid tourist couple in the Père Lachaise Cemetery who were on the verge of marriage. The woman decides she doesn't want to marry the guy because he isn't witty like Oscar Wilde. Lucky for the guy, Oscar Wilde's ghost appears to him and gives him his power of wit, or at least possesses the body of the groom-to-be and rehashes his old quotes, winning back his bride-to-be. I couldn't help relishing the implications of this, that is, that if the groom continues on this merry way (that is, in the part we don't see because the film has already finished), the groom is going to cite some Oscarisms which aren't going to go down quite as well:
One should always be in love, that's the reason one should never marry.
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralising as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

I was pleased to see my boyz in the street manifesting themselves as boyz on the quai in the short film where a group of boys were harrassing women who were walking by, showing a face of Paris I know so well. I personally would have shot this one at Place de Clichy and had the men as encircling sharks.

Swimming in a saggy sea

2006-10-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

During my first summer in Paris when the days were dripping by and we were tired of staring at our melting reflections in the Seine, French announced: "That’s it, we’re hiring a car and driving to Deauville this weekend!"

"You mean Normandy? We’re going to the coast of Normandy, which means we’re going to swim in the English Channel?"

"We’re going to swim in La Manche," French primly corrected me - rather than to encourage me to speak in French it was more to eliminate the qualifier `English', which no doubt encroached upon his patriotic fervour. [He often said that he preferred to take the plane to London because when he took the Eurostar he was forced to alight at Waterloo - the scars of this defeat have strangely been handed down intact to French from his ancestors and he re-lives this battle every time the French lose to the English in any kind of sport].

Swimming in the sleeve of water between England and France didn’t seem to be a whole lot better prospect than swimming in the Seine, and at least a paddle in the Seine, even if it did result in a bad stomache ache, wouldn’t involve a sweating, salty road trip, peppered with traffic jams.

Having travelled frequently between London and Paris by Eurostar through the tunnel under the channel (the chunnel), my vision of this sea was a little out of focus. I saw it as a transport hub and the idea of swimming in it was as pleasant a thought as getting all dolled up with parasol and petticoat to promenade on the side of a highway. I pictured myself wading among the bones of old boats and the discharge of new boats. I saw myself dodging the points of long-buried norman weaponry poking out of rust-coloured sand.

When we did go to Deauville I was a tad relieved to discover that, rather than a mooring spot for norman ghosts and a dump for the junk of a million wars, the beach was in fact a long stretch of fine-sanded, white beach which could rival Sydney's beaches.

I’m a Pacific Ocean snob when it comes to riding the surf, or searching the ultimate ride which the blonded up Patrick Swayze found at Bells Beach, Australia in Point Break. So of course the saggy waves of Deauville were a bit of a downgrade. In fact my first impressions of Deauville were clearly nothing to text home about. It was the Canicule Summer of 2003, the heat had eaten up all the shade and we were left covering our half-naked bodies in palm leaves to protect them from the sun. The sea was a desert; a hot, brown and sandy tub.

It was only when I saw the Claude Lelouch film Un homme et une femme, where Deauville was painted in soft budding pinks and greys as the backdrop to a love story, that I started to reconsider it as a viable beach option.

Admittedly the brownish sandy water near the shore still takes some getting used to compared to the bubbling blue of my beloved Pacific Ocean or the dashing green-blue of the Mediterranean Sea. But it is one of the closest beaches to Paris, and as my mother would say, it’s better than a smack in the eye with a dead fish – which admittedly could be a hazard here, as i'm still not entirely convinced that fish living in this sea feel chipper enough to continue with life and all its burdens.

The backdrop of Norman style manor houses which line the beachfront make it one of those versatile beaches, the kind of place that I love to visit in both winter and summer. I'm yet to see a beach covered in snow but I've heard tempting reports about this from Maine.

The added bonus is that, swimming in La Manche, unlike at Sydney beaches, I don’t have to be on full-time bluebottle alert. Losing children seems to be a bigger danger here, as our day at Deauville recently was constantly interrupted by a loud speaker reporting on yet another unaccompanied child who had been found seemingly dazed by the sun, randomly digging up holes in the sand, and was now waiting to be claimed at the beach orphanage.

As two nearby children learnt to play competitive sports - who has the bigger shriek and who can kick sand the furthest - I speculated whether any of these found children had been intentionally lost for a moment's respite.

Two hours each way on the train, a trip to Deauville gives me a welcome break from the enclosed heat of Paris. It's a quick venture back to something I miss most about Sydney; being able to get to the sea with a shake of your tail, to lick the air and taste salt, diving underwater to escape the sun, and lying on my back watching seagulls weave words in the sky.

Educating Rita

2006-10-16T14:06:00.000-07:00

Educating Rita is certainly a film, among other things, about the power of the haircut. For most of the film Michael Caine's character mopes up and down the screen, inspiring pathos. On first glance we think that we feel pity for him because he is an alcoholic and failed poet whose wife has left him for better poetry. But when, towards the end of the film, in the ultimate act of love, Rita gives him a haircut and we see him stepping on to the plane to start a new life in Australia, our pity dissipates. The new haircut inspires our confidence and makes us believe that this two year sabbatical in Australia may really be the start of a new life and not just a re-make in a tropical location of his previous shenanigans with the whisky bottle. All along it was his hairdo that aroused our pity.

This is not to say that I am an advocate of the "get your haircut and get a job" school of thought. I quite like longish locks on both girls and boys, but I think a regular trim to get rid of split ends and keep hair bouncy is an important human renewal process - like a bored snake should shed its skin.

In Educating Rita, working class Rita takes an open university learning class in literature in order to "find herself", against the wishes of her husband who would prefer that she act like a baby machine and start "popping 'em out". Michael Caine, suffering from an extended bout of ennui from teaching literature to undergraduates, becomes her professor.

The professer/student relationship between the characters of Michael Caine and Rita (Julie Walters) reminds me a little of my own relations with my French teacher. She isn't a failed poet (not that I'm aware of anyway) but she does let me babble on about my life, in the same way that Michael Caine listens to Rita.

My French teacher is an enigma. Even though she has been coming to my house every week for nearly a year I know very little about her and she has all the dirt on me. Part of the reason for this is that when we first started I was still unable to construct questions in French. It was much more natural for me to make statements about myself than ask her questions.

Rita wanted to learn to write essays and talk about books like the rich kids on the university quadrangle. Me too, I'd like to be able to speak French like "them ones out there", that is, basically everyone else in Paris. But I'm like Rita, who in the race to air her thoughts, to let them breathe, just lets them blow out of her without any structure. In the almighty rush to use words, to communicate, to tell stories, I pay no heed to the framework of french grammar, I speak any which way I can as long as it gets the message across.

Oh of course the situation is no where near as dire as it used to be when I'd go into the boulangerie in pursuit of a baguette and come out with three pain aux raisins. But it seems that I am currently dozing on a plateau. Part of the reason for this is admittedly a lack of zest when it comes to studying French grammar. I could also cite working in english from home and having lots of english speaking friends. But there is also the problem caused by speaking franglais all the time.
What are you mange-ing?
A pomme, d'you want to mange a bit of it?

It's got to the point where I'm unintentionally slipping English words into the conversation with my French teacher. I'm not talking about when you aren't sure of the French word so you just grab the the english word, umm `eruption', and say it in a french way - éruption. More often than not you get lucky and bingo the French word (except in the case of the back-stabbing faux amis).

I'm talking about when I say the English word (when of course I know the French word) because I am so used to speaking Franglais - picking and choosing and throwing in the French word when the English word has gone walkabout.

Can you speak French? I can understand french. That is, there's not much I don't understand in a French film or a conversation and I can read any dusty old french tome you want to lend me, but I'm still not great in spoken and written french. The problem with being a French understander is that it doesn't show on the surface (unless you're pushing a door when you should be pulling it and then you clearly don't understand). So when I speak to people in French they assume that my comprehension is on the same level as my spoken French and so I get lumped in the not very french at all category when I believe I belong in the not really french group.

Back to the Womb

2006-10-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Take me back to dear old Blighty!
Put me on the train for London town!
Take me over there,
Drop me anywhere,
Liverpool, Leeds, or Birmingham, well, I don't care!
A.J. Mills, F. Godfrey and B. Scott, 1916

Although I have English ancestry, I firmly believe that Australia should cut the umbilical cord and depose the English queen (as cute as she may look in slacks) as symbolic head of State, a symbolism rendered meaningless by multiculturalism and democracy.

I blow big raspberry bubbles at monarchist arguments such as Australia fought in war after war under the flag with the Union Jack and that if Australians were to stamp on this flag they would be stamping on the memories of the known and unknown soldiers (Not lot ago I had a discussion with a couple of French people who tried to tell me that there were actually no Australians, or at the most one or two, fighting in the First and Second World Wars on European soil. Yes there were, I affirmed, vaguely starting to worry that i'd misinterpreted the meaning of Anzac Day and that in fact it had just been an excuse to try out a new recipe for biscuits. But I stuck to my original affirmation about the percentage of the Australian population who lost their lives in World War One being the highest of any country in the world and added: Don't you remember that not long ago your government was building an airport runway over their graves?)

Despite these English roots, growing up I was never overly interested in a pilgrimage to the Mother Country. In terms of literature, except for a certain book where a swarthy hero battles with a sickly ghost on the moor, I was more attracted by the sled-driven magical and revolutionary politics of Russian literature or the fantastical beasts of heat in Latin American books. Hotspots to visit were India and Siberia.

And although English comedy made me laugh so hard that my guts were splattered all over my nearest and dearest, visiting England just seemed too much like visiting a family member who you visit because they are family but who you have little in common with.

Two weeks holed up in a hotel in Russell Square, London, in 1995, unable to sit upright due to a bout of homesickness, resting my hand on a doilie and being spoon-fed episodes of EastEnders, didn't do much to change my ideas about England.

It was my holiday in early 2001 that was the harbinger of change, when I needed a break from Sydney, and London was the most viable option as my funds were limited and I had friends there who could host me.

I was immediately struck by the way people jostle there, making you feel like you are part of a revolutionary throng. There's not enough people to really get down and jostle in Sydney. In fact now when I go back to Sydney, after having lived in two heavily populated cities, I'm always struck by how quiet it is, how many silent patches there are in what I used to think was a honking metropolis.

Dancing to Mr Scruff at 93 Feet East in London's East End I remarked how there was so much less attitude than in Sydney, everybody's boots were just the right size and made for dancing. People were there to have a good time. It wasn't all just about being seen, as is the case among a certain crowd in Sydney: I wear big sunglasses therefore I am (just quietly I do like oversized sunglasses when they are stripped of attitude) or I have Che Guevara's face stamped on my underwear therefore I am uber cool (as to my opinion on the use of Che Guevara as fashion statment i'll just quote Manning Marable in his essay `On Malcolm X: His message and meaning': "There is a tendency to drain the radical message of a dynamic, living activist into an abstract icon, to replace radical content with pure image" - and in the process the image becomes vacuous and loses its radical meaning!)

London's icy April surface was dotted with potholes of warmth. Although Parisiens are not really as rude as They say, I am still struck by the contrast when I visit London, the easygoing manner in which people generally respond to my needs, even to the point of one helpful underground employee accompanying me to the relevant platform.

I was looking through my diary of this London trip yesterday, snipping away at my memories with a pair of scissors, reconstructing and deconstructing them as I'm prone to do. I remember how London gave me such a winning smile on this holiday:

Sitting in some place called Sausage Heaven, not eating sausages, just calmly waiting for my skin to clear, watching everyone jostling past me, writing in my diary with my qantas pen.

Having my very own Before Sunrise, when instead of Vienna and a geeky Ethan Hawke, I had bold Anthony from Boston, who reckoned I looked like a german art student and needed some layers in my hair, proposing that I get off the tube with him at Tottenham Court Road to drink pale ale and stroll among the sex shops and fast food places. Maybe we could stop by Top Shop to help him pick out a retro shirt and take a trip to Tony & Guy to fix my hair.

Eating hot cross buns that weren't hot and falling asleep in the Mark Rothko room at the Tate Modern, my toes dangling out from under a vivid red and black quilt.

Feeling like I was part of a chase, walking through Hampstead Heath, hunting for love. Watching london blinking in a cold afternoon sun below me, looking where the Gherkin should be, but wasn't, because it hadn't yet been built. Hoping to find badgers and moles and all those other animals from Farthing Wood that were impossible to find in the Australian bush.

Queuing with my buddy John for 15 pence bagels in the wee small hours, the pollution of night clubs clinging to our skin, sneezing out of my eyes from too many late nights and heavy drinking I couldn't keep up with where the vodka started to taste like gin.

Drinking in old shoe shops, dank and cosy bars the likes of which are hard to come by in Sydney's bushland of metal and light.

Staying on the spice trail, Brick Lane, with curry hot enough to keep me happy.

Drinking tea in the crypt under St Martin in the Fields church on Trafalgar Square, talking to a man who spoke only in lists. He listed all the paintings in the National Gallery, the places he has visited, the people he has known, until I had to list the reasons why I couldn't talk to him any longer.

Eating sushi in Soho, with some people who talked about money the whole time (money has no poetry) and knowing I had no money, only invited me into the conversation once to say: So Pinochiette, what do you think of foot and mouth disease?

Big grassy parks with well bred ducks.

More nationalities than I could put my lips and fingers on, until Dali's melting watch at the Saatchi Gallery told me my month was up and I had to go home.

But as we all know, I went back.

Still scaling fences

2006-09-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

In a flurry of feathers and light, our silver car flew south, along with a flock of other silver cars (so many of the cars in Portugal are silver), landing at the birthday destination. I'd been warned of the overcrowding of The Algarve in summer, but I'd also heard whispers of sweet, still heat. I was determined to uncrease myself on a lost beach.

A friend of mine recently returned with his girlfriend from a visit to the village in Greece where he passed the first five years of his life before his family moved to Australia. Many of the relatives who knew him when he was a tiny tot still live there and Nik's girlfriend reported to me that Nik was a changed creature during their time in the village. His usual bossy confidence was replaced by timid, little-boy mannerisms: yes, yes whatever you like Auntie Mimi, he'd say, leaning forward for his hair to be ruffled. It was as if his childhood was an old kite, long trapped in a village tree, just waiting to be reclaimed on his return.

After hearing this story I wondered if H was going to be subject to the same kind of regression once back in the arms of his mother country. But rather than reverting to a child-like demeanour, I was pleased to see that he became more like a football player - a bronzed figure, flourishing in the heat like a native plant, more confident, the kind of person who can kick goals.

As for me, I've just passed my 33rd birthday and the changes I thought would have happened by now, haven't taken place. When I was younger I thought by the time I'd reached today's height I'd certainly be wearing sensibly ironed clothes, not sitting on the ground or scaling fences, perhaps even mothering someone else. Oh yes, of course, I look after myself, I pay my way, I take myself to the doctor (perhaps more regularly than necessary) and drive a car if pushed (but due to a tendency to drift off with the pixies there is a label on me stating that this is generally not advisable). But I do wonder if I'll be forever sleeping with an overstuffed teddybear, ensnared in the transition phase.

The birthday came and went with all the usual jigs and giggles. I was still overwhelmed with childlike glee in the morning with the presentation of Les cadeaux! Les cadeaux! – a birthday kimono and books books books. Then there was a breakfast of honey toast for the honeybee, all on our balcony at the most westerly european point, overlooking a windy beach used mainly by surfing types who spent most of the day far out in the waves.

Further east along the coast between red rocks where the waters weren't as wind-whipped, I wanted to swim to the grottos in search of ghostly apparitions. The beach was splattered with people but despite the heat the water was so cold they stayed on the sands. Determined to have the birthday swim I skidaddled right in and within moments I was at home in the water, H. calmly on the shore waving to his little heroine, the only one who could brave the ice-breathing dragons of the sea.

And later that night over sangria and curls of pasta loaded with sea shells we talked of whatnots, little flowers of conversation sprouting between us. Over-drinking together, champagne and chocolate cupcakes and giddy laughing through sugary teeth into the wee smalls.

A bird in the hand

2006-09-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

I've grown up with a fear of birds. In the same way that my fear of the telephone derives from a film, my fear of birds perhaps commenced with Hitchcock's The Birds which I saw at a young and malleable age.

While I'm an opponent of totalitarian laws which prevent people from meeting en masse, I sometimes wish we could impose such laws on birds. Every time I see a bunch of birds together I can hear their tweets of mischief. The word flock gives me the heebie jeebies. Give me a bird in the hand any day, two birds concealed in a bush are clearly plotting. Reading a children's book - the Winter of the Birds - where metal birds attack a town - didn't aid me to overcome my fears.

And though I don't want to give FUP a bad name by calling birds sinister, it hasn't helped matters that beyond the realm of film and literature, I've had real life examples of bird-attacks. On my trot home from the school bus stop, magpies used to swoop during a year long nesting season. My aunt has a small, diamond-shaped piece out of her nose where one of these magpies got lucky.

I'm sure the Paris pigeons have singled me out as a worthy victim as they fly directly towards my nose. Although several people have assured me they do exactly the same thing to their button and snub noses, I'm not convinced.

But i'm no cowardly lioness padding around on kitten paws, when we were in Portugal I organised our road trip so that we could spend a day on the Ilha Berlenga. This is a very small island ten kilometres off the coast of Portugal and only a dozen or so fishermen are permitted to live there because the island has been declared a natural reserve for thousands and thousands of seabirds.

The boat trip only takes an hour but I knew something was a-twitter when someone in charge handed out plastic bags to every one of the 150 or so passengers, without discrimination. Plastic bags for the small, the fat and the bony. The initial heaves of the sea were greeted by whoooos and cheers from everybody, as the boat rocked from side to side like one of those rides people take for kicks at Wally World.

Within ten minutes the whooos had become blurps and it was no longer just the sea that was heaving. Not many people were spared, it doesn't matter how pretty you are, on this boat you would join the throng of happy upchuckers. As one wise father seated in front of me said to his son at the start of the ordeal: the aim isn't to try not to be sick, but to see if you can be the last person to be sick.

I was simultaneously laughing and crying as all around me I could hear the sounds of sickness of all shapes and sizes. Amid the mess, a couple of youngish lovers embraced and kissy coo-ed, oblivious to it all.

When we arrived the little boy in front of us proudly held up his heavy bag and asked Havi: how much did you vomit? No time to admire the crunchy brown rock and green sea just made for swimming, the heap of bodies just off for the boat filed for the toilets, listening to the piping exclamations of the young couple who had embraced for the whole journey: It's beautiful! Wow! as they hiked off for a round of frisbee on the beach.

But in any case, I must admit that i'm feeling rather loveable as I think it mustn't be hard to love someone like me, who only purged a little bit.

I'd read that we could expect to see puffins, cormorants as well as seagulls. But we only saw seagulls, thousands upon thousands of them, many more than the fiesty birds that attacked Hitchcock's school.

Here birds rule the roost and people are their subjects. We were required to stay on the marked pathways and not stray on to the bird's turf. Happily most of the people that came over on the boat clung to the beach and H. and I had bending pathways all to ourselves, transported to a primitive place where all that existed were birds and one rabbit. We even came across a platform which served as a flying school with twenty or so baby birds being taught to fly by a couple of professional gulls.

This post really just needs to be filled with twitters, squawking, flapping, and crowing to show you what it was like to be in Bird Land. A tension, a feeling of foreboding, like we're all just preparing for something to happen.

Lisbon is a loveable pooch

2006-09-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve got Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbonne in my hot little hands at the moment, and although he wrote it in the 1920s, reading through his description of Lisbon, I’m re-seeing the city in which I spent a few days last week. The book is really just a guide to the city, but a guide written by one of Portugal’s most renowned poets and writers, adorned with heavy chandeliers of adjectives which light up the pages in praise of Lisboa.

When he was eight years old Pessoa left Lisbon with his family to live in Durban, South Africa and he lived there until he was about seventeen years old. According to someone who probably knows better than me, during this period, Pessoa missed the city like we miss the loveable pooch of our childhood years which we are forced to abandon because our mother is a naval officer who needs to move frequently. Having a pooch in every port won’t compensate for the loss of the first pooch of our childhood.

In Durban (which doesn't rhyme with Pessoa), Pessoa felt alienated, surrounded by people whose brains weren’t cluttered with memories of Lisboa, people who didn’t understand his cobweb covered background. He dreamt of going back to Portugal. When he finally did get back to Lisbon he burrowed into the cobblestones and lived there for basically the rest of his life. For Pessoa, Lisbon was where it was at, the rest of Portugal could just be considered suburbs of Lisbon.

In a street by street account, Pessoa's guide on Lisbon makes use only of the positive adjectives. He probably would have written a less idealistic, different kind of guide if he hadn’t been forced to rupture with the city in his childhood. From a distance you can’t see pus and pimples, nose hairs and stretch marks.

The guide is a defiant homage. We can feel an undercurrent of Pessoa’s belief that Lisbon should be the most talked about and appreciated city in the world. He nods at the boutiques of 1920s Paris, and then dismisses them, saying that the boutiques in Lisbon were just as good.

I’ve now got a proper crush on Lisbon. Obviously as I’ve only spent a couple of days there I’ve also got an uneven view and I could sing you all to sleep with lullabies about the river and city views from my loft bedroom window near the castle, pineapple milkshakes and fish sandwiches in laid back bars full of reclining patrons, azulejo winking in dark alleys, haggling and laughing like hippos, parks for ducks, african beats and a sun that parts buildings in order to be with you.

Looking at Pessoa’s book it seems I did miss many of the statues and landmarks here and there, and I smile to myself seeing that I took a photo of a sculpted elephant’s well-shaped butt when I should have probably been taking a frontal photo of the important Signor so and so who was standing next to the elephant.

But I did see some of Lisbon’s blemishes and scars, such as frequent graffiti saying Go home Brasiliens - racism seeping through the city walls, you hit me, I’ll hit someone else. I’ve talked about racism towards Portuguese immigrants in France now I see racism towards Brasilian immigrants in Portugal, and on and on.

But I haven’t seen enough of Lisbon and my hot little head is now steaming with schemes to live there one day or at least go back soon.

There is a Portuguese saying: Coimbra studies, Braga prays, Lisbon shows off and Porto works. I’ll go with the show pony any day, but I need to keep this under wraps as H’s family are devout followers of Porto, as both a city and a football team – it doesn’t seem possible to support one without supporting the other.

We see strong regional loyalties in lots of countries. In France the rest of the country makes snide remarks about Parisians. It’s the same in Portugal. H’s sister made a telling comment while chewing on her plate full of nothing (mysteriously H’s sister would set a plate for herself at the dinner table each night - even though she clearly was going to eat out later with her boyfriend - and each night we’d put the plate in the dishwasher to clean the nothing off it). She lives near Porto and during our tales about our days in Lisbon she interrupted: “Oh Lisbon as a city is ok, it’s just the Lisboetes I can’t stand!”

Football fever never leaves Portugal. You don’t need a World Cup in order for every television to be broadcasting football matches and if there is no game on they will just play re-runs from 1970s World Cups or else other derivatives of football such as beach football, indoor football, water football etc.

Rivalry between the cities of Porto and Lisbon comes to a head in the form of football. Walking through a flea market in Lisbon, H was sporting a Porto club football t-shirt which gloats over Porto being champion five times. Various boyz in the market directed disgruntled comments at H which seemed like jest to me, but in the end H said that wearing his t-shirt in Lisbon was really an act of provocation and that he was actually upsetting people.

Makes me wonder if H’s family would be as welcoming with all those plastic spiders and stuff if next time I show up dressed to the nines in the Benfica red (the football club of Lisbon).

Hello cocky

2006-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

We drove from the north to the south of Portugal last week, occasionally swerving around a renegade galo de barcelos which had escaped from its legend and was lolling about on the road.

As I pecked at crumbs of bolo rei, my stick legs tanning in the rays of a beating sun and strong Atlantic winds reaching through the window of the car to feather my hair, I began to understand the landscape of Portugal. However, when it comes to the terrain of the Portuguese language, I remain little more than a trained bird reciting the phrases Havi has handed me and mimicking the words of the people I encounter, an obrigada here, a bom dia there.

I've finally got to the point where i'm not struggling as much with the French language and the events of my days in France are no longer completely overcast with mystery. [One incident which epitomises these past days of mystery springs to mind. I was with French and some of his neatly-tucked cronies on a weekender in Brussels. Somehow knowledge of the existence of most European singers had managed to escape my life up until that point and from the words I picked out of the flying french conversations around me it seemed we were all shaking off last night's sleep and getting dressed to go to an afternoon performance by this Belgian guy called Jacques Brel. I was looking forward to a lazy afternoon being serenaded by a weeping guitar and so I nearly wept myself when we arrived at the venue and I discovered with my eyes rather than my ears that Jacques Brel was long dead. In fact we were going to an exhibition of his work where I would be forced to interact with cardboard cut outs and background tapes. Obviously a seance to summon him from the dead would have been better than that.]

In Portugal, particularly in the part of the voyage we spent in the north with Havi's family, i'd once again flown into a situation where i was flapping about, trying to fly in the current of conversation. Words and everyday activities were little mysteries.

Havi's aunts and uncles and family friends who have lived all their lives in Portugal don't speak any French (or English) and so at those dinners where the table was extended to cater for the extended family, I found my words flopping around in the air like flying fish and falling heavily to the ground.

After an initial, confusingly warm welcome from two old aunts, complete with kisses all over my arms and heading rapidly towards my legs (H later explained that i'd been mistaken for Cousin Natalie - who i was disappointed to learn also has a cumbersome nose), my conversation was reduced to a tiny ball of nods and smiles and I had a constant elbow banging against H: what did they say? why are they all laughing?

Of course H's parents speak French, but his mother speaks with such a heavy Portuguese accent, particularly when she is on her home turf, that I often think she is speaking to me in Portuguese when she is speaking in French. Some of the time, unperturbed by my blank face, she is actually speaking Portuguese, caught up in the beauty of her own language she wants all language barriers to tumble and everyone to share its sugary tones with her.

H's father speaks a timid French, so timid that often this French is not addressed to me at all, but to H: [in French] "Make sure elle has enough vegetables because I've noticed elle doesn't eat meat. Make sure elle eats some goat's cheese. Do you think elle needs a jacket?" I forgot that my name is Pinochiette and I started thinking of myself as Elle. Je m'appelle Elle.

When H's father does actually address me directly it's usually not even in French at all, but rather through the medium of plastic spiders and I'm expected to scream in response. I'm pleased to say I did let rip some fairly boisterous screams at least the first and second time he put one of these spiders on my plate (as the saying goes: first time is funny, second time is silly, third time is a spanking).

I guess the thing that struck me the most about once again being out of my depth in terms of language is that suddenly French became my language. In this world encircled by pine trees in the north of Portugal where English had been forgotten or never invented, I was suddenly grateful for conversations that were in French. When we came across French travellers I felt an affinity with their language, this language which bumps against me in Paris and gives me no end of bruises. It amuses me to think that a language which I botch - where I sometimes call a she a he, or say "they is" and where often I call a spade, a hammer - could feel like home. But it did, briefly.

Speaking of deserts

2006-07-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

Although the entire centre of Australia - the wide brown land - is desert, when I lived there I clung stubbornly to its coastline. The only experience I've had of being in a desert was in the Sahara.

When I was living in London, the bells of the silly season started ringing up a storm in French's head and he came up with the madcap idea to book a Christmas tour to Tunisia for his whole family. He was always lamenting that he didn't spend enough time with them - according to him this would kill all the birds of guilt with one sharp stone. It would be a veritable desert storm of blood and feathers. I was on a short leash back then, so I kissed him with my wet nose and agreed to come along.

This concept of the tour was all very new to me. I'd always travelled independently and I wasn't sure how I'd go with a tour leader acting as traffic controller inside my head, telling my thoughts when to stop and reflect over the landscape and when to keep on moving.

The tour was with a French company, and was full of families and couples, rather than swinging singles in need of a squeeze. It was the stuff that Houellebecqian nightmares are made of (although I'll say straight up that although I've referenced the guy here, I'm not a fan of Michel Houellebecq's pessimistic and misogynistic view of realism).

We had the whole shebang of packaged `culture' sampling. Our very own desert olympics. We were dressed up in traditional costume and placed on salivating camels, made to dance traditional jigs, taken to where Star Wars was filmed and then, as if to say: we rode your miserable camels, we gawked at your hollywood film set but it's been just a little bit too much of the Other now, so give me some homegrown French tucker would you - we had Christmas French style, complete with congealed foie gras, melting Buche de Noel and a little drummer boy drumming La Marseillaise.

We travelled around the Sahara in a convoy of jeeps - six tourists per jeep plus the driver. Beneath the sounds of the motor, French’s parents bickered in hushed tones, his teenage sister desperately tried to dodge the overprotective beams of her parents and fall in love with the tour guide, French struggled to compensate for thirty years of indifference, and I fell asleep. As we had one more space in the jeep, a lone woman - who had probably come on the tour to meet a group of like-minded people - perhaps find love and roll around the dunes, found herself sandwiched between a worried mother, an angry father, a teenager daughter in need of a kiss and a zombie `english' who could pass hours and hours without saying a word, none of whom would probably notice if she was accidently put on the roof rack of the jeep with the luggage.

I really was switched on zombie mode this whole eleven days or whatever it was. I felt like a screensaver, just biding time until I would start to be active again. Maybe it was the monotony of the democratic sun dappling endless grains of sand. More likely it was the fact that everyone on the tour was French, all the Tunisian tourguides spoke French, and I studied German at school so I didn’t have even your basic Kommt gleich zum hafen unser boot heisst seeteufel (come straight to the harbour and the boat’s name is Seadevil) to help me communicate. Words had grown wings and were flying straight over my head and buzzing around my ear like feral flies. My way of dealing with this was to retreat inside myself, to my personal oasis.

In fact I spent so much time off partying with an assortment of elves, fairies and pixies in my brain, that by day seven I still didn’t know the name of the lone woman, the non-family member in the jeep. I was trying to pick up French words here and there and commence to learn the language. There was a word I’d heard bandied about many times on this trip so I thought I'd better ask what it meant. C’est quoi `une giselle'? I asked the lone woman.

She was a bit shocked that someone had suddenly put into words what she had been feeling all along, that is, that she had become a thing, a hatbox forgotten by a pre-occupied family. French to the rescue, he quickly straightened my bent back, brushed some unbecoming desert dust off my collar and said sternly, gesturing at the woman: This is Giselle, Pinochiette. I think you’ve already met.

Leaping lizards! And that wasn’t the worst of it for poor Giselle. When we'd all reached the end of our tether and couldn't look at each other without wanting to vomit up desert dust, our honorable tour guides decided the ideal thing would be for us to spend a night outdoors, in tents (one tent for each jeep). This being the desert, the night temperatures plummeted to antarctic depths and body heat became the only solution to chronic cold. We all huddled together in the tent and I found myself rubbing shoulders with French's mother and playing footsy with his Father, not the ideal first tent-sharing experience with the potential in-laws. But Giselle wasn’t as ruthless as me in her need to hot-up and while we all melded together, Giselle remained apart and emerged the next day, looking old, borrowed and blue.

Probably the best part of the trip was one night when we were given a break from sampling softened culture and French and I decided to give his parents a night off from teensitting. We took his sister for a long desert stroll. "Look I saw a falling star!" French's sister cried, quickly making a wish that she would have four bouncing babies with Zahid, the tour guide, before the star came crashing to the ground. And then I saw one. And another and another. A natural fireworks display in the sky. The sky was alight with flashing, falling stars - explosions of peace, rather than war.

oi oi oi

2006-06-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

I come from a land down under

Where beer does flow and men chunder

Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?

You better run, you better take cover

Men at Work

I read somewhere not long ago that there is a floating population of 2,000 Australians in Paris. I'm not sure if this ethereal figure is correct, but if it is, that's not very many. That's certainly a small enough number to make me exotic.

Australia seems to have a good reputation in France. Despite the ongoing efforts of the conservative government of John Toady Howard (who?) to score boos for Australia on the world stage through unadulterated support for the merest sneeze of Bush and the boyz, the reputation of Australia seems to be relatively unscathed - at least in Montmartre.

People hear my accent and they try to be all smartypants and announce:

Vous êtes Anglaise!

Nup

Américaine?

Na ha

D'ou venez vous?

Australie!

Oh you speak German?

No! Australia, land downunder, where women glow and men plunder.

And then they get all big-eyed and either say "ha ha kangaroo!" or wax lyrical about how they would like to go there one day, their cousin went there once, or they went there...and they loved it!

And why would I live here when I could live in a beautiful country like Australia? Why do people want straight hair when they have curly hair?

Or they tell me that they have tasted Foster's beer or wine from Jacobs Creek (of course Australians don't take these exported beverages seriously - the good stuff stays at home - what Australia exports is the cheap and nasty stuff that we drank when we were teenagers so we could lose our inhibitions as quickly as possible and have an excuse to grope each other's boyfriends and steal clothes from stranger's clotheslines).

So generally Australia gets a got a good rap from the French people I meet. It's the Australians in Europe and many of my friends who still live in Australia who diss the big brown land.

But with so few Australians in Paris, I don't meet that many floating through its sugary streets. Except for the tourists. I can always spot an Australian tourist.

"They are Australian", I'll whisper to H, pointing to two indistinct blobs in the distance.

"How do you know?"

"I just do!"

I think I have an 83.5% success rate.

It's not their skin colouring or the shape of their eyes because as we all know Australia is a hotchpotch of many different colours, shapes and sizes.

Perhaps it's a way of dressing, a way of standing (not quite straight), their demeanour, and dare I be so lame as to say it - a certain openness - "come on in and know me".

But I don't come across that many Australians who actually live here. And with a few exceptions, those that I have met here don't really want to know other Australians. Like I am the bones jangling around in their closet, like I am going to see beneath their cultivated European ways, tear off their Euro veil and reveal their inner aussie bumpkin.

I was a bit like that when I was living in London. I'd dodge the Australians roaming around in packs thinking it was nothing other than the silliest of the sillies to move to London and carve a mini Australia within a foreign city.

But I find I've recently started to seek out other Australians in Paris. A friend rang me not long ago and said "Come out, i'm with some Australians!". It generally takes a lot to get me to leave my cave at short notice, but I boot scooted down to that bar before you could say "Larry".

Of course the guys that happened to be there, although good people who I don't wish any harm,
were the extreme form of Australian, those who drink lots of beer and then chunder, quite expressively and publicly. So one hour was a big enough dose of Australia to last me a while.

But I still do feel a welcome bond with many Australians I meet.

I guess it is nice to be blue-eyed and exotic in Paris, but often i just feel a bit quirky and out of step, from that land with lots of desert and funny accents. Oh isn't she mignonne! Like everyone just wants to give my cheeks a good, hard squeeze. Meanwhile I just want to go and do some sport somewhere, any old sport.

Hmm, very interesting all that. Considering that in Australia I always felt a bit out of place, not sporty enough, a strange dark bookish character sitting up a tree watching everyone else participating in life or sport.

I've always been a sucker for the brooding man from "Europe" (doesn't matter where - any EU member will do) but I found that a couple of years after I moved here I had a turnaround and started being attracted to six foot men full of muscles with broad australian accents and sun-drenched noses. Exotic is indeed relative and ever-changing.

Now that I am nearly as far from Australia that I can be, I've found that I have become attracted to Australia in the way I used to be attracted to Europe. I read Australian history and when I take holidays in Australia, as well as visiting my family, I try to go to some of the places there which i've never visited.

And then there is that not quite pride I have for the country I wanted to ditch forever. Especially now with the World Cup. With football i'm like one of those people who say they are a devout catholic but only go to mass at Christmas and Easter. I say "I love football" but only ever watch it during the World Cup and then forget it exists for four years.

I nearly cried when Australia lost against Brazil on the weekend. Not because they lost - because I am a good sport. But because in the bar where we watched the match everyone was supporting Brazil (and they weren't brazilians - personally i thought it was a little on the safe side to support a team who is clearly very talented and powerful and won the World Cup last time).

So tonight I chose my bar better. I went to the Australian bar near my house (somewhere I thought I would never go). And yes everyone was supporting Australia and yes they qualified, knocked Croatia out of the competition and they will be playing against Italy soon.

I don't like hoo ha

2006-06-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

These last few days I've been concerned that my lack of soft well-wishes
for the French football team in this World Cup (that is to say my inner bat cave of satisfaction that they didn't actually win in the recent match against Switzerland), is symptomatic of my failure to properly integrate into French society.

They seem like nice, strapping young men, why don't I want them to do well? I do live in France you know. Perhaps it's because I think they have already guzzled enough from the Cup of 1998. Now when they lose a football match the blow of losing is counterbalanced with the headline: `World Cup winners 1998, lose 10-0'. They are winners even when they lose.

The use of this qualifier `winners of 1998' is ubiquitous in France:

`Jacques Chirac, President of the World Cup Winners 1998',

Le Boulangerie de Violette - croissants made for and by the Winners of '98'.

I think 1998 has still got some life in it yet.

But I also think maybe my lack of support is just because I don't like hoo-ha. If they did win we would have months-upon-years of radios and newspapers splattered with victory, ticker-tape storms and a whole lot of hoo-ing and ha-ing which would smother the songs of birds and the quiet chatter of people exchanging ideas.

It was the same with the 2012 Olympic bid. I was secretly batting for London because I couldn't be bothered living with the hoo-ha if Paris was hosting the Olympics: the anticipatory highs followed by the post-games lows and mass city depression.

I've lived in an Olympic city before (Sydney 2000) so I know how it is. The communication channels are inundated with Olympic mania blocking out every other sound. This isn't to say that those two weeks in September 2000 where we dined on hot olympic pie smothered in olympic sauce and big jugs of olympic froth weren't more-than-fun.

On the other hand, distant hoo-ha, where I don't have to be at its core, is ok. There's a lot of hoo-ha in Australia at the moment about Australia winning its first World Cup match ever. Even though I didn't see the game so I can't engage in philosophical discussions about the ins and outs of the goals, I find myself just grasping on to any information I can so that I can text my Australian friends about it. No matter how banal, just the fact of keeping the conversation about the win going is enough for me. Text 1: "Did you know that when Australia won Jerry said he was so happy he could die?" Text response: "Ha ha really?". Pause. I need to say more but I didn't see the game or read anything about it, what about a re-phrase? Text 2: "Yeah, he said he was really happy. Happy enough to die."

Like the Olympics, the World Cup is a marker of time. Each four years I inevitably ask myself the question: Pinochiette, what were you doing last World Cup? Have you become a finer woman since this epoque?

Last World Cup - 2002 - I was blending with the sand on pale, empty beaches in the South of Italy. With my pallor and a big floppy sun hat, I fancied myself as quite the English lady. Entering bars for a cold drink I'd find men huddled around the television broadcasting the football, while women sat at tables watching from respectful distances. On the street sometimes I felt a bit like the woman in this photo by Ruth Orkin (a boyfriend gave me a print of this photo years ago and I remember wondering what his message to me was: women are slabs of meat surrounded by summer flies?)

But for the Final of the World Cup 2002 I'd left Italy and I was in Dublin, watching it in an Irish pub (although being in Ireland I guess it was just called a pub). More exciting then the Final was the day after the match when both French and I nearly got thrown in prison (or something) when French refused to pay for the hotel room (and wouldn't let me pay either) because there were crumbs on the carpet when we arrived and because, according to French `Paris is a more beautiful city than Dublin'.