Marseille: smile for the camera
Marseille is just 30 minutes’ drive south of Aix-en-Provence – but it might as well be Baghdad as far as many locals are concerned. Continue reading
Looking for trouble in Marseille
View from the driveway
The driveway is not the place for quiet reflection.
It’s the hub of arrivals and departures, the place where you are always hunting for the house key or the car key, busting for the toilet, tucking sweatshirts under your chin, drink bottles under your arm, grabbing shopping bags or school bags or day bags, yelling at kids to help, kicking doors open, kicking doors closed, putting everything down to hunt for keys, running back for sunglasses, putting on sunblock, finding hats, reaching for the map, plugging in the phone, fiddling with the air-conditioning, checking your reflection for toothpaste on your chin…
Then one day you glimpse a painting reflected in the wing mirror.
Ditched
The quality of this photo reflects the mental state of the photographer
“Opp.”
That’s the soft little exclamation many French people make at those unexpected wee moments in life.
A coin slips from your grip. you spill a little wine, you crash your car into the ditch…
Opp.
That was the sound of Sabbatical Man’s perfect driving record evaporating in one teeth-suckingly embarrassing moment when our leased car nudged, teetered, then hurtled off the road, scraping, banging and crashing its way along a steep trench.
Yes, the very road referred to in an earlier blog.
The absence of Dog
Dog gone
All is not right.
This is the year of our dreams.
Almost everything is better than we had dared hope when we decided to take a break from real life and spend a year in the French countryside.
But there is no Dog. Continue reading
Eating local
You really can’t get more local than your own driveway.
The cherry tree is the size of a small house and heavily laden but we hadn’t noticed the fruit was almost ready until the truck delivering the new fridge took out a branch and knocked a couple of hundred to the ground.
What a day! A cherry harvest and a new fridge (there simply wasn’t enough room in the tiny temporary one for both rosé and food for the children. Sacrifices had to be made).
Perils of the home straight
Nerves of steel are required to drive this road every day
Whoever dares to question French courageousness needs to drive on my road.
Countless fearless Aixois commuters do it every day of the week. Twice. At speed.
The road is as wide as a catwalk model’s ankle.
Steep ditches line each side of it.
Huge trucks travel at ferocious speeds on it.
Tractors and trailers, graders and even horses and carts can be seen on it.
Yet the only one who is terrified is me – leaning pointlessly toward to the centre of the car where it feels a tiny bit safer.
De-texting in France
First it was the horror of data roaming charges that stopped me texting home.
Bah non
Then the time difference set in – when I am free to text, my friends and family are often asleep or busy.
And now? Well, now it’s a French conspiracy to cure me of my texting addiction altogether.
There are 65.7 million people living in this country and not one of them wants to text me.
Best cure for misery
Pavillon Vendôme, Aix en Provence. Hard place to be miserable.
Tissues, nose drops, paracetamol, lemons, ginger, honey – a shopping list of misery.
Now, pack your miserable self, your miserable list and your miserable head cold to the centre of Aix-en-Provence on a sunny day and do your shopping.
Continue reading
Travelling with terror
Reconnaissance in Central London
Border police never used to show any interest in me.
I had never been escorted to a department store’s security office.
I’d certainly never been shouted at by a fellow traveller in an airport lounge.
All that has changed, now that I travel with three young terrorists.
The 10 sweetest French phrases you’ll ever hear
C’est ça – sweet as
Some French idioms are guaranteed to bring a smile to your dial.
They’re not fancy, you probably won’t study them in French class and the person saying them to you will think nothing of it.
You, the novice French speaker, will notice because at their heart these phrases all mean one thing: “You are making sense to me”.
Continue reading