Extreme measures

I do own a skirt, but it’s not often I wear it.  Today is a day of extreme measures, however, and so the jeans have been abandoned in favour of something a little cooler and more seasonally appropriate.  Wilf – who doesn’t have a skirt – is going round saying ‘Quelle chaleur’ and looking hot and bothered.  I don’t think he’s ever been so aware of the weather impinging on his enjoyment of life or his ability to move around, and it feels as if this might be, for both of us, about the right time to leave the city.

But we’re not programmed to leave for a while yet, and consequently we’re a little out of synch with the rest of Paris, which is already showing clear signs of shutting up shop and leaving its city guise behind.  I’d forgotten how very literal and date-driven the French are about their holiday season.

Wilf has got that end-of-term look about him, too, and it seems that, from his point of view, all the serious work has been done for the term.  But it’s dawning on me that, when it comes to serious work, it’s me who’s about to take over.  So I’m becoming increasingly receptive to suggestions as to how to entertain a small and sometimes restless boy, and I’m coming into contact with hobbies I didn’t think I’d ever be associated with.  We’ve got two whole weeks to fill before leaving for the sea, and I’m turning into the kind of mother who sends her child to art class one day and to ballet the next, but not because I think it’s good for him but because I think it’s good for me.  So if Wilf isn’t the most accomplished young man in the whole of Paris by the end of the two weeks, I’ll probably be wishing I was back at work.

A mere mortal

I’d much rather be lost in Paris than in London, or rather I don’t think I could get lost in Paris like I could in London.  There isn’t, as far as I can see, a single street which isn’t the subject of thorough and proper labelling: a street name at each end, on each side, and at any point where it abuts another.

And I should have been quicker on the uptake.  I’d always found the idea of ‘arrondissements’ a little random and a little cold, but I’ve warmed to them at last.  Or at least now I understand them, and they make perfect sense.  Starting from somewhere just north of the Seine, not far from where I am now, they swirl around Paris with absolute orderliness, in ever increasing circles until the whole of Paris has been covered.

And here’s another thing I didn’t know until recently.  Street numbers round here have an underlying logic, and I don’t just mean the fact they start at one and work upwards.  I mean that they start from the Seine and move outwards from there.  So as I’m a resident of number 6 you’re sure to find me not far from the water’s edge.  Of course not all streets meet the Seine, and, in the case of those that don’t, the numbers flow – like the current – from east to west.

How surprising that someone actually thought all this through, and, even more surprising, then made such a scheme a reality.  Sometimes I feel as if I’m in the hands of a rather thoughtful town-planner in the sky, but I’ve heard that actually a mere nineteenth-century mortal had a lot to do with it.

Linguistic ephiphanies

It was a couple of weeks ago that a little subjunctive first slipped out – it was ‘aille’, I think – and now Wilf is using these weird little constructions both accurately and with abandon.  I know there’s nothing surprising about hearing a subjunctive on the streets of Paris, but to hear one coming from a boy called Wilf...  That’s quite something.

This was a boy who’d been imbibing French since he was born but who had no intention whatsoever of speaking it.  I knew there must be a little French boy in there somewhere, courtesy of my side of the family, but it was clear the little Lewes boy wasn’t in any hurry to let him out.   And I had visions of slogging it out – me speaking French to him, him speaking English to me – forever, or at least until it was time for him to leave home, and it didn’t look like fun.  So I thought I’d up sticks and fix him right away.

So here I am, fixing him and doing a bit of a spit and polish on myself at the same time.  The linguistic epiphanies – only registered as such by me, of course – are coming thick and fast now, and the subjunctives are just part of an altogether different kind of a Wilf.   Along with the subjunctive, there’s the rolling ‘r’, strange words I didn’t know he knew, and idioms which have no place in a four-year-old boy.  But, to my ears, even when he sounds like a disillusioned French adolescent, it’s progress.  And he seems to like this new self, too.

As one would expect of a spit and polish, the change in me isn’t quite so immediately impressive.  And there’s something about being forty-something which means that progression doesn’t come in such big strides.  But now I know the French for words like ‘app’ and ‘download’, and I’m just that little bit shinier than I was before.

This darker shade of grey

It’s been a hot couple of months over here, and although people do have other things to talk about (DSK, for example) they do like discussing the weather. And then the night before last, just when I was devoid of adult company after a weekend full of it, we had the most interesting, discussion-worthy weather yet. We had thunder and lightning and driving rain. But when I tried to discuss the intensity of it all this morning with the very unadult Wilf, I found he’d slept through it all. That was definitely the right thing at the time, but I could have done with a debrief over breakfast.

And this morning it’s raining a steadier, less interesting – but nevertheless very welcome – rain. The streets feel different. There are always rivulets of water running along the gutters (the French are serious about cleaning their streets if not about not sullying them in the first place), but to see everything in this darker shade of grey, so wet and so gleaming, is like walking out into another country.

And the rain made it so much easier to get Wilf washed, dressed, fed and out of the flat. He’s not a morning person – that much has already become clear – but today, first thing, it was all go. He had booted up, put his mac on, zipped it up, pulled the hood over his head, and was waiting by the door, all without the usual pushing and prodding from me. He had the look of a boy on holiday.

None of this is to say that it hasn’t all felt rather holidayish in the heat, too. The cafés have been in their element, with more of themselves outside than in, and while I’ve been trying hard to avoid actually sitting down in them (a mixture of budget restrictions and a feeling that I should keep moving), I do like the fact that they exist. And, even more than their existence, I like the fact that they understand that two people sitting in a café would sometimes rather look at the street than at each other. I’ve always liked that – it seems so very, very sensible.

The bigger picture

I’ve been losing things regularly since I came here – my watch, my phone charger, my one good pen – so the fact that my reading glasses were on my face one minute and gone the next is nothing unusual.  It makes life rather blurry and sometimes awkward, and definitely encourages me to look at the bigger picture.  But in every case of loss so far, bar the present one, there’s been the elation of a sighting.  So I’m hopeful.

But I’m wondering whether perhaps it’s time to stop holding things at arm’s length and just buy myself another pair.  A cheap pair of reading glasses is exactly the sort of thing I’m sure I can find here.  Indeed, I’ve never seen so many pharmacies selling all manner of accessories, including reading glasses.  Or, rather, I have, but only here in France.  It’s one of those things that clearly keeps the economy going.

And in my own unscientific way, I’m impressed by the economy: so many excellent little shops, all alive, kicking and holding onto their street corners.  And so many frivolous ‘boutiques’ that obviously do more than just survive.  And, much more importantly, so many proper bookshops.  I mean independent bookshops of the sort that have been dying out in England for years.  They pile the books long and low rather than high, and you feel as if you could find anything.

And I’ve even stumbled upon a greengrocer who bags up my fruit and veg for me.  Freed from the need to involve myself in that messy business of evaluating ripeness and wrestling unlikely shapes into unwilling bags, I’m finding the whole buying process a simple pleasure.  So I’m buying more, which can’t be bad – either for me or for the economy.