The human condition

We’re almost ready to return to our default settings.  We’re leaving Paris, and I’m in pack-up mode.  I’m clearing out the cupboards, dealing with unfinished business, attempting to give back things I’ve borrowed, and starting the difficult process of fitting all our things into the small suitcase in which they came.

I’ve missed things about back home, but aside from the human element it’s mostly been labour-saving devices: my electric toothbrush, the dishwasher, and a proper grown-up fridge (I’ve spent far too much time bending down to get the butter).  Wilf, like me, will be glad to see the English contingent again, but he certainly hasn’t concerned himself with the lack of labour-saving devices or much else in the way of life’s furnishings.  Actually, I wonder what he actually remembers about his existence before Paris, since he’s even forgotten how to ask for a glass of milk in English.  And, save for his continuing disapproval of the many smokers in our midst, he’s accepted life here as if it were his own.

Perhaps he doesn’t even have default settings in the way I do.  He’s turned native with barely a backward glance, and if it wasn’t for the fact that his name picks him out as a foreigner (something we misjudged a little at the time of naming) he’d blend in effortlessly.  We came here for all sorts of reasons, but I can’t deny that it was primarily a linguistic experiment in which my son was the unsuspecting subject.  So while I would have been mightily disappointed if his surroundings hadn’t rubbed off on him in the way they have, I’m astonished and delighted by how easy it’s been to turn this Lewes boy into his Paris equivalent.  Language, it turns out, is just a different spin on the same human condition.

Bureaucracy to get my teeth into

If you’re keen on the idea of experiencing a crash course in French bureaucracy, arriving in Paris in the middle of the school year along with a boy allergic to oily fish could well be the best way of going about it.  The decision to come for a few months was a quick and easy one – such good timing! so liberating! – but implementing the decision meant trying to remember how to use a fax machine (in the end I had to resort to the postal system), making a preparatory trip to Paris along with a whole array of paperwork, and adopting the right kind of attitude.

My attitude was so good, actually, that when things started to go broadly right I felt ever so slightly let down (I say ‘broadly’ because we did have to make one extra trip to the town hall to rectify a vital mistake, making excellent use of the extra day we’d built into our schedule for just such an occurrence).  But at that point we hadn’t dealt with the medical side of things, which meant another form (eight pages’ worth) and two different doctors to oversee proceedings.  At least that made me feel I had some real bureaucracy to get my teeth into.

Once that was all in place, and once I’d understood what kind of a pouch the medicine had to be provided in, we were welcomed.  And once we’d got past the French flag and the words ‘Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité’ emblazoned above the door, we found it was a lovely, friendly, cosy little school.  In fact, it’s been so welcoming and Wilf has got on so well there that the head has asked whether he might like to come back for the occasional week next year.

And as it turned out that most of our hard work had already been done (there’s been just one more trip to the town hall, and that was fairly painless), we’re taking her up on her offer.  So she’s holding onto the eight-page document detailing every permutation of Wilf’s health and to the medicine in its special pouch, and we’ll be back, we hope, in the autumn.