“But I have never heard Margaret sing,“ said an elderly voice plaintively.
I have always wanted to write that sentence at the start of a short story or a novel having once heard it during one of those quiet lulls which the French describe as ”un ange a passé” (an angel is passing by) in a stuffy restaurant.
On the ski bus up to Médran I hit the eavesdropping jackpot:
Educated American male voice: “So there I was just outside Versaille with a busload of hungry students so I tell the driver to find a Centre Commercial….Anyway we end up in a Buffalo Bill do you know the chain?”
Companion nods.
“We all order steaks which are fairly good. The waitress is wearing a Stetson hat and rodeo gear and the place is full of totem poles, you get the idea. So I see on the menu card there is apple pie with vanilla ice cream. I say to the waitress, “In America we call that Apple Pie à la Mode,” thinking she might pick up on the irony but she whips the menu card out of my hand and says quite angrily,
“Ici Monsieur on est en France.”
Later that day I take Lexi to the Creperie du Monde and Lexi, in one of those leaps of maturity that kids have that leave me reeling, asks in a grown up voice when her photo shoot is taking place. I explain that although the article was commissioned by the Editor of a well-known UK newspaper, it doesn’t appear that he wants it anymore possibly because of the economic downturn or he doesn’t like it, which is a pity because it is a lovely article all about her. I explain the meaning of the words ”pitch” and ”commissioned”. At the corner table behind her is a well dressed man reading Monocle magazine. He looks vaguely familiar but I tend to think that of all handsome men. When he gets up to leave I see he looks uncannily like the jet setting Editor of Monocle: Tyler Brulé.
Pity he isn’t an eavesdropper.
It’s Christmas!!! Awoke to snow falling from a grey ski which put an end to any thoughts of skiing and nicely averted the fondue or turkey lunch dilemma. I have been cooking up a storm for the last two days in any case, my Jamie Oliver’s Christmas DVD playing from my laptop perched on top of the kitchen bar. In previous years my mother has been on hand to do the Mr. Bean hand up turkey palaver but this year it was me and Jamie and a 6kg bird. Did you know that the French word for wishbone is le bréchet? Me neither. I persuaded the butcher to take it out as according to Jamie it makes for easier carving - it does. I like to cook in the mountains for some strange reason as the kitchen is tiny and I have to lug all the food by foot through the snow, over the baby piste and in through the balcony door. Maybe it’s a ski-avoidance tactic.
When not cooking or ski-ing I’m reading. I’m reading my writing friend Francesca’s book Mucho Caliente see www.francescaprescott.com. Francesca and I met at a yoga class many years ago, I was in awe of her suppleness and then discovered we both loved to write. I’m so proud of her. Mucho Caliente is a romantic comedy set in Ibiza and hilariously funny. I’m also re-reading Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight. I’ve got mountain insomnia or whatever waking at 2am is called and so dip into this book and ask myself some big 2am questions. I think about my plans for 2009, what I was most proud of in 2008 and what I learnt about myself. Terrifying 2am stuff but I have found a sentence which sums up my amazing, terrifying, brave, sad, joyful, frustrating, fabulous year of change.
Beck quotes from the Sufi poet Rumi:
“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
That’s my kind of field and it is the place I go to when I am trying to figure out my own personal big picture. If you are reading this then perhaps we are in the same field. Thanks for the company.
It’s my turn on Guitar Hero now.
My name is Alexia-Rose Ritter. I am eight years old. I am the last but not least daughter of Jules and known here for some silly reason of my Mum’s, my Dad Mr. Jules. My older brother Oliver, Ollie for short , is eighteen and my sister Sophie-Georgia is 15. I’m only 8. You would think that they could have got the sums right and had me a few years earlier as they do in “normal” families. People will always think I came along as an after-thought or even worse “a mistake baby” like my Aunty Miriam. Mum says “You’re lucky to be alive it took me seven years to persuade your Dad.”
Anyway here I am, only eight years old in a household of adults. They forget about me you know. Often I hear conversations that no self-respecting eight year old should have to listen to. Sometimes they remember I am within ear shot and say “Pardon my French, Alexia”. This gets me really confused as it is never preceded by French words but rather words that I hear on American TV when they think I am upstairs watching the Disney Channel. Talking of TV I have to watch adult DVDs at night with them. These are the ones where grown-ups kiss and do other smoochy things or sometimes kill each other. They all shout “under the covers Lexi” and throw my blanket over my head. Sometimes I sneak a peak around the side but often wish I hadn’t.
My Mum is a “writer” or at least trying to be. The only thing I like about her being a writer is that she is good at rewriting essays and homework, especially Ollie’s. This reassures me because then I know that when I have essays to do for school she will help me with them. She calls this “polishing”. We always know when she is doing this as she tends to shout words like Sloppy and Poor and Crap, Oliver. Oliver gets really mad and they get into a shouting match but I know she loves him really because when she talks about him leaving next year to go to University she goes all teary-eyed. He’s already banned her from going to the airport to say goodbye. She’s always crying. When Ollie had to say goodbye to his first girlfriend Liz who went back to the States she was the one who burst into tears! Liz and Ollie were really brave but Mum had to turn the tap on as usual. Now Ollie has Lucy and I really like her, we all do. Since Ollie met Lucy he is much nicer to everyone. Mum says it’s because of the sleep-overs.
I think my Mum is a bit mad as some days she spends hours in front of the computer wearing clothes that she has slept in and hardly registers my presence and then on other days she looks really pretty and is nice to me. I would like the pretty and nice Mum all the time but Dad says “she’d be a royal pain in the arse if she didn’t write”. She’s met lots of new friends on her blog - Dad calls them “weirdos”. Dad also works from home and he can look and smell pretty bad too when he is not going to meetings. He spends a lot of the day shouting down the phone in three different languages. I am learning German at school and he is really happy when I practise with him. Ollie and Sophie just laugh at his Schweizer-Deutsch which I think is mean. So there is a lot of crying, swearing and shouting in our house. I wish I had the parents that I see on TV, the ones with the smiley faces and the clean clothes.
Sophie-G and I have bedrooms that are joined together with a passage through the wardrobe. Mum thought it would be nice for us to be close but Sophie finds me annoying most of the time. She can be moody which Mum calls her “hormones” whatever they are. I hope I don’t get them. When she is not having her “hormones” she can be really nice and let’s me sit on her bed and look at her facebook site.
Parents can be so embarrassing especially mine. At the Piano Recital, Christine - that’s my music teacher - forgot to call me up to play which was terrible and kind of weird but Mum stood up and started waving her arms about and shouting. That was a bad way to end the year but I’m glad she did it, although our family are incapable of doing anything quietly, as I had practised so hard that I never want to hear the words Deck The Halls again. I had to play it last night at the Church but this time I messed up at the end. I think I work best under pressure. We are atheists but Mum sometimes says humanists which is stupid as we are all human. Anyway, we go to Church at Christmas. Mum calls it “Carol-Singing Faith” . I could hear Dad’s terrible singing voice in the Church, right up at the front where I was sitting, I obviously didn’t get any musical talent from him.
We are in the mountains this Christmas and Grandma is in England. I will miss Grandma as she loves Christmas as much as I do and Charades will not be the same without her. She’s always on my team, never Dad’s. He refuses to play on Grandma’s team for some silly reason harking back to an incident years ago during a game of Trivial Pursuits. It will be up to me to bring in the Christmas cheer, wake everyone up early, give out the presents and make sure they wear their paper hats at lunchtime. No-one at school believes in Father Christmas anymore and when I told Mum that I didn’t either she looked so sad and said quietly “I still believe in him”. I thought that was kind of ridiculous, I mean she’s 47! So I will go along with all the silly traditions that she loves and even fake astonishment at the half-eaten reindeer carrot. I’ll be exhausted by the end of the day but I will happily sleep knowing that we all had a wonderful Christmas.
THIS ONE IS WORTH READING TO THE END
A young man called Chris from London wanted to buy a Christmas present for his new girlfriend.
They hadn’t been seeing each other for very long and she lived in Scotland .Chris consulted with his sister and decided, after careful consideration, that a pair of good quality gloves would strike the right note… not too romantic and not too personal. Off he went with his sister to Harrods and they selected a dainty pair of fur lined quality leather gloves. His sister bought a pair of sexy knickers for herself at the same time.
Harrods had a free gift wrap offer but the assistant mixed up the two items, the sister got the gloves and Chris’s girlfriend unknowingly got the knickers.Good old Chris sent off his gift wrapped present in a parcel with the following letter.
Dear Maggie,
I chose these because I’ve noticed that you are not wearing any when we go out in the evenings. If it had not been for my sister I would have chosen the long ones with buttons, but she wears shorter ones (which are easier to remove).
These are a very delicate shade, but the lady I bought them from showed me the pair she had been wearing for the past three weeks and I hardly noticed any marks.I had her try yours on for me and she looked really smart in them even though they were a little bit tight on her. She also said that they rub against her ring which helps keep it clean. In fact she hasn’t needed to wash it since she began wearing them. I wish I was there to put them on for you the first time, as no doubt many other hands will touch them before I have a chance to see you again.When you take them off remember to blow into them a little bit because they will be naturally a little damp from wearing. Just imagine how many times my lips will kiss them during the coming year.I hope you will wear them for me on our next date.
All my love,
Chris
P.S. My mum tells me that the latest style is to wear them folded down with a little bit of fur showing.
Last week was stressful. We had to endure hours upon hours of Lexi at the piano practising Deck the Halls in preparation for the Children’s Musical Evening in the Village only for the Music Teacher to forget her. There were forty kids in the room, some as young as three banging on drums, symbols and triangles and many were misbehaving. This is the Delcroize or some such method of teaching music which as far as I can see basically means Do What the F*** You Like but Lexi likes her piano teacher so we stick with her. I had fortified myself with a glass of Harveys just before going as I had already sat through an hour of Lexi and 15 ballerinas in Tutus with their over-ambitious parents at the Dance Show so I was feeling, as I had hoped, nicely sleepy and emitting goodwill vibes. That was until one moronic three year old would not let go of the drum. It was charming for the first minute.
Pianist after pianist played their Christmas renderings and I could see that Lexi, was getting fidgety in her pink satin dress with the bow thinking Surely it’s me now? Now? Now? For heavens sake Now?! (She’s a chip off the old block). Bored and eager to get it over with, she started marking the notes with her fingers on the floor (that’s the perfectionist gene from Mr. Jules). Every recorder had been blown into shrilly, every Christmas song known to man in French, German and English had been sung and yet Lexi had still to play. When the teacher started to distribute presents and the parents were getting up to go I mustered all my mummy indignation and bellowed:
“Madame! Madame! Vous avez oublié Alexia!” (You’ve forgotten Alexia Miss!) I tried to omit the “you moron” tone from my voice but unfortunately it just escaped.
Red faces all around, but none as red as Alexia’s. The children were reluctantly prized away from the trunk of goodies amidst much screaming and scuffling as Lexi tiptoed to the piano. My heart went out to her but with a ramrod straight back she played…perfectly. The Swiss public, always fair-play, gave her a loud clap punctuated by several “bravos”.
Tomorrow it is the singsong at the village church. The children are invited to sing with our very own Choeur des Hommes (male voice choir). It will be all snot and bright eyes. To make up for the “erreur” the music teacher has asked Alexia if she would like to play. She declined. Only joking. She’s eight she has yet to learn about retaliation.
