Boring personal blather

Am too tired to do anything as intellectual as looking up the origins of a nursery rhyme. Wednesday is the fullest day in my week - remember that French kids have no school today, but parents do work, or try to - and although I worked only 7hrs today instead of 10 1/2, I'm far more exhausted than I was this time last week.

Today saw the return of the car curse, as I've just decided to call it. Today I reluctantly accepted the urgent need to revise my parking skills. Reversing into a lamp post this morning was bad enough, but scratching the paint of a parked car while the owner was still in it is unacceptable.

Luckily the couple were nice enough to let me go unfined and I was left dragging the children off to judo and trying to explain that I hadn't done it on purpose. I'm praying they'll both completely forget about the incident and don't bother mentioning it to their parents.

After all, noone was hurt, and I'm not a bad driver - just a bad parker. The many, many lessons my driving teachers spent trying to hammer a sense of distance into my unwilling brain now seem completely wasted; however, I'm no longer too nervous behind the wheel, and I've become adept at weaving in and out from between other cars, a mandatory skill in Grenoble, where the road system is so complicated as to sometimes seem completely anarchic.


Funnily enough, I managed to parallel park the car perfectly tonight, thanks to a middle-aged biker who was waiting to pass, and told me when to turn the wheel (well, he gestured). I did as he told me and it bloody worked!

Enough about cars. The kids were also a bit pénible this morning. Despite the fact that their mum was leaving later than usual, and coming back earlier, Kevin cried all the way to the gym because he didn't want to leave her. I did get to spend a bit of time in a small park with a lovely flowering magnolia tree which brought back a few happier memories of my childhood in Manchester (there are magnolia trees in Longford park), leaving me with an odd, unfamiliar sense of nostalgia. I read the first Elric book for a while, keeping an eye on Claire, until she had to go to music.

Their mother came back during the afternoon, but found it impossible to work with the kids around wanting to show her things (despite my best efforts), so she went out again. Now I'd probably better explain this next bit to you, or you won't understand: in France, the April Fool symbol is the fish, and the tradition is that you cut out a paper fish and stick it on someone's back, and that's your April Fool joke. So obviously Claire wanted to make her April Fool Fish or AFF, as we'll call it in English (poisson d'avril in French), which she lovingly coloured in with gelpens while we waited for their mother to come back.


We'd told Kevin not to tell her there was an AFF, so obviously as soon as she steps through the door he goes and tells her there's a surprise. The conversation goes like this:

Kevin: Mummy, there's a surprise!
Claire: Keviiiin! You weren't supposed to tell her!
Mother: A surprise? I wonder what that might be?
Claire: WELL IT'S DEFINITELY NOT AN APRIL FOOL FISH!!!
Ceallai: *chokes herself laughing*

The funniest thing was the look on Claire's face when, just after having told her brother off for hinting at some sort of trick, she completely and explicitly gave the game away. It was an enlightened look, a look that said "Oh my God, I've just thought up the most convincing lie ever told. I am a six-year-old genius." It was priceless. Oh, how I love little children.