We have a winner :: 10:37 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, you may recall my penchant for "Star Academy" and my grief at its demise, spefically that whiny little pity vote Gregory winning it.

Well, fret no more, I have a new favourite French TV show. It's called Clara Sheller, and it's bonkers and therefore sublime.

Imagine a cross between Ally McBeal, Will and Grace, Sex and the City, and This Life. Remove all the (intentional) humor, add a lot of soul-searching and a spot of porn, and you have Clara Sheller. There's big floppy polka dot hats, roller blades, headscarves, high heels, and big sunglasses. There's a voiceover at the beginning and the end about the meaning of love and it has secondary characters whose lives have no meaning other than the deeper truth they reflect about Clara.

Here's what I have gathered from the episodes I have seen: Clara is an OCD nymphomaniac who lives with her gay best friend. In her quest for love within 12 hours of each other she sleeps with her boss and her gay best friend roommate, who is also sleeping with a homeless juggler. She becomes pregnant, but since her boss has had a vasectomy it must be JP, pronounced "zhee pay," who is the father. Her gay best friend roommate.

Meanwhile, her best female friend discovers she and her boyfriend can't have babies. Clara, oblivious to the obvious solution of surrogate, aborts the baby (this is how you know it's not american TV.) JP is so mad he buys a puppy and throws it at her, asking her if she wants to get rid of it too. (It's a pretty annoying puppy. I would.)

Clara goes out and sleeps with someone else to get over the shock. Antoine seems to be the love of her life. But then she goes on holiday with her babyless friend and her boyfriend, and discovers the boyfriend is shagging a fat woman (in France, I guess being with someone who can't make babies makes you want to have sex with people who can, i.e. fat people.)

Here's where it gets weird: Clara and the boyfriend have a long chat about why this is all Clara's fault for coming on holiday with them, and she should go home. Back in Paris, Clara sleeps with her neighbour AND JP in the sort of threesome 60 year old retirees from Kansas dream about when they move to Paris and post on craigslist about. Antoine walks in on them and Clara just smiles and goes back to blissful post-coital sleep.

The next morning it becomes obvious that both Clara and JP are in love with neighbour Gilles. But Gilles has a constant stream of men and women coming through his flat, and so is a little hard to pin down. The babyless friend and the philandering boyfriend decide to get married as a solution to the cheating. (WTF?)

Eventually, through the magic of animal sex and no (filmed) conversation, Clara decides Gilles is the man for her (while he is also sleeping with JP) until he moves to Japan. Clara asks to go with him (NO SHAME that woman) and is (rightly) refused. He sends emails to JP only. We think Gilles is a bit of a bounder.

So, it's the wedding, like, the next day, and JP makes Clara do a speech, and the dog eats the pillows. Very metaphorical. There's a two week pause (all this seems to happen over like three weeks) and suddenly, Clara is turning 30. JP has thrown her a big party. She gets a Tshirt that says "my name is Clara, but they're looking after me." Well, quite. Care in the community and all.

But, guess who's downstairs!!! It's neighbour Gilles, whom JP has called to induce him to come back for Clara. There's some REALLY heavy breathing, which means they're REALLY in love. JP dances to Brazilian music while crying, and Clara and Gilles cross the pont neuf together, arm in arm, even though their apartment was opposite the eiffel tower last week.

It's fucking genius televsion. I can't wait for next week.

Sun stricken :: 11:19 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon It had looked promising before, but generally, nothing had come of it. Pure, blue skies in the early morning are rarely, in the schizophrenic and capricious Paris springtime, a harbinger of a beautiful sunny day. Except today, when the Sun King himself appears to have blessed my trip with the wife to his home, the Chateau of Versailles.

I have been once before, but at an age where I couldn't look at a painting without being zapped into a sonambulant stupor, and where I was more concerned with imagining myself a princess in a big skirt sweeping through the halls of this royal castle than David and Le Brun.

One of the points of contention between Leslie and I the other evening was my tendency to be snooty about Paris tourists. Whenever Leslie went to take a picture of something I was rolling my eyes, and whenever she would suggest something touristy to do I would do the "Pfft" noise with the shrug.

So today, once we passed the peripherique in the RER, I took out a surprise from my bag: a UNC baseball cap and my camera. I was going to play at being a tourist for the day, just to make her happy. Also, I had broken my sunglasses and needed the cap to stop me squinting in the sun and worsening my already crappy vision. But Shhhh, don't tell Leslie - she thinks it was a gesture of solidarity. So with my diesel sneakers, khaki capris, white t-shirt, denim jacket, haven't-washed-my-hair pigtails, messenger bag and my UNC baseball cap, I was the perfect American.

The queue was long, and hot. We bought our tickets, and Leslie, with her pathetically weak bladder, needed the loo again. So we left the building and paid 50p for the toilet entrance. We were then informed that we had to rejoin the long hot queue to get in. However, as I have mentioned before, all rules in France are negotiable, as long as you can give a good reason for why you can in fact do what you have just been told you cannot. So, after some discussion, we slipped in the back door.

The main apartments were crowded, noisy, and dark. The prettiest room, to my recollection, was the Hall of Mirrors, which was bloody well encased on plywood for restoration, with a description of the room written on them. Cause that was going to make up for it.

But the gardens. Oh the gardens. They were wonderful. I am not much of a plant person. Leslie is, and she and my mother have an uncanny knack of spending an entire afternoon discussing whether than green thing with yellow flowers on it is a shrub or a bush of laburnum. It's amazing how much like my father I am, and how much like my mother Leslie is.

When she graduated from college, unlike the other lazy beggars like myself who moved back in with their parents and moaned about the job market, she got herself hired at a florist and worked all the hours God gave her to buy a three bedroomed house, before she even had her first "real" job. So that's how she knows all about plants. As mentioned previously, I kill cacti.

However, I like long walks in pretty areas, and we had a picnic, and there is nothing I like more than ending the long walk with a tasty treat or two. So we sat down on a marble bench opposite the Fountain of Appollo (the one with the horses) and had peaches and baguettes and ham and soft cheese and carambars. We surprised some prepubescent Germans by asking them in German to take our photo (yes, there is photographic evidence of me in a baseball cap) and then sauntered off into the park.

After an hour or so lounging in the shade of the king's flower garden, we decided we needed to hire a rowboat. I once played Toad in a production of Toad of Toad Hall, but I always secretly wanted to be the water rat, and to get to "mess about in boats" on the river.

I got into sailing in school because we were required to do a major sport and a minor sport three afternoons a week, as well as a service, and a hobby on the other two. Kurt Hahn, who founded Outward Bound and the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, also founded my school, and so the idea of physical education was central to our curriculum. I was rather bookish at 15, and my parents thought that a school renowned for cold showers and morning runs would toughen me up a bit.

I chose sailing as both my minor and major sport, and the special boat service as my service, thinking that sitting in a boat would be more relaxing than alipine ski patrol, being a canoe lifeguard, or being a fireman in the on-campus fire station. For my hobby, I hid in the boarding house and drank hot chocolate with Audrey, our fabulous, unintelligible matron.

I was pretty much thrown in at the deep end, as sailing on the North Sea in early autumn is not a cup of tea. We had these devon yawls with ridiculously heavy keels that basically could not capsize to sail, and they just taught us newcomers a few knots and towed us out there and left us to it.

Well, I loved it. I loved every bloody minute of it. Hanging out the boat on a fifty year old harness, standing on the bowsprit as the gib thrashed about, tying down sodden rope in a gale, the ghastly yellow oilskins and the frightful itchy sailors' pants and sweaters we had to wear. I loved my wetsuit that made me look like a pudding, and even Dr. Bell, snug in his dry suit and his powerboat, the bastard.

As part of the curriculum, we all had to spend a week as part of a crew of the school ketch, 85 feet of Ocean Spirit, which would take us around the Outer Hebrides, and where we were obliged to jump off the boat every morning before we would get any breakfast. We did a 24 hour sail to St Kilda, and the night sitting in the cockpit with the phospherescence below, and the stars above, and the clock at 11 knots, and the port and starboard lights illuminating the waves red and green every time the bow crashed onto the waves will stay with me forever.

I further indulged this love of water with my Ouward Bound choice for pre-freshman year "leadership" training course. I rafted, canoed and kayacked 310 river miles in three weeks down the Green and the Colorado rivers, alternating between plus five cataracts like Satan's Gut and Hell's Half Mile and long, flat stretches of dead calm where I felt like my arms were going to fall off with the repetitve strain of paddling. I saw a forest fire drip down the sides of the canyon. I saw a boat wrapped around a rock. I was almost electrocuted in a thunderstorm, I used a chemical toilet, I got trench foot and I was deliriously happy.

Incidentally, Outward Bound is responsible both for my horrendously ugly feet and also my freakishly strong bladder. Because it was a national park, we were only allowed to pee IN the river (yes, I know not very environmentally friendly), and if you needed to pee during the day, you had to lower yourself off the boat, pee and pull yourself back in, cause they weren't stopping. I had the upper body strength of a T-rex at the time (really tiny arms) and until week two of daily paddling I was unable to pull myself back into the boat. I just made myself stop peeing between breakfast and lunch, and lunch and dinner, to avoid the embarrassment of being pulled back into the raft by sexy patrol leader Josh. This on six quarts of water a day. I have a bladder of steel to this day.

Apart from one foray onto a sailboat on the relative, boring calm of the outer banks I have not been in any boat other than a motor powered one since. And anyone who has ever made a boat go with their own knowledge of winds and rope, or their own sheer bloodymindedness with a paddle knows this is no bloody good.

So the row boat, on the Grand Canal of little Venice in the park of the Garden of Versailles, was like heaven. I shooed Leslie into the stern, and took the role of the man for once, plying my oars up and down that lake for all I was worth, belting out American Pie (an old sailing favourite of mine) at the top of my lungs and reciting some Lewis Carroll. I made some French people smile, some giggle, and I didn't care.

Of course, after all that time in the full sun on the open water, both Leslie and I now have sunburn, and since I was wearing a t-shirt, I have a farmers' tan. Sabrina remarked: gosh, you really ARE from North Carolina. I'm no farmer, I said. I'm a sailor.

Getting hit on in Paris :: 09:49 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon I don't often get off at the Barbes Rochechouart metro. It takes two minutes to get home from there, but instead I take about eight minutes to go one more stop along to Anvers, get off there, and then get home.

Why the waste of time you ask? Well, for a start, Anvers is always busy. It's at the foot of the Butte de Montmartre, where the Sacre Coeur presides over us all, and is right next to a major music venue, and so people are always milling around, from all walks of life.

Barbes, by contrast, is generally the opposite. It is either deserted or full of sleazy men, young and old, waiting to prey on young girls walking home alone under the eaves of the overhead metro line. I've mentioned before the experience when, outside Barbes, a car reversed up the street, and a passenger got out and went to grab my arm, as part of their "courting" ritual.

I've been followed home from there, necessitating a duck into the shop at the bottom of my building, using my secret signal for help to my friend the free-mango-juice shopkeeper ("what, you don't have ANY salted butter?") and dashing upstairs while he occupies the stalker.

Paris is generally a super safe city, with more talk than action from the harrassers on the street. However, all that has now changed. Being hit on in Paris has never gotten as physical as it did tonight.

When I have friends staying, it makes sense that two is better than one, so I generally get off at Barbes rather than waste the time on one extra stop. Tonight, Leslie and I were crossing the Boulevard de Rochechouart. Leslie was complaining about how the white jacket I had lent her made her look like a cast member in Miami Vice, and I was ogling a very pretty chap coming from the other side of the street.

That's when it happened. With my eyes elsewhere, I suddenly realised a flat, outstretched palm was coming smack into my face. I felt the underside of my nose make contact, and flipped my head back to stop my nose from breaking, while the guy's hand smacked my bottom lip into my teeth.

Of course, when I turned around, I realised it was someone who looked more like Harry Potter than Charles Manson, and he had been signing down a taxi. With my vision otherwise clouded, I had walked smack bang into his hand. He was mortified, and came running after us apologising profusely, and I muttered something about "not bleeding" and waved him away (although he was also quite cute...)

The last time I got hit in Paris was also an accident, with a metro gate swinging into my face and giving me a black eye. I fixed that with purple eyeshadow on the other side, but got some funny looks from people at my fairly "lady of the night" makeup.

This time, my bottom lip is turning an attractive shade of purple and has swelled up. It's not, however, split, so, as Leslie says, I just look pouty, and hence, more Parisian. Possibly leading to being hit on more.

I'm glad I am going to Amiens tomorrow. Speak to you all Sunday.

The view from the train :: 05:52 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon My trip on the Thalys (and corresponding wait in the Brussels-Midi train station thanks to striking Belgian train workers) gave me time to think about my penchant for long train journeys.

I went to and from school by train every weekend for six years, Dumfries to Glasgow. My list of "50 things to do before I am 50" contains four train journeys: take the Trans-Siberian to Beijing from St Petersburg, take the Blue Train, cross the US by train, and take the Orient Express. I've always liked train stations, watching the countryside dashing past, alighting in a new city just as it gets dark and seeing the bums and the businessmen striding along side by side. Don't get that in airports. Nasty, soulless places.

The summer of 2003 I was travelling around Europe in ancient, unairconditioned trains because my Interrail ticket only allowed me on non high-speed services. I got sunstroke twice, flashed twice, mildly sexually harassed in a shower, and the best tan I've ever had. I also read "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time a book about motive power as represented by trains, and realised I was a libertarian. I was "researching" open-air theatre across Europe - which gave me an excuse to go and see Radiohead perform in the bull-ring in Madrid.

It was a busy summer for France. The Avignon festival had been cancelled due to the strikes by the intermittants. France had a policy whereby people who worked in entertainment over a certain number of hours in a year but who were not making a living wage were supported by the State. It was an expensive way of making sure that the entertainment industry was welcoming to newcomers. Waiting tables is a career here, unlike in the US, where it's a temporary occupation for high-schoolers and resting actors.

The government decided to scrap the statut des intermittants to bring themselves in line with Europe. Of course, the entire artistic establishment protested. The Avignon festival was cancelled, and every other performance I went to had workers stand onstage for a minute of silence in support before the show began. There were badges to wear, petitions to sign and billboards to write on in support of the workers. All this civil unrest turned my fluffy research project into something that seemed to have a little weight, so I was quite pleased.

It was also the summer of the killer heatwave. 15,000 extra deaths, mostly the elderly, were ascribed to the rise in temperature, aided and abetted by the dearth of health workers during the regular summer exodus to the coast and mountains.

Much more widely reported at the time was the fact that the heatwave was a boon for the vinters, as the increased temperature upped the sugar content of the grapes, meaning fewer additives needed for the fermenting process, meaning 2003 was predicted to be a super-vintage.

Well, the shit eventually hit the fan about the increased vulnerability of the elderly with adverse weather conditions. People were outraged. There was marching, petitions, demonstrations etc.

The French government promised that new funding would be made available for senior citizens, to stop this happening again.* Effective this year, they cancelled one of May's numerous jours feries in order to generate around two billion euros to be allocated to the elderly. This day of "free labor" has been spun as an annual "Day of Solidarity."

Tomorrow, Pentecost, or Whit Monday, is the day of that cancelled holiday. Most people in the private sector still get the day off, while public sector people are technically supposed to work. Never one to miss an opportunity for a good strike, however, the French public sector workers are mostly taking their bank holiday anyway. Schools, EDF, GDF, post offices, and public transportation will be at a bit of a standstill.

Here's my favourite ludicrous fun fact: SNCF, the national rail service, decreed that in order to keep the holiday while making the money for the elderly, their workers will work an extra "one minute and 52 seconds per day" for the rest of the year. Wheeee! Socialist planification! Almost like a chapter in an Ayn Rand book.

Who's betting such action will add fuel to the campaign against the EU Constitution fire, and that we'll see an upward swing in the "no" polls on Tuesday? I don't think a sane bookie would take that bet.

*I should like to point out at this juncture that the government has been characteristically vague ("new healthcare fund") as to how exactly it will do this. Of course, the switch late last-year from a perks-based, few cash-payments pension to a mostly cash payments pension, against which old people slowly, but doggedly marched, has nothing to do with this injection of cash. Nothing at all. Whatsoever. Honest.

Complete Results :: 02:06 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon So, as I suspected, my landlord has been hoarding my mail, because I got about six pieces of post under my doormat this morning, some dating from early APRIL. Including the complete results for the DALF:

The spoken oral: 20/20
The listening oral: 19/20
The general written: 15/20
The specialised written: 10.67/20

So, as suspected, I did indeed come close to failing the specialised written paper. I missed the fail mark by .67 points. PHEW!

UPDATE: I have been informed that a grade of 10/20 in France is considered "average." Jesus. Apparently below 9 would have been a fail.

Please remember that the paper I got full marks on was the only one where I was supposed to express myself, and that the interviewer was very interested in my French heritage as a Protestant fugitive from Louis XIV. Anyhow, I now have written proof that I am officially fluent in French. Just don't ask me to write in French.

On a related note, my cell phone's predictive text has got stuck in the French language, which means that I have joined the great unwashed majority and no longer write coherent text messages.

In the poo :: 08:53 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon Further to my post on the EU, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a little about my one and only direct experience of the European Parliament.

When I went to boarding school at nine, my parents had chosen a place they thought would help me pay attention in class. It was a private international school in the Scottish Borders, that was partially supported by local authorities subsiding places for kids with special needs (dyslexia, abnormally high IQ, asbergers syndrome, schizophrenia etc.) basically, anyone who needed small class sizes.

Our school song was the European National anthem, an adaptation of Beethoven's Ode an die Freude from his Ninth Symphony. We had to sing it in German, and one of the teachers always accompanied us on his bagpipes. This is why I have such powerful lungs today: trying to outsing those bloody pipes.

It let you work at your own pace, which is why I took Standard Grade French at 12 and not 16. But my French language skills were mostly due to the connections that the school had that meant I started going on exchanges at a very young age. Immersion is the only way to learn a language, and that is what I did.

From the family I stayed with every year for a month, and who I am still in touch with here in Paris, I learned a very nice song, based on the classic nursery song avec mes sabots literally, "with my clogs." The general gist of the song is that a wee girl in clogs is walking along the bank of the Lorraine river, and some captains in the French army call her ugly, because she is wearing clogs. Her reply is, well, the king's son loves me, so I'm not that ugly. The opening lines go:

les sabots d'Helene, etaient tout crottes

I had asked what this word crotte meant, and had been told it was an older version of "dirty."

So when the local Member of the European Parliament came to visit the school, in his capacity as overseer of internationalism I suppose, and asked me in French why I didn't like football, and I couldn't remember the modern word for "dirty" it made sense to say "parce que je le trouve crotte."

Silence. My blushing French teacher said, "err, don't you mean sale?" After the MEP had left the room, Mr Sakir pointed out, as my French readers already know, that crotte in fact means "shitty." As in crotte des chiens, meaning "dogshit."

Almost as embarrassing as the time that I was drawing a poster with all the colours of the rainbow marked in French.

At the time I did not possess a dictionary and so, one prep time, was reliant on the generosity of one Tom Prescott to look words up for me. I asked him what purple was, and I duly marked what he said down on my poster. It was a very pretty poster, it had butterflies, and flowers and a pot of gold.

I took it into class and Mr. Sakir went bright red. "That's a very bad word. I can't put this up with the others. Who told you that this was the word for 'purple'?"

Of course, Tom had told me that purple in French was merde. I assume it needs no translating.

The Crack on the referendum :: 11:54 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon Two posts in one day. Aren't you lucky? Well, the thing is, y'all might not know this over the pond, but France is fixin' to have a referendum on whether to adopt the European Constitution on May 29. And there's a bit of a flap. A kerfuffle. A to-do. And I'm going to do a little underinformed pontificating and punditry.

Unlike, say, the Tory party, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, why is this a big deal? I thought the frogs would automatically vote yes because they want to keep on stealing all the money the EU has through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) anyway? Aren't you British? And automatically anti-Europe?

Hmm, let's start with the last question. Yes, I am British, but two things make me pro-EU.* The first is my recent first trip on the Eurostar. I sincerely objected to the check-in, screening, and waiting in the departure lounge. I take the train because these are the things I dislike about flying. I love taking trains between other countries in Europe because it avoids all these things.

I resent that simply because Britain has its knickers in a twist about the possibility of checking people's passports ON THE TRAIN, I have to throw away an untasted cup of coffee and buy a new one on the other side. Of course, I demanded, and received, a free replacement, but there is a larger point I am making here.

Second, I think a free-trade bloc an excellent idea. I think most Brits would agree with me. At least, they did the last time Britain had a referendum on Europe in 1975, because that's what they voted for. Most people like free-trade. Except the loonies who never took an economics class, but do they really count? No.

Europe has changed since then. I read somewhere the term "federasts" for those who wish the EU to be a big jolly federated state. These are commonly held to be the nations you probably already consider at the core of the EU, ie France and Germany, who continually contrast their "social model" with what they call the nay-sayers' "free-trade bloc." Because that's a bad thing in their eyes.

France and Germany are increasingly in each others' pockets at the moment anyway, sharing a pavillion at the world expo, merging the overseas premises of the Goethe Institute and the Alliance Francaise, formulating plans to make french and german citizenship (not just working papers) automatically available to citizens of the other country, and finally, but not flimsily, the TV channel arte (although I like that they do films in VO.)

It was indeed, until recently, a bit of a given that France would vote yes for the Constitution. The Yes campaign is overwhelmingly better-funded. The opposition party, the Socialists (PS - pronounced "pay-ess"), led by Francois Hollande, decided to do their own Yes campaign to add to the government's. And yet....the opinion polls started showing otherwise. Six in a row. Even now, a flurry of polls later, it stands at 50-50. Not, in the eyes of Chirac et al., a Good Thing.

The government (led by a centre-right coalition/party called the UMP pronounced "oo-em-pay") seems to firmly believe that people are only threatening to vote no because they don't like the Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin. This is possible, because he is responsible for Chirac's domestic agenda, while he prances around the international stage, absolving himself of responsibility for such controversial measures as the partial repeal of the trente-cinq and the partial privatisation of GDF, EDF, France Telecom, la Poste, all the biggies. Raffarin is conveniently ill now. Gall Bladder. And Chirac is bribing France with the promise that he'll go if they vote "yes."

So there is one massive PR campaign to swing it. I mean, it's HUGE. National meetings, parties, debates, plays etc. Chirac keeps playing grand statesman on TV, and threatening that Europe will fall if the French don't vote yes. All of Europe has swung into action to keep the French punters happy. The EU parliament has been conceding French requests for investigations into Chinese textile imports harming French business, the blog run by the EU Commission Vice-President for Communications (translation: sell the constitution) was quickly translated into French and the French parliament (assemblee nationale) is in recess so as not to do anything silly.

But the internet and the meetings are alive with no-vote blogs and no-vote socialists. And the French lurve to protest. And they lurve to shoot their national interest in the foot while protesting. See details of the day the IOC was in town: nationwide, infrastructure-crippling strikes.

Why is Britain, and by extension, me, so interested? Well, because if they vote no, which is somewhat unlikely, considering the national luminaries they have parading the 300 (yes! 300!) public town hall meetings, like Delors, d'Estaing and Jospin,** then Britain, usually the black sheep baaing 'no' to Europe, may be allowed to postpone our referendum further. Blair wants us in the EU, but knows we don't want to be. So we're "waiting" for the Euro, not refusing or joining. I think he'd like to do the same with the Constitution.

There is also the elephant in the room of the money. The EU budget has not been approved by its internal auditors for ten years. Yes, the French do benefit disproportionately from the CAP, but Britain keeps pretty quiet about it, because if we pressured France into shaping up on this, the French government would immediately press for Britain's rebate from the EU to cease and stop. That's tautology, but this is my blog and I like it.

Nobody wants any of this to change, because SOMEONE would end up throwing a hissy fit and going to sulk in the corridor. So what can you do? I hear you ask. Well, mostly, just enjoy the spectacle. Like a car crash.

Go to the events. Complete listings here, for the government and here for the Socialist yes. Check here for the biggest no blog. My personal highlights:

12/5/05, 8:30pm: at the Carrousel du Louvre, the Comedie Francaise will be hosting a free play which the public can participate in, with characters debating the Constitution. Sounds dull? There's a bar!

14/5/05, 12 - 4pm: I really, really, regret that I am not going to be here for this. It sounds so wonderfully cheesy. There is going to be a "Big European Picnic" (just bring your food) in the Jardin d'Arsenal, with information stands and culminating in the release of a bunch of balloons in the colours of the EU flag.

17/5/05, time tbd: Maison de l'Europe a Paris, 35 rue des Francs Bourgeois, 75004. The European Outlook after the British elections and before the French referendum. Speaker: one Richard Corbett, apparently one of Blighty's Constitution monkeys. For more info, email maison-europe@paris-europe.com

17/5/05, 6:30: IN the National Assembly Building!!! Salle Victor Hugo, meet a bunch of Socialists. Just go for the venue.

18/5/05, 8:30: in the Cirque d'Hiver in the 11th. Lots of top dogs. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, PS leader Francois Hollande, erstwhile EU Commission President Jacques Delors, and two people I've never heard of called Jack Lang and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Sound British and German don't they? UPDATE: both former ministers under Mitterand and possible socialist presidential candiates.

31/5/05, 6pm: Maison de l'Europe (address above) The consequences of the referendum to adopt the treaty for a European Constitution. Maybe dull and self-congratulatory. Could be bloody.

*I am QUITE anti-EU though. This is mostly due to the fact that, as a child, my school song was the European National Anthem "Ode an die Freude" sung in German, against bagpipes. You try it and see how much you like Europe. Also, I really dislike Peter Mandelson and anything that pops his balloon is fine with me.

**Mitterand's son, mayor of Libourne, is not, weirdly, hosting his own town's public meeting. Someone called Jack Lang instead. Anyone heard of him? UPDATE: former culture minister, sounds suspiciously anglo-saxon.

PS Danielle Mitterand, wife of THE Mitterand, is on the side of the 'no' because she considers that this "liberal constitution will make the very water we drink a commodity to buy and sell." Rich coming from a country that buys hundreds of gallons of bottled DIET water. Note that liberal is a dirty word here in France too, but in the economic sense, not libertinism, which is what Justice Scalia means.

PPS If you're really interested, this article is much more erudite than me. Although Asterix would NEVER say the French were crazy.

Going native :: 06:08 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon I ran some errands this afternoon. I had bought my train ticket to the Netherlands online and needed to pop down to the Gare du Nord to pick it up and pay for it, I needed a new plug for the bath and I wanted to join my local library (the easiest administrative task I have ever performed in France.) On the way back I got some more devil pudding, aka danette dark chocolate extra noir, so called for the black and red pot it comes in and my inability to stop at just one.

These errands, altogether, took me one hour and fifteen minutes. Considering that when I first got here, between two screwdrivers that didn't fit the screws on the light's cover and the lack of screw-in 60watt bulbs in a 100 meter radius, it took me an hour to change a lightbulb, I feel we have made progress. Of course, the bath plug is too small, and I have to go back to the hardware store and get a wider one (11 euros!!!) but that is not the point.

The key, I feel, is knowing the bonnes addresses for what you need to do. You cannot do this until you have tried several different places that purport to provide the service you are after. There are plenty of places that have signs outside saying that they are keycutters, internet cafes, or hardware stores.

Do not believe them. They are (mostly) lying. Sure, they might sit in their shop all day, but often, they do not do what they claim to. Or, to be more precise, what you need them to do. A street may have a profusion of philatelists, say, but only one or two will be any bloody good. It is not up to them to win your business by doing their job. It is up to you to find the right one.

This is your bonne addresse. Once you become a regular, chat to the proprietor and buy things there they will start giving you discounts, keeping the best things for you and whispering rude things to you about other customers. I have a bunch of these places in my neighborhood now, and on sunny days when people stand in the doors of their shops I get nods and smiles (yes! In Paris!) as I go by. One shopkeeper presses cans of free mango juice in my hands every time I go in.

Finally, the other day I was drinking tea with a French friend, who made an exclamation as I removed the teabag from my cup. I froze, believing I had yet again broken another social taboo.

"Show me how to do that!"

"Do what?"

"THAT with your teabag and the spoon, the way you squeeze the water out. I've always wondered how to get the teabag out of the cup in a more elegant way!"

Yes, dear readers, a French person considers me "elegant." It's official, between the nods and the smiles and the "elegant," I am practically French.

Everybody loves good neighbours... :: 08:14 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon I've mentioned before that the flat I live in is an annex of two flats knocked together, with my landlord therefore living behind two of my four walls, while the third has two pretty pretty windows and a door leading to the corridor and my mailbox, otherwise known as the doormat.

Filmmaker landlord has cleverly backed his side of the party wall with the old door in it with bookshelves, thereby making an interior dividing wall slightly soundproof. On the bottom shelf of his bookcases is our wireless router, so we routinely work about three meters away from each other. He has a computer I salivate over: the apple G4 powerbook... I have a computer I spit at, and I'm too embarrassed to tell you what it is. I only hear him at his desk when he sneezes though.

The fourth wall is my bathroom door and my kitchen altar. But guess what backs onto that? His downstairs loo. I am worryingly intimate with the digestive peculiarities of my landlord. This is one of the reasons I continue to vousvoyer him, and call him Monsieur rather than using his first name and tutoyer, as he does to me. I just want to pretend there is more distance between us than a cistern.

I really hate talking to him too. As well as saying 'no' to everything I need and hiding my mail, he, as a director, feels entitled to tell me what to do. When I first moved in, he insisted I should not bring bedding with me, as there was a very cheap shop nearby. Fair enough, nice of him to advise. But normal people stop once you say, no no, I would rather bring things. He says au contraire and proceeds to draw me maps for how to get to the place to do the thing he thinks I should do.

During the whole internet connection fiasco (another reason for not moving: it took three months to get broadband working and I am not giving it up that easily) he would routinely tell me "it's a problem with the software" which is exactly what people who know nothing about computers say every time there's a problem. Of course, in the end, it turned out to be a problem with the software, but I wasn't giving him the satisfaction of telling HIM that.

So I avoid him. On the first of each month, I slide my rent in an envelope into his locked mailbox, and if I need to communicate with him at any other time, this is also where I slide the notes, in careful French. He has very clicky shoes (I think he has steel tips - like tap dancers) so every time I leave the flat I listen very carefully for a minute to make sure he is not coming up the stairwell and we don't have to talk. Once I was waiting in line at La Poste and he came in to use the weighing and stamping machine, and I hid behind the only fat French woman, praying he wouldn't see me.

Today, I walked into my grocery store and he came wheeling round the corner. I froze on the spot while he told me what to do, ("Oh, the avocadoes are very good. You should put them in a salad. I recommend Batavia lettuce, but not from here, try this place around the corner. Turn left to get there, go 20 metres" and so on...) and then squeaked out "merci" before scuttling away to skulk in the tampon section where he would not dare approach. Before I went to pay for my tortellini, I peered around the corner of the aisle to make sure he had finished paying for his stuff and was out of the door.

It's not that he scares me, I just don't like him, but have to make him think I'm nice so I get my deposit back. If I don't like people I generally have a hard time hiding the flat look of hatred that comes into my eyes. My boss at the British Embassy in Washington would sometimes stop in the middle of telling me how to do something I had done a hundred times before and say "you hate me don't you?" because I am totally unable to control this look of disdain. And I would say "no no." I'm such a terrible liar.

Plus, filmmaker landlord has a child, who scares the crap out of me because he's a) a child and b) looks like Hayley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense. He is also SILENT. Unless he's screaming (I assume with laughter at being tickled by his dad) through the ceiling.

I mean, my landlord says he's a film director, but the IMDB (the source of all my knowledge) only has two results for him, 12 years apart, but I just read a review of one of them and it seems the lead actress won a cesar (French Oscars) for it. Which is cool, because I had this really famous actress' audition tape, since filmmaker landlord left it in the VCR when I moved in and didn't ask for it back until recently.

So he must be richer than he dresses, although I bet the tap-dancing shoes must be quite expensive. Which means I want my entire deposit back when I move out or I will threaten to expose details of his bowel movements to the world wide web. You have been warned.