THIS JUST IN: ANNE IS OLD
Well, now I live with a forty-year-old woman. It was bound to happen. But the madness is over and the kids are off to school this morning under a grey and rainy sky and it’s 9am. Today’s just a regular day here, although nearly four months after we arrived “normal” is still hard to define. The last two weeks have been a case in point: today it’s exactly two weeks since the evening shown in my last post and in that time we’ve had a terrific visit from Nanny and Grandpapa, we’ve celebrated, feasted, one of us has turned forty, we’ve been to Paris and had an incredible time, and then we’ve said goodbye to our visitors. We miss the pitter-pat of grandparently feet.
Anne with her secret interlopers
Anne says seeing her parents through that door stopped her brain. I could see it skipping like a needle on a scratched record. I’ll never forget the way she backed away from her mother like she was seeing a ghost and I guess she was. It came off perfectly, and we toasted her with champagne and waited for that look to fade from her face (it didn't, for a couple of days!). That morning, I’d thought she knew something was afoot, but unless I’m spending my life with Sarah Bernhardt, she didn’t know a thing. As for the kids, it was like a magic trick. Ben kept saying “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” and Max wouldn’t leave either of them alone all night.
A GREAT BIRTHDAY WEEK
We had four days at home with Nanny and Grandpapa and we filled them with wine, wonderful food, walks, and drives to local haunts. We had a soccer game with Ben on Saturday and watched him play goal (he was amazing), and drove around the local countyside where the fall colours have really come in now. Renald’s leg and ankle have been giving him trouble of late, and sitting for long periods is difficult, but after braving the airplane (eight hours in economy!) he wasn’t going to let anything hold him back.
We gave Anne her gifts in two chunks: first, on Saturday morning, I gave her a card called Chez Redhill, which set out the formule for the week like a prix fixe menu. On it, she discovered she was going to Paris with me for three days midweek. Then, the next morning, the big day itself, we gave her all her gifts. (This, by the way, is the last piece of evidence that Anne was ever in her thirties:)
Doreen and Renald had brought a pile of gifts from Canada, my mum had left something in August, there were cards, and little packages in the mail had also come. The most incredible gift was the one her mother and sister Julie had worked for two months making: a “life book” for Anne. This leather volume was filled with over thirty messages of love and remembrance from a great many of Anne’s family and friends. It was filled with pictures, stories, jokes, drawings and so on and when she saw it, she wept. I don’t think she’s even finished reading it: every time she opens it she starts laughing and then she becomes silent and I go into the room and there are tears streaming down her cheeks. Here’s some pics of her birthday morning:
The birthday Life book ...
Grandpapa checks it out ...
A scarf from Isabel and Bob ...
Anne had always said she wanted to be on a beach on her birthday, so we went down to Gruissan Plage the day of her 40th and walked in the wind and sun and it was wonderful. (That’s the pic at the top of this post!) That morning we had gone to the market to search for all the goodies we wanted to make for Anne's birthday dinner. Oysters! Beef tournedos! Lamb chops! Merguez sausage! And Doreen was going to spend part of the afternoon making Anne’s favourite for dessert: angel food cake! Wheeee ...
In the middle of buying the oysters we got caught in a sort of "when in Rome" moment. One of the delicacies the French love is sea urchin. There's not a lot in a sea urchin. It's mostly a filter for sea water. It doesn't even have a brain. Inside, there are five strips of glistening goo, which the Japanese call uni (you've seen it on sushi menus and stayed away from it). This is the urchin roe, and some people adore it. The fishmonger at the back of Les Halles saw us staring at the spiny pile of living urchins and offered to let us taste them. The boys, of course, wanted to try it, but we thought better of that. In fact, we all thought better of it, but when the fish dude decided he'd had enough of our waffling, he scooped out a quivering mass of orange snot and told me to try it ...
... I felt more or less obligated.
Hmm. Not too bad. Kinda salty. Kinda fishy. See the big hunk left on my spoon? I decided to be brave about it and eat the rest of it. That thing I said about it being not to bad? Never mind. It was like eating something out of a baby's diaper. But let Anne show you how she felt. She was compelled by the fishmonger to have some. It was her birthday and one's forties are about trying new things, right?
Mmmmm! Urchiny!
Everything for Anne’s birthday week had been so meticulously planned that the gods had to revolt: as it turned out, the day I was supposed to take Anne to Paris for three days, the national train union was going on strike. So we had to revise our plans under the gun: we’d leave on the last train before the strike began, on Tuesday night, and we’d arrange for Doreen, Renald, and the boys to fly in to Paris rather than train in on Saturday. Then we discovered that the strike also meant that the Metro would not be running in Paris either. Ah, yes, remember my earlier entry on the Curse of Paris? Would it strike again?
Well, try as they might, nothing can ruin Paris. And this time, despite the real challenges in getting around, we had our best visit ever to Paris, and three days of alone-time enjoying it like adults was capped by a brilliant weekend en famille when her parents arrived with the kids.
We had such a great time, and, thanks to the generousity of the good people of Gruissan, we also had two of the most memorable meals of our lives. I’ll explain. I play poker. A little. And in September, the little grungy casino at Gruissan, fifteen minutes from me, started playing hold ‘em poker. So I began to go once a week, and by the middle of October, I was up 1,400 Euros. So I plotted to have lunch and dinner in Paris at two of the best restaurants in that city, on the good people of Gruissan. I have to say, one of the best parts of planning the Paris trip was plotting with people on chowhound.com about the two restaurants I should take Anne to. Here’s the conversation, if you’re interested, with especially thanks to Julian Tort ("Souphie"), a local foodie and aficionado who also wrote me privately, fully in the spirit of what I wanted to do, and helped me make my mind up.
Anne and I got in safe and sound late Tuesday nite, and when we arrived in Paris, we were the last train running: the strike had begun. The Metro was also going to be crippled (although, we discovered,
it was still possible to get around on the much-reduced -in-service 1 and 4 lines, which are the main north-south and east-west lines in central Paris, and the whole system was free to ride during the strike). We celebrated with a drink near the Bastille, and in the morning, made our way to our real hotel, the Hotel Luxembourg Parc. Hotels are expensive in Paris, but this hotel, which is rated #1 on TripAdvisor, and for good reason, is a shocking good deal for the money. They gave us a room with a view of the Parc du Luxembourg (where Catherine de’Medici had a palace built for herself owing to the fact that she was tired of the Louvre, poor thing) and we LOVED it. What a great hotel.
We spent our time tooling around, having fun, drinking it in. Everywhere you go in Paris, you're stepping through history. Wandering up toward the Seine from Les Jardins du Luxembourg? Well, here's where Manet was born.
We also found this, the last of 16 official metre measurements carved in marble at the end of the eighteenth century and distributed around Paris to help standardize that unit. Picture a milliner and his customer standing here with a bolt of cloth, holding it out against this wall ...
The Wednesday was devoted to the Louvre, which I’d never seen. It’s not a gallery: it’s a city of art. It overwhelms, and yet, if you can manage to slow down and stop in front of some of it, shut out the noise of digital cameras firing, and just focus, you can really have some great moments of communion. The Louvre is stocked with busy ghosts and the evidence of so much passion and longing—for the eternal, for justice, for remembrance, for glory—the work of so many hands and spirits. I recalled being in the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with the kids and trying to find the words to express, to explain to them why art is important, but it’s hard to help children get to the thought you get to so easily as an adult: these works move you because they speak directly to your own mortality. Take a painting like this one, by Ingres, the portrait of Madamoiselle Rivière, made in 1805, just after Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and around the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars:
This painting not only keeps alive a beautiful young woman for all of time, but in its brushstrokes, in the evidence of all the decisions about composition, colour, and feeling that Ingres brought to it, we have a record of one man’s thoughts; we can almost hear his voice. In the background of the painting, we witness him in coversation with Leonardo da Vinci, we know how much he felt for the Italian in the homage he pays him with not only the landscape in the background, but in the smile Mlle. Rivière offers us. This is Ingres’ Giaconda. And as a viewer, standing in a future none of these people would ever know, you become the latest in a chain of deathbound seekers of fulfillment, of beauty, of knowledge and hope. You can get to this thought with one painting, but it’s hard to lead other people to it. Which is why visual art offers you a rare opportunity, in a very private moment, to be both alive and dead at the same time. You stare into the eyes of this fifteen-year-old girl, her whole life ahead of her, and you are tied to her. And then, when you learn she died the following year, the cognitive/emotional circle is complete. Your moment in time, no matter how beautiful, is marked as well.
We saw so many great things on Wednesday. The Delacroixs, the whole Italian renaissance, the sculpture garden, Napoleon III’s apartments (wow).
The only disappointment was that tiny painting of a smiling Italian lady—someone’s wife I hear—set behind bullet-proof glass, with rope keeping people at least ten feet away from it. The Mona Lisa, forever doomed to be called The Greatest Painting Ever, and further damned by Dan Brown, whose book has transformed it from a moment of grace in the history of art into kitsch. If ever a man should be consigned to one of the circles of hell, it should be Dan Brown, whose book has stolen the possibility of appreciating this painting for millions of people, both the millions who have read his book and now think of the Mona Lisa as a bit player in a religious detective yarn, and the millions who will be forced to view it as if from the last row in the AstroDome. There were people having themselves videoed standing fifteen feet in front of the painting, waving like idiots while the painting lay there, tiny and insignificant, like a cracked egg in an empty nest.
Lucky people in Paris ...
There’s too much to say about Paris, so I’m going to do this post in two parts, the rest after the weekend. Just a couple words about the strike, which may be over by the time you read this. The rail unions have gone on strike and crippled the entire country. I’m a good lefty, but something like this gives every pinko pause: here’s one of the best-paid unions in France, with enormous benefits, including, for some of them, the right to retire at 50. Well, Sarkozy has done the math, and France is one of the slowest-growing economies in the Western world. And a future where the next generation is going to have to pay for half a million men and women retiring at 50 with 30 or 40 years of the good life ahead of them has made him wonder if it’s really such a good idea after all. Up to five hundred thousand people getting paid a pension, plus benefits, every year for, say, an average of 25 years? Modestly, let’s say it costs the government $20,000 a year per worker. My calculator won’t do the math for all 25 years, but by the time three hundred thousand workers are on the books (that time will come), in one year alone, the costs will run to six billion Euros. During the bulge, when the greatest number of workers will be collecting their pensions—a period of possibly fifteen years—the costs will be astronomical. And as more than one unsympathetic Parisien said to us: who’s going to pay for this? Our kids. So Sarkozy, who campaigned on this issue, is making changes that will ensure a better future for all French citizens. And this is a broken promise to the union, who was lucky enough to be governed by successive regimes here who wanted to avoid strikes and who caved to unrealistic demands, and who now strikes for their right to suck the nation dry a decade or so from now. Hard to feel bad for them. As one taxi driver said to us: “Human nature is to want more. It doesn’t matter how good life is, there is always something missing, and that is the thing people will focus on.” Catherine de’Medici tiring of the Louvre, indeed.
(By the way, did you all know we're an uncle and aunt again? Nanny brought pictures of Lynn and Josh's latest, a little girl named Megan. Here's her big sister Leah feeding her here baba...)
Anne with her secret interlopersDoreen and Renald’s secret visit was the untold story of this blog since long before I wrote its first entry. Doreen and I had actually begun discussing Anne’s birthday back in March, but we didn’t make final plans until July, and on July 7, Renald and Doreen had their plane tickets and then it was waiting and hoping none of us spilled the beans. In the meantime, unspoken in the background of this story you’ve been reading since the middle of August, I was buying train tickets, plotting separately with Christiane and Jacques (who got into the game by inviting Anne for a birthday “drink” and by being the picker-uppers at the train station when D&R got here), Doreen and I were writing nearly daily emails (a nice bonding experience, doncha think Dodie?), and every time Anne’s mum or dad called in the week leading up to their arrival, I sat in the office pouring sweat. I almost gave it away the night before when Anne revealed we were going to the boys’ hockey practice before going to Christiane and Jacques. I’d thought it was off and I argued it would be rude to be late for a birthday drink. “What birthday drink?” said Anne. “Christiane doesn’t know it’s my birthday.” (Sound of trucks crashing in Redhill’s brain, until he remembered:) “We talked about it when we had them here for dinner two months ago. Remember? They’re leaving for their desert walk in Libya the day of your birthday? Why do you think Christiane wanted to ensure they saw us before they left? Duh.” (Phew.)
Anne says seeing her parents through that door stopped her brain. I could see it skipping like a needle on a scratched record. I’ll never forget the way she backed away from her mother like she was seeing a ghost and I guess she was. It came off perfectly, and we toasted her with champagne and waited for that look to fade from her face (it didn't, for a couple of days!). That morning, I’d thought she knew something was afoot, but unless I’m spending my life with Sarah Bernhardt, she didn’t know a thing. As for the kids, it was like a magic trick. Ben kept saying “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” and Max wouldn’t leave either of them alone all night.A GREAT BIRTHDAY WEEK
We had four days at home with Nanny and Grandpapa and we filled them with wine, wonderful food, walks, and drives to local haunts. We had a soccer game with Ben on Saturday and watched him play goal (he was amazing), and drove around the local countyside where the fall colours have really come in now. Renald’s leg and ankle have been giving him trouble of late, and sitting for long periods is difficult, but after braving the airplane (eight hours in economy!) he wasn’t going to let anything hold him back. 
We gave Anne her gifts in two chunks: first, on Saturday morning, I gave her a card called Chez Redhill, which set out the formule for the week like a prix fixe menu. On it, she discovered she was going to Paris with me for three days midweek. Then, the next morning, the big day itself, we gave her all her gifts. (This, by the way, is the last piece of evidence that Anne was ever in her thirties:)Doreen and Renald had brought a pile of gifts from Canada, my mum had left something in August, there were cards, and little packages in the mail had also come. The most incredible gift was the one her mother and sister Julie had worked for two months making: a “life book” for Anne. This leather volume was filled with over thirty messages of love and remembrance from a great many of Anne’s family and friends. It was filled with pictures, stories, jokes, drawings and so on and when she saw it, she wept. I don’t think she’s even finished reading it: every time she opens it she starts laughing and then she becomes silent and I go into the room and there are tears streaming down her cheeks. Here’s some pics of her birthday morning:
The birthday Life book ...
Grandpapa checks it out ...
A scarf from Isabel and Bob ...In the middle of buying the oysters we got caught in a sort of "when in Rome" moment. One of the delicacies the French love is sea urchin. There's not a lot in a sea urchin. It's mostly a filter for sea water. It doesn't even have a brain. Inside, there are five strips of glistening goo, which the Japanese call uni (you've seen it on sushi menus and stayed away from it). This is the urchin roe, and some people adore it. The fishmonger at the back of Les Halles saw us staring at the spiny pile of living urchins and offered to let us taste them. The boys, of course, wanted to try it, but we thought better of that. In fact, we all thought better of it, but when the fish dude decided he'd had enough of our waffling, he scooped out a quivering mass of orange snot and told me to try it ...
... I felt more or less obligated.
Hmm. Not too bad. Kinda salty. Kinda fishy. See the big hunk left on my spoon? I decided to be brave about it and eat the rest of it. That thing I said about it being not to bad? Never mind. It was like eating something out of a baby's diaper. But let Anne show you how she felt. She was compelled by the fishmonger to have some. It was her birthday and one's forties are about trying new things, right?
Mmmmm! Urchiny!
A FORTY-YEAR-OLD CANADIAN IN SARKOZY’S COURT
Everything for Anne’s birthday week had been so meticulously planned that the gods had to revolt: as it turned out, the day I was supposed to take Anne to Paris for three days, the national train union was going on strike. So we had to revise our plans under the gun: we’d leave on the last train before the strike began, on Tuesday night, and we’d arrange for Doreen, Renald, and the boys to fly in to Paris rather than train in on Saturday. Then we discovered that the strike also meant that the Metro would not be running in Paris either. Ah, yes, remember my earlier entry on the Curse of Paris? Would it strike again?
Well, try as they might, nothing can ruin Paris. And this time, despite the real challenges in getting around, we had our best visit ever to Paris, and three days of alone-time enjoying it like adults was capped by a brilliant weekend en famille when her parents arrived with the kids.
We had such a great time, and, thanks to the generousity of the good people of Gruissan, we also had two of the most memorable meals of our lives. I’ll explain. I play poker. A little. And in September, the little grungy casino at Gruissan, fifteen minutes from me, started playing hold ‘em poker. So I began to go once a week, and by the middle of October, I was up 1,400 Euros. So I plotted to have lunch and dinner in Paris at two of the best restaurants in that city, on the good people of Gruissan. I have to say, one of the best parts of planning the Paris trip was plotting with people on chowhound.com about the two restaurants I should take Anne to. Here’s the conversation, if you’re interested, with especially thanks to Julian Tort ("Souphie"), a local foodie and aficionado who also wrote me privately, fully in the spirit of what I wanted to do, and helped me make my mind up.
Anne and I got in safe and sound late Tuesday nite, and when we arrived in Paris, we were the last train running: the strike had begun. The Metro was also going to be crippled (although, we discovered,
it was still possible to get around on the much-reduced -in-service 1 and 4 lines, which are the main north-south and east-west lines in central Paris, and the whole system was free to ride during the strike). We celebrated with a drink near the Bastille, and in the morning, made our way to our real hotel, the Hotel Luxembourg Parc. Hotels are expensive in Paris, but this hotel, which is rated #1 on TripAdvisor, and for good reason, is a shocking good deal for the money. They gave us a room with a view of the Parc du Luxembourg (where Catherine de’Medici had a palace built for herself owing to the fact that she was tired of the Louvre, poor thing) and we LOVED it. What a great hotel.We spent our time tooling around, having fun, drinking it in. Everywhere you go in Paris, you're stepping through history. Wandering up toward the Seine from Les Jardins du Luxembourg? Well, here's where Manet was born.
We also found this, the last of 16 official metre measurements carved in marble at the end of the eighteenth century and distributed around Paris to help standardize that unit. Picture a milliner and his customer standing here with a bolt of cloth, holding it out against this wall ...
The Wednesday was devoted to the Louvre, which I’d never seen. It’s not a gallery: it’s a city of art. It overwhelms, and yet, if you can manage to slow down and stop in front of some of it, shut out the noise of digital cameras firing, and just focus, you can really have some great moments of communion. The Louvre is stocked with busy ghosts and the evidence of so much passion and longing—for the eternal, for justice, for remembrance, for glory—the work of so many hands and spirits. I recalled being in the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with the kids and trying to find the words to express, to explain to them why art is important, but it’s hard to help children get to the thought you get to so easily as an adult: these works move you because they speak directly to your own mortality. Take a painting like this one, by Ingres, the portrait of Madamoiselle Rivière, made in 1805, just after Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and around the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars:
This painting not only keeps alive a beautiful young woman for all of time, but in its brushstrokes, in the evidence of all the decisions about composition, colour, and feeling that Ingres brought to it, we have a record of one man’s thoughts; we can almost hear his voice. In the background of the painting, we witness him in coversation with Leonardo da Vinci, we know how much he felt for the Italian in the homage he pays him with not only the landscape in the background, but in the smile Mlle. Rivière offers us. This is Ingres’ Giaconda. And as a viewer, standing in a future none of these people would ever know, you become the latest in a chain of deathbound seekers of fulfillment, of beauty, of knowledge and hope. You can get to this thought with one painting, but it’s hard to lead other people to it. Which is why visual art offers you a rare opportunity, in a very private moment, to be both alive and dead at the same time. You stare into the eyes of this fifteen-year-old girl, her whole life ahead of her, and you are tied to her. And then, when you learn she died the following year, the cognitive/emotional circle is complete. Your moment in time, no matter how beautiful, is marked as well.
We saw so many great things on Wednesday. The Delacroixs, the whole Italian renaissance, the sculpture garden, Napoleon III’s apartments (wow).
The only disappointment was that tiny painting of a smiling Italian lady—someone’s wife I hear—set behind bullet-proof glass, with rope keeping people at least ten feet away from it. The Mona Lisa, forever doomed to be called The Greatest Painting Ever, and further damned by Dan Brown, whose book has transformed it from a moment of grace in the history of art into kitsch. If ever a man should be consigned to one of the circles of hell, it should be Dan Brown, whose book has stolen the possibility of appreciating this painting for millions of people, both the millions who have read his book and now think of the Mona Lisa as a bit player in a religious detective yarn, and the millions who will be forced to view it as if from the last row in the AstroDome. There were people having themselves videoed standing fifteen feet in front of the painting, waving like idiots while the painting lay there, tiny and insignificant, like a cracked egg in an empty nest.
Lucky people in Paris ...There’s too much to say about Paris, so I’m going to do this post in two parts, the rest after the weekend. Just a couple words about the strike, which may be over by the time you read this. The rail unions have gone on strike and crippled the entire country. I’m a good lefty, but something like this gives every pinko pause: here’s one of the best-paid unions in France, with enormous benefits, including, for some of them, the right to retire at 50. Well, Sarkozy has done the math, and France is one of the slowest-growing economies in the Western world. And a future where the next generation is going to have to pay for half a million men and women retiring at 50 with 30 or 40 years of the good life ahead of them has made him wonder if it’s really such a good idea after all. Up to five hundred thousand people getting paid a pension, plus benefits, every year for, say, an average of 25 years? Modestly, let’s say it costs the government $20,000 a year per worker. My calculator won’t do the math for all 25 years, but by the time three hundred thousand workers are on the books (that time will come), in one year alone, the costs will run to six billion Euros. During the bulge, when the greatest number of workers will be collecting their pensions—a period of possibly fifteen years—the costs will be astronomical. And as more than one unsympathetic Parisien said to us: who’s going to pay for this? Our kids. So Sarkozy, who campaigned on this issue, is making changes that will ensure a better future for all French citizens. And this is a broken promise to the union, who was lucky enough to be governed by successive regimes here who wanted to avoid strikes and who caved to unrealistic demands, and who now strikes for their right to suck the nation dry a decade or so from now. Hard to feel bad for them. As one taxi driver said to us: “Human nature is to want more. It doesn’t matter how good life is, there is always something missing, and that is the thing people will focus on.” Catherine de’Medici tiring of the Louvre, indeed.
(By the way, did you all know we're an uncle and aunt again? Nanny brought pictures of Lynn and Josh's latest, a little girl named Megan. Here's her big sister Leah feeding her here baba...)
