Notes from the road ...

This has to be quick and dirty, and worse, no epic digital camera movies, either. We leave London for Amsterdam tomorrow and have spent a wonderful four days in this somewhat overwhelming city. Like Rome, New York, and Paris, London dwarfs you and makes you feel your mortality as you dance in its fumes, its jolliness, and its history. Although Anne and I have been in London before, we have regressed to pure tourism to show the city to boys for the first time. So: doubledecker tour buses, the London Eye (the slowest way in town to bleed 30 quid), the Tower of London, which was darkly fascinating, Hamley's, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square (over and over again: that's where the cinemas are!) and Trafalgar Square, where the pigeons of my childhood have been eaten by falcons the city introduced a while ago to clear them off. Sad, but it's cleaner. I know the boys would have loved to feed them, but they liked climbing on the lions enough.

Today we took them to the British Museum to see the Terracotta Army. There are about 15 of the 7000 or so terracotta soldiers, officials, acrobats, musicians, strongment, horses, and geese that the brilliant and megalomaniac first emperor of China had made for himself in order to rule China as well as the universe from beyond the grave. A really moving exhibition and a very early historical example of what Hitler might have done if he'd won the war: got the trains to run on time and gone slowly mad. Still, the remains of this madness are really stunning to see, and these two millenia gone by are enough for us to forget whatever atrocities this man must have committed in order to rule as absolutely as he did.

Anne and I have been spelling each other on and off these few days, and going to see movies or eating out or shopping on our own. It's so nice to see a couple of first-run flicks after all this time away from movie houses. I took the guys tonight as she did last night. We went to see Ratatouille (again) and then had an Italian meal at a nice little place near Russell Square, everyone sort of staring at us, wondering what this guy was doing with two little boys in a nice Italian place at 8:30 at night. But they were very nice to us, and apart from wearing the napkins as hats and trying to spear the icecubes in their waterglasses with their forks, the boys were very well behaved.

Like Paris, we take the big city as an opportunity to eat anything but French food. I believe the combined culinary accounting includes Indian (twice), sushi (twice), Italian, Mexican, and one or two others. We had a great Indian (adults only!) meal with our old friends Elizabeth and Anthony near their house in North London Saturday night ... so nice to have an adult conversation over curry.

That's the capsule report for now ... something more detailed before long.

Update ...

We're here in Amsterdam! One short hop flight and boom, new city. We lived on top of each other in London: cheek and jowl, beds pressed together, a tiny 10" television set bolted to the wall seven feet up a wall ... we got pretty tired of it quick, although London was magnificent. Now we're in a third-floor two-bedroom apartment with 10 foot ceilings, overlooking one of the many canals here and already in love (and GRATEFUL for some space!!) I walked two kilometres—through various, discrete clouds of pot-smoke—to get to a store that was still open in order to buy some supplies for the morning. I took a cab back and was dropped 200 metres from our building, which is about 50 metres from where the real window-market in prostitutes starts, and walked back past pink-lit windows with women sitting in chairs wearing almost nothing smiling very nicely as I walked past. I hope it wasn't the bananas in my shopping bag that gave the wrong impression.

So we're here safe and sound and exhausted: Anne is groaning with delight as she settles down into the nice bed about 20 feet from me.

Autumn days

(This somewhat delayed post was written on October 22 and then added to tonight … sorry if it’s a little confusing.)

***

Lighting the lamps ...

Sometime between last night and this morning, autumn arrived, and the bite of it in the air as we walked to school today was unmistakeable. Shivery and bright. Anne lit the furnace for the first time and by noon that invisible glow from the corners where the rads are began to give solace that summer is really gone.

My flu is almost finished, but lord it’s been tenacious. Still a sore throat and little asthmatic moments, but I can see the clean bill of health at the end of the tunnel. I went to see a doctor twice last week and came right up against my language deficit: it’s misleading to think you can speak a language simply because you’ve stopped embarrassing yourself daily. The special subvocabularies that we all carry with us (to see our accountants, to fawn to our children’s teachers, to joke with someone who may be dangerous) are utterly empty categories to me in French, and so I found myself engaged both times with this doctor in an amusing dumbshow that had me pretending to cough when, really, I could have done it for real, only not in French. The sum of these two visits is that I have twice as much ibuprofen now as I did when I arrived, and I’m on the Pill.

(Seriously, the gentleman wrote out a complex prescription for me, prepared it in duplicate and signed both copies, whereupon I presented such arcana to the apothecary, who asked me if I had insurance—I did not—and who then filled out such prescriptions. Ten minutes later, secreted out of the bowels of the preparatory behind the counter, I had the French equivalent of Dristan, Advil Cold & Flu, and extra-strength Tylenol. Total cost: eight Euros. So, cheaper than at home, but oh so much more mysterious.)


Visitors!!

Bob 'n' boys

We made the most of a post-flu weekend, having Isabel and Bob Huggan up to Narbonne for an overnight visit. Bob’s hardy Scots background has provided him with amazing powers of recuperation (he has been under the weather of late) which we suspect has its roots in malt, but maybe he just has an excellent apothecary up his way who is absolutely overflowing with modern remedies like Tums and Tiger Balm. In any case, we were delighted to see them. The kids because the Huggans came overburdened with gifts, and us because, at last, we could have some adult conversation in English. (Anne, of course, is not troubled by adult conversation in French, but I’m sure it was nice for once to have a partner who didn’t sound like a talking vegetable.) Among the gifts were paper and drawing pens for the boys, who decided immediately that portraits were called for. They fought over who got to draw Bob, and for long periods of the evening, the poor man looked more like a lawn ornament than a dinner guest.

Bob Huggan. Missed his calling.

But, as you can see, the results of these combined efforts were truly excellent. Benjamin, who was drawing portraits for the first time, did one of me as well, which is frighteningly accurate in spirit and reminds me of the stories of where the odd perspectives in Henry Moore’s sculptures come from—those giant bodies and tiny, far-away heads. It’s been said that the sculptures maintain the child’s perspective of the parent (in Moore’s case, his mother, and specifically, memories of lying in her lap) and we forget how we loom, both emotionally and physically in the lives of our children. This drawing of me reminded me who I am to Benjamin, and I think it’s an absolutely wonderful, albeit slightly ominous, picture. (And yes, I had had a couple glasses of wine!)

If you see this man in an alley ...

We spent the evening in front of the television, watching the South Africans deliver the French of their deepest fear: that England would take the World Cup of Rugby. It didn’t happen. It was very boring. I now retreat to my earlier opinion of Rugby: it is a game without rules played by louts. Sometimes a graceful play will suddenly erupt and the ball will move backwards down a line of men as the line surges forward, but for most of the time it is a game played on the ground, in a giant pile of male parts, with the ball hidden somewhere beneath and the referee desperately trying to sort out who’s on which team, who has possession, and why he ever chose to referee this sport in the first place. I also wonder about a game in which one of the goals seems to be to mash your face up against a teammate's arse as often and for as long as possible. Get a room, gentlemen.

We showed the Huggans the town and basked in their approval of it. The market performed admirably on this Sunday, with a live band playing outside and free cups of wine being thrust into your hands from everywhere.

Primeur is everywhere now. I suspect it is the simplest of grog to make: it takes almost like pure grape juice, with a bit of a kick, and I suspect if we’d picked the grapes in our backyard in September, stomped on ‘em (hell we had the pool), stirred some yeast into it all and then bottled it, we could have had our own Primeur cottage industry.


Another (very amusing) day in Narbonne

I’ve been waiting for an instance of the classic way things supposedly "work" in France, and to be honest, we might be in the wrong part of the country. Do you know we have not had a rude waiter yet? Or been bogged down in any of the bureaucracy, or been told one thing only to be told its opposite by someone of equal rank? God, I've only even seen two berets! How dare they evade their hoary national clichés! It sort of galls me because I was kind of looking forward to regaling you with these stories. But at last, I have a little one.

France Post is remarkably efficient, modern, easy to use, and the people who work in the post offices are very kind and helpful. But today they had a problem: the entire electronic postal system, throughout Narbonne, broke down, and they could not sell a stamp, weigh a package, make change for a ten or anything. I went in with a package at 11 am this morning, and the two counter people who work at the office around the corner from us were sitting behind their counters with the forlorn looks of people whose lives had lost all meaning. They could do nothing for me, could not predict when the problems would be solved, were powerless to advise me, and generally evinced no hope that the world would ever be the same again.

I left them, went home, ate lunch, wrote a little, did some research, and at 4:30 I went back to find their condition utterly unchanged. They had not gone home and got books, nor had they, five hours into their day, decided it was a washout and that they’d be better off at home. They were sitting there like twin Sphinxes, staring out at their empty office, their hands flat on the countertops in front of them, as if they still somehow expected to be freed back into action by a voice from on high. I almost hope the system is down again tomorrow because it would frankly be quite amusing to go back in the morning and imagine them having sat there all night.

[Postscript: they got the system back up and working on the Tuesday, and everything moved like greased lightening. Which was sort of a lost opportunity because I was thinking if it went for one more day maybe they'd go on strike and then I'd really have a story.]


A street of trees

The gradual descent of autumn here brings with it a new wealth of fruits and vegetables. Somehow, Jean’s vines next door are still producing tomatoes, and trees up and down the street have burst out in a last gasp of fecundity. Trees I didn’t realize were fruit trees are now producing tangerines and persimmons, which they call kaki here. Persimmon is one of the last fruits or vegetables on this earth that I haven’t eaten and I’ve always found their colour—tending toward a fluorescent orange—offputting. But they like them here, and they tend to be right about everything foodie, so I’ll take the plunge. I was standing in front of one of the particularly bountiful trees down the street and wondering if I shouldn't just reach up and grab one, but I didn’t want to be called a kaki thief, and left them alone. The sad thing is, as it goes with most of the figs, plums, apricots, peaches, and oranges that more or less grow wild down here, much of this fruit will just fall on the ground and rot. Unless you’re in the business of growing fruit, there’s no chance a family or even a bunch of neighbours could possibly consume the product of even a single persimmon tree. The one down the street must have had 200 fruits on it, all coming into ripeness at exactly the same moment.

Meanwhile, the neighbours have begun to pollard their trees. This is a process of cutting off all of the year’s growth to encourage next year’s branches to grow in a certain shape. Most of the time, the pollarding of the local trees is designed to encourage lateral development, so the growth is low and parallel to the ground, but they do it too with the enormous plane trees in the centre of town, and this is to give them a big, bushy aspect. But it introduces a sudden emptiness to what, until recently, had been a rich riverscape downtown.


Taking our own measure

And here's a goofy story to keep you company as we head off to London and Amsterdam for Toussaint, the kids’ first holiday break of the year. (You know, they give the kids here about six long holidays during the year, they get Wednesdays off, and have a 2 ½ hour lunchbreak every day. All of this is designed to get the children here ready for adulthood and France’s fourteen-hour workweek.)

So this was us earlier tonight: our first flight is tomorrow and we’re flying RyanAir. RyanAir flies from just about anywhere to just about anywhere else in Europe, but their near-monopoly on low-cost inter-European flights means that they could give a damn about customer service, and woeful tales of EasyJet screwups are legion. To give you an idea about what kind of company this is, EasyJet responded to the increasing number of complaints they got about their service, lost luggage, hidden costs, etc, simply by closing all of their complaint desks at the various airports they fly in and out of. And now if you have a problem, you can call a number at the cost of 60p a minute and get put on hold for half an hour. Clever, eh? Imagine turning your shitty service into a source of further profit! Check out this story from the Guardian if you don’t believe me.

So if you take EasyJet, being well prepared is useful, and tonight, Anne and I were carefully going over the hand baggage and checked baggage regulations. They charge you to check anything, and there’s a strict weight allowance (after which each extra kilogram costs you £5.50), and if a piece of your luggage exceeds their stowage allowances, they won’t take it on the plane and there you are in the airport ready to go with luggage you can’t check.

So we got out the tape measure that we found in one of the upstairs kitchen drawers and started measuring the luggage. The largest dimension on a piece of checked luggage is 119cm. We had a big bag packed, but when I measured it, it was way off the scale: it’s largest dimension was 170cm. Then I measured the regular carry-on size and saw that it, too, was too big for EasyJet: 130cm high! Then we turned to the carry-on luggage, max dimension 55cm. We measured the kids’ knapsacks: both were 60cm long! We were getting frantic, and of course, now we saw how EasyJet made life so miserable for people: you had to pack everything in ziplock bags or something, just to get any of it on board.

But I had just flown with EasyJet in August and not had any trouble with the same small suitcase that was now 11cm over the limit. Had they changed their rules? Will flying ever be simple again? We stood there in the hall scratching our heads. “Let me see that bloody tape measure again,” I said, and I yanked a length of it out of its case. I looked closely at it. “Ciceros,” was written at the end of the tape. The manufacturer’s name? “Does this actually look like a centimetre to you?” I asked Anne. She peered at it. “No,” she said. “Those aren’t centimetres.”

What the bloody hell is a cicero??

Well, I’m glad you asked. According to Wikipedia, “a cicero is a unit of measure used in typography in France and other continental European countries …. It is equal to 1/6 of the historical French inch.”

It is also 4.5mm in length.

What on earth was a typography tape measure doing in one of our kitchen drawers? I’d like to say that EasyJet put it there, but the truth is that Bernard comes from a family of printers. I guess sometimes they liked to measure the newspaper over supper. Luckily, using our immense powers of deduction, we figured it out, and now we’re taking whatever we want on the plane because we don’t own anything quite as massive as EasyJet fears we might want to squeeze into their hold.

But offer a little prayer for us anyway. It’s still EasyJet.


A last Booker moment

My short, intoxicating, and still unreal-feeling invitation to the ante-room at the Man Booker Prize this year is now officially over with last week’s announcement that Anne Enright has won for her novel The Gathering. It seems to me that this jury conducted itself with unusual dignity, and the chairman’s remarks on the night of the prize were not your usual flummery about the heights great literature can scale and how everyone was a winner, etcetera, etcetera, but something considerably more worthy of debate. This includes comments he made that argued that the state of literary discourse is woeful and that the conditions of overpraise and willful ignorance of the new and challenging is damaging to literature. Imagine such a thing being said at the Giller Prize. It ought to be said, but I think it will be years before anyone in Canada is willing to risk their yearly lichee martini to say such a thing.

The only uncontroversial statement the gentleman made in his speech last Tuesday night was the following, kindly sent to me by someone who found the transcript online:

“None of the thirteen longlisted titles would have been out of place on the short list. We were variously sorry not to be able to find room for Edward Docx’s Self Help and Michael Redhill’s Consolation, a beautifully constructed tale about historical Toronto, which does not sound as enticing as it is. And Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted is an astonishingly assured debut. We also, to pursue my educational theme, learnt a lot about Wagner from A.N.Wilson’s beautifully written and closely argued Winnie and Wolf.”

So those of you who wrote when I didn’t make the longlist to congratulate me on seventh place may well have been right.

What a crazy thing it was …

In Transit

Well, that’s it for now. We’ll try to post once from the road, but in case we can’t, we’ll be back on November 5th. And you know what that week is, don’t you? The last week of Anne’s thirties. So stay tuned for some calm and measured posts from the future quatrogenarian after that …

In the meantime, those of you who like your pictures unspoiled by brilliant prose can consult a bundle of recent images put online by that selfsame young woman. To see pictures from Anne’s trip to Picou with Ben’s class two weeks ago, click here. For the whole sordid story-in-images of Bob and Isabel’s visit last weekend, click here. And to see some of a gorgeous drive we took through the Corbieres and its mountains on Sunday, click here. That particular afternoon deserves a post of its own though, so try not to ruin your appetite by staring at the pictures without knowing how we earned them …

Its truly worth Posting

Episodic asides

A recent picture proving the French air is good for you

Well, we made a movie for you all today, but first you gotta listen to me.

Watch your step polka

Every sidewalk in France is littered with little brown bombs and everyone one of them has a footprint in it. How do they stand it? I don’t know.

After almost three months in France, the dogshit situation remains one of the profoundly perplexing things about life here. How is it, in a culture this refined, with so great a talent for the good life, that no one does anything about the astonishing filth that makes walking from your front door to the tabac an obstacle course? This has been commented on many times, I know, but no one has explained it sufficiently for me. Perhaps a French person is reading this who can decode it for me. Is it that those French who own dogs are also the most rabid about the liberté of their national motto that picking up after their animals is an affront to their personal freedom? It is a truly remarkable thing. Imagine living in a place as beautiful as this, but being forced to keep your eyes glued to the sidewalk all the time.


Wine season truly begins

As it turns out, I won’t be publishing my wine-tasting experiences of two weeks ago here, as the Globe will be running it in November. But today is a special day in the Languedoc because it is the day Primeur comes out, which is the Languedoc’s version of Beaujolais. Made of grapes picked less than two months ago, it’s a very easy-to-drink, fruity, light red wine which I imagine would even be nice cold. Some kind of law prevents stores from selling it before a certain moment in time, and it wasn’t on the shelves of our local store at eleven this morning, but there was plenty of it by five in the afternoon. Bernard, who owns a printing house, has ordered some Primeur as gifts for his customers and printed his own labels for it, which read Imprimeur.


The most dreaded of errors

It took ten weeks, but I’ve finally committed the one mistake in French I was terrified to make and which I knew was inevitable.

Anne’s mum sent relish and yellow mustard in the mail, neither of which we could find here, and the instant we opened the box this afternoon we decided we had to celebrate with hamburgers. (Thanks Doreen!!) So I went off to the local grocer and asked for some steack hâché with which to make them. I never know how much I want of something like this in grams, so I asked for two hundred, and when he ground the beef for me and was getting ready to package it up, I wanted to see if it was enough. So I asked him to show me. But instead of saying montrez-moi (show me) I said montez-moi (get on top of me).

He paused in mid-turn and kind of looked at me through his eyebrows and I said errr, peut-être quatre-cent grams? And by silent agreement, we decided not to pursue the other matter.

(The shopkeepers here are famously accomodating, but you have to be careful what you ask for.)


A short film from Narbonne

I’m using some of my ample spare time here to try to unravel the mysteries of Mac’s iMovie, which has sat lumpen on my desktop for a long time. Here’s my first honest-to-goodness movie, starring your favourite little dinkledorfs.

More soon from our autumnal paradise ...

Les ours mauvaises nouvelles and other tales from the south of France

Our absence from these pages is not as dire as it may appear at first: I did write a brilliant account of a wine-tasting day Anne and I shared a week and a half ago, but I mentioned it to the Globe and Mail and they may run it in their pages before I can run it in mine. The short form of that story is that the Wednesday ten days ago was a day in which we expected to have Ben home for the afternoon while Max was gone all day on a sortie. But he wouldn’t go. Not without Ben. So Ben’s Wednesday (remember, not a school day) was cancelled and he went with Max instead and suddenly we had a day to ourselves.

We decided to drive north into Saint-Chinian country and drink wine. Well, put wine in our mouths, swish it around, and spit it out, preparatory to buying bottles of it. We visited a couple of wineries, stopped in at a couple of in-town caves and generally made off like thieves with some very good bottles (the samples of which we had deviously swallowed rather than spitting out). I still find the world of wine down here absolutely stymying, even though I have books and websites (on this one smarty-pants from around the world are advising me on what to buy here and in Bordeaux) and am developing a deeper appreciation, but I’ll be damned if I can cut through all of the complexities and understand how to look for a good wine. It may well be trial and error, but I suspect a wellspring exists of native and intuitive comprehension of wine that will never be mine. Mind you, the locals drink cheap bottles of excellent plonk and would never consider looking more than 50 km from home for good wine. Ask Bernard what he cares for in a Bordeaux he’s as likely to react as if I’d asked him what he likes on a hot dog. We found some marvellous bottles, and the guys on WineLovers have set me some interesting challenges, so the deepening continues. As for tasting notes and more details from our October 3 adventure, stayed tuned here for news as to whether you’ll have to read it in the Globe or whether it’ll show up here after all.

A recipe

After a long week (more on which later), we needed comfort food tonight and I made a pasta sauce that was among the best I’ve ever made and I think the secret ingredient might have been blood. Those of you who have eaten at my table know that I’m a pasta sauce god, but this one, made up on the fly, is a keeper.

Sauce sanglant majestique pour pâtes de merguez et tomates

• 6 to 8 raw merguez sausages, best purchased in Narbonne, but okay if you have to get them from St. Lawrence Market, too
• ½ large onion, sliced thin
• 3 big cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 large red pepper, in strips or chunks
• 6 good-size juicy tomatoes diced with seeds
• Best quality olive oil
• Salt, oregano, basil to taste.
• Good red wine

Okay. Partially cook the merguez sausages in about ½ cup olive oil. Take them out and set them aside, but leave all the juices in the pan. Cook the onion and garlic until translucently golden and soft, then add the red pepper and cook that down too, over medium heat. By now, the merguez, sitting on a plate, will have bled and juiced a little: pour that into the pan. Add another ¾ cup of olive oil. Add the tomatoes, as well as all spices. Cook over a higher heat and let the tomatoes cook down a bit. Add a very large glug of a good red wine. Slice the merguez into bite-sized chunks and add them to the sauce, along with all juices, to cook them the rest of the way. Let the sauce thicken (if it refuses to, you haven’t put enough olive oil in, but it’s too late: add more red wine and let that boil down). Spoon generously over linguine and send me an email telling me how frikking excellent it is. You’re welcome.


Our life in hockey

Okay, so the week that was began in Toulouse last weekend. Anne and I had tickets to see Caetano Veloso at L’Halles aux Graines in that lovely town on Friday night, but we had no babysitting in Narbonne for the boys, and plus, we had a hockey practice in Castres, halfway between Toulouse and Narbonne on the Saturday. I know it sounds like we must still be in Canada if hockey is ruling our world and determining our schedules, but that happens to be half-true still in the south of France. But where hockey in Toronto is a driven pursuit, here it is a surreal dream, hockey devised by Salvador Dali, against lush, French backdrops, and with kids and coaches, it must be said, who know precious little about hockey. But let me get back to Toulouse.

In the end, we found a hotel that had a staff member who sometimes babysat in the hotel, and this place turned out to be the same hotel in whose restaurant I met Michael O for lunch in a month ago. The Hôtel des Beaux Arts, right on the quai overlooking the broad River Garonne. A grand-ish hotel with very nice people and a good restaurant. We got the kids acquainted with the babysitter, suggested they watch a movie (and took the babysitter aside to urge her to be careful to avoid channels 13 and 14 where various men and women were getting to know each other better), and then headed downstairs for a quick supper. Then the concert. I don’t know if you know Veloso, but he’s a Brazilian superstar who has one of sweetest voices on the planet. That is, when he’s playing the troubadour (download “Cucurrucucú Paloma” from iTunes if you want to see what I mean). His ballads are sung with one of the most heart-rending voices I’ve ever come across. Unfortunately, he also wants to be Mick Jagger. I expect they dig that in Brazil, and some of his fans, who had come up from Portugal or even from Brazil to see him here, went wild for his cranked-up, struttin’ tunes, but they left Anne and me cold. And he didn’t sing my favorite song of his either, “Terra.” But hey, it was a date. Our first in two months.

Two good boys sleeping after Caetano Veloso

The next day was sunny and warm (it's been raining a lot of late, although the last three days have been really lovely) and we wandered around Toulouse buying stuff and admiring the general beauty of the town. I don't even know where this photo was taken, but everything in it is gorgeous, as I'm sure you'l agree. Around 3, we got in the car and headed to Castres. The hockey practice was in a municipal sports centre almost exactly like Espace Liberté here in Narbonne, and it was chosen as the town to practice in because the Narbonne White Tigers (the team Ben plays on, and yeah, don’t ask why the name’s in English, we don’t know) is made up of players from Toulouse, Narbonne, and Castres, none of these towns having enough nine- and ten-year-olds to field their own teams. So gaggles of kids arrived from these three towns to meet for the first time and practice as a team. The coaches, well-meaning fellas all, took this ragtag collection of skaters and non-skaters (including Maxime, who was slipped into the practice by his well-meaning parents) and put them through the paces.

Untrained bears on unicycles is one image that comes to mind. Some of these kids could skate (a couple brilliantly) but most were not nearly half-decent, and a good percentage couldn’t stay on their feet. Ladies and gentlemen: The Narbonne White Tigers. Once the skating drills were done, they started working on teamplay. Positions, passing, using the ice, etc. Well here, the best skaters had no idea and the game they played was more or less rugby with a puck. IE: everyone on top, see what happens. But that was nothing compared to the state of the ice. Before we came on, the Zamboni ran over an ice surface that was pretty much a dead ringer for Samuel Beckett’s face: deep furrows interrupted by crosswise cracks. After the Zamboni had passed, giant puddles of water sat in these furrows and never froze. Waterwings would have done as well as skates, as you’ll see from these videos of the two boys doing drills …

So that was the practice. Today was the first tourney of the year. The Narbonne White Tigers in a round robin with the teams from Barcelona and Pisuerga, both teams from Spain. Hey, we might have been a hopeless group made up of three French towns, but at least we were further north than the teams from Spain.

Ferget it. They flattened us. The combined score of the two games the Tigers played against the two Spanish teams was 22-4. I speak with understanding and love when I say that watching our local team try to keep up with the hulking Spaniards (I’m guessing these ten-year olds are about ready to shave) was embarrasing and even horrifying. Barcelona scored five times in the first three minutes of their game. The parents of the Barcelona team even had a song! As it happens, we won’t be able to attend the next two tourneys, which fact grieved us until today when we realized it might be a blessing. (As was the fact that we forgot to bring the camera today.) I’m guessing many a bottle of red wine accompanied many a Castres/Toulouse/Narbonne meal tonight. I’m just hoping the local paper wasn’t at the arena.


Rugby

I mentioned rugby in the section above and I realized I’ve been remiss in reporting a major phenomenon from France, which is the Rugby World Cup, currently rocketing toward its conclusion next Saturday night in Paris. The French are soccer and rugby crazy, but in the south, soccer appreciation is a polite nod toward a national pasttime, whereas rugby is a bona fide sickness. And the world cup being played in France has been a cause for chest-beating here (whether as a prelude to garment-tearing or whooping and hollaring) since the tourney began about a month ago. France started its world cup laying down against Argentina and the head-shrinking began. If you are a Toronto Maple Leaf fan, you might identify with the kind of analysis that followed that first, blown match. Where’s their heart, don’t they care about us, is this what X-millions of Euros gets us, etc etc … but then les bleues made short work of the rest of their opponents in their pool and easily progressed to a quarter-final against …. Well, against Goliath.

The New Zealand All-Blacks are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox all rolled into one; they’re the top-ranked team in the world, and the prohibitive favorite of the 2007 Rugby World Cup; a team that has beaten France in 34 of the 46 times they have met. This match, one of the few to be played outside of France, took place in Cardiff, which was widely viewed as merciful, as the French team could take their lumps in front of fewer French fans than they would have had to in Paris. Even the most bullish of French commentators gave France a less than 10% chance to win.

But by some miracle, they did, and it was kind of awesome. They trailed 13-3 at the half as it seemed meant to be, but managed to tie it up partway through the second half before the All Blacks went ahead again, making it 18-13 and making the end, coming in 13 minutes, all but inevitable. Then, in a play that many French will remember the way we remember Paul Henderson’s goal in 1972, two of the French players concocted an ingenious, breakout play and scored a try and a conversion and made the score 20-18 and then the whole French team, showing the moxie and heart and determination that their countrymen had accused them of lacking against Argentina that first night, held on and won. It is already being called the greatest game ever played in French rugby history (if not French sports history) and watching it on television was actually thrilling.

Then they played their Argentina game against England in the semi-final last night and pissed away their opportunity to make it to the final at home. You should have seen people’s faces here this morning. I’m glad we don’t live in Paris, where Parisiens had to put up with almost 50,000 Brits celebrating in their streets into the wee hours. This is one of the heroes of the French team, the massive Sebastian Chabal (called “l’homme de caverne” or, “the cave man”) being comforted by an English player as he weeps on the pitch after the game.

Okay, I promise no more rugby news. But it is fascinating to be in the midst of another country’s obsessions and see them go through something that to your eyes seems silly. But then you remember your own conniptions over whatever team or sport you project your own hopes on to. Hell, I’m following the Leafs from here at the beginning of another already-lost season, so I know how the fans of les bleues feel.


In other news

Max has learned how to do the Sudoko puzzles and we're all delighted. We no longer regret teaching him how to count to nine. This is him on the way to Toulouse.

In the grip of the grippe

One final reason you haven’t heard from Narbonne in a while is that I’ve been battling the flu since Tuesday and am still not 100%. Please send chicken soup, as I’ve eaten all the chicken soup Anne made.

Being sick, which means doing nothing, gave me time to take inventory, here at the 2 ½ month mark in France. We have left the French honeymoon behind and this is French life. The season has changed, we have routines. Some impressions have hardened. It’s strange sometimes to be doing all the things we might do at home here – like run out of toilet paper, crave a movie, get sick, leave the homework too late – only against the backdrop of another place. We are who were are, here as we were in Canada, and sometimes the immutability of our usness – the mix of our desires, personalities, habits – gives a surreal tinge to life in France. Because the permanence of our characters, the shape of our family unit, our goals in life, our flaws and challenges, only makes our time here feel even more temporary. I realized this week that when we go home we will not be different. We will have had some incredible experiences and grown in certain ways, but we will fit back into our lives the same way you retake your seat in a cinema: a little bit of jostling and then you’re there and the seat is only just beginning to cool.

I’m not sure how I feel about this thought. I don’t know if Anne agrees or even if I’ll agree with myself down the road some, but in stating it, it forces me to ask myself the question whether I came to France to change something. I know I found my life in Toronto to be too raucous, too distracting. I did too much. I know when I came to France I wanted to do less: to focus and hold a thought, to relearn how to concentrate. And I can do that here, but I wonder if I ever thought I’d be able to import it home. Or if it’s home where the change will have to take place, if anywhere. I don’t think there’s a judgment inherent in any of this. I was living the life it pleased me to live in Toronto, even though I was aware of the limits it placed on me and the stresses it created. I became aware that I couldn’t keep going like that if I wanted to experience any deepenings in a smaller range of my life, and certainly this was one of the motivating factors in coming to France (a factor that makes being in France secondary to not being in Toronto), and yes, these deepenings seem possible here. The question is what to do afterwards.

Maybe I’m still fevered …

One more thing. As the fall takes hold here and the madness of our summer and the summer of those we know at home becomes more distant, we’re aware of everyone settling back into their routines. We hear an echo of all the lives we’re a part of and we miss you more because of it. Keep our seats warm, okay?

This episode of On the Via Domitia brought to you
by three very nice-looking boys. Why don't you drop them a letter?

Did you know?

Dept. of Technical Know-How

If you like any of the pictures on this blog, you can click on it and you'll get a full-screen shot, clear as day, printable and everything.

Just thought you'd like to know.

(Still raining here, and grey, and cold, and we might have fleas in the bed, and the children smell bad.)