The Fizz that’s the Bizz

Posted on September 8, 2011 by emmacalin

Phew! I just read yesterday’s blast from the saloon bar. So – today I’m gonna stick to some nice soft subjects like the things we do for our kids. On my twitter tree branch today I met a lady who makes the most beautiful jewellery (Keri Kalwaytis @GardenVibe ) . Seeing the pictures sent me back to when one of the kids had to take part in a “Young Enterprise scheme” at school. I believe that many such activities amount to going home and getting the wrinklies to sort it out. So, I (the team) came up with jewellery making. Several gawky adolescent boys with wavering voices and hair trigger embarrassment issues were set to work with delicate silver wire and mini pliers that seemed to get lost in hands the wrong size for their arms. In the end I (the team) took over production, supply chain and packing. It was a great team effort which was awarded with all manner of entrepreneurial back slapping and speeches from local business folk. I was proud. In fact I was so proud that it nearly wiped out my disappointment at being awarded a B for one of the essays I had helped to shape.

However, nothing has ever erased my shame surrounding my daughter’s poetry class at school. Now, she hates poetry as do the kids of most poets. She also hated French. One day she came home in despair. Her world had ended. She had to write a poem. When I could no longer bear the torment of my child…..I wrote it myself. That day I had been standing on a bridge in reflective poet mode.(You kinda wander looking wistful and fay yet with a secret distant intelligence playing on your face like folks on arty TV shows. You have to keep an eye out for traffic. A lot of poets get squashed). Small craft in the Thames were at slack water limbo until the tide turned and their ropes once again took up the strain. I thought of the currents of our lives as we are pulled – often by forces unperceived and how maybe we could use this as a metaphor for the creak and stretch of our souls as we cope in the stream of time. I scribbled out the poem and she copied it – declaring that it was my normal purple “I’m an artist” gush. Well, I was publishing a fair bit in those days, but she had a critical point I thought. I heard no more of it until it was parents’ night. I was met at the hall entrance by an excited young teacher who took me to a notice board to show me……yes you’ve guessed it – my poem. She declared that the child (she was about 12), had a special talent and asked if anyone in the family was “an artist”. I put on the commonest of accents and threw in a few grammar errors to show that none of that posh stuff was for me like. I even asked if it could get in one of them apology books where there was loads of different poems. The rest of that year was a torment for the poor child. She was hailed as a poet and lost all of her cred with the Bermondsey Gangsta Girls. I fought back with a few rap rhyme lines that she trotted out and kinda made it back in. The teacher left and I promised never to intervene again.

But, I did. My biggest shame was the Sherbet fountain slogan competition. One of the kids had left a wrapper and I read that you could make up a jingle and win a BMX bike. Now, none of the kids really liked sherbet but I used to buy them out of nostalgia and my love of liquorice. Well, I made up the jingle and sent it off with the wrapper. My line was “It’s the liquorice lick with the fizz that’s the bizz”. Now – come on – not bad eh? All your Wordsworths and poet laureates – eat your hearts out. Several months later a huge box of sherbet arrived when I was awarded some kinda prize. But who the bloody hell won???? Must have been some big name poet with a publishing contract. I refuse to accept that it was a 10 year old who just wanted a bike.

Emma thinx: Honesty is the best policy-if you can afford the premiums.

Baloney and trap

Posted on September 7, 2011 by emmacalin

So – why don’t I do some kinda shock jock analysis of everything that needs sorting out in the world? Well, fortunately I don’t need to because I heard on the UK news that all of the trouble during the recent loot-fest was caused by “The Feral Underclass.” Both the Minister of Justice and the Mayor of London have identified this group as the baddies. Dear oh dear – perhaps industry can get itself out of recession by manufacturing millions of traps baited with fashion trainers and iPods. The Mayor of St Savinien has a similar scheme to get rid of feral cats but without the iPods. But – there is a serious issue here and that sent me in search of statistics. Since I live in France I get to see the UK from afar and since I’m English I get to see France from some kinda tangent. If there’s one thing to get me craving some nice anecdotal evidence, it is the pursuit of statistical answers. The distribution of Wealth in France is less equal than in the UK according to the Financial Times. (The top 10% own 61% of the wealth as opposed to 56% in the UK). These figures are a little old but they show that there is no huge difference. Youth unemployment rates are higher in France than in the UK i.e. 20% against 23.4% (First quarter of 2011).

Now, there are innumerable papers and studies and if you really wanna learn up, I recommend Eurostat Home. So – where does that get a scholastically challenged middle aged romance writer? Simple – it gets me talking to the taxi lady, the mechanic who towed my car and the truck driver who delivered our building materials. All of these guys presented themselves as absolute gentlepersons who could just as well have been schoolteachers or lawyers. In a nutshell they were “educated”. The minimum wage in France is 1,365 Euros per month.($1918) and £1,085 ($1734) in the UK. Prices are higher in France so effectively there is little difference. We have class issues here in France too. So far no one has turned feral, although a few rugby players look a bit wild.

So, when I hear senior UK leaders describing tranches of the population as a “feral underclass” I really do wonder where we go from here.(Well, it has me staying in France!). We need to include everyone in the aims of our world, we need to define the nature of our societies, we need to think about the system of parallel communities that has grown up around the multi cultural experiment. And we need love enforcement. These days I kinda re-live the spirit of my childhood. All adults are looking out for all kids. The Jesuit quotation “Give me the child till it is seven and I will show you the man” has a lot of clout here. Now, I spent a good part of my life in those south London streets among the feral kids. I’ll tell you something about kids. THEY ARE KIDS and we’re all terrified of them very largely because an educated elite class has “expertised” the things we knew as wisdom and told us we were stupid, brutal and old fashioned. Their liberal dictatorship ordered us stand aside while they sorted out society. The intellectual overclass CRIMINALISED THE PRACTICE OF WISDOM. If you need a class enemy – that is where you start. The traps will catch the ferals.

Wow! I’m really becoming a right old cow.

Emma thinx: Wisdom – truth in unbranded trainers.

Internationale cuisine

Posted on August 27, 2011 by emmacalin

Curry – that most British of foods and possibly the most non French. A few days ago I decided to have a curry bash and invite a few folks. All morning I have been mixing and matching Balti, Madras and Korma sauces. I’ve drained the dahl, browned the boeuf and chopped the chicken. Nothing can go wrong! As I wait for the event to start I try not to think about those very few occasions when dinners and soirées have – well – needed on the hoof adjustments. I think the worst food was when I had decided to serve whitebait as a starter for the first time. I dumped a big wedge in a hot wok and dug them out as a kind of mashed fish block. I just told the guests it was high fibre pate with eyes.

But probably one of the worst dinner parties I ever held was when I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Comrades were always ravenous and survived on dry crusts and revolution jam. What they didn’t know was that I had only joined because I just wanted to be a member of SOMETHING. A guy came round selling his revolutionary newspaper and told me I was a down trodden daughter of toil. I was young with kids, debts and a bum job so it rang a bell. When the comrades found out I had a gas stove and a saucepan I kinda became a culinary apparatchik, but with the emphasis on the chick. If these guys had overthrown the government and seized power, a citizens’ committee would have appointed ME as ministress of cuisine (except that would have been both sexist and bourgeois). So, the comrades came for dinner. Talk was intellectual and inflamed with hatred of the Trots, Communists and the league of General Purpose Reds. WE were the only pure Socialists. I was really pleased that I had joined up with the right stuff because I wasn’t sure if I was a communist or not and I could just have easily fallen in with them. As dinner ended, the bearded head comrade stood and indicated that we should all stand and sing a song called “The Internationale”. Well, I guess all you guys out there know the words (check it out here). The comrades clenched fists and sang through what seemed like an hour of revolutionary fervour, all the while glaring at me and I tried to mime, hum and control nervous giggles. By this time my horny handed husband of toil was on the phone to the Maggie Thatcher to see if they could send in the Army. (That poor man – he just had to take so much of my nonsenses and fads). I think I was the first person they had met who didn’t know the words. Now – If they’d gone for Abba I’d have sung “Fernando”.

And whilst the echoes of the Internationale still resonate in my memory, I watched a small section of the Tour of Spain cycle race yesterday. In the commercial break they ran ads for Pay Day loans and ambulance chasing lawyers. To me it just kinda painted a picture of what’s going on and how we are.

Curry time approaches. At least I know how to sing “La Marseillaise”.

Emma thinx: Revolution – 360 degrees of Elites.

Carry on up your organ

Posted on August 24, 2011 by emmacalin

Very few words are worked as hard as “organ”. As I was saying yesterday I was at Saintes. Shortly before my car self terminated (French reflexive verbs are so expressive – we need more in English), I heard the organ playing in the cathedral and had to pop in. I know very little about music and so to me it is a form of magic. The organist was having a right old bash and was creating some arabesque sounds that I had never heard before. I lit my candle to Saint Universe of Beautiful Buildings and carried on feeling in a bit of a spiritual belly dancing mood. It lasted until I came to a halt in a road by the river. Before phoning the dépannage I asked a senior gent what the road was called “It is the road by the river – everyone knows this. But anyway – it will be your battery – oh yes it is always that – I have had awful problems avec myself.” I thanked him and waited for the tow truck in the road by the river. Luckily the driver was a member of the “everyone” tribe who knew where I was. The everyone tribe is pretty big in France and they know most things.

A little later the word organ resurfaced. I told an acquaintance that I had taken to going to a farm shop for my veg’. “You have to be sure that no chemicals are used – otherwise it is no different and it won’t be organic.” She assured me. Well, it tastes delicious and is much cheaper than the supermarkets. The term organic has always been too difficult to me – but generally I find a fair bit of grit inside the lettuce. At least you know it’s been grown in dirt and there must be some carbon in there somewhere.

And of course, there are the organs that concern Romantic novelists. Really I think that there should be a special Organ Thesaurus for we scribblers. We all cast about for some new and perfect way to describe the ACT. I’ve read and written enough cores and manhoods to create a novel set in a monastery apple orchard. The very word organ arouses the British sense of “Carry On” film double entendre like little else. For this reason no one has ever written a Romance where one of the stars has an organ in their front room or even a chest of drawers. Carry on!

I picked up some good words today. The French call computers “Ordinateurs”. They now shorten this to “Ordi”. Well, that’s what I’m gonna call this little machine from now on. They also have an expression for a particular kinda guy. The term is “un chaud lapin”- that is to say a hot rabbit. I see that the charges against DSK were dropped in New York. Ah well, back to the burrow.

Emma thinx: Stuff means trouble.More stuff means more trouble.

Staying on track.

Posted on August 20, 2011 by emmacalin

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Some folk just seem to skim coolly above most of us don’t they? They float noiselessly between their past and their future triumphs. As they pass they give a regal nod at us mudlarks scrambling for pennies and scrabbling to pick up the shopping that has just fallen on the supermarket floor when our eternal shopping bag handle fell short of eternity. (Is this whole everlasting carrier bag lark just a way to get folk back to the idea of FAITH. Some of these churchy guys are pretty sharp at psychology). Anyway – back to the mud. Last night I went to a piano recital at one of my neighbour’s château. YES – that’s right – OK – My neighbour has a château and I went to a recital. Now – In France I am foreign, therefore I am neither posh-oui nor posh-non. In England I could go to such an event but I would have to keep me gob shut cos one squeak of the old Sahff Lundin vowels would have me sent to the kitchens to put me uniform on. However, sometimes you come across a cool dude who just has to be admired. The recital was given by the superb Alice Rosset. She is a native of Charente Maritime and the region is rightly proud of her. She played Bach, Bartok, Rachmaninoff and Brahms. She was fantastic. I had not heard much Bartok before – I think it’s for very sophisticated folk who put their clothes on back to front and walk backwards in order to understand the shadows cast by the future on the fleeting present of appearance and expectation. SEE – I could be ARTY. Anyway – there she is playing this beautiful music and the 2140 hours to Bordeaux rattles past. Was she fazed? Non! She just played on. The girl’s a trouper and she walked on the stone driveway of the château with no shoes. If her everlasting carrier bag broke she’d just lift the shopping off the floor with a twitch of her eyebrow. Bravo!!

Now, the above ramble reminds me of some advice I received in bed from a very cynical guy. He told me that you could never beat the English class system – but you could merely side step it. You can never quite get the vowels and arrogance of the posh Anglo. So – be foreign. At first I thought he was joking but this guy used to take me to receptions and the like at places like embassies and the Foreign and Come on it’s all my wealth Office. There was no way I could pull off the My Fair Lady Act, so I went accent-uh-sexi-rissima. I don’t know what they thought – but no one asked me what school I’d been to or if I had been at the races when The Right Honourable Foreskin – Smythe had won the golden fleece.

Hair dryer humid wind here today. It’s a greenhouse of bursting juice. If you fell dead to the soil here you would decay in seconds among the worms and eat-you-pedes of NATURE. Life is sweet juice. The market will close with strangers hosing away to gutters whatever is left of what you nearly became….

Emma thinx: Drink deep the juice. In the hour glass is sand.

Reverse Parking

Posted on August 19, 2011 by emmacalin

Sitting here in the late afternoon with the temperature at 28 degrees, it seems almost inconceivable that the Municipal Gardens in Bournemouth UK were nearly washed away yesterday. I know I’m supposed to be writing about Charente Maritime, France and writing novels but if there is one thing that can raise any UK nostalgia from me it is Bournemouth. To me, it is a magical place of sepia sadness and lollipop longing – a childhood of sandcastles lost, trodden and overwhelmed – of proud flags on sticks defiant as the holiday ended and the dark satanic life of subservience called you back in to be counted and controlled. (Ooh- I was a terrible pupil. Those guys were stealing my free life and replacing it with punishment.) I used to live quite near Bournemouth and all my life I’ve gone back there, both with family and alone – several times to write poems in the course of loves and desires gone wrong, gone good or not going at all. I turned on the late BBC South News on my planet Murdoch satellite and saw a fabulously Municipal spokesman telling folk that the show would go on. Of course it will! I know I put up a poem yesterday but here is another one about Bournemouth Park. Check it out here.

From out of a blue sky this morning at about 8 o’ clock a tremendous smack and shatter of thunder stunned the whole town. There followed monsoon style rain which lasted for about 2 minutes. My eco water butts filled and all day I’ve had a kinda full water not got dem empty butt blues feeling. Think I’d like to write a song one day.

One of the things to get used to here in France is the difference between cuts of meat. This evening I’m serving coeur de basse cote de boeuf. Now to be honest, I had no idea what this meant in English. It looks like rump steak and the price per kilo would be that kinda bracket in the UK. I’m gonna cook up some onions and grill it for a couple of minutes. I had a quick peak on the internet and I could not see a kinda multilingual cut of meat chart. If anyone knows different please let me know.(Might be a big enough pull to get some google gold).

Gilles and I had a spin on the tandem. Dear Lord – we found a new hill near Les Nouillers. Dear Lord I’m getting old. I could hear his breathing was more or less normal. Sometimes the line between love and hate is very faint. Who said faint?

Emma thinx: Dribbling rivalry – oldies still wanna win.

Brass Banned

Posted on August 12, 2011 by emmacalin

I’m a relatively trusting soul. In the Tourist Information office of St. Savinien, there is a large poster advising you not to eat wild mushrooms. I trust the folks who created this work with all its intricate pictures and warnings of death and agony. I also trust a guy up the road who is a reputed maitre de mushrooms, a chef de champignons. Monday Gilles and I are invited on a funghi fest. You might be well advised to read this blog over the week-end……there may only be a couple of more episodes ever. Gilles is convinced that the guy is a true son of the soil and a bona fide rural wiseacre. If the Archers played in France, this chap would be Jethro Larkin. My American readers may not know that the “Archers” is a radio soap opera broadcast by the BBC. It’s a story of country folk. The poor talk with hick/rural accents and the rich talk with posh yah yah patronising voices.

Much politics over invitations, counter invitations, cancelled invitations and potential invitations. Since everyone knows everyone and everyone knows who went to whom and who has disputes and therefore did not, and who owes who and who should have been invited first, I sometimes think I will stay at home with all the lights off. Alternatively I could invite everyone for a mushroom spectacular….then I would know who really trusted me. As it stands we are doing lunch tomorrow for old Anglo/Franco/Americano work colleagues travelling South, and dinner for a local couple who are from “The North.” If you are from “The North” you are different. You have a natural affinity with the Brits. It’s all about darkness, rain, chips, beer, coal mines, brass bands and gritty Saturdays at Football matches in the cold sleet. Apparently Northern French find middle and southern French very difficult. In my view it’s probably because the regional accents of France are like fences in the Grand National. There are many fallers.

Friday night is Jazz night at the resto St.Savinien. These guys work so hard to make their business work. I’ll try and get a vid and put it up tomorrow. If any French person knows you are about to eat, are going out to eat, queueing for a kebab, sitting on a railway station bench with a sandwich, have food that is for a meal later they have to say “Bon appetit.” It’s a sacred mantra. If you’re about to eat – “Bon appetit.”

Emma thinx: Reincarnation – an everlasting buttonhole.

Bats!

Posted on August 10, 2011 by emmacalin

Bats – in St Savinien we have some very rare and endangered species. They live in the old quarry caves that pepper the town and also in our Préau (Charentais rustic car port/barn). Last night I sat in the garden being buzzed by dear little bats. Somehow the flap of their wings just inches from my face felt like a privilege. I just sat there, feeling the current of air created by their wings of stretched skin. It seemed like I was part of Nature. Then I went indoors to watch the world news. I felt that Nature was part of me and that I wanted to reject it. Kids under 10 years old out looting at 2am in Manchester UK. Tribal groups in Pakistan murdering each other when their enemy is poverty and lack of opportunity. I went back to the garden to see the bats and the stars.

Talking of stars – I woke up at 3 am and looked out of the window. In St. Savinien, Charente, 17350, there is very little light pollution. The sky at night in rural France is the most fantastic floor show. I remember it from mon enfance- before the cars and the madness of it all. Obviously it’s just a dome with holes pricked in to keep us fooled. All the same, I had to reflect on the painting by Titian in the National Gallery in London of Bacchus and Ariadne (Check it out here). I won’t bore you with the arty farty guff but it is a painting crammed with love and passion. Bacchus throws the crown of Ariadne into the heavens and above her it burns as an immortal constellation. If you’re able – go and see it. IT’S FREE. You don’t have to loot it or steal it. Several times a day you can get a free guided tour of selected works in the gallery. A deeply intelligent person will chat to you about the paintings. You will feel humbled and ashamed that you know nothing. At the end you will know more than you thought you could know. As a poor scum bag from darkest London with an average IQ destined for the honourless, wealthless drudge, I started to go see this stuff. It didn’t change the world but it changed me. Educators! Stop just jumping the kids through the hoops, then turning your back when they fall. Batter and discipline them until they know what they are worth! Just remember all those free tours and the sweet folk who lecture to anyone- ABSOLUTELY ANYONE – are part of civilisation and a law abiding world.

And finally a few words about La Bise – this whole Euro kissing thing but also taking in the hand shaking thing. If you were young and you were expected to kiss older folk and expect them to address you in a caring yet senior manner would you then go and smash up their home/shop/car/business? I tell you – you would not! Parallel so called communities have no hope. Community means everyone. Not this community or that community -teenage looters, ethnic rapists and Nazis are communities. In France the word has slightly more meaning…….but erosion and diversification do their work here too. Kiss before you smash. – Vive La France.

Emma thinx: Search for your darkness and see the stars.

Planted Evidence

Posted on August 8, 2011 by emmacalin

Regular readers will probably have gathered that I’m some kind of soft liberal pinko pacifist. Well, that’s the way I like to think of myself anyway. However, hidden in every pinkofist is a raving authoritarian fascist. News of rioting and looting by mobs of thugs in London both saddens and outrages me. I am a South London girl. If anyone in my family had ever had a silver spoon it would not have been shoved in their gob. Seemingly people have been in looted shoe shops trying out the sizes and styles. Now, if this doesn’t show that the British are a higher class of thug I don’t know what does. Whole families are turning up at stores with trollies and wheeling away televisions and washing machines. Police are being attacked with petrol bombs and angsting community leaders are already on the radio telling us the cause of the problem. YES!!!! It’s all the fault of the POLICE. Well, I never doubted it for one minute. Of course the police are to blame. They didn’t arrest all the terrorists before they blew up London. They didn’t arrest all the journalists who were hacking phones. They were not sufficiently sensitive to the community before they tried to sort out gun crime/mugging/drugs/burglary and deception by politicians. Just ban the bloody police and we can all live in lentil land, loving all our gun toting drug dealing neighbours. Bref – London police have a tough job. I lived in Brixton (South London) when it was just an all day, every day septic crime scene. A friend was punched in the face by a robber while she was holding her baby. He got her gold necklace and sneered. No Buddhist lentils on the boil today. Just me.

In St. Savinien, there is calm. Since La terrace nears completion I set out to obtain the finishing touches…..that is to say, plants. Tomorrow I will call a meeting of le tribunal de terasse and reveal my policy of green appeasement. I know they have been muttering about my wall to wall pavé. I’ve put on a photo of my green cred. Do you think it’ll be enough?

Now a word to all you would be builders and DIY optimists. In France they have a kind of sand called “sable de Remblai”. Some people call it rabbit sand and it is sold for putting the levelling layer under paving and cobbles. If you think you need say – 10 cubic metres, buy at least 20. I once tried reading Stephen Hawking’s book ” A Brief History Of Time”. Well, being a fellow genius it was easy to follow until I got to the issue of everything being compressed into a “singularity” whereby there was nothing from which came ALL. Now, of course I fully accepted all of the intellectual aspects of his mathematics – but it was only when I encountered rabbit sand that the subject really spoke to me. Much can truly compress into nowt!

Emma thinx: Singularity – what is the point of it?

Butcher Baker Soldier French

Posted on August 1, 2011 by emmacalin

To be one of the professional classes in the UK is a kind of shorthand for having a posh job as a lawyer, architect, doctor or dentist/headteacher etc. Now, I am sure that in the great cities of France, snobbery and all that “I’m better than you” stuff goes on. I’m not an expert on social class here but I can tell you that here in rural France the feeling is entirely different. Many moons ago in London when I was divorced and looking to get a life together I drove mini cabs, worked plucking turkeys and as a cleaner.(Check out my story from those days here).Some folk are great wherever they are. Some folk are arrogant pigs wherever they are. I can say that in the UK the “upper classes” generally treated me with surly superiority. The difference is embodied in the idea of respect. Quite simply tradesmen are still respected here. A plumber is a guru of plomb. A lorry driver is a guru of judgement and shunt. An artisan boulanger is a guru of cuisine and life.The French bemoan the fact that that there is a shortage of electricians and car mechanics. They believe that the reason is that less and less respect is shown for “trades”. They are right of course. One day there will be a super rich elite class here who will just buy underlings, snap commands and point at them with superior brusqueness. But it won’t be for a while I can tell you.The reason I got on to this is because today a further delivery of sand and cement arrived for Chateau Calin. My ex husband was a lorry driver and he was a sweet straightforward guy. (The world treated him like a piece of merde). We broke up when a lot of my posho pretensions (French speak, ART, Opera etc) pissed him off. The VM driver guy who brought the materials is a gent. He is a solicitor of sand. He is a guru of gravel. He is an accountant of aggregates. As the rasta boys used to say in South London – “Hey – RESPECT man”.

It has been hot. A couple of kids are here and they went to the young folks club. They went swimming in the river Charente. They don’t go to school locally and didn’t really know anyone. They were treated with friendliness and a sense of welcome and interest in them. Sometimes France gets a bad press from Brits. It’simple OK. In France the best and only thing to be in the world is French. So – Duh- be French. You’ve cracked it.

There are many mysteries of life in St. Savinien. One of them is the yellow recyclable waste sack. There is a rota. There are days and times for the collection of the sacks. Everyone thinks they know when these days are. Nobody says they got it wrong. It’s a French thing. I need to shrug more…..

Emma thinx: The world’s oldest profession is respect.