Rue Servandoni

Something I absolutely love is the view as you walk down rue Servandoni towards Saint Sulpice. You get a little close up of the curvy Baroque bit of the church, set against a tiny bit of sky. Rue Servandoni is so narrow, pretty and cobbled and the church is so huge in front of you that you can only see this lovely bit of it, like a detail in a painting. There is also something wonderful about knowing that at the other end of the rue Servandoni it's the Luxembourg Gardens.

Ilminster

'If he's only five, just say he's four if anyone gets on the bus', says the bus driver, 'and then you don't need to pay for him'. And the only thing that surprises me is that the busdriver doesn't call me 'Sweetheart' while he's at it! Nearly everyone else does. 'I'm so sorry Sweetheart' when I call up the hospital and I don't get to talk to Mummy. 'My darling, my ducky', even if you are only buying a packet of envelopes. A lovely Postman Pat type world where it's normal to be nice to everyone and go smiling your way down the street. The funny thing is that if you come from Paris it's all rather a shock. Suddenly there is no need to look even half way decent. This kind of niceness would see straight through the superficial you think happily, with your hair a bit wet and your jeans a bit grubby. We sit in a friend's back garden looking out over the middle of Ilminster, over the Minster itself, a lovely rosy golden stone, and on beyond to the hills and the hedges and a summer sky, pale hazy blue. Fluffy cats drift in and out amongst the tall wild daisies. Life seems suddenly too precious to be living it anywhere but here.

Since it is only get to get even worse, I help Mummy up and down the stairs, switching on her oxgen machine, trying to think how happy I am. When I am with her, the only good thing is now. And even when I leave and come home I pinch myself saying 'aren't you lucky, she is still with us'. Normal tribulations are smaller and something of a relief even in this context. So I think what the hell if the phone that hasn't been fixed for the last four months isn't fixed for another four months? All that time I can concentrate on a nice little thing, shelving any greater concerns for moments of total quiet. Or, maybe I could so fill up my life with little worries, that I would never ever have the total quiet. You sort of wonder if this isn't why humans are so naturally worried. What a handy emotion ! You can scoop it up, about widening cracks in the wall, leaks that need fixing, children's schooling, wrinkles or whatever someone else thinks they can worry you about and conveniently forget the whole wretched business of life, and death. So thank God for worries. Bring them on! I should find myself a few more of them!

Book Club

There you are all alone and intimate in a separate world, the privelidge of good books and blossoming love, so why would you want to get up and have a chat all about it amongst a large group of friends? I was very nervous about the invitation to my first Book Club. Dutifully I read the book, loved the first half, and then pushed my way through a gruesome second half just in time for the big day. We were invited for eight thirty. At about half past ten we sat down for dinner. By now I had learnt all about breast enlargements, and reductions, thigh and tummy reductions, and how to have the wrinkles around your eyes removed. Apparently there is a great method, totally invisible that gets rid of the little curvy bit under your eye when you smile and then lifts up any droopy lids. The cost is just 1500 euros (maybe per eye or maybe for both) and a couple of weeks wearing dark glasses. Dinner started. There was a little talk about the French education system, the problem of bi-lingual children, tutoring to keep up, and then, out of the blue someone mentioned that she had taken her mother in law shopping for a swimming suit. And here, for me was the revelation of the evening. At eighty one has no more pubic hair. Indeed the mother in law is quite bald in that area! I wasn't alone. It was a revelation for everyone round the table. Discussion of the book followed, briefly. At round midnight we left and a friend dropped me home, dying she said, to get to bed, and read 'People Magazine' that someone at the Book Club had just passed on to her. No-one quite knows what the book will be next month. And to be honest I don't mind if it is a little gruesome. In the meantime I shall be feeling happy that for the moment at least I still have some pubic hair!

I was accosted at Oscar's school yesterday. The teacher was looking a little embarassed. She said 'Does Oscar really like his cardigan?' So I said, 'well yes I hope he does'. It is a happy hand me down and it has a dog on it, a big red number 8 and a hood. Oscar has been wearing it for about the last two or three years so there is no longer any problem with the cuffs trailing in paint and nutella. 'Ah' she said, and then Oscar piped up 'I do like my cardigan Mummy'. So then the teacher said 'Well is it Oscar who always wants to put it on?' And it was then I realised. Either she thinks I don't want to explain to Oscar that he is actually growing or she thinks I am loopy enough not to have noticed it myself. Kindly I reassured her this was not the case, that he had indeed another, bigger, cardigan for the summer, but to be honest for the last seven months neither he nor I have taken off our winter woollies. So I saved her my reflections on my own wardrobe and came back thinking how wierd is that. Oscar has had a new pair of trousers every six weeks because they get huge holes in the left knee. He has a new coat, masses of new shoes. But what she picks up on is his cardigan. Is it that she is really too frightened to mention his hair? And here one realises one is a victim of one's circumstances. Oscar has golden hair which used to fall in ringlets like a cherub. The ringlets have fallen out and the hair has darkened a little. But clean and in the sunshine it is a lovely golden mop around his head. About half of the people I meet - Pierrot in the countryside, aged 75, particularly, try to tell me that short hair is part and parcel of being male, as if I might have missed this. Now I know that if Oscar's hair was mousy and straight, it would probably be short too. But no one else knows this. They just think - 'Poor demented thing, she doesn't know her child is a boy'. And now we can add 'Poor demented thing, she doesn't know he's actually growing!'

It's very easy to get into gambling. I'm there already, two weeks of O wanting a Ferrari and Euromillions papers are all over this table. The simple next step is taking out a subscription to the lottery, and I can hardly wait! Of course it is much easier (and cheaper!) to get a little hope into one's life with some simple seed-sowing. A packet of sunflower seeds and their huge yellow suns on golden afternoons loom into my mind's eye (rather than the slightly more realistic slug chewed remains of a sunflower seedling) and life goes on, bolstered somehow. But now O wants a Ferrari simple pleasures have been rather pushed aside. There we all are watching some ex-army looking chap smiling his head off having a whale of a time with the roof off and the Sicilian landscape whizzing past him in Ferrari's latest 'California' on a utube test drive. And I think to myself of course why wouldn't it be better than the jolly old Renault Scénic? For some reason R found this difficult to believe when he turned up here the other night. Until now the only delight that cars have ever given me has been the odd parking triumph. But now I have been reading to O his well thumbed and sellotaped copy of the magazine we got given on the motorway and where he found this treasure, night after night after night, I am beginning to wonder if O is perhaps not onto something that I have sadly overlooked. So when I turned up at O's school the other day and his teacher asked me if it was true that we were buying a Ferrari, I just smiled at her, and said simply 'well, we're trying!'.

Another thing that should never be under-estimated. A decent pair of lungs. Mummy can now only talk to me for nine minutes and even then with difficulty. She doesn't have enough huff.

The thing that really hit me about the film Chanel was the incredible effect of a good haircut. Also incredible was, of course, the effect of a pretty smile as most of the film Coco is not smiling. In fact she is looking pretty sullen. So when she does smile, gorgeously, and with the great haircut, she looks stunning suddenly.

Most of the time I just rely on smiling and hope for the best but today I can stop smiling, I have just had a haircut. But as it happens I am grinning from ear to ear because after about 12 years, I now really like my hairdresser. We scraped along for years talking about films and I often liked ones I clearly shouldn't have done. Then we discovered roses. But now, we have discovered our mutual aging! What a huge topic this could become. It started simply. I said, what could you do to make my cheeks look a bit chubbier? And we were off. Now I know about his wrinkles and what he does about them and how much a quick collagen injection to the cheeks costs and how often you have to get it done. I feel as if we have just had kids in the same room. We are intimate and we laugh our heads off about stuff. A good haircut, and a huge smile. No wonder everyone was smiling back at me in the metro coming home. Until now I've always thought I'd quite like to be living with a pediatrician, someone who knows about cars, electricity, banging nails in the right place. All wrong. Now I know I just need someone who can wield a hairdryer and all the rest would fall into place. With a bit of practice I could even do it myself! Or even, more simply, just nip back to my friendly hairdresser a little more often.

V brought over an article in the Sunday Times supplement about how children don't make you happy. That in fact people without children are happier than those without. Which I would have simply put down to a huge lack of sleep and too much washing. But not so, children don't make you happy even after they have flown the nest, according to the research. Which seems surprising. Because if you took tiny individual activies they could make you heaps happier. Just the lettuces, for example. At Gamme Vert Chloë chose them. Then she and Saskia split up all the tiny little invidual plants (30 of them) and then they planted them, somewhat haphazardly with Oscar. Everyone was happy about that, digging holes and stuffing them in and then watering them. So should not I be feeling the combined happiness of all of us? Because instead of just my happiness there were four of us feeling terribly happy, them more because of the planting, me because I know how wonderfully bountiful they will look, and indeed taste. When you think that all that planting time they could have been yelling at each other, it makes the whole experience even more delightful. A bit like people feel at church, one supposes.
The other side of the coin, the combined misery of the children hurling abuse at each other about who is to sit where at the table, for example, is simply too appalling to dwell on.

Tulips

A funny thing about my lilac. I have been wishing and wishing it to come out, and it is, almost. And yet I see now that the same sunshine that is speeding it along is speeding up my tulips too. I adore the tulips, all bright red in the lush green grass and don't want them to go over ever. Yet they will probably in about a week at most now it's so much warmer. They are just at that wide open stage with the yellow middle showing. And it reminds me of when Chloë was little and I was so dying for her to walk and you don't realise then that as soon as she walks she stops the gorgeous crawling, that lovely pit pat noise that babies make. At least with the tulips they should come back.