Bees

It's an unexpected entrance to a hive of bees. Giant life-like bull sculptures cavort on temple size columns at the gateway to the Park George Brassens in the south west of Paris. Before its reincarnation as a park and home to one of Paris' beehives, this used to be the site of a vast abbatoir and a horse market and a charming stone building with a clock tower and 'Viande à la Crié' sculpted into the stone (meat sold by shouting) still stands and attests to this noisy past. Arriving at the beehive where 60000 bees work together in each little hive seems as if it could be a huge adjustment in the magnitude of things. And in a sort of hare and tortoise way it is. A round the world trip is what it takes to make one pot of honey : 40,000 kilometres of endless bee flight. One teaspoon of honey represents the total life and flying span of 12 bees. After eight hundred kilometres of flight in only six or eight weeks a honey bee dies from pure exhaustion. And it gets worse! One queen bee lays 1200-1500 eggs every day, more than her own body weight. In a well kept hive a queen only goes out once in her whole three or four year lifetime of egg laying, and that is to mate with twelve males. They might be little, and their lives might be short, but their accomplishment seems thoroughly humbling. Even for the males, whose life seems, apparently, one of pure delight and honey eating (they are actually fed by the worker bees) it is in fact full of risk. His whole existence as he doesn't work ever, has one sole 'raison d'être' and that is to mate with a virgin queen. Sounds nice until you learn that the mating is done in flight and despite his especially much bigger eyes to help him perform well, this will certainly kill him. And if he isn't finished off doing his duty by a future queen, because he never meets one (virgin queens being very very rare), he will be pulled to bits and left to starve by the worker honey bees at the end of the summer as who can afford to keep feeding someone who is no longer serving a purpose? The males are left to die. Even the queen at the end of her life gets murdered by one of her own daughters in a new bid for queenship. So what in this scheme of things would be best, sitting around for a few months and waiting for suicide or murder, sitting around and laying eggs for years, waiting for murder, or buzzing off in the direction of an awful lot of flowers, to certain exhaustion? The bee-keeper opens the hive to show all the bees working away, and they seem so tiny and so fragile. A nasty wind can put paid to a virgin queen's virgin flight and a whole hive can die as a result. Nectar can only be procured if there isn't rain and a north wind at the critical moment. What better excuse could there be to create a blooming bee-bower, a little haven and refuge for a tired bee to stop and sip? Splurging for a little sipping. Roses and lavender here we come!

Combing the streets for old saucepans and smashing off the plastic handles appears to be common practice in France, even in charming tourist territory like Montmartre. It's called 'Recup' and it seems to take many forms. In Montmartre just after Christmas I saw a woman furtively whisk from her handbag quite a large saw which she then used to attack a discarded Christmas tree, swiftly severing the tree from the useful log that had been its base in a matter of seconds, before that too went into the handbag. Having walked around with quite a lot in a handbag but never a saw, I wondered if it was just during the post Christmas season that she kept her saw in there or whether it is a more permanent feature. Presumably there's always a bit of handy table leg or old chair that can be carved up if you only happen to have the right equipment to hand. Philippe, my neighbour in the countryside, was busy at the weekend squashing some hefty looking copper wire into ball shapes. It had apparently all come out of a transformer that he had bought for 15 euros. The wire itself, about 15 kilos of it, was going to sell for 5 euros a kilo. All he had to do was unwind it all from the transformer, and then put it all into an old oil drum cut in half with a fire in it to burn off any sticky bits. Then presto. Another friend makes clutch bags out of old tea towels. Someone else turned up at the gate in the countryside asking to take away an old metal stove that had come out of the kitchen. But what to do, if your neighbour thinks you should do the recup yourself? My wood burning stove came on a wooden crate, secured in a large metal cage. I offered it to Philippe. 'Oh', he said, with a look of real surprise, 'but you can turn that into a table. All you need to do is get a piece of glass or wood the right size.' And for that, all I need, clearly, is the right sized handbag.

Power tools

It weighs 91 kilos, is only just in through the front door and no one has the strength to move it further, and yet, to the delight of everyone, it is deemed, 'very cute'. Talk is already about changing it for something bigger, more powerful. It's my new wood burning stove that I have just bought from the internet to heat the whole house with. Even Claude, who I sent a picture of it to before I bought it, said that 'it looked bigger in the photo'. We are at Philippe's having a chat about power tools and logs. Confident that I've got something to say here, I mention that I have a friend who just went on a rafters building course and she found cutting through a beam with a chainsaw like 'cutting through cream' and sewing handbags was far more tricky. I'm preparing myself psychologically for weeks of chainsawing to stoke my new heating friend and I'm only glad that it is easier than sewing. Philippe takes me over to show me what I need. Something he calls a 'bandescie', maybe this is a 'banc de scie', a sawing bench. In any case it is a huge sawing machine. Apparently what takes the longest is turning it on. But we all agree nail scissors could suffice for my little cutie. In the countryside it's always down to size. How many kilowatts, how many square metres, the more the merrier. Philippe shows me the little bit of one his barns where he stocks his wood for his 'insert'. 'Your whole house could fit in there' he says, and it's true. Philippe's father in law says that chainsawing can be a nasty business anyway. You can saw off bits of logs and it's all going well and then one can jump up and hit you in the eye. Philippe says finally maybe I could just come round with a wheelbarrow and pick up any logs I need from his barn. He always has a stack of smaller ones for his cooker and they might just fit in the stove without exploding the sides. After all I won't be needing much, and he grins, and says 'yes really'.

Pure pleasure for only 30 centimes

It's a far cry from the 'Find it yourself, scan it yourself, and don't think you're going to get a bye bye and thank you for spending all your money in our shop, except maybe from a robot' philosophy. Carrefour can forget me, in future I'll be sipping free coffee in the members' softly lit underground café, 'degusting' a free chocolate, with George Clooney being zoomed in at me from an overhead screen. So, a dinky little Nespresso capsule in gold, or metallic pink is an awful lot more of a treat, expense wise than your average no name brand café corsé. But you'd expect that. Leggedy hostesses in gold silk blouses await you, open doors, initiate you into the marvels of the Nespresso concept. You're in a film setting, a little marble, a lot of white and black and soft lighting. Indeed if it wasn't for George Clooney, you might suddenly feel you were the star. It's a hommage to snobbism and a paradise for a tired soul in need of a pick-up. The 'star shop' on the Champs Elysées even has coffee candles that light up as you get close and waft out their delicious scents at perfect nose height. There are coffee machines presented as if they were rare treasures, the same as mine, but studded with pink sparkles, on pedestals by the door as you waltz in past the door openers. Who, in a life of washing piles, homework supervision, and bills would not fall for it? The only problem is getting through enough coffee to be able to go back to the Nespresso Boutique often enough and that means staying at home and getting through the washing pile. Thank God though, I'm not stuck here alone. Someone from the Nespresso Club even called me today and asked me how I was.

Savoir Vivre

A cold Saturday morning in February, 8 am and the Gare du Lyon station looks as if Paris was about to be hit by an earthquake. Lambs to an elegant slaughtering of their bank accounts, Parisians are off to the slopes. It’s de rigeur. In the same way you drink beaujolais all on the same day, so in February you zip down the Alpes. Indeed so much would everyone be blocking up the ski lifts all at once if they possibly could, the school holidays are designed in such a way they can’t, quite. There are three different starting dates for three different zones. Two weeks of half term February holiday are thus spread over six, and you only pay three times over the odds for a train ticket. Hubby is looking as grim as could be. We are laden with the left overs of Decathlon (a sports haven already emptied of ski stuff by mid January), Toffee, our dog, the two angels, literature for a week of cold, and copious picnique for the travels, heaven forfend we should be ripped off again. But what is worrying me most is not that we have just spent about 2000 euros to rub shoulders with our neighbours somewhere else, but all this to find snow, after the only mild week since November. Amazingly increasing taxi-sickness as we wind up the mountain in the final lag of the journey, brings increasing snow : a powdering becomes a drift. First one roof, and then all the roofs of the houses are covered no longer in tiles, but in steep corrogated iron, some of them rusting. In the shiny white landscape it’s like terracotta velvet. There is even a huge metal shovel with a long wooden handle outside the door, all the doors. Pleinpalais, our home for the week, is a little hamlet of nine houses, close to La Féclaz, a totally unheard of resort in the Savoie, and under a blue sky, it's as if the gateway to the heavens, or at least, a serious pack of wolves, should be very close. There’s no one there at all. Just the gentle crunch crunch under your feet, and a hugeness that comes from all the hedges having been snowed under and the craggy hills softened by the thick snow wadding. Even the streams are quietened: the water flows under an icy surface over the pebbles in silence.

A couple of hundred metres away there’s a ski lift, with a ski slope with absolutely no one on it. It is, according to the man sitting reading his newspaper in the cashdesk wooden cabin, too steep for children. And presumably a bit too limited for adults. So it too, is silent, un-moving.
Even in La Félaz itself, home to a more child-friendly chair lift, and a few cafés, it's quiet enough on the rise up to the top to appreciate that other worldliness of the snow covered, forested slopes. Under the sun the snowy carpet is sparkling like a million diamonds. Being here in this loveliness is clearly what the French would call ‘savoir vivre’.

Neptune

It's called Neptune. And amazingly, it lives up to its name. You pop off there, as you would to another planet. And find yourself astonished.

It's so huge, and marvellous that it doesn't seem at all like an old junk shop in the middle of run down (or as its property owners might prefer to see it - up and coming) Montreuil, but a place of total marvel, for it is as meticulously laid out and labelled as if was the Egyptian Dept in the Louvre.

You get the picture as soon as you walk in. The china and glass ware is all colour co-ordinated. First you get the yellow things, then the white ones, then the blue ones. The China is all set on table cloths, of the same colours, and decorated with glasses and carafes as if was all still in some nice grannie's sitting room. And everything has its place. There are several shelves simply dedicated to making old biscuit tins as becoming as absolutely possible. There are whole drawers of clean white gloves, tidily wrapped up in pairs with elastic bands round them, all clean, surprisingly white and in pairs. There are drawers of candles, several others of different sized knitting needles, buttons, threads. There are shelves of knives and forks and spoons, all in neat bundles, and pewter, carefully graded by size. There are sheets and table cloths and napkins, immaculately cleaned and folded and colour graded and sized. And the slightly less beautiful ones are upstairs, in their own colour coded, graded order. There is a book department where everything is in alphabetical order, and a children's game department where none of the bits appear to be missing. And a playing cards drawer. And you know that you'll never manage to see it all in this visit. As there's a whole warehouse full of furniture and electrical goods too.

But actually it's an outfit to help people. It sets out to employ people in trouble and put them into jobs and feed them. It has its own restaurant inside with singing canaries in cages. So it is thronging, in the most unusual way, with sales assistants who want to help you. And that of course is the downside. Everything of course has its price, neatly labelled. There is no getting away with offering half what's asked. An old lady who looks frightfully pleasant says "No" in a rather firm way. And you smile weakly, cough up, and then come home rejoicing. You're happy to have paid over the odds. and made loads of people better off. And you're just absolutely extatic when you've found a double pack of Charles and Lady Di playing cards. One pack of Charles and one of Lady Di, both looking so sweet, in their engagement photos. All that in Montreuil. No wonder it's up and coming.

Mr Barbe's 'heating' system

It's too easy in a town house. You flick the switch and on goes the heating. There's nothing to talk about. But in Maisons les Chaource, in the middle of winter, snow falling, and Mr Barbe's splendid 'reversable air-conditioning' installation as the only solace between me and minus 15 degrees outside, a whole new world of conversation opens up. It turns out that 'reversible air-conditioning' only works when it's not too cold. On a balmy day I get the remote control and point it up to my little beast on the wall, and hey ho, 20 degrees of warmth. My neighbours are in total delight. They got Mr Barbe to do a bit of work for them too, but he had already started to show the more petulant side of his character in my house before the work in theirs had progressed too far. Then Mr Barbe had a heart attack and died. And while I get out hot water bottles and a new secret bed warming miracle in the shape of a hairdryer to toast the bed, my neighbours assure me they are having to open their upstairs windows and swan about naked. They have installed, at vast expense and days of professional expertise, something called an 'insert'. It puffs heat right around their houses. And only takes about 1200 euros of winter wood to fuel it. I stall . And think about a little wood-burning stove from the 1950s that hubby acquires from Philippe next door from his auction sales. It takes me about six months to find the appropriate size pipes that are no longer standard, and then Claude comes round and tells me that it would all be fine. Of course it could work with coal, and sit next to the fridge, and he could fit it up to the chimney if my own programmed workman never turns up (which appears to be the case) but did Mr Barbe ensure that the chimney was secured with 17 cm of plaster or cement all round it where it touches the beams and floorboards. Claude says he couldn't sleep the night if he installed it for me but there was no 17cm of safety. I go round to Philippe for a drink. Amazingly 17cm of plaster just pops up in the conversation. No, says Claude, the only solution is to put a new wood-burning stove that can take 50cm logs, so quite a big one I'm fearing, in the sitting room. Again I stall. I have a huge log pile. It's about 3 metres high and 5 metres long but it is to block out my neighbours' new extension. I cvouldn't possibly reduce it in any way. Strikes me the easiest thing is to turn the oven on in the kitchen, stay in Paris, or go to bed. But Claude is insistant.He tells me that I can pay him in two goes. That I can buy a second hand stove. That his wife Francoise can give me all the good websites to find one. We're about to have a whole week in the countryside. He could do it for me. But I know if he does it will be the end of an era. I'll be naked upstairs like everyone else and conversation will revolve around the as yet uncharted territory of axes and power tools.

How you make the decision to let your child walk home from school alone

This is a story of a friend of mine. She's able to laugh loudly and holding a huge drill, harness a rose to a crumbly stone wall. Even more amazing, she can re-do her daughter's bedroom and make it groovy, when there wasn't even any paint falling off the walls. And so she called in all her friends, several of them professional decorators to give advice on where to start. The bedroom was pink, with bookshelves that had been handmade with hearts cut into the brackets. The curtains were toile de jouy in pink and green. There was an iron bed and a pink cupboard with little curtains in it. So of course, aged 11, it was just an embarassment. One of the decorators finally suggested that L could start by picking out a fabric for the curtains and then going from there to choose the walls, the new colours for the furniture, and the pictures. All was done. There was a trip to Ikea for the fabric. Then another to an out of town DIY store for some wallpaper. The ex-husband was brought in to repaint furniture. The mum in law was sent off with the fabric to re-do the curtains. The wallpaper went up, the other walls were painted. And I was shown the room. In the place of the old fashioned cast iron bed there was a mezzanine. The fabric was a patchwork of bright fun colours. The cupboards co-ordinated. The shelves, with the hearts, were the only remnant of a distant, childish age. On the wall was a pscyhadelic townscape. Really it was great. A week or two passed. I am on my way to the supermarket where I meet my friend. Turns out that morning she had forgotten to take any notice of the 'Please knock before entering sign' that was pasted up on the door of L's new bedroom. She had just fumbled her way in, sleepy-eyed and maternal to remind L to put something in her satchel. L looks at her, listens , and says 'Could you knock next time'.

The moon

A really daft person asked me how it felt after Mummy died the other day. And so I started thinking how best to describe it.

And this is what I thought. That it's like the sun and the moon. And in the same way that when we look at the moon it seems silver and lit from within, but that it's really the sun that makes the moon all lit up and silver. So with love. My mother always thought I was wonderful, but really it was her love for me that made me seem that way. So that now she isn't there any more I feel a little tarnished suddenly.

Putting out the rubbish

Montreuil to those that love it, has its own particular charm. It is on the metro. It is really almost Paris. And the prices are far nicer. It might be a suburb but it is a huge place probably best known until two years ago as a last bastion of communism. It is a mishmash of mostly uninspired social housing and little workers' cottages and towering old factory spaces with enviable looking glass work. So as a haunt for artists, and all those who don't need the social shoulder rubbing of the west of Paris it is perfect. And it's picturesque. People just dump their unwanted mattresses, cupboards, sofas on the pavement and miraculously they get taken away, some time later, often by gypsies who roam around with old prams and heavy metal bars.

Our house is one of the smaller ones. And probably fullest. It's only when I really have no energy that I find myself suddenly looking at an overflowing cupboard in a new way. Totally unable to cope with it. Actually no one noticed that I filled up three dustbin bags with only one shelf of one kitchen cupboard last week. Doing it was frightful. I just tipped baby's plates and cups and bottles with their cute little teddies and drinking nozzles into my unfeeling bag and kept on and on. Paricularly difficult to chuck out was one scallop shell that I'd kept. In the way one knows that there is a pretty place for a shell like that. In it went with the pale pink and pale blue cute plastic, and hey ho, one sparkly cupboard, fit for a mansion.

Until the next morning. Everyone in our house has woken up before the alarm. 'Oh' I say, 'that's very early' when I see hubby wide awake and striding into the shower and it's not yet seven. I get a dreadful look. 'Sounded as if someone was breaking into the house, but I think it was only gypsies crashing open the dustbin.' 'Oh I say' innocently. 'Yes', says hubby grumpily, 'it's all over the pavement.' And indeed, in order to get outside our front door, it was necessary to grab a broom and start sweeping the dustbin or rather all my kitchen shelf back into a dustpan. Of course, the angel looking out at the debris from the window spotted the lovely scallop shell. 'Oh Mummy, there's a lovely shell.' I was just putting some nutella on bread. 'Oh really'. And then five minutes later floods of tears. 'Mummy the lovely shell has gone'.

'Don't worry angel' I hear myself saying, 'I'll get you another one.'

Montmartre

On the days when the childish joy of climbing has escaped you completely, then nothing is more perfect than Montmartre. The hill is neither too steep, nor is it impossible. On days when you are absolutely out of any oomph whatsoever there is the Funicular. In a rather too modern looking unmanned space ship you get whooshed up the equivalent of 200 steps for the price of a metro ticket ! And of course you can come down the same way.

But whichever way you go, when you get to the top, there’s something about being there that makes you realise your cares are still right down at the bottom. You have left them with the people who are traipsing about below, while the new you floats over Paris, at one with the clouds and sky.

Or you can sneak into Sacré Coeur with a zillion tourists, a little cynical that you could find anything in this mecca of tourism to interest you. Until you sit down and gaze up and feel that quiet that comes from being surrounded by quiet people. As if you had turned off your very own ticking.

And then you can skip down the steps again, taking photos of lovers when they ask you to, or stopping for a while on the steps to listen to buskers, wondering why on earth you are here and not busking yourself round Europe, and being quite happy with the answer.

And then, at one with the whole world you can have a great cup of coffee in a café that still looks like one, and pop into a junk shop and come out having daftly said to the owner that yes you must absolutley have the old red velvet arm chair that you have no space for. It was comfy, and it was a whim, and what better ?

You'd spot Pierrot through he window of his clapped out white van with his cap on, one hand on the wheel, the other his cigarette. Or he'd tootle past the house on his bike. Or you'd find him looking at the ducks on the pond, or the clouds with something useful to be said about the weather. He had a tractor, another frequent mode of transport, which he'd use to pull along a water tank to take to the cows in his field. And if he wasn't on the move, then he'd be at Philippe's next door, having a glass of something. If he did the inviting, it could start quite early in the morning and it was always eau de vie, small glasses, but several of them. He had grown up in the village, thought not too much of it, but was only too happy to share useful secrets like how to make eau de vie, and where to buy the best champagne. He lived with his daughter Nadine ever since his wife had died, thirty four years ago. His second daugher lived next door to them (and to us) and the third daughter lives about 10 kilometres away. You could go round for a drink at Pierrot's and find four generations in the same room, milling in and out, frequently.

So his funeral was bound to be a sad affair. But nothing had led me to expect how many people would be feeling the same thing. We were invited to turn up in the courtyard of his farm for three o'clock to go with him to the graveyard. When we got there, just before three the courtyard was already lined, round all of its sides with five or six deep with people. There must have been at last three hundred of us. And for a long time we waited, almost silently, for Pierrot to come out of his farmhouse for the last time. At last he was carried out, and laid in his coffin on little trestles. Nadine popped on top a photo of him. He had a wide grin in a thin face. And then, in the by now gently falling snow, a motley band of trumpeters started up. A French favourite, that I recognised but couldn't name, rather cheery music, and then Vivali, from the Four Seasons.

And then this huge crowd of sad mourners, red faced and in anoraks that were not up to that kind of cold, followed Pierrot in the hearse full of flowers, very slowly through the village and outside to the cemetary where he would finally re-join his long lost wife.

Oh I said in a bright moment to our neighbour Francoise 'I could do with a couple of glasses of cognac after this' She smiled and almost laughed and on we went.

The cemetary is small and there was hardly room for everyone. There was a speech and then one by one we inched round to Pierrot's grave and took a rose petal from a basket to toss into his grave. And then more music, this time rather perky dance music. And back we walked, almost as cold as poor Pierrot to the village for the wake.

And then my surprise, in Phillippe's 'bar' where champagne and cognac and eau de vie flow as if they came directly out of the tap, there was just one long trestle table and on it were bottles of coke and perrier water, interspaced down the middle. Someone was brewing coffee and there was a tin of biscuits passed around. And then that awful realisation that there was no cognac, no eau de vie, no warming red wine. We were there, purple as turnips from the cold, sad and drained of emotion, and we were on our own. Finally I said to Claude, wow in England we have whisky at funerals and as he too was cold and sad he wandered off and came back with a perrier bottle, full of eau de vie. And so in this nation dedicated to the good life and alcohol, we drank it secretly.