Eleven Things I’ll Never Understand About The French

Seven months is a pretty long time to live anywhere. After seven months on a remote island, your average anthropologist would have all the material for their next bestselling book, and would be busy planning their next trip dog-sledding with the Inuits. After seven months in a city, your average cartographer would know every single road, including all the tiny short cuts that spit you out in the middle of a five-lane motorway if you don’t turn off in time. After seven months in a wood, your average druid would be able to have a long chat with all the trees, covering news stories from as far back as the 1700s. But after seven months in Orleans, I still have a lot of questions. Here are eleven things that I will never understand about the French.

1) Why isn’t there a train from Paris between half eight in the evening and ten past eleven? Pretty much everyone I know has arrived breathless at the station at 20.31, and been forced to haunt the McDo opposite, trying to work out what constitutes an acceptable purchase for three hours of wifi (the consensus seems to be a small portion of chips). Being at Notre Dame, looking at your watch, and realising that it’s a quarter past eight is one of the worst feelings I know.

2) Why do French children need a two hour lunch break? It’s not as if they’re the ones doing the cooking. If we just chucked them a babybell after half an hour and slung them back into class, it would free up much more of the day for wine drinking, baguette eating, and other important French cultural things.

3) Speaking of baguettes, why are French women so slim? I’ve swollen into a bread-filled balloon since being in France, but I’m still surrounded by women who are the same shape as their breakfast snack. What do they do with their baguettes? Lick them?

4) When is it evening? This might sound like a stupid question, but bear with me. In France, you switch from greeting people with ‘bonjour’ to ‘bonsoir’ as soon as it’s evening, and you greet everyone. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut-off point. I’ll be ‘bonsoir-ed’ in a shop at three in the afternoon – the day time by anyone’s standards – but try it again three hours later, and a cheery ‘bonjour’ will ring through the halls.

5) Why is the wine so cheap? And I mean really, really, two-euros-fifty-cheap. I’m not complaining here. I want to know their secret.

6) Why do French men wear man bags? Specifically small, rectangular, Gucci man bags. They don’t look good, not now, not ever.

7) Why do French people hate medium sized dogs? The lady downstairs has a tiny, yappy bulldog. The man across the road has a huge hairy dog that looks like a rug on legs. I have never ever seen someone with an averagely big dog. In France, you can go big, go small, or go home.

8) What on earth do French people do on a Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon, or a Sunday? Everything’s shut, and you never see them on the streets. Do they all go to a special club? Why didn’t they invite me?

9) Are there any French people who actually know all the different kinds of cheese? Or all the different kinds of wine? I read somewhere that there are 400 types of French cheese, and 354 different wine regions. Trying all of them seems like a brilliant bucket-list thing for a massive francophile, but it’s not for me. When my food is mouldy, I’d rather leave it on the plate.

10) What does ‘j’arrive’ mean? Are you just around the corner? Are you striding purposefully along a few streets away? Are you at your front door, struggling with your shoes? Or are you still in the bath? I’m guessing the latter.

11) Why does this place have such a hold on me? I’ve been back in England for a week and a half, and I’m already counting down the days till I go back. This time I’ll be an au-pair, looking after children and living with the family. Maybe this sort of deep cultural immersion will start to answer my questions. But even if it doesn’t, I can’t wait to get back on my french-speaking, baguette-guzzling, wine-spilling, confusion-making way.

Image from Flickr, by Bruno Cordioli

To the Children I’ll Never See Again

To the three hundred children I teach each week, I’m writing you a single letter.

Dear Child,

I’m not good at goodbyes. I hardly ever say a ‘goodbye’ and mean it, but this week I’m going to say goodbye hundreds of times over. It won’t be a little ‘ta ta, I’ll see you soon’. When I say goodbye to you, I’ll never see you again.

You’re not good at goodbyes either. You don’t have any concept of time. The same part of you that gets overexcited each and every week when I turn up at your classroom door is that part of you that will skip away from our last meeting, oblivious. You have no concept of forever. At the very most, you’ve seen eleven christmases, which means a tenth of your life between each one. When it takes so long to get between autumn and spring, how can you have any idea of the length of time you’ve got left in your life?

In a way, it’s probably better like this. There’ll be no misty eyes, no surreptitious sniffling. We’ll say goodbye, and you’ll think I’m coming back, and by the time you realise I’m not I’ll be no more than a shadowy figure in your memory. All I can hope for is to be a happy one.

But here’s the thing that gets me, kid. I’ll never know what you become. You’re somewhere between six and eleven. You’ve got a whole load of living to do, and I won’t get to find out what happens. You’re one of three hundred mystery stories that are missing their endings. Your futures are hidden.

I did think that, at the very least, I’d know if you got famous. I’d see you on TV, I’d hear about you in the papers. Then I realised that, even if it does happen, I’ll never recognise you. How will I be able to link the tiny girl whose feet don’t reach the floor with the glamorous singer on stage? When I watch the politician striding around in his suit, will I automatically think of the boy who drew a french flag on his paper tie? I don’t even know your surname.

In a few years you’ll have changed beyond all recognition. You’ll be taller, stronger, faster. You’ll know more. You’ll be one step closer to your future, and one step further away from the child I knew. I only get a year of you, and I’m only a tiny chapter in your life.

So I suppose what I’m saying is that I wish you luck. I don’t know, and you don’t know, what direction your life is going to take. You’re still so young. But I would like to think that you will follow whatever your dream is, that three hundred lives that I’ve touched will end up with all their wishes coming true.

I hope you reach for the stars, kid.

And don’t forget me when you get there.

Yours,

Lydia

 

(Photo from Flickr, Kevin Steinhardt)

More Than Words

Brummies are stupid. Scousers are untrustworthy. West Country people are friendly. All this, according to the telegraph, is down to our accents. As an English girl in France, whose accent is recognised the moment she opens her mouth, where does this leave me?

I’ve always had an odd relationship with my accent. Growing up in Essex, with two parents from Liverpool, my accent mixed TOWIE-style ‘buh’er’ and ‘wah’er’ with traces of the north. It never really bothered me, although I do remember my dad sighing in exasperation as I pointed to the yellow block in the centre of the table and asked for some ‘buh’er’ to spread on my toast.

Then, when I was eleven, we moved to Norfolk. Suddenly my accent became incredibly important, the defining factor in my life. It was my way of pointing out to everyone that I was different, that I wasn’t from here, that I didn’t belong. No fitting in and homogenising for me – I cultivated my accent like a hot-house orchid. It was my stamp, my signature. As everyone around me mooed ‘graaaaaass’, I sprung in defence of my ‘baff’. The softer they spoke, the louder I did. The slower they murmured, the faster I chattered.

I was rude, obnoxious, and I didn’t care who knew it. I resented the move, and everything that came with it. I scoffed at every miss-placed ‘that’, I got into an argument over the use of the word ‘shew’ (which I still stand by – shew is not, and never will be, the past tense of show). My dad bought funny books full of old-style Norfolk dialect phrases, and listened to the singing postman. ‘Hev yew got a loight boy?’ rang through the house. I wanted nothing to do with it.

All the time I was a teenager, I didn’t want to get a regional accent. It wasn’t anything against the accent itself. It was simply that I didn’t want to feel like I belonged. Norfolk never became my home until I left it, and at that time, changing my voice would have meant changing my heart.

All change! After my first term in university, I arrived home with a Northern accent. Here, at last, was a community I wanted to be a part of! I became an accent sponge, soaking up exotic sounds from Burnley and Dunstable. Trips to the shops became fraught with difficulty, because I’d find myself replying to the cashier in the same voice they spoke, whether it suited me or not. And I loved it.

But now? Here in France, my accent is once again my defining feature. I sometimes feel like people are so taken aback by the sound of my words that they barely understand them. The most common response to my ‘Bonjour’ is a knowing smile and a helpful comment about my english-ness. There’s a little girl in one of my schools (luckily not the same one that thought I was pregnant) who constantly asks me if I speak French. In French. And I reply, in French. And then she asks me to say something in French. Which I say, in French. And then she’ll cry ‘No! I said to say it in French!’

It’s hard when you try to fit in, and at every step your voice betrays you. The words that trip off my tongue and trickle through my teeth tell my backstory to every stranger in the street. When people talk about being taken for being French, jealousy starts pooling up in my stomach. This voice, that I worked so hard at and cultivated for so long, has become my enemy.

It doesn’t help that people tell me my accent is charming. I want it gone. But it’s deep within me, imprinted on my bones, and I can’t just shrug it off. Until my French Henry Higgins comes along, I’m screwed. After six months in France, I’m starting to realise that I never really will sound like I’m from here. My accent is my party trick, my blessing. And it’s also my curse.;

With croissant, and proud of it

Yesterday morning I heard the dreaded sentence that no woman wants to hear. I walked into the playground of my school, swishing away in my fabulous red midi skirt, and a little girl ran up to me. Staring intently at my stomach, she opened her mouth and out came four horrible words.

‘Tu as un bébé?’

My heart sank. Suddenly my skirt didn’t seem half so fabulous. I know I’m not a skinny stick, but I’ve never before been asked if I was pregnant. Now it was the very first thing that anyone had said to me on a tuesday morning. The only thing I could do was try to laugh it off, because I know the truth. I’m not having a child. I’m with croissant.

Nobody can accuse me of not fully embracing the many food-based opportunities that are open to me in France. I know the opening hours of all the bakeries within a ten minute radius of my flat. I’ve made it a mission to work my way through the entire contents of a patisserie shelf (current favourite? Cherry religueses) and I happily chomp through my daily baguette without thinking. On Monday, however, my food reverence reached new heights.

For my birthday, way back in November, I’d been given a gift certificate to La Cuisine Paris. They run english language cooking courses in the heart of paris, and one very enticing one focussed on croissants, pain au chocolats, and basically anything full of enough butter to turn your arteries into a screaming mess. Seeing as I don’t give a damn for my arteries’ feeling, I signed up without a moment’s hesitation, and Monday was that fateful day.

My seven class-mates ranged from a couple of American women who had never even eaten a croissant before to a Nigerian man who wanted to open his own bakery. The eight of us donned plastic aprons and waited for our teacher Dianne, a fiery french lady who had started work at four that morning in a boulangerie near her, before legging it across town to teach us novices. Croissant pastry is hard work, and Dianne had to pummel us into shape as much as she had to pummel the dough. Thanks to her fantastic drive, we knocked up croissants, pin wheels, cinnamon buns, pain au chocolats, pain suisse (a wonderful creation filled with cream and chocolate chips) and raisin swirls in half the time it would normally take. As the giant ovens filled with rising pastries, my stomach started gurgling in anticipation.

The only major issue with making croissants yourself is that it forces you to accept, beyond any point of denial, that a serious amount of butter goes into these bad boys. For a piece of dough that would make about six croissants, we used a whole pat of butter. The room was hot, and soon the butter started melting and oozing out of the dough, reminding us at every stage that very soon it was going to cling to our hips and never let go.

Despite this, I’ve never been so proud as when my little babies came out of the oven. Little no longer, they had grown and swelled and turned golden brown, and I could see all the flaky layers! Dianne later told us that in some classes the little things just don’t rise, and all she can do is smile warmly at the group chowing down on hard, dense buns. I’m pretty sure that my sense of pride was entirely justified.

I left the class with a huge bag of pastries, but more importantly I left with some serious skills. No longer need I worry that my year in France has been wasted – even if my French hasn’t improved I can crank out some authentic croissants at a moment’s (ok six hours’) notice. That’s an ability that is worth its weight in gold.

Although I really should lay off them for a while, if the damning judgement in the playground is anything to go by…

Leibster Award – What on earth is it? And other questions

The lovely, marvellous and oh-so-flattering Susie at http://susiewittbrodt.wordpress.com  just nominated me for a Liebster Award. Which is basically a way to find new blogs and tell other people that what you think they’re doing is pretty great (so if you’re reading this because I nominated you, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back). The concept is pretty simple – a blogger nominates you, and then you go ahead and nominate other blogs, and answer a pile of random questions.

The catch? It’s all about discovering new blogs, which means that the ones you nominate have to have less than 1000 followers. Pluses? New readers for you, new readers for them. Minuses? None. After all, how would I have discovered Susie’s brilliant voice, which makes me feel like she’s in the room chatting to me with each blog post? And how would you, dear reader, have discovered the wonderful blogs that I’m about to nominate?

Now part of this challenge/award-y thing is that you have to answer ten questions. It’s not normally the sort of thing I do, because frankly I have some serious issues with rule following and giving straight up answers. However, I’ve done my very best, and if my answer seems like a cop-out then it probably is.

1. What is your “Elevator Pitch”? As in, if you had to describe yourself to someone else in the time it would take the two of you to ride an elevator, how would you summarize yourself?

Given that the concept of an elevator pitch involves ‘selling yourself’ to a complete stranger, I’d probably freak out and shut up. I guess I’m just too British, because the thought of telling someone how wonderful I am is enough to give me a heart attack. In my mind, the scene goes like this:

Me: Hello Stranger… So I just wanted to tell you that, umm, well I suppose I’m quite nice, ummm, I live in France and I sort of write about it… umm, and I like to see new places and… ummmm

PING! Doors open

Me: AndIpromiseI’mareallyinterestingpersonIjustdon’tknowhowtotellyouohwaitIclimbedMountEverest!

Stranger leaves the elevator, shaking his/her head in despair.

2. Surprise! Reincarnation is a thing. If you had to come back as an animal other than a human, what would you choose and why?

Easy one – like I said in my post about Nice (https://lydiasilver.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/love-in-a-warm-climate/), I’d be a lizard. An animal that gets to bask in the sun all day and can catch its food just by sticking out its tongue is my sort of thing.

3. Describe the best day of your life (either as a memory of an actual day, or hypothetically).

I can’t think of one ‘best day’, only best components. So I suppose the best day of my life would include a combination of these things:
Breakfast. More specifically the amazing breakfast I had from Holybelly yesterday, which included the best bread I’ve ever tasted.
Reunions. There’s nothing quite like the moments where you see someone again after so long apart. I’m not talking about the hugs and the talking, but rather the first few moments when you spot them at the station, or in the cafe, or even in the street, and start walking towards them. It’s that delicious mix of excitement and apprehension (what if they’ve changed?) and hope and joy and the grin that slowly stretches from ear to ear that I like the best.
Sun. Skin-warming, smile-creating, sky-clearing sun. Everything is better in the sunlight.

 

4. What is your biggest pet peeve, and why does it bug you so much?

I hate slow walkers. I’ve no idea why. I just can’t stand it when I’m walking behind someone, and I’m faster than them, and they don’t notice. Why should I have to shuffle along as well as them? I’m so irrational that this hatred even extends to old people who have to use a stick, which I know is despicable. But all I’m saying is USE THE EDGE OF THE PAVEMENT NOT THE MIDDLE!

5. If you could live in a different time / era, what would it be and why?

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to go into the past. I can’t think of a time when women had as many rights as they did today, and I really am not okay with living in a country where my voice counts less because I don’t have a penis. As for the future, I’ll be there soon enough. I can’t think of a time I’d rather live in than right now.

6. Your house is on fire. All living things made it out safely. You have time to grab one inanimate object – what is it?

I have a ring made out of a silver spoon. It’s on my finger right now. It had to be made specially for me, because I have tiny fingers. I’m taking it.

7. What got you started writing?

I’ve always been a bookworm. It used to piss my sister off when we were little because I’d always rather stick my nose in a book than play outside with her. So I suppose books, and the crazy worlds that could come out of just ink and paper, were what started me writing. If you read a lot then sooner or later you’ll want to put a pen to paper too.

8. If you could turn back time and change one decision or action you regret, would you? What would it be?

My grandad once told me that it’s the things you don’t do that you regret. It might be because I haven’t had enough time yet to make bad decisions, or do stupid things, but I try to take any opportunity I find and I haven’t ended up regretting a thing.

9. What social or political issue would you consider yourself most passionate about?

Yesterday, gay marriage was legalised in the UK, which makes me incredibly happy. I really, truly, deeply believe that everyone should be equal. That means that women should get paid exactly the same as men at work, that no one should have their opportunities reduced because of their backgrounds, and that you should be free to love whoever the hell you want. I also massively disagree with the death penalty, but that’s another story.

10. If you died tomorrow, what legacy would you hope to leave behind? How would you like people to remember you?

It sounds incredibly morbid, but I’ve actually thought a lot about this. I want to be remembered because I did something. I don’t know what yet, but when I die if one person around the world can stand up and say ‘my life changed because of Lydia’ then that’s the sort of recognition I want.

And now (drumroll please!) I am proud to announce my nominees!

http://trueeast.wordpress.com – Sanchia at True East writes beautiful, thoughtful things about travelling and how it changes your ideas and your horizons. It’s a travel blog with a hell of a brain!

http://thecelluloidsage.wordpress.com – Phil writes film reviews that I would trust enough to follow off a cliff. If he says a film is great then I’m desperate to see it, and if he says it’s rubbish then honestly? I wouldn’t go near it with a bargepole.

http://www.emilylaurae.com – This last one is close to my heart. Emily lives in the same town as me, and takes breathtaking pictures of it. When I look at the photographs on her blog, it’s like seeing my life through a whole new set of eyes.

So these are my three nominations! To my nominees, if you want to follow up on the challenge then I offer you these questions:

1) What’s your earliest memory?

2) What’s the last thing you do before bed?

3) Why do you write?

4) If you were in a horror movie, what character would you be?

5) And who would you be in a good old-fashioned romance?

6) What do you think are the best things about you?

7) What do your friends think are the best things about you? Are they different?

8) If you could move to any country in the world, where would you go?

9) Sweet or savory?

10) Do you have a phobia?

Answer these, my dears, and go and find three barely-discovered blogs. Let the challenge begin!

Missing You

Missing someone isn’t like what they tell you it’s going to be. It’s not like in books. I’ve not gone mad, pouring over old photographs and softly sobbing in a lace nightdress. Neither have I spent hours wailing to the sky while running my hands through my artfully dishevelled hair. I don’t think about you all the time, you’re not constantly running through my brain and turning up in my dreams. For the most part, I get on with my life. But all the same, I miss you.

I notice it when I turn to tell you a joke, and you’re not there. When someone does something funny and I can hear your laughter, settling over everything in my head. If there’s something I see that I know you’d just love, or hate, or want to argue about, or want to embrace. When I see the back of somebody else’s head and it looks just like yours. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of you in strangers’ eyes.

I’m not lovesick, and it isn’t a sickness at all, or even the clichéd old nagging toothache that won’t go away. It comes and goes, like the biting pain of the wind in my ears or my aching feet when I’ve walked too far – and I always walk too far when I’m with you. Missing you is the November nights when I can’t get warm, the February days where the drizzle drums on my windows. It’s cold, it’s dark, it’s grey.

Things change. And I know that soon the missing you will be over, and the grey will be gone. Every time I see you I feel the skies turning – a single beam of sunlight pierces through the clouds, and the wind picks up, and the clouds drift, and soon the warm sun is on my skin and I’m bathing in your golden glow. While I know that my over-romanticised, idealistic dreams for the times we’re together are no more real than candyfloss strings, I’m just as excited for a normal existence when you’re there, beside me, solid, real. When others around me can hear your laughter too, I’ll know the missing is over.

Love in a Warm Climate

Readers, I have a confession. Pull up a chair and get comfy, because this is the big one. I’ve fallen in love. I am madly, deeply, head-over-heels smitten. I’ve found the Heathcliff to my Cathy, the Darcy to my Lizzie, the Edward to my Bella. And we barely even know each other. This must be true love.

It all started when I set eyes on him coming out of the station. He was hot, he was heady, he was exotic. He was rich, but underneath was dark, seedy excitement, like a wolf looking out of a dog’s eyes. He was beautiful. He was nice. He was Nice.

Last Wednesday I packed my bags and headed south. Working in French schools means French school holidays, and they have a lot of them. This holiday, the winter one, is set aside for skiing (I swear almost every family I know pulled on their boots and looked for snow) but I had other ideas. I was seeking out the sun. Sometimes I think that in a past life I might have been a lizard, because I crave sunshine and warmth, and never feel better than when there’s sunlight on my skin. I even love the way my skin smells in the sun – a combination of biscuits and factor 50 suncream. The south of France was the obvious choice for an early-spring exploration. I didn’t count on falling in love.

As soon as I arrived in Nice, I knew my heart was taken. It was like stepping into summer. The streets were wide and warm and perfectly dressed French people sat laughing in pavement cafes. The buildings in the old town were a sun-bleached orange, and the ones in the new town were a sparkling white. We sat on the beach with a gourmet ice cream (vanilla and pink peppercorn? Who knew) and watched the waves roll up and crash on the stones. We climbed the Bellanda tower, dodging the spray from the waterfall to watch the sun set over the Mediterranean Sea. And I fell for it.

I would have been the first to say that I’m a hard-boiled cynic, who doesn’t believe in love at first sight. In that case, maybe it’s lust that I feel for Nice. After all, this is one sexy city. Nice is the tall dark stranger of Mills and Boon novels, who waltzes up to the naive heroine, smoulders a bit, and then jumps into bed with her before fleeing at dawn. With its rustic old streets and glamorous new ones, it feels a bit like a pirate who spruces up in a suit and a mask to slip into a ball and steal away the princess. Nice had the charm, the beauty and the edge to keep me captivated. It was the illicit lover I ran away to, and the train back to Paris was the nice, well-bred young man forcing me back.

Now that I’m back in Orléans, everything is a little different. I feel like a romantic heroine, pining for her lost love across the seas. I’m pining for the beauty, the excitement, and the warmth, of the people as well as of the sun. If a city could ride up under my window on a white horse, I’d be expecting it. I think I’m going to write pathetic love letters to the mayor there, declaring my undying love and promising him the world if he can whisk me away to his castle by the beach. This is no fling. This is the real deal.

Or at least, until something better comes along.

A Scandal at School and a Couscous for Kings

Shock! Horror! Disaster! In a tight knit community in the suburbs of Orléans, where families have to ask other families for news because they don’t speak french, rumours travel fast. The rumour mill was hard at work last week, spinning out a story about a terrifying new change in the school curriculum – gender theory.

This ‘theory’, according to the rumour, was that genders are unchangeable. If you are born a boy, you will grow up to be a soldier or a firefighter, marry a pretty woman, and spend your life dashing around being masculine and heroic. If you are born a girl, you will spend your teenaged years worrying about your makeup rather than your school results before marrying quickly and popping out children on a biannual basis. These are your only options. According to the rumour, this idea was about to make its way onto the school curriculum and be forced down the throats of all the impressionable six year olds there. And this, of course, will not do.

It seemed to take a lot of persuasion before the schools could convince the parents that this was categorically untrue. The first I heard of it was when large signs started to appear at the school gates, begging the parents not to listen to too many rumours. But whispers kept following us down the corridors, shuffling under the conversations at lunch time, and stalking the gates when I left. The signs were not successful.

I don’t know how they achieved it, but when I arrived at school on Thursday the atmosphere was unbelievably different. I puzzled through my lessons trying to work out what had changed, but it was only in my third lesson of the day that one of the teachers took me aside and explained things. Somehow, the gender theory rumour had been put to bed, and the parents had apologised. The pupils were being encouraged to be whoever they wanted to be, and the adults were talking to each other again. To top it off, the teacher explained, some of the parents wanted to make lunch for all of the staff, to show how sorry they were, and would I like to join in?

No word of a lie, it was the best school dinner I’d ever eaten. When I wandered down to the staff room, I accidentally joined a parade of huge plates, pots and pans, all mysteriously shrouded in tinfoil. We set the table, gathered everyone up, and then I sat down and waited for the great unveiling.

The mums had made a couscous fit for a king. A massive plate was topped with a pyramid of vegetables, criss-crossing over fluffy grains of couscous. Another plate had meat, a pan had a spicy sauce, and there was even a kettle full of mint tea. I piled my plate and tucked in.

It was lovely to really feel like a part of the school. The mums had made food for me, even though I only come in one day a week, and the teachers had made sure that the meal was for when I was there too. People came and talked to me because they wanted to – they wanted to hear about my experiences, or they wanted advice of what to see in London, or to catch up on my plans for the weekend. Good food and good company make for a wonderful lunch time, and I could barely have been happier. And when you think what brought the meal on, all I can say is thank god for rumours.

The Lost Boys of the Louvre

It all started with an innocent conversation at break time. I casually mentioned that, despite having gone to Paris whenever I felt rich, cultural or simply bored, I’d not yet been to the Louvre.

‘Oh’ says the well-meaning teacher, ‘we’re going next monday. Why don’t you come with us? It’ll be a great way for you to experience it, we’ve got a guided tour, you’ll have a wonderful time. You can be in charge of a group – I’ll give you a small one, easy children, they won’t get lost, it’ll be fun. You don’t work on a monday anyway, so really, what have you got to lose?’

Everyone knows that a speech like that is tempting fate. By mid afternoon on monday, as I was standing in the middle of the Louvre trying to keep forty french kids quiet while the other adults roamed the museum frantically searching for a lost child, I’d learnt the truth about school trips. They are not, and never will be, fun.

I got an inkling of this idea when, at six o clock on a dark, rainy morning, I was trying to get the children onto the bus. Calling for kids who got travel sick to sit near the front of the coach, I felt little Sophia come and take my hand. ‘I get sick a lot’ she said, ‘so can I sit next to you?’ I smiled wanly at her, agreed, and spent the journey playing happy families while chanting ‘please don’t be sick on me, please don’t be sick on me’ over and over in my head like a mantra.

Luckily, the children of école Louise Michel seem to be a pretty resilient bunch, and no one even grumbled as we drove through Paris towards the Louvre, gliding through row after row of Hausseman blocks with the kids squealing in excitement each time they caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tour. Seeing as it’s one of the tallest buildings in Paris, this happened rather a lot. Still, it didn’t seem to drain their enthusiasm for it, and I nearly got excited to see it myself. Nearly. Then we plunged underground into the Louvre coach park, piled out, and our trip was ready to begin.

Except it wasn’t. With forty children, there is an incredible amount of organisation that needs to happen before anything fun. There are trips to the cloak room (which we managed to do an incredible four times during the day), toilet stops to make, and the obligatory photo in front of the pyramid. There were head counts to take, goûters to give out, and the inevitable confusion over tickets. We got to paris at about half past nine, but it wasn’t until eleven that we started our tour.

I can’t lie. Despite my complaints, the tour was fantastic. The children had been studying Islamic art, so the tour guide told them (and me) all about the origins of Islam, before talking in detail about some of the incredibly beautiful pieces that the museum had. My favourite was a sink that had belonged to a prince, and was covered in silver carvings of scenes of princely life – playing polo, hunting with leopards, and having picnic feasts in paradisiacal gardens. The kids unanimously decided that the coolest thing there was the large case full of intricately decorated swords and daggers. Although I listened to the tour guide’s description of them, I preferred the running commentary that came from Noah, one of the kids, full of scenes where knights jumped out from behind a curtain to stab unsuspecting victims in the throat, and lavishly illustrated with screams, gurgles, gasps, and rivers of blood.

It was after lunch that the nightmare happened. Right at the start of the day, as we walked past the information desk, the teacher in charge had turned to the children and said ‘If anyone gets lost, go to the information desk. Find someone who works here, ask them where it is, go straight there, and stay there. The Louvre is huge, and if you don’t, we might never find you, and you’ll be trapped wandering around the museum for ever and ever’. As the sea of anxious faces turned towards me, I quickly told them it definitely wasn’t going to happen, that they didn’t need to worry, and that I would always make sure that I knew where everyone in my group was. But that afternoon, as we were splitting up into groups, I felt a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach. We’d lost a kid.

I tried calling his name once more, in the hope that he’d been sitting somewhere where I couldn’t see him and he’d suddenly pop out of the shadows. No such luck. I knew he’d been with us just moments before, when we’d gone up the escalators to the second floor, so he couldn’t have gone far. Spinning around, I tried to catch a glimpse of him, but an eight year old child is too hard to spot in a sea of adults. The children were also starting to look worried. Noah, reproachful, turned to me and whispered ‘You promised that this wouldn’t happen’.

Of course, we found him again. He’d gone up the escalator with the rest of us and then, without thinking, turned and gone up the next one. After a stressful twenty minutes, he turned up sheepishly at the information desk and the visit went on. I got the impression that a kid went missing on pretty much every school trip that ever came to the museum. As we went back to the cloakroom for the final time, we came across another lost child, smiled at him, and directed him to the information desk. I’m assuming he got collected, but you never know. Maybe the teacher’s scare story was true, and tribes of lost children haunt the Louvre by night, wandering around the exhibits and stealing food from the cafes in the dark.

I was exhausted by the time we got back. A day of stressing, shouting, and playing endless games of I-spy in which the word always began with an L and was always Lydia was far too much for me. I’ve got an endless amount of admiration for the teachers who do this all the time, and who can’t say no. For me, once was definitely enough.

There’s three places like home

There are lots of different kinds of homes. Personally, I think I have three. There’s home home, back in Norfolk, there’s my uni town of Sheffield, and then there’s my flat, in my town, in France. Since getting back here after the Christmas holidays, I feel like this place deserves its place on my list. It takes leaving somewhere and coming back to know if it’s really your home.

My home home is the place I mean when I say ‘I’m going home this weekend’. Going back to my family house is like putting on a wonderfully baggy old jumper, which sags around my elbows and smells a little bit of that washing powder that only our family use. Home home is comfortable. Home home is safe. Home home always includes a fridge full of food that I liked around the time I left for uni three years ago – yogurts that I no longer buy, a bottle of ketchup when I now prefer mayo, and tons of quintessentially english foods like crumpets and chocolate digestives that my parents seem to think I’m grieving for. Home home has a lot going for it, and it’s nice to come back now and again, but it’s not exciting.

Uni home is a bit bigger – it’s not a house, but a city. The things that make it home are far removed from the ‘homeyness’ of my parents’ house. It’s less about comfort and more about secret insider knowledge – the bouncers at the club that know you by name, the corner table in the coffee shop that’s always free, and the pizza delivery shop where you don’t have to tell them where you live. Although these three things might seem slightly pathetic, they’re pretty reflective of student life. They’re instant gratification, they’re the easiest way around something, and for a short time at least, they’re guaranteed to make me happy. Not having entered the dreaded final year yet, my university home means an easy, happy, relaxed life, although I’m not sure my old flatmates would currently agree.

Finally, there’s my new, french home. This is both a flat, a town, and to some extent a country. Moving anywhere takes a lot of getting used to, but moving to France takes more. I never truly felt like it was home during the first term I lived here, because there was always something more that I had to do, another form that needed filling in, something for the kitchen that I desperately needed to buy before I could cook anything, another terrifying french letter in my postbox that I’d hold as gingerly as if it were a bomb. But since I got back after Christmas, the miracle has happened. This place is my home.

There’s no better sign of that than the basketball game we went to last weekend. I’ve been wanting to go to one since we got here, and we finally got our act together and went. And it. Was. FANTASTIC! I cheered with the home crowd until my throat got hoarse (although I was never entirely sure what the chant was), held my breath when Orléans were defending a basket, and groaned with everyone else at the ridiculous numbers of penalties that we gave away. I roared with delight when we scored, and stood up with everyone for the final minute, when we needed just two points to win. And when that ball went into the basket for the final time, I wooped and clapped along with all the Orléanaises. This was my home team, winning at home. I was home.