Countdowns are beginning

Things are constantly in motion. You are in motion at the moment, spinning on a planet that's spinning around a star that spinning in a galaxy and that's the kind of thing that make a person nervous.

This might go some way to explaining why I'm feeling a little stretched out at the moment, like I know the finish line is coming up but I can't see it yet. I don't think it's helping that the people around me are making ready to leave. My whole world currently feels like half past four on a Friday afternoon back in school, when you could feel the tension in the room. The clock would actually start to melt a little from the intensity of the gazes of the students. The energy in the room would be palpable, nervous energy wound tight and expressing itself in little scraping noises as students started preemptively pushing their chairs back.

I miss school, actually, which was why it was weird to see tweets from the school that took me in for my Sixth Form studies. The teachers haven't changed. The buildings are the same, even the ones that went up in 1965 "temporarily". They're still there. I rather suspect that if I'm not careful, my career will be like those buildings - falling into something "temporarily" and then staying there for fifty years before collapsing on someone and being condemned and retired.

That metaphor got away from me a little.

I spoke to my French tutor back in Aberdeen today, just to ask when we'll get marks back for our essays. The response I got was a sort of sighing acceptance that being in chilled out France had not rubbed off on me too much, and that they'd be marked when they were marked. Fair enough. Facebook updates and tweets from people at uni, the possibility of working with incredible people at the Gaudie, in Centre Stage, in AUSA - all of these things are driving me crazy with excitement but once again it's the finishing line I can't quite see. I'm getting into Limbo, neither Here nor There, but I'll be out soon enough.

I've booked - I say booked, I mean tried to book - tickets for +Derren Brown in August, but the wicked website isn't taking my money. I'd normally be pleased, but I like Derren. I went to his Svengali tour, and that freaked the bejeesus out of me before I even got there, because he engaged with me on Twitter. And I'm kind of a fangirl for this guy. I know, you're surprised, but the man can convince people to take payment in paper. Not paper money, actual paper. Check it out below.

Absolutely worth a watch.

In addition I've got some storyboards done - stickmen ahoy - and doodled some experimental dialogue. I'm really rather liking this malarkey, and I think I'm going to bash together a video about memory, taken from the book of the illusionist above. We'll see. It'll keep my mind off the finishing line for a while, in any case.

The students have all been warned about the test on Tuesday, which prompted some of them to come in and ask in French if they could have some practise material to take on a coach to Amsterdam where they're definitely going to study it. I said sure; it's only photocopied material and to be quite honest at this point getting totally stoned and trying to absorb the knowledge by eating the paper is about the only hope these kids have got.

I found out how to solve cryptic crossword clues, and while I am still as far from being able to solve them as Pluto is from being recognised as a planet, it feels good to know there's a system. I also learned that the Independent's quick crossword is a lot easier than the Guardian's. It was a bit of a slow day.

In recognition of this fact, the Internet threw all the distractions it could at me, including three charming internships and a job, all of which I want, all of which I absolutely must not take. To see why not, please see above for the metaphor.

I also learned - and this will be important for literally none of you, and yet I tell you anyway because I met the man and he's awesome - that +Stephen Waddington got elected President of the CIPR. Congratulations to that man. Johnny Walker black label on the rocks for everyone.

Finally, more teaching. Pushed C into the preterite (pronunciation of which is, for some reason, utterly beyond me) and she's swimming like a trooper, though every time I correct her because the verb she's using doesn't just take -ed but instead changes either:

• vowel 
• spelling
• pronunciation (read/read)
• some combination of the above

she looks so disapproving I cannot help but laugh. She scowls a bit more at that. B, on the other hand, has made huge leaps with his written work, which at the beginning was incredibly ambitious and utterly awful, and is now ambitious in line with his ability and has only small errors. And that makes me quite unnaturally happy.

Teaching. Might be something I'm actually good at.

Alright folks. Winding up here as I'm back to obscenely verbose blogs. Have a good weekend; I'm going to see a French translation of The Importance of being Earnest, because it's one of my favourite plays. Very excited. If it's brilliant I'll be dragging students back with me to see it and of course I'll be writing about it here.

Oh - and it looks like the slow route of invasion has beaten the quick route. The front page of Libération on Tuesday:

Apparently they're taking lessons from Cole Porter. You get points if you're on the Internet
and know who Cole Porter is. And aren't Sheila, because that's an unfair advantage.

Doing what I love

Sometimes you just have a day. You know it's going to be a day before you even wake up. Your body tries its best to stop you waking up because it knows, it knows that when you do, it's all going to turn to crap.

This was one of those days, only worse, because my body actually kicked me out of bed before I needed to. I woke up at 6.30, freezing cold, because the heating system in my flat turns itself off at around 5. This has happened three times in three days, and for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why. Ever since I got rid of my duvet, the evil genie that apparently lives in the radiator has decided to knock off at 5am.

I couldn't get warm in bed. I couldn't get back to sleep because I was cold and apparently wide awake, so I had a shower instead and then some coffee. The luxurious pace with which I broke my fast should have told me of the heapings of crap that were soon to land on me, but no. I was lulled, like a fool, into the sense of smug self-security that envelops a chap when he thinks he is ahead of his schedule.

I arrived at work a couple of minutes early, perfumed, fresh, rascally handsome. Today was a full day, but I felt prepared to face it. I was full of nutella and home-brewed coffee. My first task was the pilot light of the deep-sea fish of a day I would shortly encounter. I had to pull up some statistics for my colleague regarding memberships: who's paying, who paid last year but hasn't yet, how many of the new graduates are ponying up the cash…it was a task that she told me I needn't rush, that would take a couple of hours. 

Imagine her surprise, and the smug look on my face - vile, isn't it - when I returned the document to her twenty minutes. It wasn't a magic trick, but it may as well have been from the look on her face - but then, an awful lot of magic is knowing something the other person doesn't know. In this case, it was knowing that all of the characteristics my colleague needed could easily be identified by "IF GREATER THAN" and "IF LESS THAN" formulae.

In any case, with this task completed ahead of schedule, I thought I could relax - but instead, a huge ginger Belgian came roaring into my life. I do mean roaring;  he has a laugh that most of the school can hear. Once his hair goes white I can see him making a pretty penny as a Santa lookalike. It was for this gentleman that I had recorded the Mind-Mapping video, and he was exceedingly happy with it.

Except one part. One little part, that would only take me ten minutes to sort out.

The man knows me. It was only a small thing, and I was confident it would take no more than twenty (he knows me, and that means he knows how to flatter me) so, with time to spare, I agreed to sort it out there and then. I set myself up in my office, sat myself down, and made sure I was handsome. I was. I am.

I started the recording. I opened my mouth.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A chainsaw makes a noise that, if unexpected, is one of the most terrifying in the world. I leaped out of my skin and hung to the ceiling by my fingertips, like a bloody and disgusting Spider-Man. The noise stopped. I crawled down and re-installed myself. Hair a little wild, but otherwise ready to begin again. I took a perfunctory glance out of the window. Nothing.

I started the recording.

RRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr!!

Motherfu-

And this continued for twenty minutes. Every time I started recording my mysterious tormenter turned his or her chainsaw back on. Every time. If I ever meet the despicable animal who was doing this to me, I'm going to do absolutely nothing because they have a chainsaw. I'm not a total imbecile.

While I was slowly going mad inside the space of my own mind, I got a text - an unknown number. Unknown numbers always make me nervous, because I don't give out my number very much, but it was a woman who wanted to know if I could tutor her son. Sure, I said, when?

Tonight.

I warned her that I'd not be there until around 7.15; she told me it wouldn't be a problem. I hate such short notice, but a job is a job - and, speaking of jobs, it was time to get filming for the second video project of the day. There's a rather large announcement coming up in the next week, but due to various staff/national holidays, we've not had any time to prepare the online release, which will involve a video in Spanish. So that's how we two hours today: recording a three minute speech. How does one spend two hours recording a three minute speech?

Well, we did it by recording it a number of times and struggling with lighting issues, noise issues, and battery life issues. And pronunciation issues. And people-ignoring-signs-and-wandering-in-and-not-leaving issues, which were the absolute worst. In any case, we got it done, and for the next two-and-a-half hours Meyling, Sophie and I pieced together the takes to form a glorious, flowing draft. We had merely to add transitions, credits, and movement. Exhausted, we agreed to reconvene tomorrow at 8am to complete the project.

That completed, I took a whole half an hour to set up meeting the next day and chat to my colleague about work that I needed to take over from her while she jaunts off back to Blighty. Having added her items to my work schedule (and gained a new respect for the woman, she does a lot of work I didn't know about) it was to my French lesson, where I tried not to get irritated by the notion of the "traditional family," which at best is rose-tinted and at worst bigotry masquerading as "but we've always done this."Perhaps I was overreacting, but the one place in France where I've heard people using the phrase "traditional family" most was on the marches to deny the right to a family to homosexual couples. Perhaps I Pavlov'd myself again and I'm reacting to a slight that is unintended. All the same, I wonder how the class would feel if they had to describe the "traditional family" in the terms they reserve for non-"traditional" families: monoparental, recomposed (recomposé) and homosexual families versus "traditional" gives a linguistic bias (in my opinion) to the word we recognise and feel comfortable with."Hetero families" is as clinical a term as "recomposé," so why not use it?

As a result there was a slightly tense moment when I was asked what a family that is composed of a previously married father, a previously married mother, and kids from both previous relationships and the current is called. I said "a family." Because that's what it is. The day she has to say "I'm in a hetero relationship" rather than just "I'm in a relationship" is the day she has the right to label other people's families.

Sorry, that become something of a rant. I'll try to get back to the funny.

Mid-lesson I got a call from Sophie to say that the man at the top of her chain of command didn't like the video and that we'd redo the whole thing tomorrow, in one go. I have to say I'm a little relieved that our early morning meeting has been cancelled, but at the same time the fact that we wasted several hours in post-production was a knife to the kidneys of my soul. In any case, it was time to haul ass out to St. German to meet my new student, H, whose English is quite frustratingly good/bad. What I mean by this is that he has a solid to excellent grip on all English tenses and can use them comfortably and with ease, but then says "childrens" and "mens". Which is heartbreaking.

I finished that lesson at quarter past 8. I took a bus, and wrote most of this blog on the way. Since getting home I've replied to more emails and eaten half a kilo of ravioli, and I'm pretty okay with that.

Tomorrow promises to be just as exciting as today was. Oh - and I found out the name of the person who'll be replacing me. If it's you, and you read the blog, why not send me a message?

In the meantime, here's a sneaky picture from today's shoot. Hip height, so I apologise for the quality. 

As always, thanks for reading.

Shakespeare and Company

Well. It seem I really love books.

Today was a long day. It started at half past seven, as usual - I can't remember the last time I had a long lie in - and after ablutions and dressing (black shirt, burgundy tie, navy suit since you asked) I made my way to A's house for some more English tutoring. Having seen his syllabus, I'm going to need to brush up on some maths along with some biology, so that'll be really interesting. Evolution is up next, so there's a lot for me to read there - I'm currently reading The Science of Discworld III and it turns out almost everything I thought I knew about evolution is wrong, so I need to get refreshed.

After teaching, A's father suggested that I carry on tutoring A even when I go home, via Skype, and they'll set up a wire transfer and keep paying me. The idea is very tempting, especially as it'll mean I'll only need to work four hours a week to manage my budget, rather than the twenty I've currently got planned. However, I'm not sure how well I can tutor via the internet, so I might need to do a trial run first. If you tutor online, what programs do you use? Are there any you recommend?

After tutoring I headed home and dropped in on my friend Adeline, who's as cute as a button and as innocent as the driven snow (and almost as dangerous). She'd agreed to come with me on a journey to the centre of Paris to find Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookstore. We strolled down to the station at about 2 and caught the RER into town, popping up at Chatelet-les-Halles. From there it's a short walk south to the Seine, over the bridge, and into what could be described as the literature quarter. I didn't take my camera. I'm still kicking myself.

I failed at finding Shakespeare & Co on the first try, so instead we went to Gilbert Jeune, which is one bookstore with many different storefronts spread around the Place de Saint Michel. I confess at this point that I went back into full-on teacher mode. I spoke at length about Saint Michel and Satan, calling attention to the figures that form the fountain in the Place. I gathered a small crowd with my ramblings. The crowd dispersed when I realised they were there and became rather self-aware, and with a motion worthy of Schrödinger they disappeared. Going into the bookstore I was in my element, plucking books from every corner and gleefully exclaiming at the prices. My glee was turned all the way up to eleven when the manager told me that, if I were to spend more than x amount, he would give me a ten percent discount. Nothing makes me happier than books; nothing but books that cost even less. Let me teach Shakespeare for the rest of my life and I shall be content. Let me help students explore my language always and pay me only enough to survive and I will be content always.

After that outpouring of excitement (and an interesting flirtation with a goddess from the Egyptian pantheon called Isis) Adeline and I grabbed a seat outside Notre Dame and listened to the bells. They start off sounding like a mere cacophany, but as you listen you start to hear the tune and the counterpoint; it shifts and moves and is glorious. The bells are new and shiny and recently blessed, and while I can't speak for the blessing the newly cast tongues sing gloriously. The technical term for bellringing, by the way, is campanology.

Outside Notre Dame we met Arrash, another student at school, who told us about the concert happening at Notre Dame on Wednesday. He was going, and was kind enough to ask if we'd like to go too. Adeline and I were quick to agree; she is both musical and Christian and, while I am neither, I have a deep-seated appreciation for both in their more beautiful forms. The tickets were 20€ each; a little pricey, but I strongly suspect it's going to be worth it.

From Notre Dame, we said goodbye to Arrash and Adeline navigated us to Shakespeare and Co, where I managed to form another small crowd - not such a sensible idea in the tiny little space of the shop. I couldn't help it; we found the Shakespeare section and, since Adeline has trouble with Shakespearean English - heck, even I used to have trouble with Shakespearean English - I went through some of the more famous speeches with her. We gathered a little audience, although part of that might have just been onlookers concerned for my health when I talked about how everyone wants to just kill themselves although, as I said at the time, they weren't my words but Hamlet's. (Not Shakespeare's; ascribing an opinion to Shakespeare because he wrote it is akin to ascribing paedophilia to Nabokov because one of his characters was one. Idiotic.)

I snapped some pictures of books I'd like to add to the library. Do you agree with my choices? I've obviously missed a lot, so what would you suggest? Thoughts in the comments below or to my twitter as always please.

 Any you violently disagree with? Still let me know, although gently please. I like these books and your opinion matters to me.

After that glorious jaunt, and while I say jaunt I mean hours (we finally came out, blinking in the still-strong sunlight, at 7) and strolled about, looking for somewhere to eat. We found a gorgeous little bistro and got stuck in to soupe oignon gratinée, malgré du canard, tarte, sorbet and an excellent wine from the Alsace region.

Fuller and happier and utterly content in the company of a friend we made our way gently homeward. A gorgeous stroll through the still-warm night and we are home, and just about ready to collapse. Tomorrow there will be more tutoring and some work on my year abroad project and blog. And planning on how to spend my budget.

Life is just too great right now.

There's something curious at work here

The sun dawned today like a lover; warm, gentle, and incredibly far away. Everything looks more beautiful in the sunlight, I've found, and as it turns out not even engineering schools are immune to the beautifying powers of the celestial orb. Even the students, who might charitably be called bestial, were transformed by its radiance to something close to humanity.

Close. Let us not slip into hyperbole.

My morning was splendid and marred only by, once again, a lack of a meaty project into which I can sink my teeth. I have started researching for the future and lining up things I need to do for the year ahead, and the year after - preparation is the key to all things. Having completed the everyday tasks I went to see my supervisor, to see if she had anything problematic for me. She did. A table that contained 40,000 pieces of data and a list of demands; charts of certain data, sub-tables of other data. Ecstasy. A chance to turn numbers and, in some cases, binary responses into images. These pictures will literally be worth a thousand words, and I am really excited about the prospect.

My afternoon was given over to welcoming more students back, responding to students who had required a second and more vigorous reminder of the necessity of taking a certain test, and receiving DVDs from various members of staff. I enjoy films and cinema; I enjoy them so much that I have never even considered studying them. It seems my colleagues have been paying attention in our lessons, because I have been kindly lent two apparently excellent French films - Les Tontons Flingueurs and Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro. They look great but very odd side-by-side.

Along with kindness from my neighbours I did the usual housekeeping tasks for Mondays; booked rooms, planned lessons and wrote some things. I also stumbled across the following video; I know it's from the States but I would be willing to bet that the situation in certain other countries is relatively similar. I hope to make money one day; there's no doubt about that, but the figures in this video are just obscene. Do take the time to watch.

I'm sure nobody comes here to read political ideology or speechifying, so I'm not going to add anything except a question: do you think this is just?

Answer below if you'd like, or tweet me or write to me. I'd love to hear views on this and, for those who only come for the fun and the prose I've updated my Portfolio, so if you're new go there for the best of my writing so far. I think that's all the housekeeping.

That video is a little depressing, so to cheer you up I brought Audrey Hepburn back from the dead to advertise chocolate. It's perfect.

You're welcome.

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

Work has blossomed like love - right when I'm in the middle of something else. My room plan is utterly complete with tables, shelves and other paraphernalia one finds in a library. It looks perfect and uncluttered, unlike my desk, which is straining under the repeated assault from translations in varying states of draft. Most of the actual resources one would expect to find have been moved to other parts of the building, and my office now needs a revolving door as students line up to ask the same question, apparently hoping that for them I shall leap out of my chair and say "YES! I sent everyone to another part of the building but YOU, random student whose acquaintance I have only just made! I have been waiting all day for YOU! Take the resources I have cunningly hidden! Go forth and learn!"

That does not happen very often.

However, I've also now got three translations to finish for tomorrow afternoon and two pieces of English work from students to check over, as well as learning some piece of theatre or sketch for my French class on Tuesday and writing a one-side piece on old people in Britain, which is going to be quite good fun now I think about it. Le boo and le hiss to the Tories.

I've also done all my laundry and met a chap from America who's come equipped with five sentences and assures me that it will be enough. The arrogance of anyone who goes to live in a foreign country and doesn't bother learning the language is so enormous that I never know whether to laugh or weep. Is getting by enough? I'd understand if he'd come for a week. But six months, on an English-only programme - what cultural benefit could he gain?

I don't know. Maybe a lot; maybe I'm being a language snob.

An urgent email punctuated an exciting 4.30 meeting; a friend of mine seeking help with revision who knows that flattery is the surest way to wrap me around son doigt. So at some point tomorrow I shall be dredging my brain for Economics information, which means tonight I'll need to go over my notes.

I'm still really energised from my French class, where I was helping the friendliest guy in the world. He struggles a bit with French but speaks fluent Spanish and English, so go figure, he's already way ahead of me. Class was huge fun, because we have a professor who, like me, loves tangents. We were reading a short article in which there was a Chinese name so I asked my friend Adeline how to pronounce it.

She did. We repeated it back. She shook her head and repeated it again. We tried it once more. Some of us got it, but the rest of us didn't, and it led to a good ten minute debate in very flowing French about languages and their roots and relative difficulties. The spelling rules of English (a phrase which is ironically demonstrative, as I had to rewrite it to avoid "English's"because I'm really not sure it's right) came up as a large hazard, but the Chinese way of writing a different character for every different word trumped it. Persian apparently lent the Arabic world their alphabet, but a few letters were lost on the way, and Russian, like its semi-automatic rifles, hasn't changed in years and sounds astonishing.

I also got the chance to share some very useless knowledge, courtesy of QI - we were discussing menu, a Middle-French word that cropped up in La Fontaine and in the article that we were reading today and means small or little. I have a theory that menu being a synonym for carte came from food served à la française - whereby every course would appear together as an enormous display of opulent and stupid power, since nobody could eat it all at once and so most of it would be cold before it could be eaten. Thus un menu, a little card displaying a smaller selection, could be offered to patrons who actually wanted to enjoy their meal.  Service à la française is no longer truly practiced because, as previously stated, wasteful and stupid. It still exists in the form of the buffet but is, hopefully, dying out.

It was surpassed by service à la Russe, which may be more familiar to you - I don't know how often you eat 14 course meals. At its most basic it is the form of service we know whereby food is served in courses, thus ensuring optimum temperature and avoiding melted ice cream and cold soup. In true Russian style, you are given an empty plate, and staff circulate and serve precisely as much as you wish - a host who serves you a full plate risks either seriously underestimating you, leaving you irritable, or overestimating you, leaving you insulted and unpleasantly bloated.

Bloating is acceptable among the upper classes, but insults - never.

Work - and love - is calling my name. I'll leave you with a beautiful Chinese poem.



Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.


Or, in pinyin (the way of writing Chinese in Roman script):

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ


Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.


And she tells me English is difficult.

Tampons, and other false friends

I have never needed to ask for a tampon. It is not a source of pride, nor is it something I feel has been particularly missing in my life. It's simply something that I have never had any need to do. Nor, in fact, have I ever been asked for a tampon. My rough cheeks and gentlemanly manner have apparently notified anyone who needed one that I was a tampon-free-zone.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my colleague asked me if I had le tampon. My brain promptly melted out of my ears. Did she mean un tampon? Had my gentlemanly manner deserted me? Had my smoothly shaven cheeks given her the slip?

My mind rebelled at the very thought. I recovered (manfully) and managed to ask for clarification.

"Le tampon," she repeated. She pointed in the direction of my desk, and then made a stamping motion.

This was sufficient for me to realise, in a sudden rush, that un tampon is also a stamp. Not the kind you stick to letters, but the kind with a pad of ink (which was used before we had the one you stick, explaining why we use the same word. English is essentially very lazy.)

I handed it over with relief. She gave me a very strange look.

The rest of the day passed without great incident; I finished typing up the comments from student evaluation forms - I'm getting very good at typing in French on a French keyboard but consequently have a weird five minutes when I get home and q is in a's place and some silly person has swapped the m key with the colon/semi-colon. And a full stop is now easily accessible, whilst on a French keyboard one needs to first apply the shift key. Utter mental confusion reigns.

And of course when I go in tomorrow, the opposite will happen, and I shall seethe for several minutes as I try to work out who put my w on the bottom row and why the @ symbol has been shifted to the other side of the keyboard. Occupying two brain spaces is quite difficult, but we shall overcome.

And, best of all, my private lessons restart this weekend. Really excited to see the students again. Especially because the one I help with homework got an A+ for the projects we were working on. Seriously chuffed. 95%, get in.

It's only half past six, and my mother bought me a crêpe pan for Christmas. Let's hope I don't make a total pig's ear of this...

Pig's ear, by the way, is cockney rhyming slang for beer. Likewise tiddley wink means drink. That's why in England people sometimes get a bit tiddley, meaning drunk.

People in Scotland don't get tiddley. They just get drunk.