So British!

"So British" is a catchphrase, used by the French, to encapsulate all that is glorious about my fellow countrymen and me. Our accents, our stiff upper lips, our sartorial excellence and the furtive, shifty way we speak French.

I like it. It makes me feel as though I am the keeper of secret knowledge, a wielder of the flame of Britannia, a member of a secret club - a club I was apparently born into it. I rather imagine it's how Prince Harry feels every day of his charmed life. "So British" has followed me since I arrived, and only recently have I realised what a strange people we must seem to our brothers and sisters from foreign lands.

Tea, for a start. Trying to convince the French catering department at the school to provide me with kettles to boil water is turning into a Escher-themed tennis match. They simply do not understand why the water has to be boiling. Why can they not simply boil it at 9am and leave it in the huge urns? It'll still be hot by 3pm.

Tea has to be made with boiling water, I explain. Not tepid, warm, or even hot water. Boiling. A sigh, a shrug, and a rueful look at colleagues. "So British!"

Second: scones. We've bought a lot, and both students and staff are going to enjoy them. However, they're having serious trouble deciphering what they are. Are they biscuits? Cakes? What's this on top? Jam? And this? Cream? English cream? Crème anglaise? What do you mean, they're not the same thing? A sigh, a shrug, and a rueful look at colleagues. "So British!"

It is an odd thing to insist on, but I'm also certain that High Tea is going to go over a storm. It'll be bally marvelous, what what. I might even break out the tuxedo.

So: this morning was mostly calm. A few bits and pieces to do in Excel, including a formula I worked out to separate names into two columns rather than one. I could have looked it up on Google, of course, but there's a great pleasure to figuring it out by oneself.

The afternoon was crazytown central. I got the certificates for students who'd taken the TOEIC and they descended, not en masse but in dribs and drabs, to collect them. This wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the other students whom I was trying to help with an article on an explosion that killed three people. Tough to dart between light banter and "So, here we need to stress what killed these people."

Lunch was a rapid, half-hour job, as translations needed to be finished and I had a meeting about another presentation I had to do. My colleague showed me the software and how to use it; it seems very simple and I should be able to rip through it in about thirty minutes on Thursday. After that was big-brained Alexander, whose nationality my friend Adeline could not figure out (Alexander speaks like a villain from a Bond movie; his Russian accent is so beautifully clichéd that I want to record him saying things like "You have a message, Mr Kerr" for my phone alerts.).

Finally, Alexander's article was finished, my door was closed, I was reaching for my keys when -

"Can we have our diplomas?"

"Certificates," I hissed between gritted teeth, and turned, smiled, and opened my door again.

That brought me to my French lesson, where we did negation.

I'm not going to say anything else there because I'll be either sarcastic or mean, and neither is appropriate.

Instead we shall skip ahead to tonight, where I find my privacy invaded by a colleague who desperately needs work done now because she didn't do it earlier.

I caved and did it. It only took thirty seconds, and it made her happy.

I'm a flake.

Tomorrow is a day off! And I'm probably still going to get up at 7! Hoorah for body clocks!

Not.

Love Day

Today has absolutely flown by. I'm sure this happens to everyone, but I've just sat down at my laptop to start writing a blog and had to do a double take at the time. There's no way it can be 10.

Don't forget that clocks go forwards this weekend, meaning we get robbed of an hour of sleep. Or whatever else you might be doing on Saturday night; whatever your activity of choice, be aware that you'll be doing it for an hour less. Everyone who works in a bar is understandably staring daggers - because technically the clocks don't go forward until 4am, nobody in a bar gets to go home early. They do get to wake an hour earlier though, which means this weekend is my least favourite of the year.

In addition, it's Easter, and there is the usual mass of milk chocolate offerings stocking shelves left, right and centre. Milk. You ever had the bottom fall out of your world?

Milk makes the exact opposite happen to me.

There's also a resurgence in religion, but luckily this blog isn't where I talk about that. I will say props to the people who melted down their prized possessions to make a new statues, well done to the Pope with a fortune who claims to represent a carpenter's son and super-well-done to the bigots who claim God is love but marriage is only for certain people.

That's all about religion.

I started my day checking over my statistics work and talking it over with my supervisor. As I was leaving her supervisor wandered by and asked how I was doing, if I was enjoying myself, if I was attending all the French lessons. I stammered out that last night I was called away to something else, and his eyebrows came together in a frown.

He has impressive eyebrows. They're like caterpillars, and when he frowns they meld into one salt-and-pepper line across his forehead. Distracting but impressive caterpillar-brows.

You must got to lessons, he insisted. That's why you're here. That's why you have this opportunity.

Yup. Got told off for doing work for my colleagues instead of going to simple French lessons. This year abroad is the greatest thing ever.

Lunch was followed by an interesting meeting with a student who puts biblical quotes in his emails. He is one of the sweetest guys I've ever had the good fortune to meet, but he tells me he's struggling to get past the interview stage. I do not want to suggest it, but I strongly suspect that might be the reason. How does one gently tell a man with such great faith that he needs to tone it down in order to be more employable? Should we? Or should we encourage them to be themselves?

On the one hand being true to yourself is incredibly important, but on the other moral fibre has no nutritional value and can't be made into a roof.

Tricksy!

My evening finished with my students who are making leaps and bounds in progress; nervousness is still a limiting factor but they overcome it with greater ease each time. In addition, every lesson I teach I believe I become a better teacher for them, learning when to push and when to ease back a little. It's really, really exciting to watch them grow.

Soppiness does not become me, but you'll pardon it this once.

Today is good Friday (good Freya's day) in German Karfreitag (sorrowful Freya's day) and in French vendredi saint (holy Venus day.) Merely from looking at the words you'd think it was something to do with love, and to some people it rather is. Whether it is or it isn't, one major feature of today in the West is the Stations of the Cross. These always fascinated me growing up, but the carved images I saw were ancient even then. However, a parish priest who's on twitter (and doing it really well) has been posting modern images under the names of the stations. The whole series is well worth a look, so I collected them for you here.

That's all for today folks. Happy Easter. I hope you enjoy your milk chocolate.

Bitter? Me? No.

Suddenly, love!

This morning I played the clown for my colleague, acting the parts of the older members of last night's trip to the exposition. Even if I say it myself, I'm a hoot, though I imagine that no small part of that is down to my accent. Foolishness over with, I went to greet my supervisor and find out what I'd missed yesterday evening.

Yesterday evening I missed a meeting for those volunteering with the huge careers day/forum event happening at the university. This will be its 7th iteration, and no drill sergeant in Her Majesty's Armed Forces has been so fiercely punctual of timekeeping as the event's organiser. She has given me the role of bad cop, with the responsibility of going around the rooms and essentially cutting people off when it's time for lunch. People who refuse to leave will be locked in their rooms and will have no lunch and, having already spoken about lunches here in France, you can understand why that would be seen as a Bad Thing.

The rest of my day passed uneventfully; the last few stragglers are signing up for tests, I have a brief translation to complete for "whenever" (Oh, how I love vague deadlines, how I adore them, how pleasing it is to be suddenly told 'I need that translation now') and, of course, hanging in the horizon like a star is my interview for -

I want to tell you all who the interview is with. I really do, because it's exciting and if I get it then I think it will realistically change the whole direction of my career and life. And this blog has readers who, despite the inanity of my life, keep coming back, and I should dearly like to reward those good and patient people with something exciting.

I assure you this sudden dip into seriousness will be temporary, but for the moment do bear with me.

Taken from
http://www.docnews.fr/data/classes/actualite/actu_7844_vignette.jpg

So: I have an interview with Agence ELAN, a French PR firm which opened an office in London in 2011. They've directed PR for companies like Moët Chandon, L'Oréal, and Eurostar. They are the essence of where I want to be; fast moving, European - my immediate supervisor will speak three languages fluently and has three degrees - and working with a broad range of clients. This would only be an internship, of course, but even the first inch of a toe in the door is sufficient for me.

Okay. So that's happening on Thursday and I'm fizzing with excitement, but I'll try to bottle it for the moment. I shall likely pop a little on Friday, but I will do my best to keep it off your lovely clothes.

I rounded the day off with a French film, which was incredibly good fun. L'Arnacoeur is formulaic and even features a frame-by-frame reproduction of the dance sequence from Dirty Dancing - 

You know which one. Don't make me -

I hope you're satisfied.

But it still had some great, laugh out loud moments, and I'd recommend it to most anyone, although it does see this poor guy get stood up by the girl he adores.

Aw.

Unfortunately this isn't the first time this has happened. See also: Love Actually 

Awww.

That's a hell of a thing to be typecast as, isn't it. The guy who gets his heart broken.

What a blog. And it's only Tuesday. Here's to the rest of the week.

There's something wonderful about snow

Yesterday, as I strolled home and spoke to my smallest sister, it started to snow. Great big clumps. This morning when I awoke it was to find that the snow had not, and everywhere was covered in a thin blanket of sparkling snow. I say sparkling because, despite its whiteness, there was a sparkle that lay just below the powder. In any case, as I scurried across the car park (I can run from my bedroom to my office in thirty seconds) those thoughts were the ones that struck me with the greatest force. Snow adds an ethereal beauty to anything, and anything already beautiful merely has its beauty magnified - be it a town or a person.

Enough proselytizing. You love snow, and I'm sure I need not convince you of how wonderful it is.

This morning was spent completing the task I started yesterday, a task for which I was rewarded with a bottle of something novel and exciting. It's an apéritif, and not one I'm familiar with. Normally I'd put a picture of it here but, in the dash to get home and do shopping, it's still in the office. However, I promise if you check back after 11am GMT there'll be a photo of the gift in place of my grinning face.

See? Looks exciting, non?


Having delivered the goods, completed the assignment, and been incredibly surprised by the kind gesture of my colleague - perhaps I'm cynical, but every time a colleague gives me a thank-you gift for some work I've done I'm completely bowled over and stammer thanks in two different languages.

That's how you know you're getting better at second languages. You use it to thank people because it provides useful filler while you try to get your brain back in gear.

The only other thing that happened today was that I called up my interviewer to fix a time and date for the aforementioned interview, time being a bit weird between here and London. She answered the phone with the distinctive "'Allo?" of almost all French people. My resolution, which had been to speak exclusively in English, went swiftly out the window. Hearing that "Allo?" at work has become a signal, for me, to speak in French rather than English. Like a Pavlovian dog, I switched into French. (The following has been translated:)

- 'Allo?
- Ah hello, am I speaking to --
- Yes, speaking.
- Hi, we spoke yesterday via email, I'm just calling to confirm the interview time and date.

And so on, as you would expect that call to go. Except it was totally in French, and at no point did either of us suggest switching to English. It just seemed completely natural, and that pretty much made my day. A genuine French person who's never met me felt more at east speaking French than English. Joy.

The afternoon was absolutely full of work, which was also really pleasing. After lunch my colleague and I did a coaching session with the same colleague who'd gifted me the scrumptious looking bottle above, and ten minutes from the end my supervisor rang me on my mobile.

-Tu es où, Jonathan? Where are you, Jonathan?
-Je suis à l'école, Madame. I'm in school, Miss. Bear in mind that the coaching session we were conducting took place not more than 100 meters from my supervisor's office.
- But why aren't you picking up your phone?
I walked into her office.

It was a good moment. She looked completely nonplussed, stared at her own phone for a good ten seconds, and then looked at me. I apologised and explained why I'd (apparently) spontaneously materialised outside her office. She told me that the marketing and press department were looking for me, hoping to utilise my knowledge of English. A press release was ready to go out, following an interview with a CEO and alumnus of the School. All that remained was for me to okay it.

You can imagine how my ego swelled. Coming on the heels of the interview that I confirmed this morning this fresh massage of my ego (well recovered from its bruising descent yesterday) and so I stormed up to the department and spent a comfortable hour discussing very tiny variations in language. English is so rich but also so very sensitive to change; anyone who has looked up the difference between get on and get off knows what I mean.

Now, at this point I'd love to talk about how my evening was interesting, how the French lesson was brilliant, and how I trudged through snow that crunched underfoot.

Instead, I'm somewhere between elation and terror, so I'm going to close this blog here, take a dram, and prepare for my interview.

If you're slightly perturbed by the abruptness with which this blog has finished, permit me to recommend you a blog by a schoolmate, Sophy - who's in Vienna - and another German assistant +Joanna Ford, who I don't know personally but writes with the elegance and easy wit that is so often lacking from this blog.

I'll see you all tomorrow.

EDIT: Sophy, not Sophie. I'm an awful person.

I'm going on an adventure!

Planning tomorrow's jaunt, for which I shall be leaving at the unnatural hour of 7 ante meridiem, has got me terribly excited. I've looked up places to go and things to see, been bitterly disappointed by the fact that my favourite looks like it'll be closed and found myself once again confounded by the French fondness for just shutting everything for two hours at lunchtime.

Still, there also seem to be plenty of good eateries, so I'm looking forward to a delectable lunch. The early morning will be interesting and hopefully I'll get the chance to take an early breakfast when I arrive. There seems to be an awful lot to see there including big clocks, various museums, and a cathedral or three. There will probably be lots of pictures, although I can't promise a post - I know I shall be absolutely dog-tired.

Anyhow; that's tomorrow. Today was a slow news day - at least in the morning. In the afternoon, this tweet appeared in my timeline:

I like PR; I'd like to see myself in it one day before long. It's storytelling by any other name and, like a rose, is still as sweet. I like to portray myself as cool, calm and collected. I like you all to think of me as the pinnacle of effortless charm, poise and grace, un maestro di sprezzatura if you like. So it will benefit me nothing to tell you that upon reading this tweet I jumped out of my chair and said a word that my mother told me oftentimes not to say.

Nota bene - For British readers, don't forget that Mothering Sunday is this weekend, and if you've not got anything yet there's probably still some sad looking flowers or a dog-eared card at the petrol station. It's far too late for me. But you still have a tiny chance. Go. Go now!

So having fired off an email to the man in question and received a full job description in reply, it turns out that the company is looking for an intern whom they hope to turn into a full time employee, and at this point in my life I can't really drop out of university and hope all turns out for the best. There was a time when I did exactly that, but I'm older and just a little wiser now - in part because when I did, it didn't, if you see what I mean.

However; I am nothing if not tenacious, and I've sent emails in French and English asking for the company to consider me for an internship of fixed duration. I don't know if I'll get it - that advert will have been answered by a minimum of 200 actually graduated francophones, some of whom will be naturally bilingual, but nonetheless - nothing is gained by doing nothing.

As I sent the email last thing on a Friday night I don't imagine I'll get anything back before Monday, but  I'm going on an epic trip tomorrow and planning lessons all day Sunday so I'm not going to have any time to worry. That's the plan, but I daresay I'll find half an hour to chew on my fingernails. Even in the depths of panic, I know how to schedule my time.

As I packed my things away to go for the weekend, my neighbour popped his head round the door to mention he'd be gone for a week. I asked if he was going anywhere nice, and he pretended to think about it.

- Cap-Vert, he said at last, grinning.

Cap-Vert is a string of islands just off the coast of Senegal, 14 degrees above the equator.

Rouen suddenly looks less awesome.

In case I don't do a blog tomorrow please accept my apologies in advance, and have a picture of a man who looks like Ant and Dec at the same time. 

Can't be unseen.

I'm an alien

I'm feeling less and less like an alien as I live here longer and longer, but it only struck me yesterday that I have been here six months. I've only got another five months and the past six have literally flown by. 

I am genuinely horrified by time and the speed with which it is passing.

Today has been an incredibly good day, with lots of exceedingly complex workbooks and data sorting to be done. I also got to look at the accounts after my supervisor emailed them to me; they have to be clearly marked as my own and only worked on in my folder, but she will work on her copy and I on mine and hopefully, at the end of the month, they will be identical. There will not be a single cent's difference between them. It's a really exciting prospect, and means if I plan on running as treasurer for anything next year then I'm well and truly prepared. Very exciting!

Accountancy. It's interesting.

The afternoon was more complex data, this time a survey that was sent out to last year's graduates to find out how they're doing and if they've got jobs. I worked through the tasks in an hour and then, since I had an hour still to spare, made graphs to show the data in as many exciting ways as I could. I've got bar charts, pie charts, and a few hundred tables. The next task is to write it up into a presentation and make sure my French is exceptional and my prose neat and professional. 

Data presentation. It's even more interesting.

This evening - which, by the way, is glorious; warm and fine and dry and absolutely what you'd expect from France - was spent in the company of C, who's taking her TOEFL on Friday. We did some really intensive work on speaking, because the test has very strict time limits and diction is the only area in which she has issues. Not big problems, but the university in the UK at which she wishes to study is asking for a really high score. She made some progress but like most people got a little flustered at the strict time limits. I have confidence that she's going to ace it, though. I'm back to see her brother, L, tomorrow, as my other potential Wednesday client - you remember, the crazy house of five boys - has not rung me back. It's not a big thing, to ask or to do, and so for them simply not to bother just tells me that I needn't either.

I know I'm not running an office, but realising that my time here is limited just makes me more irritated at people who waste it - another reason I'm so glad I have so many things to do at work. 

Being grouchy. It's not interesting at all.

So as not to finish on the boring note, here's an ad for whisky featuring the gorgeous voice of Robert Carlyle and the glorious countryside of Scotland, to continue my theme of:

"seriously, Scotland is gorgeous, and Scottish voices to die for."

I seriously love my job.

Something I don't say enough is that my job is incredible. At least once a week - at least! - I learn more about something about which I had had only a passing knowledge.

Take today, for example. The morning was spent in the office, entering data into spreadsheets, struggling with a translation that had gone into French via Spanish. The phrasing was complex but I feel like the translation does it justice - we shall see when it comes back.

In the afternoon I had the chance to go over the newsletter produced by the BDE, the French version of our Students Associations/Unions. It was incredibly well written, considering the author's first language is not English at all, and although I discussed the issues with it in French - I ought to have done it in English, being the English teacher - he often spotted the mistake before I explained it. The BDE organises a lot of really interesting extra-curricular activities, and I'm continually surprised by how many students go along to them - I've seen how much work they have to do, and I don't know how they juggle it. For this particular student to go so far A and B the C of D and produce a ten page synthèse of the events is astonishing. I suspect he sleeps less than me, and yet he is a continual ray of sunshine. He will go far; I guarantee it.

After lunch I had a coaching session with one of the professors, and he explained his course to me - it deals with using waves to measure the sub-surface. In essence, one can send a vibration through the Earth, and that wave will travel at different speeds through different media. By recording how long it takes to get back to the surface, engineers can make an educated deduction about the substances below their feet - whether they are chalk, granite, oil or dwarven halls. These waves are also created naturally, by earthquakes, but since such events are far too destructive to induce on a regular basis, this method is used instead.

Several more students have apparently just woken up from deep sleep and realised that the deadline for the test was a week ago, and the remainder of my afternoon was taken up with adding them to my long, long list. With twenty minutes to go, the director of one of the programmes came in and asked for help drafting a delicate email. A former student had googled himself and found that he had been mentioned in a French paper by his former professor. Assuming that this was because the professor had either cited or, in fact, appropriated his ideas, the alumnus emailed all in a bother, talking about copyright law and the unprofessional attitude of the school.

What had actually happened, had this rude and petulant person bothered to read the paper, was that the professor had mentioned the alumnus along with the rest of his class, thanking them for taking the time to discuss certain ideas in the paper.

That's it. It's as though Adele's mother, upon hearing her name in the singer's thank-you speech, had rushed on-stage and tried to wrest the Oscar away from her daughter, claiming that the work was hers. It is that level of ridiculous.

It irritated me no end to simply read this person's whining; I dread to think how the author of the paper reacted to being accused of intellectual property theft by someone who couldn't spell "google." In any case, the director and I crafted a very strongly worded response which she said she would sleep on. It was very strong; the polite words only sharpened the message, which was - in effect - pipe down and be thankful your name was even mentioned, you ungrateful little rat. It might be more pertinent to politely explain the matter, despite the desire to give said rat the ticking-off he deserves.

I've been in for an hour now and I've got a blog ready and I finished my French homework a day early; the topic was Dîner Catastrophe! and if you're particularly keen to read my stab at French please follow the link. My next topic, for Thursday, is to be a discussion between myself and an acquaintance who wants the recipe for the delicious meal they just ate. It's a work in progress, but if I say that the meal was tantalising (from the Greek king Tantalus) then perhaps that gives you a clue as to the slightly dark path I plan to lay.

I must leave you now to give a lesson but, in the meantime, try to tell me who you're more likely to find in a golf bag: Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy, or Sir Lancelot.

The land of fairytales

There was no blog yesterday due to a migraine that sat right behind my left eye and threatened to pop it clean out of its socket. That may not actually be how migraines work - I'm no Dr House - but that's certainly how it felt, and I went to bed with a heavy heart. The next day I was due to go to Disney, but with pain that severe I knew I'd have to cancel - and bringing two friends down from Le Havre and then abandoning them would have been awfully rude. Thankfully, with my alarm (summer storm today, completely surreal but very pleasant to wake to) came clarity and renewed vigour; energy, not agony, coursed through my brain. I had breakfast, I got dressed, and I checked the weather.

"Ressentie" means "feels like". "-10ºC" means "You ought to wear a coat, dumbass"

I confess a small problem of mine is that I sometimes overestimate my tolerance for things. These things include, but are not limited to, alcohol, cheese and the cold. As a result, I put an undershirt on, buttoned another over the top, threw on a suit jacket and attached a gift to it and made my way into the cold. The bus arrive quickly, and although it felt nippy, I assumed it would warm up - the sun would shine, the cloud would burn off, and Disneyland would twinkle and sparkle in the light.

Being wrong once is bad luck. Being wrong twice is indicative, but being wrong three times is a good sign that you are not as smart a cookie as you'd like to think. The short version, for those who believe that brevity is the soul of wit, it was exceedingly cold and, despite having got back 90 minutes ago, I have only just regained sufficient fine motor ability to tap this out.

I've also taken on another two students because their father called me when I was tired and freezing, and it was easier to just agree than to turn him down and then explain why. So my week now looks like this:

Not pictured: free time

So that's my week ahead. Frightening. But exciting! New students are younger still, 7 and 9 (I think, the connection was abysmal, if it turns out they're 70 and 90 it'll be interesting for a different set of reasons) so I can foresee this being a real challenge. I'm going to aim for 50-50 English-French teaching and will need to start looking at more detailed lesson plans to really hold small children's attention. If anyone has any advice, I'd really appreciate it.

So: my friends, it seems, slept incredibly badly - no more than five hours sleep between the pair of them. We had to make an emergency stop at Starbuck's before a brisk walk to the RER station Auber. The RER A goes pretty much directly through Paris East-West, and although it's faster than the Metro, it still took us around 45 minutes to get out to Marne-la-Valée and DisneyLand Resort Paris.

It started snowing on the way, big, thick, perfect flakes of snow. This was to become a recurrent theme.

We arrived and were at once struck by how cold it was. At no point did we swear, because Disney never has swearing. Even when lions are being thrown to their deaths by Jeremy Irons (warning: all the sads), and you'd think that at least merits an f-word. Minimum. So there was no swearing at all, all day, even when mentioning how extraordinarily, finger-blackening, blood-freezingly cold it was. We made a game effort and went around every part of the park, tagging the Teacups and Indiana Jones on the way round. We were hampered in our efforts to get onto the more exciting rides because other people were willing to stand in line for 80 minutes to get on them, and we don't have that sort of determination. We were all far too cold.

We broke for lunch in a gigantic theatre and half-watched several of the incredible shorts Disney/Pixar have made. If you've not seen them yet, then here's a lovely little one from Wall-E to get you started.

We all know that feeling.

In any case, by five in the afternoon we were just about ready to crash - trotting around on no sleep in the freezing cold had ground us steadily down, and we made for the train station. Before long we were zooming back through the snow, falling even heavier now, and dragging our weary selves into the station. I said goodbye to my friends, who looked as dead on their feet as me, and made my way by metro and then by bus back home.

The bus, being a bus sent by Satan, stopped half a mile from my flat. That's not far, but in the state of mind where all one wants to do is sit in the warm and drink tea that half mile stretched far, far ahead of me. And blew snow in my face.

In any case, I've made it home. My laundry is on, my alarm is set, and my 7-day week starts again in 10 hours, so if anyone needs me, I'll be the one passed out in bed and not snoring. 

I hope.

Briefly:

I've written quite a long explanation of what I learned in my French class today and realised that you're probably not here for the French grammar lessons that I am. If you're interested in reading then by all means, it's over here, but otherwise my day was as follows:

Going into the office to discover that I had made two small errors the previous evening both, unfortunately, to the same person. Having finished a minor proofread and edit I sent the editor a cheery email, explaining that I'd only found some very small errors and that with my enclosed corrections the piece was ready to be published. As I sent it I realised I'd forgotten to attach the document, and shot off another quick message, apologising for the first and reaffirming that with my attached correction the piece could be published. I then went home.

You're all laughing, because you can see where this is going, but I couldn't and didn't.

So when I came in this morning I settled into my desk, opened my inbox, and got an understandably irritated message and, shortly after, a phone call. All was fixed in minutes, but the editor had a point - without the article he'd been left twiddling his thumbs. I try not to err, as it only reminds me that I'm human, but I do think that all email systems in the world could do with something like this from +Gmail:

I did! Thanks, Google!

Aside from that, however, my morning progressed as normal - I took some phone bookings for the cultural events we run for alumni and my supervisor and I adjusted the plan I've done for my old office. Since it's now finished with, I'm going to share it with you, because I think it's awesome and I hope you'll appreciate the huge number of hours I poured into it.

Isn't it glorious?

It's also a 3D model. Even as I type that I can hear the appreciative susurrations of future friends and acquaintances.

In the afternoon I discovered two things; one, that dates for the next TOEIC session had already been set - a fact I discovered by opening my inbox and watching 120 inquiring messages come in - and that someone high above me had given the order for my office to be moved, bypassing both my colleague and my supervisor. I suspect this is a danger in many large organisations; it's hard to ensure that right and left hand both know what they're doing at the same time. After sorting out a more suitable date for them to deconstruct everything the foreman and I had a pleasant chat about my internship and he congratulated me on my French. Happy days.

Last thing today was French class, which was interesting. I've done preceding direct object pronouns before but one thing caught me out; preceding indirect objects which, as it turns out, don't agree. The lessons are really helping with vocabulary and to clear up little grammar points I've always been a little shaky on and, as I love teaching, the professor puts up with my chattering as I try to nudge my classmates in the right direction. I really like this particular professor, although the fact that he's never read Calvin and Hobbes may prove to be a source of serious contention. 

In fact, here. Have some Calvin and Hobbes to warm your heart.

Bill Waterson, you magnificent, genius son of a gun. Come back.

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.

Exponential views!

My blog will soon pass three thousand (!) hits, and I would like to thank everyone who reads regularly for making me feel like the most important person on the internet. I'm 99.9% sure I'm not, but it feels pretty good to believe so. Therefore - thank you.

I arrived back in France yesterday after a very odd Eurostar journey. We were well into France, perhaps an hour away from Paris, when the most awful din started up. It sounded like the noise that occurs when you drive your car over a newly gritted road, but since I was on a train I could not for the life of me work out what the noise was. It was seriously unsettling, and the baby seated on its father's lap evidently agreed and began bawling its lungs out.

I was struggling to get back into French mode and was hesitating a little at the ticket window when a chap stepped so close to me that I could feel his beard and asked in French if I was going to take much longer. In French, but with a British accent. A British person who had clearly been away for so long that he had forgotten common courtesies. I confess I was a little sharp with the man, who huffed and told me that he was in a hurry.

Had I then dawdled and passed the time conversing with the man behind the window about the unknowable nature of God I daresay karma would have forgiven me but I resisted. I completed my transaction with appropriate haste and made my way down to the station, standing to one side on the escalator for this be-whiskered oik pass at some speed. Despite his alacrity he was,
 sadly - so sadly! - just a little too late for the train. There was another along in three minutes, and he twitched and paced for 180 seconds. I would have liked to know what  the terrible hurry was, but like many of the mysteries we glance in the lives of others it shall always remain so - a mystery.

It is pleasant, in any case, to be back.

Words, words, words, I'm so sick of words

Although actually, unlike poor Eliza, I'm actually jolly keen on words and even more so on their roots. Where words come from is a source of constant fascination, and I'm really rather hoping that I can find some etymology courses when I return to university.

A small note of thanks at the top of the page to Third Year Abroad, who are the best resource on the entirety of the web if you are hoping to spend some time abroad during your degree. I discovered them far too late, and they were still brilliant. Discover them now if you've not gone anywhere yet!

With that in mind, I shall offer a cryptic clue with etymological roots. It will (hopefully) delight and perplex you, and if it does not, you can simply skip right past it. Answers will be offered the next day, and I shall mention anyone who gets the answers.

Today has been a productive day, but not enormously stimulating. We have 1,500 books to mail out, and since I am a lot cheaper than the outside company we use for the task of sticking labels and stamping envelopes, I have been sat in front of a gradually diminishing pile of envelopes all day. It's not the most exciting job in the world, but it left my mind free to wander, which is never unpleasant. It's also quite pleasant to see one's work as a physical thing; finishing today the number of envelopes I'd stamped and stuck made a pile that rose up to my shoulders, or the stomach of a normal sized man.

I also printed all of my posts out for my colleague, who tells me I'm amusing, but also said that there were some references she didn't get, some humour she couldn't quite figure out. It's quite strange to see that even in 40 years, what is "current" has made huge leaps.

It's also been a day full of planning; on my lunch breaks I discovered that an awful lot of excellent PR firms offer apprenticeship schemes for graduates. It's really exciting to line up what I want to do and to know what the process is like, and I can start researching the firms in which I want to work.

Nerdy, but with any luck there could be a job at the end.

The weekend is ahead, and I'm planning on heading into Paris, finding an excellent restaurant and eating with Orlando. Leave a comment if you know any particularly excellent restaurants, and if you don't know Paris, here's a gorgeous timelapse video to enlighten you about the City of Lights. Nota bene the twin Eiffel Towers at 2:14, which are an absolute tourist trap but well worth seeing.

Finally, my cryptic and etymological conundrum which is a star of film: Victorious people (feminine) young goatherd.

It took me twenty minutes to work that one out. I hope you're quicker.

Ghost Town

First up, housekeeping. To the right of this post, if you're reading it online, is an email sign-up box. If you'd rather get these blogs out and about, or if you're not tech-savvy enough to know about feed readers, you can put your email in there and get these posts straight to your inbox. Which is handy if you've got email set up on your phone, because it should mean you can read them as you sit on the bus or ride the Underground or snatch five minutes between hectic shifts at your job at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Gosh.

It was my first day back at work today, and I'm happy to say I really missed it. It's interesting to find that even though I've been learning this language since I was about 8, I still get really nervous speaking it around Actual French People. Or even Actual English People Who Moved Here When They Were Nineteen. It's good that I'm nervous, though, because it means I pay far more attention to my endings, agreements, and the various other bits and pieces that I tend to forget after speaking for a while. It's really, really easy to get complacent when speaking a language one has a good level in. The fact is that native speakers let you get away with an awful lot so as not to appear stand-offish or rude.

My colleagues are all lovely, and as a result I really have to urge them to pick me up on the mistakes I make. Re-reading What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro is also helping a little; if you're interested in body language then I can't recommend a better first read. It's helping me to look for the signs when I make a mistake; generally it's a half-hidden smile or a small frown, depending on the size of the mistake and the social faux pas that I've made.

Faux pas is probably best translated as misstep, although in English we tend to use mistake.

In any case, the term begins again tomorrow and the students have been returning in dribs and drabs, a phrase of uncertain origin which may have roots in Irish prostitution. We've also got some new students who hail from Russia and are unsettlingly good looking. The sort of good looking that makes you seriously consider giving up your resolutions and committing death by chocolate. 85% cocoa solids, if it comes to that. I want my end to be like my life. Bitter, but somehow moreish.

That sounds morbid, but I assure you it's not.

So my tasks for the year have started to accumulate already; I have around 150 pages of raw data to turn into graphs which is fantastic because, well, give me data and Excel and tell me to make graphs and I am as happy as Larry. Larry was probably an Australian boxer who never lost a fight and took away a purse of £1,000 on his last fight - which in today's money would be about £399,000. That's enough to make anyone happy.

However, I also have to overcome the obstacle of bad French handwriting. There are two parts to this. The first part is the French; they form letters in a very different way to English writers, but it's relatively easy to overcome - one simply has to learn the pattern. So far so good.

If this oddity is combined with handwriting that would puzzle a doctor, however, there is literally nothing I can do save stare at the scribbled mess and wonder bitterly if a court would accept this as evidence that the student's death was entirely understandable. There is nothing more frustrating than bad handwriting coupled with the writer's assumption that the reader will know what they are saying. And the worst thing about this is that I know that someone dear to me will read this and laugh, because my handwriting is akin to a drunken spider with inky legs.

In any case, my challenge is set, and I'm excited by it. Huge amounts of data excite me, because they offer huge amounts of possibility. So much information can be gleaned from it.

My other challenge is equally exciting, but in quite the opposite direction - I have been asked to write a small email greetings card, and to write a poem within. One of my colleagues has made a sweet little animation, so all I need do is a tiny little four line poem. She's left the rhyming scheme and the meter up to me.

I have never been so paralysed by my lack of vocabulary. Not in all my born days. I was suddenly rendered utterly incapable of counting syllables, of matching sounds. I look into my English vocabulary and words practically fountain out. I look into my French vocabulary and it looks a little bit like the bag of letters at the end of a Scrabble game.

However; my deadline is the end of the week, and as soon as I have finished writing this I shall be cracking on with trying to rhyme oiseau (bird) with absolutely any word I can. 

While I suffer, I should be intrigued if anyone knows why heroin, a terrifically nasty and addictive drug, sounds the same as heroine, which is like a hero but more womanly. Or, if you're a comic book artist, with a breast to waist ratio that would make Barbie uneasy. If you know, comment below.