Uncle Ron, a man of ballet

And other realisations

Dear Friend,

I hope you’ve had a good week. It’s been rainy and grey here in Paris and, from what I gather, the weather has been similar in the UK. It is a contrast to last summer, which was so scorchingly hot that at one point I had to fashion a makeshift heat-protective curtain for my apartment using almost all the clothes I own, arranged on hangers. 

Thank you to those who wrote back to my letter last week about, amongst other things, the French attitude to childcare. I highlighted the contrast between nurseries in the UK, which keep parents updated of their child’s every movement via a special app, vs. the play schemes ( known here as centres aérés), which seem to leave parents to work out the details of what their kids got up to that day. 

I particularly enjoyed the response from my friend Manon, whom I know thanks to my dog Babbet’s friendship with her Shiba Inu, Rio. Manon is Parisian born and bred and so can be relied upon to provide an authentic French perspective. It was she, for example, who informed me that the firemen at the firemen’s ball, which I wrote about in a recent letter,  are known to ‘take off more than their shirt at the end of the night.’ 

On the subject of childcare, she shared this early memory of the centre aéré:

“Your letter reminded me of something.  One of my earliest memories in life is of a very big procession with tons of people, everyone having a rose, walking down the street with music. When I was a teen I told my parents about it, because it felt like a « manifestation »  (protest), but they don’t go to them, so I wanted to know where it was from

Turns out, that they knew and were surprised that I remembered: when I was 5 and Mitterand died (president), the animators of the centre aéré  really wanted to go to the demonstration in his honour in Paris, but were working. So without telling the parents (who would have said no), they took us anyway (probably on a Wednesday afternoon). Of course we told about it, and they actually were in quite a bit of trouble (cause French parents are flex, but a demonstration is not the safest place for 5 year-olds ).”

Others also came forward to offer comparable stories about children they knew:  

• One friend told me her niece, 15, just went on a ‘colonie de vacances’ (summer camp) in Eastern Europe. All the teenagers on the trip got food poisoning and a dozen of them had to spend the night in hospital on a drip. The girl’s mother found out, not from the responsible adults on the trip, but from her own daughter the day after she came out of hospital. 

• Another friend told me that the family’s nanny  forgot to pick up her five-year-old daughter from ballet class. They were going out for a concert and had asked the nanny to extend her usual shift in order to put the two children to bed, which would include picking the older girl up from ballet. Except she didn’t pick her up!  The ballet teacher did not herself have the parents’ numbers, another teacher who ran the school did, and that teacher was not answering her phone. So the younger teacher took my friend’s daughter for a burger and fries with her twenty-something  friends (apparently the little ballerina had a great time!). Her parents didn’t discover about their child’s night out until they got a call from the more senior dance teacher at 10.30pm, who had finally answered the phone to the first teacher. When the parents got home, they asked the nanny if she didn’t perhaps wonder where the other girl was, to which she replied “hmm, I did have a doubt.”

A local guignol puppet show advertising a drôle d’invité (funny old guest) - THE DEVIL! 

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Uncle Ron mystery solved

On the subject of ballet class…

I have written previously about my local gym, most recently as a hot-den of sexism. 

A few days ago I went with my friend Annie (currently working on a great scheme, which I will detail further down) to a class called culture physique or ‘physical culture’, which is perhaps the most French name possible for a gym class. Usually this class is made up of squats, lifting light weights, planks, that kind of thing. But just like everyone else, gym instructors also need holiday, and the usual class leader was replaced by a different teacher. She explained that she was a trained ballet dancer and that we would be doing things a little differently this week. Instead of lunges and weight-lifting, we did repetitions of balletic movements set to jaunty piano accompaniments, typical of a ballet class. 

Throughout my childhood from the age of three I did ballet classes, which took place in the local church hall and were run by a woman named Miss Joycelyn. This would have been the first place I ever heard French words, though it took me some years to realise that’s what they must be. I didn’t speak or understand French in any way until my mid teens and in any meaningful way at all until I was about 17, so throughout the whole time I went to ballet lessons, I would just approximate the sounds I heard in my head to the closest words in English. I stopped ballet classes as a pre-teen and so that’s where the ballet words stayed, frozen in time. Until this week at the ballet barre class at the gym! 

There is one particular move, where you put your hands in a graceful little arch above your head that I had always known as ‘Uncle Ron’. It was just this week, when I was instructed to do the movement by the gym teacher, that I realised it is in fact ‘en couronne’ (crown).  It was strangely moving all these years later to shed light on that naively-understood memory, and to think that something that was oncE entirely opaque to me is now clear. 

This week I also went to an exhibition with an American friend at the Maison Victor Hugo on the elegant Place des Vosges in Paris. My friend is learning French and is a very ambitious, high-achieving type, so was trying to work out how long it might take her to be able to read literature in French. I said even now, after many years of learning the language, I would probably find it quite tiring to read something like Les Misérables.

I said to her that I think of language learning, or at least my process of learning French, as a sort of looking through a curtain. At the beginning, like when I was a child in ballet class, everything in the French language was completely inaccessible to me, obscured by a thick black curtain.

As my French has improved over the years, sense slowly has seeped out from behind the cracks, until the curtain became translucent – the stage where maybe I could understand 70 percent of what I heard or read, meaning I had a pretty good idea of the main shapes and movements, but some of the details were still unclear and I could make mistakes of interpretation.

Today the curtain is thinner still, almost transparent maybe. I get a huge sense of satisfaction when I hear a French song I used to only half-understand and now I can make out every word. But there is still a curtain dividing the English part of my brain and the part where the French language lives, and because I didn’t grow up in French, I imagine there always will be there. 

Still, it’s good to finally know who Uncle Ron is. 

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Thirty-second book club

Since I became self-employed in 2018, I feel that I have been on a never-ending quest to try and understand the French tax and national insurance (sécurité sociale) system. Just when I think I have understood all there is to understand, some unexpected charge or process makes me realise I haven’t. As part of this Sisyphean endeavour to understand, I went to my local library last week to find a book on personal finance for self-employed people. I didn’t find any useful ones…BUT while I was there, in the work section, I did find a very interesting book entirely unrelated to my administrative woes! 

It’s called Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille (It’s 5am, Paris is waking up), citing the words of a famous 1968 song by French rock singer Jacques Dutronc. It’s the memoir of Anna Livart, a Dutch immigrant to France who worked as a street sweeper for the City of Paris for two years after failing to find a job in communications, which she had studied for. It’s a great read so far and quite a different view of Paris to macarons, Eiffel Tower and all that jazz. I will write more about it next week when I’ve read more!

I’ve added the Dutronc song to my Pen Friend mixtape here. 

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Delightful post and madcap challenges

Thank you very much to new sponsors of Pen Friend! I have sent out thank you postcards and I hope you will receive them soon. If you can, and would like to join them in sponsoring the letters, please do! I am working on some sponsor perks to roll out, beyond my fine postcard, of course.

Talking of sponsors, I chose to upgrade my subscription of New York journalist

Anne Kadet

‘s letter,

CAFÉ ANNE

. In return I received a magnificent letter including, among other things, some gold star stickers! Thank you, Anne.

I highly recommend her newsletter. She’s a professional reporter and she uses her skills to tell offbeat stories of New York characters and conduct delightful investigations into subjects such as ‘The Bagel Shop Next to the Bagel Shop!’ and  the ‘Mystery Tree’ in Brooklyn. She also gets involved in reader schemes – one of my regular readers worked with Anne to help his son find a woman he met on a night out. Gosh!

I thought of Anne this week when my friend Annie, mentioned above, mentioned HER scheme with/against her younger brother Alfie. It’s called The Great Carambar Exchange. They have 6 months to find the ‘best item traded up from a Carambar’. Annie has already traded her carambar for a jazz cd. She says that her brother has the advantage of being a ‘sociable, young, Gen Z’, so please do go over to the Instagram page to join in the trade with Annie!

Anne Kadet

, I feel this could be quite up your street too….

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That’s it for now! Thanks for reading this letter about many things, only some of them topical. 

If you enjoyed this letter, please consider subscribing, sponsoring, sharing, liking. And of course it is always lovely when you write back. 

Have a lovely week!

Yours,

Hannah