‘I think,’ I said, ‘it was the l’eau de vie that did for me. Maybe I was misreading her and she was wondering why such piffling quantities of booze would render me so nostalgically hungover.) (Now I know eau de vie – a brandy-cum-Polish-jet-fuel-like substance, in this case made from prunes – is strong, but it doesn’t warrant that kind of expression. Shocked by the last bit and, I thought, slightly awed, with tinges of new-found respect. ‘At around midnight’, I went on (we all did), ‘we had some freshly made and seriously garlic-y soup, and then l’eau de vie.’ (All accompanied by an excellent selection of music on youtube – I saw Deep Purple and Uzeb for the first time!) ‘It began’, I began, ‘with Ricard and nibbles followed by a surprisingly offensive drinking game involving gin, tonic and an olive strapped to a cube of sugar (I won’t explain – probably ever – but j’ai gagné!) then a sampling of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau followed by a very good red and some Bergerac I brought with me. ‘Saturday evening’, I explained, ‘turned into a bit of a band-member reunion drinkathon, with me, my last bassist, our drummer and a friend of his from England who was keen to experience a typical evening in France. The people I work with are bilingual to varying degrees the resulting Frenglish resulting in the occasional ms understanding.įor instance, on Monday I was telling a fully fluent-in-French English colleague why I’d been so brutally hungover the day before. I still don’t have a clue what we ate, but it was bluddie delicious. I did this on Sunday evening for me and Her Outdoors. Pan fry the aiguillettes for a couple of minutes on both sides, then remove to a plate.ĭe-glaze the (very hot) pan with brandy, set on fire and reduce.Īdd crème fraîche and reduce again, before returning the aiguillettes to the pan. She, her husband, a friend and her husband all said: “Aiguillettes! They’re delicious, they are.” I was even given this recipe: I mentioned my problem on Sunday at a friend’s house. And, beginning to feel like there was only one word in all our dictionaries, I found this on the previous page: aglet a variant spelling of aiguillette. Not having a clue what these were, I turned to our biggest French-English dictionary and found this definition: aiguillette ( cul) aiguillette.īeing none the wiser, I turned to our biggest English dictionary and found: aiguillette a variant of aglet. I looked at the label on the packet for the first time and discovered I had bought some aiguillettes. Equally unexpectedly, the meat was in strips. (And it was in the right fridge in the supermarket.)īut when I opened it, there was no skin. It certainly looked like it from the outside. I bought what I thought was a duck breast last week. For adults, I think it takes a little bit longer. And maybe with eight hours of lessons a day, four days a week, we would have been fluent after a year. We hardly ever hear him speak French, as we just use English at home, but I’m beginning to ask him for pronunciation advice of difficult words (his rolled “r” is incredible), while we consult The Daughter on the meaning of expressions that don’t translate. But, again, by the end of the year he was happy and competent.
His first year at school was tough, but he was very little (his class was actually called “Very Little”) and it would have been tough anywhere. The childminder had no English, so he had no option but to learn. He was going to start school in the September and we felt he should at least know what he was being asked to do, even if he couldn’t say much himself. After we’d been here about a year, he went to a childminder a few mornings a week. Only her name gives her away as a non-French person.īoy had a gentler introduction to the language. So it would be hard not to say she’s coped pretty well. And by the second year she not only spoke with the village accent, but was at the top of her class in French (where she remains, jockeying for first place with another English girl). There were some downs as well as ups, like when the teacher (rightly) banned English speaking in the classroom, but the desire to play overcame everything and after three months she spoke French very well. Before the week was out, she’d been invited back to a new best friend’s house and everything looked OK. But by the end of the day she had both English-speaking and bilingual friends. On the first day, it was hard to send this little person into a playground where she knew no one and had no way of communicating. But she’s a very sociable person and we didn’t worry too much about how she would cope at school. Despite the best efforts of Her Outdoors, she knew next to no French. When we arrived in France, The Daughter was six and a half. One question that comes up from time to time is: How did the children cope with French?
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