Bonfire of the vanities: losing my marbles

The marbles I bought for the blue room. Because they were pretty, cheap, fun, whimsical, throwaway trinkets and knickknacks.  From time to time I would slosh them about in soapy water, dry them and rearrange them in different glass and ceramic receptacles.  

When the time came to sort through stuff, it seemed to me that to treasure and hoard them and feel obliged to carry them through life would be a mistake and somehow against the spirit of marbles. I needed to part with them. I asked Iso if the Princeling, now nine years old, cared for marbles. I knew French kids still often played and treasured les billes.

Indeed he did, she said, and they were the only toys they were allowed to take into school.

I took a plain piece of the cotton fabric pieces that HHB had sent me, knitted a length of i-cord, and made a drawstring bag for them, and passed them on.

'He could lose them, you know,'  Tom warned 'playing marbles is basically gambling.'

'They're beautiful, like jewels!' Iso, Princeling's mum exclaimed, when I gave them to her to give to him, 'I might have to keep them, not let him have them...'

That was a couple of months ago. Today we received a hand made card, with rainbows and kisses painted on it, and a careful message in English, in French cursive script, thanking me for the marbles and also for the jumper I knitted for his birthday - It's all hot. I love it* - a kind of gansey type thing which I didn't photograph before giving it to him, but it's this pattern, in a rather sober, grown-up, grey-green wool/alpaca blend which I hope isn't too drab, he's a chap who likes colour. I don't know if Iso had kept the marbles until his birthday, and I don't know if he will take them to school and be prepared to risk them all at one turn of pitch and toss. I rather hope so, if he wants to, and that they won't be too much of a treasure and a source of gratitude, obligation and anxiety, and that he'll romp and play in the jumper, dirty it, hole it and scuff it up until he grows out of it.


*chaud being both hot and warm, he has always tended to think in French and translate, so 'is it yours?' was expressed as ' is it at you?' a literal translation of 'est-ce que c'est à toi?'

Knitting review of the year: pretty babies and knitworthy males

Perhaps I was a bit hard on babies, some of them are quite nice to look at really, and puppies and kittens are a bit ugly and squirmy when first born.  The most attractive very young animals are herbivores, foals, calves, fawns, lambs etc, since they have to be able to get up onto their beautiful long wobbly legs right away.

One such beautiful human baby was Princeling, who was much remarked on at the time for his prettiness and lack of crinkly red squawkiness. (This may have been in part because he didn't really want to be born when he was, but the Obstetric Powers that Be insisted he had to. His response to this, rather than to get cross, was to come quietly, looking smooth and unruffled, and continue to sleep the sleep of the just in utero until his due date, when he woke up.)

He is also, in common with Tom, a most knitworthy male.  At first he didn't really have much choice about it, but now he is still a most appreciative knitting recipient. He has probably acquired this in part from his mum, who is slim and gorgeous and enjoys her clothes, likes a good woolly and loves to see him such a garment, giving him lots of fuss and cuddles when he's wearing one, but he clearly is drawn to colour and texture and nice stuff himself, despite being a normally active, ruffianish small boy. When I saw them at the end of August, Iso asked what I was knitting, and I said in passing I might get something done for his seventh birthday in October.  I didn't think he was taking much notice but later when we parted I said 'See you soon', and he replied 'With my jumper?'

Well, as one of my Ravelry contacts said, any seven year old boy who likes handknits needs all the encouragement you can give him.  Iso said a sleeveless one would be great, as they suit him and he'd just grown out of his last one, and as I'd vowed to use up some of my existing stash before buying any new yarn (a pledge I have only partially managed to stick to, since I keep seeing orange wool around the place), and as I'd been collecting rather a lot of Fair Isle charts, I thought I'd try to do something stranded and colourful with a number of odd balls and bits of wool mix double-knitting weight I had around, some of which I'd unravelled from another unsuccessful project, so I had quite a lot of useful sized mini-balls.

Initially, animals seemed like a good theme, but then the whales took up so much room it didn't seem as though there'd be much for the rest of the animal kingdom, so I decided I'd stick to a sea-based scheme instead. The resulting effort I called 'Red Sails in the Sunset'.

This is the back; it's a bit lumpy and uneven, as Fair-Isle tends to be unless you use very fine wool and are good at it. But the stranding does make for a thick warm fabric, which I suppose must have been one of the purposes of it up in the chilly northern places where they techniques were developed - in the Scottish islands of course but also all across the northernmost reaches of Europe from Iceland to the Baltic - as well as for decoration. One or two of my Quessquitricote friends, while admiring of the whales in particular, looked a bit askance at the riot of colour involved in it (le mauvais goût anglais, they don't care what they put together you know...), but I put my trust in knowing my friends' likes and dislikes, tagged it with a birthday card bookmark with a lighthouse on it, and posted it off.

I had a very thrilled e-mail from Iso, who reassured me that her own taste was clearly not so conservative as some, and she said that when she gave it to Princeling he held it to his face, held it away and looked at it then put it to his face again, which seems a fairly positive response. She sent me this photo of him wearing it, entitled 'a good fit but room for growth'

Being always somewhat of a little shrimp, he looks rather drowned in it, but he does shoot up something amazing so it will at least fit him for a while yet, and being sleeveless, sleeve length is not an issue.

I rather think hand knits are a bit like home-cooked food, unless one is very practised and expert, it won't be quite as consistent and fine and polished as the shop or restaurant made stuff, the wonky picked up stitches on the armholes or the occasional sloppy float or tight patch being the equivalent of a slightly burnt pie crust or lumpy bit in the soup, but it is usually made from better ingredients, and has a substance and texture and personal uniqueness to it that is perhaps more genuinely satisfying, if you like that kind of thing anyway. Most importantly, and I don't cease to appreciate how well this is appreciated, it is usually made with love.

~

This is the first of a number of posts in a 'knitting review of the year' series, in no particular order.

Beach

A couple of weeks ago now, Princeling, his mum and I decided we should thumb our noses at the wind and rain and general signs of coming winter, and arranged to go to the beach.  It was a Sunday and by good fortune a window of quite nice weather opened briefly for us. Nevertheless, Tom and Molly weren't really up for slightly chilly messing about on the beach activity, so they stayed snuggled down on the sofa for a cosy Sunday afternoon, which is pretty much just how I found them a few hours later.

It was quite a little walk to get to the beach, but the boy didn't make too many bones about it, only mildly demurring that the beach might be 'trop windy' (anyone who says bilingual children don't mix up their languages has clearly not met the ones I've known). He's a good walker but as often with little kids it's the boredom factor that can be the problem, but once the sea was in sight he was off ahead down the steps,

'Hurry up!'

'How to amuse them today?'

There was long jump,

which his mum joined in.  I just took the photos.

Then there was timed running: see how long it takes you to get to that rock and back (the equivalent with an athletic six-year-old of throwing a stick for a big energetic dog)

On your marks...

get set...

Go!*

Which rock?

Some other people had a real big energetic dog, who was enjoying playing with seaweed,

we didn't try this with Princeling, though he picked up quite a lot of it, along with bits of driftwood, reed heads and other items of vegetation. Iso objected to the idea of bringing smelly seaside stuff back in the car, but we negotiated, held onto the driftwood ('que le bois?') but left the seaweed in the car park.

We scrambled on some rocks, for which I needed my hands free so didn't take any pictures, and we made seagull noises. A sand angel was made,

and there were smiles all round. We agreed we should try to do it more often, as you always do.

~

*Yes, I know it's glaringly obvious from the footwear clues that these photos were not really taken in sequence.

OK, knitting: 1) Princeling's pullover.

The other morning, Tom woke quite tired from a rather busy dream, which went thus.  We were travelling through the world, and were encumbered by a large old fashioned wooden boat, which we had to pull along with us over both land and water.  Then we were in hospital building, I was sitting up in bed looking very happy, and the boat was alongside the bed, filled with straw as it were a Nativity crib.  When he looked inside it, nestled there was a pile of balls of wool.

I’m not entirely sure I should be sharing these rather intimate and bizarre details of the workings of Tom’s night-time imagination, but I cannot help but wonder if it doesn’t say something about the place that yarn is occupying in our life…

Anyway, I’ve been saying I would post something about what I’ve been making, but having started to do so, the post began to run away with me, to get over-long and to become a rather dull catalogue of projects. One of the interesting things about knitting, I’m discovering, is the associations, thoughts and memories that it evokes as I do it, connected, directly or indirectly, with colours, textures and actions, or with what I’m reading or listening to at the time.  These are scarcely intellectually puissant or profound, but sometimes vivid or surprising, and it seems to me including them might give more point to writing about it. So better perhaps to write a series of shorter more frequent posts about individual projects with whatever tangential meanderings come to mind. This may also serve to exercise my atrophying blogging muscles and bring me in sight of the thousand published posts in seven years which I said earlier I was aiming to achieve by the beginning of November.

So here goes.

I finished Princeling's pullover back in early July, even though his birthday isn't till October, since I was concerned it would be a hopelessly bad fit, and I might prefer to make something else in the meanwhile. The sleeves sounded very short in the pattern so I lengthened them, then they seemed very long compared to the body, which I tried to redress a bit with blocking.

I met up with Iso alone and handed it over, suggesting she hold it against another jumper that fitted him and see how it compared, but she said, no she'd try it on him.  OK, I said, it's not like the surprise matters much for something like that, I'll send him a book or something else anyway...

'No no, I'll make him close his eyes while we do it,' she replied.
'He'll peep, surely?'

But she assured me he wouldn't, and later sent me a series of photos of him wearing it, all with eyes tight shut, as I'm told they were throughout, which amused me greatly, as well as making me whimper over what a little shrimp he was and how utterly drowned he looked in the pullover.

I'm still not convinced that he won't outgrow the body before the sleeves ever fit him, but Iso says she'll just roll them up.

The tweedy background wool contained rather a lot of bottle green, a colour I'm never fully content with since it was that of the school uniform I had to wear in my secondary school years.  Does school uniform inevitably predispose us to disliking that colour for ever more, I wonder?  But it also had a rich strand of purple in it, and looked much better in daylight than indoors.  It seemed a little unoriginal to resort to stripes too, even somewhat unusually distributed ones.  One Ravelry group for knitting for boys lamented how it was difficult to find anything other than trucks and stripes.  I know boys often do like things like trucks and tractors, generally more than girls do, though not always, and why not indeed? And if a boy, or anyone else, has a penchant for trucks or tractors, or anything else, why not let him have them in pictures anywhere he wants? I'm sure if I owned a boy I'd find it quite difficult to put him in pink or in flowers, and I really don't worry too much about this kind of thing any more, but I think it would be nice to find some other motifs that weren't quite so gender-skewed.  Animals, I suppose, are a possibility, and houses, and boats and fish and whales and dolphins and watery things in general are often loved by all, and one could try abstract shapes and patterns that were more varied than simple stripes.  I did see one pattern for a dear little baby hat which had a girl's version with pink hearts  and a boy's with skulls on.  Am I alone in finding this slightly depressing, creepy even? Though certainly ripe with possibilities for socio-psychological deconstruction...

Having said that, I notice Princeling, along with tractors and farm animals and a carpet with a town layout on it, has a pirate ship on his wall, complete with skull and cross bones, so I suppose that's where the skull thing comes from.  Though whether we should quite be romanticising pirates is another matter again.  But as I said, I don't worry too much about that kind of thing any more.

~

Last Sunday # 2 - Puppets, and Princeling in love

Then in the afternoon, I set off, all alone, no dog, no husband (and also no camera, since I wanted to enjoy the company and the shows unencumbered) to meet Iso, who had also decamped, no Princeling, no husband, so that we could take in the sea air and a couple of puppet shows at the Marionnet'ic puppet festival in Binic. Turns out the festival has been going for fifteen years already, but we've only really been aware of it for the last couple; we couldn't make it last year but spent the day there two years ago, which I posted briefly about here.

While it may seem odd to leave one's small child at home to go and watch puppet shows, in fact they really were for grown-ups.  The first was Crash de là, by the Belgian company, Les Royales Marionnettes (that page is in English), a gritty tale of social dysfunction, family crisis, adolescent angst and anger set against a background of industrial decay and blight in a small Belgian town.  The manner of performance, the voices and movements, were abrasive, the puppets - which were more stiff mannequins, representations of the characters with fixed expressions and attitudes - deliberately ugly, and I struggled with it at first and didn't understand all of it, especially the songs which punctuated it (near-bilingual Iso said she didn't either so that made me feel better). Yet it wasn't without humour, and in the end I was quite moved by it; the story of an angry, unhappy and unpleasant boy who is saved by a friendship with a stubborn, curmudgeonly old man, a former resistance fighter, despite his lashing out at and hurting him too. As the story develops, by the end, the single performer has more and more assumed the role of the boy, so you wonder to what extent it is his own story.  Whatever, it's a story.

The second was from Theatre des Alberts, based in the Île de Réunion, and was called Accidents - that link is to the page of their website about the show, including a short promotional video for it, which gives a general impression of the show.  It was very good, though desperately sad, bitter and savage in places, as the write-up says, 'cruel as life but also as funny'.  And it was very funny, even for someone like me, who usually just see the black in black humour and not much of the humour.

These shows, like much puppetry now, don't involve classic string or hand puppets, but figures which are manipulated by visible operators who are also narrators and at times participants in the narrative, continually stretching, fracturing and generally subverting the relationship between puppet, puppeteer and audience.  Interesting stuff.

There was also an exhibition, a number of actual pieces and many more photos, by a maker of more traditional string puppets, made by Nadine Delannoy who calls her company Âmes Imaginaires, 'Imaginary Souls'. The link is to the gallery page of her website, and I do recommend having a good look around there - the English translation is unusually good and her story and ideas are quite fascinating.  I think (as in I'm not absolutely sure, rather than 'in my opinion') her work is beautiful, though not always comfortable, but there is something truly alive about much of it.  Of the making of her 'souls' (they aren't all puppets though many are) she describes how she always begins with the head, and

every new head is inspired by a mix of several emotions. The ambiguous expression that results from this mix produces the impression of true presence in the character.

I was particularly drawn to Mortelune,

initially because she reminded me of Maggie Smith, but the more I look at her the more I see she isn't quite like.  Her maker says of her - like many of the pieces she has her own page on the site with a remark about her character - this woman hides a heavy secret. 

I also liked Jean-Baptiste:

I've long had an affection for Molière, albeit one based on pretty scant acquaintance.  With this figure, as with many of them, as Iso remarked, much life is conferred by the lightness and softness of the hair, which, again slightly uncomfortably, is often made from real fur or real or fake human hair for extensions and wigs.

Anyway, we had quite a bit of time for a long saunter by the waterside and along the harbour wall in Binic, drink a hot chocolate which wasn't very hot by the time we got it, and truly the World and Her Husband were out and about, sitting on the terraces of restaurants and cafés and bars and crêperies, getting ripped off at the funfair in the car park, watching the giant African dancing puppets that were ambulating about the town, and despite the really rather chilly wind, there was a queue for the ice cream parlour all the way down the street.  As Joe said on his blog recently, people seem to be regarding the sun 'as though it were an extraordinary new phenomenon', so starved we've been of it.

We rather guiltily remarked that much as we loved the company of all our dear ones, and to do things with them, it was rather nice to be out on the loose for a few hours without having to worry about dogs in cars, or the boredom threshold and attention spans of small boys and husbands.  It was nice to get news of Princeling though, and Iso told me that one day recently when she met him out of school, instead of erupting from the premises with his usual noise and boy-energy, he emerged rather quiet and pensive.  After a little he asked her if she was in love with anyone (amoreux - often he still speaks French to her, especially when he's just been in a French speaking environment, though she resolutely speaks only English to him).  Well, yes, she said, daddy... After a time, though, and a bit more hedging around the subject, she twigged that she was meant to ask him the question:

'Ilan, are you in love with someone?'

'Yes. Gladys.'

'How do you know?'

'She kissed me in the playground.'

'And is she nice?'

(perhaps a little hesitant) 'Yes.'

'Good. Because if she isn't nice to you, you don't have to be in love with her, and you can just say crotte to her and go away.'

Since then he has been somewhat preoccupied with the matter of being amoureux. He asked his mum if he could be in love with her, and she said well no,  because she was his mum, though she loved him very much, but also because little people could only be in love with other little people and big people with other big people, which I thought was a lovely light-handed way of helping to explaining a delicate subject.

So we made our way home cheerful and well-aired.  The evening had turned cold, Molly had been cross and fed-up that I'd driven out without her, but Tom had lit the fire when I got home, and we ate a late supper of sausage and beans to finish our exceptional Sunday.

An introvert owl, air frost, cakes, Kindlingtown, Epiphany. (In which I shamelessly make a post almost entirely out of other people's photographs.)

After the last post, I felt this fellow expressed things well.  He is a grey owl in an animal park in the UK.  He was housed in this old brick building temporarily while his aviary was being built, but now he doesn't want to move from it.  He likes watching the other birds outside, but has no wish to join them, so he has been allowed to stay in his own little house. (Photo credit and more info in the link). 

He speaks to my soul, to wit, to woo.

~

A bit before Christmas my lovely niece (she's a designer, that's her website, she's called Tom too, I chose the profile page to link to because there's a photo of her on it) woke up one morning to a remarkable air frost, and she got out early to catch these stunning photos, which I told her I would steal and put here, bwha-ha-ha.  So good when people send me gorgeous stuff because they know I'll love it. 

~

Then, she and her mum, my lovely sister, sent me these cakes!  Well, not the real thing unfortunately, but some pictures of them.  They always make a wacky Christmas cake, I don't have any photos from previous years, but last year it was covered in fondant icing penguins, the year before that they made fat robins out of Ferrero Rocher chocolates and red fondant icing (only thing worth doing with FR chocs IMO, you don't want to eat the things that's for sure).  This year, they were going to be in more than one place for Christmas, so they chopped the cake into cubes and made four different ones.  The black and white one was inspired by Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. The coloured chequered one looks to me a bit like Elmer the Elephant.

~

I went to get wood in the other day, and thought I ought to use up some of the smaller offcuts from the kindling bin. Then I thought perhaps they could become a townscape. I usually go out with Molly and find the fire lit on my return, as I did that day, but Tom hadn't had the heart to dismantle the resulting construction, and lit the fire with just two sticks and a pine cone.

~

And finally may I wish a happy Feast of the Epiphany to you all - the decorations are put away for another year and I've just been out listening to stories, drinking mint tea and eating little cakes, walking around with a daft glove puppet which Princeling had made in a puppet-making workshop on one hand and the silver paper crown from his galette des rois in the other, and more or less passing myself off as a social animal.  

Lost and found, strange fruit, and poinsettia.

Meeting up with Iso and Princeling for a coffee and and walk this morning, I took a jar each of the summer's red mirabelle jam and the aforementioned marmalade, and a card.  The small boy nosed in the bag, and showed no disappointment that it wasn't anything he could enjoy right away; he stroked the glossy wrapping paper tops I put on the jam jars to his face and kissed the card when his mum showed him the message inside.  The toy shop with the old fashioned pedal cars next door was still a draw, however, so I left Iso and Tom to finish their coffee and took him in with an offer to buy him a Christmas present.

He was very good, not demanding or acquisitive at all, and seemed mostly happy to look and pick up and move on, and uncertain about choosing.  The rather expensive wooden toys that one always suspects are designed as much for adults' aesthetic sense as a child's amusement got a cursory once over, but anyway seemed too young and simple for him now.  Better were the realistic and detailed good quality plastic models of animals and figures.  Dinosaurs were popular of course, but also a rather horrid skeletal dragon, and zoo type animals; farmyard horses, cattle elicited little interest.  In the end he settled happily for a clear oblong plastic tube with a collection of small zoo animals in it. which seemed particularly satisfying because it had a small elephant like the big one he'd picked up from the shelf.

He bore it proudly back to the café, but cheerfully refrained from opening it when the offer of a walk round the park was made.  Once there, he still wanted to carry the new toys, but on seeing the things to climb on and space to run in, he laid the tube carefully on a low wall, rushed off and forgot all about it.  Tom picked it up and slipped it into his coat pocket for safe keeping, but didn't say anything.

Half way around the lake, a good half kilometer on he looked up and asked 'Dinosaurs?'.  No, said his mum, your dinosaurs are at home.  But something was clearly dawning on him. 

'Do you mean your animals you had?' I asked.  He nodded. 

'What did you do with them?  Did you leave them on the wall?'

His arm went up, pointing across the lake, and a three-year-old's knowledge of time and distance slowly began to make a desolation of his face.  There was no petulance, no peremptory fix-things-for-me-now demand, just a growing awareness that he had made a mistake, brought down a loss on himself and there might be no undoing it, it might be too late. He began to crumple, held out his arms toward his mother and went to bury his face in her body.  

This all took place in the second or two it took for Tom to take the tube out of his pocket, and hold it out to him.

The clouds cleared from the face of the sun, but he walked along beside Tom for a moment or two and looked up at him from under his eyebrows with a look which was part gratitude, part embarrassment, and just the merest smidgin of mistrust.

~~~

The mention of the word 'bletted' the other day introduced the subject of medlars.  Every week I drive past a medlar tree, which has been dropping quite large quantities of the fruit, which with the early  frosts and snows, I surmised might be in the required, half-rotted state for consumption.  Today I stopped and picked a couple up - it belongs to a private house but it looked as if no one was collecting it, the dropped fruit was on the road side, and the place looked fairly deserted anyway.  I was merely curious, frankly the idea of eating giant rotted rosehips seemed a fairly unattractive one.  But I brought them home, checked 'Food for Free' and on its instructions, scooped out the brown squishy flesh, a surprisingly large amount, mixed it with a little cream, and ate it just so.  The verdict: absolutely delicious.  I may have to go back and knock on the door.

Also, when googling to learn more, I found a rather smashing blog of an aficionado of the fruit ( and more besides), called Medlar Comfits ( the link to a post with the eponymous recipe).

As you see, they don't look much, but that only goes to show.  Incidentally, shown above also, the smallest wooden-handled knife, a kitchen favourite which dates from a trip to the Loire Valley about 15 years ago, where I bought it to cut up mushrooms grown in caves there.  It is very fine and sharpens well.

While we're on strange fruit, don't bother with these.

I think they're called horny melons ( OK, maybe I am angling for stats from sad people googling...).  They look interesting but taste like mildly fruity frogspawn.  Not very nice.

~~~

Finally, poinsettia.  I've never had one of these before.   They are a kind of euphorbia, or spurge.  I like things like this and hydrangeas, with leaves that pretend to be flowers.  I think I may have killed it with over-watering.   Mea culpa.

Three

The Princeling is three today, it doesn't seem five minutes since he was the Most Beautiful Not-a-Wailing-Orange in the maternity ward He's still a very handsome fellow and, following a brief and sporadic spell of being rather more two-year-old goblin than elf, a very lovely character too.

So to mark the occasion, some pictures from an outing we made a couple of weeks ago.

It was a rare day of sunshine among a lot of rainy and cold ones, and we set off around the big lake in Lamballe.

There were things to climb on,

and it was so warm, we spread plastic bags on the rather soggy picnic benches and table,

and bread and Nutella, among other things, were consumed,

 Mostly by Ilan.

Then we repaired to the cafe in the square.

A spoonful of the froth from his mother's coffee, followed by the speculoos biscuit; he is evidently being raised as un vrai français.*   In fact, despite being quite as accustomed to functioning in French herself, Iso's always been very good about speaking in English to him, even curbing her execrable if unwitting Franglais to make sure she does so properly.  However, as he's generally surrounded by French otherwise, at home, with his dad's family and with his nounou, his childminder, he's been inclined to keep his counsel and not to commit himself too much in either language until recently. Now though, while most of the words were coming out French, he was obviously quite at ease with us in English and understands and responds happily.

   

(Thinks: this one's not quite such a pushover but I think I can probably get around him...)

The cafe turned out to be next to a rather charming toyshop containing nice old-fashioned things made of wood and cloth.  It was closed for lunch but was clearly an irresistible draw, but we were obliged to be gone, so we finished our coffee and went on our way, leaving them to it.  

It was a lovely outing and a welcome bit of sunshine, in more ways than one.  

Happy Birthday Princeling!

*Yes, I know speculoos are Belgian.    

Fête de Travail

I usually get a few sprigs in a bunch, which alone is enough to fill the room with scent, but this muguet is planted up in a pretty chased metal oval pot, with pink blossoms scattered over the soil.

'I left the roots on,' she said 'so you can plant it afterwards in the garden.'

I'd not said anything, but this, and the hug and the smile I got with it, indicated that M's friend and fellow student, M-H, who reads here, had passed on the word, and she'd wanted to do me a kindness.  That's fine.  It has been good to be among them again, and working.

There are numerous ideas about why people give each other muguet, lily-of-the-valley, on the 1st of May, Fête de Travail, the Labour Day holiday.  Somewhere along the line the two festivals, one ancient and celebrating spring and nature, the other modern and marking historical events, became conflated; one old king, I forget which, gave his courtiers muguet, the emblem of the Ile de France; the red rose was the emblem of the workers' struggle but was replaced here by the lily-of-the-valley for the Labour Day festival, perhaps partly because there aren't yet many roses out yet.  May, full spring, is indeed the time of gloriously perfumed flowers, but also of agitation and change. 

No matter, I've always rather liked festivals which focus on and celebrate relatively simple elements, and resist excessive commercialisation.  Work can be worth honouring, though I have little to do with the workers' struggle these days, and fragrant flowers certainly are. 

Despite the length of time we've been here, and despite growing quickly aware that we had to take the holiday into account when making any plans, because, by and large, la Fête de Travail, personne ne travaille, (no one labours on Labour Day), I must have never, in fact, been out into a town on the day.  Driving into Lamballe on Saturday morning, there were various, mostly elderly, people, setting up with small tables, chairs and buckets, making ready to sell their crop of muguet, which everyone and anyone has the right to do without let or hindrance, tax or paperwork, just for the day.  I also saw, separately, a couple of older ladies looking like they were going visiting, carrying armfuls of lilac, so obviously the celebration has been extended to other fragrant flowers, and with the late spring, not everyone's muguet is flowering yet.

I got to Maxime's and found him home alone, his parents having decamped to visit his sister in Mexico.  I was quietly quite glad of this.   The family are dear friends, who have freely shared their losses, shocks and griefs, along with their joys and celebrations, with me, and if his father or mother had been there, I'd have felt bound to tell them of mine.  As it was, faced with just cheerful Maxime, merry and motivated (although, he categorically assured me, having read the last thing I said about him here, he is not 'a boy in love'...), with his life ahead beckoning, and a much loved sister away in a far country, I had no desire and saw no need to burden him.

He worked hard with me, carefully cracking the grammar exercises from the book, then unscrambling my well-thumbed cards to set out the Rinvolucri story of 'The Woman, the Hypnotist, the Egg and the Baby' ("I want you to relax... I want you to become a hen and lay an egg."), which was pitched just right, so that I could sit back and let him do the work, and the prompts that I gave were only enough to make him think for himself. -"If 'the doctors' is the object of this clause, can it also be the subject of that one?", or " Well, the logic of the grammar is fine, but..." so he would finish my sentence "... but the logic of the story isn't."

After I left him,  I met Iso and Princeling for a walk.  Having taken the holiday into account, I'd got up early and made sandwiches.  Princeling, now two and a half, is also working very hard at processing two languages, and is not inclined to commit himself to coming out with either until he's quite certain about them.  But he understands just fine, and was much kinder to Molly than the last time they met.  She on the other hand rather disgraced herself by snarling at him when he came round to her side and took a sandwich from the pile in front of her.  But we all rubbed along fine in the end, and the rain held off. 

Feeding the sweet little ducklings on the lake with the leftover crusts turned out to be somewhat fraught, however, since the mother ducks became very aggressive towards the ducklings not belonging to their own numerous broods, then finished up by fighting one another nearly to the death, as it appeared, and abandoning their young to fly off and continue the conflict on  another part of the lake.  Molly had to be held down to prevent her from joining the fray, and Princeling nearly threw Ooh-Aah the monkey in the lake along with a crust of bread he was holding in the same hand.  So that wasn't quite as idyllic as it had promised to be.

We continued nevertheless, and made our way into town to find somwhere that might be open to serve us coffee.  The terrace of a pizza restaurant finally came up with the goods, and even offered us a choice of desserts including chocolate mousse, so Princeling got to go home with a chocolaty face, which seems to be de rigueur whenever I go out with them. I forgot to bring the camera.

A somewhat merry man, possibly having enjoyed his festive lunch, was capering and calling from the pavement, proffering small bunches of muguet at a euro apiece. Iso had earlier observed that she had never actually given or received the flowers, so I took his last one with the change I had in my pocket and gave it to her.  I think one of the things I also like about the custom is it isn't related to any particular family or romantic relationship, has no religious significance, it is simple, light gesture between friends, perhaps between workmates, as light and pleasant and sweet as the fragrance and appearance of the flowers themselves.  Iso was one of my earliest real friends here, she kept me sane when we were doing a horrendous job at a technical lycée together years ago; she was very young and very brave and very lovely, (she still is,  'une muguette', one might say!), she made me laugh and left things , like a copy of 'The Girl with the Pearl Earring, in my locker.  The friendship has lasted through not a few changes, and I've always been glad that I took on the job because of it.

So, here's to muguet,  in celebration of work and courage and solidarity and friendship, and simply for the love of its fragrance and beauty.  M's gorgeous pot of it is beside me on the bookshelves now, and will continue to fill the room with its perfume in the days to come.