We went to Kim’s school end-of-year show. It was predicatably bad and embarassing, and sad for the those who had actually worked to achieve something.

I arrived late. I had sat down at five o’clock and had woken with a start at ten to six. As I had planned to leave at half five I was late… Anyway I went into overdrive and arrived in front of a silent closed school at ten past six without getting a speeding ticket in the metro corridors.

There was another father just leaning against the railings outside, but that was all. I rang the bell. Nothing. He noted that there was no noise, and as school shows are very noisy events, this was suspicious. Had we got the wrong day? Even so, where were the kids? At ten past six they had never ever finished getting rid of the kids…

I looked for a poster or something. Nothing. There were the minutes of the last School Council meeting. Scanning that I saw an item named End-of-year show: it said that, this year, the show would be taking place at a municipal hall not far from here [the last time I went there I was part of a group all dressed as Santas, but that is another story]. I asked the other father if he knew of the hall. He didn’t. I explained that I was waiting for Ludivine and gave him directions if he wanted to go on ahead. He preferred to wait for me so I supposed that my directions had been too vague. Anyway after about another five minutes Ludivine turned up and we set off.

As we approached the room there was [again] nothing to be seen. This was in part because the room is in fact underground and there is only a gate and a staircase visible from street level, but I had been expecting a poster or something along the lines of “Parents of children from the school at 22 rue Saint-Maur: it is here.” Nothing. But the gates were not locked and so we slipped down, past some security guards who said that it [whatever the ‘it’ was] was just starting, and on, down further underground and into a large dark box.

We eventually found seats without crushing too many toes: one of the advantages of the dark was that they couldn’t see who it was doing their feet in like that…

There must have been about 500 parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and everything that passes for family and whatever in that room. Perhaps more. About a third were children under ten. These were school children waiting for their turn to go up on the stage, or younger brothers and sisters of the same. You do not inflict a two hour ‘show’, where the pauses between the ill-conceived acts are longer than the acts themselves, where the sound [disco music?] is turned up to instant deafness level, without the kids getting bored, tired, starting to chatter, play shout, and cry. So this went on for two hours.

The new Head has done lots of good work for the school. This is part of that. Before the teachers couldn’t ever talk to each other, nevermind the parents. And coordinating something like this would have needed a United Nations’ Peacekeeping force. With the Head before he took over, the PTA exploded in flight after a couple of months leaving a total absence of dialogue for all the schoolyear. That Head also sent me letters threatening to take me to court because I refused to put Kim into school on Saturday mornings when she, or I, was too tired. Please note: it was she at the beginning of the year who said that she could understand parents not putting their children in school on Saturday mornings, and that she didn’t mind. And that by everyone’s admittance—head, teacher and Kim—they did nothing on Saturday mornings… I sent her a very bolshy note back and we stayed at daggerheads for the rest of the year.

However for all of the Head’s enthusiasm and good work, he is working in France, and he is French. The French have no idea how to organise a meeting that doesn’t take all day. Nor do they know how to organise any public gathering. It can’t be genetic, so it is either cultural or something they put in the water here.

Any idiot can tell you that something like a school show would be better as a 45 minute extravaganza, or, as a compromise, as two half-hour sessions with a good 15 minute pause between them. That pieces should be rehearsed [and preferably interesting] and not just be 30 kids bouncing up and down vaguely in rythmn on stage to deafenly-loud disco music [village people???]. Even the rehearsed pieces were too long—a set piece of songs revolving around bal populaire—or just badly [un]staged—a demonstration of renaissance dance that used twice the number of people it should and wandered aimlessly for twice the time it should.

Insert sound of me screaming here.

Of course, Kim was on in the next-to-last two pieces so I couldn’t even do the decent thing and see her performance and disappear discreetly into the sunset. She looked hopelessly stressed out in an aimless singing/dancing piece that had about 60 kids all up on stage together, and then managed to drop her drum and fluff her solo in her percussion class piece.

In fact the only decent events of the night were the last two pieces from the percussion class and the hiphop dancing from the centre de loisirs who work with the kids on wednesdays and during the holidays. They were short, rehearsed, and had a reduced number of kids on stage.

Afterwards I saw Kim desperately peering out into the audience and went to find her. She was looking for her mother. I had seen her arrive earlier and pointed Kim in the direction that she had taken after giving Kim a big hug. On hearing that Ludivine was off at the toilets she disappeared off to find her before I could stop her. Anyway, they saw each other and said ‘Hello’ also. Ludivine having also seemed how tense Kim looked on stage asked her how it had been. ‘Oh fine,’ she said. ‘I played it very zen…’ Yes, Kim. Of course.

She ran off to look for her mother.

When it was all over we went looking for her to say ‘bye and found her bobbling around. Her clothes had disappeared. Eventually it turned out that one of her friends had taken all the clothes that she had found in the dressing room. That meant she had Kim’s. Except that the last time I had seen the friend she had been heading to the door. With a bulging plastic bag.

Anyway, friend was found. Everyone said good bye and on the way out Oumou collared me with all her kids around her, in arms, tied to her back and clinging at her legs, and cried out to me ‘Oh! There you are! Kids, look it’s Daddy. When are you going to pay some upkeep for the kids, eh?’ Which is funny the first time, but she says it every time we meet.

Oh well, that was Kim’s end-of-year show.

In the triva section at IMDb for Swordfish it says that On the floor of Holly’s room, a copy of the cult cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson is visible. Well, I can tell you that the other book next to it, with its cover turned to the floor, is the Puffin edition of The Magician’s Nephew by C.S.Lewis as I recognised the lovely Pauline Baynes illustration.

This is because we rented the DVD the other night. It was a strange (strange as in ‘strangely’ bad, not as in strange peculiar-mind-games-and-other-mental-messings-up, like, for example, ‘Ring’) film. It seems that it got good reviews because Halle Berry has very pretty boobs. That and the explosion at the beginning which was more impressive that Halle Berry’s acting generally. The dialogue was supposed to be sharp… I suppose that may be the case if you are a merikan of about 15 years of age. The ‘hacking’ was ridiculous, about the level of the aforementioned lady’s golf swing—and I don’t play, but I can tell someone making a fool of herself.

No post day yesterday. Funny day. Fell out of bed at about six o’clock and at ten I was trying not to fall asleep on the keyboard. I was supposed to leave to meet Alain at eleven and I knew that if I let my head touch that pillow I would be late. True. I finally let my head hit the pillow at about seven that night. And woke at half nine. Missed all the music, even Le nozze di Figaro on Arte. Sheesh. I also woke grumpy and with a headache.

And I only managed to write about 800 words. No way am I going to advance on all this at this rate. Not counting the fact that these 800 words were rough, rough notes, the sort that I write when I say, well, I must write something. It was something, but I suspect that that was all.

And I got a letter from the Unemployment Office. This is the third bureaucratic FU in a week:

. I transfered my Social Security dossier from Paris to here. When Ludivine did it they just took down the info and it was done. For me they wanted a dossier with last three pay slips, previous info, proof of address and all. So that was a month ago, more even. I thought that they were taking their take, by what where would bureaucracy be without time wasting? And they got my address wrong. They had it written on about twelve different documents. And they got it wrong. So I will now waste time speaking with all sorts of jobsworth’s because they got it wrong.

. My bank has sent me a letter saying that my Visa card has expired and there is a new one waiting for me. Except it hasn’t expired and the number on the letter is not my card. And this is the result of a cock-up at the bank more than two years ago. And not only can I not contact anyone at the bank, and will have to waste time to get this repaired—with no guarantee that it won’t happen again in two years—but I will also have to scour my bank statements looking for the corresponding charges and insist that they reimburse them.

. And the Unemployement Office computer records keep confusing me with someone else and sending me menacing letters. I call up and dial into the service and everything is OK. They tell me to ignore all of this, but it is not only annoying, but the guy whose dossier isn’t complete and whose letters I am receiving doesn’t know that the Unemployment Office is threatening him in this way. And knowing that there is someone who is going to have even more reason than me to be angry with the Unemployment Office is no consolation.

And today I have managed about 100 words so far. Think I’ll go get a coffee and try and call the bank. Again.

After breakfast, I suggested to Kim for the fifteenth time that she took a shower and got dressed. Then for the seventeenth time said that, no, she couldn’t have a bath. And then, once she was having her shower—remember, these things are supposed to be quicker and more economical than baths—so while she was having this shower, I asked her why she was just sitting in the bath watching the entire contents of the East Paris Fresh Water Reservoir disappear down the plughole while she wasn’t even wet. Note: French houses don’t have cold water tanks in the roof, so you get interesting things like diminuishing water pressure the higher up you live in a building. I remember a flat where I lived on the 5th floor, and if anyone else in the building took a shower at the same time as me in the morning, I could get nothing to come out of the bathroom taps…

Daughters, don’t you just love ‘em.

I amaze myself: the hallway lamp is repaired.

I should explain… There are two switches in the hallway, either can be used to switch on or off the light. About a month ago, maybe more, I entered the flat, reached round the corner and flicked the light switch nearest the door and… nothing happened. Now, to me this was curious. Not because lights don’t blow in this world, because they do. But because before they blow they generally display symptoms along the lines of flickering, changing intensity of light and buzzing. This light bulb had done none of those things. A bad point. A point that implied [rightly] Future Complications^TM.

I keep the lightbulbs in the cupboard that houses the fuse box. I also keep the torch and the electricity bills there. In that way, if any electricity leaks out, it stays in a familiar environment. I unscrewed the old bulb, placing it on top of the cupboard rather than in the dustbin. Then I switched on the light again. Nothing.

The way that I saw it was that there were two possible outcomes: the second bulb, fresh from the shelves of the supermarket was well past its Sell-By date; there was a problem in the circuit.

I took the bulb out and exchanged it with one in the bathroom. It worked in the bathroom. Nothing worked in the hall.

That left circuits.

I had a quick look at the fusebox, to set my conscience to rest. It couldn’t be that, and wasn’t. There are other lights on the same circuit, had the fuse blown there would be other lights not lighting. QED.

So I did what any reasonable handyman would do: I abandonned the tools on top of the cupboard with the lightbulbs and left it at that saying that I would come back to it.

Like I said, that was three weeks or two months ago.

Recently, coming back to the flat at night we have had to use the kitchen light to see what we were doing in the hallway. This increased my annoyance factor to the degree that I finally decided to repair this. After a few more days my resolution had sufficiently hardened that this morning, a cup of coffee in hand, I looked up at the empty socket thinking ‘It’s you or me, kiddo. And I’m not going to let a simple light bumb get the better of me…’

I got the step ladder out and climbed up and looked at the socket. It was a screw-in job. I got the light bulb from next to the hot plate to where it had gravitated from the top of the cupboard. Any good DIY-er can talk for hours about the migration of disassembled objects around the house. And bad ones for even longer. Anyway, I unscrewed the light in the bathroom, screwed in the light from the hot plate, and lit the bathroom light. Voilà. It worked. But thereagain, there had never been any problem in the bathroom. I then took the lamp I had got from the bathroom and screwed that into the hallway. I then switched on the light. And this worked too.

Then I realised.

I had, up to now, always tested this light using the swicth by the front door, not the one next to bathroom that I had just used. And the switch just up by the bathroom that I had just used was, when I pressed it, neither on nor off. It was flat between the two states. The switching circuit that we have in the hallway works by flipping a connection from a first line to a second one or back again. If both of the switches are on the same line, there is light, else the circuit is broken, and there is none. This implies that each of the switches is always in one of two possible states: ON or OFF. We forget that there is a third, improbable but possible state: NEITHER ON NOR OFF. This is the equivalent of the tossed coin coming down on its edge. It’s not common, but it is possible. In my case, the possibility—and I am pretty sure about this—increases enormously when there is a little girl in the house who likes playing with light switches, among other things.

Anyway. Lights repaired, I can get on with other things. If only I can find my tools…

“Please try to remember that the purpose of baths—before flooding the bathroom—is to wash…” I said, handing Kim flannel and liquid soap.
She is at a curious age; whereas, for her, washing means dabbing at just the visible parts of her face and fingertips, she will languish in a bath for hours forgetting entirely to wash, until she steps out looking like a species of pink prune.
Then drying her hair; for once, she came to me and said “Papa, there are knots that I can’t get out…” and proceeded to let me comb them out in my usual caring and gentle manner without the usual screaming, cries and jumping up and down saying “You’re hurting, you’re hurting,” when I’m not, or I may be, but I’m just doing my best.
That sort of Sunday morning.
. . . .
The other part is that I finally stopped that hacking cough at 4 in the morning, that the baby upstairs still cries for quarter-of-an-hours on end [and the parents do nothing…], that Kim started coughing again at 6 this morning, and that at 9:30 I was in no fit state to get up. I am still coughing up that horrible greeny-brown mucus stuff and I feel as if there is an orangutan squeezing my chest permanently, or at least a small gorilla. I can’t remember feeling that breathing was so difficult since my lung collapsed 20-odd years ago.

“Some people say not to worry about the air
Some people never had experience with…
Air…air”
David Byrne/Talking Heads, Air [from Fear of Music]

So we saw HP3. There were some disappointing parts, principally the kids [mostly Emma ‘wide-eyes’ Watson and Dan Radcliffe] still can’t act [Tom Felton, Rupert Grint and Matthew ‘Neville’ Lewis were fine though]. And the plot had to be hacked around to get it to fit. But while the latter part is reasonable and always open to debate, the former is just painful.

There are other errors, also. The biggest is that nowhere is any explanation given about the Four, about Remus’ role [and so why he recognised the map], and thus why it was such an insult to Snape, and the role of the deer reinforcing why Harry thought he saw his father, etc. On a minor level the means of neutralising the Tree wasn’t given and so it went from being scenery to instrument of murder and back again, which is a bit odd.

[Later update that came to me as I was going to sleep. Askaban was handled badly. It is just said that it is the ‘Wizard’s Prison’. The book is much clearer on the abject terror of the place, the toll that it placed on Sirius Black. And the ambiguity of the Dementors…]

However what was good was very well done: Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson appeared to adore hamming it up; Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman and David Thewlis were just right—each dangerous and sexy in their different ways… And the design! Visually and graphically it was invention after invention. I loved the new look of the buildings, the hillside outside the school, the Marauders’ Map, and much more. And the snow, and the visual effects around the Dementors, the transitions about the seasons… While these may not have been perfectly faithful to descriptions in the book, they were in the spirit of it. In fact, in cases, better as the book descriptions can be poor at times. [This is not bitching—writing is hard, imaging all this is difficult. Let this be clear: I think JKR is fine on plot, she is OK on dialogue and weak on writing. But she gets millions of kids reading and that is not bad. Hell, she gets hundreds of thousands of adults reading too! And the kids don’t care, they just read and discover they like it and just go on reading. And I’ll hope that they will comme back to these books when they’re older and they won’t see them as I do, they’ll still see them with their eyes as when they were kids and still adore them.]

Kim’s birthday party came and went. She did invite most of her class (argh!), however only four of the kids turned up (aaah!). She was positively burdened down with pressies—I know, I had to carry them back to her mum’s flat. And while Ludivine thought that I had exagerrated by preparing a programme for the afternoon that separated activities into 15-minute divisions (3:00 – blow out candles, 3:15 – eat cake…) by having this, as well as a big list of party games and prizes, I was able to occupy them and more importantly, stop them squabbling.
That evening Ludivine went off to her parent’s goodbye party with all the cookies she’s been preparing all day. I put Agathe (she was staying over) and Kim in the bath, then filled them with soup and then put them in front of Luputa, Castle in the Sky on video while I went to bed and watched Dark Water on DVD. The film was sadder than I expected. And creepingly uneasy rather than pure horror.
Ludivine and I watched Castle in the Sky on Sunday night after I took Kim back home. It was OK. There were some nice visuals at times but I felt that the story was a little stretched out. But thereagain, I’m not 9.