the adlards

On a good straight the throaty roar of the engine is like a whole herd of hungry lions at the thought of a good English breakfast. Reverse parking is a bit like the same herd of lions with a shared and synchronised speach impediment. ROAR. ROA. RO.ROA (Oops, begin again) R-O-A-R. ROA. RO. ROA. ROA. R. RO. R-R-R. Not as impressive. Actually a bit bloody annoying, but hey at least I know what it sounds like now. I think he was struggling with the length. Perhaps he was just a rubbish driver.

Three or four thousand IT people have decended on Cannes like the tide and I’ve been swept along with them. I stumbled down to the station at the crack of dawn yesterday and wound up in the south of France. Gartner’s annual conference is without parallel and single-handedly extends Cannes’ season. Try booking a hotel room in Cannes next week; at least half of them are closed. The old-town street, above, where we enjoyed a very nice dinner last night is packed full of restaurants end-to-end, about fifty or sixty of them I guess. Fifty or sixty beautiful, tiny, authentic French restaurants in the old town part of Cannes (that’s the end where a beer costs 2 euro not 9). They were all booked out for conference delegates.

Every hotel on la Croisette is full. Full of predominantly male, predominantly aging IT leaders. Next year one of them will be one short of full; I’m going to move back down to the old town end of the strip where I was last year. More space, less pretension, better view and lots of locals.

The weather’s beautiful and if you can manage to get out well before breakfast Cannes is absolutely stunning, the air is fresh, the Mediterranean is still and shimmering and there’s no-one about. I can’t imagine what a scrum this place must be in peak season.

Sophie’s battling with a terrible cold, coughing and choking and with such a sore throat that when the Calpol wears off she throws up. The doctor said she was OK last night and recommended Calpol for Sophie and gin for Michelle. I wish I was home to help.
No really.
No, if you knew me you’d know I mean it.

The Christmas lights are going up in Cannes. It seems strange in warm sunshine – it’s obviously been a few years since I had a summer Cristmas.

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In which Josie says:
Mum did wake up, Soph did wake up, you did wake up and me did wake up.
Pete and Ros come soon.

Today, spurred on by Poppins-esque visions of Michelle being towed across the windy sky behind Phil & Ted’s most excellent with two small children in it, I encouraged her to break her rule about never spending all day at home. It was very windy today. And rainy. And miserable. It was quite dry in the office, which was nice; Tuesday was damp and we couldn’t have the lights on so it was dark at 4.

I find wind disconcerting. Of all weather it’s my least favourite, unless it’s sporadic and accompanied by really heavy rain or thunder. Perhaps it’s that it’s impossible to find quiet on a windy day. I tried a local Starbucks with an underground downstairs section for most of this afternoon. It wasn’t quiet, but neither was it windy, and I got my business plan done.

Jamie Oliver said on telly last night that winter savoury is good for wind – talk about a well-timed broadcast.

There’s something magical about the first Monday after the clocks go back. When everyone pours onto the streets of London into the pitch dark after work there are sparkles in eyes because it feels unexpectedly like a still winter’s evening just before snow; there’s an implicit camaraderie, expressed very occasionally in the flicker of a smile, between those doomed to walk the same dark path each night in increasing cold for the next four months.

We had a an unseasonal bright, sunny morning at wake-up time today; of course we were all up in the dim one hour before that, infant body clocks being what they are. Mean time also means it’ll be dark in a couple of hours from now and I’ll be returning from work this week at the sensory equivalent of midnight.

Still, Mean Time is better than BS Time which, let’s face it, is only one step away from WTF Time which is probably what we’d have if Brussels got involved.

I do enjoy daylight saving, despite young kids watering down the immediate effect of the shift. Some people got an extra hour’s sleep last night. And it is nice to wake up in the light, even if only for a week.

Now Josie’s language is developing so fast (SO fast) I’m not allowed to use a lot of words I’ve grown accustomed to. Jo’s recently been heard muttering, “sit” when she loses her balance, drops things or runs into things. I gather from the attendant glares from MGW that she’s not, in fact, stating her desire to recline and that, what is more, I am largely to blame. I don’t know why. When I lose my balance, drop things or run into things I don’t mutter “sit” … I don’t mutter anything.

Perhaps most frustrating of all the words I May Not Use is the word “fart”. Apparently it’s unladylike (the word, not the action. Ummm. The word, not just the action? Oh I don’t know). So what are the alternatives? The word my – clearly deeply misguided – parents used when we were small was banished from my lexicon by Michelle some fifteen years ago and, having grown away from it for some time now, I don’t believe I could bring myself to type it let alone use it. I mean let’s face it, “poof-wind” is just a little too close to the truth. It also doesn’t work well as a verb in the past tense.

So I’m left floundering. I’ll be walking up to the house behind Josie; phooop goes her tiny sphincter and what do I say? I can’t laugh and say, “Haha! You farted!”. I’ve been resorting rather lamely to, “What was that?” which kind of leaves it up to her and is altogether unsatisfactory.

I think I may have come up with a solution this evening. Butt faeries. They’ll let me scream with laughter inside my head without, so far as I can tell before consulting MGW, compromising any of the laws of Decent Behaviour. Phoop, “Wow, look at that butt faerie go!”
You think?

All of which reminds me that Michelle had a cracking evening babysitting last night. She actually came home giggling. Our friends, let’s call them Bob and Julia, were going to a fancy dress party. They are accomplished performers and costume-and-set designers in their own right, so this kind of thing isn’t just something they enjoy, it’s something they do very well. Unfortunately they’d got the wrong night. Apparently their friend was quietly vacuuming her front room when she looked up and saw Godzilla and a poo approaching her front door. I almost said, “Imagine her surprise”, but it’s kind of implicit.
Bob and Julia had a very nice dinner together, presumably sans costume. Michelle bottle-fed and rocked their youngest to sleep, which she found a real pleasure – neither of ours have taken a bottle yet.

After tonight’s refried beans the butt faeries are going to have to employ their very own little traffic police.

I’ve just spent twenty minutes completing Sophie’s passport application after which I signed it with a flourish which crossed the lines and invalidated the whole thing. I shall be walking to the post office tomorrow to pick up another and shall be grinding my teeth all the way.

It’s been a good week for me although I’m pretty tired now. We’ve rolled a new phone system into one of our offices this week, finalised IT and telephony arrangements for the moving of another, agreed an approach to fitting a new contact centre, and made real progress on the development of three applications and the procurement of another. I know this is boring, but one day my girls might want to know what their dad did in w/c 24/10/2005. You just never know …

Michelle is out babysitting for the kind souls who babysat for us on my birthday. She is a saint and an angel all rolled into one.

My youngest child is having a shouting match with a jabberwock right behind me, which is making it a little difficult to get started tonight. It would, I suppose, be more frustrating to be trying to watch the 14 hours of Tintin on DVD which arrived today, so perhaps this isn’t too bad. Hmmm. No. It is. It’s bad. I think the jabberwock’s winning. Excuse me.

She’s quieter now. Michelle’s popped out to do a spot of late night shopping – antibiotics, lotions for chicken pox, that sort of thing. No sooner had the door closed than Sophie kicked off. I could have imagined it was traffic noise if the monitor hadn’t been glowing red in front of me. Oh dear, now she’s asleep down here. I’m going to have to try the gut-wrenching creep-up-the-stairs-in-the-dark-routine.

It worked! She opened her eyes on the landing but dropped off again while I did my don’t-look-at-me-I’m-just-a-statue-impression. I shall have dinner and then rest my eyes gently in a darkened room.

We all had a good night’s sleep last night. What’s amazing is the effect that a good sleep has on the potency of the wormhole that disguises itself as our shower. I always wake up grumpy; a state for which I blame 5am piano practices as a child. You would be surprised how much damage ivories do to your forehead as you drop off in mid arpeggio, but I digress … I always wake up grumpy, but when the “shower machine” (requires fingers making inverted commas in the air) is working I get under a hot shower and step out into a completely different day, full of fresh air and fluttering autumn leaves. When its not working I get under an equally hot shower but step out onto the cold floor thinking, “Oh shit. Here we go again.” Some days I never get out of the shower. My mind languishes under the hot water, breathing in the steam, imagining that as the stress ebbs from my back and shoulders they’re actually straightening out. Meanwhile my hunched body tramps to the station in the cold dark out of pure mindless habit. As it happens my body can fool a lot of people without my mind needing to be anywhere near it. Perhaps another post for another day …

Last night was a good night, though, with the result that we all had a great day. Josie decided that this afternoon was for dancing so dashed upstairs to get her dancing dress (pictured previously and now a firm favourite despite mum’s best efforts). Michelle got some cracking clips of her singing and dancing. After that it was time to get out the scissors and glue and bits of paper and make pictures. I’m sure she only makes them to entertain me when I get home …

There was a trip to the library today too so I had some cool new books to read before bedtime tonight. “One snowy night” is great, not that I’m wishing Autumn away, mind.

If anyone has a Mira electric shower guide that’s not missing the section on how to maintain the wormhole please let me know.