France Is Going Back Into Confinement…

Tags

Confinement, Corona Virus, Covid, Disease, France, French, funny, Humor, kids, Lockdown

Check your food levels in the pantry. Put all your plans to one side. Stock up on toilet rolls and pasta. Make sure you’ve got enough ink in the printer for the attestation forms. Buy some extra baggy pants to slob about in.

And most importantly – buy lots and lots and lots of alcohol.

Yes folks, the day that we dreaded, the day that we hoped and prayed would not come, has arrived. With all the inevitability of a clock striking midnight, France has gone into (almost) total lockdown again.

Who’s to blame? The young? The old? The BLM protesters? The illuminati? I don’t know, personally I think people are equally to blame for this situation. Because people cannot stop touching each other, and seeing each other, and breaking the rules. Because people are like that. We aren’t – despite what many people on social media would have you believe – sheep. So we can’t be herded and ordered about – EVEN WHEN IT’S IN OUR OWN BEST INTERESTS.

And we love to touch each other. Oh how we love to touch each other! It’s OK if I just nip over the road to drop this off with my friend, that’s not contagious. It’s OK if I just touch this parcel and accept it from this delivery man, it can’t spread like that. It’s OK if I wear a mask, meet a group of friends, take off my mask, exchange a kiss and then put the mask back on – the mask is back on, I’m safe now, see?

This whole situation, as I’ve watched it unfold from my small town in France, has very much reminded me of someone trying to stop a dam from bursting it’s banks. Once you got the first hole filled with your finger, another hole appears, so you fill that with you finger – then another hole appears and so on. Every plan that the government puts in place to stop it is immediately cancelled out by the actions of the many, many idiots in our neighbourhoods. The ones who don’t move out of your way, the ones who stand too close to you in the supermarket, the ones who laugh and refuse to wear a mask because ‘It’s all part of some big government plan’.

Governments – as a rule – can not find their arse in the dark with both hands and a torch (See Brexit), so quite how they would go about coordinating a global-pandemic is beyond me.

It’s like Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park ‘Life finds a way’. Yes, it does find a way. A way to fuck the world up with its stupidity – because we are our own worst enemy, and Corona’s best friend.

So that’s my rant over with, now it’s off for four weeks (at the minimum) of playing games, watching films, keeping my kids entertained, and trying to find something to paint that I didn’t already paint twice during the last lockdown.

But hey, there is a brightside to this: the kids are still able to go to school.

We have plenty of alcohol and toilet rolls in the house.

French Kids Say The Funniest Things…

Tags

Corona Virus, Culture, English, France, French, funny, Humor, kids, Language, Learning, school, Teaching

I teach English at a local school. I’ve mentioned it before, in fact it was in my last post :-).

The kids say some priceless things to me.

Here’s a selection from this week.

French kid #1: (in French) ‘Why don’t you speak English to us all the time?’

Me: (In English) ‘If I spoke English to you all the time would you understand me?’

French kid #1: (In French) ‘What?’

French kid #2 (After 45 minutes spent colouring by numbers in English while watching a cartoon in English and having questions asked by me – in English): ‘When are we going to start the English?’

French kid #3: ‘You speak French with an English accent’

Me: ‘Because I’m English’

French kid #3: ‘You’re English?’

Me: ‘Yes’

French kid #3: ‘Oh, I thought you were from Paris’

School Will Never Be The Same Again Thanks To Corona…

Tags

Corona, Corona Virus, Covid 19, education, France, French, kids, Language, Learning, Teaching

I’m back at school now, teaching the kids – not MY kids, although they are there, I mean the kids in general. This return has been a long time coming, thanks to that ever-present virus, and to be honest with you I wasn’t sure if I’d be going back at all.

Just to recap/fill you in – I’m an assistant at my local school and I teach the kids English – quelle surprise – teaching is maybe a bit grand as it’s more of a mixture between entertaining and teaching, but I do my best and we all usually have a laugh. I take the kids on before and after their dinner hour, the bigger kids first then the the little ones. So I get load of distracted, hungry big kids and then a load of full, lethargic little kids.

It’s great.

Most of the time.

I’m up against it though in terms of popularity, as my fellow ‘animateurs’ – as we are called here – are all French and so offer a variety of exciting activities liked painting Pokemon, creating little purses, crafting cuddly donkeys and one activity that simply involves going in the ‘room of fun’. So put that up against ‘English class’ and it’s not really a surprise that I’m usually the last girl at the dance. The other animateurs have queues for their activities, me? I have to get the security ladies to make them come along.

That only applies to the bigger kids though – the little kids are more than happy to come along and find my accent fascinating. Strange how kids can change in a year from all happy, eager smiles to grumpy and ‘cool’. Too cool for English anyway.

So yes I’m back but it’s a very different landscape to the one I was forced to leave due to being furloughed following the Corona outbreak (part one?). Now all the kids are regimented, separated into classes, kept apart and generally monitored to ensure they don’t interact with other groups too much.

Like a kind of health-conscious segregation.

It’s masks on all the time for me as well, which makes it so much easier for the kids to understand me.

Not.

There also seems to be a lot less kids in general, I don’t know if they are hiding away or if some parents have simply opted, in the current ‘climate of fear’ to go the home-schooling route. I used to be that you would have to fight your way across the school playground, fighting through the crowds with all the speed of a salmon swimming upstream, dodging running kids, footballs, hats, you name it. Now you can just stroll right through them, like their fun-factor has been drained away.

Children that did not keep up with their studies during this current crisis have suffered the worst though. There was the confinement period, which was followed by a brief return to school, which was then followed by the eight week holidays. Some parents have not helped their children maintain their education levels, and never returned – albeit briefly – when they could. As a result of this some children are having to repeat the year, or have even been relegated into lower-level classes. It’s not great to see – potential like that, squandered.

Still, my kids are there too and it’s really great to be able to see them in this environment. I often arrive early and so get the privilege of being able to watch my children play with their friends, unaware that I am watching them – the office has mirrored doors and windows. I look at it as a kind of aquarium, just one for kids.

They can be my bridge for the other children too, when a concept is too difficult for me to explain, or I simply don’t know the words, bilingual kids come in very handy, especially when they are your own. Just don’t rely on them in crucial situations like at the bank or when asking directions as they have a tendency to shut down in times of real need.

So yes, I’m back, for how long I don’t know, and I’m not saying that as a reflection of my abilities, more of the ever present threat Covid 19 poses. The landscape at school has changed, but whether these measures will be sufficient? Time will tell….

A Terribly Optimistic Experiment In Crap Songs…

Tags

Advertising, Corona Virus, entertainment, funny, Humor, Learning, Life, Music, Youtube

 

I sometimes listen to crap songs late at night on YouTube.

I have, over the past couple of months, begun to draw a correlation between the amount of ads I am forced to view and the level of the Corona virus. As an example of this a few weeks ago – when the virus was arguably at its peak –  I could go through almost the entire back-catalogue of Steps, and be forced to watch just one 5 second ad.

Ditto for Genesis.

Last night I’d only listened to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop) by Scatman John, and the masterpiece that is Blue by Eiffel 65, and I’d already endured a 15 second promo for a rapper I’d never heard of, and been encouraged to buy an Apple watch that cost more than my first car.

However it was when Flat Beat by Mr Oizo was interrupted mid-song that I knew we may be turning a corner, and that things seemed to be back to normal.

I am currently testing this hypothesis by playing Barbie Girl by Aqua, on a ten hour loop and monitoring the ad breaks and I will report back with my findings from this at a later date.

So We’re Talking To Furniture Now Are We?

Tags

Confinement, Corona Virus, Crazy, funny, Humor, Life, Lockdown, News

 

I’ve just passed my partner on our upstairs’ landing.

She was talking to a chest of drawers.

‘Has confinement gotten to you so much that you’re talking to furniture now?’ I asked as I slipped by her.

‘I was talking to you’ she muttered darkly.

I didn’t believe her.

‘It’s not Beauty And The Beast you know’ I said to her as I went down the stairs ‘They won’t talk back’.

I think it’s the sofa for me tonight.

My Current French Language Level Is…

Tags

Corona Virus, France, French, funny, Humor, Language, Learning, Life, Lock Down

 

I had a lovely little spontaneous French conversation this morning, the kind that reassures you that you’re making progress. I was taking advantage of lock-down and painting the front of my house when a passerby said hello. I said hello back and he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was painting the front of my house, as I had the time and we didn’t like the previous colour. He said it looked beautiful and wished me well. I thanked him and bid him a good day. Then he carried on down the road, hand in hand with his dad.

 

Yes alright, he was five years old – but it still counts!

Panic Buying Does Not Impact My Bad Taste…

Tags

Alcohol, Corona Virus, funny, Humor, Humour, Life, Panic Buying

 

They all laughed at me when I told them what my favourite drink was.

‘Water with chemicals’ ‘Monkey’s piss’ ‘Cooking lager’ and ‘Why?’ were just some of the barbed phrases bandied about by my French friends.

We live in dark times, and panic buying is hitting many of the items we love and need.

So it’s refreshing to know that I when I do my big shop I can still rely on being greeted by the welcoming sight of case after case of unsold Kronenbourg.

Who’s laughing now, eh?