Archives for December 2004

French is difficult for me. So many words sound the same. Roue and rue for example. See, in English that’s wheel and street and quite hard to confuse. A longish anecdote follows on this point. Try to bear with me.

The other day I was on the tram with my loving husband and bouncing toddler. There was a trendy young thing sitting beside me with one of those skiing type hats with a long tail and a pompom at the end. The Princess was rather fascinated by this and started playing with it. The trendy young thing was sweet and let her. The Princess and I have been doing quite a bit of work on tails recently (she has spent some time looking between her legs for her own tail “Mama, no tail?” “No”).  So, I said that the woman had a tail on her hat. Except, I didn’t say it in English because, you know, I wanted the trendy y.t. to understand what we were saying so I said “elle a un cul sur son chapeau”. The tyt looked a bit put out and asked whether I meant a pompom waving it about. No, I said “un cul”.  I looked at Mr. Waffle, he cleared his throat and said “I think you mean “une queue”” (difference in pronounciation only discernable to bats, dogs and fraoncophones). Smiling all round. “What” I asked my loving husband, “did I say?  “Well,” he said ” you told our baby that the lady had an ass on her hat and when she protested, you insisted that this was the case”. I see. Gosh, it’s a social minefield out there, don’t even get me started on baisser and baiser.

It is cold right now in Brussels. Very cold. And foggy. All in all, not an ideal time for your boiler to break down: cold bedrooms and no hot water. I called the landlord – he suggested we go to the basement and press the button on the left. I said I had done that. He said he didn’t know what else we could do (to be fair to him, he set about calling a heating person but nothing had happened by the time we went to bed).

The weird thing was that none of our neighbours seemed to notice, even though the boiler serves the whole building so we were all affected.

Neighbour A is a DIY enthusiast and we tried to enlist him to help – it was news to him that there was a problem. Clearly he doesnÂ’’t feel the cold.

Neighbour B seemed quite indifferent – another reptile ? Oddly, he seemed to feel it was up to us to sort it out: “Haven’Â’t you got the landlordÂ’s number ?”

This morning when the heating guy finally rang, he wanted to know when somebody could let him in. Since we both work, we tried to enlist Neighbour C who works unusual hours. We knocked on her door before going to work. By definition, she had not had heating or hot water all night. Her reaction: “I heard you outside and I was going to ask whatÂ’’s happening.” We got the impression of a whole building full of adults waiting for the Waffle family to sort out their heating for them.

Mr Waflle suggests they’Â’re all youngest children. This, with apologies to the publishing exec, is because in his family the youngest child is regarded as mildly feckless. She was once described by a family member as “very brilliant you know, but she spends a lot of her time in this world looking for her other shoe”. In my family the youngest child is regarded as immensely responsible, far more so than, say, me. I think that our neighbours may all be eldest children.