Carlo's favourite breakfast cereal is Smacks.

"What cereal do you want today, Carlo?"

"Je voudrais Smacks, Daddy. Beaucoup Smacks."

I want Smacks, Daddy. A lot of Smacks.

So I suppose when that anti-smacking bill goes through he'll have to switch to Miel Pops.

This is a detail from a card Maria made me for my return to France. Notice the cunning representation of France...

Maria had her first harp lesson today.

At the end of it she played me Frere Jaques and claire de lune.

I know.

On Friday Carlo's school - ecole maternelle - held their spring break festival - fete du printemps - to end the pre-Easter term.

He has spent the last two weeks making his costume.


I put up some more photos over here.

"Maria, your French is getting really good!"

"Yeah. Maitresse telled me I speaked really goodly."

Ce petit couchon va la marche
Ce petit couchon reste a maison
Ce petit couchon manger rosbif
Ce petit couchon manger rien
Et....ce petit couchon dit 'wee wee wee' toute la voie à la maison.

***Apologies for the roughness of my grammar. She does it too fast for me to be sure, and also I'm ignorant.

So there I was idly browsing Amazon for kids' Xmas presents and right there on the front page I came across this:



What are they doing selling that to kids?

Filthy buggers.

A week or two ago, while Josie was away at a conference and appearing on tv before a global television audience* of 300 million, I purchased some lamb chops and grilled them hungrily for myself while the kids prepared for dinner. French lamb chops are delicious. Scrumptious. Maria spied them lying temptingly on my plate and innocently inquired if they were for me.

"I would like to try one," she affirmed, sweetly.

So I gave her a piece and she demanded more and, notwithstanding she had devoured her own dinner moments earlier, promptly denounced me for finishing the remaining morsels myself.

"I love meat!" she assured me as the blood dripped down her chin. "Can you buy that for me again?"

So today I bought a tender juicy lamb steak for her dinner. When I showed it to her, her eyes lit up and her tongue began to pant. She looked closely at the decorative label stuck to the cellophane wrap.

"It really is a lamb!" she said.

"Yes, it used to run around a farm going 'baa baa'."

I swear she drooled.

"I love lamb." She licked her lips. Repeatedly. "Baa baa," I reminded her.

"Can you cook dinner soon Daddy, please."

* Well the producers claimed a global television audience of 300 million. I pointed out that barely 300 million people speak English - maybe twice that number as a second language, and it's not like the audience at any one moment for a worthy BBC documentary is likely to be half of the entire English speaking world. Y'know, just saying.

But she did fantastically well anyway.

"What are those?" I asked Maria, pointing to a set of rosary beads she's been given.

"It's a necklace."

"Do you know what it's for?"

"Yeah you hold this and say something to the guy - the guy, not the girl, the other guy. Ummm, who's that guy?

"The Pope? Il Papa? Jesus? Father Gerry?"

"No. No. No. That guy who you do praying."

"God?"

"Yeah. That guy!"

Carlo has always struggled with the personal pronoun. He started off by saying 'you carry you?' when he wanted to be picked up.

Now he has adopted a pseudo French construction for everything.

"I've had enough me."

"Me I want one."

"You me give this to me."

At least he's stopped muttering in Arabic.

Meanwhile, Maria rushed past us this week calling out, "Mum! I'm just gonna take a piss!"

Carlo celebrated his third birthday by giggling with delight and uncomplicated pleasure at having his own special day. When we sang 'happy birthday' he would stand there trembling and grinning - so we did it again and again.

"I'm a big boy! I'm not two!" he told his brother on the phone.

He mostly kept his big sister at bay while he tore the wrapping from his presents. He would select one from the obscenely large pile, play with it and only move to the next to ease Maria's impatience. We assembled the big bus together and later the enormous pirate ship. He proudly sported his new shirts and pored over the books sent from his admirers far away - from the UK, from the US, from New Zealand.

Three years ago on a Saturday afternoon we were packing away the detritus and presents from Maria's third birthday party when Josie announced she'd been feeling contractions since she put the cheerios on to boil. I expected we had hours and hours to go; we didn't. He arrived by 8 that night. We haven't had cheerios since.

He was a hideously malformed baby with his squashed head, hook nose and blotchy skin. Now he has spent over half his life in Paris. He gets blonder every day, his eyelashes get longer and he bats them over his mischievous brown eyes. He won't eat much but starch - bread, pasta, rice couscous - broccoli and (of course) sweets. He boyishly identifies aircraft, loves diggers and bikes and stuff with wheels. He plays for ages on his own and then happily lets Maria humiliate him with dress up games. And he looks like a little man.

I put a little flash slide show up in the left-hand menu.

Turns out, homework for little kids is completely useless. And every one knows it's useless.

Turns out the main reason kids get homework is that parents want it.

When I shopped around the arguments against homework, I discovered that how you feel about it depends a lot on what you think kids will do if they don't have any.

Maria loves her new school because she loves getting homework.

She bursts out of school holding her homework book up but won't let me look at it in case I wreck it. We can only look if she is holding the book and turning the pages. And we have to look. She bends over the table and carefully practices writing. She proudly shows it off and discusses the varying philosophies she considers in deciding how to tackle a challenge, like writing 'a' a hundred times or copying a sentence written in joined up script. They are teaching her to write in the scrawly writing of an old person. When she discusses her school work she casually drops French words every sentence or so because when she is at school she is entirely French and her mind switches to French mode when she thinks about it.

I asked her why she likes homework.

"It's nice to learn stuff....No it's GOOD to learn stuff. With the maitresse [teacher]. I like it because then it's all quiet. Also IU like it becasue I always make it good."

In other words, she gets a huge sense of achievement.

Carlo is still only two. Last week he started school. Ecole maternelle might have the classroom ambience of a kindergarten, but it is structured as a school. The kids go from 8.30 to 4.30 every day except Wednesday, the harried teacher has a curriculum and issues a detailed report (Maria's ran to eight pages of line by line pass/fail marking). They take lunch together - three courses, naturally - in the school canteen. The playground is filled with bigger kids. It is school - though the primmers.

On his first day he understood that the soft slow days of creche were over, baby. We trotted down to school bright and early, only to be told Dad had messed up and we needed to come back after lunch for the first day. When we finally got into the classroom, he was right at home moving from table to table playing with the equipment, checking out the other kids, batting his eyes at the teacher. All the kids had a parent present. I was the only Dad. We went home after a couple of hours and he was very happy. Some schools apparently let the parents stay for days. Not ours. On Day Two it's drop-off and leave. Parents do not enter the school grounds and long, overly-emphatic signs are posted at the front door to remind us. So on the second day there were floods of tears and pleas not to be abandoned. Carlo was even worse. A week later he is still desperate at the start of each day and exhausted at the end. The teacher says he stops crying as soon as we leave. Well he's not in actual danger, he is not hungry. What can you do.

Maria, on the other hand, has leapt into her new school. This morning I asked her if she likes it better than her old one.

"Yes, because they give us HOMEWORK!"

She can't wait to get more. Sitting down practising writing the letter 'r' in that silly old fashioned script is more fun than Game Boy. (Everyone in France has the same handwriting - attache style. There is one national standard for the way letters should be shaped. It is is a stupid way of writing. But 'everyone must write the same' is a crazy egalite thing). She is in love with her teacher. She is in love with her big school bag. She hectors Dad about the way her school books were neatly covered in plastic, though not quite neatly enough. She hands over her school cahier - with all the school's news and instructions - and informs me that if I can't read it I have to give it to mummy. The rules are clear and hard, and she likes the certainty of knowing what to do. No quarter is given for her language skill: everything is in French. So she speaks all day at home in English but she's learning to read and write in French and I find myself worrying she will only ever read and write in French and struggle in her mother's tongue.

At nearly six she is ready for big school.

Her eyes twinkling, Maria whispers in Carlo's ear. Carlo looks up at me with a big grin and says "Daddy you've got a big butt!"

They explode with glee. Carlo repeats his witticism and they giggle uproariously.

"You've got a BIG BUTT Daddy!" Carlo confirms. Hilarious.

They cackle like mad things, their little tummies bubbling with mirth.

"Say it again!"

"Daddy's got Big Butt! Ha ha ha ha hahahaha."

And on it goes over and over. Each repetition is rapturously received by its tellers. It's a line that never loses its freshness. Apparently. They can't stop their faces splitting in giggle fits. Ha ha ha ha ha.

After a hundred re-tellings their fickle minds drift to other stuff. Maria frowns and looks at me.

"Daddy, what's a butt?"

Maria has been playing around with my new MacBook and took some great photos of her self.

Check out the slideshow here.

While I've had my own dramas with an extracted tooth, Maria's second front tooth has been wiggling progressively looser for a week or so - accompanied by far less complaining and feeling sorry for herself.

On Friday, with the assistance of her nanny who has a less timid approach, the tooth left the gum and was held aloft in triumph. After being excitedly exhibited it was placed in a small dish for the tooth fairy and Maria went to sleep that night confident the tooth fairy would correct her ways from the disappointment in England - when the fairy inexplicably forgot to leave any large denomination coins.

The tooth fairy giggled about it all happily that night but absent-mindedly never got round to her collection and replacement duties.

On Saturday morning when the kids woke up, Josie shot out of bed and grabbed the tooth bowl a second before Maria could see inside, carrying it away cooing 'Ooo that's a lot of money', just a step or two in front of Maria who was shouting 'Lemme see! Lemme see!' Lucky for her the bowl magically filled just in time and Maria was delighted with the bounty - although she noted the fairy had suspiciously left the tooth behind. 'Must be someone else's that fell out of her bag."

In gratitude Maria spent the day constructing a beautiful present for the fairy. It was a colourfully decorated house for the faily, with a small door to enter and a bed. She water tested it to see if it would keep the rain out, and when the odd drop got through she built a roof and attached it. The she filled it with presents and wrote a note to say 'merci.'

It was a lovely thought and a full day of effort. So imagine the guilt with which the tooth fairy had to despatch it to the downstairs wheelie bins under cover of darkness.

At least this time, though, the fairy generously left sweets, more money and a thank you note.

10

Like a Bo Derek movie, Joey turns 10 today, the 20th.



He got cricket gear. Pads, gloves.

All he needs now is runs and wickets.

As of about now, Carlo has spent over half his life in France.

It's hard to get Carlo speaking French at home, though when someone asks him a question in French he responds as easily as if he was asked in English. And he and Maria sometimes have conversations in French, when they;'re watching the French cartoons especially.

Today we bussed down to Carrefour, because sometimes you just have to spend €300 on a shop. Yeah, NZ$600 and it was about what you would get from Foodtown on Saturday. (The Carrefour is near Roland Garros, so we perved at the tennis glams coming and going for a while. Nice hats, nice cars, flowing dresses, hot sunglasses, that sort of thing).

Once we got inside, Carlo spied a book, in French, about tv cartoon character Franklin. "Yes," I assured him, "it's Franklin." He frowned up at me. "No, Daddy. Eets Fronklar." Then we went round to the divine fish section and Carlo rushed up to a dead mullet and shouted, "Daddy, Daddy! Poisson! Poisson!"

Carlo's language has suddenly developed. No longer content to refer to himself in the third person (Carlo come here! "No. Carlo cooking.") he moved to the second. ("You carry you.")

Now he has begun to tell long, complicated stories. Unfortunately, no one can understand them.

Speaking to Joey on the phone he launched into a long, emphatic rave before farewelling his brother and passing the handpiece back to me.

"Carlo's talking gibberish," Joey observed.

Getting ready for bed that night I sweetly told him, 'I can't understand a word you're saying."

He giggled at me. "Carlo's English! Carlo Anglaise!" he laughed.

This is why no one understands him in his view. Some of his speech may be a stab at speech. He has already developed that difficult, smoky 'r'. He seems to follow the videos expertly and understand his teachers who speak only French.

Maria saw an ant and said, "Eww yuck, fourmi!"

"What is it, Maria?"

"Umm, I don't know what it's called in English."

We've had successive guests for a couple of weeks and because there were kids they got on the regional train and sped out to Disneyland for the rides and the magic.

Maria went twice, to add to her two trips last year.

Add that up.

Maria added it up and told us excitedly she has been to Disneyland five times!

Just possibly if she spent more time at school and less at Disneyland, she would have a better command of the calculations involved.

It's my fault.

Carlo broke something the other day and I said a slightly bad word. I saw him clock the word and file it and I thought to myself 'oh no, that is coming back soon.'

So last night he showed Josie a small broken toy and Mummy asked him what happened.

"Carlo buggered it," he told her.

Maria stayed home with me today and discovered my iPod. She spent hours plugged in, singing along very loudly and dancing to the same three songs played over and over. The hit was the Steriophonics' Walkie Talkie Man. Then she tried holding the iPod by the headphone cable while she danced and so when it clattered to the floor nearly buggered it.

Then our new tv was delivered this afternoon. The guys set it up and then seemed perplexed when I asked them how to get dvds going on it. So they set it up some more and were about to leave when I asked for a demonstration. The demonstration didn't work very well, so they changed it around and left. Of course then the damn sound wouldn't work. I swore and cursed and it still wouldn't go, so I had to go back to the shop and ask them to return and fix it, stretching my pidgin French slightly beyond its limits. When we got home I switched it on and it worked beautifully. So I had to ring them up and explain that I got the tv going and the repairman was no longer needed. This was much beyond the few nouns and fewer verbs of my French, but I still congratulated myself on achieving the conversation. About thirty minutes later the repair guy showed up.

Bugger.

Not sure how big a 70cm screen is in inches, but it's plenty.

Why are televisions so ugly? Because the Apple company doesn't make them.

Maria's school term ended last week with the annual printemps fete (spring fair).

For weeks Maria has been working on her costume. With parents clicking cameras and video cams as rapidly as any papperazzi the kids emerged ensemble and marched around the local streets in full dress.

When they assembled to sing to us the techaer led them through ten minutes of warm up scales and exerices before unleashing two little ditties, back to back and commercial free youwillneverhearthesamesongtwicehitsofthesixtiesandseventies.

Link to pics is in the right hand menu as 'Printemps fete'.

Intrigue has deepened in Maria's ongoing effort to win social acceptance.

Her nemesis cunningly won Maria's friends back to the other side with wizard japes such as sticking a tissue to the back of Maria's shirt and telling her she had stuck it to the back of her head, where of course Maria couldn't find it and became more agitated while her persecutor laughed and pointed. Her distress only deepened when all her friends found this hilarious and this visible distress only heightened their enjoyment.

She is excited and happy when I pick her up from school every day but her mood darkens when she relates to me the tense dynamic of her social circle. It is a classic pecking order scrap: Her nemesis thinks Maria is a place too high and she - nemesis - wants that spot in the pack. Girls start this stuff so young.

We had a chat about laughing off provocation.

Although to be honest all my soul tells me that if there is one way to handle war, it is to counter-attack much faster and harder than your enemy expects. Overwhelming force, lightening speed, a clear objective. I know this strategy to be correct, and appeasement to be wrong. [Aha. Sun Tzu - Make enemy regret ever making you enemy. Inflict much pain so enemy hesitates before striking again. Attack your enemy in this moment of indecision].

And yet I betrayed the strategy I know to be best. I spent a long conversation with Maria rehearsing provocation and how to respond gently without escalating, how to deny her taunter the prized reaction. She seemed to accept it, but she won't when it comes to the crunch. Children know how to get under each other's skin .

I am teaching her to be an appeasing, peace-loving coward.

Her little brother, however, conducts his wars clandestinely. Tonight he didn't want to go to bed. We put off the hour by reading a French kids' book together, the three of us - which is really Maria asking Carlo about the story in her perfect French accent ("Ou est le couchon, Carlo?") and Carlo pointing it out on the page ("C'est la.") with an intervention neither by father nor the English language. ("Tres bien Carlo. C'est-que ce?" "C'est canard! Quack! Quack!").

We tucked him in just as his Mum arrived home from ending global poverty.

So Josie and I dined and chatted and I suppose an hour and a half went by and the kids fell asleep, right? No. Carlo climbed silently from his cot and pulled out a very large toy box, stood on it to reach the light switch then for ninety minutes quietly played with his vast collection of plastic junk. He distributed items round his room and never let out a peep.

When Josie walked in, it was all just a big naughty grin.

"I know I'm naughty, but I also know you're not going to do anything. Shall I get back in my cot now? Righto!"

Tomorrow they can sleep in.

Maria's school is closed by the general strike. Carlo's teachers are not going out, but the creche will be on limited hours because staff can't easily get to work with the transport system being out.

The strikers will hit the government with huge demonstrations. The government will not be provoked. It will respond gently and with calm soothing sensible talk.

And the government will lose.

Maria is happier with school at the end of the week. One by one her friends have defected to her side. One came up to her and gave her a long apology for siding with the other friends. The games girls play. Only one little one remains off side with her. So we had a chat on the way home about how she felt when the other kids didn't want to be her friend, and how important it is to make sure the last hold-out doesn't feel alone and left out. Fat lot of good that talk did.

When I said to Maria 'who cares what other kids think?' she was shocked. "Daddy, don't be so mean. I care about it very much!"

She told me with a beaming grin she had a good day today.

Perhaps not coincidentally, and though it is raining and overcast, spring is here. The temperature has soared to double figures. For the first time in month the kids don't need jackets on to go outside. The new season has arrived in time for daylight saving this weekend.

Maria had a bad day today. She told me no one wanted to be her copine, her friend. She sat by herself in the tunnel, whatever that is, and cried.

They told her it was because she played their game the wrong way. They spoke to her in a mean way. She thinks they just don't want to be her friend.

We walked home together, both of us desperately sad. Daddy can't fix this one, but can make it hurt a bit less with a few hugs. For her anyway.

Carlo was not concerned. He likes to stand on the coffee table and hurl himself on to the sofa his own length away. He usually makes it with a soft splat but sometimes bounces off the edge and thuds on to the floor. Unlike Maria's emotional bruises, his stop hurting in a moment.

"Bonjour madame. Je suis John Pagani, le pere de Carlo."

"Bonjour."

"Carlo est malade aujord'hui avec petite tousse. Il est absent."

"Oui, d'accord."

"Merci, au revoir."

"Au revoir, bonne journee."

I know you won't approve of this, but every now and then I take the kids to the McDonald's over the road.

As a matter of fact, I don't feel the need to rationalise it. Anti-McDonalds cant is nothing more than middle class snobbery, an affectation meant to emphasise superiority to working class tastes. Most of those arguments you hear about it are rubbish - thank you, our kids are not obese or even average weight. As for the corporate deathburger thing? Please. There is nothing more intellectually demeaning than directing pseudo-progressive analysis at fast-moving consumer goods suppliers simply because they are retailers. How ironic that the people with the fattest, laziest philosophical analysis spend so much time targeting fat and leisure. Although McDonald's could help themselves. When you go to their website, they ask you to select your 'country/market'. I mean honestly, you can smell their greed can't you? There are no countries, only country/markets. And they wonder why they're the target of so much nihilistic cynicism.

Anyway, so the kids enjoy themselves and their happy meals. The promo at the moment, which is the point of this discursive rave, is with Happy Meals they give away minute boom boxes, which play one song. The sound is badly distorted and tinny, the snippet of song is thirty seconds long and it takes about three plays to start driving me up the wall. But, hell, I bought it for them.

Carlo walks around the house with two boomboxes playing different songs, one pressed to each ear, starting and restarting them, nodding out of time to the beat and mixing discs like p-Money.

One of the songs is that deeply irritating Aqua 'song', 'Barbie'.

You know the one: "I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie wo-ooorrrllld. (Come on Barbie, let's go pardy)."

Carlo plays it over and over.

When Maria first heard it, she looked stunned and said to me, "The Barbie World! I would like to go there."

When Carlo spills something, he says 'Ooo la la!'. When it makes a mess he says, 'Oooo la lala laaaaaa.'

Maria marches into his creche when we pick him up, looking tall, confident and elegant among the little kids. Today Carlo was playing by himself a little apart from the other kids, as he often is. He seems to enjoy creche though.

Maria translates for me. I showed her a cartoon image of a new tramway for Paris and she asked me 'c'est n'exist pas?'

"No it doesn't exist yet. It will soon."

She giggled. "Daddy, you know my French!"

"Not really, just a little bit. You're the best at French in this house."

Big grin.

Each night over dinner we practise together. She will put together a French sentence meaning something like 'I picked up the cup' and I will try to comprehend. This exercise benefits my French more than hers - though she's building confidence in using full sentences.

In English whenever she refers to something in the past tense she carefully enunciates the suffix.

"Carlo catch-ed the ball". "I drop-ped it." "I ate-ed it."

Over dinner we came to discuss Bananas in Pyjamas.

Maria calls them 'banane dans le jamas.'

She tried to teach Carlo the song. "Banane. Dans jamas. Je va en va de l'escalier."

Carlo looks unhappy. "No 'nanas. Chips!".

Today when I picked him up his teacher told me - as part of the comprehensive daily report on what he played with, how long he slept and what he ate -- he ate a lot of kiwi.

That's funny because he IS a kiwi, I told her. She gave me that funny look they give me most days when I'm not quite keeping up with the flow of things.

"Non, MANGER beaucoup de kiwi." Manger = eat. Accompanied by the Universal Knife And Fork Gesture.

"Oui. Kiwi est neo-zelandaise. Carlo est neo-zelandaise!" I smiled.

She gave me that look that says, 'you're a goddam freak'.

"Comment tu t'appell?"

"Name Carlo."

Then the big kids got to him and he found a taste for comedy.

Comment tu t'appell?"

"Bum!"

---

There we were lying in bed in the gentle pre-dawn dark, muffling out the hushed gurgles and mutterings of the kids as they woke up. And with a stomp, stomp stomp Maria barged in.

"Mummy, Joey doesn't like Jesus."

Carlo, who couldn't speak a word when we arrived in Paris, is now putting together whole sentences.

"Maria, got runny eyes," he told us when Maria cried.

But he can be much more sophisticated. "This goes here, that goes there," he burbled as he built a town with his blocks.

My favourite is, "Nooooo, I don't like it. I don't want it."

The odd English word 'curfew' comes from French, 'couvre-feu'. Literally 'smother fire'.

Some form of curfew has been introduced in forty small towns and larger suburbs around France since the state of emergency was announced on Wednesday. Mostly the rules prevent under-18s from assembling late at night.

Though rioters stoned the police in downtown Lyon last night, the level of unrest is waning.

Last night the bars and cafes in the entertainment districts were far quieter than usual. This was on a Saturday night when, as usual, Paris was alive with events - a major football test against Germany at Stade de France, rock concerts, shows and all the life of a world city.

Walking around the old Marais, where 65 years ago Nazi militants hurled incendiaries into Jewish homes, we saw the occasional squad of police. Exactly as normal. But then that is how the Paris streets have been throughout the seventeen days of unrest.

The world has watched live TV crosses from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees and wondered if these were the venues of the riots. But they are simply the most Parisien of back-drops for a stand-up. Its peaceful there and entirely calm.

Untrue headlines claim the city is 'under lock-down'. Expats have been phoned by anxious relatives and I've heard of companies worried about the safety of staff jetting in for meetings. It's nonsense. If visitors keep the TV switched off they won't see a thing. Paris itself feels the same as it did a month ago, six months ago.

The number of cars burned each night are a bizarre indicator of calm. When only a hundred were destroyed in the Paris suburbs, the 'banlieue', the police declared the night 'ordinary'. They're right but only because the 'banlieue' have bubbled with tension all year.

A poll shows seventy-one percent of French believe the President, Jaques Chirac, can't handle the social problems underlying the riots. They are almost as likely to have confidence in the xenophobic lunatic Jean Marie Le Pen.

Only thirteen percent are willing to say they understand or have sympathy with the rioters.

The TV talkshows are full of analysis - and this is a country with more current affairs talk shows than most. But in casual conversations there are few who accept or even recognise the depth of discrimination and alienation in the suburbs.

Perhaps that's not suprising. The rioters, after all, are hooligans. They are not representative of anyone. There are no useful political conclusions to be drawn from the wild intentions of young men throwing petrol bombs into cars.

Putting the rioters aside for a moment, the unrest has exposed in mass media deep seething resentment among many 'visible minorities' about racial discrimination and alienation from French society.

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn blames events on 'multiculturalism'. Mark Steyn might be the stupidest person on earth. It is rare to find someone who is so confident with opinions so totally eliminated of fact or reasoning.

France is not multicultural at all; it has absorbed multiple cultures in its borders and pressured them to assimilate. It won't even allow headscarves to be worn in schools; Muslim immigrants are told, 'when in France, be French'.

In a country where it is illegal to collect data on ethnicity, 'visible minorities' are often descendants of grandparents who emigrated from what were French territories - Senegal, Algeria and more. They are French, their parents were French, and the French claimed their grandparents were French. But too many are not accepted as French.

The romantic revolutionary slogan 'liberty, egalite, fraternite' has produced a conformist idea of 'egalite'. If you enter French society, the pressure is to behave as the French, look French, practice the French way. Yet it's too easy to call that xenophobic. France's insistence on the French way is what makes France, well, French.

Huge resources have been poured into deprived communities for decades. It fails for the same reason paying welfare benefits and Housing NZ subsidies to Ruatoria or Mangere fails to deliver long-term opportunity. Those communities need something more - respect and dignity, jobs, opportunity and celebration of their diversity.

Time and again it's been noted not a single mainland member of parliament or television anchor is from a minority.

Discrimination is only one reason why unemployment is high in the banlieue. The so-called French social model has been blamed as well. Heavily walled job protections have made employers reluctant to hire.

I doubt petrol throwing car-burners are thinking anything so sociological. Their more immediate resentment is directed at police. Policing by quasi-military force has failed and there are glimmers of awareness that community policing methods produce the best long-term results, just as 1981's Brixton riots shook up British policing. In the banlieue patrolling officers have been ordered to address people with the formal 'vous' rather than 'tu' as one uses to a child.

For police, as for the political leadership, there will be a delicate decision over when to lift the couvre-feu. It appears to be working for now but it is also damaging France, as authoritarian crisis measures do. Much of the damage is done. The fire might be smothered but embers of resentment will smoulder for a long time.

Apparently Germany is among the countries to have issued a travel advisory warning tourists about coming to France.

This would be the first time in a couple of centuries the Germans have been worried about their safety while travelling to France.

We are a long way from the riots to date, bolted behind layers of security as Paris apartment dwellers are. And though we rented a car for this weekend, we don't have our own parked on the street to be burned by the hordes. So we are safe and unaffected personally.

Last night, police say thirteen hundred cars were set alight.

We knew Saturday night would erupt into the worst night yet. There were battalions of police, hundreds have been arrested and yet the suburbs still burned and the riots spread, to the South of the city, to the centre and to other centres - Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nantes, Normandy. Cars, schools, businesses, shops are being attacked with molotov cocktails.

Most of the action is out beyond the Periphique in the 'banlieu', the suburbs. It's beyond the arrondisements, beyond the limits of the metro lines, served by suburban rail. There have been confrontations out there all year. On Bastille Day two hundred cars were burned and police used tear gas and rubber bullets. So far this year, twenty thousand cars have been set alight.

These areas are poor, badly served, isolated. There are housing projects packed with jobless young immigrants. In the burning suburbs, most are Arab or Muslim - but not all.

They are ignored by the political elites, except to be scape-goated, blamed and derided.

This is a country beleaguered by a vicious class system, and a few who have a sense of national superiority. Five million immigrants feel shut out and often unwelcome.

Unemployment in France is over ten percent. In the banlieu it's more than double that. Among immigrants in the banlieu it's 35 percent. Among the young Arab men it's approaching fifty.

Despite the size of the constituency virtually no elected officials in France are Muslim or even immigrant. So what an easy target they are when reporters go out to the communities, and collect quotes like:

"All the politicians care about are laws for homosexuals and all those immoral things. They are against headscarves, against beards and against the mosques."

The Interior Minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, is an ambitious little upstart with the manner of a ferret on cocaine. He fancies himself as the next President; until this started, so did a majority of voters. Much of what he says sounds like fresh air - loosening up the constricted, sclerotic centralism; he's pro-American. But he has also scratched the law and order itch. His government has been cutting services in the poor suburbs, it does nothing about unemployment and it attacked Muslims for looking different (banning headscarves in schools? There's a priority issue). It has insisted on assimilation and done nothing to help them assimilate. The problem is not only the Govenrment's. The socialist opposition here, and the unions, are objectively pro-unemployment too.

Sarkozy has called the rioters scum. Well they are scum, but the attempt to sound tough has sounded like abuse of the entire community.

The police are little better integrated than the political institutions. There are more police per head of population in France than anywhere else in Europe. They ride around on pushbikes and even roller-skates, and turn up to trouble in huge numbers, heavily and conspicuously armed. But they're not there when the trouble goes away. Where kiwis see in our police defenders of our own side, too many communities here seem to see an opponent.

So it's no wonder authorities can't control the criminal hooligans on the rampage. They don't know them.

The more they fail, the more those communities feel let down by those authorities, and the more young hooligans with little to lose seem to feel this is licence and motive to join the destruction.

They are burning their own communities. Their own neighbours are losing their small possessions. How hard do you have to work in those places to build something up? It's so easily taken away.

Today we drove out for a day in the countryside, motoring past the estates, the ugly high rises, the graffiti scarred walls and broken pieces. These places are far from the elegant Paris apartment blocks, the leafy rues and the wide avenues. We drove and wondered how we would cope there in those blocks. How would we manage with a family and a typical income confronting the wealth barriers surrounding the suburbs unseen? How would we cope when we know as we do now the adjustment problems this society takes for granted as part of the price of membership?

These riots may be put down soon. They need to be. But the conditions that let hooligans loose take much more patience and wisdom. We'll see whether there is an appetite for it soon.

In a cafe just off the Arc de Triomphe late on Saturday afternoon there were groups of Parisiens sitting at tables sipping coffees and wine, smoking, talking, flirting, arguing.

A lone New Zealander leant on the bar watching the TV. The barman turned up the volume a little for national anthems. The New Zealand anthem, sung beautifully in Maori by Hayley Westenra, turned a few heads. People looked around to see what was going on, saw it was sport, rugby, smiled and kept chatting.

And then the All Black haka began and the cafe went totally silent. Every head turned to the screen. Tana Umaga strutted and slapped and Ka Mate rang.It was as if passers-by stopped on the street outside. It was the moment in a western movie when the protagonist walks through the saloon's swing doors. The breath of the room seemed to be sucked away by the ferocity..


How could you not be a proud New Zealander? The admiration filled the room. The snatches of pleasure afterwards...All Blacks! Nouvelle Zelande!

Superbe.

And what followed? Heh. No one paid much attention save that lone New Zealander. Even he didn't recognise a few of the All Blacks now. The wizened old men in the bar would look up and saying something admiring every time Rico Gear scorched over the pays-de-Galle line or Dan Carter racked up more points. Which, lets face it, was pretty often. Heh.

In the afternoons the pigeons huddle in congregations waiting around parks for crumbs. Around 4.15, adults congregate around the doors of the schools and at 4.19 a formidable women stands behind it watching the second hand tick around the minute. At precisely 4.20 the door is heaved open and we pour in to collect our kids.

As Maria left her classroom gaggle, beaming as usual, someone grabbed her hand and chanted 'one, two, three' and as a frown flickered over her teacher the call spread, until several were counting together. Maria smiled sweetly back.

"I've been teaching them to count in English," she told me. "It's easy. Sooooo easy," and sailed away full speed on her scooter.

In Wellington she also had a friend called Dylan. 'See ya Dullun,' she would say. Here she departs with 'saloo, Deelar.'

When she annoys Carlo he tells her to 'arret'.

It's a beautiful day.

It's 25 degrees outside, there is the slightest breeze and the skies are the exact shade of the blue stripe in the tricoleur. I found a new cafe with an unorthodox menu, pleasant patient staff and Wellington ambience.

We are at war with the French, as usual. Among our Monday complaints is the run-in Josie had this morning with the directrice at Maria's school . The witch stands in her 'overweight Labour woman MP' flowing outfit at the front door each day and confronts parents as they enter. Today she wanted to know, loudly, aggressively, why we hadn't paid Maria's dance class fees we didn't know we had to pay. Aggressive, confrontational, 'you must go home and get a cheque now.' It was due on Friday, see. Josie has taken to abusing them in English. I did it all along, because of the absence of alternatives, and to be honest they leave you alone.

This is such a class-ridden society, half the community seems to be competing to out haughty-tauty their neighbour. The other half simply ignores them, and ignores the rules.

Immigrants can't ever compete. We will never be able to trace our ancestry far enough back. The only way to survive is to give it back much harder than they dish it out, every time. They respect that. They have to, don't they.

So that's the rule really. Hit harder than they hit you.

Works fine.

France is on strike today.

It amazes me how tolerantly the French public accept the disruption. The schools closed with a day's notice, so parents all over Paris had to scramble for solutions. Transport is out or severely reduced in many parts of the city, and since you can't rely on the reputedly undisrupted services you have to treat it all as disrupted.

Yesterday I foolishly went to the nearby centre to buy a few things for a slap up dinner, and it was closed. The butcher was closed, the bakeries were closed, the wine shops were closed. The 'supermarkets' (yeah right) were closed, the flower shops were closed, the sweet shops were closed, the cheese shops were closed. The seafood place? Closed. The greengrocers? Closed. All of them. The only shops open were the small clothing stores. Go figure. It was Monday, so that accounted for many of them, but this is also the season of the strike, when Parisiens customarily return from work and go on strike in their moods of grumpiness.

I mean, I support the right of workers to organise collectively to secure fair employment conditions. But doesn't it seem suspicious that there is a strike season?

I walked to another centre a mile away, so it's no big deal and maybe that's why consumers are tolerant. 'We are all going on strike sooner or later.'

Apparently 65% of the population aspires to hold a job in the public sector. Few aspire to their own businesses.

I didn't really manage to fathom what Paris Nuit Blanche is all about, but it seems to be an excuse for all night concerts and keeping some of the cheaper galleries open all night.

The evening was like Cuba St Carnival, but less focused, and it's not as if Wellington would let anyone have an event that went all night, because we don't do that stuff in small provincial villages.

There were crappy buskers, like the puppet master on stilts jerking a 'puppet' accordion player totally out of time.

Crowds of youths hung around pissing in the street and shouting. Alcohol was everywhere. Teenies were getting smashed not on alcopops and beer, but on elegantly bottled French red wine.

I went to Jardin Les Halles and watched this Kraftwerk-meets-Moby DJ belt out some techno Brasilian multi-media that had the throng jigging. A spastic hippy percussionist woman played bongos, shakers, clackers and all manner of drums without ever really syncing to the song. She jived around and worked the audience like a superstar, which she wasn't. Every now and then a guest drummer would come out and wack a few beats, which only highlighted how bad the hippy was. Then a slender woman in a raincoat stood in the centre of the stage with a microphone, and I thought she was about to sing. But, no, she vocalised silently into the mic. Then she started walking AND talking, so clearly she worked in TV. It was a reporter doing a piece to cam right in the middle of the stage right in the middle of a song. And the cameraman didn't like it so he made her do it again. And again. Then he called up a kreig light to shine on her face and she kept walking around the stage recording her piece, and it only took maybe fifteen minutes while the stage show went on behind them.

Thumping base that buzzes on the soles of your feet and shakes your spine. In the rising cool night air, heavy with doobies, nearly naked dancers - men and women - would come out on stage and wiggle themselves pleasingly in chorus lines or alone for a minute or two, then disappear forever.

Elsewhere a laser radiated from a tent onto the side of an apartment block, illuminating an inexplicable series of photo slides, to the sound of techno-whale grunts.

I missed the metro home and spent ages at taxi stands without any luck. There were special night buses, but no one seemed to know which ones left from where or how often they left. I heard you could get info and buses at St Lazare. It took nearly an hour to walk there past women waiting in doorways and along streets stinking like urinals, trying to flag a taxi the whole way. The first time I've felt unsafe in Paris. St Lazare at 2am was like the New Orleans stadium, the hull of slave ship, only drunker with no kids or actual death. Crowds surged toward buses, which were overflowing. They were so stuffed full, people had their faces squeezed up against windows and doors. There were long queues just to see the information signs about which bus went where, and desperation at the actual information booth. Panicked crowds of twenty or thirty would suddenly run together to reach departing buses with the losers falling beneath their feet. I decided it would be easier to walk.

I tried standing outside flash hotels to get a cab, with no luck until the Paris Hilton - I was trying to think why that sounded familiar -- when a big Mercedes taxi swished up and carried me home. It would only have been forty minutes walk from there anyway, but I was tired and sore and it was after 3am.