It's cooler than it was in summer, though temperatures are still climbing well over twenty.

There were beautiful Paris days over the weekend, and we threw open the French doors. The sky is deep blue until the showers come along. The air feels lazy and warm and the grand stone buildings seem to glow.

Daylight saving has ended. The parks are emptying a little.

In the late afternoon there is a layer of golden leaves around the park lawns and pavements, looking as if they've been placed there like dinner plates at tea time.

In the mornings, men arrive in crisp lime uniforms with machines to blow the autumn into neat piles, which they scrape into bags and cart away before children arrive.

You can't have messy leaves lying about on the ground and rotting like so much nature. What are we, animals? So the kids step carefully around the ubiquitous mounds of dogshit on the way to the park and then scamper about the manicured playground free from the threat of vegetation.

When a ball, which is not really allowed at the park, rolls onto grass, Carlo stops chasing it and stares, wondering how to retrieve it. He has learned that grass is not for walking on.

For a flash-based slideshow of some very cute Maria photos, click 'Maria's Moods' in the sidebar (might take a while to download on dial-up).

Took about a minute to create that. Did I say I love my iBook? I do love my iBook.

What did Joey say when he came across Henry VIII's armour?

(Quietly, reverently): "Dad, do you mind if we just stand here for a few minutes while I just stare at it for a bit?"

The pix are here.

The English have instructions everywhere.

"Keep right on the escalators."

"Do not use the locked gates. Please proceed to the entrance on the right."

No one has ever persuaded the English that the best way to get people to do things might not be to command them. It's not just the ubiquitous officious signs that sound like a Telegraph reader holding a clipboard. Every single advertisement contains a command.

"BUY IT NOW!" "GET YOUR HANDS ON IT." "BE THERE!!"

Most of it is useless.

"Do not violently assault Underground staff."

That's going to be great, isn't it? You can just imagine some chav about to bop a station warden on the nose, and then thinking "Oh, blimey, there was that sign saying I shouldn't hit these geezers. Orright sunshine, on yer way then."

The July attacks have sent sign-makers into frenzies of new commands.

"Terrorist activities are strictly prohibited. Offenders are liable to severe penalties. You must not commit terrorist actions on London Underground Services. If you are a terrorist, please report immediately to London Underground authorities. Thank you for choosing to travel with London Underground."

Here are some things I wish I didn't know:

1. Things you really, really don't want to lose on the metro include - and this would be near the top of the list - a bag containing your passports and ID cards, Eurostar tickets, camera, PDA and assorted electronic knick-knacks.

2. There are some really, really bad words a nine-year old boy shouldn't hear when his Dad realises he has lost a bag containing these items.

3. Paris Metro staff can track down a bag and bring it right to you in practically no time at all. No one shrugs and tells you to try lost property tomorrow.



4. People find bags in the Metro and don't even rifle through them and steal stuff.

5. If you arrive at the Eurostar five minutes before it leaves, you can still check in, clear French and UK customs and find you seat with a couple of minutes to spare.

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'.

Deborah, whom you will occasionally see in the comments, took some gorgeous photos of the kids.



I'll post a few more soon, but as a taster, there are some beautiful pictures of Carlo here.

(Or click the Carlo, October '05 link in the sidebar).

Man, these are really bad.

Just because the airline is government owned, does it have to be stalinist inspired?

What is with that hat? Are they completely insane?

What is appealing or creative about dull drab grey, minimalist lines? Even the fabric is rubbish. They look like Hallensteins poly suits for sales clerks.

Zambesi. eh. Rubbish.

Tell me about that picture.

Well the big round circles, that's an 'escargot'.

That's a snail?

Yes, we had some at school. They were really big, and you know what Daddy?

What?

You're not allowed to eat them.

I don't believe they've given the Nobel Bloody Prize for Literature to Harold Pinter.

The jumped up, pretentious, blithering example of everything that is wrong with contemporary lit? The writer whose single contribution to literature was to invent dialogue featuring -lo-o-o-o-o-ng - periods of no dialogue? Is that the one?

The twit who imagines himself a voice for the working class, virtually none of whom would bother to read, much less see, his appalling output? That Harold Pinter? The one who writes idealised fantasy scripts about wot the workers are rully loike?

The Harold Pinter who is always complaining about the decline of modern standards?

The welfare-bludger in a silly cap who has never* had a commercially successful play without a subsidy, despite being staged by every company in decline? The same one? The one who should have stopped writing thirty bloody years ago?

The one who isn't funny?

Blimey.

Excuse me while we silently brood for a bit, okay chum?



* Certain facts altered to suit my mood.

I know I haven't updated these for a while, but the freaks are still expressing their mating calls in the London Review of Books, though the nihilist hasn't been back for a while.

This week they gave a prize to:

"List your ten favourite albums. I don't want to compare notes, I just want to know if there's anything worth keeping when we break up. Practical, forward-looking man ..."

Then there's, 'Clever mistress wanted. Very light duties...'.

If that's creepy, try 'Will you crown me with algae? Woman seeks man...'.

A 'professional M, 38' from Basingstoke 'seeks a heartless common slut with detailed knowledge of sheltered housing applications.'

And near the ad from 'thinking man's crumpet' (I mean, honestly), an 'otherwise thoughtful, stylish political woman' asks for 'straighforward love and friendship.'

You're looking in the wrong place, baby....

This morning I took the boys down to the Seine, which loops around a mile or two west of our apartment. We ate our lunch in a deserted park full of overly-safe climbing equipment. Crudites on a delicious chewy roll for me, choquettes, croissants and bread rolls for the little men. Joe wasn't sure if he wanted to go for a walk, but when I mentioned a boulangerie, he was excited and dressed in a flash. How cool is that?

I passed the time listening to podcasts of news bulletins from round the world while the boys wrestled and ran. Then apropos of the post below, I played songs on shuffle and got to thinking about the music of the eighties that still stacks up.

Those that, somewhat surprisingly, aren't holding up as well as I thought they would:
Bruce Springsteen
Madonna
Talking Heads
U2.
This may be through being thrashed. They're not gone yet, but they don't thrill me when they come on any more.

Also
The Cure. (Ick!)
The Specials
UB40
Maybe The Clash
Don't think I liked any of this that much.

Eighties music that stands up better than I thought it would, twenty years down the line:
Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Grace Jones.
Interesting these both had a techno feel, see.
George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers.
The Sex Pistols (but only in very small doses).
Bowie.
Van Morrison.
The Rolling Stones.
REM.

New songs everyone should have on their ipods:
James Blunt. Fantastic. Best album in ages. Beautiful. Sad. You would love it.
Maroon 5.
Moby. (Can't get enough, even when I'm sick of it).
The Magnetic Fields. Beautiful.

I can take small pleasant doses of kiwi bands the Black Seeds, Fat Freddy's Drop and Trinity Roots, though they all sound a bit the same.

Also Celia Bartoli, except there are a few too many of those jangley waltzes and they get on my wick.

I know I should be dwelling on meaningful stuff like geo-political equilibriums, writing a book and developing business ideas, but it doesn't go with childcare. The news counts as my homework. The beat is back baby. It's got a backbeat you can't lose it...

I remember a conversation with my brother when I was ten or so. He convinced me some kids at school had invented a box with unlimited capacity. As long as you could push things into the opening slot, you could go on adding more and more stuff to this pencil case-sized box and it would never fill up. I realise now he was describing a black hole.

He could have been describing an ipod. No matter how much music or how many photos we add, we just can't fill it up. It has sucked up all our CDs, downloaded music from the iTunes music store, accepted and filed a thousand photos and it's maybe a third full. So I walk around with this slender toy in my pocket, happy happy happy. Come home and plug it into the speakers. Go out and fill my ears and my soul.

When Walkmans came out people used to bleat about how terrible it was that commuters all wandered around in headphones and didn't talk to each other. Well it's a relief, isn't it? I can't think of anything less welcome than a nutter on the metro trying to start a conversation.

You think you are bored with music and you left it behind when you grew up. But you only got bored with the effort of it. Make it easy - click, click, click - and it's better than the radio. Easier, more enjoyable.

It's amazing how much old stuff seems dull now. Ah yes, just like us...

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.

"Are you a big girl or a little girl?"

I'm a big girl.

"What about mummy? Is she a girl?"

Yeah, she's a girl.

"What do we call big girls?"

Ummmm. Humans?

It's a long ride home from language class on two metros so I bought an International Herald Tribune (a locally-tailored edition of the New York Times), flicked through the news section and began reading an op-ed about that giant squid a couple of Japanese scientists filmed.

I was tired and in a hurry to get back and prepare for a bit on the radio, so at first I missed the date-line.

There I was sitting on a crowded Paris metro reading an op-ed that looked lifted from the NZ Herald. Whoever Steve O'Shea is, he felt like an old buddy.

And on the ipod? A Fat Freddy's Drop album I bought off the iTunes Music Store a couple of weeks ago.

Yesterday, I noticed the 'espace rugby' shop around the corner (near the local Eden Park chain store, apparently named by a former French rugby international who played there) has decked out its front window in Canterbury of New Zealand gear.

Down at the American library today there was a display book in the kids' geography section about - New Zealand.

It's only coincidence and I notice little mentions others wouldn't begin to register, so it's not much.

Enough to pinch myself though.

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.

Maybe the lesson was a teensy bit elemetary. The new school season has begun and I'm taking night classes in, strangely enough, French pour etranger.

When I enrolled the seven page application was entirely in French, so it required a working knowledge just to get in the door.

The teacher made us all introduce ourselves, and then went around the table asking for national identity. We learned it's Columbien for men, Columbienne for women, there was la Peruviene, Bolivien, Philipine, several Indien, and then she got to me, paused, announced something about it being a bit complicated, and moved on to the Czech.

Then they came to the guy from Kosovo. What is your nationality, she frowned. Je suis Kosovo, he replied.

"But are you Bosnian," someone asked?

No. Kosovo.

"Oh, you are from Bosnia-Herzogovina."

No. Kosovo. My family were Albanian.

"Oh, you're Albanian." And they moved on while he stammered unheard, "no, I'm from Kosovo. How do I say I am from Kosovo."

At least they didn't call him a Serb.

I was the only English mother tongue there, but it's ironic it's the ummmm (you'll hate this) lingua franca of the group. Well franca certainly isn't the common lingua.

I did learn the subtley different intonation in the 'pel' sound between 'm'appell' and 'nous appelons.' Also when you sound the 't' at the end of petite and when you don't, which always had me floundering before. You know, unlike the rest of the language.

You'll find this hard to believe, but occasionally, just every now and then, Carlo can misbehave the teensiest little bit. And when that happened on the weekend Daddy picked him up and put him, sobbing, in the cot for time out.

A couple of minutes later, when Josie went to retrieve him, he told her '*sob*Daddy *sob* naughty *sob*'.

And so the Terrible-Two defiance begins.

Now when he doesn't get what he wants, or he is asked to 'put that down' or his request is declined he spits out 'Daddy Naughty!'

He has added 'no' to his vocabulary.

Would you like some bread, Carlo? 'No bread.'

Want to go for a walk? 'No walk!'

Say goodnight to Daddy. 'No Daddy! Daddy Naughty.

I tried a line from Independence Day: Do you want world peace, Carlo? 'Peace! No peace.'

Yesterday while Josie and I had lunch I sent him away. 'No way!'

Josie spoke to him sweetly and explained he could have some time when we finished lunch. 'Go away,' I added. '[screeeeech] No Way.'

Soft talk repeated, and as he toddled off, 'and go away'. Spins around 'No Way! Daddy Naughty!'

We're still posting over here.

But only until I've got the hang of this new site and checked it works.

Let me know if you have problems.

Pretty though, ain't it. I can change the look of this site with a single click. Macs are so cool.

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.

This is our new blog site.

Click on the links to the right and it will take you directly to pix.

Did I mention how much I love my mac? Don't need to know lots of complex web info or nutting. Publishing all this is a doddle.