I am now into my third week holding down two part-time jobs and thus the days just fly by. But I have to say, I am absolutely loving it. Suddenly, the house is more messy, but I am getting insights into a new universe that is commercial pharmaceutical research. I have already had some *remarkable* conversations with investigators. I will say no more, I’ll put it in a different post or tell you in private . No, honestly, this job is so up my street: It’s extremely complex in terms of paperwork and I get to talk to a lot of strangers on the phone, who are sometimes difficult, sometimes utterly charming and helpful. For someone like me who very much enjoys talking to interesting people, this is rather a fun work.
At the same time I am doing my other job, which allows me to brush up on my abilities in qualitative data analysis. This is great too, I am so happy to fully immerse myself in interview analysis, which can be mindboggling and complicated. But at the same time, it’s so beautiful when, after reading and coding the interviews four or five times, themes start to emerge, fall into place and suddenly you produce meaningful results. Okay, I appreciate that you may be thinking that this is loony work and can’t see the beauty at all? That’s fine with me… I love it anyway.
I just hope that my work meets my employer’s expectations so I will be hired for follow-on projects from mid-February onwards. So far, Lyon is looking promising, I have been offered more hours just today. With Switzerland, I am not sure. I will discuss the project with them tomorrow, so please keep your fingers crossed for me!

The offspring is busy too, Lucy is reading like there is no tomorrow, devouring one book after the other, and Linus is happy at school. He practically lives there at the moment:
He left the house at 7.30am this morning and I don’t expect him to be back until about 10pm tonight. He has had a full day of lessons until 5.30pm, then his Model United Nations debating club, and afterwards he will watch this year’s theatre production. Tomorrow he will again be leaving the house early. After school, he will be going to yet another Model United Nations convention, this time in Ferney-Voltaire (right next to Geneva). He’ll be gone until Sunday night.
The boy is definitely growing up, he just does not miss his MUM anymore!!! Having said that, it’s quite a liberating feeling, I was never very fond of those moments when I had a crying toddler who was in utter distress to part with his mum for, say, 10 minutes, clinging on to me. Yes, it’s good this phase is over. Just imagine, if he’d cling on to me still, I would have trouble wrestling the boy down… But luckily, I won’t have to. He’s very excited to go and discuss GM food as a representative for Venezuela. (They are assigned countries that they will represent before the convention).

Rolf is a busy bee too, so no real news on that front. Although, I have no idea what he is actually working on. The man with the big brain always does stuff that could potentially endanger the sanity of my own somehow differently wired thinking apparatus… So if you want to know, just ask him yourself.
I think dinner’s ready, so I better go, the family does not approve of ‘Black Quiche’. Have a great evening!!

I’m glad the thing is out. Mary, Joseph, the babe and the other folks living in our stable under the tree must be equally relieved: They were almost up to their ankles in needles. As you can see, one of the shepherds had already keeled over from exhaustion:

Removing the ornaments gave me a refreshing shower of dry needles. (I still find needles all over my body, in the most unexpected places…) but still, the tree looked not too bad afterwards, considering the substantial loss of green that it had undergone already.

Well… maybe not.
Next, I pulled the tree out of the apartment. Had it been a child, I would say it was kicking and screaming all the way. But in its tree-like quiet manner, it just left an impressive green and prickly trail behind…

Which I swept up into a nice pile of – green and prickly stuff.

So what do you do with an ex-Christmas tree that is in such a sorry state? Lucy suggested to keep it until Easter, transport it to Germany and burn it in one the traditional Easter bonfires. Great idea, but somehow I had a few objections.
I think we have now agreed that a LOCAL recycling point in Lyon, in our quartier, will be the best solution. For the time being, the tree is still sitting on the balcony… and I have a huge pile of needles at my disposal.
I could still put the tree and its components to good use as an educational means: If my kids should be naughty today, I will make them glue the needles back on the tree with superglue.
Every last one of them .
Now there’s a thought… Maybe we should keep it a bit longer after all?

The transparent front

The engraved back

It is a Chi-qoo solar power pack, financed with a generous contribution from my dear mother-in-law on the occasion of Christmas. I found it on Kickstarter, a site where inventors and creators solicit support for innovative projects. I made my contribution to BootstrapSolar and they sent me a kit, which was reasonably straightforward to assemble. The case is mostly bamboo, with a transparent (acrylic?) cover to reveal a view of the innards. The battery holds a whopping 6 Ah, enough to charge two or three mobile phones via the two USB ports. The internal battery is recharged via the two 5-watt solar panels. Theoretically, this should take no more than 3 hours — I haven’t had a chance to verify this because the weather conditions were not favourable. I could charge it with the AC adapter instead, but I’m loath to contaminate this precious device with French nuclear-generated electricity

What I like about this gadget is that it reduces my dependency on grid power for running small electronics. This makes it useful for travelling and camping, as well as for emergencies (the latter having been the inspiration for the inventor — he spent several months volunteering in Japan, helping victims of the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake). It may also be a step towards sustainability, although of course the device isn’t exactly sustainable. It relies on limited resources in multiple ways: there’s the lithium used for the battery, precious metals used in the circuitry, and large amounts of energy used in making it. The solar panels in particular have probably been made with much more energy than I will be able to recuperate in my particular use case.

Another open question with the Chi-qoo is how useful any small electronics would be in the kind of emergency where grid power is lost on a large scale. Mobile phones would be useless, at least initially, since the base transceiver stations would also be likely affected. But having a small broadcast radio receiver could be vital. The most promising means of enabling two-way communications would probably be participating in an emergency radio network. Hey, that reminds me of my amateur radio days — maybe I should reactivate my callsign (DG6YHS) and set up an emergency rig for disaster preparedness. That would be fun! I’ll keep you posted

We also had a wonderful Christmas and New Year with the family in Germany – much more relaxed and enjoyable than it used to be in recent years. But then, maybe that’s just a change in perception, me mellowing and becoming a bit soft with age… (Now there’s a worrying thought, if that’s the case, what will I be like in 20 year’s time???).
Which leads me (almost smoothly) to something I have been contemplating recently: Raising softies. Wrapping kids in cotton wool. Avoiding change, because it will be oh! so harmful for children. And … They won’t be able to cope!!!
Is this true? I think not. Because, as always, there is a cultural dimension to this. And as you know, I get awfully excited about those!

Take Germany for example. Young children wear bonnets or caps about 360 days of the year. If it’s not to protect them from harmful sun rays, then it is to shelter them from wind. If there is no wind, then there will be a chill in the air that could potentially cause an ear infection…. (You know I am talking about parents who get it right all the time and are not afraid to talk about it).
These things are pretty much unheard of in England or Scotland. Kids wear … thin clothes? T-shirts in winter are acceptable if your child says she’s warm. A coat is not compulsory. My kids were both (and Lucy still is) like that… always happiest wearing a few layers only.
So, are German kids healthier? Are English kids more resistant? Or do they get the dreaded kidney infection in Spring when sitting on the ground without the special protection that only hand-knitted woolen knickers, lovingly fashioned by your own grandma, can provide? (Yes, I had to wear these scratchy things decades ago…)
I honestly don’t know whether kids are healthier in Germany because they wear more layers. But what I do know is that I grew up with the notion that children should have a very stable environment and they should ideally grow up in the same place and within a set circle of friends. Otherwise they would be harmed. You know, change damages children emotionally.

While I have always assumed that this way of growing up is something to aspire to (although we have miserably failed at providing this kind of environment for our own children), I am now starting to think that maybe this is not such a superior way of growing up.
While providing a secure family environment for children is no doubt paramount, I reckon that exposing children to new social situations (i.e. changing schools) might be very beneficial.
You see, here in France, at our kid’s school, classes are jumbled up every single year. Children are assigned to different groups, sometimes even split up with their best friends. Admittedly this can be very hard for children, and Germans never fail to point out just HOW tough this is. But unless your child has been the victim of prolonged bullying, it’s easy to ignore the potential this fresh start may provide: In groups that remain the same for years, unpopular children will be unpopular, or worse, bullied, for a long time. For those children, it can be such a relief to suddenly find themselves in a group where they are appreciated and valued.
If you have to find your feet in a new class every year, you can move from unpopular to popular (and vice versa!). But that’s what life is like. Things change! Moving from one social group to another keeps you from convincing yourself (at a very young age) that you are popular/unpopular/ middle of the road/… , because it gives you the opportunity to experience you that you may take different positions in a group: your role as a loser/ hero is never static. So if you are an underdog in one group, it’s not necessarily your fault, but it might just be that the group is not right for you and you might be perfectly fine in a different group. What a liberating thought!

And this takes me right back to the beginning of the post… Tough experiences help you grow. Parents are naturally inclined to wrap their children in cotton wool. To keep stuff away from them. I’m no exception. But I have now come to realize that you don’t do them a favour. There is a big bad world out there after all. And it’s only a child’s family and close friends that care enough to provide a safe haven and a nest snugly lined with cotton wool. So the opportunity to prove themselves outside the nest, socially, intellectually… is essential for growth. The wooly hats and knickers should be reserved for those dangerous days in Spring that could give you bladder/ kidney infection.

… Gosh, this was a long post. The caffeine had me on a roll… Got to go, got to start knitting wooly pants now, Spring will be here in a few weeks’ time … Take care!

All the Germans had some sort of capital-lettered

1. “WOW” and 
2. “this is incredible” reaction. 
3. Then: shaking heads in disbelief and laughter to release the tension.

Conclusion: The story is perfect for entertaining Germans. They will get VERY excited about it.

… Unless they are German politicians.

A French person’s reaction was more like…

1. … spontaneous, uninhibited, mad  laughter along with the following
2.  comment: “Yes, I can explain to you why you got this advice and it’s perfectly normal by French standards, but the person who suggested this should have been aware that you NEVER say anything like that to a GERMAN.”

I am grateful to my friend for bridging this cultural gap for me . 

Conclusion: Don’t bother telling this story to French people – they’ll think you’re daft or at least not too clued-up on how to screw the system efficiently.

A Malaysian-Indian friend (married to a French man):

1. LAUGHTER! 
2. More laughter. Then:
3. Comment: You’re cute and so funny, this person meant well and was just trying advise you with your best interest in mind.

Conclusion: You get a lot of laughter from foreigners who are well acquainted with the French culture. Mind you, they will be laughing about YOU, not the incident.

But do you know what? … I don’t really care becoming the laughingstock in this exploration of cultural differences, this is much too interesting not to be pursued further. As soon as possible (this will be early January) I will tell my story to a total random sample of  Swiss, Italians, Japanese, North-Americans, South-Americans …, just to see their reaction. Maybe I can affirm some cultural prejudices.

Recently, I watched a film version of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book on TV and I thought, “I have read the book, but cannot remember what it was all about, this is new to me”.
So I went through our bookshelves and came across a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. To my relief, it was a different book, so no wonder the film plot was all new. But as deep as I dig into my memory, I can’t remember the story in ‘A hundred years of solitude’ anyway… I haven’t yet started reading it again, but I picked up another book that was sitting right next to it.

Do you also find that certain books, if put away for ten years, can be an immensely pleasurable read again if you just let them stew for a decade? The book I picked up was so meaningful to me in the last millenium that I had underlined certain passages.
It is

... Graham Greene's 'The heart of the matter'

When I looked at it last weekend, I could not at all recall why on earth it had been so important, but the blurb sounded good. So I read it again. Over the course of two days. And I was hooked again. The themes that Greene writes about really resonate with me. Why? I guess by the time you’ve lived on this planet for a few decades, you have encountered people and experiences that make you wonder about the human disposition.

[Spoiler ahead] If you haven’t read the book, Greene’s main character (Major Scobie) develops from an upright regular police officer into this contradictory, tragic man. His weird (catholic) pride of wanting to do ‘the right thing’ for everybody but himself lands him in a downward spiral of lies, murder and, eventually, suicide.

Greene’s insight into the human mind is so very compelling as you watch the tragedy unfold. I found it hard to read the book to the end, because I wanted to intervene…. and shout at Scobie
“For f**** sake, come clean, if you are honest with yourself and the people around you, there will be less bloodshed. People around you can survive honesty, but it’s the intricate cobwebs of lies, cover-ups and deceit that lead to disaster”.
To me, the book illustrates above all that you can never fully understand another person, be it your child, your friend, your spouse. Admittedly, this is not a revolutionary discovery, but it’s so easy to forget that every person lives in his or her own little universe. (There’s a thought – 7 billion parallel universes on the planet. And that’s not counting the cats, dogs, budgies and wild beasts!) I find it liberating nevertheless: We are all individuals doing their own (mostly) irrational weird and wonderful thing and I guess that’s what makes life exciting, exhilarating and painful at times. If people were predictable and straightforward, the world would be a pretty boring place to live in.

It may not be enough to have just one book on your bookshelf, but it’s a wise idea to keep the ones that have been meaningful to you and re-read them after a while. So please get me a book anytime! But make it a treasure, because there are the books that are plain brain candy. I have a few of those as well. In fact I have got a whole pile of them. But that’s a different story. A lot of these will go away soon, to be released into the wild to maybe, just maybe become someone else’s treasure and inspiration.

I thought I’d start this post with a pretty picture. My kids go crazy for these and they are pleased that they are in season again. You might think “Pah, clementines, what’s the big deal?”

The deal is that these delicious beauties are not ordinary clementines (at least not in our book), no, these grow in Corsica. They always come with their pretty dark leaves attached and they are the most wonderful tasting clementines you can buy in France. They started popping up on the markets about a couple of weeks ago and we have already been munching our way through more than 3 kilos. We discovered them during our first winter in Lyon. Since then, their appearance has become some sort of pre-Xmas landmark. When they go out of season, it’ll be the oranges from Italy that keep us happy right until March. But talking about pre-Xmas landmarks… This weekend will be the first Advent weekend. Shock. Another landmark on the way to Xmas and so much to do until then: Making the wreath, buying clementines, making mince meat and -pies, buying clementines, organizing the advent calendars, buying and crafting gifts, eating fresh walnuts, ensuring that Nikolaus will visit our children and leave sweets in the shoes, writing cards (maybe?)… it’s always the same lovely-crazy routine landslide that dashes you with a bang straight into Christmas eve in December. I hope we’ll have many parties along the way…

On a different note, people who know me a bit are aware of my particular genetic disposition to part with stuff that does not need to live in our house. I inherited this trait from my mum. And I have no idea where she got it from, certainly not my wonderful grandma . Recently we have been tidying up like there was no tomorrow. This becomes necessary every decade or so, when you live in a flat without attic or cellar (i.e. loads of space for junk).
Due to the way our life has unfolded and our habit of moving every now and then, we don’t have the luxury of living in a house we bought years ago and that we can fill up with stuff to our heart’s content. No, we have to organize our possessions sometimes, according to the circumstances. So recently, in another mad stint of chucking stuff out, I decided to part with our kids’ cloth nappies and a lot of baby outfits. I just kept a few that are special to me.
While I normally happily chuck stuff, this was hard. It made me all sentimental. Isn’t it weird that you can get so attached something that used to catch your baby’s poo? Let me tell you, strange as it may sound, it’s a very emotional thing.
But I got a grip of myself and looked at the whole thing with a more analytic mind and came up with the following equation:

a: There is no point in shipping boxes with cloth nappies from one country to another if you have kids at school age.
b: My kids will never wear these nappies again
c: My kids might not produce offspring themselves and if they should do, would they want to use those nappies???
d: Someone else might be really pleased to use these for their babe.

So, adding a+b+c+d = Charity Shop.
(This equation might not look very mathematically accurate, but it’s still kind of convincing, at least in my universe.)

And that’s where the nappies and baby clothes ended up today. It felt good to leave the bags there, but at the same time I got sucked into the depths of the shop by the old “charity shop magic”. I can never say no, I have to browse. And to buy and re-home something if it really catches my attention.
Today, for example, I am wearing one of my favourite tank tops: A woolly knitted grey and white jacquard-patterned tank-top that I bought about 12 years ago in London. This thing is vintage, it’s a Marks and Spencer tank top from 1979 and has a certain ‘Sesame Street’ feel about it. I love it nevertheless. Just like the vintage handbag

I recently bought for a song and which looks like I stole it from an elderly lady on her way to church. I think it’s super chic. And different.
Today’s catch was a neat pair of 3/4 length checkered trousers that look great with boots. I bought them for €4.50. I can’t wait to wear them tomorrow! I would post a photo, but they are currently out on the line to dry.
I think things that you really appreciate are wonderful. Just like this old but dearly loved tank top I keep wearing winter after winter and that makes me look nerdy or a bit off the mark one year, but (apparently) fashionable this year (I don’t really keep up with trends). It’s these things that are worth keeping, not the nappies that make me all sentimental but are really just cluttering up valuable space in our flat.
I have one more bag with baby stuff to take to the charity shop. Yippeehh! I might find another piece of clothing that I can rescue and treasure for years to come.

Why do I write about this now? Because today, I found a much more eloquently worded and scientifically sound blog posts arguing along the same lines. This blog, which is maintained by an insightful and clever vet from London, really affirmed what I have come to believe since earlier this year. Go on, read it, and you will from now on enjoy the fat in your food without a trace of guilt .