Z is for...

Zut alors!

There's a classic image of the stereotypical Frenchman - stripey T-shirt, beret, bicycle, a baguette and some wine, maybe a Gauloise hanging out of his mouth - and the stereotypical Frenchwoman - outrageously chic, poodle on a lead, high heels clickety-clacking. And then there are those expressions we're always vaguely led to believe the French use but that we're all pretty sure they don't.

"Zut alors!" is one of those expressions, along with "Sacré bleu!" and "Comme çi, comme ça".

None of that's particularly interesting. But what I do find interesting is that, whilst I have never heard any French person ever say "Sacré bleu!", the other two are totally in use. The latter, "comme çi, comme ça", means "so-so" and is actually pretty standard.

The other, however, may seem utterly improbable but is in fact amazingly common. "Zut" is an interjection used by anyone wanting to make an interjection but without offending anyone (in the presence of small children, for example). I would never have imagined that people actually used it.

But they do.

So. This has been a pretty crappy day, in a pretty crappy week, in a pretty crappy month and in a pretty crappy year. The A to Z Challenge is now at an end (unless there are more letters in the alphabet that no one told me about), I'm really tired, my back aches from sleeping on the sofa while my dad's here, I'm hopelessly behind in my work and my financial situation - which everyone keeps promising me will improve - persists in absolutely not doing so.

All of which means there's really only one thing to say.

Zut, alors!

Y is for...

Yellow.

Contrary to what most of the entries on this blog might lead you to believe, my favourite colour is neither dark nor depressing. No, it's yellow. A bright, sunshiny yellow.

When I was a child, my mother had very set ideas as to what colours a redhead could and couldn't wear. In the former category, there was dark green, dark blue, brown, dark purple and grey. In the latter, all the others. Every photo of me from about the age of 4 up has me wearing one of those dull, drab colours. And I yearned for a yellow jumper. Or red. Or orange. Or anything not "dark".

Added to this was the fact that all British schools have uniforms, and they're frequently dull and drab too. In the many schools I attended, I had a navy blue uniform (white shirt, red tie), a hideous brown and yellow combo (yes, there was yellow, but the uniform was still predominantly brown), a dark green + kilt combo and, for my entire middle school period, a grey-green monstruosity (white-and-green striped shirt, beige jumper and socks, burgundy cape. Yes, a cape. An ankle-length cape).

As a teenager, my parents never gave me an allowance, so I still depended on my mother for the clothes I wore. She "let me choose", but I was never in any doubt as to what she thought suitable. I managed to get her to accept lilac and turquoise, but there was still a lot of dark - navy blue, dark purple, black. With my white, white skin I probably looked more like a corpse than anything.

It wasn't till I went away to university that I finally (eventually) plucked up the courage to wear clothes that friends told me suited me, but that I knew my mother would hate. Above-the-knee skirts, for example, and fitted clothes (my mother was obsessed with the fact that I was fat, even though I've never been fat in my life. Just fatter than her. But she weighed little more than 6 stone (around 90 pounds, maybe, or 40 kg) and was 4 inches shorter).

The day I travelled home for Christmas after my first term in St Andrews, I was wearing an emerald green shirt,  pale green mini-skirt and Doc Martens. My mother almost fainted.

It was liberating. After that "success", I went wild, wearing the wildest, brightest clothes on earth - I went to a formal dance pretty much dressed as a deck chair, with a red-yellow-white striped Lycra mini-dress, gold tights and red T-bar sandals with a vertiginous heel.

Now, I've calmed down a fair amount, but still don't buy into the French thing of wearing black all winter and navy, white and beige all summer. I do have black clothes, and some beige, a little white. No navy, though, and no dark green. Almost no brown, either.

I have yellow, though. I also have yellow kitchenware, yellow walls, yellow jewellry. It's a colour that brightens my mood (and heaven knows it's needed brightening of late), warms me up, makes me feel that there's something good in the world.

Yellow is a good colour.

X is for...

X

I'm not quite sure how "X" came to be an almost universal symbol for a kiss, but it has. When I was a child, I always signed letters and cards with a row of them, usually three. Back in the heady days when I had a proper family, I signed things from the 4 of us (me, the girls, my ex) with four of them and a hand-drawn pawprint from Tom. Now, I'm back to three (+ pawprint).

Today, however, I'm going to be writing an awful lot more. Today there will be an infinity of them, an infinity squared, even. Because today isn't just an ordinary Friday.

Today is the day my baby girl, my Looby-Lou, my little Lobster, turns 8.

She can be difficult. She hates sleeping, likes less and less food and eats little. She can't sit still for more than a nanosecond and she's big on sulking. She is hyper-sensitive to perceived injustice (in the form of things-her-big-sister-does-that-she-doesn't) and even more naturally untidy than I am.

But - she's also affectionate, bright as a button, fun-loving, giggly, mischievous, both girly and a tomboy, friendly, generous and downright adorable a lot of the time.

Happy 8th Birthday, my littlest hobo, I hope you have a wonderful day and a wonderful year being 8.

I love you more than anything.

W is for...

Winnie the Pooh.

I was a moderate fan of Winnie the Pooh when I was a child, but you have to remember that I am positively ancient, so back in those days, the Disney version didn't exist, and my knowledge of the Bear of Little Brain was "limited" to the original books.

I say "limited" because that original, A.A. Milne version is a damn fine version, and the stories and poems he wrote for his son (the famous Christopher Robin) are wonderful.

The Disney version is immensely popular, and I have nothing against it. The characters retain their charm, the stories, though sometimes a little too moralising, are generally cute and fun, and the drawings, though more cuddly than the originals, are still pretty adorable.

My fan-dom lasted long into adulthood - the one time I flew long haul (from Paris to New York) I had the choice of watching a disaster film (this one) or an animated (kids') film, The Tigger Movie. Well, I was travelling alone and didn't care what my fellow passengers thought of me, so I chose the latter. And thoroughly enjoyed it. I should perhaps mention that I was 31 at the time...

Anyway. It turned out that my elder daughter, C, fell in love with a plush Winnie the Pooh when she was very small. That one unfortunately got lost a couple of years later, so a replacement was procured (thank you, Disney Store online!) and she's had him ever since. He may be a Bear of Little Brain, but he is also a Bear who is Very Much Loved.

C turned 10 back in December, and in many ways she's very clearly on her way to being a teenager (heaven help me). She listens to music on YouTube, she can apply make-up better than I can, she can seem amazingly sophisticated at times.

And yet.

At heart, she's still very much a little girl, endlessly loyal to her Winnie, holding him on her lap pretty much constantly when she's at home, hanging him over the back of her chair by his T-shirt when we eat, kissing him goodbye every time she leaves the house.

I'm pretty sure many of the kids in her class would laugh at her for being a baby if they knew how very much she adores her Winnie, and I'm equally sure she doesn't ever talk about him when she's with her friends.

And whilst I've never been one to mope around at the thought of my girls getting older (I've said it before, I'm soooo not a baby or toddler person!), I do kind of hope she'll keep this love of her Winnie for many years to come.

This is the one she has. Only hers is much grubbier. And much loved.

V is for...

Violon d'Ingres.

I don't remember the first time I heard this expression, but I think it's great. If you're not familiar with it, Ingres was a 19th century French artist, famous for paintings such as this:

For the artist, his favourite pastime - if you consider that painting was his job - was playing the violin. Hence, any activity that you do for pleasure and not as a job is your equivalent of Ingres' violin-playing.

Love it.

The "Violon d'Ingres" is also a very famous photo by the great Man Ray:

which suggests that for the photographer, women were his "violon d'Ingres".

Go on, I dare you! Try and fit this expression into your conversation tomorrow.

And my "violon d'Ingres"? Hmmm. Maybe reading, maybe arts and crafts. I'm not sure... What's yours?

U is for...

Up.

When things go wrong in your life, you feel like you're spiralling down, down, down. Out of control. You can't see daylight when you look up (assuming you can actually look up), and beneath you it's all dark and scary. It's not a good feeling at all, and it's one that I've been all too familiar with in the course of my life.

There have been - so it seems to me - so many times when things have been less than perfect. Less than "just OK", actually. I know I moan a lot, and complain a lot, and I know that despite all the crap that goes down I do still have much to be thankful for, and am thankful for, yet it would be a very unfair to say that I have (and have had) an easy life, because it's not true.

These last few months (err... two years? three years? it's hard to know when the latest round of crap kicked off because the early stages were insidious and progressive) have been a new low period in my life. I don't think I've gone out of control, but I've certainly had that impression. I've certainly felt that I was falling, sinking down into the depths of a dark, dark hole. I've certainly struggled to keep my sanity. And I know I've been more miserable than I've been in a long, long time.

The bad times aren't over, and there's still a way to go. Just last night, I was so far off the end of my tether that I ended up getting up from the dinner table and going to bed, leaving the girls (aged 10 and almost-almost-almost 8, remember) to finish their meal, clear the table and get themselves ready for bed, then into bed, all by themselves. No story, no goodnight kiss, nothing. They did it, but both spent part of the night sobbing, which always makes me feel spectacular, as you can imagine. And my lifestyle is currently verging on out of control - insomnia, poor eating habits (basically "not eating", actually), too much crying. But I'm hoping, as I finally succeed in getting one bank account into the black and the other overdrawn by less than €100, that maybe, just maybe, I'm at the bottom now. Maybe this is as far down as I'm going to go. I barely dare write this because I'm scared of tempting fate, but financially at least, there seems to be a glimmer of hope. It's still weak and distant, but perceptible.

So what that really means is that from here on out, the only way is UP. And I don't remember the last time I was in "up" mode. It was hard to imagine, even 2 or 3 weeks ago, but now, I am starting to be able to imagine that things might actually not be so dark and miserable in the future. As I said, there's still a way to go, and I'm not a natural "glass half full" kind of person, but it's there. That tiny, tiny glimmer is there.

It seems kind of appropriate that Up is also one of my very favourite animated films. I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it more than the girls did. The opening sequence (which lasts about 20 minutes if I remember correctly) is stunning, an amazing risk - it's about old people, it's incredibly sad, and ultimately very downbeat. Quite an opening for a kids' film. But then it picks up and is really very amusing. And touching. And yes, I cried - at the beginning and at the end. If you haven't seen it, go see it! It's a kids' film, for sure, but definitely worth watching as an adult!

T is for...

Temptation.

Everyone knows the famous Oscar Wilde quote, "I can resist everything but temptation", but it's still perfect. Because that is it, exactly.

I can stand up to the trials and tribulations life throws at me (mostly. sometimes. partially). I can be strong and superhuman and translate a phenomenal amount of words in no time at all. I can be sleep-deprived yet functional, sleep-deprived yet efficient. I can deal with hassles and two jobs and raising children.

I can do all that. Maybe not well, and maybe not with my mental health intact. But I can do it.

But what I can't do is resist the temptation to do certain things. I get a new DVD, I can't resist the temptation to watch it. All of it. I buy a bar of chocolate and I can't resist the temptation to eat the entire thing, even though I know I'll feel like crap afterwards. I find myself incapable of resisting the pull of such things. It may all seem innocent enough - I mean, I'm not hooked on crack or anything after all - but sometimes, this inability to resist temptation can seriously screw me up.

Example. One of my students lent me his Grey's Anatomy DVDs. All of them (though not, thankfully, all at once). I started with season 1 and have been steadily working my way through them.

He passed me the DVD for season 7 not long ago. That's 22 episodes, about 45 minutes long each. Or, if you prefer, over 16 hours of DVD.

And I got sucked in, as usual. After years of being unable to understand the attraction of this series (and whilst still disliking Cristina and Meredith more than any of the other characters), I'm now hooked. So instead of watching maybe 1 or 2 episodes in the evening, I found myself watching several, whenever I could, instead of working. Instead of sleeping. Instead of doing housework.

Result? I watched all 22 episodes in 6 days (watched the last one this morning, in fact). And I'm now hopelessly behind with my work. Not to mention the housework (bearing in mind my clean-freak dad arrives in 2 days too...).

Temptation is a sneaky bitch, really. And I'm powerless.