Why oh why did we ever have to come back! No, that’s not fair. Poor old Lon­don can­not begin to com­pete with the charms of Glouces­ter­shire. But it’s hard to leave the gor­geous coun­try­side, fresh air, deliri­ously good food (and no lit­ter­box, no laun­dry, no beds to make!) of our hol­i­day and on top of that, to have school start today. Alas, real life beck­oned and so we came back. But we had the best weekend.

Lords of the Manor is one of my favorite places in the world, set in one of my favorite places in the world, the Cotswolds. Which means lit­er­ally in what­ever old lan­guage it is, “cuts through hills.” And the land is very, very hilly, mak­ing any drive absolutely stun­ning, with vis­tas of cul­ti­vated green fields, ancient stone walls, hedgerows and plenty of sheep, cows and horses on which to feast the eye. And any walk through the fields is a work­out because the land does go up and down, up and down. So you put together a top-hole loca­tion, per­fect but delight­fully change­able weather, the two peo­ple I like best in the world and a nice added attrac­tion of Avery’s friend Ava, and it was just an idyl­lic weekend.

We picked up Ava on Fri­day after­noon, leav­ing her mother with a cry­ing hun­gry three-week-old baby, poor thing. But she looked pretty thrilled with her lot, and handed Ava over with a bulging knap­sack, rid­ing hel­met and lit­tle hand­bag filled with, as it turned out, a vir­tual elec­tron­ics store of enter­tain­ment items. How long we can hold out against Avery’s hav­ing a Nin­ten­dog, or an iPod, I do not know. We can but try. What with our two bags of clothes, books and rid­ing gear, it was an extremely tight squeeze in Emmy! Not much of a boot. But the girls bun­dled up in their tar­tan rug and we were off, top down and music blar­ing. I have to say right now that the only down­side (a word I really hate, should say “neg­a­tive aspect,” I sup­pose) to the entire was the girls’ obses­sion with a Suzanne Vega track that details her expe­ri­ence in a diner on a rainy day with a cup of cof­fee and some­one comes in with a drip­ping umbrella… argh! It goes on an on. And even worse, she got a whole host of other annoy­ing musi­cians to COVER the drat­ted song in their own even more irri­tat­ing ways. But the girls absolutely love it, and had soon mem­o­rized it all and insisted (in a very charm­ing way of course) on lis­ten­ing to it ad nau­seam, which state I have to admit it didn’t take very long for me to achieve. Oh, what can you do? They’re kids. We stopped in the adorable lit­tle town of Wood­stock, pass­ing the impres­sive gates of Blenheim Palace on the out­skirts, and in def­er­ence to John’s par­ents (whose gift the whole week­end was, thank you), said as they always do, “You know, we should really visit Blenheim some­day.” We have prob­a­bly passed those gates ten times in our 17 years of mar­riage, many times with John’s par­ents in the car, and with­out fail, one of us always utters those words. But we never go.

Now, every Amer­i­can expat liv­ing in the United King­dom has to offer the oblig­a­tory com­plaint each fall that, firstly, the British don’t call it “fall” but instead “autumn,” and then sec­ondly, there isn’t the gor­geous col­or­ful foliage that we’ve all come to count on as the har­bin­ger of what­ever you call the sea­son. It has some­thing to do with the fact that Great Britain, or at least South­east Eng­land, does not get what you’d call a good hard killing frost. I know, I sound like Gar­ri­son Keil­lor, but every once in awhile my mid­west­ern upbring­ing sur­faces with a vengeance. Any­way, as I was say­ing, the frost just never descends here in the way it does in the north­ern bits of Amer­ica. So the leaves do not, in gen­eral, get to be bril­liantly col­ored before they fall. Hey, maybe that’s why they call it autumn: there’s not much to write home about in terms of the leaves actu­ally falling.

In any case, nor­mally I do feel this sort of com­plain­ing home­sick feel­ing about Octo­ber in Eng­land. But in the Cotswolds, and in par­tic­u­lar on the ivy-covered walls of Wood­stock, it was glo­ri­ous. Red, orange, and yel­low ivy fes­toon­ing all the old, old hotels and pubs and yarn shops that peo­ple all the lit­tle towns, and plenty of fallen leaves for lit­tle girls to scuff in. We had a truly awful lunch of watery shepherd’s pie and fish and chips “like hockey pucks,” restau­rant critic Ava pro­claimed, then the girls got ice cream and felt quite fine again. They shopped extremely labo­ri­ously in a dar­ling art sup­ply store, touch­ing I think every SIN­GLE item on dis­play, in search of what­ever was wor­thy of their spend­ing money. John and I took turns super­vis­ing them while the other lucky grownup got to exit the shop and wan­der around the town. John finally made motions through the shop win­dow of peel­ing back his eye­lids and putting hot nee­dles in his eye­balls (he hates shops full of lit­tle things), so we got the girls to decide on var­i­ous mechan­i­cal pen­cils and goo­gly eyes, and were ready to go. We hopped back in Emmy and whizzed along, arriv­ing at the hotel just at dusk, when it was look­ing par­tic­u­larly wel­com­ing. The lovely Julia behind the desk who had helped us with reser­va­tions and the girls’ extra bed came out to greet us by name, which was awfully pro­fes­sional and pleas­ant. In with all our clob­ber and through the remem­bered white-painted, book-lined rooms with mas­sive fire­places, lots of wind­ing hall­ways that ensure I will be lost when­ever I leave the room, and into our bed­room, on two cozy lev­els with a big four-poster for us and a nice plump pull­out sofa for the girls, already made up. And a huge spray of beau­ti­ful flow­ers and a bot­tle of chilled cham­pagne, from John’s parents!

We set­tled in, which meant mostly that the girls went through all the sam­ple toi­letries and divided them up with a min­i­mum of acri­mony and lots of nego­ti­a­tions, where­upon I had to beg for just a tiny bar of soap to wash my hands. Gor­geous dark-red bed appoint­ments, cur­tains and car­pets, and golden wall­pa­per, and dou­ble leaded-glass win­dows open­ing out onto the hedge by the side of the drive. Just per­fect. Avery and Ava quickly switched on the telly to find the usual Fri­day evening’s assort­ment of dread­ful Eng­lish quiz pro­grammes, so they were in heaven. John and I opened the cham­pagne and sighed with con­tent­ment, albeit with the girls’ swing­ing feet clunk­ing us in the head as they lay on their stom­achs on our bed, all agog with details of Welsh his­tory, Latin Amer­i­can geog­ra­phy, and dis­tinc­tions among var­i­ous types of pasta shapes. I espe­cially loved Avery’s wry com­ment, “I don’t have so much com­mon sense. What I have is gen­eral knowledge.”

Then they forced us to watch some­thing called “Strictly Come Danc­ing,” where for the ben­e­fit of some char­ity, celebri­ties learn to dance and then per­form before a panel of delib­er­ately cheeky judges. I was tempted to find out how much they thought they would raise for char­ity and offer to donate the whole thing if only they’d take the pro­gramme off the air. And even worse: we hap­pened upon an “episode” where they wasn’t even any danc­ing! Just inter­views, and analy­sis. I com­plained, “This is just ‘Strictly Come… Chat­ting,’” which cracked the girls up. All was well with the world. Except. I had for­got­ten to book for din­ner! Oh no! And they were fully booked in the hotel’s divine restau­rant. Julia came to the res­cue, how­ever, and booked us at what she described as “a new place, or rather a refur­bished old place,” that the staff had been invited to last week and had reported favor­ably upon. So we headed out cau­tiously, the girls hav­ing got very dressed up in their favorite dresses: Avery in a lettuce-green linen dress that I had made for her one Easter (long ago, she could hardly breathe in it), and Ava in, she informed me, Bon­point from head to toe. Lucky girl. I walked into the shop in New York, on Madi­son Avenue on the hottest day of the year this sum­mer, just for the air-conditioning and had to leave imme­di­ately upon see­ing that the coat I liked for Avery was $978. Oh my. They both looked extremely lovely.

The restau­rant was, well, a pub. “The Coach and Horses,” no less, the most bor­ing of all pub names in a land where “The Slug and Let­tuce” is not con­sid­ered odd. John and I looked at each other in some con­ster­na­tion, not being devo­tees of pubs even now that smok­ing is banned in some of them. I just don’t like watery warm beer and bad steak and kid­ney pie, nor the blare of some sport­ing event on the telly and the sus­pi­cious glances of the inevitable locals, not that I blame them. But there were were, so we descended the steps and went in, to be greeted with fer­vor by the wait­ress who anx­iously assured us the hotel had called and we were most wel­come. Uh oh, I thought, being, as a New Yorker, accus­tomed to the wait staff’s chilly demeanor pro­vid­ing an exact barom­e­ter of the excel­lence of the food. The din­ing room was painfully newly-done up, with glar­ing shiny new wall sconces and a truly repel­lent flow­ered car­pet. And it took the wait­ress a very long time to remove, item by item, all the unnec­es­sary glasses, cut­lery and charg­ers once she’d taken our order. How­ever. The food came and it was sim­ply superb. How­ever this place got its new chef they must do what­ever they can to keep him.

At first glance the menu looked hope­lessly pre­ten­tious, but that was just in con­trast to the sur­round­ings. Actu­ally the food was very sim­ple, and quite, quite per­fect. I ordered some­thing called a “can­non of lamb,” a name with which I wasn’t famil­iar, but hey, lamb is lamb and I can’t have it at home any­more with my soft-hearted daugh­ter. It is essen­tially half a sad­dle, the best part of the fil­let which in my Frenchy expe­ri­ence is called a “noisette.” I have found in trips back to Amer­ica that lamb is really not pop­u­lar and I can never under­stand why. My par­ents report hav­ing it shoved down their throats drowned in mint jelly after being cooked for sev­eral days while the fam­ily went to five dif­fer­ent church ser­vices in a row. Per­haps that has some­thing to do with the country’s gen­eral avoid­ance of the meat. Because of my par­ents’ shared child­hood expe­ri­ences they shielded me from birth from both the Methodist Church and lamb. Now I can­not attest to the lack in my life of Method­ism because I am igno­rant of what I’m miss­ing. To will­fully deprive me of lamb, how­ever, is an action­able offense. And this at the Coach and Horses was the real deal. A long fil­let cut in small slices, pink and juicy and melt­ingly ten­der. The menu John snagged for me claims that it was pre­sented with a rose­mary puree, but this was not true. It was served with the same full-flavoured, tart and com­plex red wine sauce that came with Avery’s fil­let of beef, also per­fectly cooked. John had the lamb as well, and we both savored the but­tery potato puree nes­tled under­neath, but were chilly on the “tian of veg­eta­bles” on the side, an odd sort of ver­ti­cal pile of an aubergine slice, some red onion, and a yel­low cour­gette, topped weirdly with melted cheese. Ah well, we can’t expect per­fec­tion from a pub! Even, as they are known here so pre­ciously, “gas­trop­ubs.” I myself find that des­ig­na­tion impos­si­bly twee, and will not use it. Either you’re a pub with a great restau­rant or a pub with­out a great restaurant.

As it was, this place was like a fancy for­eign cousin recently bereaved of both par­ents and forced to live with poor rela­tions. The locals in the “pub” part of the estab­lish­ment downed end­less pints of lager and looked askance at us, putting their heads to one side and peer­ing around the door­jamb. Some­thing tells me there’s still fish and chips avail­able to them. I can­not see them get­ting on the out­side of “pan-fried sea bass with rata­touille, potato galette and herb oil.” Ava went for tagli­atelle with goat’s cheese (I love the Eng­lish insis­tence on the pos­ses­sive apos­tro­phe, as though the goat might come back for it) and baby cress salad, and while she imme­di­ately dis­man­tled the gor­geous pre­sen­ta­tion with wild mush­rooms piled on top and issued a “yucky” decree, the pasta under­neath was more than accept­able to her. We all hap­pily plun­dered one another’s plates and among the four of us ate every bite. Divine!

Home through the dark curv­ing roads, we dis­cussed accents. Now Ava is full-blown Eng­lish, both par­ents, both sets of grand­par­ents. But she has inher­ited, I think from her urbane and sophis­ti­cated father, an incred­i­ble tal­ent for mim­icry. She can be a per­fectly Eng­lish girl, with cut-glass vow­els. But she can also be quite a good native Moroc­can girl, gleaned from her incom­pa­ra­ble nanny Fati, as well as a good French accent speak­ing Eng­lish. So we decided to ask her some pro­nun­ci­a­tion ques­tions. “Do you say ‘gull’ or ‘gel’ for ‘girl’?” She says “gull,” but I have heard Lord Peter Wim­sey (in his Ian Carmichael incar­na­tion) say quite plainly ‘gel,’ with a hard g. So I don’t know about that. She pro­duced a con­vinc­ing York­shire per­sona, with “ayuh, lass,” rolling out of her throat. She even could pro­vide really good instruc­tions on how to pro­duce cer­tain sounds! Maybe we have a lin­guist, or a speech ther­a­pist on our hands. Although some­thing tells me Ava is des­tined for a more glit­ter­ing future. “Do you say ‘glahhss’ or ‘glass’? ‘Tom­ah­hto’ or ‘tomato’?” Very funny. We stopped at a for­lorn lit­tle petrol sta­tion with a leaky broken-down ice cream freezer, so the girls had to aban­don their plans for ice cream and have choco­late bars instead. Plus horsey mag­a­zines, so that all the con­ver­sa­tion before they went to sleep was read­ing aloud from pony clas­si­fieds. “Oh here’s one, Avery, that you could have. ‘Fine scopey jumper, 13.4 hands, a lovely lit­tle chest­nut mare with 40 rosettes.’ And only 5500 pounds!” Quite the per­fect day.

Sat­ur­day saw us at the lus­cious break­fast pro­vided by the hotel: a cold buf­fet with many cere­als, pas­tries and fruits, includ­ing a really good apri­cot stewed in cin­na­mon and honey. Then I had boiled eggs and toast sol­diers, as did Ava, but she imme­di­ately objected, with a true Eng­lish girl’s speci­ficity, to the width of the sol­diers. “They are too big to get in the egg top!” And of course she was right, plus the bread was very fancy-dancy whole-grain, and I’m sure the proper deal is nice white toast­ing bread from Warburton’s. John had the Full Eng­lish com­plete with black pud­ding, roasted toma­toes, fried eggs, sausage and incred­i­bly fla­vor­ful Eng­lish rash­ers of bacon. Avery con­tented her­self with mas­sive num­bers of pains au choco­lat, and then we ran out into the coun­try­side for the long refresh­ing walk to Lower Slaugh­ter. Because nat­u­rally Lords of the Manor is in… Upper Slaugh­ter. This walk is one of my favorite in the world, pass­ing as it does through sev­eral sheep fields and afford­ing many oppor­tu­ni­ties to chase them. Well, not chase of course because that would be scary and cruel to the sheep. No, we just… pur­sue them dili­gently. But some­one stole a march on us and all the sheep were across an annoy­ing body of water! Ah well, we’ll come back in spring when the lambs are out. Much more trusting.

We passed through all the oblig­a­tory kiss­ing gates, where the per­son passes through and has to offer a good-luck kiss to the one com­ing after. There was much strate­giz­ing about who went in what order to get the desired kisses. On the way we stopped at the Old Mill Museum and Shop and invested in sev­eral 50 pence bags of “duck feed,” and thereby chanced on the sin­gle most sat­is­fy­ing bit of the girls’ entire week­end! Take them to a four-star coun­try house hotel with gourmet food, decked out in French fin­ery, and what do they like best? Yep, a 50-pence bag of cracked corn. They just kept buy­ing more and more, and feed­ing the lit­tle beasts right out of their hands, on the banks of the low beau­ti­ful River Eye that winds through Lower Slaugh­ter. It has been named many times as “The Best Con­served Eng­lish Vil­lage,” and it’s true. Per­fec­tion every­where in the win­dow boxes, front gar­dens, thatched roofs. They even lay on the occa­sional horse­back rider who comes clip-clopping down the street, splashes into the river, and comes out on the other side, send­ing up sparkling droplets into the air. Weep­ing wil­lows line the river which is spanned by sev­eral pic­turesque old foot­bridges, one of which the girls sat on to throw their duck feed. Pretty adorable. “Here’s one hun­gry lit­tle adorable baby, Avery!” “Oh, Ava, this lit­tle white one misses you! Come back!”

Off finally to get in the car and go to their horse­back rid­ing les­son! On the way we stopped to try to have lunch at the Mount Inn, high above dar­ling lit­tle Stan­way, another per­fect vil­lage. But no sooner had John dropped us off and dri­ven away to get cash, than it turned out first there was no fish and chips, and sec­ondly, any­thing we ordered would take 40 min­utes. Grrr. Avery took a spill on the lawn and bruised her coc­cyx, a word that actu­ally made her feel bet­ter. Nat­u­rally the child can ride enor­mous horses over huge jumps, but flat on the ground she gets injured. John picked us up and took us to Jill Carenza’s sta­ble for their les­son and frab­jous day! there was time for a ham and cheese toastie in the barn’s lit­tle cafe. Bliss. Avery got on a nice gray pony called But­tons, and Ava on Blue, and they were off. A good les­son, under at first cloudy then grad­u­ally clear­ing skies. Lots of high jumps! In fact her high­est ever, we think, 30 inches. Quite high enough, thank you.

Back to Lords of the Manor for high tea, a rit­ual when we stay there and even when we’re just pass­ing through. Eclairs, meringues, fruit cake, short­bread, pound cake, and of course scones with clot­ted cream and straw­berry jam. “Kris­ten,” Ava asked earnestly, “Do you say ‘scone,’ or ‘scawn’?” “I have to say I say ‘scawn,’ how about you?” I replied. “Oh def­i­nitely ‘scawn.’ How about ‘the sun shone,’ or ‘the sun shawn’?” “Shawn,” we agreed. The beauty of Eng­lish books on tape: thank good­ness I got it right for Ava!

Well, I am starv­ing so I am going to go make some tuna salad with chick peas and lemon zest, and a side of oven-roasted beets with bal­samic vine­gar. Want to join me?

Well. Remem­ber how I was going on and on about how good my French was? How proud I was to be able to get along with­out any­one try­ing to speak Eng­lish to me, how cool it was to get new shoes for Avery entirely in French? Even prouder was I to wan­der into a French cook­book store, the Librairie Gour­mande and express my desire for a cook­book that was a sort of mem­oire, a cook­ery writer’s rem­i­nis­cences, a sort of per­sonal his­tory of food. Just like, in fact, the sort of cook­book I am cur­rently try­ing to write. As much per­sonal mem­o­ries as recipes. You know the kind of thing. Oh boy did I ever pat myself on the back when the nice pro­pri­etress put her head on one side like a lit­tle French spar­row, lead me to a shelf, and handed me exactly, pre­cise­ment what I was look­ing for. “A la table d’un ecrivain: petit traite romanesque de cui­sine,” by Marie Rouanet. Trans­lated: “From the table of a writer: a lit­tle romanesque trea­tise on cui­sine.” Isn’t that exactly what I was look­ing for?

It’s much too hard.

I haven’t worked this hard since 1992. I have enlevee my mas­sive Cassell’s French Dic­tio­nary from a high, high shelf and I am madly sift­ing through try­ing to make head or tail of what this nice lady is say­ing to me. It is absolutely won­der­ful, though, when I man­age to fig­ure out a para­graph. Eng­lish is so lit­eral! At least the Eng­lish I read, and speak, and write. I don’t have a poetic bone in my body. But I had for­got­ten that French is almost entirely (when spo­ken by French peo­ple) metaphor­i­cal, and absolutely must mean sev­eral things, pos­si­bly con­tra­dic­tory, at once. Take even the word cui­sine itself. To start with, it is both a noun and a con­ju­gated verb, and even more than one of each! A cui­sine is lit­er­ally a kitchen, the room in your house, but it’s also a cer­tain type of cook­ing, as in “French cui­sine.” And the verb is much more expres­sive than just “to cook.” The bor­ing verb for that is “cuire,” which is sort of like “to make cooked,” like a bald instruc­tion to “make not raw any­more.” Cuisiner is poetry, it is to cre­ate, to trans­form, to ren­der some­thing not just “not raw,” but lov­ingly lifted up and served. It’s just a won­der­ful word.

“That cui­sine might be love itself and only inter­est­ing when it is refined love, that notion of ‘tell me how you eat, how you cook, and I will tell you how you love,’ seems to me to be sim­ple evi­dence; I read the proof of it in the pages of my cook­books, those great books with their pages gnawed, dog-eared, stained with fat or sugar, at times torn out but minutely saved, com­pan­ions of the art of cook­ing. In them one finds every­thing. They are swollen over the course of the years with recipes clipped from mag­a­zines, or copied out by hand, or noted down as dic­tated by a friend… And the vocab­u­lary in these books is stun­ningly lover-like. There is no ques­tion but to sim­mer, to flame, to truss, to serve, to sing, to pare, to let rest, to burst, to stuff, to dress, to blanche, to lay out, to knead, to seize, to pluck, to mix. These are the words of pas­sion, right up to that muslin bag for the bou­quet garni, light as a mar­riage veil, fra­grant and lined with white cotton.”

Well, that’s just lovely! But it took me nearly half an hour to fig­ure out what the hell she was say­ing. I won­der if there would be an Eng­lish or Amer­i­can mar­ket for Rouanet’s books, and if so, if I could get the job of trans­lat­ing them? Who am I kid­ding, I’d be on my death bed before I got to Chap­ter Four. Ah, well, I can dream. But truly, every­thing she says rings true to me. I do think of every­thing I cook being a sort of offer­ing. I know that sounds ridicu­lous, but it makes the annoy­ing bits worth­while; if as you scrub out the skil­let from your tomato sauce you can imag­ine the moment when your beloved fam­ily will tuck into their lasagne, com­ing home to din­ner after storm and peril in the busi­ness world and the rid­ing sta­ble, it makes those dish­pan hands just a lit­tle more accept­able. I felt so good when the home­made chicken soup I made for my friend Jill was deemed to be “so ter­ri­bly ter­ri­bly wel­come, and so good.” It’s enor­mously impor­tant, I think, to run the risk of being thought awfully pre­sump­tu­ous, to turn up with a con­tainer of unasked-for food, feel­ing slightly shy and silly, in order to have it com­fort a new mother in between feed­ings, in the mid­dle of night when she’s all by her­self and feel­ing pos­si­bly slightly pan­icked and neglected.

So I’m going to try to wade through these two books I bought, dic­tio­nary at the ready, and if I come upon any more gems, I’ll pass them along. In the mean­time, I’ll con­tinue to taste-test among the seem­ingly end­less vari­eties of tiny toma­toes at Marks and Spencer, and force my child to eat “just one more bite” of pear to see if she prefers Com­merce to Red William, and con­vince our­selves that guinea fowl tastes any dif­fer­ent from your run-of-the-mill chicken. And there’s always a skil­let wait­ing to be scrubbed.

Peo­ple always say, “It must be so won­der­ful to live in Lon­don, all those muse­ums [or gal­leries, or restau­rants, or the­atres, or fancy shops].” All those won­der­ful what­ev­ers that we never go to, use, eat at, do or buy! We live as if we were in South­bury, Con­necti­cut, most of the time. That is, eat­ing at home, wear­ing the same old clothes, watch­ing “All Crea­tures Great and Small” or arcane BBC pro­grammes about word origins.

But this week: we went to the National Por­trait Gallery! Again, you might ask? Well, we didn’t want to do any­thing TOO rad­i­cal. So yes, at Avery’s request we went back to the Tudor Por­trait Gal­leries and she looked and looked, and copied her favorite Eliz­a­beth I por­trait, and mused on hav­ing the same name as her mid­dle name, only spelt dif­fer­ently. What a coin­ci­dence. Who could deny any­thing to a lit­tle face like this? She has the absolute longest atten­tion span of any child (or even adult) I have ever known! We sat in the one gallery for nearly an hour.

We actu­ally did some­thing new, as well: lunch at the Crypt, a lit­tle cafe I remem­ber from long ago, under the church of St Mar­tin in the Fields, where “Sir Neville Mar­riner” used to con­duct, I remem­ber from National Pub­lic Radio. Can that be right? Could there have been some­one called Sir Neville Mar­riner? It’s quite odd, in any case, to walk along in the cafe­te­ria line car­ry­ing your tray, get­ting a nice plate of tuna may­on­naise in an avo­cado half, and be step­ping on grave­stones all the time.

Well, we have not been idle since our return from Paris. Avery has spent the bet­ter part of every after­noon at Pony Club, at Ross Nye Sta­bles. She, Ava and Anna have joined with what­ever other sta­ble gulls are avail­able and have rid­den, cleaned tack, mucked out stalls, fluffed hay and gen­er­ally made them­selves use­ful in the way of small slaves. And then there are the post-Club play­dates, and the post-playdate sleep­overs. So all in all, John (who found a week of leisure to his lik­ing and so took another!) and I have been tool­ing around town, run­ning errands, fer­ry­ing chil­dren to and fro, and gen­er­ally hav­ing fun in a leisurely sort of way. We would rec­om­mend to you a new British film called “The His­tory Boys,” by Alan Ben­nett, directed by the bril­liant Nicholas Hyt­ner, cre­ative Direc­tor of the National The­atre where he, SIGH, directed my crush actor Matthew Mac­fadyen and his idol Michael Gam­bon in “Henry V,” just a few unfe­lic­i­tous months before my arrival on these shores.

First “The His­tory Boys” began as a won­der­ful book, then a huge suc­cess in London’s West End and sub­se­quently a huger hit on Broad­way, it has been made into a film. The story fol­lows the lives of a num­ber of awk­ward but quirk­ily intel­li­gent boys try­ing against all odds to get into Oxford Uni­ver­sity, with no panache, no charm, no pol­ish, but an incred­i­ble grasp of his­tory. Now, you ask, could there be a more British sort of project? This film clearly comes out of the same cul­ture that spawned the won­der­ful tele­vi­sion pro­gramme “QI” which you sim­ply must see if it plays on BBC Amer­ica. Here’s what the offi­cial web­site says about “QI”:

Quite Inter­est­ing — or ‘QI’ to its friends — could loosely be described as a com­edy panel quiz. How­ever, none of the stel­lar line-up of come­di­ans is expected to be able to answer any ques­tions, and if any­one ends up with a pos­i­tive score, they can be very happy with their per­for­mance. Points are awarded for being inter­est­ing or funny (and, very occa­sion­ally, right) but points are deducted for answers which merely repeat com­mon mis­con­cep­tions and urban myth. (Alan Davies has turned this aspect of the game into some­what of an art­form.) It’s okay to be wrong, but don’t be obvi­ously, bor­ingly wrong. In this way, QI tries to rid the world of the flot­sam of non­sense and old wives’ tales that can build up in your mind. QI not only makes us look more closely at things, it encour­ages us to ques­tion all the received wis­dom we have car­ried with us since child­hood. Think of the pro­gram as a humor­ous cra­nial de-scaler.

It’s so much fun, in the way that the crazy “Balder­dash and Pif­fle” was last year (haven’t seen if there’s a new series this sea­son). British tele­vi­sion is per­fect if you like to watch peo­ple exer­cise wits much sharper than your own. The humor is just what the doc­tor ordered for the increas­ingly fast-moving, mind-bendingly empty cul­tural world we live in. OK, one giant step off soapbox.

Any­way, we really enjoyed “The His­tory Boys.” There are some won­der­ful comedic scenes in school­boy French, some gor­geous scenic shots of Oxford both inte­rior and exte­rior. In my new screen­writ­ing mode, it was inter­est­ing to see what is essen­tially an ensemble-cast film, and to try to decode who was even slightly the main char­ac­ter, what counted as plot and sub­plot. I’m about to watch “A Cock and Bull Story,” which I think will be more of the same. As Abra­ham Lin­coln allegedly said, “It’s the kind of thing you’ll like if you like that kind of thing,” an expres­sion that for some rea­son has always delighted Avery.

We ended up after the film at the St. Christopher’s Place out­post of Carluccio’s, a small chain of restaurant/deli/larder-ish shops that can be counted on for excel­lent house­made moz­zarella and pesto, if you defy my instruc­tions to make your own. I had a pretty good sage and spinach ravi­oli, but John had the real deal: pump­kin risotto. It didn’t taste par­tic­u­larly like pump­kin, which to my gen­er­ally anti-squash mind­set is a good thing, but it was a beau­ti­ful color and topped with a gen­er­ous spoon­ful of sauteed rose­mary and gar­lic. On a cold night, wrapped up in my husband’s enor­mous Shet­land sweater, it was a great dish for the out­door table.

Fri­day we spent the morn­ing with Keechie at the vet. She’s really off her rocker, so along we went with her in the soft-sided kitty prison slung over my shoul­der so I could look in on her, pupils enor­mously dilated with fear, poor dear. I mean, the cat’s afraid of the sound of the wash­ing machine door shut­ting, so you can imag­ine the effect that Lon­don traf­fic and con­struc­tion sites had on her. Actu­ally, she’s so insane that the stress lev­els were about the same with both expe­ri­ences. She’s now on Val­ium. Seri­ously. The vet explained quite solemnly that tor­toise­shell cats are that sen­si­tive, in pro­por­tion to the bright col­ors of their fur (I’m not mak­ing this up) and that at least she wasn’t feral. Well, OK, that seems like an extreme ver­sion of look­ing on the bright side, but what­ever. So after two attempts to stuff the pills down her throat by brute force, I have resorted to crush­ing them up and offer­ing them to her in a spoon­ful of pot­ted chicken. Yes, in Eng­land there is such a thing as pot­ted chicken, and let me tell you it makes her REAL pop­u­lar with her sib­lings. They’re all now try­ing to look anx­ious so as to get in on the goodies.

My reward was to have tea with my friend Twiggy. Now, when I first met Twiggy she was intro­duced to me as Trupti, and we had our day at Wim­ble­don together. Her hus­band Ed and John work together at Reuters, and so what started out as a sort of busi­ness day out became the start of an email friend­ship between us, and sev­eral scotched attempts to get together in per­son. We finally achieved it, at a truly splen­did place called The Wolse­ley. I got dressed up in my new Paris out­fit and cute knee-length high-heeled boots and was dri­ven in style by John, tak­ing Avery and Anna ice-skating (I know, he’s a saint). I was a bit early and so got to sit in the cen­tre of the gor­geous room, ceil­ing tow­er­ing over me, carved swirling wrought-iron scroll­work every­where, peo­ple look­ing like they were famous seated all round. The peo­ple who didn’t look famous looked either like they were about to sign on some dot­ted line or like they were worth a GREAT deal of money and had decided to invite three of their most beau­ti­ful friends out to lunch. Rachel Hunter was there! And a shaved-head Ralph Fiennes, which unfor­tu­nate hairdo choice took away some of the fun of see­ing this erst­while crush of mine. Note to Matthew: don’t do it.

Twiggy arrived shortly and we ordered full-on after­noon tea. I have to go back some­time, how­ever, when I don’t have to eat any­thing sweet, because the savory menu looked fan­tas­tic: steak tartare (bet I could learn some­thing there), rack of lamb, all the usual sus­pects. But our tea was lovely: fresh mint-leaf tea served in lit­tle fil­i­greed sil­ver and glass cups, per­fect sand­wiches of the usual vari­ety (ham and cheese, egg may­on­naise, cucum­ber), but the added attrac­tion of a finely chopped cel­ery and soft cheese on a golden sundried-tomato bread. Then of course scones and Devon­shire cream and straw­berry jam (our waiter got very con­cerned that our scones had cooled as we chat­ted, so he marched them away and came back with fresh). Amaz­ing. And Twiggy made a spe­cial request for her favorite cock­tail, served to her once in Glouces­ter­shire and never forgotten:

The Cow­ley Cooler

1 shot Amaretto
equal parts fresh orange juice and cran­berry juice
a gen­er­ous squeeze of lime juice

Serve over lots of ice in a tall glass, and gar­nish with a twist of lime peel.

It was so refresh­ing, and this from a girl who was taught nearly 25 years ago that a real drink con­sists of only two ingre­di­ents, and one of them is ice. We chat­ted and chat­ted, cov­er­ing her tra­vails with her new house, located under Tower Bridge, my two writ­ing classes, her plans for Diwali, the Hindu Fes­ti­val of Lights and New Year, to be cel­e­brated this week­end. “It’s so nice in this day and age to have a fes­ti­val, and in fact a reli­gion, that isn’t founded on con­quer­ing any­one or killing any­one or sac­ri­fic­ing or pun­ish­ing any­one,” she said earnestly. “It’s all just a cel­e­bra­tion.” I can sec­ond that. She is such a calm, peace­ful per­son obvi­ously very com­fort­able with her­self and her life, that is was a plea­sure to sit in her com­pany and talk over things hap­pen­ing in our lives and our fam­i­lies. Her soap box? Fresh juic­ing. I can tell I’m ripe for the pick­ing on this sub­ject, because while I get fully half my calo­ries per day in one kind of juice or another, she has con­vinced me that all the nutri­ents flee the liq­uid within three min­utes of being juiced. So I’m hot on the trail. As is usual with my food obses­sions, while they don’t always last long, in the mean­time my fam­ily will be sub­jected doubt­less to every known sub­stance in liq­uid form. I’ll try to stick to non-meat prod­ucts, for their sake. Duck juice? I don’t think so.

Among Twiggy’s other con­ta­gious enthu­si­asms (she’s that sort of per­son, in her tiny doll-like beauty) is the pho­tog­ra­phy of Yann-Arthus Bertrand. Not being much of a pho­tog­ra­phy fan, this man’s amaz­ing work had com­pletely passed me by, and I’m not still sure if I would ever buy a piece, but I can see the appeal: he pho­tographs the earth from the air. Both nat­ural sites and cities come under the lens. I’ve posted this, one of his best-known images, of a heart-shaped crop occur­ring in nature. Quite inter­est­ing, and worth know­ing more about, clearly.

I floated home past the Ritz, through Berke­ley Square crammed with home-going busines peo­ple glued to their mobile phones, and felt very very lucky to have a friend as refresh­ing as Twiggy, not to men­tion cool enough to get the best table at the Wolse­ley. At home it tran­spired that Avery had achieved her Level 7 Skat­ing Badge! It’s amaz­ing what just a few pri­vate lessons with Nicky have done for her skills. Good on you, Avery. So I dili­gently sewed it to her PE bag which is now begin­ning to look quite like an embroi­dery project. Anna had come home with her to spend the night and although I was full of tea sand­wiches and amaretto I nev­er­the­less man­aged to pro­duce food for the hungry.

Yes­ter­day found me at my “cre­at­ing fic­tion” class, shak­ing in my boots and read­ing aloud. I’m happy to say it went well! I could have writ­ten the responses myself, because I knew it already and they all said essen­tially the same thing: enter­tain­ing, but where’s the plot? I have a plot, actu­ally, but every­one was unan­i­mous in say­ing that it needs to rear its ugly head much sooner, because while they were all lulled hap­pily into lis­ten­ing to all my dia­logue and descrip­tions of places, peo­ple and things, at some point their protest­ing intel­li­gence said, “Wait. Where’s the plot?” So I can take that on board and improve it. What a relief to have it over! Today is a nasty, rainy day, which didn’t stop me from hound­ing Avery and John into tak­ing me to the farmer’s mar­ket. I came home with ridicu­lously sweet and juicy British cherry toma­toes, gor­geous beet­root, a top­side beef roast for tonight, a new kind of apple juice called “Worces­ter and Bram­ley”, some unusu­ally dark and dense lit­tle cucum­bers, and a crusty cia­batta. Once at home I shook myself like a dog and made:

Hum­mous
(serves four as an appe­tizer with toasted bread and crudites)

1 410-gram [soup size] can chick peas (also known as gar­banzo beans)
1/2 cup tahini (sesame paste, in for­eign or Mid­dle East­ern sec­tion of shops)
3 whole cloves gar­lic
juice of 1 lemon
salt to taste
1 cup olive oil, maybe more

Sim­ply put all this in the Cuisi­nart and turn it on, puls­ing occa­sion­ally and scrap­ing the chick peas away from the sides. Then, if you want to, pour some more olive oil on the top and leave it. The fla­vors will improve. Go blog or give your cat a Val­ium or fold laun­dry. But you may not be able to resist dip­ping in right away. Can you imag­ine some­thing so good for you could be so cheap and so quick to make? If you like it thick, use less olive oil, if you like it run­nier, add more. Could it be easier?

Before I go watch my film, I have to tell you what we over­heard in the restau­rant at din­ner last night, although to pre­serve what­ever clien­tele the place has, I will with­hold its name. Not good Indian food. Any­way, this fel­low over my shoul­der was bemoan­ing the char­ac­ter of the French peo­ple, I know not why, and this is what he said: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Frogs: they don’t even have a proper word for ‘entre­pre­neur.’” Now THAT man will not be appear­ing on “QI” any time soon.

OK, this is ridicu­lous. I’m get­ting my knick­ers all in a twist over my writ­ing class today. “Cre­at­ing Fic­tion,” it’s called. Why does that carry with it the knell of doom? I don’t have any trou­ble “Cre­at­ing Non­fic­tion.” I have slaved for WEEKS on these pre­cious 2500 words that I’m meant to be read­ing aloud in three hours to twenty hyper­crit­i­cal class­mates. Well, guess how long yesterday’s post was to this dar­ling blog? 2250 words. And read­ers, I assure you I did not slave over it. What makes fic­tion so much harder? I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sun­day night in Paris found us all com­pletely exhausted! Sarah’s happy hour rest­ing turned out to be an Hour From Hell lis­ten­ing to the girls play their annoy­ing Nin­ten­dog, with what­ever lit­tle beeps and blips and lit­tle bark­ing sounds accom­pany it, so she had been rode hard and put away wet by the time we met up and was sorely in need of a demi-bouteille de vin rouge. I laid our case before the concierge. We wanted a din­ner out that was charm­ing, authen­tic, kid-friendly and close by. “But of course,” he purred, “the Brasserie Balzar is what you want. Just around the cor­ner,” and he gave us tres short direc­tions to this lit­tle spot. Sarah and I looked at the girls, slumped in their chairs in the lobby, and looked at each other. “Let’s just see for our­selves how close it is, and come right back,” she said, so we exhorted the girls to stay put and ran out. Sure enough, it was lit­er­ally around the cor­ner, and we stopped to study the menu. A man appeared at my shoul­der. He looked both of us up and down and then said, in French, “Would you like to come in and have a drink with me?” I almost, but not quite, burst out laugh­ing. “Non merci,” I said, and Sarah sur­faced. “What was that about?” “We just got propo­si­tioned,” I said. We looked at each other. Finally Sarah said, “Let’s tell him we changed our minds, and we’ll just run get our chil­dren and be with him in two sec­onds. That’ll teach him.”

Ten min­utes later we were hap­pily set­tled at a typ­i­cal French din­ner table cov­ered with heavy white linen, not so hap­pily sur­rounded by smok­ing din­ers, the only com­plaint we could make about the dar­ling restau­rant. I did not real­ize that the typ­i­cal French brasserie, some­where in between a fancy restau­rant and a bistro, was an endan­gered species. Not that it’s going to dis­ap­pear, but that it’s going to be taken over by a chain of big­ger restau­rants and slowly go in the direc­tion the entire world seems to be going: big­ger and all alike. So we were happy that even though Balzar had in fact become part of a big­ger restau­rant group called Flo, it retained all the beauty, exper­tise and charm of its sistren through­out the city. Wait­ers bal­anc­ing untold lay­ers of plates climb­ing up their arms, their faces sport­ing han­dle­bar mous­taches, lots of pot­ted palms and foxy mir­rors tilted from the wall to afford din­ers the best pos­si­ble view of every­one com­ing and going, a swing­ing kitchen door that threat­ened to top­ple every waiter who came in or out but never did. And inter­est­ing din­ers. A very ele­gant sin­gle lady next to us with her half-bottle of Cotes du Rhone, a nice gay Amer­i­can cou­ple on the other side speak­ing flu­ent French with the waiter, lots of Frenchy peo­ple smok­ing like chim­neys. Ours were the only chil­dren and they were prop­erly subdued.

Because we don’t get it to eat it at home any­more (unless cuteness-protesting Avery is away), I ordered lamb. Gor­geous thin salty chops, not too Frenched, so there was still a bit of gnaw­able crispy fat left on the bones, for me and for Eve, while Avery had one more coeur de rum­steck, and we all had pommes de terre purees; why are they so much yum­mier than ordi­nary mashed pota­toes? Again, is it just atmos­phere? But the true star of the evening was Sarah’s steak tartare. For some rea­son I am always a sucker for raw what­ever: I love the Korean dish of ground raw beef with a gar­nish of pear and mush­room slices and a quail’s egg bro­ken deli­ciously over the top, or sashimi of tuna with a nice spicy dress­ing on a bed of greens. This was an indis­puted mas­ter­piece of fresh­ness, a per­fect bal­ance of fla­vors, and most mys­te­ri­ously, the supreme tex­ture of hand-chopped meat. I have to admit that I came home and tried mak­ing it the other night, and while it was fine, good qual­ity, looked nice, it was noth­ing com­pared to the Brasserie Balzar. We iden­ti­fied the usual ingre­di­ents: capers, scal­lions, tabasco, all per­fectly mixed with the chopped filet mignon. Sim­ply sub­lime. Cold, cold, cold of course, on a chilled plate. It was a large por­tion, so my friend­ship with Sarah was not com­pro­mised by my fork’s lit­tle voy­ages to her plate. Oh la la.

Back to the hotel where we hung around the lobby try­ing to decide what to do the next day, ask­ing the advice of the two concierges where we could pos­si­bly find shoes for Avery, whose feet had mys­te­ri­ously grown out of her shoes over the course of the day. As we dick­ered, the girls played lit­tle games with the tiny col­ored lights adorn­ing the floor of the lobby. One mys­te­ri­ously turned from red to green to off with unpre­dictable fre­quency, caus­ing much to-do for our detail-oriented chil­dren. Finally they decided they had to alert the concierge to this flaw in his oth­er­wise perfectly-oiled machine of a hotel. Now, Avery, while not pos­sessed of what I would call even a min­i­mal grasp of the French lan­guage, has nonethe­less a rock-solid mem­ory. So it was but the work of a moment to teach her to say “Pardonnez-moi, mon­sieur, mais quelques uns de vos lumieres ne marchent pas,” mean­ing, “I’m sorry, sir, but some of your lights are not work­ing.” And because she is a per­fect mimic, her accent was spot on. He looked down gravely at her and said, “That is to give you some­thing to think about, lit­tle one.”

Another per­fectly cozy night in our lit­tle beds, except for one small thing: we woke up with mos­quito bites on our hands and faces! I think they came from the lovely foun­tains out­side the hotel, which must get switched off dur­ing the night and pro­vide a per­fect bed for bugs. Ah well. We met up with Eve and Sarah, they headed to the post office for post­card stamps, and I checked out of the hotel. Thence to the Ile St. Louis, a part of Paris I had never vis­ited dur­ing my times there, since it con­tained no art his­tory libraries. Isn’t that pathetic? But Sarah, being an adult with­out a mis­sion except hav­ing fun, had tracked down this beau­ti­ful area and in par­tic­u­lar the rue Saint-Louis-en-Ile, a gor­geous tiny road lined on both sides with pur­vey­ors of fine food prod­ucts. So we ambled up the street, tak­ing in olive stores, ice cream stores, a choco­late store called Cacao et Choco­lat where we came away with gor­geous choco­late pil­lows made with sea salt, so not too sweet for me. And a beau­ti­ful epicerie, or spice shop, called oddly enough l’Epicerie where I bought some fish spices for my mother in law, some raspberry-flavoured sugar for Avery’s break­fast toast, and for me, because I couldn’t resist the dar­ling lit­tle cans, a con­tainer of mousse d’homard which will either be deli­cious because it’s lob­ster or degoulasse because it’s all been mashed up and put into a tiny tin.

Finally, how­ever, it was time for Eve and Sarah to head off to the air­port, so we parted sadly out­side Notre Dame with many promises to meet up in Lon­don soon. Eve and Avery have made fast friends, so I don’t think there will be any prob­lem con­vinc­ing them to travel wher­ever it takes, to have another adven­ture. The per­fect trav­el­ing companions!

To dis­tract our­selves from both our sad­ness at part­ing from them and Avery’s itchy mos­quito bites, we dipped into Notre Dame, just for a glimpse of the impos­ing facade, a nice short lec­ture on one of my favorite archi­tec­tural ele­ments, the “fly­ing but­tress,” and a look at the gor­geous stained glass inside. We lit a can­dle to what­ever cause Avery had in mind (prob­a­bly some­thing to do with a French pony), and ducked back out again. Not exactly the semester-long lec­ture course on the church that I remem­ber sit­ting through in grad­u­ate school, but hey, she’s ten years old. Time enough to bore her to death in future years. It was time to SHOP. We jumped in a taxi and took the most scenic route you can imag­ine, along the rue du Riv­oli, past the Opera House, to the Galeries Lafayette, a ridicu­lously enor­mous and elab­o­rate depart­ment store. I think it’s sort of the Saks, or the Har­rods, of Paris. It reminds me of the huge depart­ment store GUM in Moscow, where were used to wan­der around in 1991, still sport­ing its Art Nou­veau archi­tec­tural glory, but empty of any­thing to sell. Well, Galeries Lafayettes has plenty to sell! Just ridicu­lous. How­ever, we made a bee­line for the children’s shoe depart­ment and, an hour or so later, emerged with a dar­ling pair of bal­le­rina slip­pers and a cute pair of knee-length boots. It turns out to be sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to explain “nar­row feet” in French, as well as “no, no laces please, nor Vel­cro,” but we pulled it off. It was actu­ally a lot of fun to accom­plish, and I came away with a whole new set of vocab­u­lary words as well as a renewed respect for the sub­junc­tive and the con­di­tional and other gram­mat­i­cal conun­dra that I had for­got­ten since about 1986.

We tried and tried to find some­thing for me, but I get very eas­ily flum­moxed and feel­ing all Social­ist when con­fronted with a great deal of expen­sive mer­chan­dise. We had almost given up when the agnes b shop pre­sented itself, and no mat­ter that I pass the shop here in Lon­don on the way home from Avery’s school every sin­gle day and have never gone in: no, this time I found the per­fect, per­fect lit­tle short brown skirt, and a cardi­gan with lit­tle knit­ted thingys that fit over my thumb! I changed into them and came out feel­ing quite French. We smiled at each other in mutual sat­is­fac­tion, and headed out, back down the rue du Riv­oli, to Brentano’s, the great French-English book­store where I spent a lot of time my last trip around Paris. “Oh my good­ness, the last book in the “Series of Unfor­tu­nate Events” is out!” Avery gasped. Nat­u­rally, we would buy this in Paris. We col­lapsed at a side­walk cafe to have some lunch and I cru­elly did not allow Avery to read, oth­er­wise she would run out of books for the train ride home. We shared an incred­i­ble plat­ter of smoked salmon and foie gras, with per­fect toast, and I felt very sad that I was leav­ing a city where the most ordi­nary of food estab­lish­ments offers up some­thing so supe­rior to any­thing either Lon­don or New York can aspire to. How is that?

Back to say good­bye to the hotel and col­lect our incred­i­bly enlarged bag­gage, in a taxi ride that took us down the Quai de la Megis­serie, pos­si­bly the strangest street I have ever seen. Why would one par­tic­u­lar street con­tain all the city’s col­lec­tion of both gar­den cen­ters and pet shops? Hon­estly, one after another, jar­dinieres and mag­a­sins aux ani­maux, with cages full of par­rots adorn­ing the side­walk in front of one shop, and then next door to it a mot­ley assort­ment of gar­den gnomes. I’m none the wiser for look­ing up “megis­serie” in the dic­tio­nary and find­ing that it means “taw­ing, or leather-dressing.” Hmmm. Of course, New York has its flower dis­trict, and Lon­don has its book­shop dis­trict, but pets and plants together? Just another indi­ca­tion of how Paris doggedly main­tains its idio­syn­cra­cies. I like that.

And off we were to the train sta­tion, and through immi­gra­tion. The Eng­lish pass­port chap gave us the usual skep­ti­cal “why do you have two dif­fer­ent last names” scrutiny, asked what my hus­band did in Lon­don. “He works for Reuters Amer­ica,” I said patiently. “And you believe him? Would you trust him if he told you he worked for Reuters Uzbek­istan?” he asked. “I’m not a very trust­ing per­son,” I told him, and for what­ever rea­son, it worked. We got in the train, stowed away our belong­ings, and set­tled down for a return to… nor­mal life. But I must admit, nor­mal life isn’t too dread­ful when it means being met at the train sta­tion in Lon­don by John in our dar­ling Mini Cooper, and being dri­ven home in the nice foggy dusk past the Houses of Par­lia­ment, Big Ben, Buck­ing­ham Palace, Hyde Park. Not too dread­ful at all.

Our sec­ond day in Paris dawned fair and per­fect, with a sharp breeze and intense blue skies. After break­fast we were all agreed that a visit to Sarah’s and my old haunt, the Musee Rodin, was in order. We walked down a beau­ti­ful lit­tle street that I’d like to visit again when the shops are open, the rue de Four, lined with gor­geous mag­a­sins whose win­dows were full of dar­ling lit­tle skirts and shorts. The new thing this fall seems to be tiny lit­tle cuffed wool shorts, which I would love to have. We arrived at the Musee Rodin to find, to our amaze­ment, not just a lovely open gar­den through which to walk to get to the front entrance, but an entirely new mar­ble build­ing, pro­vided, the wall lit­er­a­ture assured us solemnly, by Sam­sung, com­plete with a video dis­play and a SHOP. Now, in MY day, the Rodin Museum did not take itself so seri­ously. I am quite sure there was no shop. Cer­tainly no enor­mous sets of glass floor-to-ceiling doors marked “tirer” and “pousser.” Sarah and I gaped in aston­ish­ment at the enor­mous quan­ti­ties of mer­chan­dise. Admit­tedly a lovely book­shop with lots of new books I had not seen or heard of since tak­ing my vow of silence on all things Rodin and Claudel, but also cuf­flinks fea­tur­ing lit­tle sil­ver like­nesses of his water­col­ored Cam­bo­dian dancers, paper­weights, ash­trays, mouse pads, pot hold­ers, t-shirts and even neck­ties fes­tooned with “The Thinker,” “The Kiss” and other iconic imagery. Lit­tle leather cell­phone hold­ers, pen and pen­cil sets, note­books, ear­rings, you name it. At some point it ceased being tacky and was just funny. I bought Avery a lit­tle viewfinder after our visit to the museum, because she did man­age to see every­thing fea­tured in it.

We bought our tick­ets and duly “tirer-ed” the pre­ten­tious entry door, and there we were, look­ing up at the mag­nif­i­cent build­ing where Sarah and I each spent so much time in the early 1990s. I looked up at the tiny win­dow on the upper right of the top floor, remem­ber­ing the hours and days and weeks I spent in the room beyond, the Archives Rodin. The lit­tle wiz­ened man who held court there, with a cig­a­rette in one hand and une verre de vin rouge in the other, giv­ing me chary access to his trea­sures with many exhor­ta­tions to “soyez soigneuse.” We felt quite over­whelmed with nos­tal­gia! How did I have the courage to storm the citadel, a lit­tle 25-year-old nobody?

The girls zoomed around the gar­den, play­ing Avery’s old Tribeca game run­ning up and down wheel­chair access ramps, chant­ing as she did as a two-year-old, “the dog goes up, and the dog goes down,” over and over, to Sarah’s intense ner­vous­ness since last year Eve broke off her front tooth doing just that. They posed as you can see beneath “The Thinker,” and shook their heads over the creepy fig­ures in “The Gates of Hell.” I deliv­ered a lit­tle homily about the mean­ing of the sculp­ture, how it was Rodin’s project from H-E Dou­ble Hockey Sticks because after it was com­mis­sioned and he’d spent half his career work­ing on it, to be the door­way to a new museum in Paris, it was can­celled. “He couldn’t stop work­ing on it, and he put all his frus­tra­tion and con­flict into all these fig­ures,” I explained. “When he died, the man he had instructed to set up a museum here went into his stu­dio and found it all in pieces on the floor, and had to think up as best he could how to put it together. Then it was cast in an edi­tion of mul­ti­ples and sent all over the world. That’s why it’s known as the world’s only sculp­ture of which there are copies, but no orig­i­nal,” I said. The girls ingested this drop of art his­tor­i­cal wis­dom in respect­ful silence (or just bore­dom). “Why is every­body so depressed on this sculp­ture?” Avery asked. “Can’t any­body just be happy?” Eve sighed and said gloomily, “Not in H-E Dou­ble Hockey Sticks, they can’t.” So then they raced around look­ing for a happy sculp­ture, and after a bit we went inside and found Eve’s name­sake, which they liked a lot, and some piles of tiny plas­ter hands which they deemed “freaky.” There was, finally, one “happy” bust, but then it was dis­cov­ered that her eye sock­ets were empty and that was that. “Creepy,” was the ver­dict. But they greatly enjoyed them­selves. I found the lit­tle hid­den door that leads up to the archives and was vis­ited with a very strange sense of the pas­sage of time: the years I spent there as a new­ly­wed, home­sick for my hus­band in Lon­don, work­ing so dili­gently on what would become a 400-ish-page dis­ser­ta­tion, then to be whit­tled down to a 20-ish-page arti­cle in a learned jour­nal, and hun­dreds of hours of lec­tures. And now here I was, one teach­ing career and one gallery later, with one of my best friends, and favorite artists, lead­ing our 10-year-old daugh­ters around. Very odd.

After raid­ing the museum shop, we hopped in the Metro and headed to the Champs-Elysees for our one purely-photo-op-motivated stop. The girls had messy choco­late crepes (Sarah and I bravely resist­ing our urge for a French hot dog, encased as they are in baguettes), and the we started on the marathon walk to the Tui­leries, where they indulged in another time-honored French child’s past­time: they rented lit­tle dilap­i­dated old, old boat mod­els, and sticks, and spent a bliss­ful half hour push­ing them out into the enor­mous foun­tain, rac­ing from one side to the other as the breeze sent the boats on mys­te­ri­ous jour­neys. The nice, dreamy lady who rented the boats to them said, “You must tell the boats what is your heart’s desire, and then the boats will go in search of it, and you must fol­low.” Which was a nice way of explain­ing that the boats would have a path of their own! They had a very good time. Sarah said rue­fully, “You know, we’ll show them the Rodin Museum, and the Lou­vre, and all that, and THIS is what they will remem­ber from their first trip to Paris.” Not such a bad thing, that. Sarah and I took the time to chat, and mar­vel at the quirks of fate that have smiled down on the two of us. Not long into our friend­ship, lo these 10 years ago, we dis­cov­ered that we spent the iden­ti­cal two years from 1990–1992 in Lon­don, both of us study­ing in the library of the Vic­to­ria and Albert Museum, both of us liv­ing in South Kens­ing­ton. Now what is the chance that we did not see each other dur­ing those two years, indeed we prob­a­bly shared a tube ride, prob­a­bly sat across from each other at a study table, had a sand­wich next to each other in the museum cafe? And then to meet up years later at the Col­lege Art Asso­ci­a­tion and become such fine friends. Even if Avery and Eve don’t become best chums, to spend their first trip to Paris together will be a nice mem­ory, and it was so sat­is­fy­ing for us.

From there to the Lou­vre, where the girls were deter­mined to see the Mona Lisa, of course. We warned them that they mightn’t be able to get very close, and that it would be smaller than they expected. They were, how­ever, invited by the guard to come right past the bar­rier and really quite close, and Avery whipped out her Rodin Museum note­book and made a lit­tle sketch, then they came back to us. “You know, that’s kind of a dis­ap­point­ment,” Avery said. “I mean, why is it so famous, any­way? Is it really bet­ter than any of these other paint­ings?” Of course the $64,000 art his­tor­i­cal enigma. Sarah and I explained a bit about the chicken-and-egg nature of “great art” and “great artists.” When does the object make the artist famous, and when the other way round?

We emerged from the museum, feel­ing a bit hun­gry and tired, and decided to take the Bato­bus to the hotel neigh­bor­hood and find a snack. As we waited for the boat, how­ever, we got more and more fam­ished. Finally the boat came, we got on, and Eve was sure there was a vend­ing machine, so we weren’t too pan­icked about hav­ing no food with us. Well, there was a vend­ing machine, but it was evilly out of order. And then what was meant to be a 15-minute ride around the Eif­fel Tower and back to Notre Dame, became an hour-long ride with many irri­tat­ingly long stops! Eve had a book, but Avery did not, and she became more and more wilted. Finally Sarah had an inspi­ra­tion: her box of mints! It turns out that if you’re des­per­ate enough, Certs are one of the Four Basic Food Groups. Sarah saves the day!

We finally trouped off the boat and walked toward our hotel, unde­cided as to whether we should eat at the now-awkward hour of 5 p.m., or stick it out till din­ner. Until we came upon the strangest lit­tle side­walk eatery we had ever seen, spe­cial­iz­ing in… falafel, pizza and hot dogs! Yes, there was the hot dog we had resisted five hours before, dis­played before us in all its bizarre glory, in a baguette topped with cheese. We suc­cumbed. “Une verre de the cit­ron pour vous,” the lit­tle pro­pri­etor said in a jolly way, and sure enough, two lit­tle paper cups of lemon tea appeared on the counter. It was strangely wel­come, and we sipped hap­pily as we waited for the odd hot dog to emerge from the panini maker. We divided it into four por­tions and walked along munch­ing. “Now, I con­sider us to be quite the gourmets, as well as the gour­mands,” Sarah said indis­tinctly through a cheesey bite. “Is this really good, or are we just starv­ing to death?” “Well, we are starv­ing to death, true,” I agreed. “But think: it’s a really good qual­ity hot dog, and a Paris baguette, and what tastes to me like really quite good Gruyere cheese,” I diag­nosed. Sarah con­sid­ered. “So what we’re basi­cally eat­ing is a croque mon­sieur with a hot dog instead of ham,” she decided finally. “Exactly,” I said. The girls were giddy with relief at hav­ing some­thing to chew and swal­low, and we were all in quite the best humor pos­si­ble. “Oh, I know where we are,” said Eve. “Look, there’s that Vieux Campeur store, the Old Camper. It’s quite near to the hotel.” Avery paused. “Except, Eve, that there’s another Vieux Camper store, there, on THAT cor­ner as well.” “And look, there’s another halfway down the block,” Sarah pointed out. All in all, we counted eight Vieux Camper shops within two blocks. It turns out there are 19 of them all in all. Tres bizarre.

We finally arrived at our respec­tive hotels and made a plan to meet up in an hour, after we rested a bit. Eve invited Avery to come play with her Nin­ten­dog, so we parted, and I fetched a bucket of ice from the friendly hotel bar­man (I was ridicu­lously pleased when he com­pli­mented my French!) and had a lovely Scotch while speak­ing with John on the phone. “You guys can never leave me!” he wailed. “I am so pathetic when you’re gone! All I do is watch movies.” He was plan­ning to have noo­dles and the home­made pesto I left for him, and was proud to have bought lamb’s let­tuce for a lit­tle salad. Don’t ever buy com­mer­cial pesto, because look how easy it is (and very flex­i­ble, you can always do less or more of any ingre­di­ent accord­ing to your taste):

Fresh Basil Pesto
(makes enough for a sauce for pasta for two)

1 medium bunch of basil leaves (a gen­er­ous hand­ful), stems removed
1/4 cup grated pecorino or parme­san cheese
juice of a lemon
1 clove gar­lic (or more)
1/2 cup pine nuts
olive oil to achieve con­sis­tency you like, per­haps 1/2 cup
sea salt to taste

Place all ingre­di­ents in Cuisi­nart and whiz till liq­uidy (although pine nuts will remain tiny chunks). Taste for salti­ness. If the cheese was not salty you will want to add some. VOILA. You will be amazed at how pretty, and how fresh, this is.

More on our Paris Sun­day evening din­ner later, because it was, as was so much of our trip, a real French expe­ri­ence. A toute a l’heure.

I think I need to describe our trip chrono­log­i­cally. It will give a bet­ter sense of what’s pos­si­ble to do, odd to expe­ri­ence, fun to eat, and easy or dif­fi­cult to get to on any given day in Paris, with two ten-year-old girls. Which I am cer­tain is a man­i­festo for more peo­ple than I might think!

I’m sorry to say that the Eurostar was a com­plete bore. Might as well have been on New Jer­sey tran­sit going from Newark to Philadel­phia, except for the French accents of the chefs de train. I think my pre­con­cep­tion was col­ored by the fact that reportage was done by John, who has always trav­eled some expen­sive and fancy way via busi­ness trips. Alas, we went by sec­ond class. Yawn. Cramped, not par­tic­u­larly com­fort­able. How­ever, the fact remains that an hour and some speed­ing through Eng­lish coun­try­side, 20 min­utes in the dark tun­nel under the Eng­lish chan­nel, and another hour and some speed­ing through French coun­try­side, and you emerged into the Gard du Nord! Such a gor­geous train sta­tion. A brief ker­fuf­fle try­ing to get Euros, real­iz­ing I was trav­el­ing with three bags and allegedly an extra per­son, except that Avery’s arms were com­pletely occu­pied by her doll Holly and so she did not actu­ally serve as a per­son to help carry baggage.

I had for­got­ten how com­pletely… French Paris is! Whereas Lon­don has become a bit too, in my opin­ion, Starbucks-ized and Pret a Manger-ized and any other chain you can imag­ine (the Eng­lish imag­i­na­tion run­ning to the pre­dictable and the fre­quently avail­able, as far as shops go), Paris is res­olutely, tren­chantly, rebel­liously ITSELF. Every­one smokes, there are sev­en­teen cafes on every block, every­thing looks a hun­dred years old and com­pletely solidly… French. And so very, very beau­ti­ful. All the ornate iron­work and stuffed flower boxes, the brass door sur­rounds of all the cafes, the dark red awnings pro­tect­ing the ubiq­ui­tous loung­ing Parisians puff­ing away and sip­ping end­less cups of cof­fee and ver­res de vin rouge, at all times of the day. We jumped in a taxi and sped away to the hotel, the Grand Hotel St. Michel, to meet up with Sarah and Eve. How­ever, we were met by a most gra­cious hotel concierge who has­tened to take our bags and say that he had made une faute, and was actu­ally fully booked for the night, and so was tak­ing us to a sis­ter hotel around the cor­ner. We arrived at the Hotel Select on a dar­ling lit­tle open piazza, the Place de la Sor­bonne, because guess what was across the lit­tle street? The Uni­ver­site de la Sor­bonne, full of sophisticated-looking stu­dents puff­ing away, of course, ele­gant in their com­pletely under­stated French way, com­par­ing notes, exchang­ing books, gen­er­ally look­ing much cooler than their Eng­lish or Amer­i­can com­pa­tri­ots. We checked in to the mod­ern and sleek hotel, my French return­ing in leaps and bounds, and before we knew it there was a knock on our door and there were Sarah and Eve! Much hug­ging and kiss­ing, and we spilled out onto the street to explore.

Avery and Eve lagged behind Sarah and me, and they were clearly get­ting to know each other very quickly. It’s really a case of two girls’ being forced to be friends because their moth­ers are friends. But it did not seem to be any­thing of a hard­ship. Eve is much more the urban-looking child, with jeans and a back­pack, even though she’s spent her entire life in the sub­urbs of Rochester, New York, whereas Avery, born and raised in New York City and now liv­ing in Lon­don, looked like some throw­back to “The Lit­tle Princess,” hav­ing dressed up for her trip to the big Euro­pean city. They chat­tered away and Sarah and I caught up on what’s been hap­pen­ing in our lives, our hus­bands’ activ­i­ties, her art­work, my writ­ing classes, our chil­dren. She had left her son Noah at home with her hus­band Mike, and seemed not at all cer­tain that both of them would be intact when she got back. “He’s already had to raid Eve’s sav­ings to pay the clean­ing lady, so anything’s pos­si­ble,” she said rue­fully. I reported this to John, laugh­ing, and there was a lit­tle silence. “How much do I pay Dor­rie?” he asked anx­iously. Hus­bands left at home are a breed apart.

We stopped for lunch at a lit­tle side­walk place in the rue St. Ger­main and ordered salades nicoises, while the girls had crois­sants stuffed with cheese and smoked salmon. Com­plete heaven. Unfor­tu­nately Avery is now acquainted with a real crois­sant, which will dec­i­mate her opin­ion of the Eng­lish cousin crois­sant with which she’s been con­tent up to now. I remem­ber so clearly com­ing home to Indi­anapo­lis after my bliss­ful sum­mer in Brit­tany, when I was 16, and my father and I scour­ing the so-called bak­eries for crois­sants, much less the pain au choco­lat which I craved. There was no joy. Just think of the French food you can get in Indi­anapo­lis now, I’m sure. Still, noth­ing beats the native baby, and boy did those girls eat. Our sal­ads were very odd: one grated veg­etable was uniden­ti­fi­able by either of us, and we’re nei­ther of us food slouches, so I asked the waiter, straight out of cen­tral cast­ing with a big gray mous­tache and white shirt and tie, and he said, “Celeri,” which is cele­riac to you and me. Most odd. Still, any good in Paris is bet­ter than most food any­where else, so we were quite content.

From there we walked to the Jardins Lux­em­bourg
to find the mar­i­onette show Eve had been keen to see. The park was gor­geous in the Octo­ber late-afternoon sun, and the weather com­pletely per­fect: per­haps 70 degrees and breezy. The trees were just begin­ning to turn and the girls can­tered ahead (Eve being quite a keen horse­woman as well as Avery), toward the bell that a fel­low was ring­ing in front of a tiny lit­tle white clap­board the­atre. Avery said dubi­ously, “If he’s hop­ing to get cus­tomers with that bell, some­one should tell him it’s actu­ally more of a deter­rent.” Truly! We got tick­ets, and sub­mit­ted to a bizarre entry rit­ual where the ticket taker bel­lowed out the num­ber writ­ten on people’s tick­ets, and admit­ted per­haps six peo­ple to the the­atre at a time. We waited anx­iously for “41” to be called out and when it was, entered the the­atre cau­tiously. Never found out what the rig­ma­role was about; they just let us sit any­where. Except that the chil­dren were sent to the first few rows. After a bit, the pup­pet show began, and there fol­lowed the fun­ni­est, strangest hour of the­atre our girls had ever encoun­tered. “Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood”, in FRENCH. Truly silly pup­pets, lots of dash­ing about hit­ting peo­ple over the heads with broom­sticks and a wolf with lots of white teeth and red gums, all in FRENCH. I began to real­ize, as the play went on, that it was run­ning true to the clas­sic pan­tomime form, in French and Eng­lish the­atre. I had won­dered what “panto” was, as I always read about in Hello! mag­a­zine. Actors being inter­viewed about their love affairs with other actors always say­ing, “We met in panto.” Well, I asked in my act­ing class, and it turns out it’s a clas­sic show form with many set char­ac­ters, who given the indi­vid­ual drama play out their parts basi­cally as always the same char­ac­ter. So there is the evil witch, the good witch, the jolly pro­fes­so­r­ial type who saves the day, the good prince and the prince of dark­ness, and the old man played by a woman and the old woman played by a man. Too funny! One chap who appears all the time is “Guig­nol,” and this time he was the sort of deus ex machina who saves Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood from the ter­ri­ble jaws of the wolf in grandmama’s clothing.

So all the French chil­dren knew when a clas­sic ques­tion would be asked of the audi­ence and what to reply. Our chil­dren were com­pletely mys­ti­fied! Not to men­tion that the ques­tions and answers were in FRENCH. At the inter­val when the French chil­dren were griz­zling for sweets from the sweets lady, our girls rushed back to where we were sit­ting and said, “We have no idea what’s going on!” So we reviewed the story plots, and tried to give them some phrases, or at least words, to look for in the next act. “Mon Dieu, mere grand, que vous avez des grands yeux!” “My good­ness, grand­mother, what big eyes you have!” But it was too hard. So they sat with us for the sec­ond half and we tried to trans­late, and at least they were able to shout “loup!” at the grand­mother when the wolf came in to fool her.

It was truly the most French-child thing they could have done!

We emerged into the sun­shine, and there trot­ting along ahead of us were a bunch of lit­tle chil­dren hav­ing pony rides. The girls joked broadly about what fun it would be to take a pony ride, and “then we could just casu­ally say, ‘Can­ter on!’ And no one would be able to catch us!” Sarah and I kindly refrained from point­ing either of the obvi­ous flaws in this: they don’t know how to say “can­ter” in French, and we also doubted that any of those ani­mals had can­tered in many, many years. Nevertheless.

Back to the hotel for a lit­tle rest, a lit­tle read­ing, and then I ran down to the lobby to ask the concierge for some ice, and help in mak­ing reser­va­tions at Cafe Max for din­ner. Alas, it turned out the cafe is closed Sat­ur­day AND Sun­day. What? Next time. But dear read­ers: I accom­plished this all in French! My gram­mar came back, my vocab­u­lary, and my accent got bet­ter as the min­utes went by. I must say, what a plea­sure to know that a skill I spent so many years hon­ing, and then just as many neglect­ing, was still func­tional. What fun to speak French. So the nice concierge sent us to a restau­rant he was very fond of, Les Edi­teurs. “Bon, it’s not too far, and the atmos­phere is excel­lent, and they will be nice to your lit­tle girls,” he assured me. So we met up out­side the hotel and set off, and sure enough, it was near the Place de l’Odeon very nearby and adorable. Fre­quented in the olden days by mem­bers of the lit­er­ary com­mu­nity, the walls were lined with books and painted a cozy dark red. We were ush­ered upstairs, and had sim­ply the most divine meal. I’ll tell you both the French and Eng­lish descrip­tions, so you can order them for your­self. I started with saumon marine a l’anthe et deux poivres, creme leg­ere a l’anthe et toast de pain bio, a gor­geous dish of mar­i­nated thinly sliced salmon with two pep­pers, and a light cream dress­ing. Now, how­ever, what is “anthe”? I have looked it up in vain. Pos­si­bly some­thing related to anise? I don’t know. Not a strong fla­vor, in any case, and the fish was per­fectly pre­pared. All accom­pa­nied by the typ­i­cal French salad of frisee and other bit­ter greens. Sarah had a tarte fine d caviar d’Aubergine et anchois, a small tarte with egg­plant caviar and anchovies. Then we each suc­cumbed and had a belle tranche de foie gras de canard et toast com­pagne grilles , huge slabs of duck liver with gor­geous tri­an­gu­lar slices of grilled coun­try bread. The girls shared a coeur de rum­steck et frites, a per­fect rare filet of rump steak with French fries. We were all frankly thrilled to bits. Avery and Eve amused them­selves draw­ing strange car­toon char­ac­ters and dis­cussing “elec­tronic toys I have known”, in Avery’s case fol­lowed mourn­fully by “that my mother and father will not let me have,” like Nin­ten­dog. When dogs fly, maybe, but not until then.

Back to our hotels to col­lapse. Avery and I each had a cozy, puffy sin­gle bed, with fluffy eider­downs and really good pil­lows. I opened the case­ment win­dows wide and our room looked directly onto the carved mar­ble fig­ures ador­ing the rooftops of the Sor­bonne. Gor­geous. We could hear the splash of the foun­tains in the piazza and the sounds of street musi­cians. “I don’t ever want to leave,” Avery pro­claimed. And so to sleep.

We’re back chez nous, and I promise (well, sort of) that that’s the last French you’ll hear from me for a really long time. Sans doute! Sorry, I really mean it now. Absolument.

We had the time you just can’t describe. John advises that I break it up into FOOD, SIGHT-SEEING, and FRIEND­SHIP. Because that’s how it was. So I shall take his advice, come tomor­row. Right now I’m crash­ing, so I’ll leave you these three lovely pho­tos, none of them to do with food, but oh well. Je suis fatiguee. A demain.

That’s “Paris here we come” to you, Avery. Got to brush up on that French home­work! We’re off tomor­row morn­ing on the Eurostar for… Gay Paree! It will be such fun to meet up with Sarah and Eve at our cute lit­tle hotel in the 5th arrondisse­ment (much plushier than any of the ques­tion­able places I stayed as a doc­toral stu­dent lo these 15 years ago). I think our first-day plans include a mar­i­onette show, a carousel, some shop­ping, and din­ner at my old haunt, Cafe Max. We’ll report back as soon as we get home on Mon­day evening.

Wednes­day saw us at church for the autum­nal Har­vest Fes­ti­val Thanks­giv­ing con­cert. Avery was most dis­con­certed to find that since she did not take vio­lin, and chose Book Club over Choir, she did not get to do any­thing more spe­cial than deliver food to the altar and sing “All Crea­tures Great and Small” at the end. So vio­lin lessons are a high pri­or­ity, should Mrs D allow it, in advance of any more con­certs. But it was lovely any­way, and dar­ling Becky shared her girls’ flow­ers with Avery.

We were then off in the clear­ing rainy day to visit St Paul’s, a pos­si­ble senior school for Avery. Every­one had said, “Oh, it’s the top school for girls in all of Eng­land, you won’t believe the facil­i­ties [a word I really dis­like],” so we were pre­pared to be impressed. But oh MY. As you can see, just the build­ing itself is lovely, and it’s sit­u­ated on Brook Green in Ham­mer­smith, a lovely lit­tle vil­lagey cor­ner of West Lon­don, the most per­fect ver­dent lit­tle com­mon you can imag­ine. Then once in the entrance doors of the school you find your­self tread­ing black and white mar­ble and look­ing up at an enor­mous, carved-wood ceil­ing in the great Assem­bly Hall, with seats up in the gallery set along­side a huge floor-to-ceiling many-paned win­dow through which the sun began to stream as the High Mis­tress gave her wel­com­ing speech. We found our­selves seated next to Susan, Sophia’s mother, and so clutched at each other as babes in antic­i­pa­tion of the for­est of com­pe­ti­tion, pres­sure, and hot­house pre­cious­ness that is the famed rep­u­ta­tion of St Paul’s. But I beg to dif­fer. It was warm and friendly, openly com­pet­i­tive and high work­load, but the gulls who led us around were com­pletely charm­ing and relaxed, infor­ma­tive and cute, and the gen­eral atmos­phere of the school as far as we could infer, was one of hap­pi­ness and total fun and fulfillment.

And even more to the point: there are THREE libraries! Avery’s mouth sim­ply dropped open and stayed open. Floor to ceil­ing books, with slid­ing library lad­ders just like she has always dreamed of. She fell ecsta­t­i­cally upon a copy of “Jane Eyre” lying on a table and said, “I am offi­cially in heaven.” There were sev­eral state of the art com­puter labs, art stu­dios that rival Hunter Col­lege (and sev­eral art­works on dis­play that I would have hap­pily shown in my gallery in New York), a swim­ming pool, an Eng­lish lab with professionally-published mag­a­zines con­tain­ing the gulls’ prize-winning essays and short sto­ries. Com­pletely impres­sive. All this in sur­round­ings that just oozed with Vic­to­rian charm, carved wood­work, old wooden floors, worn con­crete stair­wells, bell cham­bers and out­door spaces that over­look all of Cen­tral Lon­don. And the cafe­te­ria! Ten or twelve food sta­tions with every­thing you can imag­ine to eat. And in the last two years the gulls can go out to lunch in the nearby High Street, where we saw a gor­geous fish shop, a florist, lots of lit­tle cafes.

Let me see if I can pos­si­bly relate the Byzan­tine struc­ture of the school years. They begin in Lower Fourth, then go to Upper Fourth, then Year Nine and Lower Sixth, then Mid­dle Sixth, then Upper Sixth. I think. Or maybe not. I couldn’t keep track. And some­times they call the Lower Fourth “Year Sev­ens.” I will never be able to keep track. Our guide, Amy, could not have been more poised. Wear­ing a lit­tle blue polka-dotted dress with a Peter Pan col­lar, topped by a short tar­tan jacket and with lit­tle embroi­dered flats, she was like a book illus­tra­tion for “Charm­ing Eng­lish Teenager.” But sharp as a whip. Tak­ing four A-levels in chem­istry, physics, biol­ogy and… art! She’s a pho­tog­ra­pher on top of all her sci­en­tific skills. And she’s the first per­son I’ve ever met in real life who is plan­ning her Gap Year! And no, it’s not a year spent fold­ing clothes and dress­ing man­nequins, it’s the year between high school and uni­ver­sity when upper-class Eng­lish kids get to bum around and play, pre­sum­ably before the unbear­able pres­sures of Oxford or Cam­bridge dig in their claws. Would you believe: 40% of all Pauli­nas (isn’t that an almost too-sweet des­ig­na­tion for girls at the school) go to an Oxbridge school. Incredible.

We all emerged with the def­i­nite sense that what­ever it takes, within rea­son, for Avery to get to go there, we will try to achieve. She absolutely loved it, and I can def­i­nitely see her at home within those walls. So fin­gers crossed! The entrance exam isn’t until a year from Jan­u­ary, so I’m actu­ally glad we had a chance to see how won­der­ful it is and have a year to pre­pare. We’ll see. Avery has the right atti­tude: “It would be per­fect for me to go there, but if I don’t get in, another school will be won­der­ful too.” She’s right.

Thurs­day saw me at my screen­writ­ing course, screen­ing the first half hour of “Ed Wood,” which left me com­pletely cold. But it was good to ana­lyze another film. Next week Dalia and I are meet­ing up in advance of the class to com­pare notes on the one-page film out­line we’re meant to bring on Thurs­day. And big sigh of relief: I hve fin­ished my 2500 words for the fol­low­ing Saturday’s fic­tion class. It’s so hard to read aloud! I read it to John who had sug­ges­tions, and I think if I read it sev­eral more times I’ll be bored enough with it not to care how it sounds in front of 20 strangers.

Today was a half-day for the begin­ning of the half-term break, so the gulls were allowed an “own clothes” day. I will never for­get a year ago today, going back to King’s Col­lege after Avery’s inter­view, once we had decided to attend the school, to tell Mrs D she would be com­ing, and feel­ing at home in her “own clothes.” The gulls then donate how­ever much money they like to a named char­ity, for the honor of leav­ing their uni­forms at home for a pre­cious day. I remem­ber Avery going up to Mrs D hold­ing out her pound coin and smil­ing shyly. “I’d like very much to come here to school, if that’s all right.” It’s been quite a year. It was funny at pickup to see all the out­landish cloth­ing items that emerge to cel­e­brate their free­dom to choose what to wear! Fake fur, sequins, much-tattered jeans, and the SHOES! Dress-up pumps, cow­boy boots, Avery’s own blue furry Mary Janes, which beloved shoes turned out to be too small, and so they belong to Anna now. The girls and I went to lunch with Becky, in the cool blinky Octo­ber sun in the Maryle­bone High Street, and now we’re on our way to the Fri­day skat­ing les­son and din­ner out. Then, we must pack! And go off on our French adven­ture. I hope I remem­ber the language?