Somethings never change

Dear all,

I feel it my duty to post something since I have not at all participated in the web-bashed haberdasher since its inception this summer, this largely being due to my absence from the United States and/or extreme laziness.

That said, I now bring you greetings from France, where they don’t know what a QWERTY keyboard is they think that a nozzle attached to a long hose coming out of the wall qualifies as a shower.

I hope not to bore you or overwhelm you. So quick update: am living in Nantes, France with a colleague who is actually my boss but insists he is just a colleague, where I am regularly berated for using the polite vous rather than the personal tu. I am struggling (read: failing) to find an apartment for myself before I run out of my boss/colleague’s goodwill and before classes start on the 18th.

So this week was la rentrée, when everyone comes back to work after their long summer holiday and all the kids go back to school. I accompanied my boss/colleague’s wife to pick up her kids from school. Once back home, I was relieved to find that the French school system has not in any way changed since 1965. All good French schoolchildren still carry the same requisite notebooks, binders, notebook covers, and loose leaf paper with them every day. Even their backpacks have remained essentially immutable other than the addition of rolly wheels, an innovation which, you will recall, swept the world in about 1999.

Children, are in fact, as I once was, still not allowed to use white out to correct their work, but must use an effaceur which essentially erases fountain pen ink. I was so struck by the similarity in childhood office products since my days in a French school that I was motionless with fear as one of the girls produced a black notebook. Our black notebooks were always reserved for Dictées, a way for the French educational system to cultivate secretarial skills in all of its citizens: dictated tests. On that one point, France at least has evolved, black notebooks are now used for other subjects.

My knitting continues to be a source of entertainment and the butt of all jokes, as it was in Chile, where my host family doubted I would ever finish. Now my “host family”(read: boss and his wife) joke that I am like Penelope and will be knitting for all time, waiting for a husband to appear.

It is good that some things never change. It would be a lot better if the space bar on my computer worked...