Smelly Yoga

It’s Thursday - yoga day at my local Asian Health Centre for the Elderly. Us non-members come in first and push the chairs and sofas to the edges of the room, when we’ve finished our class the seniors arrive for a session with the same teacher - they all seem to be men. While they are waiting for us to gather up our things and leave, they get on the exercise bikes at one end of the room and gossip while pedalling.

Our yoga room is on a busy street; heavy traffic, children and mad people can be heard screeching at volume on the other side of the big windows. Inside we have an extractor fan which starts rumbling when the kitchen staff arrive, the fan circulates the pungent lunch smells but keeps them trapped in the room with us. There were more incense sticks than usual this morning because the oldies are making model planes involving the use of strong solvents, some of which has leaked into the carpet.

Our teacher is very keen on breathing and making sure the air flows in and out through the correct orifices, we are instructed to concentrate on our bottoms

Keep your mind on your anal sphincter - and any other apertures underneath, make sure none of your energy escapes!

This was a particular challenge today because I have reacted badly to last night’s eel and quite a lot of energy was requesting release.

Cut Myself Shaving

On Thursday mornings I go over to my local day centre for elderly Asians where there is a yoga class in the lounge before the serious telly-watching gets under way, we do lots of corpse posing and we're supposed to be breathing but I keep getting distracted by the smell of chapati-making in the adjacent kitchen.

It must do some good because I always come away feeling very chirpy and want to tap away on my laptop, trouble is, in an attempt to smarten up before yesterday's interview I shaved the bobbley bits off my coat and nicked my fingers with the razor

taptap ouch taptap ouch

Has everyone already seen this? - love Bill Nighy, bloody Blogger has sliced the edge off though!



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Elephants In The Room

24th April

The email in the previous post is probably connected to my attempt to introduce our Production Manager to village society before I left her there to fend for herself.

Soon after she arrived in France, I took Miss Whiplash to the village yoga class. I am a good head higher than the tallest woman in the village, we have all got used to me being the village giant, when I brought along a new classmate who stands head and shoulders above me.

Miss W tried her best to mingle but the local accent is strong, her French didn’t work and she and the villagers found each other mutually unintelligible, so although the class were impressed by her height and leopard skin leotard, everyone became too embarrassed by this failure to communicate and soon got on with their business as though she weren’t there (there is always a half hour of gossip before the class starts). Miss W spent the evening with a grin clamped on her face to prove that she is basically friendly, but being ignored makes one feel invisible.

I am currently obsessed with the idea of invisibility/visibility partly because I have taken a couple of weeks away from the insect filming to do a job in an Arabic country. I am transfixed by the way the Arabs float around in their flowing robes while the western visitors walk among them looking like raw sausages.

There are plenty of muslim women with their faces completely uncovered and they easily make eye contact with me but the ladies who peep out through a letter box in their face coverings and the ones who are completely covered behave as though they are invisible. What I hadn’t realised was how different these garments can be, there is an abaya shop close to where I am staying, in the window are styles cut in different ways, decorated with pearls, diamante and embroidery, I was particularly struck by a pleated and diamante-studded abaya that clearly inspired the Darleks. Outside this shop swings a large sign with a painted image of a woman wearing a black abaya, her hands and face originally in the painting are now covered over by three crude blocks of black paint


*no time to do a fancy image today, that one’s straight out of the tin from Crazy Spandex Girls

Salmon Supper

8th January
We celebrated the first yoga class of the new year with an after-class supper, I attempted to take some initiative with this one, proposing that I could contribute a big tart. Mme B, astonished that I still misunderstood the etiquette of these events put me firmly in my place:
I will bring a whole salmon, we will have it cold with mayonnaise, Mme Bic can make her salad, Mme Eena will bring rillettes, you bring bread

We decided to hijack the maire's conference room for our meal this time - it has a nicer table, The Bontettes, The Bic Biros, Church Cleaning Lady, The Bank Manager, The Sheep Farmers, Scary Eena, The Instructor and myself all eating Scary Eena's rillettes under the gaze of Sarko. My neighbours are forthright in a way that some people might find rude, mostly I find it amusing. During supper the conversation turned to 'The English’, I’m used to this conversation now, it usually starts with someone asking me a question like;
Do the English eat soup?
The questions can get a bit repetitive and sometimes I answer in a way that amuses me but my flippancy will always come back to bite me and I will be informed at a later date that 'The English think soup has aphrodisiac properties’ or 'soup is only drunk at midnight in England’.

After the soup conversation we got down to the real business
The English certainly do like a drink don't they?

During Sunday's Tart Party, Bic Biro toured the tables constantly with bottles of cider, the village ladies have explained to me that the polite rule here is to accept no more than a glass or two, no matter how much the host insists. English participants, who don’t understand this game and wanting to be seen to join in properly will accept more than the correct amount of glasses - the side effect being that their French improves.

M. Bontette suggested that
The English are not a nation of alcoholics they are just Bon Viveurs

Mme B actually snorted at her husband
But they are incontinent in all ways … sex, drink, food, it’s all stories of bottoms with them … they don’t know when to stop

Cocktail Hour

30th October
After the yoga class this week we had our picnic supper in the Salle des Fetes. Pulling together six small plastic picnic tables we were completely dwarfed by the cavernous hall. Bic Biro brought out his apperitif drinks; bottles of Muscat (sweet wine), Ricard and a French brand of Whisky. Mme Bontette had got her fish soup simmering away on the bar counter and was in exuberant mood. She wanted everybody to try a Manhattan - which in her head means equal parts Muscat and Whisky. We don’t have ice and the bottles have not been near a fridge. It takes very special circumstances before I can look at cheap, warm whisky with anything approaching desire. French people think it’s very odd that English people often opt for red wine as an aperitif.

Despite the echoey, swimming-pool quality of the hall I asked Bic if I can use it as a venue for our film show, he’s thrilled with the idea - we have a date.

Food - and Yoga

23rd October
My reasons for not mentioning my background as a cook to French people are different from my UK reasons;
a) They will laugh heartily at the idea of an English person cooking. French people from all regions and in all age groups absolutely love recounting stories about their friend's old auntie, who once went to England and how terrible she found the food.

b) French people like the idea of 'stability', people who chop and change careers, are instable - and if you do use that word in a sentence when you're discussing someone, say it with a shocked upturned note.
I let my neighbours assume that I have the correct insectologist and fluffing qualifications and have been doing this job constantly since graduating.


I’ve joined the weekly yoga class that takes place at our Salle des Fetes. Half the class are couples; The Bontettes the Bic Biros and the Sheep Farmers, then there is a pregnant postlady, the lady that cleans the church and Jeanne who runs the lunch café in the next village. My bank manager takes part and Scary Eena does the session in her slippers. The instructor is lovely and helps Eena and the Postlady into reclining postures while the rest of us find new ways to stand on one leg.

The evening always starts with lots of kissing and lengthy greetings. After this week's session Mme Bontette declared that next week we should have a group picnic supper after the class and that she will provide fish soup, Scary Eena immediately volunteered her rilletes, Mme Biro offered a salad and Mme B then told the rest of the class what they must bring – having failed my tomato-chopping task at last month’s sports day I am appointed bread monitor.