Imaginary places

You know how dreams can be so vivid, but as soon as you wake up, they melt away? And how trying to remember them is like clutching at steam?

But you know how there are also some dreams that don’t fade but instead stay with you, sometimes for years?

This is my dream that didn’t fade. It started with a map showing the southernmost tip of South America, which was very close to Antarctica – much closer in the dream than in real life.

Next thing, I was down there on the coast. I was standing on a headland of red rock that jutted into the sea, and the water was calm and a brilliant blue. It was summer.

I saw two people standing in the sea and thought “The water must be freezing! We’re so close to the Antarctic here!”  

I waded into the water and was astonished to find that it was not cold at all.

“It must be an ocean current coming from some warm part of the world,” I thought.

The dream was so vivid that I woke up absolutely convinced that this place really existed. I spent hours on Google Maps, examining the southern coasts of Chile and Argentina, searching for my beach. I did search after search for “red headland”, but was just confronted with endless photos of film director Leslye Headland. (The picture above is the best I could find, but it's not exactly right.)

Film director Leslie Headland

I researched the southernmost tips of all the continents, and I even checked the northernmost points, just in case I had got my orientation inverted. But it yielded nothing. Anywhere near the polar regions is just grey rock and snow.

Maybe my beach is a real place, just not where I thought it was. Maybe I had seen a picture somewhere and when I rehashed it in my dream, I just located it in the wrong part of the world. But it was probably entirely a construct of my imagination.

Another imaginary place does actually exist. I first became aware of it when I heard En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor, which is surely a contender for Most Beautiful Song Ever Written:

Here are the words, in the original Spanish and in English:

Aranjuez, Un lugar de ensueños y de amor Donde un rumor de fuentes de cristal En el jardin parece hablar En voz baja a las rosas. Aranjuez, Hoy las hojas secas sin color Que barre el viento Son recuerdos del romance Que una vez juntos empezamos tu y yo Y sin razon olvidamos. Quizá ese amor escondido esté En un atardecer, En la brisa o en la flor, Esperando tu regreso. Aranjuez, Hoy las hojas secas sin color Que barre el viento Son recuerdos del romance Que una vez juntos empezamos tu y yo Y sin razon olvidamos. En Aranjuez amor Tu y yo. Aranjuez, A place of dreams and love Where the sound of crystal fountains In the garden seems to whisper To the roses. Aranjuez, Today the dry, colourless leaves That are swept by the wind Are reminders of the romance That you and I once began And for no reason, forgot. Perhaps our love is hidden In the dusk, In the breeze or in a flower, Waiting for your return. Aranjuez, Today the dry, colourless leaves That are swept by the wind Are reminders of the romance That you and I once began And for no reason, forgot. In Aranjuez, my love, You and me.

I listened to the song on a loop for a couple of weeks until I was sick of it, then I moved on and thought no more about it.

But I was reminded of it recently when I came across this picture, Jardí d’Aranjuez (Glorieta II) by Santiago Rusiñol:

It occurred to me that Aranjuez is an actual place, not just some name cited in a song. So I Googled some more pictures and was enchanted:

 

Aranjuez, it turns out, is a city near Madrid. It was built by the royal family in the 16th century as their spring residence and is a UNESCO world heritage site. It is a fairyland of royal palaces and spectacular gardens with ornate fountains and picturesque riverside walks. The rich, fertile land yields fat, juicy tomatoes, giant asparagus and luscious strawberries. Every spring, the Tren de la Fresa (Strawberry Train) runs along the historic route from Madrid to Aranjuez, and every passenger is given a plate of strawberries to eat en route.

The locals are enamoured of their city. Blogs rave about the fusion of history and modern lifestyle. Children grow up happy in Aranjuez, say the residents, and retired people have an abundance of quiet places to walk or sit in. It has been the set of numerous films. People who have spent their lives moving from city to city stop when they get there, and put down roots, captivated by its charms. It truly appears to be a golden paradise.

I started obsessing over Aranjuez. I spent hours looking at pictures of its gardens; I read every forum and resident’s blog I could find. Since I was in Spain at the time, I even started looking at trains to go there for a weekend.

But before I went ahead and organised a trip, I decided to go on a virtual visit courtesy of Google Street View. I put the little yellow man down in the city centre and waited for Aranjuez to load.

Aranjuez loaded. Aranjuez looked like an abandoned industrial estate.

“Perhaps I’ve just landed in an unfortunate place,” I thought, and moved the yellow man to a garden, but had no better luck there. The garden was surrounded by a high, solid grey wall and you couldn’t see any of it. I tried another street, and it was just more drab ghost town.

Everything looked dry, blindingly bright and scorchingly hot. There were no cars on the road, and there were hardly any people.

“These pictures were probably taken in the summer in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone was inside to escape from the heat,” I told myself.

But then I saw that the few people that were out and about were wearing long sleeves, so it couldn’t have been that summery.

I did the Street View tour of the length and breadth of the town and found no fountains, no gardens (except those hidden behind giant walls) and barely any signs of life, only anonymous-looking blocks of flats, factory loading bays, and some workers emptying a row of recycling bins.

There were some pretty parts of the city, to be sure, but it was all just so eerie. 

In fact, when you go back and look at the Google search results properly, you see the cracks appearing. Although the locals do love it (probably the parts of it behind the big walls, though), all is not rosy. The first discordant note sounds in the form of an article by a resident, entitled The Price of Living in Aranjuez. It is a privilege to live there, he concedes, but the problem is that everyone wants a piece of it. Every morning, the buses and trains are packed with commuters, and the central station groans under the weight of the people passing through it.

And the more you look, the more you find. The city is expanding too quickly. More and more people are moving there, but the infrastructure is not developing fast enough to accommodate them. The charm of the city is spoilt by extensive building works, while many of the older residential buildings are left to fall into a state of disrepair. A lot of residents prefer to work in Madrid. “Aranjuez = dormitory town!” declares one resident on a forum.

I suppose the lesson learnt is that paradise doesn’t exist, and also that residents have insights that tourists might miss or ignore. I should have known, I suppose. 

The delights of Alpine cheese-making

I went on the most delightful visit recently to a farm in the Swiss Alps. Usually, when I think of a farm, I think of ploughed fields, combine harvesters, and rows and rows of sad-looking animals in dark, warehouse-like sheds. I certainly don't think of the mountainous idyll that it turned out to be.

After an hour's drive through the ondulating Swiss mountains, which looked to be lifted straight out of an oil painting, covered in lush green grass and patches of pine forest, we drove up a bumpy dirt road, at the end of which was a little house perched on the mountainside, with nothing but sloping meadows and pine trees as far as the eye could see.

The farmer and his wife greeted us with open arms and great joy at the prospect of guests, and showed us to the tables that they had prepared on the terrace, as if feeding a large group of people were the most leisurely of activities (although considering their daily routine, which they later talked us through, it probably was the most leisurely thing they had done all day). We sat down to the most delectable homemade soup, fresh bread and cheese made with the milk of the very cows that were chewing their cud in a shed not two metres from where we were sitting.

The soup was served in special handade wooden bowls with traditional wooden ladles, and as we ate, the farmer explained the tradition of knocking the ladle against the bowl to “salute” it and thank it for the soup. Then he explained their work to us.

“I studied for four years to be an electrician,” he said, “but then I decided that I didn’t want to be an electrician after all. So I went back to the beginning again and studied agriculture instead. I took over the farm from my father.

‘Daddy,’ I told him, ‘the future is organic’.

‘You are crazy, my boy,’ he told me.

But I really believed it, so my wife and I started our organic farm. And now we are very successful.

“You know, when we were studying agriculture, they were always teaching us how to maximise yield, how to use pesticides, how to make as much profit as possible. But they never taught us about organic farming.

“See those flowers growing in the grass over there?” he continued. “Those are weeds. The cows must not eat them or they will get sick. But because we farm organically, I cannot put pesticides on them. But,” he said, reaching for a scythe hanging on the wall, “God gave me two arms. And so every two or three days, I –” and he swung the scythe dramatically.

“And what do you think this is?” he asked, seizing another odd-looking contraption not unlike an oversized tuning fork.

“A spear!” suggested someone.

“A probe!” shouted someone else.

The farmer shook his head.

“See those yellow flowers?” he pointed at the mountainside. “Those ones, if you cut them, they grow back very quickly. And the cows must not eat them. It makes their blood too liquid and they get very sick. So I take this –” and he demonstrated thrusting the two prongs of the contraption into the earth “– and I remove the plant at the root.” He gave a knowing smile. “If you put pesticide on those plants, you have to do it three times a year. But you take out the root by hand, and it is gone forever. Now I go and get you another kind of cheese. A cheese that is one year old. Somebody wants more bread?”

The farmer’s wife is a herbologist and treats their animals herself when they are sick, using plants growing around the house. When any of their neighbours get ill (“neighbours” meaning the family living two mountains away and another family up at the top of the mountain, accessible only by cable car, you understand), she goes to them and shows them which of the plants growing on their doorstep they can use to cure them.

“In the winter,” the farmer told us, having brought us more bread and cheese, “I keep my cows down in the village. Then in the summer I bring them up here. In the summer they eat the grass on the mountains here. In the winter I don't buy food for them – soya or cereals – because produce a very special cheese and the cows have to eat only Alpine grass. So in the summer, I harvest grass in the village, and I dry it and store it for the cows to eat in the winter. Last winter was very bad,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “Everything was covered in snow for six months. Six months!”

And then it was time to go and look at the cows.

The cows, 35 of them, were in a shed adjoining the house, their tails tied to the ceiling to keep them out of harm’s way.

“This one,” said the farmer, proudly pointing at one cow lying down and staring at the wall, “had a baby yesterday. She is a new mother.”

“Do you let the calves feed from their mother?” someone asked.

“No,” said the farmer. “Because then the cow only gives enough milk for her baby and none for us. We take the calf away as soon as it is born. We milk the cow and give its milk to the calf, but because we are milking her, she produces more.”

“But doesn’t she miss her baby?” someone asked.

“No,” said the farmer. “The first day she looks for it, but when she doesn’t find it, she forgets about it.”

“Are the cows inseminated naturally?” asked one lady very delicately.

The farmer grinned and beckoned towards the back of the shed. Everyone pushed through to look at the cow that he was pointing at. It had a ring through its nose. It was a bull.

“This,” the farmer declared proudly, “is the father of all next season’s calves! We have to choose him carefully, and it is a very difficult job, because it is not easy to find this pure breed of cow, Simmental.  And every year or two we have to choose a new bull, because it is good to change the genetics every generation or two. We choose the lucky bull according to his parent’s strength, their size and their resistance to disease, and his mother’s milk production. This bull is two years old.”

Two years old and already a hulk! Incredible to think that such a monster can grow in just two years. He looked very tranquil as he sat there chewing his cud and staring at the wall, much more so than you would if you had been chosen out of all your brothers not be sent to the great blue yonder but rather to sow your seed and ensure the production of the next generation of calves.

“Do you see the horns of that cow?” said the farmer, pointing to a cow with twisted horns. “Do you see how they do not go straight up? That is because of the moon.”

“Because of the moon?” everybody murmured, baffled.

“Yes,” he said. “When the horns start growing, I tie them so that they grow into the right shape. And you must take the tie off when the moon is like this –” he drew a horseshoe shape in the air “– and  then the horns will grow up. But I did that cow before I knew about the moon. I took off the tie when the moon was full and the horns grew crooked.”

He pointed at a cow which certainly did have very crooked horns.

“I had one cow and the horn was so twisted that it grew into her face.”

Poor cow.

“What do you do with the cows when they stop giving milk?” somebody asked. 

“When a cow gets old,” replied the farmer, “I take her to my friend who is a butcher.”
“Ah,” said everybody, disappointed. The farmer shook his head sadly. 
“I drive her myself to his house,” he said lovingly. “I hold her – I put my hand on her – and I say, 'Thank you for– Thank you for everything'.”

It was a lovely moment. I don't eat meat, but I think I would if all animals died knowing themselves to be so loved.

And then into the kitchen so we could learn about cheese-making.

“Every morning,” the farmer told us, “I wake up at 4:30. I milk the cows and I put the milk together with yesterday evening’s milk in this pot. It is 1000 litres.”

When you are used to picturing milk one litre at a time as you buy it from the supermarket, it’s hard to picture a thousand litres of milk. This is a thousand-litre pot.

 

“I leave the milk for a few hours, until the cream rises to the top,” said the farmer. “Then I take the cream off the top with this.” He indicated the colander-like object hanging on the pot handle.”

“You cream the milk!” shouted somebody proudly, showing off their knowledge of technical terminology.

“Yes,” the farmer agreed. “I cream the milk. Then I put in lactic ferment.”

He pointed at the pile of firewood next to the pot.

“I heat the milk over a wood fire,” he said. “These pieces of wood are small because they heat up more quickly. I know how many pieces of wood to put and how long to let them burn to arrive at precisely the right temperature. Then I put rennet.”

There was a brief flurry while everybody tried to work out what rennet was.

“It comes from the stomach of a cow,” explained the farmer, when everyone was listening to him again. “We buy it in a bottle, but my grandfather used a piece of dried cow intestine. He kept it hanging up and he used to cut off a piece and put it in the milk.”

Everybody groaned.

“After some hours,” continued the farmer “the milk is like yoghurt. I take my guitar –” he seized an apparatus that resembled a television aerial “– and I use it to break the milk into pieces.” He demonstrated running the aerial through the pot.   

“Then I put it on the fire again until it separates into a solid part at the bottom and a liquid part at the top.”

“Curds and whey! Curds and whey!” shouted somebody excitedly.

“What is curds and whey?” asks somebody else, bemused.

The farmer momentarily left the general confusion and returned shortly afterwards with a cloth on a stick.

“Then I wash my hands and arms very well,” he said. “With cold water. Very cold! Three degrees!”

He chuckled. He raised the cloth on the stick.

“My assistant holds the end of this cloth and I take the other end. And I dive into the pot and I pull the cloth through the liquid."

"Is that why you have such big muscles?" somebody asked, amused. 

"No," said the farmer. "These muscles are from digging up the weeds outside. With the cloth I take out some of the curds from the bottom of the pot. I have to make sure I take out the same amount every time so that the cheeses are the same size. Then I drain the curds and put them in a mould and in a press.”

“Those are the cheeses from yesterday,” he said, indicating the press behind him. “This afternoon they will be removed to make space for today’s cheeses. They are stored for between six months and a year, and they must be oiled, salted and turned regularly.”

He beamed. “Now we go and see my goats!”

The goats live in a straw-lined space in the lower level of the house, although they are free to wander around outside if they wish. The kids follow their mothers around, but also go off and play together. We watched two of them playing with large sheets of plastic, jumping on it and running back and forth over it, delighting in the crackling noise it made.

“Do you use the goats for milk?” somebody asked.

“No,” replied the farmer coldly. “They are only for meat.”

And then it was on to the pigs. There were pink ones and black ones, and they lived in a little clearing in the forest.

“See that pig there?” said the farmer, pointing to a fat pink pig lying on its back with its legs sticking up in the air, its back leg occasionally twitching. “It is working very hard.”

Everybody sniggered.

“It is!” insisted the farmer. “It is making meat. These pigs make very good meat.”

He went to the fence and tried to call the pigs so we could see them up close, but they weren't interested. They were too busy making meat. So he opened a barrel at the gate of the enclosure, and suddenly five pigs were trotting towards the gate with great enthusiasm. He placed something resembling chicken feed on a tree stump, and the pigs squabbled over it, two of them trying to attack each other as a third scoffed the food.

“See that pipe?” said the farmer, pointing to a hosepipe leading into a trough. “We send the whey that is left from the cheese down that pipe. It is very good for the pigs.”

And then the visit was over and we returned to the farmhouse, where, all fired up by the delight of organic Alpine farming, everybody bought pieces of cheese to take home.

People in Paris 2: The metro

As promised, the next leg of the guided tour of the human oddities that populate Paris. Today we are going to be looking at the metro, which is where the oddballs of Paris congregate.

LIGHTER MAN

If you go from anywhere to anywhere by metro in Paris, chances are you’ll have to change lines at Châtelet station. And when that happens, sooner or later you will have to negotiate the conveyor belts. They are installed to help you get from one end of an unfeasibly long corridor to the other, which is all well and good, but I have never made it the length of the conveyor belts without coming within inches of murdering somebody. Groups of tourists clog them up, sauntering along while consulting their maps, periodically stopping across the breadth of the belt so that nobody can get past. People with ridiculously bulky coats plod along them, bearing large bags of shopping, keeping to the right as is appropriate but still blocking the passage with their bags. Enamoured couples stand there, not even bothering to walk, so lost in each other’s embrace that they don’t notice how many commuters they are tripping up with their protruding feet. Teenagers glued to their phones walk slower and slower until they grind to a halt completely, causing the people walking behind them to pile up on top of them. It is a very fortunate thing indeed that I do not habitually carry large blunt objects around with me, because otherwise I would have battered a number of people to death by now. I am often overcome with a barely resistible urge to deliver an almighty push to the person in front of me, causing everyone on the belt to go toppling like dominoes. I have now taken to avoiding the conveyor belts altogether. I can get to the other end of the corridor faster by walking on solid ground.

I’m not the only person who feels like this. There was once a young man on the belt in front of me, growling and grinding his teeth and looking as furious as I felt as he kept trying to overtake people but not being able to squeeze past. Eventually he heaved a mighty sigh, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, lit it, and ran the flame along the handrail. There are worse ways to let off steam.

SAINT LAZARE – METRO GUARDS

In Japan, people are employed on the metro to shove passengers onto the trains at rush hour. In Paris, people are employed to stand in front of the train doors at rush hour to stop too many people getting on. 

Japan

Paris

SAINT LAZARE – TERMINUS

The metro line 14 terminates at Saint Lazare. When it stops there, a little jingle is played and you are told to get off in three languages. The glass doors between the platform and the train have big red “do not enter” signs on them so you know not to get on the train. So why on earth are there always people who stay on the train and others waiting on the platform who merrily board the train as it arrives at the terminus?

One evening I decided to stay on the train at Saint Lazare, to see what would happen. As it drew away from the station, I had the surreal impression of being carried away from the world as we know it and beyond a border that no human should cross. The carriage was eerily silent. A man wandered down the aisle in my direction, but he didn't appear to see me. It was as if we were occupying different astral planes. I half expected to be able to pass my hand through him. 

Fifty metres or so down the track, the train stopped, sat there for a few minutes, and then changed direction and trundled back to the station, stopping at the opposite platform. But that doesn't explain why those people on the train were there in the first place. 

HARIBOS

A man boarded the train, deposited himself purposefully in the only free seat, and started rummaging in his bag. He withdrew from it a bag of Haribo’s cola bottles and a sheaf of spreadsheets and spent the next twenty minutes studying the spreadsheets, steadily working his way through the packet of sweets. He timed the exercise so perfectly that he swallowed the last cola bottle just as he arrived at his stop.

PICTURESQUE WOMAN

A voluminous lady of advanced years waddled onto the metro and seated herself regally on a fold-down seat, depositing a vast supermarket bag at her feet. Her hair was swept up into a chignon, topped by a pink cap, one of her shoes was laced with a black lace and the other with a red lace, and her features were enhanced by bright blue eyeshadow and fluorescent pink lipstick.

Out of the depths of her coat pocket, she produced  small magnifying glass, which she held up to one eye as she squinted at the plan of the metro line, which was stuck up above the door. Then she put the magnifying glass away and started digging determinedly in her plastic bag, which proved to be stuffed full of envelopes, brochures, and other assorted bits of paper. She extracted a small brown envelope, a roll of sellotape and a pair of scissors, and proceeded to stick down the flap of the envelope as thoroughly as any envelope flap has ever been stuck down. Then she deposited it all back into the bag and squinted at the line plan through her magnifying glass again.

UNDERAGE DRINKING

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when I saw two sweet-looking boys, aged not more than nine or ten, sitting on the metro, peeling the label off a beer bottle.

“Surely not,” I thought. “They probably just found the bottle somewhere and want to put flowers in it.”

One of the boys caught me looking at them and just stared straight back at me.

As they got off the train, that same boy looked me squarely in the eye and took a swig from the bottle. Then they pranced off down the platform, and I was left wondering if their parents even knew that they were using public transport on their own, let alone what they were drinking in the process. They probably lit up cigarettes as soon as they were out of the station.

Out of the mouths of babes

The highlight of my week is Friday afternoon, when I look after the two most delightful children: 6-year-old Sarah and 4-year-old Xavier. The family is from Martinique, in the French Caribbean, and their walls are decorated with photos of family members sitting on tropical beaches, their fruit bowl is always full of bananas and clementines, and the mother makes pancakes with rum for the children.  

I speak to Sarah and Xavier in English, although they speak to me in French. They are not at all fazed by the language difference - in fact, they barely seem to notice it. It helps that a lot of conversation with children of that age is about concrete, practical matters, which can be helped along with gestures:

“Where are your gloves?”

“Put your shoes here.”

“Hang up your towel.”

“Let’s go and wash our hands.”

“Do you want me to cut the apple up?”

etc.

It doesn't escape them that I'm speaking a different language, though. The first time I looked after them, Sarah looked up from the drawing she was doing and gave me an impish smile.

“You speak English,” she informed me.

“Yes, I do,” I replied.

“Julie spoke English,” she said, going back to her drawing. (Julie was their last babysitter.)

Xavier looked at me quizzically.

“Why do you speak English?” he demanded.

“Julie had blonde hair,” said Sarah. “She was from the United States. Are you from the United States?”

On another occasion, Sarah asked me to do her hair, but I wasn't doing it the way she wanted it. 

“It's very difficult,” she told me in a comprehending tone of voice. “Because you speak English and I speak French” She shook her head. “It would be so much easier if we both spoke the same language,” she sighed.

Every week I make my way home laughing out loud at the gems Sarah and Xavier come up with. Here are some of them to brighten your day too.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SARAH AND XAVIER

1) Wolves

“There are no snails,” lamented Xavier, as we walked home from the park. “No snails anywhere. Because when I say ‘Aaah!’ they hide in their shells.”

“The wolves ate all the snails,” Sarah informed him. Then she turned to me. “Do you know what eats humans? Wolves. But there are no wolves in France anymore. Do you know where they are now?”

“Where?” asked Xavier.

“At the north pole,” Sarah said.

2) Caries

Sarah opened a pot of natural yoghurt, seized the sugar, and proceeded to pour such a quantity of sugar onto the yoghurt that it almost overflowed out of the pot.

“Hey!” I said. “That’s enough!”

Sarah looked up at me. “Too much sugar?” she beamed.

“It’ll rot your teeth!” I told her, tapping my teeth to make the point.

“It gives you caries!” shouted Xavier excitedly, bouncing up and down in his chair.

“Yes,” replied Sarah sagely. “The caries in your mouth eat sugar. It’s their meal. Mmm!” And she rubbed her tummy delightedly.

“Sugar gives you caries!” Xavier repeated, standing on his chair and jumping off it.

“Caries live in your mouth,” Sarah told me. “Then they eat sugar and grow bigger.”

3) The danger of bean chilli

Later that evening, as I was dishing up their dinner, Xavier wandered into the kitchen. He tipped the pot of bean chilli towards him, studied the contents, and wrinkled his nose.

“I don’t eat that,” he declared. “It’s not healthy.”

4) Cats and breathing underwater

As we came back from the park, a cat ran out from under a parked car.

“Why are cats afraid of cars?” asked Xavier.

“Because they make a noise,” I replied.

This level of English was clearly beyond Xavier, but he was not put out.

“Because they think that they’re going to kill them?” he said.

“You know,” mused Sarah, “there are people who eat cats.”

“Where?” demanded Xavier, horrified.

“I don’t know…” she replied thoughtfully. “In India…”

And that was enough about cats. Next topic.

“When I was a little baby, I was in my maman’s tummy,” Xavier informed me. “At the beach.”

“Yes,” Sarah chimed in, “because Xavier was born in France and I was born in Martinique. The waves make you do this,” and she demonstrated rocking backwards and forwards, holding her nose. “And you can breathe underwater.”

GOING TO THE PARK

1) What colour is the sky?

As we wandered down to the park one evening, Xavier came to a screeching halt and nearly fell off his bicycle.

“Look!” he exclaimed. “The sky is blue!”

Sarah regarded the sky thoughtfully. “I don't think it is,” she replied.“I think it is black.” They both stood there considering the night sky. Then Sarah turned to me.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Fortunately, colours can be compromised upon.

“I think it’s very dark blue,” I said. “So dark as to be almost black.”

And they seemed satisfied with that. 

2) Cold hands

It was a chilly evening at the park, and while Xavier had gloves, Sarah did not, and her hands were freezing.

“Will you lend me your gloves?” she asked Xavier.

Any other four-year-old in the world would have said no, but Xavier took his gloves off and gave them to his sister, without a moment’s hesitation.

A little while later, Xavier started to feel the chill in his fingers.

“Will you give me back my gloves?” he asked Sarah.

“But– ” she hesitated. “But then my hands will be cold.”

“But my hands are cold,” said Xavier.

Do you see that? He didn’t say “But they’re my gloves. You’re only wearing them because I lent them to you and now you have to give them back because I say so.” He said “My hands are cold.”

Eventually they decided to wear one glove each.

“We’ll share,” said Sarah as she took a glove off. “Because we’re brother and sister.”

“Yes,” echoed Xavier. “We’re brother and sister.”

On another chilly afternoon when we were out, Xavier’s hat started falling off because the buckle under his chin had somehow undone itself. I stopped to do up the buckle, taking off my gloves to make the operation easier.

“But,” said Xavier, looking uneasily at my ungloved hands. “But… you’ll be cold!”

3) Escargots

It’s always a workout for me when we go to the park. Xavier usually takes his bicycle, and goes wobbling along on it at an astonishing pace, while Sarah runs like the wind, and I end up running after them, shouting at them to stop when they get to the road.

One time, Xavier was pottering along, more slowly than usual, when Sarah came trotting up behind him. Just at that moment, he came to a standstill while he made some observation about the scenery, whereupon Sarah collided with his back tyre.

“Come on, Xavier,” she chided him. “We are not escargots!”

Another time, when Xavier didn’t have his bicycle, he was walking next to me and watching Sarah as she charged down to the end of the road.

“Sarah runs very fast,” he observed. “She always wins races.” He paused thoughtfully and then informed me gravely, “I run slowly. But I sweat.”

COMING BACK FROM THE PARK

1) You always want to win!

When we get home, Sarah usually goes charging up the stairs to their apartment on the fourth floor, while Xavier stares mournfully after her.

“You always want to win,” he moans. “I’m not even racing.”

When we get to the top, he stamps his feet and says, “It’s not fair! You always want to win!”

“But I thought you weren’t racing,” replies Sarah breezily.

2) Flowers and phone calls

When spring began, the park was liberally dotted with a variety of wild flowers, and Sarah started picking them to make a bouquet. Then she delegated the task to me.

“That one!” she instructed. “And now those ones. And make sure the yellow one has a long stem, and tie it around the stems of the others.”

Shortly afterwards, she commandeered my phone. I kept her under close surveillance as she merrily pressed all the buttons.

“I know lots of things about your phone now!” she informed me. “Hello? Hello?” she chirped into the phone. “What’s your name? What’s your name? Yes, this is Sarah.”

Then I turned my head for a second, and when I looked back, she was dialling my mother’s number. I seized the phone back and quickly cancelled the call.

“That was my mother you were calling!” I told her. “What were you going to say to her? Were you going to speak to her in English?”

“It was your mother?” said Sarah cheerfully. “And who are all these people?” as she scrolled through the address book.

“My family and friends,” I said.

“I’m going to call them all,” she told me. “I’m going to call your mother and your father and your brother and your sister and your grandmother and your grandfather…”

“Do you want to phone your mother?” I asked.

“Yes! Yes!” she said excitedly.

So I let her call her mother.

“I’ve made a beautiful bouquet,” she gushed into the phone. “There are red flowers and yellow flowers and –” she paused to check the bunch “– and  white flowers and blue flowers and some that are not flowers, they’re leaves, but it’s OK because it matches. When are you coming home?”

She put the phone down.

“She’s nearly home,” she informed me.

Then we got home. As we went upstairs to the apartment, Xavier started bouncing up and down in front of me.

“Can I hold the keys?” he said excitedly. “Can I hold the keys?”

I gave him the keys.

“Because it’s my dream,” he told me solemnly, then he clutched the keys to his breast and charged up the stairs.

Once we were home, Xavier disappeared into the bathroom. A good quarter of an hour later, when he still hadn't emerged, I went to see what he was up to. I found him staring up at the cupboard door, a towel hanging from his hand and a despondent look on his face.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm trying to hang the towel on the door," he whispered. 

The cupboard was a floor-to-ceiling affair, and even the average adult would have to stand on a chair to reach the top of it. And little Xavier, aged four, was not going to rest until he had hung his towel over the door.

3) Sheep

Sarah tends to keep up a continuous patter of discourse, which is delightful to listen to but which I don’t always manage to follow with any great degree of comprehension. In the middle of one of these monologues (in which I believe she was recounting some outing to the shops with her mother), she turned to me and asked, “Have you ever been alone with a sheep?”

Now I know she can’t have said that. Why on earth would she have wanted to know if I’d ever been alone with a sheep? I must have misheard. In any case, she didn’t wait for my reply and charged straight on with her story, but I spent the next two hours puzzling over what she had said, without coming to any sort of conclusion.

TALKING TO STRANGERS

“Bonjour Madame Monsieur,” sang out Xavier merrily, to nobody in particular, as he stomped along the path to the park. He turned to me and pointed an accusing finger. “You’re called Madame!” he informed me. Then he pointed at a woman walking past in the opposite direction. “You’re called Madame!” he informed her.

I sat on a bench in the park and watched the children playing on the climbing frame. Then Xavier came bouncing up to me and told me, “I want a sweet.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any sweets,” I said.

Seconds later, I saw him approaching some teenage girls on another bench, who were working their way through a packet of jelly babies. I half wondered whether I should reproach Xavier for breaking the golden rule of childhood – don’t accept sweets from strangers – but I decided to let it slip for this time, especially after seeing how enchanted the girls were by him. A moment later, he reappeared at my side, offering me a fluorescent green jelly baby.

On the way back, a bus sailed past us. Seconds later, a woman came careering along, eyes fixed desperately on the bus.

“Why are you running?” Sarah demanded of the woman as she hurtled past.

“To get the bus!” the woman called back over her shoulder.

 

A little further on, we passed a man going in the opposite direction. Xavier looked him up and down.

“Bonjour,” he said.

“Bonjour,” the man replied with a smile.

Xavier broke down into giggles and clutched at my hand.

“I said bonjour to the monsieur!” he chuckled.

TEN

Every now and then, the children will spontaneously come out with something in English. Sarah came home from school one day spouting “Yes I do!” and “No I don't!” and used one or the other as a reply to every question for the rest of the day.

The one thing Sarah is very enthusiastic about is counting in English. At every opportunity, she will start singing out “One! Two! Three! Five! Four! Five!”

She was going up the stairs one day, counting them as she went.

“Eight! Nine! Ten!” she shouted triumphantly as she reached the top. Then she turned to me with a concerned look on her face.

“How many is ten?” she asked.

BON APPETIT

“Bon appétit, everybody,” Xavier sang out as he sat down to his afternoon snack.

“You can’t say bon appétit,” Sarah chided him. “It isn’t lunchtime.”

“You can,” called out their father, who was listening in from his study. “You can say it any time you want.”

“Even in the afternoon?” asked Sarah suspiciously.

“Yes,” her father said. “Any time.”

WHEN I'M BIG

Xavier has great plans for when he grows up.

“When I’m big,” he shouted out excitedly as he tried to swing himself, “I’m going to have a fighter plane. And everyone is going to go on my fighter plane!”

And as I was trying to put on his shoes while he was trying to walk across the room: “When I’m 17, I’m going to be taller than my papa!”

And as he was sitting at the dining room table eating slice after slice after slice of apple: “When I’m grown up, I’m going to dress up as an eagle and I’m going to eat only fish!”

“You’ll have to eat pigeons too,” Sarah told him sagely, “because eagles eat pigeons too.”

AND ONE LAST THING

I found this assertion quietly hiding in the midst of my notes on Sarah and Xavier's antics. I don't know what it is or where it came from, but given that it's there, I suppose I might as well share it with you.

The instrument must be calibrated on the nitrogen peak (28 a.m.u.) and the calibration factor must be reported in the documentation.