What a Good Sport!

One of the best things about being back in Oz is decent winter sport. I speak of Aussie Rules, of course. The Sochi Winter Olympics earlier this put me in mind of those looooong winters we spent in France, when for months it seemed the sun had been liquid papered out of the sky and you had to dress up like the Michelin man just to go to the letter box. The compensation (supposedly) for it being winter was that you could watch winter sports on TV. If you understood them, that is ...

My French husband Maxime spent most of his undergrad studies skiing in Grenoble (much more interesting than chemistry lectures), and so he is a keen skier and winter sports watcher. He would do his best to explain winter sports to me, but without much success. People appeared to get medals for going down a slide! Then there was a sort of lawn bowls on ice consisting of someone slowly pushing a large Edam along while two assistants were frantically sweeping brooms before it, as if they were cleaning up after a Dutch party. And the French TV commentary was so bad. Firstly, there was rather a lot of silence. None of the banter of a Bill Lawry and Tony Greig exchange.

'Why aren't they saying anything?' I'd ask.

'They’re probably drunk,' Maxime would say.

Eventually a commentator might manage an 'Oh la la.'

'Oh lalalalalalala,' his colleague would add, but only if what happened was really impressive.

Other than that, the commentary team would make noises such as 'Pfffff' or 'Bof'. It had about as much depth and analysis as watching the big game with a Tellytubby.

No wonder there's no cricket in France ... nothing happening AND no one saying anything! Not the best telly. Actually, being made to sit through hours of 'sports de glisse', (sports where you 'slide') was salt in the wound to me, because I really did miss the cricket. Not to mention Aussie Rules. I tried explaining Aussie Rules to Maxime when we lived in France, and even showed him a video of the '84 Grand Final. He loved it. That is to say, he rolled around laughing at the punch-ups, the '80s hairdos and the microscopic shorts.Then he took himself off to the computer to Google 'Australian Rules Football shorts' and the phrase 'packing your lunch', which I had foolishly introduced him to.

He stayed on the computer a long time ... and I began to wonder why he was spending quite so much time looking at men's crotches. He had a surprise for me. No, he wasn't gay, but he had stumbled upon the site of an Aussie Rules team in France, in Strasbourg. Don't believe it? Here's the link:

http://www.football-australien.fr/les-clubs/kangourous-de-strasbourg/

Since then, we discovered little footy clubs had mushroomed all over Europe, often started by Europeans who'd seen a match on TV by chance and fallen in love with the game. Shame it doesn't happen to all Europeans, i.e., Maxime ... but more on that next time!
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The French Make Waves

Before we left France, Maxime waxed lyrical to friends about beaches and new world wineries, showing off a little.

'And the Australian barbecues are amazing!'  He'd exclaimed.

They are? I thought.

'Do you know, they have so many parks, and each park has free public barbecues. They are actually in working order and people clean them after they use them!'

'Never in France,' the friends said and all the French shook their heads glumly, thinking of blackened barbecues in concrete parks in Marseilles.

I'm pleased that Maxime's positive about the beaches (and those fabulous barbecues)  because on our first holiday to Australia he was a little less positive (actually bloody annoying, but I didn't say that because I'm a caring and supportive partner). We went to a couple of Mornington Peninsula ocean beaches, but at Point Leo beach, Maxime complained that the waves were too wavy. At Gunnamatta, the beach was too crowded. 

'I like to be alone on a beach,' Maxime said à la Greta Garbo.

'Yeah, and that happens so often in Europe,' I muttered darkly. (Then it rained a year’s worth of rain in the week we were in the Grampians and I never heard the end of it.) 

'The French don’t transplant well,' Mum pronounced, having read it somewhere. It quickly became her favourite phrase.

But these days, now that he knows how to dive beneath oncoming waves, if not quite how to catch them, Maxime's as happy as any Skip to plunge into the surf. Still, one of the Dads at our kids' swimming lessons told me recently that it's mostly foreigners who drown on Australian beaches. So I've been careful to tell Maxime about rips, just in case he ends up like Harold Holt and gets a swimming pool named after him. 

He borders on religious in his devotion to sunblock too. This is partly because when we first came to Australia, I'd been out of the country so long I'd lost some of my reflexes, like putting on sunblock and wearing something other than sandals when going for a bush walk. So after seeing how painfully red you can turn after even ten minutes in the midday sun (and after seeing me narrowly miss a black snake with my sandalled foot) Maxime chooses sensible footwear and smothers himself in so much sunblock that he looks like a ghost.

That other beach tradition, fish and chips (with optional sand), is taking a little longer to win its way into the Frog's heart. Although he's happy enough to eat the chips and pronounce judgement on their sogginess or crunchiness, the battered fish completely mystifies. The kids too. When they first encountered fish in batter, the girls started peeling it. They ate the fish, shunned the batter and wouldn't have a bar of the chips. Unfortunately now they've worked out what chips are. (That's right. They are vehicles for eating sauce). And try as he might, Maxime cannot persuade fish and chip shops to provide him with a scallop without whipping it in batter first. I'm personally a bit squeamish when it comes to rubbery creatures from the sea and find a little batter disguise helps enormously. But then I guess Maxime's been eating slimy rubbery things since childhood. Snails for instance. Maybe if they battered snails they'd catch on in Australia! Actually maybe not.

Bonjour Australia (and about bloody time!)

After ten years of living in France, my French husband agreed to move to Australia (to Melbourne, my home town). For years he'd been making excuses not to move ('we won't find jobs', 'the kids will turn into pumpkins' (well, something like that)). At times I gave up hope of ever shifting him. So what was it that convinced Maxime in the end?

CHEESE.

In was mid 2012, at the end of a four month sabbatical, a trial of living in Australia, when Maxime announced to the cheering masses (well, to me and Mum anyway), that he'd be happy to move here permanently.

'It's thanks to this cheese that I've decided,' said Maxime, waving a chunk of Bruny Island hard cheese.

'What?' I said, and Mum looked skeptical.

'I know if I can have a source of good cheese, it will be possible to survive,' he explained.

He made a move to Melbourne sound as dangerous and difficult as settling in the middle of the Amazon. But I shouldn't really have been surprised - Maxime once told me he lived to eat. And meant it. Other Aussie cheeses Maxime had sampled thus far had been adjudged 'nice', but 'not real cheese' and 'more like cream'. But now, Eureka! He'd found the cheesy grail.

'It's because of the schools out here too,' I added to Mum, to prevent her from thinking Maxime bases all his life decisions solely on dairy products.

Our two eldest kids had been attending the local state primary school and the contrast with their school in France could not have been starker. I thought back to snowy evenings in France, when I would pick up our six year old after a long day (8.15 to 4.15), asking about her day, what she'd played at lunchtime.

'We don't play, Maman,' Chloé'd said once. 'There isn't play equipment. And we're not allowed to get our clothes dirty.'

I was astonished.

'Well, what do you do then?'

'We sit and talk.'

I pictured all these children sitting about at playtime, discussing like mini Jean-Paul Sartres at a Left Bank café.

And then there was the evening Chloé was in floods of tears because she had red crosses in her book because she had lost her pen.

'Your pen?!' I'd said. 'That's no big deal. Here, have one of mine,' and I gave her a biro.

'No no!' she'd wailed. 'Un stylo à encre.'

'A fountain pen! You've got to be kidding me! They went out with Dickens, for Christ's sake!' I turned on Maxime accusingly, 'Did you use a fountain pen at school?'

'Yes,' he said mildly.

So it was I'd discovered the French school system had not evolved since Napoleon. And I saw my first fountain pen (eventually). Forget pen licences, five and six year old froglets were were writing in flowery cursive script in ink.

During the Australian sabbatical, Chloé and Elise had been having to learn to print their letters separately with a pencil while they made amusing spelling mistakes, like spelling 'sheep' as 'chip'. But they'd also been saying a lot of things like, 'Mummy, I love school here.'

'Yes,'  Maxime now concurred to Mum, 'there are lots of things specially adapted for children here. The lifestyle suits them well.'

But just quietly, I think the main reason he agreed to move was the cheese.

And so we relocated to Melbourne in 2013. The kids can now spell 'sheep' with reasonable reliability and every month or so a little refrigerated parcel arrives at our door from a small Island off Tasmania.

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P.S., here's the link to the cheese website, for cheese lovers.

http://www.brunyislandcheese.com.au/