When Should You Lie To Your Husband?

Is it ever appropriate to lie to your partner? 

Yes: when he’s a French cleaning maniac.

For instance, when I’m cooking, my French husband Maxime will often appear at my shoulder, and ask me a loaded question such as: 'did you wash that pot? It doesn't look very clean!' or ‘where did you buy that meat?’ or ‘is it meant to have that uncooked texture?'

Lie, lie, always lie (and then banish your husband from the kitchen). White lies are your friends. This is my maxim for Maxime, and it helps me to refrain from strangling him.

I learnt the inestimable value of the white lie the (very) hard way, however. I went through years of domestic discord with Maxime in France: there are all sorts of aspects to cleaning I had been blissfully unaware of until I met him - and they are all aspects to which he attaches critical importance. For instance, Maxime is very particular about the washing, sorting clothes into five separate piles to be washed at different temperatures and speeds. I had never heard of anyone doing that before, and in a moment of madness, I amalgamated two of Maxime’s piles to wash. Worse, when he asked if that’s what I had done, I was honest and confessed. Oh, the histrionics that followed! Maxime squawked with outrage and disbelief and flapped his arms as if he was doing a seagull impression. Then he lectured me extensively about washing machines (a topic in which I have only minimal interest), every now and again bursting out with exclamations like ‘I can’t believe you did that!’ and finally finished with a series of dramatic sighs that would’ve done a Bell Shakespeare actor proud.

Although I have to say I was not altogether unhappy with the final outcome: I was promptly sacked as clothes washer.

Nevertheless, it would have saved a great deal of heartache (and time) if I’d just said ‘of course I washed your five piles of clothes separately, Maxime.’ But as I've said, it took me a while to learn my lesson, and my domestic misery after Washing-machine-gate continued:

I thought I would be safe doing the dishes. I mean, we have a dishwasher and I don’t have to wash dishes myself! But no. When a piece broke off our salad bowl, I glued it back on and continued to use the bowl as normal – and wash it as normal. One day, Maxime saw me unloading the dishwasher. The salad bowl was on the bench nearby, looking suspiciously like it had been recently unloaded.

 'Did you put the salad bowl in the dishwasher?' Maxime shrieked.

‘Yes,' I said (stupidly).

'No wonder it broke.'

'But that’s not how it broke!'

'Yes it was. It broke due to accumulated stress,' said Maxime.

I know how it feels, I thought.

Then Maxime gave me a series of complicated instructions about dishwashers which I would henceforth forget.

But the question I really wish I’d lied about was when Maxime said, ‘Do you know how to iron?’

A very contentious object

‘Yes,’ I said, and plunged into a reverie about ironing handkerchiefs while watching the cricket back home in Australia.

'I don’t know how to iron,’ said Maxime. ‘Could you iron this shirt for me please?’

‘Oh, OK.’

A little while later, I brought the ironed shirt in to him.

‘Oh,’ he said (instead of thank you), and he gave the shirt a puzzled frown. ‘So … for you, that’s ironed?’

I made it clear from now on he could learn to iron himself or employ an ironing lady, or I would iron his face. After all, we were both working full time, and I did the cooking, which thanks to a certain frog was far more work than it needed to be (I'll deal with that issue in another post).

The cleaning crises got to the point where a visiting friend said he thought that if we didn’t hire a cleaning lady, we’d break up. I thought it would be a bit foolish to break up over a sponge, and so I began to think about it. Especially since Maxime was saying with increasing frequency that 'the house looks like nothing'.  Maxime often talks about stuff being invisible. I know by now that if something’s invisible, it’s bad. I did clean the house of course, but as you can imagine, my efforts at cleaning were not up to scratch - I used the wrong product with the wrong sponge on the wrong surface (my crimes were legion). But when Maxime cleaned anything himself, it would take the whole day, with him emitting more of those angry squawks or long-suffering sighs. I couldn’t bear it.

Eventually we trialled a cleaning lady and I thought we were saved. Wrong. After the cleaning lady had finished, Maxime was even fuller of complaints than when I cleaned the house (I could be seen leaping for joy in the background. I wasn't the worst cleaner in the world after all!).

'I could clean better myself,' Maxime concluded after a tour of the house.

'Yes but you don’t, that’s the point.' I said.

'It seems to me that the cleaning lady doesn’t have a sense of vocation - she’s not dedicated.'

'Er, Maxime, how many people do you think say they want to be a cleaner when they grow up? I hate to break it to you, but we are not going to find someone with a PhD in cleaning.'

Thus the cleaning lady solution fell through. But Maxime and I are still together. How did we manage it? Well, for one, Maxime, due to the sheer exhaustion of having to maintain his level of cleaning rage has sort of burnt out. He’s lowered his standards and allows me to vacuum. As for me, I learnt the value of the white lie of course. Now if Maxime asks if I know how to wash cars, for instance, I say no. (It’s remarkable, the number of things I suddenly don’t know how to clean.) I don’t know how to sew on buttons (actually that’s true) or darn socks and, if I hadn’t been sacked as clothes washer, I would tell Maxime that I always always sort the washing into five piles. The result is that Maxime and I now live in semi-messy domestic harmony.

Except for the day I got a particular email from Mum. ‘Maxime’s parents say they do his ironing for him,’ she wrote. ‘They are wondering why you don’t do it?’

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Hollande Causes an Upset

It appears Président Hollande has grand plans for merging regions, such as Alsace with Lorraine (and Champagne-Ardennes too perhaps).

'Alsace has nothing in common with Lorraine!' My French husband Maxime cried when he heard. 'Hollande is trying to destroy our culture!'

This is all salt in a longstanding wound for Maxime: the rest of France seems not to understand Alsace very well, from what he says, and nothing is apt to drive him out of his tree so much as when French politicians lump Alsace together with Lorraine. 

'It's because the politicians don't know their history. They think the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine!' Maxime will shout (referring to the German occupation of 1870-1914). 'It was Alsace-Moselle that was occupied, not Lorraine!'

The first time Maxime shouted this, I rather cluelessly said, 'Isn’t Moselle in Germany?'

(And he still married me despite this!)

'Moselle is a département of Lorraine. But the rest of the Lorraine was not occupied,’ he explained.

To be honest, (which I luckily wasn’t), as an Australian, I was still coming to terms with the fact that Lorraine was a place and not just a quiche.You would think that the Moselle was a purely French river from the way Maxime spoke of it. I subsequently rushed to Wikipedia just to check that The Moselle River flows into Germany too. It does, of course, and many fine Rieslings are made there, but for the sake of domestic harmony we try not to mention this.

And what is worse about this whole merging of regions is that Maxime suspects Hollande of wanting to copy the Germans. Like many Alsatians, Maxime is rather sensitive about the German thing: the history of the Alsace is perhaps best summed up in the joke by the Alsatian cartoonist Tomi Ungerer:

Q. Why is Alsace like a toilet?

          

A. It’s always occupied.

The history of the region is often sad. Alsace was decimated during the thirty years war, and in 1870, it was the Prussians’ turn to invade. They didn’t quite see themselves as invading though. On entering Alsace, they assumed they would be welcomed as liberators by their 'German' brothers. The Alsatians unfortunately didn’t share this point of view:  the people of Alsace may not have been French for long (since Louis XIV or Napoleon’s time depending on the town), but they weren’t German either. They were Alsatian, having previously been largely independent as part of the loosely bound hotch potch that was the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans kept at it and forbade the speaking of French, and forced the Alsatians to fight as Germans in the wars. These soldiers were called the ‘malgré nous’, fighting the Allies ‘despite ourselves’, since it was made clear to them that their family back home would suffer if they did not comply.

So you can imagine how incensed Maxime gets when the French, even worse than lumping Alsace in with Lorraine, lump them in with Germany! 

The French misunderstanding of Alsace was illustrated to me by a Vietnamese lady we met when we were living in France, who told us how she’d come to Paris as a refugee. Trouble was, she didn’t warm to Paris. Being from the country, she wanted to seek out a more pastoral corner of France, and putting her finger randomly on a map of France, she hit Colmar, capital of Southern Alsace.

'Oh la la!'  the Parisians had cried, 'you can’t go there! They don’t speak French!'

'That’s OK,' she replied, 'neither do I!'

                                                                              

A couple of weeks later, she got off the train to find she had debunked a Parisian myth - the Alsatians all addressed her in French. Oops. 

Perhaps it's best not to ask Hollande what language he thinks they speak in Alsace while Maxime is in earshot - just in case!

What Does a Frenchman Love More Than Wine and Cheese?

So, what does a Frenchman love more than wine and cheese?

French. Yep, a Frenchman literally loves to hear himself speak. Which is all very well - the problems set in when he hears someone else speak French.

On Saturday night, I watched a Spicks and Specks rerun with our daughter Chloé, who is 9 years old and a native French speaker. We'd have a nice, peaceful evening in front of the telly, I thought. Wrongly.

‘Who wrote the music for the opera “Carmen”?’ asked quiz host Adam Hills.

‘Bizet,’ someone probably famous replied.

‘Georges Bizet,’ confirmed Adam Hills.

Chloé was incensed: 'They got it wrong!'

'No they didn’t,' I said

'Yes they did, Mummy! Adam Hills said it wrong! That’s not the answer. He didn’t say it properly.’

Chloé was gesticulating at the TV in a small person version of Gallic outrage. ‘It’s Georges Bizet!’ she cried, saying Georges with a big and throaty ‘r’.

'Oh for goodness' sake, you're as bad as your bloody dad!' I laughed. 

I don't usually refer to my French husband Maxime as 'bloody', but I did have some reason to feel a bit miffed with him. Earlier that day, I'd gotten an email from the conductor of a choir I'm in, asking if I could make a recording of the lyrics of some French songs we’d be singing, so that the other choir members could hear the correct pronunciation. Hmm, I thought. I do speak French, but was it good enough? I sought out Maxime.

‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said to him. ‘I mean, my pronunciation isn’t the best.’

(My 'r's are not so much rolled as stationary.)

‘Oh yes, your pronunciation is terrible!’ said Maxime. ‘I don’t understand why it’s so bad.’

Ouch. Why do Frenchmen have to be so bloody honest? (I’ll tackle this issue in my next post.) Well, at least things were clear: Maxime would do the recording of the French for the choir instead of me. I rang the conductor and told her.

‘But you don’t need to bother your husband. I’m sure you’ll do it fine,’ said the conductor.

‘Well, it's just that Maxime thinks I might not do it up to his standards. It’s better if he does it. Otherwise, when he sees the concert – ’

‘Ah! He’ll say it wasn’t up to scratch and it’ll be your fault!’

‘Exactly!’

He would have seen me as the perpetrator of an en masse, public mauling of his beloved language.

At least I can pronounce half of this book ...

So the lyrics issue was sorted. And even if Maxime was harsh, at least Chloé hasn't criticised my French yet - she seems to save that for other people (and TV personalities). In fact it’s really not advisable to try out your rusty French on our French kids. When visitors do try, the kids usually burst out laughing, much to the surprise and bruised pride of the visitor.

‘Well, I didn’t think I was that bad,’ said a rather miffed Aunt on one such occasion.

On another day, a friend foolishly said something about an ‘arbre vert’, beaming with pride at having fished out the words for ‘green tree’ from a dusty corner of his memory.

‘No, no!’ said Chloé. ‘Not Abwe vair. Arrrrbrrrre vairrrrrrr.’ The friend was then made to practice saying ‘arbre vert’ until Chloé finally ran out of patience. ‘You’re still not saying it right. You must say the French “r”. Not the English one. The “r” in English is pronounced “w”,' Chloé informed our friend, who was beginning to look very confused. 

(Our flimsy Australian 'r's sound like 'w's to Chloé. It took me an age to get Chloe to say three instead of fwee. 'Come on, Chloé, you can say '“r”,' I'd said. 'I'm the one who can't say “r”!' Now Chloé says thrrrrrrrrrrrrrree.)

The French believe in speaking languages with absolute correctness. Which, incidentally, is why they don’t like speaking other languages. (See 'Les Français sont vraiment nul en anglais' The French are Really Bad at English). They want to be able to do it well, or not at all. This also means that Maxime has been quite stressed over the kids’ French, and whether it will deteriorate now we’re in Australia. ‘I want the kids to speak correct French. I don’t want them to be laughed at,’ he says. Hmm, so it’s normal for the French to laugh at people for messing up French then? I only got laughed at the once when we lived in France, and I had thought that the bloke who had laughed at me was rude (and annoying). Maybe he was normal? I’d been applying for French citizenship, and a flunky behind a desk called me in to see him. As we went through my application, my accent and choice of words amused the guy no end. He would repeat them to himself and giggle. He even called his secretary in for a listen, for God’s sake. I should do shows, I thought.

When I actually got granted French citizenship, I felt like such a fraud. And I sounded it too. Not good when you’re stopped by the police for cutting a corner while driving:

'Your documents, please,' the police asked me, in French.

I started extracting cards from my bag: 'Oops, not that one, oops, not that ...'

The gendarmes regarded me with curiosity as cards of various hues and nationalities flicked before their eyes.

'Voilà,' I said finally and handed over my ID.

'Vous-êtes Australienne, Madame?'

'Oui. Oh wait - et Française.'

'Française?!' (With that accent? I could see them thinking.)

Oh no, they’re going to revoke my citizenship because I speak crap French! I thought. But they didn’t revoke it. They even let me go with just a warning. Although, now I come to think of it … they laughed.
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Men are from Mars, Frenchmen Are From Venus? Gender Stereotyping in France vs. Australia

Last night, at a dinner with French expat women put on by Melbourne Accueil, one of the women commented that, 'In Australia, the men are super macho, like Italians. Men never want to speak to me. They don’t flirt with me, like men in the workplace in France would.' This got me thinking about gender in France and Oz. How does my French husband Maxime come across in Australia, for instance? For a start, his name doesn't help him pretend to be a 'super macho' Aussie:


‘Hello, is Max there please?’ a voice on the phone asked me one day.

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Max,’ the voice said.

‘I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name,’ I said. ‘Oh, wait a minute! That’s my husband!’

I’m glad to say this embarrassing exchange only happened the once, although I still do a double take when anyone calls Maxime ‘Max’. Maxime has introduced himself to some people as Max because he has gotten sick of being called a girl – he’d receive letters addressed to Maxine with the title ‘Mrs.’ And I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say, ‘It’s not MaxiNe, it’s MaxiMe. I know it has an ‘e’ on the end but he’s still not a girl.’ Which is why Maxime sometimes finds it simpler to tell people his name is Max.

But some might think the girly charge justified. I mean, what self-respecting, appropriately hirsute bloke goes to the footy and drinks pear cider? (See The Frog and the Footy) What kind of man likes going to the ballet, is happy to eat quiche and goes into a pub and orders a glass of pink moscato? A Frenchman. Or, more specifically, my Frenchman. I should point out, though, that I have not the smallest issue with the above, and neither does he.

But since we’ve moved to Australia, I’ve become aware of male stereotypes again, having completely forgotten them in France. The blokey and jokey stereotype of the Aussie male. And it’s made me realise that the taboos on men here are really quite broad. Like the taboos on women in France. Allow me to digress:

In France, it seemed to me that beauty was a woman’s highest attribute. I got this impression from the way French women starved themselves to be thin (literally. Frenchwomen don’t get fat because they don’t eat, I don’t care what that French Women Don’t Get Fat book says. I've watched countless gaunt, hollow-cheeked hostesses not eat their own meals, on the pretext of being too busy serving them.) And there's the way Frenchwomen dress – immaculate; feminine; lots of makeup. There were other little things like the fact that at dinner, only men were allowed to pour wine and women had strictly no interest in sport. But what brought home the narrowness of the stereotype and the central importance of beauty was what happened to me during pregnancy: 

Maxime thought my gyny was great because she was French (my previous one had been Swiss). I thought she was less great because she said I had put on too much weight during my pregnancy. I was scolded until I wondered whether we had mistakenly gone to an obesity clinic. How fitting that I originally took the French word ‘grossesse’ to mean fatness instead of pregnancy. Then the doctor gave me a pregnancy pack which told me all about how to keep myself as beautiful as possible with the application of a battalion of creams. All of this was a bit unsettling. Wasn’t it meant to be about having a baby, somewhere along the line? I didn’t really consider my appearance to be of much importance at this juncture. All this relates, I later read, to the French female’s lack of self-confidence. Her sense of self-worth plummets if not propped up with a few creams and slimming teas ‘minceur’.

‘Frenchwomen are not comfortable with their bodies,’ had been Maxime’s analysis.

(I decided I wouldn’t question him too deeply on his experience in this area.)

French men, on the other hand, seemed to be free to behave as they liked. They could eat and drink what they liked and lots of it, and could dance and hate sport with impunity. And at parties, men and women mixed, whereas in Oz – something I’d also forgotten in the years away – men tend to seek out other blokes and women talk to women. Maxime doesn't want to hang with the blokes - he says he often prefers to talk to women. No wonder Frenchmen have a certain reputation with us Anglo Saxons!

Happily, the stereotypes have posed no real problem to us. Maxime blithely tramples Aussie male taboos here, and I steadfastly ignored female French taboos in France (i.e., continued to stuff my face when pregnant). And it was fine … except that my in-laws thought I was some sort of barbarian. Maxime hasn't suffered here either so far, despite his girly drinking habits. The only issue is that my brother-in-law is terrified Maxime will kiss him. Maxime gives my father a kiss on each cheek to say hello each time he sees him, after which he loves to walk up to the brother-in-law with a big grin on his face.

‘Don’t you want to give Maxime a kiss?’ I'll ask my brother-in-law with a smile.

The brother-in-law will then put up his hands and back away, saying, ‘No no no! I’m good, thanks, Max.’

Ah well. In Australia, maybe Maxime will have to stick to kissing women. I don’t think he’ll really mind.
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The Frog and the 2014 Budget: Can Your Kids Still Afford Uni if They Speak French?

In order to persuade my French husband Maxime to move to Australia, I plugged Australia incessantly when we lived in France. But before agreeing to move, Maxime told me I had to make a ‘business case’ for it (he tends to use corporate-speak in everyday conversation).

‘I don’t want to be worse off for moving,’ he’d said. 

Oops.

Up the top of my highly sophisticated and thorough ‘business case’ (i.e., excel spreadsheet with two columns: ‘cost in France’ and ‘cost in Oz’), was a comparison in the price of petrol, quickly and persuasively followed by the price of meat. I sneakily left out the price of cheese.

‘What about tax?’ Maxime had asked.

‘Well … we won’t get to divide our taxable income by the number of kids we have, but there is no compulsory social contribution to pay, so tax-wise, maybe we’ll be even?’ I said hopefully. (Except that the social contribution means you get paid 70% of your last salary when you're unemployed. Fingers crossed Maxime's company hangs in there and he never finds out what you get if you're unemployed in Oz!) ‘And health and education are (almost) free, just like in France!’ (I chose to gloss over the Medicare levy and the curiously named ‘HELP’.)

Maxime’d been afraid Australia was like the US, with its shambolic healthcare and education system where you have to take out a mortgage in order to pay for a university degree, starting adult life behind the eight ball.

‘And how about the standard of Australian education?’ Maxime wondered.

‘No worries, we have a great education system!’ I assured him. (I based this opinion on a sample size of one. Me.)

But now everything I said back then has just been turned on its head by the new budget. We are going the way of the US. This means that down the track, the kids may well end up going to uni back in Europe. Which they can do, if they do an International Baccalaureate in year 12. And if they can keep up their French. 

But that’s another issue. Having taken wage cuts to move to Australia, we've had to do our own austere budget and French lessons for the kids were on the block! I hope Maxime makes a good homeschool teacher ...

The Frog Does a Diet: The Amazing Ciderman

Fourteen course degustation menus, brie with truffles, potato gratins and mousses au chocolat are things of the past for my French husband Maxime. Mostly. Along with his new fitness regime, there is Maxime’s new diet, which I alluded to last time (The Frog Becomes a Fitness Freak), and his entourage have been most impressed at how he’s persisted with it.

This has been possible, says the thinning one, because of the move to Australia. He’s a hemisphere away from the old triggers and the old enablers/fellow bon vivants. In France, even the tradies were trouble: like the time a bloke came over  one night after work to discuss renovating our bathroom. I’d let Maxime handle it, due to my lack of French vocab concerning tiling and towel rails. I’m not sure how much bathroom discussing went on, but apparently, it was thirsty work.

‘Maxime!' I said the next morning. ‘You drank FOUR bottles of wine with the bathroom bloke?’

‘How did you know?’ said Maxime, all round-eyed.

‘Er, let’s just say the four empty bottles on the dining room table were a bit of a clue.’

Now, following the dictates of his PT, Maxime has been transformed – he hardly drinks any wine at all. This has had unexpected consequences: when we went out the other night, Maxime shunned red wine and ordered a pear cider, followed by an apple cider and then – OMG! – sparkling moscato.

‘Maxime!’ I said, ‘You’re drinking like a teenage girl! You must be out of practice - you’ve forgotten how to drink like an adult.’

‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so,’ he said, a little embarrassed.

Now, instead of calling him the Wine Lord, I call him the Amazing Ciderman.

Maxime can stick to his new low carb, low fat, low sugar diet, he tells people, because he finds something yummy to eat that’s healthy. Surely, I think to myself, he can’t be referring to his hand-squashed chia seed and cayenne pepper smoothies/lumpies? (‘Muddy puddles’, as two year old Julien calls them in a homage to Peppa Pig.) Or does Maxime mean yummy and healthy like his cupboard full of assorted birdseed and various denominations of chaff? What’s more, despite all those pepper smoothies and delicious psyllium husks, occasionally, Maxime will be tempted by the Dark Side. His parents send him chocolate from France, for instance. He defends this by saying he ‘needs’ a supply of good quality chocolate (i.e., French chocolate. (Michel Cluizel and Bonnat, for example)).

‘Why?’ I ask him.

 ‘Because if I buy Cadburys I have to eat the whole block,’ says Maxime.

‘Huh? Why?’

‘It’s because it’s bad quality.’

I’m still struggling with Maxime’s logic.

‘With good quality chocolate I only need a couple of squares.’

I think hard about this and decide that I think he means that because the chocolateness is so dilute in ‘bad’ chocolate, he needs to eat much more to get a hit.

How many treats does a frog need?

Mystery packs of Tim Tams also appear in the pantry from time to time. And then disappear. But Maxime doesn’t berate himself, knowing that guilt is counterproductive (and not much fun). He thinks the odd blowout is necessary to maintain discipline and thinness the rest of the time. For instance, Maxime announced this morning that he has to be good:

‘I got a bit out of control on the weekend,’ he said. ‘There was a packet of chocolate biscuits at your Dad’s place. And I could see it was from ALDI too, but I couldn’t resist - it was at my hand reach, so I ate the whole packet.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said sympathetically. (Although I think those biscuits were meant for the kids, not Maxime’s stomach.)

‘But I know that I be back into my good habits this week. And I’ve been doing a lot of skipping at work.’ (He keeps a skipping rope in his office.)

So it's all good. Except maybe for Maxime’s colleagues having to listen to the boom boom boom of Maxime’s skipping. Especially since his office is between the CEO and the CFO ...
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The Frog Becomes a Fitness Freak

Given my last post (Aussie Lunch Break, French Breakdown), this one is going to surprise. Because Maxime’s major discovery since coming to Australia is not the restaurant Shoya, not Mount Mary wine, not Bruny Island cheese, not even TimTams, but yoga. Of all the things I expected him to get out of being here, yoga was not one.

He has been swept up in the Australian craze for personal trainers (PT) and bootcamps (though he has yet to be swept up by Aussie fashion - the craze for sleeve tats and bushranger beards. When he had to pick up the kids from school, he came home puzzled, saying, ‘I was the only parent without a tattoo.’ What a rebel!)

Maxime's life-changing moment came on a day trip to Mount Baw Baw (as they do). We were having lunch (no surprises there), when my attention was snagged by a line of spiky rubber mats on the ground near our al fresco dining table. We hadn’t known this, but it was an extreme sports weekend at Baw Baw. We’d just come for the less extreme sport of having lunch and looking at the view. But the thing is, despite my association with a decadent frog, I’m actually a long-time runner, with long–time injuries to match. And I wondered wistfully if a spiky mat might massage various tight muscles. But I’m a shy type, and so I made Maxime (not a shy type, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now) ask the bloke next to the mats about the product.

 It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Maxime purchased a mat right then and there. But not for me, I was chagrined to discover – for him! What did he need a spiky mat for? A digestion aide? Not only that, he made himself an appointment with the mat guy for a PT session the following week (in Melbourne, not Baw Baw).

I just looked Maxime, mouth gaping and a weeny bit cross.

Spiky yoga mat

‘I thought in Australia it would be easier to start a new exercise regime,’ explained Maxime. 

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s the outdoor lifestyle. And it’s easier to eat more healthily. They try to cook healthily in restaurants here. You can have something vegetarian which tastes interesting.’

Well, I knew that in France, vegetables were often soggy and soaked in either oil or butter or cream or all three for good measure and bad arteries, but did Maxime just say vegetarian?! I mean, this is someone who, as we drove through the rolling hills of the Belloc in France, announced that the region was famous for its agneau and said, ‘Mmmm, I can’t wait to eat them!’ as we passed a flock of sheep.

‘OK,’ I said now, ‘but what are you going to use that mat for?’

‘Yoga,’ said Maxime.

‘Yoga on that? God. I guess it would be good for nerve stimulation and stuff, but … ouch!’

But the determined frog did. He yoga-ed all over the place on his bed of rubber nails. He still does training with his Baw Baw PT too, and, to the mystification of colleagues, has begun skipping at work. He has bought a special adult skipping rope (i.e., not pink with tassels) and while his workmates eat their Not Lunches, they can hear ‘pound pound pound’ coming from Maxime’s office.

What's more, where in France, breakfast consisted of croissant au chocolat, now it consists of smoothies. (Everyone these days seems to be eating gruel, as my dad calls it.) Each morning, Maxime mashes up chia seeds and rice bran and various combinations of coconut, turmeric, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, which have special properties, like making you live for ever or something. And Maxime only uses ‘quality products’, because, he says, otherwise the spices taste ‘like nothing’. So he buys a brand called ‘Herbs of Gold’, as in, gold for their marketing department. The only snag is that Maxime has a deep mistrust of our blender’s capabilities, so he makes his smoothies by hand. They are hand squashed, with the result that the smoothies are more like lumpies.

And unfortunately, he always wants me to try a sip.

‘What do you think?’ he asks eagerly.

‘Well, what can I say, Maxime?' I answer. ‘It’s completely foul.’

There’s one last consequence of all this new lifestyle and yoga-ness. Now, whenever the kids roll around on the floor in random fashion, Maxime insists that they are performing the Downward Dog or the Upright Pigeon or the Lopsided Duck or something. Personally I think they look more like a cut snake or a stuck pig.
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