Behind The Scenes Of A Crowdfunding Campaign - A Frog's Eye View

I feel like I owe my regular readership – or perhaps, what was my regular readership – this apologist post. Even though food and wine and Frenchness may not feature (much). 

I had to take a break from blogging in recent weeks because my intellectual and emotional resources were all-consumed by the crowdfunding project I was involved in. In fact, my French husband Maxime also found himself being sucked into the crowdfunding vortex with me, despite the fact that only one of us had been hired to do it and he had a day job. Nevertheless, every day for two months, he'd monitor the campaign page to see how much we’d raised and give me ‘help’, Maxime style.

It all started when I was contacted by some local Melbourne innovators some months ago. They were not social media savvy and needed help to promote a campaign to fund a clinical trial of a new potential therapy for chronic tinnitus. My first response was, ‘what on earth is chronic tinnitus?’ Then, when it was explained to me, I thought about the temporary ringing in the ears we all experience from time to time and thought: but what if that ringing never STOPS? If you can never escape it? And the penny dropped – it must be terrible. I mean, even our three year old stops crying sometimes. So I got on board with the project.

What’s more, once I began to talk about it, heaps of friends and family began to ‘come out’ and confess that they suffered from tinnitus. I was almost hurt. ‘But you never TOLD me!’ I would say to them. I felt as if they’d been keeping a huge secret from me - as if they had a secret identity and were in fact a goat.

And so I learnt about tinnitus and beavered away on Twitter, Facebook and traditional media. I even created a flyer for the campaign in French, to be pinned up at various places in France which we would be visiting. We weren't going to France for the campaign (the sort of campaign that can afford that doesn't need crowdfunding), it was because Maxime had to go to Paris for business, and the kids and I tagged along to visit the French family and friends we left behind when me moved to Australia almost two years ago. Maxime was dubious about approaching the French for crowdfuning help, however. They would be way too suspicious of something so new as crowdfunding! But despite Maxime's warnings about the French resistance to newness, I thought sticking up flyers couldn’t hurt. (Besides, didn't the French invent the term avant-garde?)

I soon came to regret making a flyer in French though. I did my best, looking up the French for tinnitus (les acouphènes, would you believe), and asked Maxime to print off a few copies while I went to check the dinner.

'You mean print a few copies and correct it,' came Maxime's reply. 'Who wrote this? The French is a catastrophie.'

'Uh ... me,' I said.

He threw up his hands as if to say ‘but of course’. Maxime then sat at the computer for the next hour, composing an impossibly wordy but probably quite beautiful version of the French flyer.

'People have about three seconds to read this, Maxime,' I said to him. 'This is a flyer. We can’t give them something the length of a novel by Proust, no matter how well-crafted the French.'

This is not to say that writing the English version of the flyer was any easier. 

'You can’t talk about 'feedback loops',' said Maxime. 'It’s got to be understandable by simple people - like real estate agents.'

I don’t know what Maxime has against real estate agents. But I insisted on keeping some science-y stuff – people like to feel they’re helping advance science, I thought (although apparently they don’t generally like it enough to actually go to their computer, look up your website and enter a really long credit card number).

For all his criticism, constructive and otherwise, Maxime did write to people on behalf of the campaign, and the French ended up being the second largest group of supporters after the Australians. You see, Maxime, having the Frenchman’s seemingly inborn knowledge that he’s absolutely terrific, had no issues with writing to people to ask for contributions. But for me, writing and sending emails to contacts asking for help was the mental equivalent of a really long Chinese burn. For some reason, I was afraid people would write back and say ‘I hate you forever for asking me to give money’. I was actually surprised (and hey, relieved) when instead of ‘bugger off’, people replied ‘OK’. Of course, Maxime could have pointed out how silly I was being about all this. Which is why I didn’t tell him.

And, unlike Maxime, I didn’t feel I could ask people for help without giving something in return. The only carrot I had was to invite people a party where I would could place before them my traditional buffet of Too Much Food. As an added bonus, they would get to drink Maxime’s wine (another thing on my list of stuff not to mention to him).

In the end, we raised over 5000 dollars, which, although short of the target, is apparently not TOO bad when you have nothing to sell and contributions aren’t tax deductable. I'd seen that

not even Maxime's flowery French would get us to our target when it was clear that tinnitus organisations wouldn’t help out, not even with a measly re-tweet or two, (though wishing us well), since this was not a not-for-profit exercise. At that point, I realised we were pushing a rather large amount of faeces up a very large hill. Now, other avenues must be explored to fund the tinnitus trial. Or, as Maxime pointed out, we could run the campaign again, and do it properly this time (i.e., listen to him more).

At least the crowdfunding campaign gave me an excuse to have a party. And, after the hordes had left the party and the empties had been put in the recycling, Maxime had an excuse to go out and buy more wine.

Is it Possible to Have a Buddhist Holiday in France?

You would think that my French husband Maxime would be overjoyed to be going back to France. Three weeks revelling in Bordeaux wines, truffled foie gras and other froggy delights! But in fact, he's a bit nervous.

Since he took up his new health regime, Maxime has replaced his formerly favourite breakfast of chocolate sandwich (yes, really - chocolate in bread - instant croissant au chocolat!) with ... rice bran smoothies. He has shunned wine in favour of filtered water or cider on special occasions. He used to say he lived to eat, and now he trots out pseudo-Buddhist maxims about keeping things in balance. I feel like I'm living with a yogi. Or maybe Yogi Bear.

But in France, such temperance - ça ne va pas!

'My friends are used to me living a little differently,' he told Mum ruefully the other day. 

That is, opening champagne at 10 in the morning, ordering steak for dessert and dancing with his glass of wine instead of me at weddings.

'I'm not sure what will happen to my weight,' he said.

Hmm, I think I could have a stab at that one.

So which Maxime will our French friends great when we get off the plane tomorrow? The low-alcohol Amazing Ciderman or the Wine Lord? My money's on the latter - the temptation of ripe brie and baguette, pommes de terre sautés, confit de canard, a glass or five of Vieux Telegraphe ... not even Buddha could say no!

Let's wait and see. The next post from Alsace, France!

Lunch is No Déjeuner Downunder

One of the prickliest issues between my French husband and Maxime and I is … lunch.

What do YOU have for lunch? Perhaps it’s leftovers from home heated up in the company microwave? A souvlaki from the takeaway round the corner? A sandwich? As a student at uni, before I left for Europe, I used to have a Vegemite sandwich for lunch each day. (Vegemite, for those who don’t know, is a black lunch spread made from the leftovers of beer-making). I thought my sandwiches were quite acceptable and savoured every salty morsel.

But …

Maxime grew up in France, where kids have a cooked three course meal, starring such ingredients as foie gras and duck confit, served to them at school each day. At home, lunch is cooked as well. At work as an adult in France, Maxime enjoyed three course lunches at the work canteen, or a restaurant outing perhaps. A bottle of wine might also be consumed, to celebrate the special occasion of it being lunchtime.

When I first took Maxime on a visit to Australia, we stayed with my parents, and ate with them. We had roast lamb on Saturday nights - all good. Barbeques in the Dandenongs were fine too (well, except that Maxime insisted in peeling the slightly singed skin off his sausages). But Maxime’s eyes popped in disbelief when at 12 each day, my parents would begin assembling pre-sliced bread, Vegemite, peanut butter and margarine. And it didn’t help that he believes margarine is poisonous. ‘But where’s the lunch?’ he’d say.

'Maxime's used to a cooked lunch,' I would explain. I guess I could have offered him toast.

Now that we live in Australia, people become very anxious whenever they are put in a position of needing to provide Maxime with anything to eat. So you can imagine that the cat was really set among the pigeons when I announced that instead of just coming alone as planned, I'd be bringing Maxime along for lunch at my parents' house. My parents had already ensured they had something in stock for me to eat - these days, I have a salad for lunch.

‘We have a pile of leaves for you,' said Mum when I phoned her with the alarming news, 'but what on earth will Maxime eat? We're just having sandwiches.'

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘he’s in Australia now – he has to adapt!’

Then I remembered that so far, Maxime 'adapting' to lunch in Australia had involved either me cooking or (preferably) a restaurant. Nary a sandwich had passed his lips.

At 11 o’clock on the day of the lunch visit, I took Maxime aside.

‘Lunch will powerfully affect your sensibilities,’ I said. ‘You will be asked to make sandwiches for yourself for lunch using brown and black pastes, which are unlikely to be presented as sculpted pyramids and or garnished with truffles.’

I told him I would take to his private parts with a cheesegrater if he breathed so much as a syllable.

And so we arrived at 12 to find Dad setting out the spreads and breads. He’d anticipated Maxime’s reaction.

‘You need adulterated food to keep your immune system in shape,’ he smiled.

‘Hmm,’ said Maxime, surveying the table doubtfully.

He opted for things that bore some resemblance to what he calls food – ham and cheese, even though the ham was suspiciously uniform in colour and texture and the cheese was hard and didn’t smell of sock like his preferred French fromages.

I winced and waited for Maxime to trot out his usual lines about the cheese ‘not being cheese’. But in the end I was proud of him, because he was good enough to wait until we were in the car on the way home to ask if I thought there may have been asbestos filaments in his cheese.

'It had this stringy texture,' he explained.

Of all the things he could have said about supermarket cheese, a resemblance to asbestos is not one I saw coming.

'But was it good?' I asked.

'No.'

'Oh.'

But in the end, Maxime still got a cooked lunch. In a moment of inspired genius, Dad boiled him an egg!

Blog-i-day

Dear readers,

The whole family have some sort of bug so I'm taking a short holiday/blog-i-day.

The Frog has the man flu which is bad enough, but I have the woman flu, which is worse - because you can't lie on the couch like a corpse - you have to keep on keeping on (and besides, the kids will jump on you).

Wishing you all a great weekend et à bientot!

Kate.

What Sort of Wine Deserves a Medal?

When we lived in France, I did a wine course, as I recounted in an earlier post. Not only that, but I topped the wine exam at the end, beating all the frogs – a fact which is a constant source of satisfaction to me, especially the fact that I did better than my French wine-expert husband Maxime. 

But the story doesn’t end there: having done well in the exam, I was invited to go to Colmar to be a judge at of the latest Alsace vintage. It was to be one of those events where they award those little medal stickers you see on some bottles in the supermarket. How exciting! I thought. But I was too shy to ring up and accept the invitation in French. I decided to make Maxime do it for me.

Of course, he had no problem making the call for me. In fact, he seemed strangely eager to do it. 

After Maxime made the call, he got off the phone and said, ‘Yes, it’s fine – you’ll be judging Riesling and I’ll be judging Crémant.’

‘What do you mean you’ll be judging Crémant? YOU didn’t get invited!’ I said indignantly. 

What’s more Crémant was MY favourite wine! How come Maxime got to be the Crémant judge?

‘I asked if I could be a judge too, since I also did that course. And they said yes.’

No wonder he’d been so keen to do the call. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I said.

Actually I could. Maxime has more front than Myers. This is a man who talked his way into a private tasting with Didier Dagenau (when he was still alive) and inveigled himself into being invited to Vinexpo.

Awarding a medal to my nightly drop

The judging day began at 9 in the morning, in a great barn-like exhibition building in Colmar, capital of South Alsace. An old wine official bloke began proceedings by giving the assembled judges (there were actually dozens of us) a briefing. We were meant to award wines that reflect what is typical of Alsace, and of the grape variety, so that the consumer would get an idea of what ‘Alsace’ should taste like. To some winemakers, this is an anathema. What should be celebrated is the individual terroir (that mystical term encompassing climate, soil, topography etc. of an area of land) and the variety of taste you can have thanks to each terroir’s uniqueness. You should not be trying to produce some sort of common denominator wine! As one Alsatian winemaker complained to me once ‘they want us to make wine which is typical. But which typical is that?!’

It seemed I was going to work for the Dark Side of the Force.

After being given our instructions, we went to our tables. I sat at the ‘Riesling table’ with two other judges, who were both Alsatian winemakers. It made my head spin to think that when I’d first come to France, I didn’t even know that Riesling was grown in Alsace. My knowledge of Riesling back then had been based on encounters with four litre cardboard casks of ‘Rhine’ Rieslings back in Australia, labelled Kaiserstühl or some such. Now I was to judge real Riesling from out of a bottle instead of a cardboard box (and the real Kaiserstühl was just up the road). 

The two winemakers and I had nine Rieslings from the year before to rank and one reference wine that was meant to illustrate what the powers that be deemed to be ‘typical’ Alsace Riesling taste. The samples are tasted very young – as the tasting went on, it began to feel as though the acid was stripping all the skin off my lips and my teeth felt strangely furry. It did not at all turn out to be as much fun as I thought it would be. Especially since only some winemakers submit their wines for medal awards and the top winemakers tend not to. They don’t need a little medal sticker to sell their wine. My fellow judges and I sipped our wine tentatively, and the winemakers looked at one another in dismay and made ‘pfff’ sounds. They didn’t want to give a medal to any of the wines. But award we must.

Maxime, on the other hand, seemed to be having a fine old time on the Crémant table. He and the others at his table were laughing and rosy-cheeked.

‘This is actually quite good – taste this,’ Maxime said, handing me a glass as I approached.

Bastard! I thought. He not only bloody muscles in on my wine judging debut and scores a spot on the Crémant table but he gets decent wine!

Of course, Maxime didn’t really need to be appointed a wine judge. He is one naturally. And no one is safe from his pronouncements. Now that we live in Australia, not even the Australian Prime Minister is safe. Upon reading an article on the contents of Mr. Abbott’s wine cellar, Maxime adjudged it to be ‘the cellar of a yobbo’. And as I’ve said before, wine rules Maxime’s politics. So the PM should be thankful that he can’t vote in Australia! 

Yet. 

Maxime plans to get citizenship ASAP so he can vote for someone who appreciates Clonakilla Shiraz Vigonier.

Mind you, Aussie wine critic Jeremy Oliver can dish it out almost as harshly as Maxime. I particularly love the bit in the article where he says that in the PM’s cellar, ‘the only Riesling listed is from Margaret River, where it should be classified as a weed.’ 

Can you imagine having dinner with a pair of wine critics like that!? Actually, it’s probably better not to.

Can the French Play Footy?

It doesn’t seem to have had much publicity, but nonetheless, the International Aussie Rules Cup is on at the moment in Melbourne. The important thing from my French husband Maxime’s point of view is that it provides yet another excuse to hang out with his fellow frogs. Thus it was that last Sunday, we trekked up to Royal Park to watch France versus Britain. I was looking forward to a fierce fight fuelled by the traditional French-English rivalry. Last year, England beat France in the final of the Euro Aussie Rules Cup, so what with that and Waterloo, the French should have been keen for revenge.

We arrived a little late, and Maxime headed off in search of nourishment in the form of woodfired pizza (such are his priorities). It was almost quarter time when he returned.

‘Where’s France’s score?’ Maxime asked as he approached with the only slice of pizza which had survived the journey back from the pizza van.

‘Where’s France’s score’ effectively summed things up.

‘There isn’t one,’ I said. ‘But, I mean, they don’t stand a chance. The French players are all microcscopic.’

The Brits towered over the Frogs, easily outmarking them (not that the marking was great, I have to say), and brushing them off with relative ease. With the average French player being the size of Napoleon, the game was rapidly turning into another Waterloo. (Les Coqs versus the Bulldogs. Seriously, who would you predict to win a fight between dogs and chooks?)

Napoleon and Asterix take the field for France

‘The French seem hesitant,’ said Maxime.

I’d be hesitant too if I was 4 foot nothing and playing on a yeti.

‘Look, there’s Asterix!’ said Maxime next, spotting a small blond French player we’d met at the meet-and-greet the week before.

‘They don’t need Asterix, they need Obelix!’ I said. ‘Where’s the magic potion? Give the man some supplements!’

By the last quarter, France were yet to score a goal. Nevertheless, a crowd of perhaps 70 French watched the game through to the bitter end. Not that the French supporters provided much in the way of actual support. They were the most silent footy crowd I’d ever stood with, muttering the occasional ‘ah merde!’ or ‘ce n’est pas vrai’ or ‘Oh prostitute’. The only vocal member of the crowd was an Aussie bloke, who would periodically yell ‘man up, France!’ I’m not sure the French understood what this meant. At any rate, they certainly didn’t do it.

France's end. Which about sums it up.

The final score was 88 to 7, with France’s only goal kicked just before the final siren (which I missed it because I’d chosen that moment to go to the toilet. Maybe should have gone more often!)

Today there might be a chance for France to score a win. France takes on the Indonesia garudas, who were comprehensively squished by tiny Nauru (227-7) and Fiji (208-0). According to Wikipedia, a garuda is a ‘large mythical bird’. So there’s definitely hope for France – Indonesia are birds too. What’s more they don’t even exist. Allez, les Coqs!

Can a Frenchman Love Footy?

Honestly, sometimes I think we're still in France. My French husband Maxime tends to organise our social outings and they involve one (or preferably both) of the following elements:

1. Food

2. French people

But last night's food-and-French-people outing at least had an additional element to interest me - Aussie Rules!

It was the meet-and-greet with the French Aussie Rules team, over from France to contest the International Cup in Melbourne. Over 300 French expats were expected to come along, and maybe the police got wind of it, because the venue was flanked with booze buses. Maxime was even breath-tested on the way in (maybe they also caught wind of his form when it comes to wine). But the police were out of luck - Maxime hadn't had a drop (in fact, the police were keeping him from having some drops). Billy Brownless may have stubbies rolling around in his car (as he announced on Triple M's Rush Hour), but our car is, sadly, a dry area.

As we entered the venue, the French football team was busy giving a rendition of the Marseillaise. So in true footy spirit, I sang 'We Are the Boys From Old Fitzroy' (OK, it was really just to annoy Maxime by messing up his anthem). Then the players introduced themselves to the assembled French expat masses. (We learned that the players included one with the nickname of Asterix, which means the opposition will need to look out for rovers on supplements.) As I listened to the player introductions, I looked about me and noted from the banners that the French team had chosen the name of 'the Coqs' (roosters). A little foolhardy for a competition in Australia, I thought. At any rate, I'm not sure I'll be shouting 'up the Coqs!' when I see them play ...

Singing the Marseillaise

French footy was actually born in Maxime's home region of Alsace. Maxime didn't start it, of course. But he did come across the Alsatian footy team when we lived in France. He had been surfing the net to find information on the microscopic size of Aussie footballers' ... shorts. (Such are the things Maxime looks up on the net). Instead of short footy shorts, he found a footy team - the 'Strasbourg Kangourous', just up the road from us in Alsace, and started by one Marc Jund. Back in the 80s, a couple of games of Aussie Rules were televised in France, and Marc had seen them. Probably it was a slip-up - the network probably meant to show some weird European winter sport involving someone going down a slide in sub zero temperatures dressed in Lycra. Be that as it may, Marc had been hooked and decided to start his own Aussie Rules club. He sought help from the AFL, and received a couple of footies and the rules in English. Which no one spoke. So much for that then, you might think.

Not at all! The dogged Strasbourgeois kept up their club. They did their best trying to nut out the game, watching all the footy replays they could get their hands on. More than ten years later when Maxime and I visited the Strasbourg team, they still hadn't worked out how to bounce the ball. (And so I showed them. 'Ah!' they said, fascinated as though I'd just performed an arcane act.)

And so it was that footy gradually caught on in France despite considerable odds and the inability to drop punt. The reason it does survive in France and other countries in Europe is down to European footy players who are not so much footy mad as footy insane. Like a Czech tigers fan I ran into in Europe whose entire house is festooned in black and gold. 

Last night, I met a case in point: as the French footy meet-and-greet evening wound down, and les Coqs became les Coqs au vin, I was introduced to a tall Toulousien at the bar named Gregoire Patacq. I asked whether his club, the Toulouse Hawks, had had any support from the AFL (some rules in English, perhaps). No, seemed to be the answer.

'When Demetriou said the AFL wasn't interested in expanding the game, I was devastated,' said Gregoire. 'I'd had a hard week at work and then that. It was really tough.'

'Did he really say that?' I said. 'I seem to remember someone telling me the AFL were practically throwing money at the middle east in order to get them to take it up.'

Then I added a few sympathetic things about things not being fair even in Australia - about how poor old Tassie doesn't ever get an AFL team, for instance (despite actually wanting one).

'Well,' said Gregoire defiantly, 'we still have footy. And we're not giving it up!' 

And I understood that if any football authority ever tried prevent them from playing it, the French would be up on the barricades. The French are always so passionate about things. But who would have thought one of those 'things' would be footy? 

Fantastic.