The Elephant Man

I had a day off work on Monday due to a somewhat extreme reaction I had to two insect bites on my forehead. The result was a swollen monster face which would have made John Merrick look pretty damn desirable. So, for fear of scaring the children I decided to stay in the house on Monday and drink tea and eat Malteasers instead. I’ve heard they have healing properties, and it must be true because I’m back to my normal self again now, which means I have no excuse not to go to work tomorrow. There’s supposed to be yet another grêve – yes, the French really do LOVE to go on strike – but unfortunately it won’t affect me as only certain teachers are taking part, and none of them are tomorrow’s teachers.

I’m not really sure why I haven’t blogged since last week... Too tired I suppose. But also, there’s only so many times you can say, ‘Today I went to the beach and lazed around getting a tan’, before your soggy and freezing English (and French and German) audience get pissed off and stop reading.

I decided to join Nick today on a quest to find the university library at Schoelcher. I have to start getting serious quite soon about a 6000 word project I have to do (in foreign French!!). So despite the fact that I'm in denial about it, it was actually quite comforting to find out I can at least get access to some academic books without too much hassle. Nick was really excited about the library. (Too excited in my opinion... Personally I thought it looked a bit like something from Beirut in the '80s - maybe I’ve just been spoilt with previously having 24 hour access to Sheffield’s Information Commons.) But Schoelcher library has books in it, and it’s air conditioned, so I suppose it’ll do for my purposes.

We were supposed to go to the library at eleven this morning but we somehow got waylaid at the cinema (where we’d arranged to meet) and ‘accidentally’ went to see a film called Tous à l’Ouest instead. And then afterwards we were hungry, of course, so we had to go to Snack Elizée, which is fast becoming my favourite place to eat (they sell PEANUT milkshakes. How amazing is that?), and I had a tuna kebab with rice and kidney beans. So we didn’t even make it to the library until 2pm. We had fun though. If I could start every day with a movie and a peanut milkshake I think I’d be very happy ...if a little fat...