animeaux en france

I am having a very Normandy morning. It started with a bird in the poele (wood burning stove, scarily our only source of heat here in the winter. We are talking visible exhaled breath in deepest darkest December). That’s about five we’ve had in a week. Or maybe it’s the same one. The Special Ed of local birds that keeps falling down the chimney. Needless to say that poor Tom had to be dragged out of bed to sort it. Sorting it involves Tom’s not patented but-should-be method of opening the door to the outside, then the doors to the poele. If it is the same bird, it can’t be so stupid, as it always flies out.
Next on the animal agenda, 5 very fat/big sheep wandering into the front bit outside our house. At first I feared it was another bird. The sound of their hooves on the gravel, that’s fast becoming ‘lawn’ sounds not dissimilar to the sound of bird fluttering in the stove. But no.
Sheep.
I am not sure what gender they were. I am not familiar with sheep parts. I can tell the gender of a cat at a glance, but sheep, no. However one of them had dangly bits which, if he was male, and had been human, he would have needed the bollocks equivalent of a sports bra. I moved from kitchen to dining room to sejour, watching them, and suddenly they started staring at me, or so I thought, tipping their heads to one side and doing bull impressions with their forelegs. Then I realized that it wasn’t me that they were looking at. One of the tiny feral cats was slinking by. A little black and white one, but they all look pretty much the same. A bit of inbreeding there, I suspect. I rather doubt that Raymond, our farmer neighbour is experimenting with cloning though. But you never know...
They chased it off, and then continued to scoff the stale bread I had chucked out, assuming that it was the birds that were eating it. Maybe that’s why the sheep looked so fat. They were bloated on refined flour glutinous baguette (or ‘French stick, as they insist on calling it in my local bakery in Sydenham. There, a baguette is, apparently, a large round brown affair. I must experiment sometime and ask for a ciabatta… If I am lucky I might get a cottage loaf. But probably not in south east London. More likely a crusty roll)
Anyway.
We had chickens round the back the other day, attended by large chicks. One had somehow got through the chicken wire and was stuck. Tom, now also known as the bird man (and at home, with cat-presents, the mouse man and the frog man as well) heroically saved it, only to be almost savaged by a hen. The very French looking cockerel, white with a scarlet coxcomb and a gitaine hanging out of the corner of his beak, looked on aloof. Certainly, that was his progeny, he being the only cock on the loose, in more than one sense, his chick now being man handled by a well, man, but one of his harem could sort it. Boffe (as they say in France – a bit untranslatable, but mildly negative.) Not that he really cared.
Going back to the sheep with their unexpected food preferences, this could explain why all the herbs we planted 2 months ago have completely disappeared. Although that could have been the chickens.
Three small kittens out the front now. More results of Raymond’s cloning experiments, looking exactly like all the other semi-ferals. They are cute, moving as if wearing nappies, and very very nervous. Tom, of course, wants to feed them. It seems, though, that one of them must have been a cloning experiment gone awry. A mainly black tiny one, that Tom described as a tadpole. I suspect that the cloning machine might have been cuckolded.
Ah now the chickens are back. Well just the cockerel and one of the hens. ‘Sacre bleu’ the cockerel is thinking, his gitaime dropping out of his beak. ‘The bloody sheep have eaten all of the fucking bread. There were about three loaves, albeit unpalatably dry - je suis desole: unpalatblee dry baguettes out there these mourneeing. But now they ‘ave gone. Wee will joost ‘ave to eat ze vegetable slop that they left under ze tree, or ze vegetable peelings…”
We ave, er, have tried in vain to acquire a compost bin, but neither Point Vert (garden centre, sorry if that’s obvious) or Monsieur Le Clerc (hypermarche) have been helpful, so being in the habit of recycling at home, and not having a rubbish collection here (we have to take it to the decheterie/dump/recycling place several kilometres away) left over food and peelings get ‘put under the tree’. I assumed that the slugs ate it, but maybe not…
The other animal that makes a frequent non-appearance, but a lot of noise is the fouine. Stone Martins in English, apparently as big as a cat with a big bushy tail. I hear them at night moving around in the attic. It sounds like they are moving furniture around up there. Perhaps they are. “Ah ma cherie, le canapé (in French = settee not small pre-dinner snacklet) ce n’est pas dans le lieu corrige. Ici est meilleur…!” you get the drift. They make a lot of noise, and when you put the shower on in the main bedroom, it brings out the eau de fouine pee very nicely, thank you.
Ah and flies.
Les mouches.
All over the place.
It’s a fly summer, it would seem, which means that it’s a good one. My uncle-in-law has apparently commented on how they are having sex early this year. Early or not, they certainly are.
Having sex.
On the bread I’ve left out, on the dining table, and a few abortive attempts on me. Oh and swimming in any drink that’s left uncovered for more than a moment, the little hedonists, (then dying) and landing on my head, my legs, my arms, and very likely other places, trying to do bad fly sex things, and biting, and pooing (I assume that’s what it is) all over the place, and generally being very, very, very annoying.
I used to worry a lot about the flies when we first bought this place. The first summer was a fly summer too, but now I am a little less uptight about them. Just annoyed. And I don’t even object to Tom swatting them, I have to say, very successfully. I am actually impressed by his skills in this respect. I could do with ten Toms, Matrix style, killing the damned things off. Or maybe I just need to get a lizard as a pet.
The latest ‘animal’ episode (apart from the feral cats again which Tom is now feeding squirty cream to. Ok I’m doing it too. I know it’s wrong, but we are both in cat withdrawal states. And the squirty cream will have gone off by the time we are next here… Yeah. Whatever.) are the wasps/bees/big waspy things that stung Tom while he was doing his macho thing with the petrol-fuelled hedge trimmer. He thinks that he may have disturbed a nest. I was busy reading while he was trimming, so only vaguely aware that that was what he was doing when I heard the screaming.
I feared the worst. A dangling, bloody hand, a gash in the head, some other severed bit.
Fortunately, it was just stripy insect things whose identity is still not known, but came with stings. He said that one got stuck in him, pathetically trying to extract itself from Tom’s flesh, while Tom tried to keep control of his macho-machine. I am rather imagining all of this, of course, as I was busy on-line at the time, but my one time wasp stinging episode involved just that. I think he was a young one, and wasn’t terribly experienced. At any rate he didn’t seem to be able to extract himself from my leg. Ironically, I had acquired an irrational fear of wasps long before I was stung, and this one got me very shortly after moving into the shared house where I met Tom. I had to pull the thing out of me. I have been far less fearful of them since.
I am rapidly running out of animals here. There are moles of course, but not surprisingly one doesn’t see them. The owls, like the fouines, heard but not seen, our neighbour’s geese that make a racket at dawn that sounds like a machine. (Or maybe it is a machine.)
Baaah is all I can say.
Actually ‘bear’ is a more appropriate sound if not word. For a while I thought that my neighbours were impersonating sheep, but of course being sensible pragmatic farmer types they probably weren’t The sheep were impersonating people impersonating sheep. Obvious explanation.
Back to the flies.
Mission impossible.
Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh…
“Will you stop buzzing that fucking annoying tune, Lieutenant.”
“Sorry sir. But it seems appropriate. I know there are 50 of us but there’s no way we are going to get into the fridge.”
“We are on the ledge, handle thing, whatever you call it. We will get in there and eat the food, poo all over it and lay eggs.”


“Yeah right and how are we going to get the door open, exactly sir?”
As you said there are 50 of us and…
“With all due respect sir,” (said sarcastically of course) “ we are flies.”
“Ok. Maybe a rethink.”
Short silence.
“We could draft in the ants. Those big m-f red ones.”
“Sir, they are not exactly reknowned for being altruistic. They may be big, but they kill the little black ones. The male human tried to save a black one, but the red bastard came right back to get it and dragged it to his queen in the ant hill. And I thought the red shirts were phaser fodder.
“What?”
“Star Trek reference, sir. Sorry for the geeky allusion. But anyway, I doubt they’d help.”
Another pensive pause.
“Ok… What about the chickens?”
“What are you going to ask them to peck the fridge open, assuming they can be bothered to spit out their cigarettes?”
“The sheep? They like human food.”
“Given that about a hundred of us have been swarming on their backs for the last few days, I rather doubt that they’d be helpful, even if we offered them bread.”
“Ok.” Last resort. “The feral cats.”
If the fly could have rolled his eyes or indeed was capable of any facial expression it would have happened.
“Alright, mister smarty-pants-lieutenant, how about this. We swarm on the humans and bite them until they give us what we want. They open the fridge and we no longer have to survive and procreate on their puny left over crumbs.”
“Brilliant, sir. Now that’s what I call a plan.”
At that point the napalm aka fly killer spray filled the room, and they all died horribly, apart from the lieutenant who was swatted by Tom.
Ok I was going to stop there, but I realized that I haven’t mentioned the cows.
Ok the cows are not that interesting. They tend to just stare at you slightly aggressively, and if you stare back they do the thing that bulls are supposed to do, the thing that the sheep seem to do – stroke a forehoof back and forwards on the ground (like they are actually going to be able to hurt you, although having said that, they are pretty hefty, baguette scoffing and all that. But the cows definitely have greater kudos... cowdoss?)
They also moo, which sheep don’t do. And bellow.
They have permission to be in our field when they are in calf, which terrifies me, but so far we have been mercifully cow free in that area. On a camping holiday in Dorset, years ago, Tom derided me for being afraid to traverse a field of cows with calves. With several deaths reported in the news lately I feel vindicated for my temerity and my reluctance at the agreement that was made with our neighbour, but neighbourly things were going down the pan so it seemed worth doing.
Alright I am done for now…
Or maybe not.
There was one survivor. He knew he wasn’t going to last long, but that didn’t matter. Before the flyocide incident he’d managed to couple with his wife. Well, not wife really. Female fly. It could have been male. He didn’t really care – flies aren’t that choosy - but he was pretty sure it had been female, so that meant eggs, and another generation, and let’s face it those slobbish humans weren’t going to clean up anytime soon. Why else would they have had such a fine population of flies in their house?
Plus he and the other fly had ‘done it’ under the bookshelves, so the progeny might just survive, unlike the offspring, or not offspring, of the other stupid twats who had left their eggs in an abandoned glass of wine.
Duh.
His lungs were giving out. Ok he probably didn’t have lungs, but what the hell. Dramatic license and all that. He was dying. He was allowed his OTT moment, even if he didn’t have anyone to share it with.
So did the last fly die, slightly comforted that there might be another generation that would succeed him.

“Ok we are going to get our revenge. Those humans are really going to suffer. Are you with me.” Not really a question.
“Yeah, said the other ten flies. They were a bit confused having only just metamorphosed from maggots into winged things.
We’re not trying to storm the fridge are we?” one newby asked, some race memory kicking in.
“Hell no. We are going for the big time here. The humans. Pain. Revenge for the evil they inflicted on our forefathers.”
“Forefathers?” one slightly more intelligent fly dared to say.
“Yeah fuck we are going to bite them and sting them, and...,”
“We can’t sting... sir” the slightly more intelligent fly said. It resisted the temptation to ask what the ‘and’ was.
“Er... no. But we could draft in the wasps, er stripy stingy things in. They’d be on for it. The male human disturbed their nest.”
The slightly more intelligent one hunched up a little.
“Are you sure about this... sir. I mean we are kind of on the humans’ territory after all. We don’t really have a right to be here at all.”
“They killed our fucking predecessors boy. Revenge is our right.”
The other fly would have shrugged if it could have. But the commander had a point.
“How do you know I’m a boy?” it suddenly blurted out.
“Because you are young and, oh god you’re not female are you? That would explain a lot.”
“No, definitely a boy,” the female fly lied.
“Right, so action time. Next time the human idiots open the door we are out there and liaising with the stripy fellow insects.”
The not-a-girl fly sighed. Life was so shit and it had only being going on for a couple of days. Magotthood had been tough. All those hormones and the whole eekiness of being a white wriggly wormy thing. She had hoped for better when she grew up and transformed, but had instead ended up in captain sheep-shit-is-my-food-of-choice once I get outside of the door and the war’s over.
And pretending to be male.
She actually kind of liked the humans, in spite of what they had done to her parents. At least the wasp plan was crap. They would never help. She hoped.
“Sir, perhaps I could volunteer to do a reckie to see what the humans are up to?” she offered as boldly as she dared, given that she had an alternative agenda and that she was a not-girl.
“God thinking Lieutenant. Buzz around, get as much info as possible and annoy them as much as you can.”
“Right –o… er sir.”
“And try not to get swatted.”
“Yes sir.”
She did actually fly upstairs to see what was going on. All the doors were shut. They had gone, it was clear. So back down to the sejour, where she found a gap under the door big enough to crawl under and escape to freedom. There was a slight pang of guilt that she hadn’t let her fellow flies know about this, but only a slight one.

Sleep

Sleep (or to not).

We’ve not really got on with each other for years. Our relationship all started to go wrong in my early teens. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to take an hour or two to get there, but I rolled with it.

University.

Not much better, although we got on quite well in the afternoons. He would enfold me in his arms for an hour or two when I was revising. But perhaps that was just perversity. After that, our relationship got worse. Often I would be tossing and turning until 3 or 4 in the morning. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but trying doesn’t work with sleep. In fact, it makes things much worse if you try. He wants you to succumb (or in my case doesn’t) not to try. I have tried all sorts of techniques – herbal sleeping tablets, various mental exercises, but none work really other than prescription tablets, and I can’t go down that route.

But now the game plan has shifted. Possibly for the better. I can get to sleep, but I wake up early.

Really early.

I am not sure when it shifted. In the spring, I suppose. Last winter, sleep was actually dominating me. Not a kind embrace, but a suffocating, stupefying stranglehold. I was waking at 11am, having a nap in the afternoon, then going back to sleep at 8 or 9pm. The pernicious beast was making me sleep for England. But, as I said, something changed. Maybe it was the lighter mornings and the lack of curtains. Maybe crawling out of the bereavement induced depression a little, but anyway I started to wake earlier.

And earlier.

Waking at 7 am became the norm, then 6am, then 5 am, and now an all time – what low or high? - 4am. It can’t be blamed on the dawn anymore. I have a curtain now I have moved into the back bedroom, and the birds aren’t so noisy out the back. Clearly, I have just developed a bad habit. Developing bad habits is something I am good at. Far too good at.

I have never been able to just sleep when I am tired. I sleep to patterns. (I am rather the same with food.) A rigidity that I hate. I also can’t stand being woken up by alarms. For years, before the 6am habit/addiction developed, I didn’t need an alarm clock. I would set it for 8am, but always woke ten minutes before it went off. I stopped bothering to set it after a while, but there was always Tom’s alarm. His literal alarm clock going off horribly early, but also his natural alarm-for-me system, his coughing, stomping around, talking to himself more than an hour before I actually need to get up was enough. I woke up 10-20 minutes before he did, lying there, tense, knowing that more sleep was an impossibility. Now, of course, the tables are turned. I get up at indecently early times, and probably disturb him. This is not a good thing at all, and I do try to be quiet, but there is some karma about it.

I think my father had a similar problem. He was ill from his early 40s – Crohn’s disease that had him up in the night, and he got into a pattern of getting up at 5am, washing up and feeding the cats. I am not sure when he started doing this – he didn’t retire until his mid 50s, so how he could survive doing this without his post-retirement mid-afternoon nap I don’t know. He didn’t get up like I do, but just laid in bed reading theology, or possibly thrillers, or listening to Radio 3.

But all of this aside, I like watching the dawn happen, like listening to the dawn chorus, but it’s a guilty pleasure, and one I pay for mid-afternoon.

This getting up early business is having a knock on effect on the cats. They now expect to be fed at 5am or whatever. They don’t wake me like they used to do when they were younger, but there’s no peace once I go downstairs if I don’t feed them… well Basil (the male cat), in particular who mews like the eunuch that he is until I rip open a couple of sachets. It’s not what I want to be doing, but mithering is involved if I leave it so it’s not worth waiting. Unfortunately, 5am is the hour of the dead bird (why can’t they eat that instead of pestering me?) which doesn’t add to the whole trying to relax-at-least- as- I’ve-not-had-enough-sleep thing. They will be three years old soon and have only just discovered the art of birding. Personally I definitely prefer the frogs. You can save frogs (although they squeal which is not pleasant) … and mice (and worms) but birds are a different kettle of fish, so to speak. Sharp beaks, the whole fluttering flying and pooing everywhere aspect. Anyway, I have digressed.

Back to alarm clocks. I think the 4am awakening is the ‘nature’ equivalent of waking up before an alarm goes off. The new descent into insomnia hell involves me waking up 10 minutes before dawn, regardless of the fact that I can’t actually see the dawn. Although I suppose I can hear it.

Perhaps I need one of those total immersion tanks, but then I would just wake up panicking about what time it was and not get back to sleep, plus it would be wet. And claustrophobic. And the cats wouldn't like it. Although then at least they probably wouldn’t pester me for food, and Lily-cat wouldn’t jump on my chest with her ‘make herself heavy’ thump.

The best insomniac times have been abroad when I can pretend that the time zone change is to blame. The excuse sort of washed in New York and Tokyo, but Paris… who am I kidding? Anyway all of these involved my being up at in appropriate times, sitting cross legged on the floor of more or less large rooms. (Japan large, New York small, and needless to say, Paris very small.) I was seriously, and as I said unjustifiably out of synch in Paris. I woke up in the early hours. It was hard to know what time it was. The street lights deprived the night of its darkness; a dirty brown twilight ever pervading, confusing birds that sang all night. The windows obscured by ‘black out blinds’ - blinds that are designed now to keep the light out rather than to stop it escaping, but they couldn’t altogether stop the light getting in, their perimeters outlined by a halo of fluorescent glow. I lay there, then moved to the floor waiting for a dawn that it seemed would never come, longing to go out, but afraid to do so in the dark, on my own. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of. And eventually I convinced myself that I should go, escape the claustrophobia of the tiny Parisien hotel room.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be invisible, or, at least, to have some power, some immunity, that meant that one did not need to fear others. What it would be like to walk out into night, at any time, anywhere, knowing that, at worst, one could be hurt, that one could not be mortally wounded or killed. Would that work? Would knowing that death was impossible be enough to make one fearless? Would it make life better or worse? Would one seek new ‘edges’ to make life worth while?

Interesting, but not really an option.

I hadn’t eaten for days. I knew it as stupid, but every time I tried, I just found that I couldn’t, and now, at last, I craved food, I craved a buttery croissant, but, ironically, although it was 7am ( I checked the clock in the hotel lobby), nowhere seemed to be open. Typical. So instead, I just wandered around and around, and, eventually, found myself at the gates of the Jardin de Luxembourg. It was still dark.

It would seem that I can never get used to how late it gets light in France in the morning in the winter. This sentiment is one I more assocciate with driving through Normandy at 8am, in winter, amazed that almost everyone must have to go to work in the dark. Although being brought up in the north, setting off for school in the dark in the winter was the norm, so maybe it shouldn't feel strange, but that was (quite) a while back.
But in this instance in Paris... strange white statues, menacing marble women loomed out of the half-light in the Jardin. It always surprises me how pompous Paris can be. Not as bad as Berlin, it seems, maybe not as bad as London, but I am never up in my home town, place of residence at any rate, at this time in the morning, in this state of mind.

I sat down on a metal chair next to a large pond. Dawn was on the cusp of finally happening now, and the seagulls were hopping along the ground comically. I knew that if Tom woke and found me not there he would be angry – angry, not worried – and I also knew that he wouldn’t wake before I got back. I could take coffee in Les Deux Magots, linger over patisserie, and he still wouldn’t be awake when I got back. It was tempting, but I didn’t like to look so far forward. I had got used to these unwarranted, unelicited, jet-lag hours that I had taken to keeping of late. I wanted to savour this.

There were a surprising number of joggers in the park, I noted. I hadn’t thought of the French as a nation particularly partial to participating in this pastime. Although I suppose there must be some way that the women stay so thin and manage to eat so much. Had to be that or the fags. Or maybe a one meal a day regime.

I resented their arrival, having been the first person there, the only person there for some time, apart from the gendarme who had told me off for moving my metal chair from its allotted location to one nearer the pond sothat I could observe the ducks better.

Anyway, that’s the Parisian insomnia escapade.

Tokyo.
Sitting huddled by the window of our 13th floor room. Tom had sensibly gone to bed early, while I sat watching the city fall asleep surprisingly early, ironically regaining my desire to write after a 15 year lull. Ironically, because there wasn’t enough light to see by to do so.

New York, listening to music and again trying to write in a lighting-challenged environment.

These really should be bad memories, but they aren’t.

Perhaps that is part of the problem. I actually rather like being up when I shouldn’t be. I like the solitude, the privacy, even if there is a snoring soundtrack going on in the background.

So possibly no cure for insomnia.