Trop vite

Juggling day to day commitments is tricky, with weeks and even months often passing by in a blur - and despite the best of intentions, time trickles through your fingers unheeded. And as age and gravity takes its inevitable toll on various bits of your anatomy, another new school term begins - so what better time to take stock. Throughout France the rentree is a red letter day, not least since most of the kids have spent the last two months running around in 30° heat and, being in universal rude health (& possibly bored with being away from their pals), they actually turn up. 

Similarly, their teachers have forgotten how exhausting it is to keep a class of tartrazine fuelled terrors in order, so are also happy to enter the fray. Necessarily, all this changes a few weeks into the new trimestre as their charges contract an interesting (and frequently explosive) array of digestive complaints from each other, and the professeurs themselves begin mull over the relative benefits of  a strike or two – especially as there are no bank holidays ‘till the beginning of November.

And wandering through the autumn morning sunshine towards the playground gates, it’s hard not to notice that though still a couple of months shy of 10, number two son is now shoulder height and has developed a taste for rap and his elder brother’s selection of shoot ‘em up xbox games. The Harry Potter back pack has long gone, as has his (always mistaken, but gratefully accepted) belief that you are a font of all knowledge. But there’s still fun to be had kicking away the first falling leaves and discussing the relative merits of school lunches (3 courses, good) and the principal dinner lady (an apparently unsackable tyrant, bad) and, God forbid, the prospect of big school (and having to go to lessons on a Wednesday morning) come this time next year.

Like much of life, it’s all whizzed by so fast – the compensation being that the boys have had the chance to enjoy the freedom of a French childhood, are bi lingual and, most importantly, happy. And at the risk of being too smug, you can now sit back and congratulate yourself on a job (thus far) well done. Now where’s my pipe and slippers?