My Exhibition

Hello, my last blog was one of the least read blogs I’ve ever written with 49 views. No one cares that I went on holiday, and fair enough. I remember having to watch videos my granny made on her camrecorder and copied them onto VHS of her cruises round the world and they were dull, I get it. Mainly we did just have a nice time which is boring. Compare that to a blog I wrote this time last year called “double bad news” that had 374 views. 

374 minus 49 = 325 people that are only interested in bad things happening to me. If you’re one of them sorry but you will be disappointed by this blog. Other than getting told off by a librarian and getting a massive bruise mainly everything was fine. So quit now if you like.

But for the nice people still reading I’ll tell you the story of my first solo exhibition. We got back from holiday on a Tuesday afternoon and we had a ton of things to do. The next day I was putting up my exhibition, but because it’s a Wednesday (so no school in France) I teach a little group of kids English in my house. We are currently making a video of the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears. 

After my English teaching I rushed off to the gallery and got there just before they closed for a 2 hour lunch. The French love their long lunches, but it’s super annoying when you can’t even use your long lunch break to get some useful shopping done because loads of shops close for lunch. Once when I had French lessons the person in charge apologised that we only had a “very short lunch” of one hour. Anyway I got to the library 5 minutes before lunch which meant I could stay locked in working on the exhibition over lunch time. The paintings all clipped onto invisible strings, so the small ones were fairly easy to sort. I needed help doing the massive one. It’s really hard to put up a painting together when there’s a language barrier. When I got home I asked Dan what the French word for diagonal was. He told me it was “diagonale” and I was fuming. As well as the big paintings I had these little A4 lino prints and gelli prints. And then I had some of my print making things to display to show the process.

The private view (which I think is badly named because it means the opening night that anyone can normally come to) was on the Friday. The library lady told me on the Wednesday that she had all the food, and drink for it. Which was kind of annoying because a few weeks earlier Dan had gone to Spain to get a load of cheap wine and snacks for it, and paper plates and everything. I just assumed I had to provide that, and it was lovely that I didn’t have to, but it would have been better if we hadn’t made a whole trip to another country to stock up. We served all their much nicer wine so I still have a lot of cheap wine to drink. I also made a lemon cake and cookies because the French don’t really think of that kind of thing, they just had a lot of charcuterie stuff. 

Gelli prints

People started arriving half an hour before opening, just random local old people who must come every time for the food. It was weird seeing them looking at my art and taking photos, someone was even writing notes. Some of my friends started arriving after a while and I went to poor one of them a drink and got told off by the librarian! Apparently the bar is not open until I have made a speech in front of the mayor. I had to sneak my friend a water because she was so thirsty! It’s not the first time I’ve been told off by a librarian of course. Librarians are kind of the opposite of dyslexic art students and if you are going to give dyslexic art students a photo copy budget of 100 quid then you should expect to find them sprinkling glitter and bits of string into the photo copier. We’re certainly not going to waste that budget photocopying books, because we all hate reading. 

Anyway I made a little speech about my work which Dan translated into French and then we could finally drink something. Quite a few people wanted to talk to me, which resulted in me getting none of my own cake and cookies that I’d spent the whole day making. But other than that it was a lovely night. I sold one of the mountain canvases and my painting on 3 stones, to a woman who’s kid once painted a stone that she loved but then it went missing. Something like that, but she was very emotionally attached to this stone paintings. I felt like a fraud selling the stones, I don’t even really own them, I stole them from a beach and then painted them. I also sold 3 lino prints.

Painting the rocks

The next day we went to the water park. Since coming back from Corsica Eric has been desperate to swim because he missed out on the holiday, so we went on the opening day of Frenzy water park. It was warm, like 25 degrees, but a bit grey which meant there were only 20-30 people there for the first couple of hours. Last summer we went to a different water park where you had to queue up to an hour for each of the big slides, here the most we waited for one slide was 5 minutes. They had loads of big slides but unfortunately the boys were too small for many of them. They could go on the inflatable obstacle course, the body board slide where you go on your front and when you hit the water you skim it for ages, the slide that throws you up in the air and 3 of the water chutes. 

My favourite slide 

The bruise maker

I went on one slide with Dan where it’s a normal water chute at first you, do a bit of a spiral in a tunnel and then you go very fast nearly vertically into a big half pipe. I’ve never seen someone so scared yet so repressed as Dan, he said “crikey” a lot. We also both had a go on the one that throws you into the air, there were different levels between 1 and 8, I found I had no control of what happened or how I would land so one time smashed the water so hard I got a big bruise on my leg.

 But all in all it was fun, the boys actually just loved watching people do the big throw you in the air slides. I wish you could join a water park like people join gyms and just go on your lunch break or whatever. Talking weird lunch breaks, even the water park closed for lunch! Not all of it, but all the big slides were closed for an hour for Lunch. That’s weird right?

Recently I’ve been trying to make a bit more effort with French. I’ve signed up to some new online classes and I’m trying to do more jobs that previously I would have let Dan do, because he’s better at French. Partly because I have to because he’s out at work all day now and partly because it will help with French. My Spanish friend (who speaks to me in French) challenged me on this recently. She came round for lunch and it was the first time she’d come without translator Dan being there. She speaks very good French enough to have a French job in a clothes shop, and she just learned by talking. She said when she moved here she had to do all the admin and go to all the meetings you have to go to when you’re trying to find a job and a house and a school for your kids. She was saying how I should have been the one to go to the hospital with Eric when he needed stitches. But it always seems like it makes more sense for Dan to go if possible.

This week I’ve done a lot though. At the exhibition I spoke to a lot of people in French then I went out roller skating at the beach and then for a meal with my roller skate club, where I’m the only English person. I have previously avoided socials because I just think they’ll be awkward. I then went to an estate agents to ask about houses to rent, and I was really proud of myself that I had a good conversation with that guy. I also took the boys to get a hair cut, that was fairly awkward, because I tried to subtley say to the hair dresser that she knows how to cut hair better than an 8 year old so please don’t listen too much to his instructions, but I couldn’t quite say that well and would you believe my 8 year old would not translate that sentence for me.

And then this is less fun but I had to go to the dentist for a filling. I don’t enjoy the combination of doing something horrible and adding in my embarrassing French, I don’t know dentist specific words like “filling” either. She spoke to me a bit in bad English she said she would put me to sleep and I was pretty surprised and then she said “not you, I will put your teeth to sleep” which is a cuter way of saying I’ll numb the area. Then she got really confused between the words tooth and teeth and I explained it for her. Anyway my teeth had a nice sleep and woke up all better.

Next week I’ll have more chance to practise French at a meeting at Percy’s new secondary school, but I’ll write more about the whole weird French school system and how we dropped the ball on school admin, resulting in a parent knocking on our door next time.

Corsica

For a long time I’ve been interested to go to Corsica, we even considered going for our honeymoon. It’s a beautiful island of beaches and mountains owned by France or part of France or something like that, they speak French but apparently they don’t like to be called French, like the welsh. They hate it when you call them french. 

Anyway for our honeymoon we ended up just seeing what flights go from Manchester on the afternoon after our wedding and we ended up going to Crete. It was the only time we ever did a normal hotel with a pool kind of holiday. But a few months ago when it seemed like we were going to be moving back to England we decided we should take our chance to go to Corsica. It’s pretty annoying to get to from the north of the UK. Flights are only from the south and only on a Sunday last time I researched, but going from where we live in France we could just drive 3 hours 30 and drive onto a ferry.

I’m a big convert to ferrys. They are magical. They literally ferry you about to the place you want to go, while you sleep! It’s so relaxing compared to flying (especially when someone else is driving.) You can pack whatever you like as long as it fits in your car. We even saw someone bring a dining table on top of their car! You don’t have to worry about liquids, and if you want to bring a razor on board to shave your legs you can. Has there ever been a ferry based hijacking? Let me just google… Oh yes once. 1974 in Singapore, 5 hostages, no one died. We’re well overdue another one in my opinion. 

Security was lax, on the way they asked if we had any paint, we said no, but I did actually have some posca paint pens, they should be more specific because I bet you can take watercolour paint. On the way back they did look in the car boot but they didn’t open any bags. I feel like when I fly now it’s just the boring thing you have to do in order to get to your destination, whereas the ferry did feel like part of the holiday. We did have a cabin though, maybe if you were sleeping on the floor it wouldn’t feel so holiday like. People brought sleeping bags and slept together in little friendship groups and it looked pretty fun, I would like to see if you could get away with bringing a tent. And a camping stove to use on deck, that would be so cool.

The holiday would have been perfect if it wasn’t for Eric’s stitches which he couldn’t get wet. Any other time it would be no problem to not swim for 10 days, but this was such a water based holiday. We stayed in an Airbnb that had a pool and was a 5 minute walk from the beach. 

The first morning we got in at 8am in Propriano in the south west and drove down the most southern point Bonifacio. It was a beautiful city with a load of millionaire super yachts to look at. My Dad spent his 21st birthday there helping his millionaire uncle to sail his boat there, and for his birthday he bought my Dad a bowl of 21 scoops of ice cream.

My Dad on his trip round the med in 1978

From there we went to the most beautiful beach, the water was that perfect turquoise that I associate with the Carribbean. Me and Percy got straight in. The doctor who stitched up Eric’s knee said he can’t go in the pool because of the risk of the wound getting infected but that the sea was even worse. I put this special splash proof plaster on Eric’s knee, it was basically sticky back plastic. But because it was his knee not a flat bit of him it did’t stick well. I said he could stand in the sea and play ball, it was really hot so he wanted to cool down. I forget 8 year olds aren’t like adults though, once you say he can play he gave very little thought to his leg and it was stressful to watch. Then he fell over in the sea and while the splash protector did help it didn’t completely protect him. He said, “don’t worry I feel fine.” He didn’t understand that there are no immediate consequences to the leg getting wet, but days down the line there could be. 

We had planed to go canyoning, which looked so fun, but obviously not something Eric could do. I had this book called Wild Swimming France and the absolute best looking places in the book were in Corsica, so on the second day we headed out in search of them. We had bought Eric a gift of a “Perplexus” (a big complex maze ball) so that he had something fun to do while we were playing in the water. He was very excited for this. We drove inland from where we were staying into the mountains and it was so beautiful but in a different way to the mountains where we live, the rocks were red and the trees were all pine trees. We came across a beautiful bit of river and we should have just stopped there and swam and had our picnic but we didn’t because I wanted to find this specific place from the wild swimming book. 

We eventually found this bridge, packed up and continued our journey on foot up the riverbed like the book was suggesting. The book said this was a 20 minute easy walk. They didn’t have instructions for how long it would take with a kid who A) can’t get their knee wet and B) refuses to bend their knee. Percy happily scrambled off ahead hopping from rock to rock but it was slow for Eric. We had to be next to him to make sure he didn’t trip and when it got to a bit where you needed to step a bit in the water we gave him a piggy back. He was trying hard and I know it would have been annoying for him, he would have loved to run off like a free mountain goat but that’s how he got this injury in the first place.

After over an hour we needed a break and we all sat on a big flat rock to eat our picnic. I ventured a bit further and found it opened out to a beautiful bit that you could actually swim in that was pretty deep. It wasn’t the place photographed in the book. I’ve no idea where that was meant to be, but this was a lovely bit of river that we could have completely to ourselves, so why not go a bit further. We found Eric a spot he could sit and dip his feet in and then we all swam.

 I enjoyed it a lot, apart from when I heard the sound of a wild animal, something cat like, but not just a cat. It was pretty creepy sound but we never saw anything. They do have wild bob cats in Corsica so maybe it was that. There was a cool deep bit that I could jump into and I took some photos on this disposable underwater camera I have. We didn’t stay too long because Eric got bored and it was a long trek back.

After beginning to wade back through the river with Percy while Dan was carrying Eric, Dan spotted a path! The journey that had taken over an hour of scrambling, carry Eric and being really careful not to let Eric’s leg get wet was just a 5 minute walk on this path! We couldn’t believe it! The next morning we went to our local beach, our Airbnb host had apologised to us that this beach was not as beautiful as Saint Guilia the very turquoise one. Just look at this hideous beach we had to endure. 

We had it pretty much all to ourselves because no one else would want to come to such a disgusting beach.  We also went for a lovely little walk round a peninsula and played some crazy golf. I was very bad at it.On the last day we went back to the beautiful beach and hired a pedalo with a slide, unfortunately Eric still couldn’t go in the sea but he had fun on the boat. 

And then we went to get the ferry back. The crossing on the way back was longer because we left from the east coast, we also had no idea it would be stopping at Sardinia. It was about 9pm and we were just getting ourselves to bed, because when we share a room we just all go to bed at an average of our bedtimes. But then I got to go out and have a little glimpse of Italy at sunset which was a bonus. 

In the morning we arrived at Toulon around 9:30am but before that we saw a dog having a wee on the carpet outside of the lift and then a woman stepped in it, and a big crowd were watching and the dog just kept on weeing everywhere. We also saw a woman wandering around with a cat in a special cat backpack. You just don’t get this kind of fun on Ryanair. I wonder if you are allowed to take any pet on a ferry? Can you take a snake? Can you take a horse? Could you take a hamster?  

We had so much to do when we arrived back. Eric had his doctors appointment to take the stitches out, I had to do a food shop and then do my lesson planning and last minute preparations for my exhibition that I was putting up the next day. Plus the normal unpacking and washing stuff, so not a relaxed end, but I’m very grateful we got to see such a beautiful place.

Next time I’ll write about my exhibition and going to the water park. A bientôt.