To Elf or Not to Elf?

Newsflash: My Instagram feed is no longer populated solely with bowls of porridge and pictures of the Maldives. Since December 1^st, I’ve seen innumerable photos of little toy elves involved in incorrigible high jinks in the homes of many of my friends. Hashtag investigation revealed they are Elves on Shelves. If you are as puzzled as I was, don’t worry. Here is your handy need-to-know guide.

The Elf on a Shelf is an American tradition purportedly going back decades (well, on sale commercially since 2005 at least). This festive season, the elves have crossed the pond with a vengeance, eagerly waiting to leap from the shelves of John Lewis or Tesco to those in your very own home.

The premise of Elf on a Shelf is essentially an extension of Santa’s Naughty and Nice list. The little dudes are official Scouts for the big guy, and they live in your house throughout December, spying on your child’s behaviour and reporting back to Santa in the event of any misdemeanours that might warrant Christmas being cancelled. So far, so George Orwell.

It’s simple; you buy your elf in his nice red suit, take him home, and then he gets on with his surveillance and hides every morning in a different place in your house, cheekily lying in wait while your children try to find the little scamp. Except of course it’s down to you to cultivate belief in the ‘hotline to Santa’ side of things, and it’s you that will come up with all these inventive hidey-holes. Maybe not quite that simple after all.

Oh, and there’s a complicated bit about how you don’t actually own the elf, you’re just adopting him, and so the retailer who sold him to you should in fact be referred to as an Adoption Centre for Elves. And your elf is nameless, so you have to complete an online elf registration form in order to get an official Elf Adoption Certificate. Hmm. Anyone else hearing those Trumpian ‘special registration database’ alarm-bells ringing?
 

Not being a parent myself, I am constantly amazed at the lengths you have to go to in order to entertain, educate, morally guide and supervise your little ones. I assume I’d welcome any help available in the candy-cane-sugar-fest build-up to Christmas, and so initially, I admit, the idea of handing over behaviour management to a Santa Scout for a month far outweighed my concerns at any police-state undertones.

The tricky part is that in addition to an already-busy morning routine, parents have to arrange for the elf to be surprised in the middle of some exciting elfy shenanigans. Going from my Instagram evidence, this could mean he is poking about under the Christmas tree, doing a keg-stand with a bottle of Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup, or being part of a complicated skit involving some Duplo characters and a digger performing a heist on a biscuit tin.

Impressive and an absolute hoot for the kids, sure, but the level of ingenuity required to keep this up throughout December strikes me as immense. It’s the Christmas Eve palaver of planting mince-pie crumbs and sherry dregs in your living-room, not to mention shards of carefully-strewn carrot outside the front door, except you have to do it for twenty-four nights in a row.

Who will remember all the various japes your elf has got up to by the time you hit week three? You probably won’t, but you can guarantee your children will. Disappointed cries of ‘But Daddy, he’s already hidden in your sock drawer,’ must haunt the dreams of elf-owning parents across the land.

Tbh, it seems the majority of elf-shelf-enjoyment is being had by grown-ups that don’t even have children. That’s certainly the impression you get from perusing #naughtyelfonashelf threads on Twitter. (Warning: do this at your peril). These elves, getting themselves into scrapes involving Barbie strip-clubs and marshmallow hot-tubs, have clearly forgotten their brief of filling in report cards and carrier-pigeoning them back to Santa. Heck, by the number of elf-sized miniature liquor bottles being emptied, I’d say they’ve forgotten which direction the North Pole is.

I'm slightly confused by the shelf part of the whole operation, the suggestion presumably being that one’s elf is to be found each day on a different shelf. There are only 4 shelves in my entire apartment, and one of them is the high-up kitchen shelf where boxes of matches and my knife-block live. If I had kids, elves would only be invoked as part of darkly modern fairy tales that illustrate why the phrase ‘keep out of reach of children’ exists.

Are care-givers across the country spending this month endlessly debating the health and safety implications of placing an acrobatic elf on a bathroom shelf, where he’s abseiling down the hairdryer flex, or hiding in a fort made of aspirin bottles.

 

And when you run out of shelves, what then?

Actually, it seems that the shelf aspect of things isn’t all that critical. The Tesco product description of our elvish playmate suggests that he can sit ‘on the mantelpiece, table or even nestled in the Christmas tree.’ See, not a shelf in sight. Might as well call him Elf that’s Just an Elf.

My research led me to several reviews from parents who embrace the elf, and the power he wields. Notably, the single mum of 6 who praises the elf for keeping her sane and turning her children into angles (although I query the sanity and fatigue levels of someone who can’t spell angels).

However, many families are not fans of the elfdom. It’s just too fraught with stress. The playground competition of ‘their elf does more interesting stuff than our elf’ is a level of parenting critique that no-one needs. And life is far too short to ever be involved in a fight with a co-parent where your line of argument is that ‘it is completely inappropriate for Naughty the Elf to be hiding with his head poking out of the toaster.’

So, toy companies, bravo indeed. You’ve succeeded in creating the must-have toy of the festive season that sold out before December even began. I trust that you have a contingency plan for the middle of the month, when the parents and pitchforks descend, demanding that their shelves go back to being elf-free zones.

And as for the elves, I can only hope that they are receiving adequate wages and benefits for such gruelling 24-hour surveillance shift-work, and not just being fobbed off with vague whisperings of ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ and a bushel of sugarplums.


[Photo By An Errant Knight - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41334323]

Attack of the Wooden Mouths (or, how hangovers are different in your 30s)

By ori2uru - originally posted to Flickr as champagne tower, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5236607

On Sunday morning, I opened my eyes very slowly.

I was expecting the terrible sensation when your eyelids are stuck together and you forgot that they might be, and then you realise they are and your body half-heartedly tries to prepare itself for bright lights and the onslaught of gravity, while your brain attempts self-preservational shutdown by refusing to find out what might be going on behind all the blurry vision-fog and eye-glue.

You see, on Saturday evening, I went to two parties. Two parties. This is not the sort of social gallivanting that I generally get up to (query to self: have I ever done it?).

The first was my Work Do (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice free champagne until it all ran out and was replaced with questionable white wine), and the second was the Christmas party of my lovely Italian/Canadian friends (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice champagne all night. The sort that comes in the incredible extra-large bottles that are my favourite, but that are also very heavy and difficult to pour out of, so it’s altogether better if someone else does it).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t sink 15 glasses of champagne and get completely hammered, as the Jen at Christmas Parties of Yore would have done. These days I am (mostly) civilised and a grown-up. (NB. We won’t mention the Negroni-fuelled fiasco the night before these same Italian/Canadian friends got married in July).

But over the course of a delightful evening, I did drink quite a lot. And I probably deserved at least a bit of a hangover. Or, as the French so aptly put it, a gueule de bois, a mouth of wood.

Yet on Sunday morning there was not a headache or a spinning room in sight. I got up, ate porridge with seeds and goji berries, and smugly went about my day. This is fantastic, I thought; I’ve finally cracked it. Champagne is my drink. I’m never going to drink anything else again.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of my story.

It turned out the gods of the Wooden Mouth had other plans for me.

First up, I went to a lovely fancy oratorio choir concert that my friend Pam was performing in. I sat with two other friends, we enjoyed the beautiful music, and then we all went off to get the Métro together, feeling wonderfully cultured and stuffing our faces with mince pies as we discussed which station we hate the most. For me, it’s Châtelet Les Halles, hands down, which was ironically the station we were heading to.

And that’s where my troubles began.

My magical Métro pass, which I love and which makes my life reasonably-priced and easy, didn’t work. The gate didn’t slide open when I beeped, so when I re-beeped, I initiated the angry-sounding DOUBLE BEEP ALERT noise. Leaving me trapped on the wrong side of the barrier to my friends.

My brain could not handle this unexpected development at all. It was Sunday, so naturally all the ticket booths were closed, and there was not a single staff-member to be seen. My subconscious started heading towards a group of camo-wearing machine-gun-toting soldiers as the only available figures of authority in the vicinity before I stopped it. What did I think they could do, shoot the barriers down to let me through?

I wandered aimlessly around the station for a bit, and then sent a pathetic ‘Save yourselves. Go on without me’ message to my friends, before realising I no longer had any idea which of the 94 different barriers I was supposed to be trying to get through (there are many excellent reasons why Châtelet is the worst station).

Eventually, I beeped my way through 3 different barriers at random and I think the system let me rejoin my friends out of sheer pity.

To recover from all this, we went to have a festive drink and a welcome sit-down at Starbucks. Where I forgot my own name.

I was busy practising saying ‘gingerbread latte’ in my head in a French accent so that it would be intelligible for the nice French barista (it didn’t work; I had to repeat it six times before we got anywhere). And when she asked my name, poised to write it on my cup, I went completely blank.

Most of my students believe I’m called Jan or Jane, so part of me was excited to rectify things ever so slightly and get this right. And then I heard my friend Jo somewhere to my right declaring that her name was Hélène, and I realised it would be simpler to just say a more normal French name. But I couldn’t think of any of those either.

I said Jen. She wrote Jan. I said, No, no, with an ‘e’. So she wrote Jane.

My friends went on to have dinner that evening, but I decided to quit while I was (not at all) ahead. As I was walking home, a group of people asked me the way to the Opera House. They spoke French, but with Spanish-sounding accents, so I was overjoyed to not only understand but also to be able to answer their question. Of course, I declared confidently, it’s down that street. About 10 minutes’ walk. You’re welcome.

It isn’t. It’s precisely the opposite direction from where I so airily pointed. I’m sorry, Spanish tourists. Please google a picture of the Opera House; it really is beautiful, and well worth a visit.

I’m self-imposing a one-party-per-night limit from now on.

Two Years Deep

Friends, it’s been two years. Two whole years exactly that I’ve been in Paris, embracing my status as happy, often-confused, often-idiotic, foreigner in town.

Today is a fairly unimpressive day. I taught a private class this morning, for which I had somehow accidentally suggested the French electoral system as the topic. Then I bought a swimming-hat – bonnet de natation, if you’re interested.

But yesterday. Ah, yesterday. Yesterday was an excellent Paris day, so to celebrate my two year Paris-aversary, I thought you’d like to hear about it.

It kicked off with my favourite activity, GOING UP STUFF. After two years of recommending that all friends and visitors sack off going up the Eiffel Tower and instead go up Tour Montparnasse, I finally went up the thing myself. And, boy, was I right. There is no queue, you get to the top in a magically-smooth elevator which takes just 38 seconds, and then you are at peace to enjoy spectacular panoramic views (which, dur, include Lady Eiffel herself) without being elbowed incessantly or wanting to throw yourself off the top just to escape the 18,000 people around you who can’t form an orderly queue. And you get to take photos like this one. It was superb.

Then I did a spot of shopping. I spent an hour in San Francisco Books, looked at about a million books and managed to only buy three. I visited the shop of Henri Le Roux, the man who invented salted caramels, and managed to only buy four. And then I nearly bought a CAPE, before getting enraged at the counter by how long I was having to wait, and flouncing out of the store. I have never felt more Parisian. 

(NB. Well, it was labelled ‘cape’ but was really a cardigan with holes for sleeves. And if I was really Parisian I would have explained in a loud voice to no-one in particular why it was completely unacceptable to expect me to wait that long before doing the flouncing out. But it was as Parisian as I’m likely to get.)

Then I went home and read some more of Harry Potter 6 in French. I’m so close to the end. My deal with myself is to finish the whole series within two years of starting, so I’ve got until September 13^th. And I might actually do it, as I no longer have to stop every eight words to look something up (dungeon = cachot, half-blood = sang-mêlé, golden snitch = vif d’or etc. etc.). It’s all going swimmingly.

I spent the evening with my friends Pam and Steph, who I didn’t know from Celine Dion two years ago. We drank champagne and bitched about the 37-degree heatwave that has descended on Paris this week and discussed our favourite skincare products that you can buy in a pharmacy. It was all so very, well, French.

Then on the way home, I went the wrong direction on the Métro, which I have never ever done before, and which made me feel like a sheepish Paris moron. Because a little humility never hurt anybody, and sometimes Paris just needs to remind you that she's the boss.

In Your Face, Willy Fogg

Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlehobbits. Lend me your ears and stop the presses. It is my half-birthday, and it is also exactly 20 months ago today that I moved to Paris. The planets are aligning, and I can practically feel the insightful clarity and profound observations raining down…

I’m not entirely sure what’s up with time these days, but I presume there’s been some meddling by the little science wizards over at the Theory of Relativity’s centennial birthday party. Perhaps they’ve put a kink in the continuum, and things are speeding up. Either way, 20 months has gone by in a flash.

Here are a few things that I have learned in that time.

Living in a different country, practising the great arts of settling in and successfully talking to people and buying stuff, are incredible skills, and I am sincerely pleased that [most days] I have them.

I have discovered reserves of patience and tenacity I had no idea I possessed. I am referring in equal measure to the hoops I unblinkingly and repeatedly jumped through in order to get my Social Security card, as well as the day I opened a tin of coconut milk using only a knife. I essentially spent 38 minutes grinding through the can and then cooked a Thai curry that tasted of steel-dust and VICTORY. (It would have taken approximately 9 minutes to go round the shop to buy a tin with a ring-pull, or an actual tin-opener, but that’s NOT THE POINT.)

My life has subtly changed in other ways. Square pillows, for example, are normal to me now. I also spritz my face every morning with Zinc spray, and that’s normal too. I know more types of cheese and wine than I ever knew before. I only buy newspapers from huts on the street and when I go to the cinema, it gets fully, properly dark and a tiny cartoon miner named Jean flings his pick-axe to signal the start of the film. The light in this city is remarkable, and gives the world a glow that I hope I never take for granted.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to have a week off. I held my very own stay-cation, which I like to call Around My World in 8 Days.

It was ferociously jam-packed (well, it was intended to be, but then I realised that full-time adventuring is actually quite tiring so I incorporated a couple of days of sitting). 

So, as I was saying, it was somewhat jam-packed, and included such exciting episodes as the Annual Parisian Cherry Blossom Festival (complete with Japanese drumming and dancing spectacle), my first Bloody Mary, a day spent exploring the forest of St-Germain-en-Laye, a foray into the largest flea-market in Europe, a series of delightful lunches, dinners and desserts, and cinema excursions to see Truth and The Jungle Book.

I often spend time with my friend Kate, usually after a carafe or three of Côtes du Rhône, fretting about such things as why haven’t I bought a house, why are shoes so expensive here and why can’t I get to the end of Harry Potter 5 in French?

But on days like today, when spring is in the air and I get to go to an exhibition of 700 Barbie outfits this weekend, I feel that life is pretty good.

Interestingly enough (or not; you decide), this is not the first time I’ve mentioned my half-birthday on this blog. The last time was in 2013, when I waxed lyrical about my grand scheme to spend the next 8 years learning to make paella and then regaled you all with a trip to Birmingham. Exciting times.

I also shared with you my secret dream-life, in which I become a writer living it up in New York by the time I’m 40.

Well, here we are. It’s 3 years on, and I’m revisiting my goals, as any self-respecting, list-making Filofax-owner worth his or her salt is wont to do.

I could be lamenting the fact that I am still as yet unpublished, spending euros not dollars, and I have not the faintest clue how to make paella. And yet I’m not.

Perhaps one day I’ll be living in the Big Apple (obviously, if that’s the case, I’ll be much cooler, wear sunglasses in lofts and will only ever casually call it ‘the City’), and perhaps I won’t.

Either way, I’m not worrying about it. I’m still getting to know the person I am and where I belong. And that’s fine by me.

If you have a house, or a baby, or a cat or a budgie, or a career or family, that motivates you and challenges you and that you love and that drives you, ALL POWER TO YOU. And massive congratulations from me. I couldn’t be happier for you.

If, on the other hand, you have struggles or shitty things going on at the moment, I’m sorry. I hope you have a support-network and a good supply of kit-kats to get you through. And get through I am sure you will.

For a while there, mortgage-less and not a budgie in sight, I was FOMO-ing all over the place, worrying that there were things going terribly wrong in my life journey.

And then I calmed the fuck down and realised one or two wise things. Vis à vis, the following...

The upbringing I had, the lasting friendships I’ve formed, and the people I gravitate towards in life, have all encouraged me to be interested and engaged and curious, to read widely and avidly, and to be eclectic and diverse in my tastes. So what if that means my apartment is a pile of books I’m in the middle of, I have a whole host of mad Parisian challenges on the go, and I have frequent anxiety because there’s just not enough time for all the television. (But what about Empire? What about Mozart in the Jungle? What about Dickensian?)

I’m extremely happy to be interested by the world and its stuff, to be inspired by the superb array of people that I know and love, to be a bit of an explorer.

And so, as I look back over the past 20 months and those recent adventure-filled 8 days, I say Tchin! Here’s to whatever’s next.

Postscript:

It occurs to me that I’ve never read the actual Around the World in 80 Days. The Jules Verne version is currently queuing up on my Kindle, downloaded in a flurry of guilt. 

The first page seems to include a rather long and anally-retentive description of precisely-folded shaving-towels for one’s toilette and having tea and toast served at 8.23am precisely. To be honest, this is not the adventure-tastic tale I imagined.

I know the protagonist as a tall and rather dashing lion called Willy and not Phileas, and I believe his butler to be a cat named Rigadon and not some dude named Passepartout. Other details I recollect from my childhood include a goat in a wheelchair, a creepy wolf with a glinty eye, a mouse named Tico who is obsessed with his tiny sun-dial, and a mysterious personage known as The Brigadier, who was, you’ve guessed it, a deer. Bravo, animators, bravo. I have literally just realised how clever that is.

If you don’t know what I’m on about, may I please refer you to the 1980s and one of the coolest TV shows ever made, Around the World with Willy Fogg. Available on DVD now.

You’re more than welcome.

Second moulin to the right and straight on til lunchtime

I like a good challenge. Any follower of past escapades such as #GM10 or Drinking the Snail can testify to that. I particularly enjoy challenges that didn’t previously exist and that no other idiots before me have embarked upon.

At brunch a couple of weeks ago, a new challenge was born, with the most self-explanatory name yet, Paris without a Map. Hashing out the details took the best part of 5 hours of face-to-face meetings between the participants, an extensive email thread which includes the phrases ‘I think you should be allowed to run but not to take a bus,’ and ‘It is a Sunday after all and therefore dedicated to relaxation.’ I also had various suggestions from friends and family. (For ‘suggestions’, read sceptical comments such as ‘You’re doing what?’ and ‘Oh god, not again.’)

In a nutshell, the rules were thus:

2 brave teams would travel in a subterranean manner to their respective starting-points. Over the next several hours, each team would race to the rendezvous-point finish-line with ABSOLUTELY no map / GPS assistance, whilst completing various check-ins and tasks devised by the opposition on the way. A complicated points system was established, and there had to be a possible route of between 9 and 9.5km.

Impartial adjudicators (my friends Ana and Will) selected the teams, by drawing names out of a hat. ‘Names’ being pots of UHT milk, and the ‘hat’ being my hands. George and Jen vs. Pam and Olivier.

Each team held a preparation meeting before the big day. Pam and Olivier went first, and so did all the serious point-setting for easy, medium and hard challenges. George and I asked ourselves important questions like ‘We can get them to go outside Paris for part of it, can’t we?’ and ‘Where would be the best place to get them to do an impression of a bat?’

My Paris A-Z goes everywhere with me, so I was somewhat nervous at leaving it at home that morning. I googled how to make your own compass, but the requisite magnets and shallow vessels of water weren’t really feasible at short notice. And I thought I was onto something with a vague memory that you can orient yourself using the nave of a church, except that there are about a million churches in Paris facing every which way, and I barely know my apse from my elbow.

You don’t need to hear the details of how we wasted valuable time buying chocolates shaped like rabbits and lambs, or visiting a Belgian cultural-centre-slash-épicerie for no reason at all. Or how we spent ages looking for wild fish and a macaron company headquarters, both to no avail, and took a series of entirely unnecessary photos of bus-stops.

The important thing is, we achieved. We accosted tourists and made them take selfies with us. We took a composite image of the Moulin Rouge in the past and now. We found a specific type of German high-speed train. My personal high-point of the day was George frantically making an about-turn signal at me and hissing, ‘Not down there. There’s a bishop blocking the way.’

To cut a 14.8km journey short, EGG-O ENER-J (clever Easter-themed Jen-George anagram team-name) lost. Amazingly, there were only 9 minutes in it. Our elated selfie in front of the Philharmonie de Paris building is full of victory and sunshine, now sadly tinged with defeat as, unbeknownst to us, Pam and Olivier had arrived moments before and nipped to the toilet.

I’m choosing to take the high road and not quibble about the fact that one of our challenges was not achievable or that there was an ‘on-foot/as-the-crow-flies’ miscommunication somewhere along the way.

Instead, I prefer to see Paris herself as the loser; being without a map was ironically the least challenging element of the day. Not once did I feel lost or disoriented. Seeing the Arc de Triomphe side-on or using the shape of the lake in Parc Monceau to gauge directions, and assessing distance using the faraway sight of a particular Métro bridge on line 2, made me realise how well I know my way around these days.

I have realised whilst writing this that all these ridiculous challenges have involved me enlisting entirely different friends each time to take part, which I think proves that you all secretly want to do them. If you know me, and haven’t yet been roped in, watch this space. I’m sure to be harassing you soon enough. Future projects currently being workshopped involve finding all the original water fountains in Paris and something to do with the classic Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline movie French Kiss.

It’ll be first come, first served, so you’d better get your name down asap.