Charity begins at home, but should not end there

The above quote comes from Thomas Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fuller) although many people have said something similar. I think they would all happily admit they were wrong if they found out what happened to me this morning. Sandie was off for the day and I was babysitting all three children for the first time. I have to confess I didn’t have everything under complete control. So much so that when we all went for a family trip to the rubbish tip this morning, it was only a few hours later that I realized that I had mixed up the bin bags and my charitable donation of some old clothes and shoes for the local Emmaneus organization (http://www.emmaus-france.org/) was sitting alongside some rather smelly stuff in the bottom of a large skip……. And er, yes, you guessed it, my rather smelly stuff, or rather that of MGC, is now sitting alongside someone else’s charitable donations of old clothes and shoes. Oops. A sleepless night of worry lies ahead as I count down the minutes to the re-opening of the tip tomorrow morning.

Missing Chips

Maxime and I went up to Orthez this morning although I seem to have misplaced him on a number of occasions today. The first time I lost him was even before we had left the house. I found him in the garage wearing my cycling shoes and trying to climb onto my bike. I gently explained to him that we would be taking the car to travel the 80 kilometres to the riding stables. When we got to the stables his erstwhile 12 year old babysitter Abby was waiting for him. This week she opted to put him on the back of a pony and off they went. I didn’t see them for about 1.5 hours as they hacked off into the wilderness. Thankfully they both came back with huge smiles on their faces, although Maxime did seem confused that he couldn’t eat his pony despite it being called “Chips”. He also didn’t eat much at lunch because we had a salad which isn’t his thing. He made do with a huge slab of pate and half a baguette. I was just waiting for him to crack open a bottle of red and start waving a white flag and then we really wouldn’t have been in any doubt about his nationality.

6 Legs Good 4 Legs Bad

At times it certainly feels like Animal Farm here, and with three children under the age of two and a half, we often have the odours which could be described as agricultural (I am sure Maxime has hidden a dirty nappy somewhere in the pantry but for the life of her, Sandie can’t find it). However I would have to say that overall it’s been a good week. The announcement of my new role was obviously the big event, but the week ended on a high note when I got back from Zurich. On Friday morning I received the two new pairs of suit trousers I had ordered. Unfortunately rather than being one blue and one grey, I had received two blue trousers by mistake. When I rang the tailor in Paris she accepted that she had made a mistake (already making me question whether or not she was really Parisian), and promptly said that she’d check up on the grey trousers and send them on in due course. I asked if she wanted me to send the second blue pair back, but she said no because I would clearly get more benefit from them than her. A nice surprise indeed!

E-Day

E-Day isn’t making reference to the fact that I have started taking class A drugs, it is more making reference to the fact that yesterday was D-Day, so today must be E-Day. Yesterday was D-Day because the formal Wipro announcement was made that I have been appointed Global Client Partner for the Private Banking division of one of our largest clients. It’s a great role change for me – finally I accepted that I should really embrace the fact that I have been working in Financial Services for over 10 years and that managing teams and helping clients is what really interests me, (definitely more than just data and technology). I’m looking forward to the challenge(s), especially that of trying to create a real sense of team across the 200 people or so who work on the account in Zurich, India and Singapore....The role change will mean lots of regular travel to Zurich, but the biggest benefit of that is that it will be a bit more predictable and stable when compared to my previous role which could often have me in four different European cities in a week. I have also been very lucky because I’ve moved from one boss who I really like (and who hired me), to another. I’m looking forward to the journey ahead...hopefully I’ll be saying the same thing in 3 months time!

Room with a view

I am now back in Zurich and in my regular hotel (http://zuerichberg.hotelszurich.it/ ). Message to wife: can you believe it but they have not given me a room with a view over the lake - my balcony overlooks the forest this time. However fear not, things are going to be ok....I am now going to eat my regular Monday night chicken club sandwich.

Bricoleur

Since I got back from India I have managed to spend quite a long time at home (3 weeks). It’s been great to manage to do everything from home and spend so much time with Sandie & Co. I have however started travelling again today and am currently in the plane on the way to Zurich via Paris. I wasn’t however expecting my “last” morning at home to start quite so early and in the way that it did. At roughly 7.03AM Maxime started sawing his new “big” bed with his new plastic saw. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Naturally I blamed Sandie because I don’t think I have ever gotten up that early in life to do DIY, so I therefore conclude that it must come from Sandie’s French genes (I realise that many reading this would, correctly, say I have never done any DIY in life ever).

Springtime

I had a good weekend and 2010 is already starting to seem like a very long time ago. Spring in the south of France is definitely upon us and we even saw the first lizard of 2011 in the back yard. I managed to spend large parts of Saturday and Sunday out and about; firstly with Pich who was very well behaved, and then with Maxime and the new bike we bought to enable us to whizz around the local lake.

At the minute things are going well – Sandie is happy to be seeing a bit more of me and all three of the kids are happy and healthy. Work is going well and there should be some interesting developments to tell you about as well over the next few weeks. Maxime was also impeccably behaved at mass on Sunday, or so I thought until an elderly woman at the end congratulated me for being so patient..... reading between the lines was always one of my strengths. On reflection, I think the only thing she really could have complained about were Maxime repeatedly licking a stone pillar, him whispering to me, loudly, for about 20 minutes that he had done a “caca” (sort of ruins the sacrament of the Eucharist for some apparently), or the fact that he brought the entire pile of mass sheets to me from the church entrance, one by one.

Ray of light ray of light ray of light ray of light

When I was a student in Oxford I lived with a friend of mine, Dominic, who was something of a music aficionado. In our second year when we lived in Bullingdon Road I remember him being disgusted by the fact that I used to put Madonna’s Ray of Light song on continuous play. I thought it was a brilliant song and was quite happy to listen to it 10 or 15 times in a row. Today the shoe was on the other foot and I felt how I imagine Dominic must have felt over 10 years ago....on our way to Orthez (1 hour) Maxime insisted on the repeat play of his favourite children’s song “j’ai mange tout le chocolate, j’ai bu tout le coca cola”. As if that wasn't enough punishment to cleanse my philistine soul, Maxime then decided that we would listen to his second favourite song all the way back. I was subject to constant cries of “encore canard, encore canard, encore canard” (roughly translated as “again duck, again duck, again duck”), as soon as I had the misfortune that the song came to an end.

False Alarm

It is very easy, and natural, for people to become conditioned by the environment around them.

Whereas I was initially thinking about this in terms of our recent experience with Capucine and Gaston and the knock on effects of this on Maxime, it seems like the Economist also agrees.... http://www.economist.com/node/18226813?story_id=18226813 An interesting article which basically concludes that “lonely people...are at greater risk than the gregarious of developing illnesses associated with chronic inflammation, such as heart disease and certain cancers.... over a period, a gregarious person has a 50% better chance of surviving than a lonely one.... What Dr Cole seems to have revealed, then, is a mechanism by which the environment (in this case the social environment) reaches inside a person’s body and tweaks its genome so that it responds appropriately. It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other. Rather, their genes are regulated differently, according to how sociable an individual is." Anyway, back to the topic in hand....

What got me thinking about this knock on impact on Maxime was our visit to the Carnival in Bayonne yesterday. After arriving I popped Maxime on my shoulders and we walked for 15 minutes or so to the main centre of activity near the merry go round. I put Maxime down and off he ran towards it. Three steps later his legs collapsed and he fell over. Assuming he had tripped up, I put him back on his feet and set him off again. Another three steps and the same thing, this time holding the back of his knee with cries of “mal, mal, moi mal”. Despite being disgusted by this immediate desire to speak French, I gave him a little hug and set him on his way for a third time. When he fell over again, my new instinctive reaction was to fear the worst. I nervously turned to Sandie and we both looked at each other fearing that a trip to our friends at Bayonne hospital was on the cards..... A concerned second or two passed, and then Sandie suddenly then had the presence of mind to realise that the little man was probably suffering from pins and needles in his legs as a result of sitting on my shoulders for so long. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The choice was easier for Sandie, she burst into a fit of uncontrollable giggling at my unnecessary worrying.

But as they say, he who laughs last laughs loudest. Just before we left the carnival Maxime went on the bouncy castle. I watched Sandie, who had decided earlier in the week that we both needed to be more severe with Maxime, issue three two minute warnings to him over the course of about nine minutes. Finally she realised that the only way to get him back, (by now he had gone all the way to the back wall of the castle), was to take her shoes off and go in and drag him out. She went in purposefully, but was soon to be seen bobbing up and down negotiating with Maxime, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks. Aidan 1, Sandie 1. That said it was clear that the overall winner that day was his nibs himself.

Quiet as a Skinny Church Mouse

I have just managed to complete a second week working from home. Having a small period of quiet after a busy start to 2011 has really helped get things back on an even keel. It’s been fun to be able to do my work but also spend time with the family and also Pich. Next week looks like it might be more of the same before I start travelling with a trip to Zurich towards the end of the month. On the other hand I am missing the fine food of some of the restaurants where I normally go – eating Maxime’s leftovers, soggy half eaten biscuits and cold spinach really doesn’t compare. That plus the fact that it’s Lent (meaning a self imposed embargo of chocolate and fresh milk) mean that I suspect I’ll be one skinny church mouse in six weeks time; either that or my Saturday trips to McDonalds with Maxime need to be a bit naughtier...

Like a Grown Up

I was proud of myself this week. Despite 2 piles (of un-read books next to my bed) good, 3 piles bad, the lure of the Amazon was too great and I purchased another book online. I wasn’t proud of that compulsion to flex the plastic, but I was proud of the fact that I read the book within 5 days of it dropping into my mail box. I am obviously overlooking the fact that it was a pocket sized little thing which was only 88 pages long and used large font. All in all I found the “Xenophobe’s guide to the Swiss” a most enjoyable read. I’m almost looking forward to going back to Zurich in a couple of weeks now that I feel like a responsible adult who reads the books he purchases online.

A Whole New Dummy

One of the books I read recently was A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. I found it particularly interesting. Basically it contends that we are moving out of the information age and into the conceptual age. No longer is analytical, procedural, “left -brain thinking” key because all of this type of work can be done offshore and by computers. In the future the key skills that are going to be important are those that are managed by the right hand side of the brain. The top 6 skills that we need to develop are storytelling, playing, design, infusing meaning into things, providing symphony (basically providing clear overviews of things) and being able to empathise with others.

Empathy, an interesting one. Daniel Pink convincingly suggests that the inability to “offshore those jobs that require high levels of empathy” is the reason why we will always have doctors and nurses close at hand. Maybe then I should be reassured by the events of last night when Maxime, who never had a dummy when he was a baby himself, happily took himself off to bed with Gaston’s dummy firmly between his teeth. Rather than walking in your customer’s shoes, Maxime is obviously trying to walk in Gaston’s booties. I now obviously feel quite confident that life is going to work out just fine for him, even despite Delphine from the crèche suggesting that he’s hyperactive.

Mucky, Naughty Saturday in Bangalore

Yesterday Maxime and I had one of what my Dad calls “Naughty Saturdays”. We headed off to the stables relatively early; in fact he had woken up at the crack of dawn exclaiming that the sun was no longer sleeping and that he was a “happy boy”, so that obviously meant it was time for action. On our way there Maxime was easily placated with his little Makka soft toy (http://www.flickr.com/photos/techstyle/1151945401/ for the uninitiated) and a large plastic plane. Makka was carefully stuffed into the plane with one arm popping out of one window and a leg squeezing out of another on the opposite side, so I naturally asked Maxime where he was headed. I thought maybe Paris, Zurich, London or Barcelona – some of Papa’s regular destinations. The answer was no, although there was a resounding “oooooooooui!” from the back of the car when I asked whether or not Makka was going to Bangalore. I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew then that I would be left in peace for the next 8 hours and 45 minutes.

On our way back from the stables we stopped at McDonalds. It was there that I realised both that Maxime is a true O’Brien, and that I am getting a bit cannier with him. After he had successfully polished off 6 chicken nuggets (Happy Meals only provide 4 so he naturally had to have 2 of mine), I asked him for a chip. He made a conscious effort to find the smallest chip in the packet....and then broke it in half. It became quite clear that young Maxime will never die of hunger. My revenge was sweet however because like a shamed celebrity with a blanket over their head, I managed to whisk him out the back door of the establishment and into the car so he didn’t see the soft play area. The only difference was that rather than a blanket, I used some stewed apples to convince him that he wasn’t being duped in any way.

On our return to Biarritz I picked up my new Clark Kent Superman like glasses which Maxime found a bit funny but Sandie seemed to like (after a couple of servings of Martini). Unfortunately the glasses did not convey the super powers I needed to remain calm when at 5PM, only 2 hours before we had 20 people turning up at the house for a dinner party, Maxime decided to spill a tin of white paint just outside the front door. He was duly dispatched to his Mamie’s house where he was quickly exchanged for a bottle of white spirit. I then spent the next hour scrubbing concrete with a wire brush. Thankfully everything ended well and we managed to get everything done in time and Maxime was even dressed up in his knight’s amour and sword to greet everyone with a welcoming prod.

Today Sandie is currently having some girlie time with a friend whilst I try and manage the three at home. Maxime has just decided to take off his trousers and nappy so I’d best go and deal with that before we end up with a mucky Sunday as well.

Message to Wife

Wife, you may well be sleeping now, but if you’re up in the middle of the night to feed the children, could you please remember to remove their dirty nappies from the sink in the bathroom? I am quite happy if you want to re-establish your “temporary bin in the bathroom” system that you started a couple of days ago – that was a good innovation on your part. Please respect the sink. Thanks. Husband

Halcyon Days

I’ve always been an early riser and Sunday is the day when I don’t shave or wear my contact lens. For the rest of my life routine and organisation is the key to getting stuff done. So imagine my surprise to conclude that I’ve been really quite efficient today despite being unwashed and in pyjamas till 4PM in the afternoon. Remarkable. It feels like being a student again, or at least what being a student should have been like if I hadn’t been getting up at the crack of dawn to do my football training outside Dominic's bedroom window before settling down to a day of work at 9AM each week day morning. Ah, that takes me back.

The Perfect Procrastinator

I blame myself for underestimating him, but I just didn’t believe that someone so young could be so devious in his efforts to avoid going to bed. This is little Maxime’s bag of tricks to stay up late.... (1) watch Makka Pakka, Upsy Daisy and Iggle Piggle on the TV in the night garden – nothing happens before this is finished, (2) prod his brother and sister to make them cry to distract attention away from himself, (3) quietly hide in his brother and sister’s playpen by slithering under various large toys, (4) insist on speaking to Papy John and Mamy Moiw on Skype, (5) insist on going to his bedroom using his little horse shaped bike (much slower than walking), (6) insist that every single one of his eight favourite soft toys are present in his bed, including of course those that he has hidden around the house, (7) insist that he has a drink of water, and finally (8), insist that both mum and dad sing “bah bah black sheep”, together, and individually, (thankfully for Sandie he makes no stipulation about us singing in tune). It’s funny, but all that seems to be worth it when you hear him say “night-night” in his high pitched little voice; although going forward I think we are going to have to start putting him to bed shortly after he gets up following his afternoon nap.