The annual French exchange

As the exam season kicks in with a vengeance, my student daughter hit on a brilliant idea to revise for her impending French oral. She and her flatmate booked a budget flight to Lyon and spent two days immersed in speaking French. It was a far better (and more fun) idea than the usual method of improving teenagers’ language skills – the dreaded French exchange.

Apart from my schoolfriend Sarah, who became lifelong pals with the French girl she exchanged with, I’ve never come across a success story.

When I was 16, I swapped with a sweet French girl called Marie-Line who lived in a fishing village on the Normandy coast. I was desperately homesick, barely uttered a word of French and had nightmares for weeks after walking into the basement and discovering a massive tank of crabs, fish and other creatures from the ocean swimming around – the results of her father’s latest fishing trip.

My daughter did a French exchange at the age of 12, which was far too young. It came about after a French business contact of my husband’s suggested it – and we reckoned it would be churlish to refuse.

When Jean-Paul delivered his daughter Sabine to our house she was clearly appalled by the whole idea. She loathed the food I cooked, couldn’t understand a word I said in either French or English and spent the week buying up her body weight in sweets. It wasn’t her fault at all that she hated the whole experience but it certainly didn’t do anything for the entente cordiale. Worse still, when her father politely rang the following week to thank us for having Sabine to stay, he added: “Oh, and I hope you didn’t let her eat any sweets. I forgot to tell you that she isn’t allowed them at home.”

Image: François Schnell

Texting etiquette

My English teacher at secondary school was a stickler for doing things by the book. She was called Miss Milner and she spent hours drumming letter-writing etiquette into my class. In fact she was so thorough that all these years later I’m certain none of us ever use “yours sincerely” when it should be “yours faithfully” – and vice versa.

But after reading in today’s Mail on Sunday that texts and emails sent between David Cameron and former News International boss Rebekah Brooks will be revealed at the Leveson Inquiry this week, I’ve been wondering about text and email etiquette.

“Hi” is the universal form of address these days – and that’s fine. But what do you say when you sign off? It’s easy if you’re emailing family and friends but I’m less sure about work contacts, editors, my children’s teachers… “Yours sincerely” is ridiculously pompous, “kindest regards” doesn’t sound quite right to me and “love” is way too forward. In the end I usually settle for “best wishes” - slightly feeble, but I can’t think of anything better.

And that’s not the only conundrum. What about xs? I sign off text messages and emails to virtually everyone I know with an x or two. And when it’s my family I just hit the x button so they get a random number of xxxxxxxxxxxs.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned but it doesn’t feel right in a work context (I’m terrified, incidentally, that one day I’ll forget who I’m emailing and send an editor a long stream of xxxxxs by mistake!)

PS. How impressive is Samantha Shannon? The 20 year old Oxford undergraduate (above) has combined studying for her English degree with writing a series of futuristic adventure novels. Now she’s landed a six-figure book deal with Bloomsbury, the publisher of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, with the first novel due out in September 2013.

Competitive tiredness - who is the most exhausted?

Did you know there’s a new syndrome called “competitive tiredness?” Apparently loads of us spend our lives bickering about who is the most tired. Well, in our house my husband reckons he’s in pole position because he works killer hours at the office. My children are revising for exams so they’re exhausted and I think I’ve got a claim because I’ve got a mass of deadlines piling up.

But perhaps the answer to the conundrum is to copy the example of two close friends. With four children – aged ten, seven, five and nine months – and a hi-tech business they run together, Charlie and Anna swapped roles for a week to see who had the most demanding life.

Anna took sole charge of the office for five days while Charlie ran around after the children. He got up in the night to see to the baby, organised the school run and did the shopping, cooking and cleaning. She worked 12-hour days at the office before coming home to four boisterous children at night.

It was a real eye-opener for both of them. Charlie couldn’t believe how shattering the constant broken nights were and Anna groaned with exhaustion when he handed over the baby the instant she walked through the door in the evening. But they both said they’d do it again like a shot and reckon we should all give it a go. The only trouble is that I wouldn’t be much cop at running my husband’s business and he'd be hopeless at reviewing books. Perhaps it’s best to stick to the day job. What do you think?

PS. Lunch at the pub is a brilliant way to recover from a bout of competitive tiredness. The picture above shows the village of Farnborough in north Oxfordshire, home to one of my favourite pubs. A glass of wine, delicious lunch and good company - my perfect spring Saturday.

Friday book review - The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

Peter Carey is a writer’s writer. He has won the Booker Prize twice and combines beautifully written prose with originality and emotional complexity.

That’s my opinion, anyway. Carey’s latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, has received mixed reviews, but I loved it.

The story begins in London, on a blisteringly hot spring day in 2010. Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator and horologist, has just received devastating news. Her married lover, the man she’s adored for 13 years, has dropped dead from a heart attack on the tube.

The clandestine nature of their affair means Catherine must grieve by herself and can’t even go to his funeral. The added irony is that while her job is all about intricacy and precision, in private she’s a complete mess. She drinks too much, takes too many pills and becomes ever so slightly unhinged.

Worried by the fragile state she’s in, Catherine’s boss gives her a secret project. He asks her to reconstruct an extraordinary clockwork duck commissioned by a 19^th century Englishman as a “magical amusement” for his frail, consumptive son.

Even though she’s grief-stricken, Catherine becomes obsessed with the quest to rebuild the mechanical bird - and keen to discover why the child’s father went to such lengths to keep his promise to his son. Along the way, she starts to reflect on the mysteries of life and death and how the miracles of human invention often go catastrophically awry.

Set 150 years apart, these are the two intertwining strands at the heart of The Chemistry of Tears. A tender novel of secrets, love, grief and heartache, it’s ingenious, thought provoking and gloriously eccentric.

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey (Faber and Faber, £17.99)

Do you ever leave work at 5.30pm?

Working late last night, I finished the piece I was writing and keen to get it out of the way, clicked send. I was stunned ten minutes later to get a reply from the person who’d commissioned the article. It was 10pm!

Whatever happened to the far-flung days when we’d all finish work at 5.30pm and skip merrily out of the office, safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be back at our desks until the next morning? We sometimes went wild and stopped for a drink on the way home, or heaven forbid, went to the cinema. Now, with emails, mobile phones and loads of us working from home, work is a rolling 24-hour enterprise. It’s so extreme in the newspaper world these days that friends of mine work from 8am to 9pm, and are still expected to be on call right round the clock.

That’s why an interview I read with Facebook COO (chief operating officer) Sheryl Sandberg this morning was like a breath of fresh air. In a recent video interview, she relates how she walks out of the office at 5.30pm on the dot every day - so she can have dinner with her children at 6pm. She admits that telling people she was working shorter hours to spend time with her family was a challenge at first but now she’s quite open about it.

“I was showing everyone I worked for that I worked just as hard,” she says. “I was getting up earlier to make sure they saw my emails at 5:30am, staying up later to make sure they saw my emails late. But now I’m much more confident in where I am and so I’m able to say ‘hey! I am leaving work at 5:30.’ And I say it very publicly, both internally and externally.”


As a famous businesswoman at the top of her field, Sheryl Sandberg can call the shots more than the rest of us, but I definitely think she’s on to something.

PS. BT has put its iconic red phone boxes up for sale at an eye-watering £2,000 per box. I don’t know about you, but I’d far prefer one like this chic green one – spotted at Bicester Village the other day…

Just William - and how to succeed

School heads are a redoubtable breed. I’ve met loads in my time and most of them have bowled me over with their enthusiasm, clear-sighted focus and commitment to education.

On one occasion I interviewed the super-inspiring head of a girls’ school. She wore leopard-print stilettos, knew every girl in the school by name and when she spotted a pupil using her mobile phone during school hours (strictly forbidden) showed her supreme displeasure by raising an eyebrow just ever so slightly. She was one of the most impressive people I’d met in a long time.

But quite apart from the shoes and the raised eyebrows, the thing that’s stuck in my mind ever since is the advice she gave to her pupils.

“If you want to do something then set your mind to it and make it happen,” she told them. “Think ‘I can and I will succeed.’”

The idea sounded like Just William’s arch enemy Violet Elizabeth Bott (“I’ll thcream and thcream ‘till I’m thick”) stamping her foot to get her own way but I reckon there’s something in it. So here are  my aims and objectives for the day. I’m going to write two articles, finish my new e-book, research a press release and book my car in for a service.

Will the plan work? Hmmm, I’m not so sure…