Opéra Garnier

On 13th January I went, with some other parents from Kieran's school, on a guided tour of the Palais Garnier, Paris's famous Opera House, organised by the parents' association with a guide from Paris Walks.  I have become a convert to guided tours, you find out so much more about a place with a guide than you ever could from reading a leaflet or guidebook and the two hour tour seemed to race by.

The Opéra was designed and built by Charles Garnier as part of Napoléon III's renovations of Paris in the mid to late 19th Century and is one of the most opulent buildings I have ever seen.

Looking towards the ballroom and the main entrance

The Opera house was built for people to watch people. The foyer has wide staircases to accommodate the ladies' crinolines and lots of balconies from which audience members could watch the people coming into the building below.   

View in the opposite direction towards the auditorium

Similarly, the auditorium is built in a horseshoe shape so that the audience members in the boxes around the sides are on display throughout the evening, indeed in the early days the chandelier in the auditorium was not dimmed during the performance and audience members would come and go from their boxes, visiting friends and paying little attention to what was going on on stage.

On the first floor, above the main entrance is the ballroom, which can be hired for functions and is a favourite venue for Stella McCartney's Catwalk Shows during Paris Fashion Week, it was also used as the Hall of Mirrors in the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette

Christmas 2010

Driven back to England for Christmas by our oven's size, inability to cook evenly, and its all-round inferiority to the cooker I left behind:

French oven                 English Range Cooker

We arrived in England on 22nd December where I immediately began shedding members of my family.  We dropped Paul at the Glasshouse offices in Weybridge for a night out with his colleagues and then Emily in Hatch Warren to see her friends.  The boys and I popped in to see Jackie and Thomas and had a lovely afternoon catching up, me with coffee & chat and Kieran by walking into their pond, which he claims he didn't see as it was covered with snow!

We arrived in Winchester that evening and spent the next couple of days there with my parents before heading off to Paul's parents' for Christmas Day, which was the usual round of presents, food and drink.

Opening Presents  Alex with Buzz   Christmas Dinner   Emily's socks

The week after Christmas passed in a whirl of visiting friends, sorting out the car, which needed a new exhaust, and we give huge thanks to Brett Ruth for coming out on the Sunday morning between New Year's Day and Bank Holiday Monday to fix it for us.

On New Year's Eve we celebrated Kieran's 12th Birthday in Stratford on Avon with pizza and a performance of the Matlida musical and we completed the day, and the year, with a lovely dinner at Victoria and Stephen's.

December catch-up

Life during December was the usual round of Christmas activities for the children, sandwiched between large amounts of snow.

We had our first snowfall on 7th December which resulted in the road leading to Kieran's school being impassable so I had to walk up the hill to collect Kieran and 3 other children.

The following morning the snow had all gone and although more was forecast we made the decision to send the children to school, thinking that if more snow fell it would just be another walk up and down the hill.

How wrong we were!  Snow started falling at around 1pm and by the time Tina left to collect the children the roads were lethal, she managed to get to the house of other parents from the school in St Germain en Laye and holed up there whilst the hero of the hour, Jan Willem, walked the 2.5 miles to the school and returned with 6 children in tow around 3 hours later.  

We were further frustrated by the fact that the mobile networks became overloaded so there was no way for Tina to contact me to let me know what was happening.  Once the children had been fed and watered and Tina's husband had arrived in St Germain they decided to risk the roads, which were a lot better, having been gritted and driven on in the interim, and Kieran finally arrived home from school at 9.15pm. We didn't even bother trying to get him to school for the rest of the week, much to Alex's disgust.

Christmas school activities included:

Kieran's school show, at which he showed off his circus skills

Alex's singing of Christmas songs, in both English and French

and Emily's school Christmas Ball, for which clothes were bought at great stress to Paul who had to brave both New Look and Top Shop when the ones we'd ordered from their websites failed to arrive in time.

After all that we were glad to head back to England for Christmas.

What I read in 2010

I have been very remiss in updating the blog during December, not because nothing happened but because so much did that it will take me a while to write it all down, and then it will probably all sound very banal!

In the meantime, I have been updating my list of books I read during 2010.  I only managed to read 42 books last year, which is well down on my total for the previous few years, for this I blame the move and the fact that I chose Jude the Obscure as my 'classic of the year'.  It took me over a month to read and the unremitting misery really got me down, but at least I'll never have to read it again.

Here then are the books I read last year:

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prudhomme
A Call After Midnight by Tess Gerritsen
Open by Andre Agassi
Dead Souls by Ian Rankin
Scared to Live by Stephen Booth
The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright
Promise Me by Harlan Coben
Echo Park by Michael Connelly
Under the Knife by Tess Gerritsen
Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin
One Day by David Nicholls
Nation by Terry Pratchet
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Falls by Ian Rankin
A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin
The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
Exit Music by Ian Rankin (here endeth the Rebus books)
Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz (read to Kieran)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J K Rowling (read to Kieran)
Found Wanting by Robert Goddard
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Tell Noone by Harlan Coben
Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid
Day after Night by Anita Diamant
A Darkness more than Night by Michael Connelly
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffinegger
The Poet by Michael Connelly
The Narrows by Michael Connelly
One Moment One Morning by Sarah Rayner
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J K Rowling (read to Kieran)
A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling
Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard
Lost Light by Michael Connelly