Saturday, June 25, 2005
Nous devrons faire une micro-trottoir. Est-ce que je pouvais vous demander des questions?
I’ve recently established contact with my old French teacher – the finest man who has ever wielded chalk before me. I decided to chance a (perhaps drunken) arm. Did he have a copy of the film we made on the History-French Paris trip I went on as a callow lower-sixth former, one commodious decade ago?
And it arrived today. I put it in the player. We had to make a film, see? The others dodged the responsibility: Ed and I hauled in the slack. We edited it too; we had to bump up others’ parts so it wasn’t just us. Oh, I’m not so bad: skinny; flailing within a t-shirt more suited to a larger boy; what looks suspiciously like an undercut; adolescence with her rosy fingers touching my cheek. I take on the bulk – in fact, perhaps all – of the contact with real-life French people. I grew in confidence by the second day of micro-trottoirs. I asked nonsense questions (“What do you think of Paris’s bins?) with a misplaced pride. Such petty transgressions were exhilarating - we really couldn’t get over it. I had completely forgotten our self-aggrandizing credit sequence. We overplay our parts, of course, but it could have been worse.
Now I’m thinking about the video we made in the Upper Sixth: “Bonjour La France”. I was l’auteur. Somehow managing to temporarily shrug off the teenage terror of standing out, I pushed for a daytime TV format. Ed was the husband presenter, I his wife. A couple of girls made me up (“You’d make a really pretty girl…” “Cheers”.), I stuck on a dress and we were away. Maybe I shouldn’t seek that one. Perhaps, like The Great American Novel, it is a quest best unfulfilled.
Believe me, I tried for screenshots. I would share with you if I could. Didn't work.
Bien sur “Vous preferez le sport ou les poires?”
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I’ve recently established contact with my old French teacher – the finest man who has ever wielded chalk before me. I decided to chance a (perhaps drunken) arm. Did he have a copy of the film we made on the History-French Paris trip I went on as a callow lower-sixth former, one commodious decade ago?
And it arrived today. I put it in the player. We had to make a film, see? The others dodged the responsibility: Ed and I hauled in the slack. We edited it too; we had to bump up others’ parts so it wasn’t just us. Oh, I’m not so bad: skinny; flailing within a t-shirt more suited to a larger boy; what looks suspiciously like an undercut; adolescence with her rosy fingers touching my cheek. I take on the bulk – in fact, perhaps all – of the contact with real-life French people. I grew in confidence by the second day of micro-trottoirs. I asked nonsense questions (“What do you think of Paris’s bins?) with a misplaced pride. Such petty transgressions were exhilarating - we really couldn’t get over it. I had completely forgotten our self-aggrandizing credit sequence. We overplay our parts, of course, but it could have been worse.
Now I’m thinking about the video we made in the Upper Sixth: “Bonjour La France”. I was l’auteur. Somehow managing to temporarily shrug off the teenage terror of standing out, I pushed for a daytime TV format. Ed was the husband presenter, I his wife. A couple of girls made me up (“You’d make a really pretty girl…” “Cheers”.), I stuck on a dress and we were away. Maybe I shouldn’t seek that one. Perhaps, like The Great American Novel, it is a quest best unfulfilled.
Believe me, I tried for screenshots. I would share with you if I could. Didn't work.
Bien sur “Vous preferez le sport ou les poires?”
|
