Move over, Father Christmas, you're out of a job

Strange things happen when you move to another country and give up work. You know what it's like. Sometimes you find yourself having a conversation about feminism and before you know it you have agreed to dress up as Mary Christmas for a toddlers Christmas party, not so much in protest against the male-dominated world of Father Christmasses but more because your friend's husband has refused to do the job himself. It happens to everyone.

So there I was having a chat with my friend Katy about how the CERN Women's Club runs the toddlers group, and that the toddlers group itself is mostly populated by mothers rather than fathers, and so wouldn't it make sense to have a female 'father' Christmas. Indeed it would, I agreed, what a nice thought. A couple of weeks later, at 11am on a Tuesday morning, I find myself waltzing into the Toddlers Christmas party, belly hanging over the belt of my Santa outfit, merrily crying out "Ho ho ho, I'm Mary Christmas!" The parents all laughed, the children looked confused. Where was the man with the big white beard? I then launched into a long-winded explanation about how my husband, Father Christmas, was very busy in the workshop with the elves at the moment and so he'd asked me to come along on his behalf. Not quite the strike for feminism with which the whole idea began. Nevertheless, I took my role very seriously and assumed the over-enthusiastic, smiling guise of a children's entertainer, promising a fun morning of singing and presents to go along with the sugary snacks. Becoming increasingly confident, after we sang Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer I ad-libbed, swerving off into a story about how Rudloph, too, was busy resting in his stable at the moment, preparing for his big night on Christmas Eve. Why had I never done this before, I'm a natural!

Fortunately, none of the children cried and once I'd remembered that it is obligatory to have your photo taken with Father Christmas - and so, too, with Mary Christmas it seems - I dutifully re-attached my jolly smile and posed with a whole swarm of bewildered small children. I was, I am assured, the best 'Father Christmas' they've ever had. Apparently the man with a beard thing doesn't usually go down well with small children, who have been warned to stay away from strange men, and in any case they usually just turn up, say Ho Ho Ho and leave. My stories and songs were a winner. Take that feminism!

In other news, but still along the 'look how great I am' train of thought, I have had my second sewing machine adventure. Keen to install some kind of curtains in the baby's room, but without any curtain pole or curtain-holding fixture, I came up with the rather ingenious (if I do say so myself) solution of using velcro strips to attach some homemade curtains to the windows. When I say curtains, I really mean two sheets of fabric sewn together, but nevertheless I'm quite chuffed with the result. Even more so, because I didn't buy any new material for them - I happened to have precisely the correct amount of material left over from my aforementioned failed cushion cover (see the bunting blog) to fit the windows, with even a little spare to make a couple of ties.

As baby preparations go, making curtains should be quite low on the list of priorities and hardly counts as one of the essentials, but it makes a welcome distraction from the actual decision-making priorities. Such as, what to call the baby if it turns out to be a boy. At the moment, we don't have a name for it. We've read the book twice and there are officially no boys names out there that we both like. Andy suggests we adopt a numbering system, starting with Zero, because, quote, "in C-like programming languages, array indexing starts at zero and this means blah blah......" Something or other about neat sequencing...

We may not have a name for it, but we do now know what happens during the birth. We've now had 3 of our 5 antenatal classes and the very calm lady who refuses to answer our incessant questions about how much pain there is with "none at all really, it's a walk in the park", tells us that "you should enjoy the contractions, just go with it". She has also shown us a knitted womb and doll baby complete with a knitted umbilical cord, played us some tranquil 'hypnobirthing' CDs and asked us to write down our perceptions of what it means to have a baby. I wrote: "A big adventure!" Andy wrote: "Poo. Milk. Vomit."

The Escalade: fire, muskets, drums and one live chicken

We can hardly say we are living on the other side of the world, being barely 1,000 miles away from our home in Penicuik, but there are a few strange customs over here. There is no mowing your lawn between midday and 2pm Monday-Saturday, and only between 10am and midday on a Sunday - they are quite particular about their 12-2 lunch 'hour' and don't want anyone spoiling it with some noisy grass-cutting. If you are visiting a French family for dinner, you should take chocolates for the children but certainly not a bottle of wine for the adults: this would undermine their own choice of wine for the meal they have prepared. And once a year, the patisseries of  Geneva are filled with chocolate cauldrons containing marzipan leeks and cauliflowers, which are smashed open by the youngest and the oldest at the Fêtes de l'escalade.

The Escalade commemorates a rather strange moment in Genevan history when, on a cold December night in 1602, the Duke of Savoy sent troops into Geneva in an attempt to take over the city, but was defeated by Catherine Cheynel. The mother of 14 children and the wife of Pierre Royaume, she poured a giant cauldron of hot vegetable soup on the attackers and subsequently saved the city. It's their own version of Bonfire Night, I suppose, albeit with a bit more soup.

The festival takes place in Geneva over two weekends in December, starting with a big run through the city on the first weekend, complete with ridiculous costumes, and culminating with a big torch-lit parade in traditional 1600s garb on the Sunday evening of the second weekend, with a whole host of other activities taking place in between. We didn't see any of the run, although Andy reported back about eight physicists from CERN who had come second in the costume competition: two of them dressed as protons, and ran around in circles before bumping into each other - at which point, a person dressed as a Higgs appeared, before decaying into a Z and a Z-star, which then decayed into four muons... I'm not entirely sure the general public would have got the joke.

However, we headed into town on the final Sunday to see what all the fuss was about with the parade. Crammed into the old town square along with hundreds of other onlookers, many of whom were carrying pretty paper lanterns, we stood shivering alongside the stalls selling marron glacés and the carts wheeling along huge barrels of vin chaud to witness the spectacle, due to start at 5pm. Unusually, the Swiss were not on time. At around 5.30pm we heard a troop of around 20 piccolos (yes, really) tweeting out a traditional reformation-era tune, accompanied by a band of drums and thus began a long line of people kitted out in (not very warm-looking) capes, bonnets, breeches and 1600s military uniforms. There followed: several groups of mounted guards, a cart wheeling a collection of antique pieces of armour, a whole host of men carrying what can only be described as fire on the end of a stick, more men carrying muskets and lit fuses (!) a donkey with a step-ladder on its back, half a dozen sheep, a lady with a live chicken under her arm... and more piccolos. At one point a man said something loud in French, people cheered and then started singing what sounded like the French version of God Save the Queen. We didn't know the words, so we sang God Save the Queen for good measure. Presumably someone somewhere was smashing the giant cauldron (the marmite - interesting to note how our favourite yeast extract got its name, even though the French don't eat it) and the song was in praise of the soup lady.

The old town square as darkness began to fall

On the way back through the town, via an impromptu stop-off for dinner at Chez ma cousine, where they serve the very best spit-roasted chicken you have ever tasted (and the restaurant's imaginitive tagline translates as 'we eat chicken here'), we came upon these beautiful giant wire bird sculptures in the trees.

Unfortunately, it was virtually impossible to get decent photos of the parade in the darkness, so instead, I'll give you some nice photos of the snow that has been falling, deep and crisp and even, over the last week. Thanks to the volume of snow, the ski lifts here have opened two weeks early and on Saturday Andy went up to Crozet (about 20 minutes from our house) and had some of the best skiing he has had in years. I, meanwhile, drank chocolat chaud and did some knitting. On Sunday, before heading into town for the Escalade, we had a walk around our pretty village in the crisp winter sunshine, reminding ourselves how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place.

The view out to where the Rhone cuts through the Saleve and the Jura at Bellegarde.

Peron from the hillside

Slight panic, upon realising the snow is a lot deeper than I thought...

Let it snow... but not until we've got our snow tyres

It seemed this morning as if we had woken up in a ski resort. Looking out the window I could see wooden chalets and big fir trees laden with crisp, white snow and beautiful flakes still falling softly to the ground. Fetch me my skis, I'm off to the piste! Except, well, I'm forbidden from skiing at the moment and we don't live in a ski resort: true, you could probably ski down our hillside to the main road, whizzing through a few people's gardens on the way, but there's no chairlift to bring you back up again and there's no stop-off for vin chaud. 

To be honest, we were caught out. And we've been kicking ourselves today for not being more prepared. We had a sprinkling of snow at the weekend, which was pretty but disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, but the forecast for the week promised snow, snow and more snow. So on Monday morning we quickly made enquiries about getting snow tyres fitted on our C-Max. Unfortunately, it has R17 wheels, and secondhand snow tyres in this size are hard to come by, as well as being more expensive than your average R15s, so we were forced to visit a dealer. Our local garage quoted us 750 EUR for the four tyres and installation. We had little choice but to accept, but we would have to wait until at least Wednesday to get them.

Annoyingly, the BBC Weather forecast was spot on, as it so often is, about the snow. On Monday afternoon I headed off for my knitting group in some light sleet, knowing that the BBC had warned there would be snow at 3pm and that I would need to keep an eye on the weather situation. Sure enough, 3pm arrived and so did the snow. I made a hasty exit from the knitting group and hoped to get home before the snow settled, but even on the short 2-mile journey back along the main road, it was already causing the car to slip when I braked. With my mum's voice in the back of my mind ("Driving in the snow at 7 months pregnant! What were you thinking?!") I inched carefully back to our village, but had to ditch the car halfway up the village as the car simply couldn't handle the steep hill. As luck would (not) have it, Andy is doing control room shifts at CERN this week (meaning he gets to press the big red button that starts the LHC - more or less), so he needed picking up from CERN at 11pm, some 9 miles away... Fortunately, the snow turned to rain over the course of the evening, and since the car was already at the bottom of the village where the roads are more regularly travelled, I was able to get out to collect him safely.

But this morning was a different story. I had an appointment at the hospital at 8.30am, and I knew the snow was due to fall heavily overnight. Even with the car left at the bottom of the village near the main road, it was clear when we looked out the window at 7am that the snow was too deep for me to risk driving (mum's voice again sounding in my ear). With no public transport to make use of, and much to Andy's disgruntlement, we had to call a taxi. It got me to my appointment ok, but the cost for the 13-mile journey was as much as my recent train ticket from Edinburgh to London: approximately £70. Ouch.

Meanwhile, Andy headed off to CERN with a sleeping bag, prepared for the fact that I wouldn't be able to collect him after his shift at 11pm, and that he'd be spending a night on the sofa in the control room. When I finally made it home (a long walk and a bus journey later) at 1pm there was a message on the answerphone from the garage: our snow tyres were ready for fitting. And not a moment too soon. As I look outside now at the deepening snow, feeling festive with the Christmas lights twinkling in the background, I remember that the BBC forecast promises snow for the rest of the week, and I know that the 750 EUR will be worth it.

The garden turns white

Best of British: where the French are getting it wrong

Today was a very exciting day. I discovered Jim's British Market. While I have never understood people who go on holiday to a Greek island and seek out the obligatory ex-pat-run Olde English Pubbe or O'Doherty's Irish Bar - surely a large part of the point of going on holiday is to explore and enjoy a new culture, instead of resorting to watching the football on a giant TV screen in an unconvincing replica of a traditional British pub? - I am not on holiday. And besides, so far we have really been enjoying lapping up the French culture and, with the exception of some decaf teabags and Heinz baked beans that we brought out with us, I haven't missed many home comforts. Disregarding the frogs legs and the snails, the proliferation of tripe and the penchant for horse steak and veal, the French way of eating isn't really so different from our own.

But as Christmas approaches, I've noticed a few gaping holes. For a start, the French don't really do Plain Flour. They do flour for cakes, flour for brioche, flour for pastries, flour for quiches, flour for baguettes and flour for country bread, but they don't do plain old plain flour. Neither do they really do wholemeal flour, except in some of the bigger stores, and even then it's not always available. So when I made some shortbread the other night for the CERN Christmas Fair (yes, my WI halo continues to glow), using my foolproof Bero recipe (since you ask, it's 3oz sugar, 6oz butter, 9oz flour and just mix together until you can roll out then bake for 15-20 mins at 190oC) and just about the plainest of the flours I could find on the French shelves, it came out flaky. When I started moaning about this to another CERN wife the next day, she said: 'Ah, you need to go to Jim's British Market. He has everything.'

She wasn't wrong. I called in to the shop in St Genis this afternoon and came out a very happy lady. Not only did I get my plain flour, but I also got the ingredients for our Christmas cake. That's another thing about the French - they don't really use very much dried fruit in their cooking, so when it comes to buying raisins, sultanas and the like, they sell them in tiny little packages. It would take four of five of these tiny packages of raisins to make a decent Christmas cake, by which point the charming homemade aspect of the cake would start to be rather undermined by the sheer cost of it. Slice of extremely expensive dehydrated fruit mixed with incorrect flour anyone? But Jim had big bags of raisins, big bags of sultanas, big bags of currants and even - wait for this - tiny pots of mixed peel and glace cherries. The Christmas elves would be most pleased.

I had to restrain myself from going a bit mad in the shop to be honest. As well as the obvious items - Cadbury's chocolate, McVities biscuits, Hellmann's mayonnaise, wedges of cheddar and stilton - he also sells things like bacon (which the French don't eat - mon dieu!), suet, porridge oats, and proper British ales. Since I've been keeping down my caffeine intake while pregnant, I've been getting people visiting from the UK to ship in decaf teabags by the bucketload, but no more: Jim sells PG Tips Decaf. They also stock English greetings cards - which I think my family will be pleased to hear about, as I fear that the novelty of me sending French ones is starting to wear a little thin - and the cute tea shop attached to the shop sells cream teas, tea cakes and full English breakfasts. The only snag is that because all this produce is imported, the costs are at least double what they might be in the UK. So my bag of plain old plain flour came in at a whopping 4.50 euros - roughly four quid for one of the world's most staple food items. So I'm not sure that one big bag of raisins will work out much cheaper than several little French ones after all. If I happen to offer you a slice of Christmas cake in the coming months, please accept it and tell me how delicious it is: short of going to Fortnum and Mason's, it is probably the most expensive Christmas cake you'll ever eat.

Buckley's Tourist Trails: Part one

We had our first visitor staying with us from Thursday to Tuesday, and on Friday we headed into Geneva so I could show her the sights. I'll be honest: I hadn't done my research. My few visits into the city so far have all ended in coffee shops, and we've been a bit lazy about seeing the sights since we moved here. Fortunately, we had a beautiful crisp winter's day, so the city did most of the work for me.

First up, we took a walk along the lake towards the Bain des Paquis, from where you get a beautiful view of the lake, the city and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. There were swans-a-swimming, boats-a-rocking and even a very brave swimmer who launched into the freezing cold lake in nothing but his speedos. A lovely cafe for that obligatory coffee stop completes the idyll. In the summer, I'm told the jetty is crowded with swimmers and bathers making the most of the crystal-clear water, and the rare chance to get something for free in Geneva.

The harbour from the Bain des Paquis

The lighthouse at the end of the jetty

From there we walked up to Geneva's old town, which surrounds the cathedral and overlooks the modern city below. Along the way, Nikki asked things like: 'What's that monument?' and 'Where's the famous jet d'Eau'?' To which I shrugged unhelpfully and sheepishly proffered my little Thomas Cook guidebook. (There isn't a Time Out guide to Geneva, for some inexplicable reason, and I can't help feeling that the Thomas Cook guidebook is a little biased - everything is wonderful, beautiful, amazing, with absolutely no hint that you'll have to pay a fortune to enjoy it all. The 'cheap' restaurants they recommend start from 50 CHF for a meal for one.) As it turned out, I wasn't being entirely thick: the jet d'Eau wasn't doing its thing that day, so it wasn't that I had entirely failed to see the 450-foot high fountain of water.

After lugging my increasingly large bulk up the hill to the old town, we stopped for more sustenance at one of the many cafes on the pretty leafy square. Although it is a beautiful part of the city, so different to the gleaming boutiques and grand hotels elsewhere, it takes all of five minutes to walk around the old town and unless you want to buy expensive art or equally expensive chocolate, there's not a lot to see beyond the main square.

After lunch we met up with another friend and popped into the cathedral. Very much like Durham Cathedral, although not nearly as big, it is quite a sparse and unadorned building, but the real intrigue lies below. Recent excavations revealed the remains of three - yes, three - former cathedrals buried beneath the current building, dating back as far as the Roman Empire. And what remains is remarkably intact: in this huge underground labyrinth you can still see the extraordinary mosaics covering the floor of the Bishop's reception room, see the buried skeleton of an Allobrogian chieftan, around whom the first churches were originally built, and clearly discern the different layers of building materials that were laid down as the buildings morphed over the centuries. The only disappointment for me was that they didn't actually explain why these former buildings were buried by the current one...

Sadly, the weather turned for the worse at the weekend, and non-stop torrential rain rather limited our tourist options, so on Saturday afternoon we went along to Carouge - a suburb of Geneva filled with independent craft shops and cute cafes. It used to belong to the King of Sardinia, and the Mediterranean feel survives in the colourful shop fronts and narrow streets. Although we were too late for the market which takes place every Saturday morning, we stopped at a patisserie (of course) for a late lunch and Andy made a bee-line for the only climbing shop in Geneva (until this point I expect you were wondering how I managed to drag him along).

Sunday took us to Luzern to hook up with an old school friend. Beneath the pouring rain and the mist, it was still clear that it's a stunningly beautiful place, although I'm afraid my photos don't do justice to it. Unlike Geneva where the mountains are visible in the distance, in Luzern the mountains tower over the town, and being in the German region of the country, the buildings are more reminiscent of the chocolate-box style towns in southern Germany than the grandiosity of the Genevan banking districts.

Looking across the lake as it cuts through Luzern

Thanks to the rain, we saw a lot more of the inside of cafes than we did of the town itself, but this did give me the chance to have a go at understanding the bizarre Swiss-German dialect they use here. As a semi-decent German speaker, I was looking forward to impressing Nikki with my multi-lingual skills, but I have to say I was flummoxed. They could understand me fine, but I haven't a clue what they were saying. It was unlike any kind of German I've ever heard before, and apparently it's only spoken and not written down. Nikki was seriously unimpressed with the fact that a single country - and not even a big one at that - should be so divided linguistically and culturally, and suggested that Switzerland should just give the French bit back to France, the German bit back to Germany and the Italian bit back to Italy. Surely a popular suggestion with the Swiss, no? It is a slightly bizarre set-up for a major European country, one in which you are driving along the motorway and the road exit signs change suddenly from 'Sortie' to 'Ausgang' without any warning. I'm told the Swiss call this dividing line the Röstigraben, which translates literally as the 'rösti ditch'. In other words, the Swiss divide their country according to the way they cook their potatoes. Seems like a sensible geographical policy to me.

Someone save me. I'm making bunting...

One of the things I was determined to do during my few months as a lady of leisure was to learn how to use my sewing machine. I've had it for four years now and, with the exception of one angry afternoon when I swore loudly at it while attempting to make a failed cushion cover, I've never used it. It was a second anniversary present from Andy. In case you're thinking that doesn't sound very romantic, and in fact suggests Andy was suggesting I should become more domesticated and regress to some kind of wartime ideal where I spend my evening darning his socks and mending his clothes, he bought it at my request.

We do the themed anniversary presents thing. Although it sounds a bit corny, it actually makes life more interesting and saves each of you having to think up something hugely romantic and meaningful every year. That said, I don't think we'll ever quite surpass our first anniversary, when we approached it with gusto. The theme for your first year is paper, so Andy bought me the complete 7 hardback volumes of the Oxford History of Western Music and I commissioned him a painting of Durham, the place we lived when we got married. Ah, very romantic I know. Things go downhill from here...

The second year the theme was cotton - I got the aforementioned sewing machine and Andy got... well, he got a power kite which may or may not have had some cotton involved in some of the stitching somewhere along the way. Year three was leather, but before your mind starts racing I'll tell you that I got a lovely leather bag which I still use every day and Andy got some kneepads to go with the aforementioned power kite (I've omitted to mention that the kite and the kneepads were actually bought at the same time, because it took us a whole year to get round to buying the 2nd anniversary present). Year four... Well, things start to get complicated around then because there are so many varied themes for anniversaries these days, that we started to pick and choose the ones that we liked. If you look up fourth anniversaries it says linen and silk, or fruit and flowers - or the 'modern option', electrical goods. Quite a wide choice. I would have asked for a fruit tree but I'd just bought myself some of these when we moved into our new house, so instead Andy bought me a little bay tree which sits outside the front of the house - you know the kind, with the little ball-shaped head that posh people have on either side of their giant porches (we don't have a giant porch). And Andy... well, I can't actually remember what I bought him that year (you can sense the enthusiasm in the idea fading can't you?). This year was our fifth anniversary for which the theme is wood. I bought Andy a big splitting axe. Because nothing says I love you like a giant axe. He actually hasn't bought me anything yet (our anniversary was in July), nor in fact have I had a birthday present either (except the two pairs of slippers - yes, really), but he owes me a carved wooden bowl.

Anyway, back to the sewing machine. Mum bought me two beginners books on how to use my sewing machine for my birthday (for some reason all my birthday presents seem to have come in twos this year), and on Sunday I set about making friends with it. I was very diligent and sat down reading through the introductory chapters about finding the right space, setting up your machine, getting the right equipment etc etc... After an hour or so I had managed to thread the machine and sew a few straight lines without any swearing. Not a bad effort.

I had the idea that because we can't decorate the baby's room in the house we're renting here, I would make some bunting to hang up and make the room more colourful. So I found a kit online from a great website called Clothkits, who make all sorts of easy-to-make kits for clothes, toys, dolls etc. It was actually surprisingly difficult to find bunting kits online which were suitable for a baby's room but which were not either pink or blue. Since we don't know what we're having, and in any case I object to the pink and blue thing, I chose a really brightly-coloured kit, which I must admit turned out to be a bit brighter than even I had intended when it arrived. I had also assumed all the triangles would be cut out for me and I would literally just have to sew them on to the line and hey presto: bunting. But in the event it was more work than that, but also more rewarding as a result. The fabric arrived in long strips which I had to measure and cut up into triangles.

From long strips of material...

...to nice neat triangles, pinned ready for sewing...

...with a little 'help' from Bella

Then you have to pin the triangles together, sew them up inside-out, turn them out the right way and press them, before you can attach them all to the bias binding and finally have some bunting. It took me a fair few hours' work but I'm really chuffed with the result, given that before I started I didn't know my bobbin from my feed dogs. And it turns out that actually the sewing is the quick and easy part - it's the measuring, cutting and pinning bits that take some time and care to get right. It takes a bit of patience, and I don't have much of that, but I'm inspired to try something a bit trickier next time, maybe even some curtains... I wonder if the baby will appreciate the effort?

Want to meet people? Get pregnant.

It turns out that being pregnant is a great way to meet people. It also helps to be the wife of a physicist. Who'd have thought it? I'd always assumed that being the size of a blimp and spending too much time with science geeks would be a sure way to ward of new friends. But since arriving in France I've been lucky to meet lots of new folk. It helps that Geneva is only 50% populated by Swiss people - I've nothing against them at all, but it means that the other 50% that also live in the city have created a brilliant network for getting to know people. Making new friends since moving here has been a strange kind of chain reaction, leading me from one new set of people to the next, each overlapping slightly with the previous in one way or another.

Being pregnant helps. There are lots of networks for new mums and expectant mums in the area, and when I arrived in Geneva a friend from back in the UK, currently living in Geneva, recommended a great MeetUp network called Geneva Mums, Tots and Bumps which, as the name suggests, links up mums with babies and ladies with bumps for a whole range of useful things. Aside from the website, which has a really useful discussion forum for asking questions and sharing information, they also organise meetups, playdates, activities, nights out and lots more, as well as simply allowing mums to be in touch with each other to arrange their own activities if they wish. Not forgetting dads - who are also catered for with nights out. Every month the group organises a 'Sushi and Sucklings' event, so-named because its geared towards parents with babies under 6 months old and expectant mums, and we meet at a sushi restaurant in central Geneva. I went along to the lunch in September for the first time and although the location was a little puzzling - you're not recommended to eat sushi in pregnancy (but there are noodles and rice dishes on the menu too) - it was great to meet other ladies in the same position, to share worries, and to hear reassuring birth stories from those whose little bundles have already arrived. At CERN there is also a toddler group that meets on Tuesdays and Fridays, and although I got a few odd looks for turning up without a toddler (who knew there are entry requirements?), there are also a few mums among them who are expecting their second (or third) child soon, so it's been nice to meet other CERN wives in a similar position.

The toddler group is run as an off-shoot of the 'Cernoises', the wonderful name for the Women's Club at CERN, which is largely made up of CERN wives and which serves as an umbrella organisation for a whole range of other activities. My weekly French classes are run by the Women's Club, and they also run classes in embroidery, art, music, gymnastics and yoga - as well as running monthly coffee mornings. It sounds pretty old-fashioned - and it is - but it's brilliant having a network of people who are so welcoming of newbies. Somehow, I've been coerced  into doing some baking and jam-making for the Christmas Fair in late November, so as you can see my career as a full-time lady of leisure and budding WI member is blossoming.

In fact, that's not all. I've also joined a knitting group. Strictly speaking it's a needlework group, because we're not all knitters - there are embroiderers, patchwork makers, people who crochet and so on - but we get together once a week to make our own things and have a chat over a cup of tea. Very 1950s. I've only been to one meeting so far but I took home-made shortbread (can you see my WI halo glowing?) which went down rather well, so I think I'll be welcomed back. The knitting group came about through another new acquaintance, albeit a slightly random one. I answered a query on the CERN Market - a kind of advertising board for people who want to announce flats to let, cars to sell, baby equipment to give away and all manner of other activities or opportunities - from someone looking to organise a Come and Sing Messiah at CERN. I emailed to say I'd like to take part and received a reply saying that as well as looking for singers they were also looking for people to help organise it... Despite my best intentions I revealed my former career as a Freelance Arts Manager. Needless to say, I'm now organising it. The lady who emailed originally also happens to live in my village, and goes along to the knitting group - and so another link in the chain was added...

But the people in the knitting group surpassed themselves. That night, after my first visit to the group, I received an email which had been sent out to 'the ladies of Logras'. It turns out that the lady who hosts the knitting group knows pretty much all the ex-pats in my village and took it upon herself to announce the arrival of Jo Buckley in the village. I felt a bit like royalty. 'Please get in touch with Jo and meet up with her, she'd love that', the email said. The very next morning, two emails arrived in my inbox inviting me to two separate parties within the next week. My social life is being coordinated for me! The shortbread must have been really good.

Beautiful Annecy

We've been waiting for a nice day to take a trip to Annecy, and yesterday we finally got it. Blue skies, sunshine and 20 degrees - even in mid-October - it was perfect and we had a lovely day out. Andy played squash first thing in the morning while I took the rabbit to the vets (she's very much on the mend, described by the vet as 'the perfect patient'), and after the customary Saturday-morning-croissant, we set off for Annecy around 11.30am. Our sat-nav, affectionately known as Shaun (as many of you who have met him will know), excelled in taking us up the most weird and windy back-roads to avoid the expensive Geneva-Annecy toll road, which despite the short distance will set you back 20 euros for a return trip.

Annecy is known for its beautiful crystal-clear lake, the canal that runs through the old town and its picturesque old buildings, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It's a stunningly beautiful place, very fairytale-esque, and with such good weather we had one of the nicest days we've had since coming here. One of the most famous views of the town is that of the old prison, which floats in the middle of the canal, flanked by colourful old houses and cafes on either side. A swan obligingly swam up the canal for us just as I was capturing this lovely vista:

The canal and the old prison (left)

Unfortunately, we arrived just in time for lunch (shame), so after a brief wander through the old town, we stopped off at one of the many outdoor cafes (in mid-October!) for a Savoyarde treat: tartiflette.

Tartiflette: totally delicious and absolutely no calories

Sometimes your mouth just isn't big enough...

YUM

We were pretty lazy tourists, it has to be said. We looked up and admired the castle, but decided against taking the steep climb up to see it properly. Instead, we walked off our lunch with a saunter around the pretty old town with its many shops and cafes, and then headed out to see the lake.

Bump goes to Annecy

Old town streets

Aside from the clear blue water, the lake is striking for being flanked by some amazing cliffs which Andy spent a while gazing at longingly, trying to work out how accessible they might be for climbing. 

It's pretty rare for me to convince Andy to spend a day wandering aimlessly around a pretty place, as good weather usually = climbing. But his little legs were worn out from his squash matches of the last few days so I made the most of our day of unhurried wandering, and we made a detour on the way home to visit the Gorges du Fier. This huge river gorge features some impressive rock erosion, and gets extra points for a big sign advertising 'Marmite du Geant' - not to be confused with the giant's jar of yeast extract, it's actually a huge hole in the rocks, named after a giant's cooking pot. Sadly the bridge that takes you around the rocks and across the gorge was closed for the winter, but what we saw from the entrance looked fairly impressive. One to take bump to next spring I think.

Gorges du Fier

 

The times they are a changing...

Today something terrible happened. I was browsing the condiments aisle in Migros, when I heard something awful coming over the in-store radio. A Christmas song. Not just any Christmas song, but some dreadful modern arrangement of Little Drummer Boy, sung as a duet with the girl warbling away with X Factor-esque trills and squawks. This is my least favourite of all the Christmas songs in any case (closely followed by The Pogues - I'm sorry, I just can't stand it) but on 18th October? I know we moan about Christmas being thrust down our throats too early in the UK but I'm pretty sure this is the earliest I've ever heard festive music being piped over the airwaves. There are Lebkuchen in the shops too, along with candy canes, Santa chocolates and other Christmassy things. I'm not sure I'm ready yet. Christmas means 8 months pregnant and the imminent arrival of a noisy little bundle - I need more sleep first.

On the plus side, the season changing has some other, much nicer, repercussions. We were away in Belfast over the weekend to visit Andy's parents and when we returned, the stretch of the Alps that we can see from here had become noticeably whiter. Usually it is just Mont Blanc that glows big and white on the horizon, with the rest of the mountain chain alongside it looking, well, brown and rocky. But now it is all noticeably snowier, and Andy is starting to get that worrying 'ooh, winter climbing' glint in his eye. This snowy spectacle is a little dangerous for drivers though: I'm sure there must be several accidents every year caused by people just gazing up at these amazing big mountains as they rattle along the dual carriageway.

The Jura mountains aren't high enough to have a snow dusting yet, but they too are changing. Carpeted from top to bottom in thick green forest, the Jura are now steadily turning golden as autumn sets in. It's hard to believe that less than two weeks ago we were sat outside in shorts and t-shirts having a barbeque, as the temperature has suddenly dropped. The days are still warm enough - around 16 degrees or so most days - but at night the temperature is hovering around freezing and there was a deep frost on Tuesday morning that didn't lift until lunchtime.

Now, I must deal with an important bit of other business. In my last blog I waxed lyrical about the food in France, essentially giving the impression that it's all fine patisserie and nice markets and that the French could do no wrong when it comes to food. I need to clarify the situation, because in the days after posting that, we experienced some of the worst food that Europe - never mind France - has ever seen. We went to stay in a hotel in Autrans, just outside Grenoble, for a couple of days, where Andy was attending a physics workshop and I was... well, tagging along for the ride. Aside from the fact that the hotel looked rather too much like it was once used as a Nazi mountain hideaway (built in 1939 too...), it had a swimming pool that I seemed to have to myself, cows clanging away in the fields and beautiful mountain scenery. The food, however, was categorically awful. Dinner on the first night was a piece of cremated meat and some stodgy pasta. No sauce. For lunch on the second day we were served some kind of pungent (i.e. on the wrong side of ripe) overcooked fish with a bizarre curry-esque sauce and cauliflower so over-boiled it was reduced to piles of mush. We couldn't wait to leave and promised ourselves that we'd get away that evening in enough time to stop at a nice restaurant on the way home to re-stock our bodies with nutrients. Unfortunately, Grenoble was too traffic-heavy to consider stopping so we ploughed onwards and had hit the motorway before we had managed to find anywhere. Becoming increasingly ravenous and grumpy with it, I insisted we stop at a motorway service station just outside Chambery. Surely the French, of all people, know how to do motorway services properly?

I will never speak ill of service station food in the UK again. Andy ordered a macaroni cheese and was presented with a dish of dry, brown tubes, all the life completely sucked out of them. I ordered a burger, which to be fair was cooked freshly for me, but which was served with totally disgusting, overboiled and totally inedible 'mixed vegetables'. We paid 20 euros for the privilege. When Andy plucked up the courage to take his macaroni back, trying to work out how to explain in French that he simply couldn't eat it, he began by saying, 'I'm sorry it's....' At which point the lady jumped in and said 'awful, I know. What would you like instead?'

Unfortunately, the evening got worse before it got better. We missed our turning on the way home and ended up at a Swiss border we didn't have permission to cross, or else we would end up on the Swiss motorway without a pass. On the approach, we were flashed by a speed camera. We then did an illegal u-turn in front of the police and had to drive 10km in the wrong direction before we could turn around and head for the correct turning. In turn, this meant we had to pay the motorway toll (péage) in both directions for 20km of road we didn't intend to travel upon. We're interested to see if the Swiss motorway authorities manage to track our car down to our UK address to send us the speeding ticket... Andy says, 'Of course they will. They're Swiss.'

Fromage and financiers: Food in France

I had fairly high expectations about the food in France. I pictured myself cycling along to the local market and coming back with the basket laden with fresh vegetables, smelly cheeses, cured meats and of course the obligatory baguette sticking out at a jaunty angle. Breakfasts would be grabbed from the local patisserie and we would eat our dinner on the terrace each evening, making the most of the late evening sunshine, savouring the delicious salads and fresh quiche I had conjured up during my leisurely day at home, before finishing the meal off with a tart made with fruit from the garden.

To some extent, the food here has definitely lived up to my expectations. The fruit and vegetables here are a world apart form what we get in the UK. The melons taste amazing, so sweet that they are almost pungent, and the tomatoes are so good that you need very little else in a salad. It's all incredibly fresh and even though it's now October, the shops and markets are still full of what I would consider summer produce. I have made a few cakes with fruit from the garden and I think there has been one homemade quiche. But it's not all fromage and financiers. My first wake up call came with my first visit to the market in Thoiry one Sunday morning, where I was greeted with stall after stall of stinky cheese, heaps of the local cured sausages, and butchers selling amazing cuts of steak. It looked wonderful.

The market at Thoiry

Lesson number one: all of the above are off the menu for pregnant ladies. True, you can have a steak if you like, but it needs to be well-done - and what's the point in massacring a good piece of meat? Cheese is fine, but not the stinky soft kind. And cured meats are only to be eaten if cooked, not savoured as part of a nice cold platter (also comprising the afore-mentioned cheeses) with a little glass of vin (also forbidden, bien sûr). It is actually pretty tough being pregnant in France. Of course, the French are quite laissez-faire about the whole thing: 'Wat eez ze problem weez a bit of toxoplasmosis fur yur bébé?' But in the UK we're a bit more strict, and I can't help feeling that I must do everything I can to keep the little octopus inside me safe and well.

All of which makes eating out quite difficult too. One Friday evening we decided we'd throw caution to the wind and venture out of our little village for a meal in a restaurant. Eating out costs roughly twice what it does in the UK, so it's not something we are doing very often. Expect to pay at least £20 for a run-of-the-mill pizza; a nice but not particularly special three-course meal with wine for one will set you back around 80-90 euros. We considered our options: steak restaurant, steak restaurant, steak restaurant... oh and a few places that do pizza. Some of the steak restaurants do have a few other items on the menu: goat's cheese salad (forbidden), foie gras (forbidden) and horse (not forbidden but no thanks). Unfortunately for Andy, for the next 4 months it's pizza all the way.

Lesson number two: the French only eat lunch between 12-2pm. Turn up at 1.45pm expecting a late lunch and you will be turned away and left to starve. We found this out to our cost the day we drove all the way up to the top of a mountain at 2.30pm only for them to turn away a ravenous pregnant lady without so much as a bit of baguette. But today we decided to try our luck again and ventured out to Gex in the hope that a bigger town might have more options for a leisurely Sunday lunch, and we got lucky. We chanced upon a lovely restaurant called Le Convivial, where Andy had the biggest steak tartare I've ever seen:

I had a delicious plate of guinea fowl with wild mushrooms, decorated with wild flowers. Sadly the camera didn't pick up just how colourful the plate was:

There were desserts too - pain perdu with caramelised pears for me and some tiny cakes called cannelés, which we'd never come across before, for Andy. They were both scrummy, but we scoffed them too quickly for me to get pictures.

Lesson number three: you are never more than two minutes walk from a patisserie. Really. How the French stay so slim is a mystery to me, given that every village is filled with the sweet smell of freshly-baked pastries. And in Saint Genis, just a short distance from CERN, they have one of the best patisseries around: Sebastien Brocard. So good it's won awards. This is how happy I was when Andy took me there on our first day:

Oh my... I'll take one of everything.

Row upon row of beautifully-crafted little financiers, tartlets, macarons and exquisite celebration cakes.

And it doesn't say anything in the books about endangering your baby with one too many macarons.

Andy gets stuck on a mountain

I'm not really the worrying type. I've learned to accept that when Andy heads off to do one of the many dangerous activities he likes to call fun, there is little point in me worrying about whether or not he's still alive, as it won't make much difference to the outcome. I have been through the scenario of the policeman knocking on the door with a grave look on his face too many times now to keep going through it. When Andy is away climbing/mountaineering/ski-touring/biking I just distract myself with other things. And so it was on Sunday, as Andy had headed off to the Alps to do a late-season route with a colleague from CERN.

We had enjoyed a lovely Saturday together, visiting the Grottes des Cerdon, near Nantua - a hugely impressive series of caves beneath the mountainside, full of some of the most spectacular cave formations I'd ever seen.

You are taken up to the cave entrance in a little train, and you then descend around 100m through the caves to arrive in an enormous cavern which was once used as a fromagerie.

That night Andy reviewed all the options for the next day's climb and decided that doing the route they had originally planned - the Midi Plan Traverse - wasn't really an option. The first cable car didn't leave until 8.30am, and the last cable car back down was at 4.30pm. The route would take 4 hours, plus 4 hours to return to the cable car station, and since it would take at least 30 minutes to an hour for them to get started after catching that first cable car, it would be impossible to complete in the time available. The maths just didn't stack up. The only other option would be to descend from the end of the ridge and catch the train from Montenvers, but time was a bit tight to do that too. They decided to do another route that was much shorter and didn't involve these logistical problems. Andy had a plane to catch to London the next morning, so getting stuck on a mountain wasn't an option.

But get stuck on a mountain he did. After whiling away the morning visiting the excellent market in Thoiry, finishing off my latest book (The Most Beautiful Thing by Fiona Robyn, definitely recommended) and doing various chores, I was quite pleased with how well I had distracted myself from Andy's mountainous adventures. Then at 3pm I received a text (I'll omit the sweary bits): 'Disaster. Decided to do the ridge after all. Just at the summit now. Definitely missed the last cable car. Going to have to descend the glacier.' Don't panic, I thought (ignoring my incredulity that they'd decided to do the one route that they definitely didn't have time for). They'll descend the glacier and if they're lucky they'll get to Montenvers just in time to catch the last train down. I spoke to him a little while later and he told me the descent to the nearest hut should take a couple of hours and they'd ring me and update me when they got there. If I hadn't heard from them in 3 hours I was to assume a) they had no phone reception or b) they were in trouble.

I rang 3 hours later. They were still stuck in the middle of the glacier, barely two thirds of the way down it and winding their way around ridiculous crevasses and seracs in the fading light. It sounded pretty hairy, by all accounts, and we made a deal that if they were still on the glacier in half an hour and the light had disappeared that they would call mountain rescue. Another hour to the hut, they reckoned. I distracted myself with a film and tried not to picture them at the bottom of a crevasse, singing 'Brown Girl in the Ring' by Boney M (this reference only makes sense if you've read/seen Touching The Void). An hour later and they had just about finished the glacier and reckoned another half hour to the hut. By this time, it was 8pm and their only option was to sleep in the hut overnight and get up very early to continue their descent. Catching the plane to London was no longer an option.

Unfortunately, they never found the hut. I spoke to Andy again at around 11pm (thank goodness for mobile phones, or I'd have called out mountain rescue long before this) and they were effectively lost. At 2am he rang me to say they'd decided to bivvy (camp rough without a sleeping bag, mat or anything at all) on the mountain and continue their descent at first light. At 6am, I awoke to an immense thunderstorm which crashed around for a good hour or so - the same thunderstorm that would later hit the mountain Andy was on in Chamonix...

Having expected Andy home around 7.30pm on Sunday evening, he finally arrived home at 2.30pm on Monday afternoon, tired and full of aches but otherwise in one piece. The 3-hour descent promised by the guidebook took them 11 hours. Today he is hobbling around on a very swollen ankle and I am trying to remain sympathetic. I can't help feeling that my preferred option - market/reading/afternoon at home - turned out to be the better option.

Rabbit rabbit rabbit

When we moved into the house in Logras, we agreed to look after our landlord's two rabbits. Actually, I practically begged them. I'm a bit of an animal lover and fortunately Andy indulges me in this most of the time. In our seven years together our menagerie has included a dog, a cat, several rats and a hamster, but rabbits have not been part of the Buckley household - until now.

Our landlords had just acquired the two rabbits a few weeks before they were due to move back to the UK and, for various reasons, they ended up leaving them behind in the care of one of the neighbours. This particular neighbour has many rabbits of her own - and several chickens and a couple of goats - but none of them are pets. They are destined for the pot. Perhaps with this in mind, our landlords agreed that it would be a lot nicer for their two to come back 'home' to live with us and we happily agreed. Unfortunately, it hasn't all been happy families since then...

Snowy, for some reason sitting in her poo

 

Jura

The two rabbits, Snowy and Jura, are sisters and Snowy is very much the dominant of the two. She has always beaten Jura up a bit, but from what I understand it's never been a problem - Jura just stays out of Snowy's way most of the time. But when we took them back from the neighbour, Jura was covered in lots of lumps and scabs - it looked like Snowy had really been taking it out on her in the intervening couple of weeks. They hadn't had a split level cage at the neighbour's, so we hoped that when they were back in their usual two-floor hutch with us, they'd have a bit more space to themselves and things would improve. Sadly Jura's wounds didn't seem to heal and we had to separate them to stop more damage being done. Then, last Saturday, we were horrified to see one morning that one of Jura's scabs had opened up on her back into a huge open wound. Evidently, in her efforts to clean herself, she'd begun pulling off the scabby bits and had managed to make things worse. I won't post the picture, but it was pretty gruesome.

We called the vet out that day and he agreed that Jura needed to go to a vet clinic as soon as possible to have everything cleaned up and looked at properly. It took until Wednesday for us to get an appointment, and by this time we were fearing they would take one look at her and say that putting her down would be the kindest solution. But she is such a happy rabbit, and she had been eating and drinking and seeming quite content throughout the whole ordeal, that they they simply suggested cleaning her up and treating her with antibiotics. They kept her in overnight, anaesthetised her, shaved off her fur (!) cleaned her up and called the next day to say I could collect her. I arrived to be greeted by a little blue bundle:

 

We now have to take her back to the vets every three days to have her dressing changed, and she has to receive antibiotics twice a day - fed to her orally with a syringe. The first attempt at this wasn't terribly successful and most of it went on my shoe. Fortunately, she's since discovered that she loves the taste of the antibiotics, and she gleefully laps away at them with her little tongue. Fingers crossed, in about a month's time, she'll be rid of her big blue bandage and the fur will have begun growing back. It's still a very big wound to heal but we're hopeful. Snowy, meanwhile, is going to be relocated to a happier home where she can have the place to herself and not take out her grievances on anyone else. Who would have thought rabbits were so complicated?

CERN's quirks - part one

For those who have never been to CERN, I imagine it must seem like some kind of mythical place, where state-of-the-art technology and science boffins come together every day to make new discoveries and plough undaunted into the unknown in the name of science. And to some degree it is. But the reality is also a lot more mundane than some of the news report would have us believe.

It isn't, I'm afraid, a very visually attractive place. You might think that all that state-of-the-art technology would be carried over into the buildings themselves, and that walking around the site would be like wandering around a series of space age glass boxes, with holograms on the walls and giant pieces of particle-finding equipment around every other corner. Sorry to disappoint. If anything, CERN looks more like a big industrial estate or set of factories. When you think about all that atom-smashing equipment, they've got to make it somewhere, and a lot of the big buildings at CERN are dedicated to making stuff. Most of the rest of the buildings are dedicated to housing the thousands of people who work there, along long dark corridors of identical-looking offices.

But it has its quirks. All of the buildings are given numbers instead of names - Andy works in Building 40, Restaurant 1 is in in Building 501. These happen to be more or less side-by-side, so don't let the numbering system lull you into thinking there is a sensible pattern to it. The roads (of course there are roads, the site spans several square kilometres) are named after notable scientists:

Some famous scientist or other

The site has two restaurants, Restaurant 1 and Restaurant 2, and the bigger and busier of the two, Restaurant 1, serves an absurdly wide-ranging choice of food. It's not your average work canteen. (Until recently, the food options were called 'Menu proton' and 'Menu neutron'. It's a little sad to me that they abolished this fun (if slightly cheesy) naming system. Perhaps CERN weren't making any money out of 'Menu neutron' because it has no charge? Ba-dum-tssh. Thank you. I'm here all week.) Between the hours of 12 and 2, the restaurant swarms with hundreds of people, and you can choose from up to three different main courses, two lavish salad bars, freshly baked pizza, pasta, sushi, soup or just plain old sandwiches. And that's before we've got on to the patisserie counter with its huge array of beautiful freshly-made tarts and fancies.

But if you're the shy type and would prefer not to mingle with people at lunchtime, there's always the vending machine. Not the kind of vending machine that sells crisps and chocolate bars. The kind of vending machine that sells packets of cooked ham, cans of sweetcorn, bags of pasta, bottles of milk and processed sausages.

It's easy to see why some people might decide to hide away in their rooms sometimes. Physics chat is pretty much a constant at CERN, from first thing at breakfast (over freshly-made pastries, but you have to arrive early to get the custard-filled ones, or the beautifully-named frivolité d'abricot - or 'apricot frivolity') to last thing at night as people sit around outside drinking beer and looking out to the Mont Blanc in the distance. And while you're lunching, you can catch up on how things are going underground, on one of the beam monitors stationed around the restaurant:

If this is starting to sound a bit more like the CERN you had pictured, then here are a few more titbits to keep you happy. On the grass outside the restaurant, they've stationed one of the dipoles (giant magnets) for the LHC:

The dipole, with Mont Blanc's snowy peaks just visible in the background

And the inside of Building 40 has a giant mural of the CMS experiment emblazoned across it (bad news for the ATLAS folk who share the same office space):

Building 40

If you're lucky enough to have a guide, or a husband with an access card, you can also be taken down to the ATLAS control room to see the boffins in action, as they monitor what's going on within the LHC itself. The very best thing about this part (sadly not pictured) is the giant red button that they've put in the viewing area that sets off some flashing red lights just so visitors can legitimately press a Big Red Button (apparently it's quite distracting for those actually working behind the glass). 

ATLAS control room

The LHC has four 'experiments' around its 27km ring, and ATLAS (Andy's experiment) happens to be stationed right on the main CERN site (well, just across the road beside the swimming pool actually). I am one of the lucky folk who was able to descend in a lift some 100 metres underground and take a tour of ATLAS before the cavern was closed up and the LHC was started. It was quite a staggering sight. The cavern itself is the size of St Paul's Cathedral, but pretty much all of that available space is filled with something: from the huge pieces of structural metal to the tiny colourful electronics and hundreds and thousands of wires. And a human being - or several human beings - decided where each and every bit should go. What you see on the TV doesn't capture the magnitude of it. CERN may not be very pretty to look at on the outside, but what's going on inside is pretty exciting.

20 weeks: inside and out

20 weeks down and 20 weeks to go: Baby Buckley is half-cooked. It seems like such a long time since that morning in May when we found out we were expecting a baby. But that quite extraordinary meeting of two miniscule little cells has now grown into something around 6 inches long with two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet and all the appropriate digits.

I went back to Edinburgh on Monday for my 20-week scan. Not knowing how quickly I would be able to sort out healthcare in France, and not wanting to miss out on any scans I decided this was the best option. Unfortunately Andy couldn't join me but my mum decided last-minute that she would catch the train to Edinburgh and come with me to the hospital, which made it so much more exciting. Mum had never seen an ultrasound scan before and she thought it was magical. Forget all those fuzzy black and white static images that people gleefully show you when they announce the news: for most of us it's difficult to tell on these blurry pictures what's a head, what's leg and what's just background smudge. Here's the latest snapshot of Baby Buckley:

If you can spot the baby's outstretched arm lolling up by its head and just glimpse a hand on the other side then you get full marks.

When you see it all moving around on screen it's something else. Unlike the 12-week scan - where ultrasound technicians are only interested in three things: 1) How many of them are in there? 2) Does it have a heartbeat? and 3) How long is it? - the 20-week scan is a whole lot more detailed. In the UK, unless there are any unexpected problems/queries, it's the last time you'll see your baby before you give birth and I wasn't quite prepared for how much they need to check. They start with the head and move gradually down the body: measure head circumference, check size and shape of brain, check for two eyes and - amazingly - check the lenses on the eyes, check the nose and lips and look to see if the palate is intact, check the spine and make sure there is skin running all the way along the back of it (if there isn't this could be a sign of spina bifida or a similar spinal defect), look for two arms and two hands (difficult when the baby is lying back casually resting on/hiding one of its arms) check the heart and make sure the ventricles are coming off it in the right direction, look at the intestines, check the kidneys... skirt quickly over its privates if you don't want to know the sex (we don't) and carry on down to the legs. Are there two of them? Are the feet coming off at the right angle? What length is its femur (3cm, since you ask)? How many toes? The list goes on... Thankfully everything was present and correct, and although the baby didn't fancy cooperating and refused to pose for proper pictures, it was pretty special.

On the outside, things are starting to become evident too. I seem to be a bit of a slow grower, because every time I tell something that I'm pregnant (enceinte) they look down at my belly and back up at me as if to say, 'Are you sure...?' But at 20 weeks I now have a growing bump - and it's not all pain au chocolats.

I went for my first visit with the local doctor in France last week. She prodded me, weighed me, took my blood pressure and announced that everything was parfait. Unlike the UK, I will continue to see her - rather than a midwife - every month throughout my pregnancy. In December and January I'll have appointments at the local hospital, including a final scan at 8 months. And also unlike the UK, I'll be paying for the privilege each time: 30 euros for each doctor appointment, 100 euros for a scan and as for the birth... well, that could be quite expensive, depending on how it all turns out. Let's hope for a quick, no-fuss, in and out in 3 hours birth, shall we?

It's definitely an exciting time. The baby now kicks and squirms and somersaults throughout the day, and with a bit of patience Andy was lucky enough to feel one of them the other evening. Mum has presented me with yet more knitwear for its wardrobe - including a very precious loan from my sister, a cardigan knitted by my late grandma - and we've ordered the pram, car seat etc etc. Looks like we really are having a baby.