La Belle Maison

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Helena

Ever since we have been visiting our friends Norrie and Mary in the Savoie, I have been in love with a beautiful old farmhouse on the top of a hill in same hamlet as they live in. I call it THE house or La Belle Maison. It is actually very English in aspect I think, solid and imposing, with a tennis court and a view over rolling hills and a church (see below pic).

We always said to the owners that if it were ever for sale we would love to buy it. In 2009 they told us they did want to sell it, so we went inside to look at it and asked them how much they wanted it for it.

Sadly it didn’t work out, the price was too high and then they changed their minds about selling. So we left La Belle Maison and decided to rent it next summer instead.

Two days ago – a miracle. The lovely owner of THE house emailed to say that they do now want to sell, and that the price is substantially lower and, most crucially, she wants us to have it.

Yesterday we made an offer and it has been accepted. There is still a long way to go. We have to sell Sainte Cecile (not a popular choice with most of the children, although Hugo likes the idea of La Belle Maison in part because of the tennis court) and then there is the interminable French bureaucracy to deal with.

But at least we are one big step closer. Maybe we won’t be renting it next summer, but living there.

Bea has a boyfriend

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Helena

Baby Bea (almost 11) has a boyfriend. Rather confusingly he is called Leo, but apparently has lovely curly black hair and is very cute. They have so far carried out a rather Middle-Eastern style relationship, in that it was arranged, and they never really meet.

When Bea broke the news to me that she was no longer single, I asked her how she had gone about acquiring a boyfriend. “Well, we heard he liked me, and then Olivia made him,” she told me. Olivia apparently “made” him by telling him Bea was about to be asked out by someone else. That girl is so smart it’s scary. On the day Steve Jobs died her one comment was “does that mean Apple goods will become cheaper?”

Bea is on a bit of a roll. Last week was the class photo. “Can we have the pretty girl in the middle please?” asked the photographer. Bea was thrilled, as was, I should think, Leo, even if he was bullied into the “relationship” by her older sister. Olivia is on to her second boyfriend, having been chucked the first one, the son of one of Olivia’s favourite teachers at school. My friend who works at the school told me that said teacher apparently told her son that he had “blown it”.

“All other potential daughters-in-law will pale in comparison to Olivia,” she said to him. The poor boy is only 12, but his mother is confident he will never find anyone as good again. And secretly of course, so am I. Although I can’t help feeling that if she really wanted him back, she could have arranged it. Or maybe got her sister involved…..

Tweet, tweet, I love you….

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Helena

I am hoping it is a little but like the early stages of a romance. You know those first heady glorious weeks when you want to know EVERYTHING about the other person and spend EVERY second of the day with them, preferably in bed.

I am, of course, talking about Twitter. For so long I have said “I don’t have the time” and “What’s the point?” and “Who cares what all these geeks are up to?” But now I am well and truly in love, or at least in lust.

A whole new world has opened up. A world where I can know the results at Roland Garros almost before Rafa has hit the winning forehand, where any major news events will not happen without my knowledge and where fashion trends are only a tweet away. In fact I can follow just about everything I care about, including my children and my husband.

My favourite tweeter is a man calling himself @FrankLampardUK who is hysterically funny and always spot on. I have a fantasy that he really IS Frank Lampard and my favourite footballer is as cool off the pitch as he is on it. Sigh.

The downside though is that my husband has fallen in love too, in fact he is much worse. Head over heels, obsessive love has struck him. He spends his whole day glued to his iphone. And he’s competitive with it. He now has twice as many followers as me so is jolly pleased with himself. And is up to all sorts of tricks like a ‘tweetdeck’. And he knows what all @ and the # are all about. Clearly a mid-life crisis. But I guess there are worse ways to spend it.

I am going to spend as much of mine with Frank Lampard as I can.

I am a sofa…..

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Helena

I went to a baby shower last week, and just to give you an idea of how they tend to do these things in Abu Dhabi, I am uploading a photo.

Understated, eh? My first thought as I walked in was of the film Batman, when the duck turns out to be carrying gun-toting madmen. But happily it was peace and cup-cakes all round.

There was a fortune teller there so I decided to see what the future has in store for me. The good news is that I will write a best-seller. In fact I am soon to sign some mega-deal, possibly with a production company. What a relief, the amazon rating is teetering and sales are steady but not good enough to ensure I can afford to rent a giant duck for my next party.

The Russian fortune teller also told me that there is a man from my past (isn’t there always) who is going to reappear and try to take me away. Apparently my husband will react as a man reacts when someone tries to take their favourite bit of furniture away.

“He doesn’t say much, but he needs you, like his favourite sofa, and when someone comes to take it away, he will notice when he tries to sit down, and he will protect his world. He is a strong man and it is his right.”

So there we have it, I am a sofa, but at least I’m the favourite one. Am intrigued to see who this man from my past is and why he would want another man’s old sofa…..

I’m in the money

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Helena

Well, not really, but for the first time since I started this blog in November 2006 someone has paid to advertise on it. And I still have to set up the PayPal account to actually get the money, but I feel this is a bit of a breakthrough.

Rupes will be most impressed. he has been complaining that the books and the blog are a “luxury”, because they don’t really make any money. The other day he showed me a brilliant cartoon from the New Yorker with a man telling his agent he wants to write a book.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says the agent. “If you really want $800 that badly, I’ll just give it to you.”

I think though that for books (and the blog) money is not really the point. I am already thinking about the next novel, in fact I have started it, and I am thinking about characters, plot-lines, themes, names and so on. The one thing I am not thinking about is money. Or lack of it.

I have also been given a bit of a helping hand with the new novel as my first love showed up in Abu Dhabi this week. Regular blog readers will know him as Heathcliff. I first met him when I was a teenager and was madly in love with him (unrequited, nach) for too many years. Obviously this theme has been done before, look at the hugely successful novel One Day, for example or Turgenev’s novella First Love. But as my father says: “There is nothing original since God said ‘let there be light’”. So watch this space.

Am looking for a good title if anyone has any ideas, just don’t expect to be paid….

Heathcliff comes to Abu Dhabi

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Helena

So this ex-boyfriend thing has now reached ridiculous heights….not that Heathcliff (as you may remember him from blogs of years ago) was ever my boyfriend. No, he was the first love of my life. I was all of 17 when I met him at Pucci’s Pizzas in Chelsea and I fell in love in the way that only really stupid 16-year-olds can. Naturally he didn’t feel the same way about me, which is lucky, because what is the point of anguished teenage love if it is not anguished? Apparently I was too skinny I heard from a mutual friend years later. Which just goes to disprove the theory that a woman can’t be too thin or a man too rich.

Now he is a famous chocolate-maker, and he is coming to Abu Dhabi to launch his own brand of chocolate. You might even have heard of him, he is called Willie Harcourt-Cooze. He has been on TV and has written books all about chocolate.

Today I am interviewing him for the magazine, on the phone, so the article can come out when he is here at the end of the month. “It seems surreal you interviewing me,” he said in an email yesterday.

Not as surreal as Heathcliff pitching up in Abu Dhabi carrying bars of chocolate….

Message from my father to my son

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Helena

Leo is still terribly in love. “I have a heart broken,” he told me last night. The cause of this is still Eloise who has now apparently fallen in love with a boy with dark hair – can you imagine?

“It’s not about how cute you are mummy,” he told me angrily last night. “It’s about how clever you are. And he is really really stupid.”

My father (pictured above with the children in Florence) sent the following advice to him, in Italian of course, translated for the blog by my mother.

Dear Leonardo,
I write to you in Italian and your mother despite speaking a miserable Italian with double errors will translate.

In our world, women are as numerous as the leaves on the trees and the arenas of the sea. If you ask too much from one of them, you show little appreciation to all the others. Always remember this saying by Don Giovanni: if you are faithful to one woman, you are unfaithful to all the others.

You need to be wise and grateful. It is natural to fall in love, but you must never forget that if you show it too much, it is not like with your mother, for whom there is only you. Eloisa has a lot of choice: and she is having a lot of fun seeing how you are in her hands, when you cry, to her, it is like music.

Only two things in life deserve absolute fidelity: la Ferrari and il parmigiano. I ask you to think and to always consult your mother.

Abbracci Benedetto

Misery memoirs and all that

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Helena

While I was in India last week I interviewed the writer Amit Chaudhuri. He was charming and interesting and terribly middle-class. He comes from a middle-class Bengali family, grew up with “servants” as he called them (interesting note we PC Europeans would not think of calling them that but I just arranged for our maid’s visa and in her passport under job description is written just that) and went to private schools.

In a poem I read by him he said that: “My problem was how to suffer, for I knew suffering to be essential to art; and yet there was little cause for suffering. I had loving parents and everything I required.”

This is a sentiment Rupert and I have often discussed. OK so we have had our share of suffering but we have often wondered if we are just not angst-ridden enough to be serious writers. Actually all I ever wanted to be was Jilly Cooper so not much need for angst but you get the idea. Chaudhuri laughed when I asked him about his lack of suffering and said, “I suffered because I didn’t suffer.”

I am pleased to report that Leonardo will be able to call himself a serious writer. He is still suffering because of his “girlfriend”, the feckless Eloise. In fact the total angst and suffering knows no bounds. He won’t even CONSIDER the option of another girl and cries at the very mention of her. Here he is looking dreamy on the beach at the weekend.

The only sign that he is toughening up was that yesterday, after weeks of pleading from us all, he proudly told us “I haven’t called her for two days. Normally I call her every day, all day. Now she’ll be thinking ‘why hasn’t he called?’ Ha. I’m doing hard to get.”

With advisers like his canny sisters, there is no way his strategy can fail. And if it does, it will just be fodder for more poetry.

Girlfriend update

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Helena

All went well. The Egyptian scarf was a huge success. Leo lent it to his girlfriend during the mid-morning break when she complained that she was cold.

“Then I kissed her,” he told us proudly over lunch. “But not on the lips.”

“Er, does she know she’s your girlfriend?” asked Rupert, a highly-trained hack, always ready with the most penetrating question.

“No, of course not,” said Leo, tucking into his pumpkin salad.

“Oh good. I’ve got lots of girlfriends like that,” said his father.

Meanwhile the other gift from Egypt; the tent pictured here, has been a huge success. They have pretty much lived in it since I got back. So we have been allowed to watch the Australian Open undisturbed. What an amazing tournament, I am going to miss it once it is all over tomorrow.

I’m sure once Heloise, as the “girlfriend” is called, sees the tent she will be begging to be Leo’s girlfriend and stop her flirting with the other boys. I hope so anyway. The end of the tennis along with a broken-hearted Leo might be more than I can handle all at the same time……

Young and in love

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Helena

I returned from Cairo last night to sad news. Leo apparently came home from school yesterday weeping.

“What’s wrong?” asked Rupert.

“She broke my heart,” he wailed.

“Who?”

“My girlfriend,” Leo told him. This girl is the reason he was all dressed up on Monday last week. When I questioned why he was wearing a gold-sequined waistcoat to school he looked at me as if I were a total idiot.

“Don’t you know my girlfriend comes back today?” he snapped and went back to combing his hair.

Anyway, back to yesterday.

“What did she do?” asked the concerned father. “How did she break your heart?”

“She spoke to another boy,” said the heart-broken one.

“Oh don’t worry about that, Mummy speaks to other boys all the time.”

But he was inconsolable. “It’s not the same,” he wailed and ran upstairs.

This morning he was clearly prepared to take out the competition. He was wearing another waistcoat and very dapper he looked too. Especially when I gave him the Egyptian cotton navy scarf I bought him from Cairo.

If all else fails, he can always gag her with it.