Curating stuff!

I took a short break from the news/social media this week and I have to admit it did me the world of good. I can never stay away too long but a fews days' break seems to do me so much good. Not that the horrid stuff goes away, of course, but it gives my mind a rest to turn it all off, however briefly!

The French elections are getting ever closer and I just saw tonight that two of the more prominent candidates have announced an agreement between their parties to try to oust Napoleon. The French have this weird (to my mind) election process where in order to even stand for election you have to have confirmed support from X number of French mayors. Florian Philippot has been out campaigning solidly for about a year now and I like him very much, but he didn't get enough mayoral support and cannot stand. So he has gotten together with Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (who will be running) to forge an alliance based on five campaign promises and they announced it in a large press conference tonight. Of course the other candidates don't get anywhere near the air time that Macron gets, so while I'm afraid it is almost a done deal that Macron will get back in (he has backers with deep pockets), I would love to see Dupont-Aignan make it through to the second round and maybe people would see that there is an alternative to Macron and vote him in! I don't go in for political debates much but those two working together would be my idea of a pretty darn good team!

On Thursday I drove André back down to Valence to pick up his new car and he is thrilled with it. It's definitely very nippy and everyone is suitably impressed, but when I filled my car back up with petrol when I got back - ouch! It's now at almost $10/gallon so I would think anyone that doesn't have to do the km will definitely avoid it. I just pity those that can't avoid it, although there is (and has been for some time) a big push to get people car-pooling so maybe some good will come out of this price hike!

I finished watching the Netflix series Inventing Anna last week and yet again it kinda blows my mind how seemingly easily some people can fool others! It's the true story (although embellished I would guess) of Anna Sorokin who claimed she was a German heiress and convinced not only friends and acquaintances to fund her lavish lifestyle but also big-name banks. She was 26 when she started her antics in the US and to be honest I didn't feel that the actress pulled it off as she just came across as a rather silly young girl who thought prancing around in a short skirt would make people fall for her lies. Well more fool me, I guess, because that seems to be exactly what happened. Then the other day I watched an interview with the real Anna Sorokin and boy did she come over as an extremely arrogant, smug young woman - you know, with a face you'd just like to punch. More surprising to me is that she was no great looker either. I mean, if she had been some stunning beauty I could maybe have understood the appeal but I guess it just goes to show that if you have the self-confidence or chutzpah to try it, you might just pull it off!

Anna Sorokin

Spring is definitely in the air now and with that come all my grandiose plans for a massive veggie garden - which of course probably won't pan out because I go off the boil too easily. That being said, I'm already watching gardening videos on my computer and just discovered a young English woman called Emma Bailey and am really enjoying her channel. She comes over as a bit dippy and a real giggler but it's such fun to watch her as opposed to the obnoxious Ms Sorokin!

Oh and I almost forgot to mention, Jen asked me the other day if she could throw a surprise 30th birthday party for Jordan at my place on 4 June. Of course I said yes, only to find out afterwards that I'll be hosting about 50 people if they all come!!!! Yikes, pray for good weather won't you! She and her friends will organize it all but will need my house and garden to host everyone. So the first thing I did was get myself a child gate to put across the back garage door - which is right next to the rather nasty cellar steps! There will potentially be five or six very young children at the party and those cellar steps have always given me nightmares whenever young children are around. That being said, Jordan and Jen came over on Saturday for Jordan to install my new bathroom sinks. In the meantime I spent my time on my hands and knees chasing Charlie (he's still not walking) and both grandma and Munchkin were exhausted at the end of the day. On the plus side, Jen had Charlie climb down my internal stairs for the first time very slowly on his belly, to a great round of applause when he finally got to the bottom. Judging by the smile on his face you'd think he'd just carried out a moon landing!

Having that party lined up means I really want to start getting rid of stuff - I just have way too much of it and the other night I was thinking "do you really want to spend the rest of your life curating stuff which, for the most part, has no real value to you"? So you store, dust and curate this stuff and then hopefully one day you will consider it "done". But what if that's the day you keel over dead having spent your lifetime curating crap and for what? I don't know, I think it's probably true that as we get older we start to realize we don't need all this stuff and it's really just another millstone around our necks - or am I wrong?

I think this hit home even more today as a friend from work sent me a message to ask if I'd heard that H had died in Australia? I hadn't, as it turned out, but H and I were friends, went out walking together occasionally or to the theatre and she and I shared an office for a couple of years in HR. She used to handle the job vacancies and very often people would try to get information out of her about what was going on with a particular vacancy. She was very professional and never discussed it with anyone, certainly never said anything to me about it, but in any case I was never interested anyway. But, I do remember her bursting out laughing one time and she just went "oh the poor sod". When I asked her what was so funny she mentioned that an external candidate had applied both for the position of Chief Economist and also for the vacancy for a delivery driver! Not the same skill set I would think but ....!

My kids adored H because when they were pretty young they would catch the train from school and meet me in the office to go home and she was always messing around with them. She would rib on them and they would make fun of her appalling French accent because despite many years living in Geneva she never mastered French or the accent for the limited French she did have. She didn't have children of her own (I don't think she wanted them), but was always great fun with the kids. While I wasn't her closest friend we were still good friends and at only a few years older than me it came as something of a shock this morning to hear about her relatively sudden death. As she always said "it's hard to fly like an eagle when you're surrounded by a bunch of turkeys"! RIP Chookie, my old mate!