Ca fait du bien

Watermelon season

Saturday morning. Occasionally there are minutes of silence, when the dwarves are ensconced, like a dysfunctional couple, on an iPad and a television in different rooms, watching the same programme. It allows me time to wander about opening doors and windows and allow the air and light to come flooding in.

The Lozenge had been collecting photographs of J and I and arranging them around the house. He brandished one picture, taken when we'd just got engaged. 'Where was I in this photo?' he asked. I tried to avoid the obvious conversation at that early hour, but was lured into giving a brief explanation of how we begin life on the planet. 'I don't like being an egg, Mummy.' 

The night before, J and I had found some fun in the form of a French party. Les Francais, they know how to do things abroad, and arranged: 'Un Bal pour la Communaute Francaise a Jerusalem' which we attended despite not quite fitting into that category. Sometimes a good night out is as valuable as a good night's sleep, I thought as I drew up another blind feeling like we live on a ship. Each window has one, and I hate them being closed in daytime.

We met lots of people that we wouldn't usually, including a couple of wives of French Gendarmes with not a word of English or Arabic between them. But we chatted as they elegantly puffed their way through a packet of Vogue Menthe cigarettes. After a few more glasses of vin rouge each, I bumped into one of them in the bathrooms, leaning elegantly against the wall in her golden stilettos. 'Ca va?' she asked. 'Oui,' I replied, 'J'ai perdu mon mari, mais sauf ca, tout va bien, merci.' 

'De temps en temps ca fait du bien, n'est pas?' she remarked.

I wasn't quite sure I agreed, since at a party where I knew know one, J was my lynchpin, but I loved the line. It encapsulates so much about what I love about French women and their frankness. 

We also got talking to an American diplomat and his wife, a self confessed 'soccer Mom' with four children. They were funny and interesting, and described how his parents, from deep Michigan, needed to apply for their first passport in order to visit him on his first posting in Tunisia. 

We are starting to formulate a mosaic of friendly faces in this city. Ca fait du bien, aussi.