In which Hestia gets all Frenchified....

The Cookery Book

I don't know about you, but late at night, glass of wine in one hand and mouse twitching in the other hand - I've made some odd purchases.  Usually on Ebay.  Usually they arrive and I have no recollection of ever buying that empty jam jar or 1975 Jackie Annual.  Oh yes, I've bought both.

Surfing the intertubes at night now comes with a new hazard: following links through other people's tweets on Twitter.  This is what I dida couple of weeks ago and this is how, this morning, I come to be opening a Children's Cookery Book.

In French.


I blame @indiaknight, whose glorious Posterous postings regularly beguile me into worryingly long periods spent drooling at boots, bags, tap-dancing shoe designers and, yes, a children's cookery book in French.

I've got my Higher French and, every parents' night at school, the teacher pats me on the arm and reassures me that Blair IS still learning French on weekly basis.

Confident and feeling all cosmopolitan I enter Sonshine's bombsite playroom and present him with the book.

'What's that?' brows down (ie it's not lego or a Bakugan)

'It's a cookery book.  In French. You've been doing French at School for five years now, non?' I grin.

I begin to read out a recipe - Onion Soup.

He raises a small hand and says 'Question?' with that upward inflection at the end that alerts me to the fact that this is some psuedo-bored-preteen mannerism picked up from The Suite Life of Zac and Cody). 

'What exactly *is* this stuff you are reading out?'

'It's French. Basic French.  The stuff your school has been applauded for by the Council. Your school gets extra money from the Council for this. French. You've been doing it for the past FIVE years.' 

He looks at me in the pitying manner of an expert regarding a novice, 'Ah, but mum, we only TALK it, we don't READ it.'

Great.

Sensing my disappointment (could it have been the sharp slapping shut of the book that gave it away?) he did manage to work up a degree of genuine enthusiasm about the illustrations - and this morning he was discovered copying the illustration of a 'lapin' to take to school.  He has proudly announced that he now knows that lapin = rabbit. 

He's VERY fond of rabbits.

He has also forgotten that it's a cookbook.

Oh dear, how much trouble am I going to be in when he asks me what 'lapin au vin' means......