1995: Settling Down, and along came Charlie!
We spent Christmas 1994 with the Berhaut family at Le Tahu, semi-formal suits
and cocktail dresses around a candlelit dining table on Christmas Eve. It was
warm and cozy and charming.
Then we spent the New Year at a hotel in Marble Arch in London's West End as
a guest of Grandma.
This was the year that the grandparents stepped up. We seemed to be visiting
or visited by one or the other constantly during the year, and it was all very
reassuring.
We were staying with Grand-père at
La Grée
at the end of August when Charlie arrived at La Clinique des Augustines in
Malestroit.
The nuns' Mother Superior during World War 2 was honored by Général
de Gaulle for her services to the Resistance, in particular for sheltering
British airmen. She was doing this before the American presence in the war was
really felt, and thus before the Liberation of France could be realistically
perceived. This is the kind of courage in religion that makes it easy to
have faith!
De Gaulle also honored all of Brittany for its peoples' efforts on
behalf of the Resistance, in a very practical way. He promised them that
they would never have to pay to use the new turnpikes that France was building
in Brittany. So now when you arrive in Brittany from the rest of France, the
paying autoroute turns into a free autoroute at the border. Too few know why.
We took the children back home to the Forest of Rambouillet in time for
school, and daily life continued. The school was a quaint little village school,
which meant that the Principal, Madame Vidal, was very important. She indeed put a lot of
effort into garnishing her own coming retirement.
We did the weekly shopping about twice a week
at Carrefour, the local hypermarket, where for some reason we always seemed to have lots of fun. Lunch on
those shopping days was at Flunch, French fast food with an anglicized name.
The children's athletic interest was judo or
bicycling,
with weekly classes and occasional competitions in the former. They went to
parties and held parties and made friendships that in some cases have lasted
through years of living on different continents.
Ian continued working from home, and the
advantages of the portable computer which he had first acquired when he
hung out his own shingle in August 1992
were becoming clearer. With a fax program installed, not only were his
professional faxes available wherever he was with his PC, he could even convert
them into text and work on them. So draft contracts could be converted and
modified without typing the whole thing. Now that was a labor-saving device for a
two-finger typist!
Our regular visits to Disneyland Paris continued throughout the year. The divorces were wending their
slow way through the legal system and the children's lives. Disneyland was where they
could always be children, and they were. Charlie's first visit was when he was
16 days old, just to get him juiced in it. In the photo, one of the children, we
think Thomas, is holding his mini sleeping bag open.
Here is our carousel of time, and here are the other
annual updates:
1994,
1996, 1997, 1998,
1999, 2000,
2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005,
2006, 2007
