Our son's first visit to Douentza

Bilal and I had unexpectedly busy Christmases with our working lives, meaning our holiday time was limited.  We thought things would be less busy in the new year, but they weren't.  Eventually, we decided we just needed to take a holiday and work things around them.  There is always the temptation to procrastinate with taking holidays, thinking that a less busy time will come.  Apart from anything else, my due date for our second child is not far off.  I have no doubt I will soon have another distraction, as Bilal is looking forward to more children after then.

The fashion industry is composed of some very self-centred people who often don't understand that life is not all about them and their whims, so many people in my industry struggle to understand why I am happy with this and insinuate that I am some oppressed wife and Bilal is a misogynist who just views me as a breeding mare.  Me personally, I like big men like Bilal (he is a very big man, MDR) who are into adult pursuits like raising a family, rather than little boys who eschew responsibility and play computer games.  I view it as very manly for a man to be very attentive to children: - Bilal loves to take our son with him everywhere he goes.  A depot environment is no place for a baby, so he doesn't take him to work (I am sure he would if he could, MDR), but Bilal takes him everywhere else, including the gym (in spite of what anyone thinks of the sight of a very big man pumping iron with a small baby a few metres away).

We decided to visit Douentza, the town in Mali he is most closely associated with, though not exclusively, being born into a nomadic Touareg family: - we tend to travel to rural areas according to where his family's livestock are located.  We are on holiday now, so as to avoid the hottest times of year.

I have my tablet with me and recently bought some equipment for satellite broadband (as well as photovoltaic cells), as we plan to make regular trips to Mali.  Bilal was slightly perplexed by this, as is generally quite happy to avoid contact with the outside world when in Douentza.  Also, he is not particularly communicative with people other than friends and family anyway.  Furthermore, he is very hot on privacy: - he will very rarely agree to photos of him or our son, the conditions being that the photos are only stored on a hard drive in our home not linked to the internet (Bilal is worried about hacking).  As a result, his relatives in Mali have no idea what our son looks like, hence why they are particularly keen to see him.

Douentza is not exactly a place where an it-girl such as myself can live a life of glamour and luxury and the travel arrangements in Mali are a world apart from France's fantastic TGV system, saddened as I am by the lack of political will to build a new Marseille-Nice line, as it would make it easier for many high-society girls such as myself to enjoy the glitz of the Côte d'Azur.  A girl such as myself always loves her manicures and pedicures: - opportunities for this are very limited in Douentza, except when women are being beautified for their wedding (when the whole town stops).  I still love it though.  Given the lack of glamour, the arrival of an it-girl such as myself with her returning-son husband quickly becomes the talk of the town: - Bilal doesn't particularly like this from what I can tell.  Men try and pretend they aren't inclined to look at a super-attractive girl such as myself by observing the custom of turning their back when an unfamiliar woman is present, but Bilal knows better, hence why he comes along with me in public.  You can't blame them for trying to be respectful towards Bilal by not ogling me, lol.

Mali is topographically flat and boring, but the area around Douentza is unusually varied: - it sits in a gap between two mountainous areas.  Bilal enjoyed climbing them as a child and we both want our son to grow up to be rugged, though with more finesse than Bilal (e.g. not referring to women as well buff wifeys, MDR).  I am definitely enjoying being back.  I enjoy climbing up the mountains.  Most people would find this difficult with a baby in tow, but Bilal seems quite happy to carry him and all his paraphernalia.  Anyway, for now, we are enjoying the holiday and anticipating what life will bring with our second baby.  Bilal is looking forward towards the birth and future children: - some people talk about trying for children, but Bilal and I won't need to make any changes, him being the energetic man that he is.

Getting into good habits early on

I recently read an article about parents overfeeding babies.  When I first realised I was expecting a baby, one of the first thing Bilal and I discussed was what we would do regarding feeding habits when the baby arrived.  Obviously, it is good for new parents to have aligned attitudes about things involving children.  We agreed that feeding habits would be consistent for the initial period in the baby's life, as it is important for babies to get the food they need to grow properly.  No diligent parents would want to leave their children malnourished.

However, we agreed that at a certain age, there would be divergence according to gender.  Ideally, if our baby had been a girl, the first expression she would learn would not be "oui", "non", "papa" or "mama", but "la moitié, s'il vous plaît".  As indicated by the book "Why French children don't talk back" by Catherine Crawford, we French know a thing or two about how to raise children.  We like to get our children into good habits early on and beauty is one of the primary ways I plan to do this with any daughters I have: - I don't want them to grow up looking fat and ugly.

There is all sorts of talk in the Anglo-Saxon world about how women are bombarded with unrealistic images of what women should look like, to the extent that they have tried to make fat women legitimate by introducing a "curvy Barbie".  Apart from the fact that cartoon (or otherwise not-real) characters are exaggerated in how they are constructed, I think they should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging women to get fat like that!  With any daughters I have, I plan to promote the skinny ideal to them so they grow up to look like a pretty Frenchwoman, not a fat and dumpy Anglo-Saxon woman!  Quelle horreur!

However, none of this matters to us at present, as our baby turned out to be male.  To me, my ideal situation would be for him to grow up with the suave urbane sophistication of a traditional Frenchman, but with all the ruggedness and muscularity of Bilal, who plans to teach him how to run the farm he recently purchased in the mountains to the north of Marseille, making visits to his family's farms in Mali where possible to teach him about farming in an extreme climate.  I have no doubt that Bilal will want to introduce him to La Savine's culture, which I admit I have some reservations about, but I know Bilal will be more than capable of protecting him.  I have no doubt that our son will be irresistible to women if he manages to acquire both French sophistication and Malian ruggedness!

Anyway, if he is to have all these things, he will need a large food intake.  My food intake is fine, as I have a medium-intensity exercise routine (not considering using the lift unless my destination is more than 20 floors away and walking as much as possible).  However, our son will need more than that, so I am thinking of how to expand his dietary repertoire beyond Bilal's chicken and jollof rice!  MDR!  French cuisine has plenty of options for accomplishing muscle growth with high-calorie diets: - there are lots of dairy, meat and fish products that have been discussed in previous articles.  There are also lots of nice healthy fats in the area around Marseille, most notably olive oil, which will enable him to fulfil his calorific requirements without putting undue strain on his heart.

Anyway, all that is a long time away and I am still getting used to baby stuff!

Things I love about Bilal

I am writing this article because some of my readers have expressed skepticism about how enthusiastic I really am to be getting married to Bilal, given what I say about him, primarily regarding his use of hip-hop French.

Granted, there are many strengths that Bilal does not possess.  He does not speak very good French.  Yes, he has native-level competency, but his vocabulary is hip-hop French, rather than the French equivalent of Queen's English.  He is no gentleman: - he refers to me as a "meuf" or "femeu" (French for "bird", as in slang for "woman"), saying I am his "pineco" (verlan for "copine" or "girlfriend") and quite openly says in front of his "homies" that I am "bien faite" ("well fit") as if these were completely normal words that one would use in a job interview.  His tastes in fashion are very different to mine: - unless he is wearing his chèche, he wears sweatsuits with baseball caps on backwards.  He is not very outgoing; in fact, he is painfully shy with unfamiliar people.

However, there are plenty of strengths that he does have and this article is intended to inform my readers about them.  Firstly, he is an extremely attractive man.  He is 195cm in height and has a very large build because he works out so much (for this reason, he doesn't tend to say, "la moitié, s'il vous plaît" at mealtimes).  There are only two occasions on which I have seen him bare-chested: - the first time was when he was rescuing someone from church who was getting into difficulty while swimming (referred to in an earlier post) and in a recording made on a mobile camera (which I will refer to later in this post).  I have never seen someone as heavily-built as him (he is more heavily built than the man in the picture below), even in the silly girlie magazines I used to read before I became born again.  He has these absolutely gorgeous curls that result from his genetic makeup being somewhere between the Arabs of North Africa ("Rebeus", as Bilal calls them, who tend to have straight hair) and the blacks of Sub-Saharan Africa ("renois", as Bilal calls them, who tend to have curly and knotty hair).  Bilal is seldom seen smiling, but when he does, it is an absolutely beautiful sight: - he has the most perfect teeth and he has the most adorable dimples (that are visible on the rare occasions when he is seen smiling).  He is a very heavily-built man, but has a really cute baby face.

Secondly, he is an extremely tough and brave man.  He runs a boxing club in La Savine to keep the restless and angry youths there out of trouble: - this is something I found out very recently.  He took up boxing competitively and did very well, but he was only willing to go so far because competing at a higher level would have taken up too much time and compromised his work at church.  La Savine has a terrible reputation that would be even more terrible if there weren't peacemakers like him around.  He has very strict rules and youngsters join on the explicit understanding that they will be subject to his discipline if he finds out they are involved in things like drugs, carrying illegal weapons and other gangland activity.  There is a poverty of expectation and he has inspired several youngsters to make something of themselves with both the fact that the boxing club gives the youngsters something to do and the fact that he gets to witness (i.e. evangelise) to the attendees of the club.  He refuses to allow any acts of Islam or any other religion (e.g. prayer facing Mecca) to be carried out on the premises and there is openly evangelistic literature on the walls and pamphlets everywhere.  Someone posted on Youtube a video of when a group of about 20 Muslims burst into a session of the boxing club and delivered threats of violence and death regarding his evangelistic activities.  Bilal politely, but firmly stood up to them and they backed down.  There was another video someone put up of Bilal on the street standing up to a group of about 10 thugs carrying knifes who threatened one of the children who was a regular attendee.  They had apparently travelled from Savigny in Paris (an area with lots of gangs) to cause trouble and didn't know who he was.  A few of them tried to attack him with their knives and Bilal deflected the strikes; the rest of them decided not to bother and fist-bumped him out of respect, seeing how tough he was.  I once travelled to Mali with Bilal and I saw the rugged terrain in which he carries out his activities as a herdsman: - the terrain is often mountainous and extremely hot for most of the year.  Mali has been a very unstable part of the world for a long time and I found out from some of his relatives that Bilal has regularly stood up to raiders armed with machine guns trying to steal his family's livestock.  Of course, nobody would ever deduce that Bilal was capable of any of these things just through a normal interaction with him.  As I have said before, I would much rather have a genuinely tough man like Bilal than a heavily-built, but pseudo-tough man who has never faced any hazards worse than defective gym equipment.

Thirdly, he is a very hard worker.  It is not easy arranging dates with him because he is always so busy.  He works the standard 35-hour week in his day job with "Le Trom de Marseille" (as he calls it).  However, I have heard from a colleague that he is always working extremely fast and productively.  Though he never got involved in student life at university, he was always very diligent in his studies, even though this wasn't widely seen, as most of his non-timetabled work was done in his room at home behind closed doors.  He was never one to make a song and dance about how hard he works, but I know he is a very hard worker.  When we were in Mali, if something needed to be done with his family's livestock, he would do it, irrespective of the time of day or how difficult the task.  Bilal is always active in church right the way through the day.  Our church has four services on Sundays: - early morning, midday, afternoon and evening and Bilal attends every one of them, operating the audiovisual equipment and does not desire to lie in on Sundays.  Even between the services, he is active.  Before the early morning service, he is busy setting up the audiovisual equipment.  Between the early morning and midday services, he is busy making preparations for the Sunday School class.  Between the midday and afternoon services, he is busy delivering his Sunday school class (except when he is eating his normal goats meat and jollof rice lunch).  Between the afternoon and evening services, he is busy evangelising at major interchanges in the city (bus stops, "Trom" stations, Marseille St. Charles station, Marseille Blancarde station etc).  After the evening service, he is busy counting the collection money and doing the church's accounting work.  The church has several meetings during the week.  There is a prayer meeting on Tuesdays, a children's meeting on Wednesdays (which children in good standing with the Sunday School may attend) and a Bible study on Thursdays: - Bilal is involved in all three of these meetings.  Also, Bilal's boxing club meets on Mondays and Fridays.  Bilal normally keeps Saturdays free of pre-arranged appointments (though he attends things if needed).  Occasionally, he will rest if he is extremely tired, but most Saturdays, he is engages in theological study.  He loves to read the works of theologians John Calvin (French of course: - his book "The Institutes of the Christian Religion is Bilal's favourite book with the exception of the Bible itself), John Wesley etc, as well as biographies of the great men of faith of the reformation and beyond, such as Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson, George Whitfield, John Wycliffe etc.  Biblical commentaries are a favourite of his as well: - off the top of my head, I know he has the commentaries of theologians including John Gill, Matthew Henry and John Calvin at home.  Also, one project he is working on at the moment on Saturdays is the translation of the Bible into his local Touareg language.

Fourthly, Bilal is an extremely kind person.  He is a very wealthy man on account of his online share trading activities, but I know that he does a large number of compassionate acts.  People at church give him their used food containers, primarily plastic pots.  He doesn't normally tell people what he uses them for, but I am aware that he uses them to distribute food.  Every day, cooks a large amount of jollof rice and goat's meat, puts it in the donated plastic pots and distributes it to residents of La Savine who are struggling to afford enough food to eat and local homeless people.  Given that many of them cannot afford to heat their homes in winter (La Savine is in a high-up and exposed part of Marseille), many women need the extra energy and aren't in a position to say, "La moitié, s'il vous plaît"!  Facetious I know, but MDR!  The flat Bilal lives in with his parents is not big enough for guests to stay, except on the sofa or the living room floor, so he has a spreadsheet that he uses to manage the details of people at church willing to offer temporary accommodation to people who find themselves homeless through no fault of their own.  He organises laundry runs on weekdays so that the host families don't need to bother with bedlinen.  He also collects used clothing and household appliances to distribute to people in need.  He regularly visits the older residents of La Savine who don't have anyone to keep them company.  Even on Sundays, he is not too busy to chat with someone who has a burden on their mind: - he will always arrange a time during the day to chat with such people if they wish.  If he sees a beggar on the street, he will always offer some food, even if the only food he happens to be carrying is something posh for a party.

Fifthly, Bilal is very fond of children.  Pslam 127:4 talks about the value of children to a man.  If a man is even considering using contraception, it would suggest that he has some values that are at odds with God's standards when it comes to children.  Bilal wants a large family for both cultural and religious reasons.  I refer back to the aforementioned religious reason.  When it comes to cultural reasons, he is extremely fond of his native Touareg culture and does not want to give it up by westernising and having a small family or being part of a childless couple.  He has openly said he would rather father five children and die a very young man than live to 100 and have one or possibly none.  I have told him I will cooperate wholeheartedly with his attempts to have a large family, which is natural, given how incredibly handsome he is.  Some lezzie feminists would accuse me of betraying feminism by saying this to him, but I would say that apart from the fact that I want a large family too irrespective of anything Bilal wants, he is a man who has spent many years diligently labouring to bring good to so many people and glory to God's name that he thoroughly deserves a helpmeet in his labours and if a large family is his main earthly aim, he deserves a woman who will give it to him.  I have no doubt that he has a special love for children.  When he is not diligently labouring away at another task associated with the church or his workplace, he can often be seen cradling a small baby or playing with toddlers or small children.  As mentioned earlier, he is very diligent in his evangelistic efforts via the Sunday School.  He is motivated to deliver his Sunday School class no matter how unwell he is (though the truth be told, he is a very fit, strong and healthy man and is therefore very rarely ill, save for complications that used to result from him not knowing he had coeliac disease).  His love of God and children and the desire to see their souls saved is what drives him to come all the way from La Savine on Sunday mornings come rain or shine (mostly shine in the case of Marseille, MDR).  As mentioned, he was completely willing to stand up to thugs threatening a child from his boxing club even when he was badly outnumbered.

Sixthly, all these things would be in vain if Bilal were not a converted man.  As the famous hymn verse (from "Rock of ages cleft for me") goes: -
"Not the labours of my hands
Can fulfil Thy law's demands
Could my zeal no respite know
Could my tears forever flow
All for sin could not atone
Thou must save and Thou alone
Believers are completely forbidden from marrying non-believers and if Bilal could not demonstrate that he is a born again man, I would never have entertained his advances, nor would my father have given his consent.  Anyone who is reading this post who is under some delusion that they are heaven-bound because they grew up in a Christian home, you are delusional, a blessing though it is: - you have been warned!  Bilal has presented both a credible testimony and conduct that is befitting of a believer.  Nobody should ever be under the illusion that one can enter heaven by means of good deeds: - salvation is by God's grace alone.  However, as the Bible points out, we must look out for the fruit of the spirit and James 2 makes it explicitly clear that unless good works result from a person's conversion, that person's faith is dead.  God gives us the rule about not being unequally yoked for a reason: - if I were married to a man who fulfils the definition of a suave Frenchman, but who is not a believer, we will be at cross purposes throughout our marriage, as we will both be pulling in different directions.  A believing husband is a tremendous gift from the Lord.  Being the Impossibly Dainty French Woman, I have been approached by enormous numbers of men, but I don't believe many of them were believers and I am delighted that God has chosen to bless me with a believing husband.

So there you have it.  A few key reasons why I am delighted to have Bilal as my future husband and why I am not hankering after any supposedly better prospects.

Visiting Mali

As some of you, my readers, might have deduced, I was keen to visit Mali at some point.  I wanted to visit Mali and Bilal's family and generally experience the environment that has made him the man he is today.  This is the reason why I have not posted for quite a while now.

Our journey commenced at Marseille-St. Charles station.  Marseille has very good connections to Charles de Gaulle Airport via the high-speed lines, with the trains leaving the main route shortly before Paris and entering the LGV Interconnection Est.  Given François Hollande's very high taxes, I feel the need to pursue cheap train fares where this option is available (hey, some sacrifices are sometimes needed if one wants two penthouses and eat only the highest quality food!) and I was delighted that Bilal and I managed to find cheap idTGV fares between Marseille-St. Charles and Charles de Gaulle-TGV stations.  Vive la France! From there, we took a flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali.  We could have flown onwards to Mopti, but Bilal wanted to show me Bamako first and we figured that car rental choices would be better there.  I rarely seem to travel by car, but in Mali, it turned out to be necessary: - we didn't have enough time for travel by camel to be practical.  Even though I, as an impossibly dainty Frenchwoman, love to walk everywhere, the distances were too great to be practical.  Tee hee!

Another reason for hiring a car was that some members of Bilal's family met us at the airport.  Even though I am able and willing to walk long distances, the relatives who met us were not!  We needed the car in order to have the flexibility of visiting relatives of his in different parts of the country.  I said Bilal comes from the Timbuktu area, which is true, but the definition of the word "near" is somewhat flexible here!  The word "near" could mean several hundred kilometres in a vast and empty nation like Mali!  MDR.  Being a Touareg, the question of where he comes from is somewhat nebulous.  However, the specific town he is most associated with is Douentza.  Douentza has an airport, but we had no success in finding information out about flights there anyway.  Douentza is quite small, with a population of only about 20,000, but they seemed very hospitable, even if they are under the yoke of Islam.  Douentza sits in the middle of nowhere in between two beautiful mountainous areas.

I always viewed Bilal as being very athletic and rugged, but I was in for a shock when we went into these mountainous areas!  Training as a herdsman began for Bilal at the age of approximately three to four years, in line with tuareg custom.  Various people in La Savine are pseudo-tough, as are some people in the dodgy Paris suburbs.  So too are the wiggers in various middle class areas of French cities!  If one wants to see tough, one should see what people who have been surrounded by gangland culture in La Savine and grown up as a herdsman in the harsh, unforgiving environment that Bilal grew up in!

As I have often said, Bilal is very much a hip-hop person, having grown up in La Savine.  When he speaks, his French is somewhere between a Marseille 'hood accent and a Malian accent.  When he is in France, it sounds more like the former, whereas during the trip to Mali, it sounded more like the latter.  Given that we were in Mali, he toned down his hip-hop vocabulary, knowing that people there would not understand words like "pineco", "darblé", "renoi", "rebeu", "racba" etc!  He was also easier to understand for me as well, as the gulf between Malian French and French French is much smaller than the gulf between La Savine hip-hop slang and French French!

Being the Impossibly Dainty French Woman, the thing that was most notable during the whole of the visit was the attention given to my weight.  In France, I am rightly admired for having a dainty figure, but various stupid people in Mali looked upon me with pity!  People were constantly asking me if my father did not feed me properly, to which I had to reply that I was earning my own income and that my impossibly dainty figure is something I consciously chose!  In Mali (and indeed many African nations), obesity is regarded as a sign of prosperity.  In France, we regard it as a sign of stupidity.  Luckily, Bilal was willing to be a dissenter and tell people around him that he simply did not find it attractive for a woman to be overweight.  Also, I found that there were a few relatively Westernised people in the larger cities (e.g. Bamako, the capital) who follow Western fashions and therefore know that being thin is attractive and a sign of sophistication.

Shopping for local attire was difficult, as the (relatively) high-quality clothing tended to be made for disgustingly obese women, whereas the clothing suitable for impossibly dainty women such as myself tended to be lower quality on the expectation of such people having lower incomes.  In the end, I just visited a local seamstress who made something for me, having taken my measurements.  I don't like dressing in a way that exposes large amounts of flesh, as I feel it is not befitting of a Christian woman and does not look attractive anyway.  However, on this trip, I felt it would be practical to cover even more of my flesh, given that the sun is very intense at this time of year in Mali.

Obviously, given that we weren't in France, the food was not of such good quality as I am accustomed to in France.  However, it wasn't as bad as in the Anglo-Saxon world!  MDR!  Taguella is a ubiquitous part of Touareg cuisine and tends to be made out of millet: - as I understand things, it can be made out of wheat, but fortunately for Bilal's bowels, this is relatively uncommon common in Douentza!  Millet porridge is very common as well: - it is relatively easy to grow millet in hot and dry climates.  People tend to eat sheep, goat and camel meat as and when their finances allow.  I got the right 'ump (said in a Cockney accent) when I found myself having to eat the latter, MDR.

As a result of the lower quality, it was inevitable that I would find myself eating more.  However, that wasn't a bad thing under the circumstances, as I was even more active than normal.  The reason for this is that I tended to accompany Bilal on his journeys to look after his family's livestock.  Just following him was exhausting enough!  However, being a quintessential Frenchwoman, I was well prepared.  As I have often mentioned, a Frenchwoman does not like to use lifts or escalators and prefers to use the stairs where possible.  I live in a penthouse in a tall and luxurious building near the Vieux Port in Marseille (which has a lift as a grudging concession to the wealthy and overweight foreigners who have bought flats there), so I am naturally used to such exercise!  My physical fitness attracted stares from puzzled locals, but who cares?  Anyway, I found that my dainty Frenchwoman portions were not enough for the physical exercise I was doing, so I found myself eating more, but I quickly burned the calories off, given the increased exercise.

As mentioned, although Douentza is the town Bilal is most associated with, he does not have an overwhelming association with one town, given that he is a Touareg and the Touareg people often live a nomadic lifestyle.  Douentza is at the edge of the zone inhabited by the Touareg peoples.  Douentza is on the edge of the Pays Dogon (Dogon Country), which is primarily inhabited by, yes you guessed it, the Dogon people.  The Pays Dogon is an absolutely beautiful mountainous and historic area.  There are lots of historic Tellem granary buildings everywhere and I am told the environment is a lush and green one (Bilal and I were there towards the end of the dry season).

Timbuktu was also another region we visited.  The mosques there were the main architectural attraction in terms of their historic value.  They are completely devoid of spiritual beauty, being mosques, but they abounded in architectural and historical beauty, particular the Djinguereber Masjid.  Bilal took me to see some relatives there and again, they asked me if my father was starving me and again, I had to explain that being slim is a sign of sophistication and being fat is a sign of stupidity.

One thing that was noticeably different was Bilal's temperament.  He often has a facial expression (often obscured by a hooded top or a chèche) that looks rather wistful, as if he is homesick.  I have never visited his home in La Savine, so I don't know if it is absent there, but it was noticeably absent in Mali.  Granted, believers should not feel entirely at home anywhere on earth, as they are looking towards the future in their celestial abode and Bilal is delighted to be in church on Sundays, but he still seems to feel as though he is out-of-place when he is in middle-class areas of Marseille.  He is normally painfully shy, but during the trip, he was noticeably different.  He was unusually inclined to start conversations with others and he was not avoiding conversations with monosyllabic answers as he normally does.  Whatever is most normal for him, I adore him, I was glad to see part of the other country that has gone into making him the man he is today and I can't wait till he makes a proposal of marriage.

Coeliac disease is no longer a yuppie illness

Over Christmas, Bilal had some very strange times.  Being my new boyfriend, he was invited to spend Christmas with my family, given that his gormless family members don't celebrate this occasion.  I remember when my mother invited him over.  He seemed very unenthusiastic, but my mother persisted and he agreed to spend Christmas with us reluctantly.  I stayed in my own flat while he stayed with my parents.  I was enthusiastically looking forward to having Les Treize Desserts, that great Provençal equivalent of a smörgåsbord.

One of the things that has been regarded as extremely odd about Bilal is his refusal to eat any local French cuisine.  There are a few specialist shops in or near La Savine selling traditional Malian products and Bilal always refused to eat anything other than traditional Malian cuisine and nobody had the faintest idea why.  Our church is one where people tend to stay the whole day.  Given Bilal's responsibilities at church, it was not really practical for him to go back to La Savine and come back again for his next task, so he would bring in a packed lunch, perhaps eating it in a room out of sight.  Even on House Party, he would insist on bringing his own food and he would cook it himself if need be, setting up a fire to cook taguella, a traditional Malian bread, which tends to be cooked in sand and ashes.

During the various meals at Christmas, Bilal was constantly trying to make excuses not to participate in mealtimes, saying that he didn't have much of an appetite.  In France, this is quite normal for women with dainty figures such as myself, MDR.  However, it is not normal for a man to have no interest in food: - as I have explained in a previous posting, if a Frenchman is overweight, it is regarded as a sign that he is living the good live.  Anyway, Bilal found that there was no way to avoid eating food at my parents' home without seriously offending those who had cooked it, so he reluctantly ate the food available.  I did not witness the events of the early hours of Christmas Day, as I was sleeping in my own flat after the midnight celebrations of Christmas Eve.  However, when I arrived on Christmas Day, I saw Bilal walking towards the door of my parents' home in order to leave and looking very upset and humilliated.  There was quite a commotion of people trying to persuade him to stay.  What apparently happened is that in the early hours of the morning, he had some extremely violent bowel problems and unfortunately, because the bathroom is not soundproofed, he was not able to hide the sounds resulting from these violent bowel problems and he made very loud moans of pain.  Toilet humour is not exactly to a French woman's taste, so I will bypass some of the details.

After a lot of persuading from me and my parents, Bilal eventually agreed to stay.  This he did for a few further weeks and he ate whatever food was in front of him (and continued having the same bowel problems).  One of my relatives who is known for being a hypochondriac happened to be staying with us this Christmas.  She spoke with Bilal and persuaded him to see a doctor.  Bilal is quietly a macho man, as he is used to surviving in harsh conditions in the Sahara Desert facing down threats to his family's livestock, be they wild animals, armed raiders, lack of water etc, so he wasn't all that enthused by a visit to the doctor.  However, after a very large amount of persuasion, he agreed to visit the doctor.  The doctor took a blood sample from him and told him to visit for a follow-up appointment to discuss the results after the sample had been tested.

When Bilal returned for his follow-up appointment, the doctor asked his permission to refer him to the local hospital for a biopsy, as the blood sample confirmed suspicions that there were antibodies present.  Bilal was a bit apprehensive, but he agreed, as he felt that if there was something wrong with him, he may as well stick the course and find out.  I remember accompanying him to hospital for the biopsy and seeing how nervous he was, even though a biopsy is a reasonably routine surgical procedure.  In this case, it involved pushing a tube all the way through his digestive system and scraping out a sample of his lower intestine.  The sample was later analysed to see if the villi had been blunted on account of inflammation, as in the picture below.

When Bilal visited the doctor again, the doctor informed him that he has coeliac disease (spelled "celiac" by silly Americans who like to murder the English language).  Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition in which ingestion of gluten causes the villi in the lower intestines to become inflamed.  It is lifelong and there is no way of treating it; one can only prevent the negative effects thereof by not eating gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, rye and spelt.  All this perfectly explains why Bilal never liked deviating from normal Malian cuisine.  Malian cuisine, particularly in the north, is not completely free of wheat, though Bilal comes from the area around Timbuktoo, which is further south.  The foods he tends to eat include taguella (a bread made out of millet flour), rice, beef, mutton, goat, chicken, baobab leaves, spinach, jollof rice, fufu (no, this has nothing to do with men being camp, in spite of how its name sounds), maafe etc.  These foods are not sophisticated in the opinion of a stylish Frenchwoman like myself (at least in the way they are prepared in Malian cuisine), but unknowingly, it appears that they allowed Bilal to live with coeliac disease for so long.  He abstained from French cuisine (in which gluten features so heavily), as he found it inflamed his bowels.

I don't personally know what I would do if I had coeliac disease myself.  I would struggle to abstain from all those foods with gluten in them that make French cuisine so sophisticated.  Granted, not all French recipes have gluten in them: - tartiflette and cassoulet are two examples I have discussed in previous blog posts that don't normally contain gluten.  However, I would struggle to do without my morning baguette: - a micro baguette of course.  One can buy large French sticks like the ones in the photo above.  However, as Mireille Guiliano agrees, the optimum size of a portion of bread for a sophisticated Frenchwoman such as myself is about the size of an old cassette tape.  Gosh, I feel so old, given that I can remember these!  Still, as Zoë Williams correctly points out (grudingly and somewhat sarcastically), we Frenchwomen excel in all of life's seasons, whether it be the young filly season or the old bag season, tee hee.

Anyway, enough about that silly woman!  Bilal has introduced me to various aspects of Malian cuisine and some of it, though nowhere near as sophisticated as French cuisine, at least appears to be vaguely edible.  I am particularly curious about the way tea is drunk.  Normally, what happens is they pour the tea from a great height into the pot several times over.  Supposedly, this enhances the flavour, but even my sophisticated French palate can't tell the difference, so I have no doubt that this is made up.  It isn't as sophisticated as Mariage Frères tea, but it is just about bearable.  Still, if I get married to Bilal, I will have to make some adjustments: - it won't do for him to be in bed alongside me and having bowel problems!  MDR!

So there you have it: - coeliac disease is definitely not a yuppie disease (along the lines of man flu), as I indicated in a previous blog posting about gluten intolerances, tee hee!  Bilal is about as un-yuppieish (yes, I acknowledge there is no such word) as you can imagine.  Granted, some Anglo-Saxon yuppies like to spend ages reading medical textbooks and therefore induce symptoms psychosomatically, but occasionally, there are genuine cases of food issues and Bilal is one such example.  All you yuppies out there, stop pretending you have diseases you don't really have!  It makes a mockery of the people who really do have them!

A BBC attack on French women's effortless perfection

About a week ago, I came across a BBC article expressing disapproval of French women's perfection.  In it, the BBC journalist named Joanna Robertson attacked the supposed tyranny of the French culture pushing women to be thin.  In the article, she proved that she doesn't care much for consistency either.  Towards the beginning of the article, she wrote: -
"Pharmacies are filled with miracle-claiming diet products and women's magazines run endless columns of slimming advice."
Then later on, she wrote something far closer to the truth, which read: -
"There is an idea put about in what the French call the "Anglo-Saxon" press that French women do not grow fat.  
They simply follow a set of mystic rules, handed down from mother to daughter, that govern their personal grooming, comportment and, most of all, their eating habits.  
A sensible, balanced diet. Plenty of fresh produce. Three meals a day. Absolutely no snacking. Regular, reasonable exercise. Nothing to excess."
It is an almost direct contradiction, though I broadly feel unable to disagree with the points raised in the second quotation.  The major point I disagree with is the word "mystic".  There is nothing mysterious about how we are impossibly thin.  It is the fact that we are impossibly perfect.  We have absolutely delicious food that means we feel satisfied by the taste, rather than the feeling of our bellies being stretched (as is the case with unsophisticated Anglo-Saxon women).  Joanna Robertson is entirely right when she says that obesity is frowned upon in France.

I note one point that appeared towards the end, which read: -
""It is an absolute tyranny," says Marjorie, a 49-year-old business executive, herself pencil slim.
"The tyranny of the silhouette, we call it - but it is also a kind of dream because it represents total success.
"It is not like in the UK where TV shows have women of all shapes and sizes doing all kinds of things. I love that - chubby 55-year-olds kissing men full on the mouth. You would never see that here," she adds.
Marjorie works near the Paris suburb of Saint Denis where there is a large immigrant population from the Maghreb.
She is inspired by these women with their full, rounded, curvaceous figures and the way they walk tall.
"They are so much more feminine than our Parisian chic," she says, "but the sad truth is that if they want careers in this society they are going to have to get skinny to get ahead.""
Fat and feminine!  These two terms are almost mutually exclusive.  I view it as severely unfeminine to be fat.  I have seen such scenes on British television with obese 55-year-olds kissing men on the mouth and it made me feel physically sick, but anyway.  In pre-industrialised society, men needed to marry a woman with strong arms, because he knew he would need someone who was capable of doing large amounts of physical work on the farm.  Proverbs 31:17 reads, "She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms."  The English NIV renders this as, "She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks."  However, in an industrialised society, there is no longer a need for women to be heavily built.  This does not mean we work any less hard.  Today's women work just as hard, even if the work isn't always physical.  However, as Joanna Robertson seems to be close to admitting, but doesn't want to, thin is beautiful.  This is unfortunately a fact that she correctly indicates has not yet occurred to "Maghreb" women living in France.  Bilal told me that he never liked the sight of women from his culture having "full, rounded, curvaceous figures".  He has told me that he always thought it looked horrible.  Granted, Bilal comes from Mali, which is outside the zone traditionally known as the Maghreb, but that is a minor detail.

Bilal has told me that one of the reasons he enjoyed being able to take the bus and get out of La Savine for a few hours at a time on Saturdays and weekday evenings (of course, on Sundays, his reason was coming to church) was because it was so refreshing to him to see lovely, thin French women, rather than the "full, rounded, curvaceous figures" *cough* of the immigrant women he came across in La Savine.  Granted, this was a minor reason: - a much bigger reason was that he found it hard work steeling himself against all the hip-hop gangland culture he witnessed in La Savine.

This was the main reason, but for him, seeing chic and elegant French women was a bonus for him.  As he has reminded me, such women no longer interest him, as I have agreed to be courted by him.  He has been entranced with my beauty for a long time, hence why he was willing to wait several years to receive my father's approval to court me.  Why wouldn't he be?  I'm the impossibly dainty French woman!  As Joanna Robertson points out, we French (rightly) regard being skinny as a sign of success.  Bilal has rightly recognised that there is more to me than my physical beauty and has correctly said that my physical beauty is only the tip of the iceberg.  However, he says he just finds the sight of fat Arab women using a veil to hide their ""full, rounded, curvaceous figures" disgusting.

Why can't the rest of the world appreciate the beauty that we French women possess with our effortlessly dainty figures?  It is not true to say that we have these because we smoke, because we use magic, because we pop pills or anything like that.  It is ultimately down to the power of a simple, but very powerful phrase: - "La moitié, s'il vous plaît" ("half of that, please").  It means we enjoy the pleasure of good food, but we only eat dainty portions thereof.  We don't have fat diets, we do eat things besides cabbage soup at mealtimes and we don't starve ourselves!  When someone offers us some food, we just say, "La moitié, s'il vous plaît": - if that means we have to only put half as much on our forks to allow us to keep pace with the other participants at the meal, then that is exactly what we do.  We cut the food into dainty pieces, put these dainty pieces into our mouths and savour the immense pleasure of eat bite, so that we don't need to consume huge quantities to feel full.

So there you have it.  The secret of my success.  Women around the world should say at least a hundred times a day the phrase behind my success: - "La moitié, s'il vous plaît".

My new boyfriend

I have recently received e-mails criticising me for not being politically correct, given my comments about hip-hop culture, suggesting that I am old-fashioned (in spite of the success of my fashion magazine) in my views on trendy multiculturalism, totally forgetting that I deal with trendies all the time.  In my line of work, whether or not you like it, you have to deal with silly people who like to think they are the bee's knees because they hold fashionable views.

Well, I have got some news for such people: - there has been a change in my life.  I recently acquired a boyfriend who is a member of a very trendy ethnic group.

In the church I attend, our custom is for a man who is interested in a lady to approach her father for permission to court her. The father then asks the suitor to open his books to him, by which I mean he asks him to assure him that he is a suitable prospect for his daughter, i.e. he is financially stable, he can support a family, he is a spiritually fruitful man, he is diligent in his day job and labours for his church etc.  He also has to convince the man that he understands that courtship should be no longer than necessary for both people to make a decision about marriage and that as long as he is in a courtship with the man's daughter, he is to be constantly attempting to move himself to a decision on whether or not he wants to make a proposal of marriage.  If he can convince him that he is a sound prospect in all these areas, the father will then ask his daughter if he is happy to be courted by him.  If the answer is "yes", then he gives his permission and then he is at liberty to commence a courtship with her.

Being the impossibly dainty, glamorous, fashionable and stylish Frenchwoman that I am, I am very regularly approached by men.  Obviously now, my answer will simply be that I am spoken for.  However, up until now, what I did was I placed bulk orders for business cards with my father's contact details on (say 1,000 at a time with companies such as Vistaprint).  When men asked me out on a date, I would simply give them a business card with my father's details on and say, "Here are my father's contact details.  Direct your request at him.  If you get past my father, then you are probably somebody worth considering."  Sometimes, the man would persist and in such cases, I would normally repeat my answer.  With some men, I found myself saying, "What part of the phrase "contact my father" do you not understand?"  Up until now, the problem was that I was handing out huge quantities of business cards to interested men, but up until now, I haven't been asked by my father if I am happy to be courted by a man.  Obviously, I don't know if Daddy has been excessively picky on behalf of such a stylish girl such as myself, or if very few of the men I gave business cards to were serious enough and man enough to contact my father, or if many of them did, but were totally unsuitable prospects.

The full name of the man who has finally gotten past my father and claimed the much-coveted prize of being able to court a stylish and impossibly dainty Frenchwoman such as myself is is Bilal Ataubaq Ag Abdul-Khaliq.  In case anyone wants to know the meaning of the names, Bilal means someone who satisfies thirst, Ataubaq means handsome, beautiful, helpful, generous with got a lot of love to share and Abdul-Khaliq means servant of the Creator.  Ag means "son of": - his last name is Abdul-Khaliq, his father's name, because where he comes from, the father's name is often used in place of a surname. Bilal is a Touareg from Mali and is well known in the church for his extreme diffidence.  Although there are photos of Touareg peoples in this posting, none of them are of Bilal, as he was not happy about any photos of him being public and anyway, it is easier to just pick things of Wikimedia Commons.

I have been aware of Bilal's existence since he first started attending our church at the age of around ten.  He would come in all by himself at that tender age and he would be dressed in whatever hip-hop clothing was fashionable at the time and he had a strong preference for hooded tops.  The hooded tops would tend to have the drawstrings pulled tight, so as to show as little of his face as possible.  He would always sit at the back of the church in a slightly hunched posture.  If a female approached him and tried to start a conversation, he would simply ignore her: - cultural conditioning, I suppose.  Since the start of our relationship, he has made an exception for me, but otherwise, that is still the way he is now.  If a man approached him, he would reply to him in a monosyllabic fashion, though as time went by, if a man started a discussion with him about theological matters (e.g. the sermon the pastor had just delivered), it was possible to engage him in conversation.  The church could not and would not stop him attending the church services, but without parental consent, the church was unable to allow him to participate in Sunday School, which was a shame, as Sunday School might have made him less solitary.

I found out that the reason Bilal was always alone when coming to church was because he converted to Christianity in the face of extremely strong disapproval from his family.  His conversion happened when he was back in Mali: - he attended a church there, hoping to point out the supposed absurdities in Christianity and why only the word of Muhammad was accurate (*cough*), but his soul was soon won for Christ after a few weeks of attending the church.  When his family moved to Marseille, he searched out a church with similar doctrines (i.e. ours) and that is when he started attending.  One Sunday, the police turned up to take him home, as his parents had found out about his church attendance and falsely reported him as having run away (not true, as he would turn up on Sundays, stay all day and then go home).

His parents tried to stop him attending and even went as far as throwing him out of the family home.  He turned up on the Sunday looking very scruffy (this was aged 11 I think), as he had been sleeping rough.  One of the elders spoke with him and ascertained what had happened, took him to his parents' home, told them that he had several high-profile contacts in the police force and social services and threatened that he would have them arrested for dereliction of parental duties if they did not take him back.  They said that they would do so only if he renounced the religion that the Westerners had corrupted him with (a load of nonsense, as the pastor of his church back in Mali is a local man).  Bilal told his parents that he still loved them and, as far as practicable, was determined to honour them in accordance with the fifth commandment, but that he would openly disobey them to attend church on Sundays.  He also cited the words of Acts 5:29 ("Il faut obéir à Dieu plutôt qu'aux hommes" according to Ostervald and "We ought to obey God rather than men" in the KJV) and the words of Matthew 19:29, Mark 10:29 and to them.  The words say that whoever has left his family members for the sake of the Gospel will be abundantly rewarded in the future.  Bilal also added that if he had to sleep rough, he would, for he was used to harsh conditions back in Mali and reminded his parents that the family livestock would not last long in the very hot summer months without someone physically strong enough to take care of them.  In the end, the elder kept up his threats against the parents and his parents took him back in.  This I only found out a few months ago, though I remember the day he came in looking scruffy: - obviously, a stylish and impeccably-dressed Frenchwoman like me will not struggle to notice something like this!

About a year after this (age 12 or so), Bilal started wearing a tagelmust (aka a cheche), a head covering that Touareg men wear when they reach puberty.  The way he wears it, it only shows his eyes and the top of his nose.  For reasons of practicality and for the sake of blending in (he lives in La Savine, Marseille's roughest area), Bilal often wears hip-hop clothing (say a sweatsuit with a hoodie to obscure his face), though he wears a tagelmust and other Touareg clothing when this is reasonably practical.  In Touareg society, men will generally wear the tagelmust except in the presence of close family members and they feel shame in showing their full facial features to a stranger or person of higher social standing than themselves.  I am aware that for this reason, when teaching his Sunday School class, he will remove his head covering (as it is understood in our church that being a Sunday School teacher is a position of authority), so as to be able to gain rapport with the children, but he will only do this behind closed doors.  Being alone with children is a bad idea from the perspective of child protection issues, so he has a younger adult male perform classroom assistant duties during his class.  If someone knocks on the door, he will replace his tagelmust before telling the person to come in and he gets very funny if people come in without knocking.

These days, he is very heavily involved in the church.  Teaching Sunday School is the only "frontline" duty he has, but I know that he has many "back office" duties, e.g. preparing the elements for communion, ensuring the baptismal pool remains clean and is filled with warm water on the evenings when baptisms take place (our church is a credobaptist one), ensuring that the church's IT systems are well looked after, ensuring the electrical affairs of the church are in order, typing out letters on behalf of the pastor when he leaves a recording for this purpose on a dictation machine etc etc.

One other miscellaneous thing he is involved in concerns music.  My church recently released a CD with organ plus solo renditions of all the hymns in our hymnal and I bought a copy sometime last spring ago.  The first hymn on the CD was "Jésus mis à mort pour moi" ("Jesus put to death for me", a translation of "Rock of ages, cleft for me").  The photo below shows the rock that the hymn is believed by some to have been based on: - this is near a garden centre in Burrington Coombe in the British historical county of Somerset (a county regrettably composed of people deluded enough to think they are capable of producing as good quality cheese as we French).  Immediately, I was taken aback by the beauty of the haunting singing voice on the CD and as the CD progressed, it was clear that the singer had a range of at least four octaves.  I decided to look on the cover and see whose voice it was: - it was Bilal's.

I also learned of a story a few weeks ago where the pastor had to visit La Savine (Marseille's roughest area, which is also where Bilal has lived throughout his time in France) on account of a pastoral emergency (the wife of a church member who lives in La Savine dropped dead suddenly).  Bilal accompanied him as a bodyguard.  He dressed up in hip-hop clothing in order to blend in, pulling the hoodie drawstrings tight to hide his face, as is his custom.  Someone then approached the pastor to demand his valuables from him, threatening him with a knife.  Bilal stepped in front and politely told him to kindly leave them alone.  This didn't work, so the attacker lunged at the pastor with his knife.  Bilal picked him up by the front of his shirt and threw him a bit like one would throw a javelin.  The pastor's attacker then landed about five metres away and ran away, obviously scared and not willing to persist.

Last summer, we had a church day out one Saturday and we visited a small sandy beach (there are no natural sandy beaches in Marseille) that is just off the Avenue Pierre Mendès France.  At the beach, there is the Skatepark du Prado and a go-karting track, which the younger children who attend the church enjoy.  Part-way through the day, panic set in when it became apparent that one of the children swimming a little too far from the shore for comfort was getting into difficulties.  Bilal (wearing full-on Touareg dress and reading a book at the time) became aware of this and walked towards the sea, undressed down to his swimming trunks, swam out to the child in distress and brought him back to the shore.  There was rapturous applause upon the child's return and someone said to Bilal, "I thought you couldn't swim", to which he replied indifferently, "Well how do you think you rescue livestock stranded by flash floods in the desert in Mali when you are miles from anywhere?", before putting his clothes on and resuming his book.  Some people started crowding round Bilal to congratulate him, but luckily, the pastor stepped in and explained that giving him unwanted attention like this would be like shooting a mocking bird.  For those readers not au fait with English literature, this was an obvious reference to what Scout said about Mr. Radley in Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird".  My mother insisted that I read this to help with my English fluency, but quite why my pastor decided to cite from low-quality literature, knowing that we French are the best at everything, I don't know.  Anyway, this was the first time I had ever seen him even with his head uncovered.  He had these beautiful naturally curly locks of black hair (not the sort that gets knotty, more like a perm, though natural in his case), with a skin tone somewhere between white northern African Arab and black African.  The other thing that was noticeable about him was his extremely heavy build and enormous muscles: - I used to read silly girlie magazines that contained pictures of heavily-built men, but they all seemed rather scrawny by comparison to Bilal.

This brings me onto the next point about him.  Growing up, he laboured in the family business of being a herdsman.  Sheep, goats and camels were his specialism.  He is from the Timbuktu area, which is drier than southern areas, meaning that farming cattle is not desirable there (given how much grass they consume).  During summer holidays, we would not normally see him in church, as he would return to Mali to look after the animals (no easy task, given that average daily maxima in Timbuktu are above 35 degrees between March and November).  He would do whatever he needed to do, be this engaging in one-on-one combat with animals or people attacking his livestock, herding them to areas with food and water (in the mountains if necessary, of which there are some to the west of Timbuktu) etc.  When he arrived in France, he did well in his studies and went through the university system.  He now works as a rolling stock engineer with the Marseille Metro and he has the long-term aim of starting up a business as a high-speed open-access railway operator along the lines of NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori, the Italian open-access high-speed operator) and is taking steps to lay seeds for the fulfilment of this aim.  I have no doubt that this went down well with Daddy, although the fact that Daddy works for SNCF means he is unlikely to welcome the competition that Bilal's proposed open-access high-speed operator would offer!  MDR!  Bilal has told me that he is into online share trading and it is rumoured in the church that he is a very wealthy man.  I am not interested on finding out the precise extent of his wealth at this stage, as Daddy has already ascertained that his financial maturity is sufficient to start a family.

Anyway, the event concerning him I found most notable was when I was walking past one of his Sunday School classes in progress a few weeks ago.  He was giving a talk to some secondary age children about the Five Points of Calvinism: - remember, John Calvin was born in Noyon in Picardie, which is further evidence that we French are the best at everything, which includes producing theologians!  MDR!  I loved Bilal's passionate and theologically sound explanation of the doctrines of grace to the children and how he expertly dealt with all their questions.

Coming to the conclusion of this blog post, Daddy told me that several years ago, Bilal approached him and asked his permission to court me.  Daddy then said any black man who came anywhere near his children would suffer very serious consequences.  Bilal then said, "Sir, Marianne is under your authority and I fully respect that.  I can see that I don't have your approval now, but I am willing to wait until I do receive your approval.  Oh, and just a little diversion, don't bother threatening me like that.  I've lived in La Savine since I was 10 years old and for many years, I have had to fight wild beasts and livestock raiders in order to protect my family's herds.  If you think I'm even batting an eyelid at a threat like that, then you obviously don't know me very well.  However, as I said, I won't court Marianne without your approval, but I will wait until I receive it and I will work to earn your approval."  Daddy added that there were a few other instances where he asked between now and the first request.  In the past few days, Bilal approached my father asking to court me again.  This time, Daddy asked me if I was willing to agree to it.  I don't know him very well, but I decided I would at least see what he had to offer, so I said "yes".  Daddy therefore went back to him and said, "Bilal, you are 100% welcome to court Marianne.  There is nobody in the church who is more worthy than you to do so.  I would be honoured to have you as part of my family if this courtship results in marriage."

So there you have it: - I have my first boyfriend.  Bilal told me I am the type of girl he always aspired to court.  Conversely, Bilal is not the suave Frenchman I always dreamed of in my youth (Serge Gainsbourg minus the cigarettes is the archetypical example, I suppose), but I am open-minded.  A few days into the relationship, I am very happy.  Watch this space.