Our second child

I have given birth to our second son.  As expected, Bilal was overjoyed by the arrival.  One could falsely believe that he wasn't, given how much he has spoken about subsequent children, but he has been visibly excited throughout the pregnancy and his joy in holding our second son just after he was born was clear for everyone to see.  In one sense, nobody deserves anything, given that we all fall short of God's glory, but in another sense, given the fruits Bilal has produced during his Christian journey, I think Bilal really deserved this type of fruit.  He has a yearning for a big family and I am very aware that it is something he has aspired to for pretty much all his life.

As with his older brother, our son was a very pretty baby immediately upon being born and he was born with some lovely curly locks and beautiful light brown skin in between the skin shades Bilal and I have.  I would have enrolled them as baby models immediately if Bilal hadn't said no: - personal privacy is one of his primary preoccupations, so this is out the question, but I don't mind, as he clearly has his family's best interests at heart.  He is no controlling husband and does not do things like demand to know where I am at any moment of day, lol.  Marriage is about give and take and Bilal has certainly given a lot, so even by the standards of non-believers, there is no justification for upsetting him by sharing photos of our sons against his will (the boy in the photo below is not ours).

The delivery had no complications and I was immediately back to my previous waist measurement and weight with no fat to lose.  People often say this doesn't tend to happen, but I have managed it during both my pregnancies!  It is easy if you just eat sensibly: - just utter the magic phrase at mealtimes ("la moitie, s'il vous plait)!  MDR!  The lack of complications meant that I left hospital within a matter of hours: - as a BBC article pointed out, we French are often hypochondriacs, but it was blatantly obvious there was nothing wrong with me.  This was nice, because although I don't do much worrying about my health (since I eat properly), Bilal does.  He can be very attentive if he suspects I am unwell and it is often hard work to reassure him.  Even with French standards of hypochondria, he has made a name for himself at the local doctor's surgery for being overly cautious with almost every sniffle our first son has had, MDR.

Within an hour of completion of the delivery, Bilal was talking about future children, which attracted an unwanted disapproving comment from a feminist member of the hospital staff: - "Come on!  Your wife has just given birth and you want to force more children on her like she is some breeding animal?  A woman is worth more than the children she bears!"  Bilal was visibly shaken by this comment and he is uneasy about engaging in conversation with unrelated women, so I stepped in: - "Madam, I am aware of many options open to me in this country if I were in an abusive marriage and my husband were forcing me to have children against my will, but he is not, so I will thank you not to interfere in our private family life".  Bilal said very little after that and was clearly very upset, but he returned to his normal ungentlemanly self after we left the hospital with our sons and returned home, MDR.

Save for my parents who were at the hospital and came home with us, our first acquaintances to visit were some of his "homies" from La Savine who he has been trying to encourage to come along to our church.  When they rang the bell from the street entrance, Bilal was naturally too engrossed in our sons to notice, so Daddy went to the intercom.  The poor quality of their French made Daddy reluctant to let them in, so he asked Bilal if he knew them, to which Bilal abruptly replied "let them in, they are manz homies from La Savine".  When Daddy let them in at the door, he was visibly unimpressed with their attire (low-slung trousers and hooded tops covering most of their faces).  Upon seeing our second son, they said, "Congratulations fam!  You da man!"  Bilal replied, "True dat!  Manz only been married 19 months and manz knocked up manz well buff wifey twice and manz now got two sons!  Manz gonna knock her up again as soon as possible and be an even bigger man!  Us manz Heavenly Father has given man a bare sick gift between manz legs!"  Bilal then did a hip-thrust gesture and a loud grunt whilst saying that for effect.  This caused me to start sniggering and my parents let out a groan: - Daddy never liked Bilal's ungentlemanly behaviour and he tried to turn Bilal into a gentleman when we were courting and subsequently engaged, but eventually just gave up, reasoning that Bilal is an otherwise wholesome man, even if he is quite hip-hop with some similarly hip-hop friends.  I am expecting Bilal to be similarly ungentlemanly when we go to church today, MDR.

Bilal is enjoying his short time on paternity leave.  Ever since becoming a father, he has been almost clingy with our sons: - though he enjoys his job and works very hard, I know that he is always yearning for the end of the working day to come so he can come home and be with me and our offspring.  His interaction with our sons is at least as much as mine.

I'm engaged

Today, Bilal made a proposal of marriage!  This is something I have been eagerly awaiting for several months and I can now announce that it has finally happened!  I accepted without hesitation.  Bilal and I are very different people, but I appreciate his exotic nature, with him being a mix of Touareg and hip-hop influences.  This is evident in his language usage and clothing.  He is definitely my tall, dark (and heavily-built) stranger.

Bilal has moved into my parents' home (readers will note that I live in my own flat a short distance from the Vieux Port).  The reason for this is to adapt him to French culture a little bit more, as I have no willingness to live in La Savine, even if a top-floor flat would offer fantastic views of Marseille and the Mediterranean Sea.  Such a rough gangsta area is not appealing to a sophisticated haute couture Frenchwoman such as myself.  I would get tired of people greeting me by saying "Wesh-wesh toubab?" ("Wagwan honky?")  For some reason, Bilal never looks entirely at ease when in some more typically French areas in a way that he did in Mali (I cannot vouch for what he is like in La Savine, having never been there) and often appears homesick.

In the longer term, we are wondering about what sort of arrangements will be most agreeable to us.  One option we are considering is purchasing a livestock farm that would enable Bilal to feel at home.  Although the Common Agricultural Policy allows French farmers to get away with many backward and inefficient agricultural practices (hey, I suppose some compromises are necessary to produce the pure and natural products that a Frenchwoman desires), they are still a world apart from Touareg practices.  Another possibility is for us to construct a mountain home in the mountains to the north and east of Marseille to allow him to life a hill farmer lifestyle when he is not at work.  If anyone has any suggestions, please e-mail me at mariannegaboriault@gmail.com : - we are looking for countryside that is as rugged as Bilal is, MDR!

Even if we struggle to find somewhere that causes Bilal to feel completely at home, Bilal has told me he is willing to endure feelings of homesickness for the rest of his life in order to be with me, adding that I am "une femeu bien faite" (French for "a well fit bird") even by French standards: - obviously, when he is living with my parents, they will attempt to smooth some of his rough edges.  Bilal was never a macho man, but he has spent so much time around people who speak in this manner that he uses such words as if they were normal words.  He managed to restrain himself for job and university interviews, but found it too tiring to keep up a pretence beyond that.  This is partly why he tends to gravitate towards tasks that involve doing things in the background at work: - he can prove himself by the quality of his outputs and is unlikely to be obstructed by his hip-hop use of language.  At university, he would just turn up for lectures, practical assessments etc and just go home again afterwards to do his study: - he did very well academically and he was very diligent with his studies, but he never had any interest in being involved in the extracurricular life of his university, as he never really felt at home with the white middle-class liberal atheistic students the way he does in da 'hood or at church.  He feels at home at church because he knows that in this world, we are to regard ourselves as merely sojourners and if a church is a sound church, it is the closest experience a believer will have to the world to come.  Obviously, the wedding will take place in our own church (not the one shown below).

Obviously, given my obsession with food and Bilal's coeliac disease, we will need to expend a lot of thought about what food will be served at the wedding.  It will not be nice for me to have to share a marital bed with Bilal if the food served at the wedding has caused him bowel problems, MDR.  Unless a gluten-free croquembouche is available, we may unfortunately have to have an Anglo-Saxon style wedding cake.  Maybe we could have something along the lines of Mireille Guiliano's flourless chocolate cake?  Bilal is awfully fond of this recipe, but given that it is a recipe Mireille Guiliano approves of, presumably I shouldn't worry, MDR.

I think Bilal will look absolutely gorgeous in a morning suit, but he doesn't like suits and as far as I'm aware, the only time he has ever worn one in his life was for his job interview with the "Trom de Marseille" (as he and his homies call it in Verlan, MDR).  He is very fond of his Touareg attire and some of this looks gorgeous upon him though, especially the bright indigo garments.  Because he is such a handsome man, being around him requires a greater amount of self-restraint and I am pleased that with our engagement, the amount of time I will have tocontinue to exercise this self-restraint is getting shorter.

I will be looking for the most beautiful bridal dress I can find.  Apart from the fact that I am the bee's knees and worthy of the best, it would not do for a fashion magazine editor to turn up for her own wedding in an unfashionable bridal gown.  This will be my biggest worry when it comes to wedding preparations (apart from possible legal hiccups obstructing the legal validity, e.g. the registrar being sick on the day of the wedding).  However, as I have always been dainty in my eating, I will certainly not have to worry about how my figure will look in the dress as lesser women do!  All I can say is roll on the wedding day!

Meet France's toughest rappers: - a programme I watched with Bilal

I don't know if any of my readers have heard of a French celebrity named Cléo Le Tan.  I use the term "celebrity" in the loosest sense of the word, as it would be legitimate to describe her as being famous for being famous.  As someone in the fashion industry, I am very aware of her antics as a party girl and her failed attempts to replicate the fame of her forefathers.  As a believing woman, I don't care much for many of the silly celebrities out there, but if one is a fashion magazine editor and owner, one has to know the industry very well in order to stay on top of the game.

Her father is the French painter Pierre Le-Tan.  Her father's father is the Vietnamese painter Le Pho (famous for exaggerating women's skinny figures, though mine needs no exaggeration, MDR), who came to France for his studies in fine arts and married a Frenchwoman: - no surprises there, though Vietnam is one of the few nations with thinner women than France!  Tee hee!  Her father's father's father was the last Viceroy of Tonkin (Northern Vietnam).  Her sister is Olympia Le Tan, who has had arguably more success, in her case as a fashion designer.  Cléo Le Tan is descended from royalty, yet she is suffering the ignominy of having to make herself famous by being a party girl.  As of late, she has tried to make a name for herself as an author, though not with any noteworthy success.Pierre Le Tan commented not all that long ago that his daughters were raised amongst antique dealers, designers, writers, decorators, architects, landscapers ... same-sex couples who lived together and dressed up to attend masked balls.  Being a believing woman, I am very glad I did not grow up around same-sex couples.  However, she has therefore had privileges I can only dream of, yet all she has managed to make of herself is a name for being a party girl.  Apart from anything else, I would never allow her to appear in my fashion magazine, as she isn't even thin by French standards!

Anyway, enough details about why Cléo Le Tan is a non-celebrity clinging to the coat tails of her forefathers, I recently watched a programme with Bilal presented by her called "Meet France's toughest rappers", in which she exposed the dark underside of the suburbs of France's large cities (though the programme only covered Paris) and the hip-hop culture that exists there.  I was curious to know what Bilal thought of the programme, as Bilal is by far the most hip-hop person I have any regular contact with.  He and I are very different in this respect, though I don't love him any less and I wouldn't want anyone else for a boyfriend.  Given that he spent much of his life in La Savine, I consider him an authority in hip-hop matters, MDR.

 The first thing Bilal noted is that the rappers in the video were not tough by the standards of La Savine.  As I have mentioned, Bilal works as a rolling stock engineer for the Métro de Marseille and for his training, he often travelled to Paris (one of very view exceptions in terms of his travelling habits).  When he was there, he got to know the local 'hoods and he says that although they are more numerous than in Marseille, La Savine is far tougher and he therefore viewed the people in the video as being merely wannabe tough rappers.

Another thing Bilal and I noticed during the course of the programme was when Cléo Le Tan started talking like a wigger.  She is an obviously upper-middle-class woman from the way she talks, both in English and in French (this is probably the only positive thing one can say about her), yet during the course of the programme, she is shown referring to women as "meufs" (verlan for "femmes"), translated in the subtitles as "chicks", though "birds" is another way of translating this.  I don't view it as being in the least bit unusual any more when I hear Bilal talking in verlan, given that he tends to use such words as if they were normal words.  However, an upper-middle-class woman like Cléo Le Tan (don't forget she is descended from Vietnamese royalty) sounds very silly when she uses verlan words.  As Bilal would say, "tu voit ce que je veux dire?", which is French street for "ya see what ah'm sayin'?"

  

Generally speaking, Bilal thought Cléo Le Tan stuck out like a sore thumb, no matter how hard she tried to ingratiate herself with the locals during the video, e.g. by helping them out with facilities to make a rap video of their own when their budgets would not stretch to this.  As British street people would say, it was a blatant case of somebody not "keepin' it real".  Maybe she was trying to portray herself as some sort of explorer, trying to get to know new things that she was not previously familiar with?  She still looked silly.

 

All in all, Cléo Le Tan is someone who doesn't appear to fit into either world.  She has not had much success of her own in the French celebrity circuit and she will soon be tomorrow's has-been and she certainly doesn't fit into the hip-hop world either.  Given that she is not pencil-thin like me, she certainly would look out-of-place in my magazine and there is no way I would feature her unless she lost a lot of weight!

An unpatriotic chef

In recent years, British celeb chef Jamie Oliver has been in the news for his dislike of his own country.

There were two main areas that he discussed.  One was the working ethos of his fellow Brits.  He claimed that British youngsters don't work very hard and are wet between the ears, with parents phoning in for 23-year olds saying they are too tired to do a 48-hour week.  He claimed that in his twenties, 80-100 hours was the norm.  My comment is that a Frenchwoman knows that a 35-hour week is quite enough to get one's work done.  He said, "I've never experienced such a wet generation.  Meanwhile I've got bullet-proof, rock-solid Polish and Lithuanians who are tough and work hard."

A Frenchwoman is effortlessly perfect and she works efficiently to get her work done in 35 hours per week.  So therefore, if Jamie Oliver worked 80-100 hour weeks, he probably wasn't very efficient.  An efficient and competent worker should have no need to work longer than his/her contracted hours.  In Britain, my fashion magazine employers would scowl at me for leaving on time, insinuating that I wasn't committed to my job, even though I got twice as much done as the people who worked twice as long as me.  Lots of them were just pretending to be working and looking busy, rather than producing things: - a Frenchwoman has much more important things to do than pretending to be working or staying in useless post-5PM meetings, such as scouring the local markets for the choicest ingredients with the best flavour.  What is it like working at my fashion magazine?  I scowl at my workers if they stay past normal closing time!  MDR.

However, it is the second main subject he covered that caught my attention.  Jamie Oliver's words were as follows: -
"I meet people who say, “You don't understand what it's like.” I just want to hug them and teleport them to the Sicilian street cleaner who has 25 mussels, 10 cherry tomatoes, and a packet of spaghetti for 60 pence, and knocks out the most amazing pasta. You go to Italy or Spain and they eat well on not much money. We've missed out on that in Britain, somehow."

Now, a stylish Frenchwoman like me is sure to agree with this.  I know that it is possible in most places to buy the food items he mentioned for the price he mentioned.  Even in Monaco, this is probably possible or nearly so, given that there is a branch of Carrefour in the country.  As for me personally, I can't verify whether or not it is possible to buy the items mentioned at the price mentioned.  As my regular readers will know, my mentality for shopping is buying the best at whatever cost.  I'm the bee's knees: - nothing but the best will do for me!  It is probably possible to buy these things at that price, but they wouldn't be of the highest quality.

Mind you, I do agree with the things Jamie Oliver says about the immense stupidity of British people.  When I was a fashion journalist, I was given the task of writing a fake rags-to-riches story about a fashion designer who had come from a pikey household with a single mother and a child eating chips and cheese from a styrofoam container in front of a huge television like the one described by Jamie Oliver.  The fashion designer had actually come from a boho chic household with parents who were very knowledgeable about sartorial matters (not a very common household type in Britain), but my editor demanded that I write a fake rags-to-riches story, because hey, the truth doesn't sell as many magazines as a sensationalist lie.  We visited a chav home, having bribed them with £50 to participate in this blatant lie.  The photographers took photos of the mother with her brood of various different skin tones (indicating the low likelihood that any of them had a father in common) sitting in front of the large television watching reality TV (the word "reality" is a bit misleading), occasionally punctuating this with video games.  The children and the mother were eating burger and chips, cheese and chips, battered sausage and chips, battered Mars bars etc.  Yeek!  The mother was a big fat ugly chav and the house reeked of the fast food and I spoke with this woman to discuss what sort of lies we would tell about how this stylish designer grew up in this impoverished situation, but rose above it.

We wrote the article, published it and got away with it, but I must say, this article is still a huge stain on my conscience.  I kept trying to tell the editor that we should follow my mother's example of openly repudiating our background if we dislike it, rather than telling lies about it.  Apart from the fact that my mother did not emigrate early enough to acquire a native-level competency of French and therefore makes idiomatic errors in her French and doesn't have a French accent, she is pretty much as French as possible: - she only eats very dainty portions of the best quality food, she refuses to take the lift if the destination is less than 10 floors away, she walks wherever she is able and she is therefore effortlessly thin in spite of all the children she has had (I'll do an article on the tax system in France favouring "familles nombreuses" another time).

Anyway, this visit to a chav British household, apart from scarring my conscience, left me psychologically scarred for life, lol.  People might accuse me of being supercilious, but I just can't stand being in the presence of such disgusting people.  Even French people just above the breadline have more class than this.  In an earlier post, I linked to an article by Cécile Delarue where she talked about how an elderly widowed Frenchwoman with a limited income who grows her own fruit and vegetables will eat well and not waste food, knowing how much effort it takes to produce it this way.  Being an impeccably stylish French woman, I go for the best quality at whatever price, but if one has been stupid and lazy in life and therefore does not have money to burn like me, it is still possible to eat very well.

Some British right-wingers would respond to Jamie Oliver's sentiments by saying, "If you don't like our glorious homeland, don't let the door hit you on your way out".  My response would be similar: - if you hate Britain, your severely un-stylish homeland, do what my mother did: - emigrate to France and surround yourself with lots of stylish French people.