Relaxed Parents

[Written May 7]

We’re mid-way through a week’s stay at a generous friends house in St Hillaire, Languedoc.  I won’t pretend that it’s been entirely relaxing but we really needed a few days out of London and a week free of his usual array of computer and console games, TV DVD and digital children’s channels certainly won’t do dudelet any harm.  Dudelette is enjoying her first week free of socks and bootees (London weather vs May in the South of France and has developed a compulsive fascination with her toes.  She’ll reach her feet up in the air, grasp at them like a professional yogi, then topple gracefully sideways, still clinging on to her feet for dear life.  Her vocabulary of whoops and chirrups continues to expand.  She’s also acquired a favourite toy -  a nearly-empty pack of wet wipes that crinkles and crackles in a most satisfactory manner.  She’ll lie on her back juggling with it via all four hands and feet for up to twenty minutes at a stretch before finally getting bored and demanding a trip to the other side of the room.

Dudelet hasn’t been so easily satisfied and has been giving free rein to his Jeckyl and Hyde tendencies.  But enough of that – we’re visiting here for the third time but the village continues to surprize us.  The afternoon of our arrival, we heard what sounded like a lazy brass band rehearsal in the distance as we walked back from a visit to the village shop.  We tracked down the noise to the village carpark and recylcling zone where we also found a carnival procession gearing up for departure.  The band were playing a kind of woozy New Orleans tune, something cyclical and insistent that was repeated over and over again as the dancers went through their moves.  They were in full costumes – sinister white theatre masks set in thin-lipped  concentration, grass Hawaiian skirts and bikini tops over long-sleeved white t-shirts and gloves with long, black wigs and floral reefs.  They carried lengthy, feathery sceptres which dipped and tapped above the heads of the spectators and some had pillow cases full of confetti.  The procession was led off by a tractor towing a trailer carrying an effigy of one of the dancers and the dancers followed with the inter-mingled crowd and band taking up the rear.  We watched them leave the carpark, the dancers slowly whirling and treading in the tractor’s wake, scattering confetti and making strange, marionette-like gestures.  They were evidently a mxture of genders and ages but it wasn’t always easy to tell.  Dudelet was fascinated and hovered at the front of the crowd for a little while before dropping back to take my hand.  He immediately relinquished it as a friendly woman with two young daughters in princess costumes offered him a handful of confetti.  He took it shyly and immediately flung it over supermum (who’d earlier commented that the dancers seemed to be targeting women). A lot of children seemed to be in costumes; there was even a scattering of small harlequins and columbines weaving through the throng.

After that, we followed them as they processed down the road.  Dudelet kept ahead of us, getting as close to the dancers as he dared and picking up fistfuls of discarded confetti like the other children.  He’d never seen or experienced anything like it and neither had we.  Eventually, they reached an evidently pre-arranged spot and the band had a rest whilst the crowd milled around the dancers who were evidently unwilling to drop out of character.

Later, we heard the band again from the house and dudelet and I dashed to the bottom of our narrow street to find that the procession had finally reached our locale as part of a programme, we guessed, of visiting every single spot in the village.

Earlier this evening, dudelet decided to make his own mask and have his own procession.  Heartbreakingly, he decided against it at the last minute.

“We don’t have enough people so it isn’t really a very good plan,” he told us.  So he and I went for a walk instead.  Then he went for another walk with supermum.  The light was beautiful and dudelet took his new super bubble blowing mixture.  Tomorrow, we’ll try and find a certain lake.  And tomorrow evening, I might write about it.