Renaud Barret's film, System K, explores the urban jungle of Kinshasa where, amid social and political chaos, an eclectic and bubbling street art scene is emerging. It screens in Palmerston North this weekend.
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I was a Francophile from early on. I have no idea where this love of most things French came from but I would create menus in French that I mostly never cooked. There were to be no potatoes for me - pommes de terre pour moi - though apple
from the earth doesn't sound particularly sexy.
A prized possession was a poster of chateaux of the Loire, which I still have albeit in the spare wardrobe and not on the wall. My favourite was Chenonceau - it looked like a fairy tale on champagne. I got to visit the chateau on my second trip to France but only just. Such is the choice of chateaux in the Loire Valley our tour didn't include a visit, just a lunch stop in the nearby village. I walked as fast as I could to the chateau and managed to take in some of the atmosphere before speeding back to the bus as fast as my croissant-powered legs would let me.
Then came French classes at secondary school. Oh la la, it was hard. While the alphabet was more or less the same, words didn't go in the same order as English, letters sounded different and you had to do things with verbs that surely were what a prim Anglican school girl shouldn't know how to do. And aren't masculine and feminine toilets?
In fifth form French there were just four of us left. The other three were naturals but I would rather stare dreamily at the posters of Paris landmarks our teacher had put up around the classroom. Oral dictation was the worst and I still remember the day when Mrs H read some sentences in French and we were meant to write them down - in French. Quelle? I got zero out of 20. Oh the shame.
