Last night at bookclub we discussed Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. The stories that appealed to most of us were those of his time living in France. As far as I am aware, no one in the group speaks French as a first language, and we have all experienced the difficulties of communicating in a foreign language. Of course, most of the continental Europeans in the group are effortlessly bilingual – reading a book in both its English translation and original language – and French presents no difficulties in everyday conversation.

For me however, I am still struggling to communicate in any situation outside a restaurant. I am getting braver at saying “je ne comprend pas” (I do not understand), and thus forcing the other person to switch to extremely basic French, mime, English, or a convoluted mixture of all three. The gender of nouns presents another challenge, and I was delighted to read how Mr Sedaris had come up with a solution:

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? … I tried using gender in my everyday English. “Hi, guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or “Hey, Hugh, have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.” I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn’t work out with my wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter.

The scenarios reminded me of my youth, when my sisters and I would enact epic dramas with our food. Ketchup-wigged french fries would march across our plates, engaging in brief affairs or heated disputes over carrot coins while burly chicken legs guarded the perimeter, ready to jump in should things get out of hand. Sexes were assigned at our discretion and were subject to change from one night to the next — unlike here, where the corncob and the string bean remain locked in their rigid masculine roles. Say what you like about southern social structure, but at least in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing both ways.
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It’s a pretty grim world when I can’t even feel superior to a toddler. Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds, I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying a melon, you need to use the masculine article. In saying the melons, you use the plural article, which does not reflect gender and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine. Ask for two or ten or three hundred melons, and the number lets you off the hook by replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes.

I’ve started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner, shouting, “What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?” I answer that I’m sure we can use them for something. The only hard part is finding someplace to put them. They won’t fit in the refrigerator, as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I bought from the butcher the night before, forgetting that we were still working our way through a pair of pork roasts the size of Duraflame logs. “We could put them next to the radios,” I say, “or grind them for sauce in one of the blenders. Don’t get so mad. Having four pounds of tomatoes is better than having no tomatoes at all, isn’t it?”

Hugh tells me that the market is off-limits until my French improves. He’s pretty steamed, but I think he’ll get over it when he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.

– David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

There is a large blind community in Brussels. The Braille League have their offices just down the road, and I often see blind commuters on the metro. Each station has posts with the directions written in braille, and the newer carriages announce each stop verbally before arrival.

A few months back we went to the Only 4 Senses Restaurant. The food was served by blind waiters and we sat in complete blackness in a basement near the Grand Place. We were taught to place our fingers inside our water glass to tell when it was full, and the chef asked us to guess what we were eating by taste alone. I had a casserole, which was relatively easy to manage, but poor Adrian found that cutting and scooping a vegetarian lasagna was a little more challenging. Our guide would ask us if we had finished eating or if we wanted some more to drink, because he had no other way to tell. He would constantly use our names so that we knew who he was talking to. We spoke to our waiter about his life in Brussels, and then after the dinner we met his guide dog.

I have also just finished reading Star Gazing by Linda Gillard, recommended to me by the robots at Amazon. It is a fascinating Scottish story, told from the perspective of 40 year old woman called Marianne, who has been blind from birth. Marianne describes her world with no visual clues, and gives great insight into the daily life and loves without vision. Dropping ones keys, for example, can be a potentially tragic event.

There is a great theme of music within the novel, and her sighted friends often use orchestral analogies to explain the world to Marianne. One of them takes her star-gazing, and explains the constellation Boötes:

‘If you look east one of the brightest starts you’ll see is Arcterus. It has a yellow orange glow… they’d sound like… flutes. No piccolos. Shrill. Arcturus looks warmer. A cello maybe… on second thoughts make that a viola’.

I was unfamiliar with most of the references to opera composers and classical music pieces. Much in the way that Marianne understood the images through her familiarity with music, I felt as if I gained an understanding of the music through my visualisation of the images. It would have been lovely to create a playlist of the main songs from the novel, and play these in the background as I immersed myself into the story.

Hopefully, I will never know what it is like to be blind, but through these small experiences I hope that I have gained a little more understanding of what it would be like to live without vision.

Image from girlebooks

If I had never bought the kindle, I never would have thought to read Middlemarch, and I would have missed out on a truly majestic work. But because it was on the list of the 100 best books of all time and it was free, I transferred it to my kindle for a rainy day. I didn’t know anything about the book, but I liked the sound of the name. I started reading and I was instantly hooked. It wasn’t until about half way through that I learned that George Eliot was the psydonym of Mary Anne Evans, changing the voice I heard in my head from male to female. Written in 1871, nearly 140 years ago, the characters were vivid and fascinating. This book is set in the ficticious town of Middlemarch in England, and follows a dozen people through their lives from 1830 onwards. The prose was a pure delight, and it was so easy to highlight my favourite passages on the kindle without damaging her words.

When a modest and religious young woman fell in love with a man she did not know: “She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies.”

One man’s opinion of a woman who asked too many questions: “She is a good creature—­that fine girl—­but a little too earnest,” he thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question”

On the scientist and his method of “combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work.”

On joy versus misery: “It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—­ in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.”

On arguments between spouses: “There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.”

On enduring difficulties: “Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.”

On how to chastise a dog for misbehaving: She took his fore-paws in one hand, and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled his brows and looked embarrassed. “Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you,” Mary was saying in a grave contralto. “This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman.”

On choosing a husband: “No, indeed. I don’t love him because he is a fine match.” “What for, then?” “Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

My working week became a little bit brighter with a gift from my Secret Santa from the intertubes. Even though my Secret Santa posted this box to me in November from Canada, it only just arrived on my doorstep. It was lovely to find all these tokens from Quebec, especially as Montreal it was a candidate for our new home back in 2008. The package contained many regional bookmarks, a lovely card from Santa, as well as The Shadow of the Wind, Flashman, and a local cookbook with lots of interesting family recipes. Furthermore, some delicious maple sugar, coffee candy, and hot chocolate mix to keep me company when I am curled up with these new novels.

I started Flashman on my metro trip to work this morning, and by 29 pages in I agree with his self-assessment that he is “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady.” I am looking forward to learning about military history from a very interesting perspective, as well as introducing some French-Canadian influences into my Australian-Belgian cooking repertoire.

Thank-you Santa, for sending me some exceptional literary and culinary delights.