Saint Etienne, Vallouise, France

I feel like I am in a Pixar film. We have two hamsters in the flat. One in a cage in the kitchen, one in a cage in the living room. Both gnawing at the bars. If I didn't keep closing the door between the rooms they would be able to see the mirror of their solitary bent-on-escape lives. Which seems cruel to both though I have been told that two male hamsters would fight to the death if put together.
We are looking after PSM's eldest son's hamster while they are on holiday. Mush Mush. A golden hamster with gentle eyes and inquisitivie whiskers. Everytime I mention the fight to the death the boys look fascinated, even sly, certain Sparky would win. Though Sparky - who has entertained us by building structures out of his sawdust to get nearer to the bars, mixing water from his bottle to the sawdust to make a firmer mixture to build those slopes and spires, and eventually a kind of condensation heating system out of these water/sawdust mixtures, all the time maintaining his fierce stare and wild determination seems to have a new ploy. He has become a 'pet'. My youngest son plucked up courage to handle him with gloves and within a couple of holiday hours both boys were bare hand handling, even putting him in their pockets and on their shoulders. I worry that my own fear has blighted the little furry fellows life. Or he has pulled off his best stunt yet, swopping himself with another more biddable but look-a-like pet.

It is the Easter holidays. In my surprising life we went ski ing for the first five days. My brother has a flat in the Alps and I would beg, steal or borrow to ski, to teach my young sons to ski. Infact of course I mainly borrowed. But it always costs more than I think and I come back with shaky financial nerves, not enough money left to buy the beds for them that I had also borrowed money for and a sense that my strategy, this brave but foolhardy sailing into the wind, trying to give them a good life, a life off the breadline I have put myself on will tumble. I should get a proper job. Spend less on ebay shoes. Spend less. I don't know. I feel shaky and wrong with my illusions of grandeur. Defeated. At one point I let them watch tv on a beautiful sunny afternoon so that I can cry while I tidy up their bedroom. I berate myself that other mother's are managing better and indeed facebook proves it. Sunny smiling children mix perfume in perfumed gardens.

Later ( and all of it behind scenes ) I pull myself together and we have fish and chips in St James's park and play catch. It is magical. All three of us happy.

My answer ( if anyone ever asked ) to 'What is the most surprising thing about you?' Would be that I can ski. That I can ski well.
I go with exh and two other Dads and their sons. I forget to be alarmed at the exclusively male company until just before going. My plan is that each adult takes responsibility for one days food and I get a bit bossy just before we go about how to do it. I want us to save money, I want us to be fed well. But it is good for me to lay down the law for I would have adopted annoying martyr tendencies if I hadn't and everyone sticks to the arrangement with good grace.
This holiday my youngest son cracks it - he learns to ski. I feel like a lioness watching as he is joined by his brother and the two other boys coming down the mountain, his cheeky face beaming - the three older boys at his side, caring for him, praising him, standing by him when he falls until I swoop from high to lift him onto his feet. In the time between speeding down the mountain, dusting snow out of small children's gloves and necks, strapping small feet into ski boots and persuading boys to put suncream on or sitting on chair lifts both exh and his friend keep drily suggesting I find time to visit a church. This blog has caused so much trouble in this group, and I am not really forgiven, certainly not by exh so I say, no I don't think so. I enjoy just the speed, the angle my body can make coming down a mountain fast, the swoop and elegance of a turn. Of not thinking of anything, anybody, but doing this, being here now. And the mountains are magnificent, beautiful, breathtaking. Oh it is a good thing.

During an evening meal the two other dad's charm me with a tale of themselves as young men paying a prostitute to play table tennis with an imaginary ball in ( I think ) Poland. They said when their hour was up, she stopped on the minute but that she played well.

On the last day it is necessary to do a supermarket shop to replace things we have used in the flat and me and one of the dads drive down the mountain to do it. He has injured his knee and has not been able to ski the last few days and has already explored some of the valley. I keep saying nervously how brilliant the holiday has been and then remembering about his knee and feeling guilty. Can we just go back to a church in the village, he has left his camera case he says. I think he is teasing me, wonder if he is testing me but can only say yes. He parks the car like in a car advert, just flung by a water trough that serves as a roundabout in an old stone, fairy tale village. We enter the church through a beautiful old grained wood carved door. The church is lovely, of basillica design, arches like the structure of internal organs .

I am paranoid that he has engineered this and determined as I look round not to write about it. He finds his camera case quickly and easily - did he just have it in his pocket I wonder? There are lovely statues and frescos. A rich gold altarpiece with floral decorations painted on the vaulted ceiling above. A fresco of dead christ, his rib cage exposed and puny and some absolutely lovely figures of saints - Saint Pancrace, Saint Roc, Saint Jacques de Compostelle, Sainte Barbe, Saint Antoine and another of a pious but sinister looking priest. I am grateful to come here, see this lovely church built in the 14th century - tucked in a dead end valley with a glacier like that hitchcock ship in Marnie at the end of their 'street' - it must have been a remote place for most of history.

Back in London I think I am going to have to describe the French church after all for the Easter holdiday means I have no time to visit anywhere but adventure playgrounds and pet shops. Also I want to be straight about my Marie Antoinette lifestyle. I am poor but I have assumptions of middle class life which are tricky to balance with where I am and what I describe.

Round here preparations are under way for the Royal Wedding - shop facades are being steam cleaned on Victoria Street to a certain height as if getting rid of old grime to eye level. Though I check the route and it doesn't look like the royal couple will come this way so I not sure what it is about. Though there will be thousands of people pouring down these streets maybe they just want their brand names to look good. I discover too more historic grime of where I live. On my street corner I find a description of badger baiting:
'In 1792 one William Ebberfield ( probably the same individual as a well-known local criminal called Slender Billy, later hanged for forgery) was prosecuted by his neighbours for the nuisance caused by dog- and badger baiting in a house in Great Peter St. In another ( or perhaps the same ) 'pit' said to be Duck Lane, the the heart of the Westminster slums, a dog-fighting African monkey attracted the fashionable West End to rub shoulders with more local low life.'
Also the overcrowding,
'Under parliamentary powers obtained in 1845, Victoria Street was cut through the Almonry, Dacre Street, and the northern ends of Duck Lane and Strutton Ground. The slums, however, did not go away. Indeed the vicar of St John's estimated that the work displaced five thousand of the poor from their homes. Although three quarters of these left the district, mostly crossing the river to other poor districts, the remainder croweded into the courts and cottages that were left, living three or four families to a house built for one. A local missionary estimated in 1855 that in one of the areas's 24 common lodging houses an average occupancy might be one hundred and twenty people a night. 72 lived in one of the twelve six-roomed houses in one court. From another in the course of three months, 69 young people had been sentenced to transportation, and one hanged at Newgate.'
'Westminster And Pimlico Past.' Isobel Watson.

The imprint of desperation still exists. I have seen a young man in shabby shoes and a grey face his fingers shaking, his eyes ashamed but determined, neck methadone in one gulp at the counter in Boots, a gentle girl like a soft Disney animal, kindly holding out the plastic measured cup. We'll see you tomorrow she said. He waved. An acrid aftertaste in the air. A homeless man ran bleeding through our courtyard recently but followed by a well dressed man who stubbornly kept on his trail organising help. Another destitute man sits on the corner sometimes with his arm around a life sized toy Alasatian Dog. But Westminster Council are trying to pass by laws to make street sleeping illegal and helping or feeding homeless people prosecutable with heavy fines.

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-02/soup-runs-and-rough-sleeping-could-be-banned-at-we/
http://london.indymedia.org/articles/7920

My youngest son, has only just started to read but he understood immediately the flier that came through the door - 'Do not feed the homeless' it said, drumming up support for a demonstration against the measures and he wrote in his still big, wavery letters. NOT RITE.

Finally and this was before school broke up my Indonesian friend came unexpectedly one morning to drop her son off so I could take him to school. His beautiful face anxious as she ushered him in. I need to tell you something privately she said and I pulled the door to and stood with her in the stairwell hearing the boys all laughing slightly manically inside. Her husband had been set upon by three men, somewhere just outside of London. His face had been smashed, his cheekbone broken. I have to go to him she said. Yes, I said let me know what I can do to help. But I don't think there is anything I can do. They are trapped in something terrible and I don't even know what it is.

Amen.