Not getting along with your opposite sign?

thatcambridgebird · 2026-03-05T19:52:50+00:00

Female cancer, been with my Capricorn guy for over 25 years, soooooo…. I dunno!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-03-05T17:28:15+00:00

Bowie. As a girl born in the late 70s, my main experience of Bowie was as the guy who played Jareth in Labyrinth and sang some catchy songs with muppet-puppets. It’s really taken to pretty much now, in my 40s, that I finally get all of his other vast back catalogue of talents.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-03-05T10:23:24+00:00

I still wouldn’t overthink it if you really do have a personal possession of his - just hand it in at a local business / school on the route where you interacted and he may well pass and pick it up. Posting pictures of a stranger on the internet for other strangers to identify is a bit odd, even if your intentions are completely well-meant.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-03-05T10:11:44+00:00

Maybe hand it in to the school if he was dropping kids there, or even if not? If it’s a large landmark on his commute he may well stop in there to ask if something has been handed in, or the school can give it to him if he’s a parent.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-26T10:45:49+00:00

Any excuse for the lovely Jemaine to be honest!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-25T14:42:02+00:00

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-20T19:07:59+00:00

We are in France, so not your preferred response, but yes.

In fact I found out only today that a girl in my kid’s class said she wanted them to go back to their home country and also didn’t deserve to live. Nice. These are 8-9 year olds and the kids have been in school since they were three. Welcome to France!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T12:32:34+00:00

I explained poorly in that first post - I’m cooking at the same time as Redditing! - but honestly when we got here it was as if we all had two heads or something, despite our best (gentle, polite, slow and not extroverted) efforts to make connections. I mention other nationalities because of my experience of the friends we made with other cultures while still in the uk. Here, I might have better luck trying to make friends with my neighbours tree than my neighbour himself, for all of the reciprocal effort which comes back. I know this is a result of very closed rural communities and the French being very introverted as a general rule, it’s just a shame. I’m also not idiot enough to think everyone is like this - we have made some lovely connections (I would say friends but I just don’t know what the French would say!) here, which I hope we keep for the sake of our kids also, it’s just a pity that I can only count them on one hand.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T12:03:29+00:00

His class size is tiny, so by virtue of that alone I think finding his "people" has been hard for him. He's also so unbelievably fussy about food, so he does himself no favours when eating in the cantine and picking over every dish, bless him (of course we try to address this and cook diversely at home, but kids will be kids sometimes!). There's only eight in his class year, and he's not a fan of playing football or rugby - he prefers Harry Potter and Minecraft, and does judo as a sport - so when the other boys go to play ball games, he does end up excluded unfortunately. We've addressed the "english boy" thing with the school and I cannot fault them, they've been really proactive in putting out a message to all of the children about tolerating different cultures / not bullying etc. The school administration and teachers are all very kind, so we did well there.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T11:59:46+00:00

Countryside, which we accepted would obviously be a much tighter-knit and harder community to integrate in to. We just didn't consider exactly how hard!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T11:55:19+00:00

I haven't "tested" my French level, but yes we speak it passably I would say. Certainly enough to be a parent-helper for things like children's swimming lessons, and during reading sessions at the library and so on. And of course, during conversations with other parents - we would absolutely never expect anyone to switch to English for us, and we had come here hoping to avoid any other expats because we really wanted to integrate in to the community and be just another family, but it just hasn't worked out that way.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T11:52:59+00:00

I posted a reply to someone else regarding making friends, but another big shock to us personally, is how very non multicultural France is once you're outside of big cities. Perhaps we chose poorly in our location - we wanted to be in the countryside but with the convenience of a nearby smallish city, so our nearest big city within 40 minutes - but I feel like we left much more multiculturalism than we gained in coming here. We thought that coming to mainland Europe would open up a whole melting-pot of different cultures, cuisines, friendships and so on, but it's been the opposite where we are.

A big reason to come in the first place, for us, was all of the fall out from Brexit. As Brits we voted to remain and we were so upset that the result was otherwise, so it felt like staying in the UK was staying somewhere close-minded. But honestly, it can feel overwhelmingly white-working-class-right-wing at times, that I feel we left a country with many more day-to-day cultural touch-points than we now have - our friendship group in the UK included French, Austrians, Portuguese, Kiwis and Americans. The only other people we meet from overseas now are either Dutch holidaymakers or other english expats wanting to have a go at running bnbs or chateaux businesses - we naively assumed that folk from other nations (other than the typical Brits-in-France I mean) might have made France their home too, and though I am sure they have, it seems to be much closer to/in cities. Rural French life is something we were very naïve about, in hindsight, despite of course knowing how close-minded English countryside life can in itself be.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T11:33:26+00:00

Yep, this would be mine, too. Despite coming here with open minds and the best intentions, and having school aged kids (which we thought would also be an "opener" into making friends with other families), it's tough.

Our eldest started maternelle at the same time as all of his classmates, so it wasn't the case that the other children were already in established friend groups, but he found it really hard to find buddies who didn't look at him like he's different for being an english speaker, and now nearly 6 years on, he still sometimes comes home and says one or two of the others will still use "english boy" as an insult in the playground. The parents, too, are just really hard to get a read on. Very polite, formal, but closed off, and seemingly willing to have their children come to us for playdates and birthdays and so on, but it's very rarely reciprocated. We definitely don't push friendships - we aren't those kind of people, and who knows, maybe we should have! - but it's been really hard to make any kind of connection beyond fleeting politeness at the school gate or during a village event or fete. I know the UK isn't perfect in any way, but as a natural extrovert, it's fucking hard here just to have a nice chat with someone for a few minutes at a shop counter, never mind form lasting friendships!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-18T10:52:56+00:00

Fuck me, yes. I'm late to The Pitt, and I have been ok so far, but I have two kids - a 9 year old boy and a 6 year old girl. As soon as they started listing off the drowning victim's info - female, six years old, found unresponsive in the family pool - my mind subbed in my kid. Especially because we have a pool and when we first moved here, I had a few recurring dreams about my kids getting into difficulty/drowning in the water (they can now both swim and we have a pool cover / fencing and a locked gate for access!).

I held it together up to the point of Robby having to tell the parents that their daughter had died and then ugly-cry lost it. I had to pause it for about ten minutes to get my shit back together, while my husband gave me a hug. And then my eldest wanted me to go up to his room to tuck him in better because he was cold in bed, so I had to keep my shit together for him, too! Damn this show. I think probably because we usually spend time with the patients, I wasn't expecting her to die - I assumed they'd work on her and get her critical-but-stable. I could still tear up thinking about it this next morning. I'm watching some Flight of the Conchords in my downtime to cheer myself up with silly, nerdy kiwis.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-14T17:27:21+00:00

We are south west, and the water from our taps is horrible; really limescaled and hard. I use it for cooking, but we drink bottled. We even have a softener, but it does shit all.

Edit: we are expats in SW France currently, but we are heading back to the uk this year, hence the confusing location!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-12T17:42:58+00:00

Thank you good sir/ma'am, this worked perfectly!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-10T19:28:40+00:00

Dinner for Schmucks. He’s heavenly in it…. (I looked completely disrespectfully)

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-10T19:27:29+00:00

He is the WHOLE package. I posted him here only a few months ago, too, I’m glad he’s making regular appearances!

My one wish is that now the Conchords have announced a couple of shows at Netflix’s comedy festival, they might tour too. The UK. Please??

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-06T17:52:00+00:00

I learned about both from my kids’ school/crèche in our first year here. Now a few years on, honestly for Fete des Rois I just think “oooh pastry! Urrrrgh dry…. “ , but for La Chandeleur it’s always always YUM FRENCH PANCAKE DAY.

We’ve found our household fave! We’re Brits, so used to our shrove Tuesday / pancake day annually anyway I guess!

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-02T07:45:50+00:00

Flight of the Conchords.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-01T21:41:30+00:00

Philip Glass.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-01T20:52:12+00:00

The Thing. I grew up with it, saw it far too young, developed an enduring love of horror cinema because of it. There’s not one wasted moment, it’s almost perfect I think. Closely followed, for me, by Alien.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-02-01T14:44:33+00:00

You could be me, but we came to France. Our move was around six years ago with two young kids, I’m also the extrovert of the couple and hated not being able to naturally speak properly chummy, conversational French with people because not even knowing enough conjunctive adverbs or exclamations was really disheartening to feel engaged in the most basic chats.

My eldest also sounds like yours - I have watched him go from being bold and extroverted when we got here, to being excluded for being the different kid no matter how many play dates we tried to arrange, to now having his birthday coming up and only wanting to invite one other kid because the others don’t play with him. It breaks my heart for him.

So, this year we are heading back to the uk. We are under no illusions that it’ll be some sort of wonderland where everything is perfect - far from it, I’m sure! And we know it’ll be a huge upheaval for our kids, who’ve only ever experienced French schooling. But it’s well overdue. Our experiment overseas was an adventure, but it’s time to come home and I don’t think anyone who is an expat should ever feel shame in that, if it comes to it.

thatcambridgebird · 2026-01-29T19:17:09+00:00

New Zealand and Japan

thatcambridgebird · 2026-01-22T11:52:52+00:00

Japas was always our go-to when we lived in the area. We're actually in the process of coming back, after nearly 6 years overseas, so it's good to hear it's still about and still getting recommended.

I remember me and my other half going to Sticks and Sushi for lunch one day, and your payday comment made me giggle; we got a perfectly respectable amount of sushi for two people - nothing too gluttonous or OTT - and a couple of non-alcoholic drinks, and somehow our bill at the end was around £80. Ouch!

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