I write very disappointed this evening as the snow has come. I'm also feeling rather sheepish as earlier in the week, I longed for snow after seeing photos from home, and now it's here and in Clermont Auvergne and the match on Sunday is cancelled. So that is a shame. It will be rearranged, so I'm told, and that is of great consolation as, just as I wrote about Bourgoin, heading to Clermont is one of the reasons I'm here! Pilgrimage is not too strong a word. The snow would have made it even more atmospheric as I tried to hype it up even more but sadly, not to be this weekend.
However, the hype is building for the big derby! Racing took 3 full pages in the Paris free newspaper "20 Minutes" this morning to publicise the game. It included a written piece by Eric Blanc, former player, club director and father of my back-up scrum-half. He was cranking up the niggle, making sly digs towards the flamboyant Stade Francais owner Max Guazzini and his penchant for pink shirts and the club anthem, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive". Excitingly, there is genuine niggle in this game. For a start, the club owners hate each other. Guazzini laid into Racing with the typical snobbish Parisian attitude about the banlieu (suburbs) where our club is situated and Jacky Lorenzetti replied with "Our roots are historical not geographical" and lambasted Stade for playing around with their shirt and colours for commercial gain, claiming that the 'ciel et blanc' is something far too sacred to be messed around with. Those blue and white stripes are of course the same stripes of Cambridge University, re-enforcing the historical point.
I've watched the pros a fair bit this week, some looking a bit drained after the international month. Sireli Bobo is in top form though, as always. I inwardly smiled when I saw Francois Steyn but I don't think he even knows I'm Scottish and making myself understood to this proud Afrikaner (read into that what you will) would be tricky. I have been basking in that victory, however, especially in light of the previous week's drubbing. I also grew to 7ft when I heard that Australia had put 59 points past France. I displayed a total lack of taste and decency in the way I rubbed it in everyone's faces, but hey, the short-term wonderful feeling that it gave me was more than worth it. I just hope Scotland do the business come February 5th in the 'Tournoi de 6'...now that would make my life easier.
My big news from today is that I improved 5 kgs on my Bench Press score which I'm slightly embarrassed to say means quite a lot to me. Oh how I'd love to be naturally very big and strong and to be able to take or leave weights as I please. My initial thought was, wait till Serge hears. He was nearly dancing around in a Scottish jig yesterday when I nailed a huge squat and by the end of the session he was pretending to toss the caber. I cannot wait to see his face when I present him with a bottle of Glenlivet.
My class is trundling along, only a week and 2 days to go. I must admit I'm becoming very tired of some of my classmates. Two woman in particular interrupt and give answers when people are thinking and then repeat the prof's answer after she's said it as if to claim that they were saying it all along. I snapped this morning and have lost a 'friend' but I'll live. I am still resisting group work as I find working with my Korean chum simply a waste of time as, although his French is outstanding, I haven't the slightest idea what he's saying. So, on we plod to the test next week where I fear I will be horribly exposed. And as I write I remember that I was supposed to have written a short resumé of the life of Paul Verlaine. I hope I wouldn't be being too offensive if I simply wrote down hurriedly in the morning a general life of most French writers of the period which goes something like this: born to bourgoise parents, schooled in Paris, publishes poems written under influence of opium, marries, divorces, homosexuality, publishes some more, finds absinthe and dies.... And on that note, I'm off to dream of interception tries in Clermont...
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