Civilising the Barbarians

The last few weeks have been tinder-dry hot and we have closed the awning and wooden blinds against the heat and sun to keep the house cool and dark. News reports of more than a hundred fires burning across two states, a third of them out of control, pepper the days, as much a part of summer as the cricket on TV, and the hot evenings stretch out into the foreshortened nights. In these blistering days we take refuge in our city’s art galleries where the spaces are airy and air-conditioned, and rarely too crowded; and the girls can climb up and down endless stairs, ride the escalators, sit down at the café and drink babychinos while we luxuriate in a latte; and occasionally look at some art.

We spent endless days of our summer in Paris going to galleries, including six full days at the Louvre, treading almost all of its passages, as well as visiting many well-known and lesser-known of Paris’s varied cultural treasures. When Rhea and Lara were born we continued many of our favourite pastimes, including gallery-visiting, popping the babies in the pram and wheeling them around either awake or asleep. One of my friends said that she didn’t take her baby to galleries because it would be boring for him but I never found it so – even when the girls were at the age when they were running ‘off’ as opposed to running ‘around’ they still loved the open and familiar spaces and we had a gallery excursion at least weekly (two adults required). Many galleries also have children’s rooms these days to engage them. There has never seemed to be a time when Lara and Rhea haven’t enjoyed a gallery visit.

Last night was a respite from the summer haze and heat with monsoonal-like rain freshening up the garden and cooling us all down. The girls’ godparents came over for dinner. They ploughed through the sheeting rain and arrived when it had eased and we had a lovely evening. We ate light potato cakes topped with smoked salmon for entrée, followed by tomatoes and parsley with clams in spaghetti and ending with mangoes with home-made mango ice-cream. We discussed the girls, work, travel, free-range eggs, the forthcoming election, the tennis and our families. Today I had my Sunday sleep-in followed by a meditative hour weeding. The weeds were joyously easy to pull out after all the rain.

After that we had a special gallery visit. As Maggie was touching down for a two-week visit from Seattle, Rhea, Lara, Steve and I went to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition – the girls started in their pram and then Steve and I held/managed one each. We showed them the oil-on-cardboard ladies doing their hair, the men racing their horses and the book that Lautrec had evocatively illustrated over the typing: his own copy, for his own pleasure, because the author turned down Lautrec’s offer to illustrate the forthcoming edition. We discovered the children’s room that was secreted in the exhibition space, and Steve and I took turns one in the exhibition space while the other showed the girls how shadow-puppets work; took photos of them dressing up in top hats, cat’s ears and arm-length white gloves; encouraged their drawing and leafed through a book of photos of cats slipping through tall doorways or across misty, centuries-old bridges.

The visit was special because we were enhancing our usual babychinos at the café with a High Tea complete with ribbon sandwiches, tiny quiches and cherry tarts, turquoise macaroons, chocolate and macadamia brownies, rosewater ‘marshmawows’ and, of course, scones with jam and cream.

The girls sat up and sipped their babychinos from adult-sized china cups with delicate handles while Steve and I slurped our cappuccinos and Earl-Grey tea. ¹

I couldn’t help reflecting on our honeymoon in Paris three-and-a-half years ago while we were enjoying our High Tea. One day we saw a special exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec posters at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs adjacent to the Louvre. It was a very dark exhibition space painted like a crumbling warehouse and hung with rooms full of Lautrec’s posters. Afterwards we went to a tucked-away bistro and had a leisurely lunch. Today’s afternoon tea lasted thirty minutes. We hovered over one child each, anxiously ensuring they didn’t drop the china cups on the tiled floor, and after successfully keeping them occupied with some delicacies for a while, we picked up the pace of consumption as they jumped down from their chairs and delightedly did circuits of our table: dropping their baby dolls behind the concrete barrier near the top of the ten-foot escalators, slipping through the gap between the fake hedge and our seat to retrieve them, running round giggling to the cordoned-off rope and uncordoning it to let themselves in, wrestling a bit with a sister if they both arrived at the same time, and repeating the process another 57 times.

I don’t think they do badly: in fact their skill in holding a teacup and consuming its contents is really quite impressive given their age, and even though they did run around a lot, it wasn’t too annoying for the neighbouring patrons (I don’t think) and despite appearances, they weren’t endangering themselves so we could leave them to it. But the time between enjoying a civilised and stationary afternoon tea and their current yoyo-like behaviour is likely to be a long interval indeed, with knife and fork skills, the art of conversation and the ability to eat without strewing the seat with crumbs or covering one’s face with froth and chocolate topping all requiring quite some work.

I’m not worried. We’ve made a good start, and we’ll knock some civilisation into them, week by week, gallery visit by gallery visit, one babychino at a time.