Back in May 2004, I took a drive up to the Netherlands with Yasmina to visit friends in Utrecht. A big advantage of living in France is that access to most of Europe is overland and most of western Europe is easily accessible. We drove up to Amsterdam one day and toured around the capital [...]

I’ve been busy with Nathan over the last few days, who is now at home and living it up in his bedroom with all his presents and toys. Yasmina left hospital just four days after the birth but I think she’s pleased to be home rather than staying in hospital. Friends have been round to [...]

I propose that it might help to understand what makes a country tick by watching, without even necessarily fully understanding, the primetime news bulletin at around 8 or 9pm. The best known news bulletin in France is at 8pm, on the most popular terrestrial TV channel TF1. On of the presenters – and certainly the [...]

On October 14th, 2005 at 10:30pm local time (GMT+2) Nathan Neil Faris White was born after a long day waiting for the slow dilation of his mother’s cervix and for his head to engage. It was a natural birth after all. Yasmina was very tired but did very well to push and with the help [...]

Yesterday I spent a lot of time waiting with Yasmina at the hospital. She was monitored for a couple of hours in the morning and again in the afternoon but the contractions are still too far apart and not strong enough. She didn’t sleep very well and is started to get very tired of the [...]

One of the things about living away from England so long is that most people miss that which is quintessentially English, or was an integral part of their experience growing up; like HP sauce, proper tea, marmite (yuk!), and decent beer – IPA, bitter or generally “real ale” as we call it. I’m not going [...]

Got up early to take Yasmina to the hospital for 9am this morning. I’ve just come back home quickly to have a little time to myself before I return. It already feels like it’s been a long day, and labour hasn’t even started yet. Here in France they will not let a pregnancy go beyond [...]

Hello! Welcome to my new domain. After troubles with my other host I decided to move. I have just finished migrating my blog, comments and theme to this new server, which is all hosted under my domain name caperet.com. Now I have a couple of issues : redirecting traffic from the old site is no [...]