"Excuse me, how much does a croissant cost"?
I have breakfast at the station bar, waiting for the 6:00 train, when I hear a guy ask the bartender:
"Excuse me, how much does a croissant cost"?
You hardly hear the price of the croissant or coffee at the bar. So I look at the boy and notice that it is as if he were doing the math. After a while he asks for a croissant. But nothing else.
He leaves the bar, I follow him, I notice that after a few meters he stops leaning against the station wall.
My train hadn't arrived yet, his regional was almost ready for departure.
I approach talking trivially about the weather, the wind ... and then ask him:
"how was the croissant?" And he: “it wasn't bad. Why are you asking me? "
I use the utmost caution:
“out of curiosity, I didn't like it that much. However, I haven't had coffee yet. Would you like to take it together? "
He looks at me curiously:
“sure, thank you, he's very kind. But I only have 10 minutes. Then I absolutely have to take the train, today is my first day of work ”.
We go back into the bar and I say to him:
"Look, don't you want a cappuccino"?
Accept. We consume and immediately go back to the tracks. The boy stops, sad look, low voice:
“I know he understood. And I thank you because you didn't make me weigh it. Today I start working, and it is not the job I expected. But I can no longer weigh on my family. Because my parents can't take it anymore. I always have a few coins in my pocket, but now at the end of the month I will finally be able to take something home too ''. Thanks again for the cappuccino and above all for the grace. These are not things to be taken for granted ”.
He runs to catch his train. Mine arrives almost immediately.
I leave with a sense of sadness, imagining how many people every day cannot afford even a cappuccino at the bar. But when this happens to a boy, sadness turns to anguish. It's not right.
Because you were more than a grandmother. You were so much more. Not only did I feel safe with you. Not only with you was me. And the dances in the morning with our favorite record: the “hits of 2005”, the breakfasts with milk and cereals. Not just laughter. Not just scolding them when I wanted to sharpen the markers. Or when I refused to help you. Not just beautiful things. Not just the imitations of grandfather, which made everyone laugh. Not just the jokes around the house, not just the stories. Your stories. I remember them all. When you talked about them in the evening, when I was tired of playing and had finished dinner. Your stories. I remember them all. They were so far-fetched, yet I miss them too much. And the fantasies. Our fantasies that others will never understand. And when I was little I found in you the support, the comfort. Then when I got older and you a little older I became your support. Your comfort. Every day I curse myself for all the time we could have spent together and we didn’t. A lot of things awaited us. Because you were more than a grandmother. You were so much more. Not only did I feel safe with you. Not only with you was me. And the dances in the morning with our favorite record: the “hits of 2005”, the breakfasts with milk and cereals. Not just laughter. Not just scolding them when I wanted to sharpen the markers. Or when I refused to help you. Not just beautiful things. Not just the imitations of grandfather, which made everyone laugh. Not just the jokes around the house, not just the stories. Your stories. I remember them all. When you talked about them in the evening, when I was tired of playing and had finished dinner. Your stories. I remember them all. They were so far-fetched, yet I miss them too much. And the fantasies. Our fantasies that others will never understand. And when I was little I found in you the support, the comfort. Then when I got older and you a little older I became your support. Your comfort. Every day I curse myself for all the time we could have spent together and we didn’t. A lot of things awaited us. I wanted you to be there again for my birthday. You would have showered me with compliments the entire month and beyond. And when every time I have to pose in a photograph with the remaining grandparents, it hurts to see everyone go away like this. I know you’re there. But not being able to touch, hold, hear your voice anymore. It hurts. It hurts so much. And miss you. You would have showered me with compliments the entire month and beyond. And when every time I have to pose in a photograph with the remaining grandparents, seeing grandfather alone next to me, it hurts. I know you’re there. But not being able to touch, hold, hear your voice anymore. It hurts. It hurts so much. And miss you.
Research shows that British women do 60% more housework. Is there any hope for balance when it comes to emptying the bins?
Why, exactly, is housework so annoying? Certain specific chores are obviously pretty unpleasant: few people relish cleaning the toilet, or extracting mouldy vegetables from the bottom drawer of the fridge. But why housework in general? Part of the answer, surely, is that it’s unending, so you never achieve that satisfying sense of getting it out of the way, nor even of having made a little progress. The only reason you’re stacking the dishwasher is so the dishes can be dirtied again tomorrow; you’re fishing the toddler’s toys from under the sofa so he can fling them back there as soon as he wakes up. “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, published in 1949. “The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.” Needless to say, De Beauvoir wasn’t objecting solely to the work, but to the division of labour: housework is also annoying because, if you’re a woman living with a man, it’s highly likely you end up doing most of it, no matter who earns more, or who spends longer at the office. To be fair to us, men do a lot more housework than in 1949. But women still do a lot more than that. So now both sexes have grounds to resent how much of their lives they spend with Toilet Duck in hand, or scooping bits of spaghetti from the kitchen sink.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 