During the recent lockdown, we went to the rescue of our 87 years grand mother who was until then happily living alone in Paris. But with the Covid-19 spreading everywhere, how could we let her at her vulnerable age go food shopping in the highly contaminated city ? The plan was to go and take her back to London. But as the French government imposed meanwhile the confinement, we became trapped.
The rules in France were strict : it was roughly forbidden to go out, the parks and gardens were all closed, the streets were empty. For the first time in Paris, the usually busy city was eerily silent except for the deafening noise of the too many ambulances, which seemed to threaten all of us, scurrying and locking ourselves for safety. We were also determined to protect our beloved grand mother and so we stayed on house arrest for 1 then 2 then 3 long…very long…extremely long months.
No one, especially us, had imagined that the confinement would be so long, stressful and strenuous in an apartment, without a garden.
So here we were, away from our home, without our books, colouring pencils, DVDs, games… Worst of all we had a terrible internet connection, which for us was the worst possible situation.
We had dramatically discovered the meaning of words such as pandemic, contamination’s rate, co-morbidity…. But more importantly we had discovered the feeling of fear towards an insidious and invisible enemy.
We were eager to escape this stressful imprisonment and even more importantly to stop the sword of Damocles hanging over all of us with the most horrific questions such as “what would happen if one of our parents died ? If both died ? If one of us died ? “
As a diversion, our mother proposed to us to write a book on our favourite topic of conversation with her : Greek mythology. We love to quizz our mother and make bets to earn money. Our mother used to live as a teenager in Greece and has since felt the need to spend every summer 2 weeks back to her halcyon days. That is how my brother and I had discovered very young the complex stories of Greek Mythology. Summer after summer, we have put our feet into their footsteps, we have strolled in their ruins and in their hills, we have tasted the golden honey persuaded to be eating the famous ambrosia of the gods. We both felt a real intimacy with them, almost as a distant family.
Each of us would decide on a subject, research it and write about it in our own words as the subject of creative writing. We need to thank Google Translator as most of the books were in French, Wikipedia, the whole web and more importantly all the fantastic authors of these books starting with Homer, Hesiod and so many more…
Immediately our walls would open up so we could feel the light touch of the Zephyr wind, bathe in the sun rays of the sunset, we would run with Heracles, listen to the enchanting songs of the sirens, learn determination with Odysseus. Suddenly, despite everything, we were free, our minds would be flying over the magnificent Greek landscapes that were already printed in our minds. What better escape from our walls but to imagine the sheer terror of being in the rough sea between Scylla and Charybdis ?
The Greek Gods also taught us that in life there were, there are and there will be ups and downs, in absolutely everyone’s life, that “there is nothing new under the sun’ and that all a man needs is his own determination.
This is not an exhaustive work on the Greek Mythology. We are 11 years old and shall be 12 at the end of summer, which is our deadline for this book, as by then we should hopefully go back to normal school.
This is simply a humble homage to our heroes.
We hope you will have as much fun reading as we did researching.
Here is our homage…
Paul and Antoine Laffineur