Mainly domestic

 

Autumn is definitely here and very fancy opulent leaves are spreading themselves over the barn.  I am yearly amazed by this show. I don’t do anything at all to make it happen, though Karl, our friend who works like a human cannon ball and helps Mike with the garden, spent a little time earlier this year disposing of competing stuff.  He works so speedily, though,  he probably only took 10 minutes to do the job.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dog has had her first bath.  When she came to us last year, she refused the bath very strongly, but she has since taken to wading in rivers, streams and ponds (not swimming, paws have to be on the ground) so I thought she might be willing to finally try a tub soak.  And she was – took to it like a dog to water!  She has been scratching a lot lately and, as we couldn’t find any sign of fleas, mites or other pests, we thought it might be eczema.  So I carted her into the bath and sluiced her down with some fine beeswax soap which my sister, Helen, makes from the bees she keeps in her Leeds garden.  I do remember her saying it was good for skin complaints and Dolly gave every appearance of enjoying it.

 

Other than that, I have been making jam with figs picked from a huge tree belonging to our friends, the Roxburghs,   Roxburgh pears and our own apples; also a rather peculiar looking recipe which involved butternut squash, sugar and oranges.  The fig stuff is really good but I’m deeply uncertain about the orange squash business.  

 

Now that I live on the edge of a French village in the Dordogne, I jam-make, knit and sew – all activities I didn’t subscribe to in London, and was beginning to think that Mike was putting some sort of Stepford additive in my tea.   

 

 

My friend, Brenda, thinks we have become more domestic because there is a limited range of things to do down here.  Not much in the way of libraries – certainly no evening classes, swimming pool half an hour away and cinema at least three quarters of an hour.  Though there are meetings with friends and lunches and beautiful walks with the dog.  I also leap about and wave my arms rather foolishly at a Zumba class once a week – supposedly slower than the real thing and suited to oldies - Zumba for Golden Years.  And we organise quizzes to raise funds for Médecins Sans Frontières, a truly good cause. 

If I am becoming a Stepford wife, I am still rather feral.  The kitchen floor is habitually dirty.  I have rather given up on it.  The pot sink in the kitchen is very ancient and rather charming but, in line with its age, is also rather incontinent.  It  leaks water down the side of the drainer onto the floor.  Every time you do some task at the taps, water splashes under your feet and then wet foot marks follow – also paw marks if the dog is keeping you company.  I do make some effort but continual mopping is no fun.  If I can remember I may try spreading a towel on the floor before I do anything.  I could also make a lot more effort in the garden.  I instigated a herb bed when we first came here but weed it only spasmodically.  If it doesn’t rain, I might give it a go tomorrow.   I might also make an attempt to produce some marmalade, though that does look like a fiddly task.   Separating the peel from the pith looks no fun at all. 

 

After six years in France I finally have a French mobile phone.  The French rates used to be so expensive that it cost no more to use my English mobile.  But things are now changing thanks to EU rulings and the French rates are now cheaper.  I set up my new account on the internet and was asked to key in a pin number to use when I add credit to the account.  So I used numbers from my birth date.  “Never do that,” said a helpful friend, “It’s easy for other people to guess it”.  If anyone would like to break into my mobile account to add some credit to my phone, they are welcome.       

Memory - the griat bang theory

Jangling about in my head, alongside how to make bread , kedgerees,  a decent dhall, pin numbers, phone numbers,  my address, friend’s names and addresses and memories dating back to when I was about two,  I also carry a large collection of bizarre scraps, which switch themselves to replay from time to time, apparently independently of my will.  

About 20 years ago I worked in a legal office which dealt with insurance claims for a large van owning company.   All of the claims were based on accident reports filled in by the driver, and quite often the drivers were not good at filling the forms in.  My favourite stated

Cause of accident: Sudely a griat bang

Damage caused: Front front whee

What I was not expecting, though, was that this would pop into my head yesterday whilst Dolly and I were wandering behind Lake Cou Cou.  Not only did it pop, but if formed itself into a little song which went

Sudely a griat bang
Sudely a griat bang
Sudely a griat bang
And I hurt my front front whee
As everyone can see

Fortunately there was no-one else around at the time, other than the dog and a few sheep,  to hear me singing this pretty ditty.

 

Upsetting Dino Murby

 

Dino Murby, an aging and short legged dog, is visiting at the moment.  He is an easy guest – his main pleasures in life being eating and sleeping.  Much of the time he lies with his eye closed impersonating an elderly rug.  He also likes short walks.  I included him on an hour long trip the other day and, though he plodded on gamely, he panted so much that I spent the next 24 hours keeping an anxious watch, in case I’d brought on a heart attack.    Fortunately he has survived, but, so I don’t have to explain to Sue and Richard how I caused their dog’s death, I left him with Mike when I took Dolly for a longer walk yesterday.  And apparently he was extremely upset.   Once he realised that we had gone without him he stood in the kitchen howling . Mike had to spend a long time comforting him. Although it was flattering to be missed, Dolly will have to make do with short shared walks until Sue and Richard return. 

On Sunday I chopped up old cards.  I had a box containing all the birthday/Christmas/ congratulation/farewell cards we have received over the last 10 years.  I thought they might come in use for my grandsons for scrapbooking at some stage.  As they are now both too old to care about scrapbooks,  I spent several hours separating the pictures from the greetings to make new cards.  I consigned the discarded bits to the rubbish – thinking the recycling people wouldn’t want to pick their way through lots of bits of old card.  So this morning, the rubbish bag began to sing.  Somewhere from its black and mucky depths, it played “Happy Birthday” clearly and repeatedly.   Mike became very distressed.  I’m not sure whether he couldn’t stand the tune or whether he just wanted to retrieve the innocent card but he began to go through all the rubbish in a rescue attempt.  He found it.  It was right at the bottom.  He also rather smeared himself in jam.         

 

 

The View

We have a view!  I may have said this before but outside our bedroom window is a very small balcony.  Not large enough for lounging or breakfasting, it’s where we feed the birds.  When we first bought the house there was also a good view of the fields beyond.  But in the past year or so this has been obscured by the branches of an encroaching tree.  We’ve been undecided about having it lopped – in spite of our gaining a view of the fields and the night sky - would the birds still visit if they had no convenient branch to launch themselves from?  But then the tree grew a bit more and began tapping its branches on the roof.  Some of it had to go.  A splendid young couple arrived from near Thiviers the other day in a tree lopping van pulling a trailer.  And the job is now done.  The tree still stands but it has lost its power to block the view or harm the roof.  And the birds are still visiting.

I stood on my balcony in the evening air pretending to be Juliet.  “Close those windows,” called Romeo from below, “You'll let the moths in”.

Monday was my birthday and I was taken for a splendid lunch in Perigueux to a restaurant with a shaded garden, Le Clos St Front.  Our first visit, you eat in the garden on fine days under a canopy of green leaves. 

A bit like Jack Sprat and his wife, Mike is catholic with his wine drinking but  prefers red in the main, whilst I usually stick to white.  So if we’re having a splendid lunch, we opt for half a bottle of each.  And my half bottle of Sancerre was so beautifully golden and so delicious that it made me feel like never drinking any of the usual stuff again.  If I change my drinking habits I could forego the frequent glass or two of table wine or AOC over dinner and save all wine drinking for treats  – once a week, or even once a fortnight and then sit down with a half bottle of something expensive and divine.       

 

For Blighters Everywhere

I haven’t written anything here for ages, so this is a quick catch up.

I have just returned from my yearly fortnight in Scarborough sluicing out student property between lets.  Brenda Durham –small, kind, cheerful and packs a mean cleaning punch -  came with me.  For which I’m very grateful. 

In between sluicing we walked, ate curries and fish and chips and discovered real ale.  I’ve always been a wine woman but now wish you could get Copper Dragon Golden Pippin in France.  The Golden Pippin pub – the Leeds Arms had a report on the wall of how a Victorian landlord of the pub had had acid thrown at him by a vengeful lover.  She was heard to say, “Take that, you blighter,” as she did it.   

 

There were also various modern warnings and instructions scattered about - possibly influenced by the acid thrower’s spirit - warnings to blighters everywhere.

 

   

   

Scarborough is still an eccentric place.  There’s band music most days in the open air by the Spa.  Pensioners pay to sit in deck chairs and listen.  I don’t understand where all these people are coming from.  They must have been relatively young in the 60s! 

 

I too am a pensioner but have no wish to sit in a deckchair by Scarborough Spa.  A friend of mine once tried to sit in a deck chair out of season when he thought there was nothing going on.  A man came up to him and said, “It’s 50p if you want the organ to start”.  What’s to say?

One afternoon we took a trip a few miles up the coast to Ravenscar.  George III was kept at Raven Hall in his mad periods by a doctor who had written permission to beat the king if he gave trouble, or behaved like a blighter.  Raven Hall is now a hotel and we sat with tea and cake and gaped at the view.

 

 

It’s good to be back home, though, and the dog is ecstatic to be taking long walks out again.  And the countryside is still beautiful.

 

Yesterday Mike and I went shopping in Grand Frais in Perigueux, my favourite vegetable shop in the world.  The French are wonderful at  displaying fruit and veg.  



Even though some of their foreign product names are a trifle eccentric.

 

 

I may buy these as Christmas gifts for friends.  "Take that, you blighters," I will say.

Hail storms, trains and thieves

Sometimes there is nothing worth writing about and sometimes there is too much.  And we have been going through a too much period.   I did manage to take photographs but now the camera is playing up and everything appears lost.

Derek and James, the men with the broken down car, repaired themselves and arrived on a very hot Thursday.   Friday was equally hot and we sat on the terrace in the evening watching the sun go down.  First the thunder arrived, then flashes of multi coloured lightning.  Before it got ominous it was startlingly pretty.  Thankfully we were inside by the time the spectacular hail storm arrived.   Enormous hail stones, the size of large golf balls, flew from the sky with the force of bullets.  Cringing inside, under siege, we expected the windows to shatter at any moment.  

It didn’t last long but, after the onslaught, we found a devastated garden full of broken branches and tiles.  An outside plastic table had large holes bored through it and many roof tiles had been snapped in half.   There were also dents in Derek and Mike’s cars.   We are less badly affected than some of our neighbours.  Whereas our roof tiles are the old Dordogne overlapping ones and have been snapped in two at the overlap, with no leakage to the house, others have had holes bored in their roofs and some have had windows and car windscreens shattered.   Everyone is calling for “bache” – sheets of tarpaulin used to cover ruined roof tops.  The job of covering the roofs has been assigned to the pompiers, who were working flat out taking bache from one house to another and now say they have run out of money. (Hope they don’t do this in the middle of major fires).  M Bougeaud, a local roofer, retired last year and passed the business on to his son.  He is now back at work, dealing with the clamour on his business.   Insurance companies have been telling people they can get estimates from roofers up to 100 kms away.   

Generally, people are being wonderful. The mayor has issued a special bulletin offering help to anyone afflicted and listing all the local roofers and workmen with their contact details.   Neighbours have called, to see if we are okay.  Mike’s telephone services are in demand among some of our English neighbours as his French is so fluent.  It’s really not easy having telephone conversations in a foreign language.   

In spite of all this, Mary Rogers and I had arranged to go to Paris for the night on Tuesday.  Mary is racing round Africa in a truck next month and needed a Mozambique visa.  A visit to the Embassy seemed a safer bet than a postal request.  We got to Paris safely on the train from Limoges. (This is the line that had a spectacular crash with fatalities last month so we thought we had done well).  We negotiated the replacement bus service from Austerlitz to Bastille, that metro line being out.  We’re not used to Paris so were still doing well.  It was after Mary stuck her card into a machine and bought us 10 metro tickets that things started to go wrong.  The metro line was very very crowded. Even at past 10 in the morning it was more like a rush hour service.   Halfway to our destination, with the crowd thinning out, a man helpfully pointed out that Mary’s passport was lying on the floor.  It transpired that the reason it was lying on the floor was that someone had unzipped the little belt she was wearing and removed her credit cards. Possibly the same someone had also unzipped the front pocket of my wheelie case and removed my kindle.    Not nice. 

We are brave women, though.  We continued.  Mary  got her visa.  We spent an afternoon and evening in Montmartre and another afternoon wandering by the Seine.  We found restaurants and ate too many things.  It poured with rain on Wednesday.  We still had a good time.

Mary subsequently found that whoever lifted the credit cards has managed to also lift a great deal of money which she doesn’t have from her account.  We hope giant hail stones land on his head. The bank is supposed to return the money.  It bloody better.

       

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

Shifting

We have been moving furniture.  This, for Mike, is very anxiety inducing.  Many men don’t like furniture to be moved, treating it as a kind of bereavement.  My husband belongs to this number, so, when I first broached the subject, he put his head in his hands and moaned softly.    I think he also rocked a little but I couldn’t swear to it.   I, on the other hand, am a rearranger.  Left to my own devices and given a fellow shifter to grab the other end, I would move beds, tables and chairs around on a regular basis.  We compromise by shifting a lot less than I would like and more than is pleasing to Mike.

But having a table next to the armoire looks lovely.   And Mike’s study is really improved by bringing the green coffee table from the barn and moving the large dining table out.  Also one of the spare bedrooms is much better with two single beds, than with a double and a single. 

I am seriously considering not providing my guests with the option of a double bed.  The two spare bedrooms are too small for doubles anyway.  So any guest couples feeling particularly amorous could squash up together or be creative with floor space.  But this will mean disposing of the double bed in the other small spare room and replacing it with a single.  And Mike’s head might fall off.

We hopefully have guests arriving tomorrow, though not amorous ones.  Derek and Jo (married) were due to come down with their friend, James.  Jo, though, has had to stay home for many urgent reasons, and Derek and James visited Normandy and were coming on to us, but their car broke down last night.  We seem to have failed to make proper sacrifices to the God of the Visit.   Our last lot of expected guests were detained by air strikes.  Derek and James are still hoping to get to us tomorrow, though.

In the meantime, our main visitors continue to be bugs and the odd mouse.  We found a very tiny mouse staggering around in the kitchen the other day.  Mice would generally be given short shrift but this one was so young it didn’t have its eyes open.  Mike, the friend of all creatures, tried to feed it with diluted milk and tiny scraps of muesli but it died overnight. 

 

 

 

At the moment the weather is hot, but until Monday it was very very hot.  The dog and I didn’t walk but sloped off to the river in the afternoons.  I read and swam and she soaked herself in the water up to her neck.  She is a deep paddling dog but not a swimming one – she likes to feel river bottom under her paws.