Flowers and grandmothers

The dog and I continue to walk out every afternoon, although the weather remains dodgy.  We haven’t been caught in any more hail, but sunshine is usually mixed with rain.   It rained so hard in the night that the river at the bottom of the field was leaping and churning and reddish brown with clay and mud.   

The rain is bringing on the wild flowers, though; all manner of stuff that I can’t even find in our flower books, including these things which might be purple dead nettles - or something much more peculiar.  They have little purple bits sticking out at the top and remind me of the Tiny Clangers.

 

There are also meadows full of dandelions.

 

 

Today I was remembering, Jessie, who I met on holiday about 15 years ago.  Jessie told stories which had no proper conclusion, involving phrases which she often repeated.   Reporting the speech of others she would always say, “And then he/she said, ‘Jessie I have something to tell you’”. 

 

One day she told me a story about her grandmother.  When Jessie was a young  woman she went away on holiday.  When she returned her brother said to her, “Jessie, I have something to tell you”.  Then he said, “I am afraid our grandmother is dead”.  “How terrible”, said Jessie, “I must see her.  Where is she?” “I am afraid you cannot see her,” said Jessie’s brother.  “But why not,” said Jessie, “I love my grandmother, I must see her”.  “No, I am afraid you cannot see her,” said Jessie’s brother, “Jessie, I have something to tell you. I am afraid she burst”. 

When she told me this story,  I had to suck in both of my cheeks to avoid laughing.  This would have been a terrible thing to do about to someone remembing their dead grandmother.    But I still don’t understand it.  I don’t see how she burst.  Jessie never explained.

You might gather that nothing much happened today.  Except that the dog has started to give Fascist salutes in her sleep.

 

 

 

House

Raining - and raining yesterday too.  So plans for making an effort in the garden have gone by the board.  I did plant some coriander seeds in little pots and put them in a spare bedroom.  I was going to do the same with some butternut squash seeds but goodness knows where himself has put them.   

The butternut squash were a sad disappointment last year.  I dried the seeds from a bought squash very carefully and raised lots of little plants.  I had so many I was distributing them to friends who got lovely squash crops and were all grateful.  However, our squash came up round and green and striped.    I can’t blame the seeds as others had success with them.  Somebody told me that the butternut squash is a very promiscuous plant and will “cross-pollinate” with anything going.  If I can get any started this year, they aren’t going to get a chance to start branching out and getting tiddly on nectar and “cross-pollinating”.   They’ll be strictly confined to a butternut squash only area. 

As I couldn’t garden this morning I forced myself into some house cleaning whilst still in my pyjamas.   House cleaning isn’t my best thing but I do prefer the house not to look like a complete tip.  For an Easter treat (for the house, not me) I’ve swept the stairs down, cleaned the bathroom, done some dusting, wielding a hoover, changed the towels and also put clean sheets on the bed.  That will probably be it until we either know there’s a visitor coming or I can see the dust on the furniture again. 

I change sheets once a fortnight (not weekly).  Mike has a much bigger tolerance of used sheets than I do.  When I’d been away for a few weeks and noticed that the sheets seemed to have been on a while he pointed out that they were quite clean on my side.

Some people are much more particular than me.  I was visiting the flat at Scarborough last year.  My niece had arranged to come for the following week with some school friends.   A very clean nice tidy woman friend had slept in one of the beds for two nights and offered to change her sheets on leaving.   “Certainly not." I cried,   "They’ll be perfectly alright for school kids”.  My friend said that she thought that was very dirty.  I didn’t think to ask her what she’d been doing in them but knew she'd been alone.      

Over the last two nights we’ve watched an old film and an old play – The Godfather and Abigail’s Party.   There’s a really horrid marriage in each of these – Connie Corleone’s husband chases her round the apartment beating her with a belt,  but Michael Corleone subsequently has him garrotted,  so that’s alright.  In Abigail’s Party Lawrence and Beverley spend most of their time in mutual snarling and demonstrating how thoroughly miserable two people can make each other.  Lawrence ends up escaping by dying of a heart attack. 

Mike and I said afterwards how glad we were we had a happy companionable marriage - slight bickering thrown in but no beating and hardly any snarling.      

 

Lunch and Murder

We’ve been out to lunch again.  And it was a really good lunch indeed.  Christian Dardelet, who gives cookery lessons at his chateau outside Sarrazac, also cooks lunches or dinners for groups of people.  He doesn’t have a restaurant as such.  He gives the cookery lessons, rents out gites and also sells great tree trunk loads of wood from his grounds.  So his lunches and dinners are private parties and have to be booked.  As we have a lunch club which goes somewhere different every month for lunch, we asked Christian to cook us something and 25 of us went and ate it today.    



(L to R) Yvette Bickerton, Kerstin Wood, Mary & Alan Rogers

It was a very classic proper French lunch – don’t read the next bit if you’re a vegetarian - foie gras, veal, goat’s cheese, pineapple pudding.  Veal is a different matter here.  It does involve eating very young cows, but the Dordogne prides itself on raising the calves in fields with their mothers and not isolating them or inflicting other cruelties on them.  Not only did we have very nice things to eat, but we were given different things to drink with each course.  We did take our time this afternoon though.  Lunch started at 12.30 and finished about 4.00.    Which is why I’m doing this post a bit late.  I’ve come home, drunk two big glasses of water, taken Dolly for a walk and calmed down.  



Annita Wright, Pamela Roxburgh, Mike Brewer

 

There was a problem with Dolly this morning.  Mike started to walk her down to the river and then came back suddenly.  “Something bad has happened,” he said, “Dolly has killed a coypu”.  When I asked where she was, he said he had left her out in the field as he wasn’t speaking to her.  I do sympathise with him but I don’t know  if dogs realise when you’re not speaking to them.

Apparently she found the coypu in a small stream leading to the river and grabbed it by the neck.  When Mike shouted, “No, no,” she seemed to think he was asking her to bring it, so she brought it.  If anyone hasn’t seen a coypu, they are creatures about the size of cats with long ratty like tails.  They are good if you think of them as beavery, ottery type of creatures and not so appealing if you think of them as very large rats.  I do have a picture of one that was in our fields a year or two back. 

 

When we came back from lunch Dolly was delighted to see us.  She licked us a lot and promised to protect us from any birds, coypu, or other creatures that may be wandering about on our property.  I did originally think she was a gentle collie/spaniel cross, but I’m now thinking she’s more of a Mafiosa - Donna Dolly Corleone.

Trains

 

 

Mike doesn’t like air travel.  In fact, he’s phobic about flying, which is why he wouldn’t come to South Africa with me.  So when we had trips to Italy last year we went by rail – sometimes in overnight sleeping compartments.  I now know I don’t like them much.  It was a disappointment.  I had romantic ideas about sleeping compartments from watching Poirot or The Lady Vanishes, but they’re not like that now.  European train travel allows pensioners to travel at half fare, so it’s possible to buy first class tickets at much reduced prices - which is what we did.  Modern first class sleeping compartments are very, very small with bunk beds, a tiny sink in a cupboard in a corner and a shared loo at the end of the corridor. 

What I liked about them least is the insistence of the guards that you lock your door at night.  I’ve said before that I’m claustrophobic so I’d prefer to deter villains and burglars by piling cases against the door, than by locking myself into a 7 foot by 3 foot space.  But the guards won’t have it.  They come down the corridors at night testing all the doors, opening them and shouting, “Lock your door” at you as you’re drifting into sleep, just to let the burglars know which doors are unlocked.        

Our first class tickets also bought us a rather horrible breakfast in the mornings.  Someone knocks on your door with a tray containing a plastic encased rubbery sugary croissant and a carton of fruit drink which is not fruit juice but some other beverage.  There’s also one other item of food on the tray but it’s so unmemorable that I can’t remember what it is.

I  thought about all this yesterday because Mike was clearing out some things and came across a bag of toiletries that we had been issued with on a sleeper train.  “Look,” he said, “This folds out into a toothbrush and there’s some toothpaste with it.”  “Throw it away,” I said, but he took no notice.  He was brought up to be prudent with bits of string and brown paper so he never knows when things might come in useful.  “Oh, look,” he carried on, “Soft ear plugs!” “For soft ears?” I asked.  There was also a small bit of soap in the goody bag which I think has now been saved.  But even Mike declined to save the piece of folded plastic that was meant to be a toilet seat cover.  Just imagine carting one of those around with you everywhere.  Though I suppose some people do.    

 

The picture at the top of this page is of some blossom that has just appeared on the side of the house.  Nothing to do with the post at all.

 

Village History

Today’s blog is much more sombre than usual.  Yesterday’s walk took me past the memorial on the edge of the village. This is not a common memorial – it commemorates seven people killed on the same day in 1944. 

 

On 10 June 1944 the occupying German army was responsible for the slaughter of approximately 600 men, women and children in Oradour-sur-Glane, a village close to Limoges.  The men were herded into five garages and barns and shot and then burned.  About 400 women and children were confined in the local church and then killed.   

News of the Oradour outrage spread through the Dordogne so, on 28 June, when it became known  that two German columns were advancing on Cherveix Cubas, there was great panic.  Many people tried to hide in the surrounding countryside.  A neighbour told us that he was taken to the woods by his mother.  He was a tiny baby at the time and his mother was so distressed that her milk dried up and he had to be fed on donkey milk. 

The two German columns came to Cherveix from both Genis and St Agnan.  The soldiers were armed and shot their weapons randomly, claiming to be looking for “Terrorists” – the Maquis.  It seems that the then Mayor, Paul Queyroi, spoke to the commanders and managed to calm the situation.  There were also fluent German speakers in the village, refugees from Alsace who were able to translate. 

The Germans stayed in the village overnight, shooting weapons and creating noise, though ostensibly not killing.  However, after their departure on 29 June, seven dead bodies were found in Anlhiac a nearby hamlet.  There were three Maquis, including a woman, two men from Lanouaille who had happened to be passing on a motorbike and two Anlhiac villages, one a 77 year old man who was deaf and disabled and the other a 33 year old man who had been working in the field.  Some of the bodies showed signs of torture and a large bloodied tin bath was found.

They have been commemorated by the village and the memorial is not far from the bridge.              

 

The remains of the brutalised village, Oradour-sur-Glane, can be visited, remaining as a museum and a memorial to those murdered.

In the Spring

We’ve just received our copy of the new Yellow Pages – Pages Jaunes.  As well as the directory there is an official Pages Jaunes insert from which I noticed they were selling ladies – both Eastern European and Asian.  Which I think is a bit of a no-no on the part of Pages Jaunes.  The ladies are being advertised by a Bordeaux company.  The Eastern European ones are described as Franco-Slaves.  This may be perfectly correct French but has other connotations in English.  The advert comes complete with pictures of the beautiful Ekaterina of the Ukraine and Thi-Thao of Vietnam.  Spring is certainly coming to the Dordogne so young and old men’s fancies may well take them up on the offer.

 

 

 Spring has progressed far enough for some very pretty daffodil like flowers to have sprung up in the orchard.  Also a tree is in blossom which I think is apple but could be pear.  The little tree which I know definitely is a peach is sending out buds and we now have our own cowslips on the bit of grass leading down from the garage.  There are also some little blue flowers which might be vetch but I’m not sure.  As I said in previous posts I am basically a townie. 

 

 

 

The very tall old cherry tree is also in blossom. This tree is a bit of a nuisance as, when it occasionally deigns to fruit, the cherries appear so high up that we can’t get at them without immense risk. The birds have a field day and mock us as they gobble up the bright red fruit.

 

In spite of the generally good weather Dolly and I managed to get caught in our third hail storm of the week yesterday. We set out in the sunshine walking round the back of Lake CouCou and got about halfway round the walk, got stared at by sheep, then lightning, thunder and hail followed each other. Dolly tried to shelter under a tree and I felt I had to keep her going as I’m very uncertain of the safety of trees when there’s lightning around. I do feel that Thor doesn’t like us.         

     

 

Cave Men

Among the sparsely populated area where we live there are several notable men. 

The Starers live in the next village.  Two elderly men, usually dressed in multi coloured acrylic jumpers, sit on a bench beside the roadside and stare at passing traffic.  Sometimes they are joined by a third.  Sometimes they wear flat caps.  They don’t seem to talk to each other.   

The Walker walks on the main road between our village and the next – though generally nearer to the next village than to ours.  He is always very neatly dressed and usually carries an umbrella.  I have never seen him walking anywhere else, just stepping along the busy inter-village road.  We once also saw him at a carol concert a few villages away.  He appeared in the choir but didn’t seem to be singing, just staring ahead and opening and shutting his mouth from time to time.  We think that someone cares for him, dresses him neatly each day and then sends him out. 

The Man Who Should Be Dead lives in our village.  When we first moved here neighbours pointed out his house, saying that the old man who lived there was in hospital and would not return.  We saw him for the first time about a month later wearing a flat cap and pruning his roses.  He has also been sighted bicycling gently down the road.

There is also The Man Who Sits Outside.  An old man, dressed in blue with the ubiquitous flat cap, sits on a chair overlooking both the road and his garden in most weathers.  He is very rarely absent.  I was once shocked to see him in the supermarket in the next village, as if a character had escaped from the television set.    

We took a drive out yesterday and saw nearly all the above on our way.   After hearing from my daughter in Wales that she and my grandsons were snowed in with all the schools closed we felt particularly lucky.  Here it didn’t rain, the sky was blue and the sun shone.

We drove down to the Valley of the Vézère  which is studded with caves and wonderful old chateaux; fit for sleeping princesses. 
 

 

 

The Vézère  is one of the earliest known inhabited regions in the world.  Cavemen have a bad image; clubbers, rapists and general bully boys.  Looking at the Vézère, it’s easy to see that people simply lived in caves because they were convenient, hunting animals for food and gathering from the plentiful trees and bushes which are still around.  There are areas which don’t seem to have changed for centuries, save for the electric cables and some tarmacked tracks. 

 

The people who lived in the Vézère valley were often prolific artists – not only Lascaux had its walls decorated.  I’ve never seen a cave drawing of women or children or any kind of domestic scene.  Cave art mostly consists of animal pictures – possibly they drew when the weather was too bad for hunting and dreamed of what they would like to catch.  Presumably those who couldn't draw stared, or paced, or sat at the cave entance.    

 

Lunches and Medicine

 

I went to the NEDWA lunch yesterday - the North East Dordogne Women’s Association.  This started out as a multi-national organisation but is mainly English speaking.   We meet up once a month for lunch and there are also other meets on offer – book clubs, sewing groups, cookery classes, outings and the like.  The Association motto is “Women making a Difference”.  At one time I thought that we weren’t making a difference to anything except our waistlines but I’m now prepared to admit I was wrong.  It is good to meet and chat and exchange news. 

 

 We all try valiantly to speak French with varying degrees of success.  Many of us aren’t fluent and may never be, and it’s good to talk in our own language rather than pick our way through a dictionary.  Some of the older women live alone and I’m sure the meetings are a God-send.  

In one overheard conversation, two women were clearly revelling in speaking their mother tongue.  One said to the other, "I really need one of those thingys," to which the other replied, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean".

The most awful news I had yesterday was that our doctor is shortly leaving the local practice.   Registering with a French doctor, Mike and I were awed by the luxury of half hour appointments with very thorough examinations.  Mike has varying health problems and is constantly referred for different treatments and tests.  The usual question put to him is, “When was the last time you had this done in England?”  His usual answer is, “Never”.   Dr Fraize has been known to telephone a specialist as Mike sat in the surgery if he feels unable to deal with a problem himself.   We both know he is the best doctor that we have ever had and we cannot imagine how we will replace him.  

 

Mouse

A few years ago we had a spate of mice.  We did get rid of them, mostly by humane trapping.  As I am acutely claustrophobic, I would wake in the mornings worrying about mice in traps and rush them to freedom at the bottom of the fields behind the house, usually wearing pyjamas and wellington boots (me, not the mice).    After that Mike went round blocking up most of the holes where mice might enter and now we just get the odd one visiting, which is par for the course in an old house. 

Yesterday Mike met a mouse who had been living in a big bag of tea bags in one of the kitchen cupboards.  It leapt out and made a dash for it when he opened the bag.   When I visit England I bring back large quantities of PG Tips, emptied from their boxes into plastic carriers for easier travel.  I didn’t realise that mice like them as much as we do.  There were many nibbled and emptied tea bags in the carrier in spite of the fact that there was an unbroached muesli packet on a lower shelf.  I don’t know if this means that tea bags are a better option than cheese in mouse traps.  When we were in the business of trapping mice we found they responded well to peanut butter.

 

I recently said that we don’t do much, being retired people, but must say that Mike volunteered to do a spring clean on the kitchen and has done a great job.  We don’t have a conventional kitchen – no units and an old pot sink, but there’s a lot going on and I like it.  I made some bread in the newly cleaned kitchen this morning and also sat and sewed a very girly and soppy looking handkerchief into three lavender bags.   We had some dried lavender from last year in need of a home.    I hope that mice don’t like lavender.

 

    

 

Hail again

No, Boucle du Pas de ma Mignonne does not mean Circuit of Not my Sweety.  As well as being a French negative, Pas also means steps, so the translation is roughly Circuit in the Steps of my Sweety.  I find this very disappointing.  I had imagined a murdered sweetheart, possibly attacked by bears, and a distraught lover running amok for 6 ½ kilometres shouting “Not my Sweety!”   This sad event could then be commemorated by the walk mapped out by the Tourist Office.  Instead, they appear to be commemorating some form of stalking!

 Dolly and I tried and failed to follow the steps of somebody’s sweety again, today.  After we got caught by a hail storm on Monday, Karl has told us that there are sometimes really big hail stones over here, the size of small cabbages or, at least, very large Brussels sprouts.  Some of these monsters attacked his roof some years ago and drilled big holes in it, which necessitated him making a large insurance claim.  This has naturally made me a bit nervous.  A woman and dog wouldn’t have much chance against the sort of hail that can wreck a roof. 

 

 

When we walked past the Château at the beginning of the walk there was lots of blue sky and sunshine and some white fluffy clouds.  We carried on for about three kilometres, going past a sign that said that the wood to our right was reserved for hunting and for wild deer.  Poor wild deer! 

 

 

The sky then turned very grey and sulky.  First it rained and then the hail started.  There was nowhere at all to shelter – we were a good distance from the bear caves and the hail appeared to be getting bigger.   That is why I accepted a lift in a car from a man I had never met before, although I know your mother tells you never to do this.  I reckoned he was a better bet than the hail stones.  He turned out to be a knight of the road and a perfect gentleman.  He actually stopped and picked up another wet walking woman further along and took us both back to Excideuil.   I was very grateful and thanked him profusely.

 I have been moving coats, scarves, gloves and shoes to the new armoire today.  It is a lovely thing to have. 

Circuit of Not My Sweety

This blog shouldn’t just be called “Life in France,” it should be “Over 60s Life in France” or “France for the Aged”.  I was just wishing we could sleep all night and remembered my mother making similar complaints as she got older.  We rarely wake up simultaneously but take it in turns to be awake and shuffling or fidgeting during the night and then we’re dropping asleep on the settee by 9 or 10.  Last night was a bit better as we forced ourselves to stay awake till nearly midnight.

 

 

There’s a great walk round the back of Excideuil called Boucle de Pas de Ma Mignonne, which seems to translate as Circuit of Not My Sweety.  (Anyone with better French reading this is welcome to correct me).  It takes about 2 hours and goes past some very old caves claimed to have been the home of people thousands of years ago and of bears before that.   Of course it’s always possible that the bears came afterwards and munched the people up but it’s hard to tell.   

 

 

 

It’s a really good walk – there are fields and rivers to cross as well as the caves.  Dolly and I set out yesterday and had been going for about half an hour and got as far as the caves when it started hailing of all things.  Neither of us liked it.  Dolly headed for shelter under a rocky outcrop.  She’s sometimes a very sensible dog.  We both waited a bit, hoping for better weather, but the hail turned to some harsh rain and we decided to abandon the rest of the walk and get back to the car – which still took us another half hour.              

 

 

The armoire arrived today.  Mike and Karl went to get it from Perigueux and Karl handed it in through the window bit by bit. 

 

 

 

 

It’s a very splendid thing and it’s good to know we have somewhere to hang our long coats, which have been clinging to the back of bedroom doors when not needed. 

Work (or not)

Reports of the Philpott arson trial in England get more and more barmy.   Mick Philpott attempted to endear himself to the jury by stating that he hadn’t had a bath in 12 weeks, just a face wash. Trying to explain the fact that petrol was found on his trousers, he said that that he rarely changed his clothes. “I try to stick to the ones I’m wearing, “he said, “Because I don’t do much work”.   I find I have no charitable thoughts about Mike Philpott at all.       

 

     

 As retired people, Mike and I can’t be said to do a lot of work, though we do wash and change our clothes regularly.  I flick an occasional duster and do most of the cooking. Mike has been known to wield a hoover and has actually cooked dinner for the last two nights for which I am grateful.  I do the longer dog walks and we both fiddle a bit with the garden and attempt to grow the odd vegetable.  We are very glad that our friend, Karl, comes once a week to do the heavy outside stuff like chopping up trees.   We both read a lot, but understand that doesn’t come under the heading of labour.

 

 

When we dismantled and disposed of a big old white wardrobe yesterday it was quite a major project for us.  Mike unscrewed things whilst I clung to pieces of MDF to stop them falling on our feet.  The wardrobe was in a first floor room so Mike managed to heave pieces of it out of the window to where I was waiting on the raised grass below.  The whole thing was very successful.  Neither of us injured ourselves, though the dog seemed a bit put out.  We are getting an armoire on Tuesday which is vastly superior to the old white wardrobe.

Hautefort

I went briefly to Hautefort yesterday afternoon.  Hautefort is the beautiful little village with an imposing château where I usually buy the “Radio Times”. 

 

The Château de Hautefort  was originally a 12^th century fortress belonging to Bertran de Born and was besieged by Richard the Lionheart and the French king in Bertran’s time. Richard’s older brother, Henry, had rebelled against their father, Henry II, and Bertran stood accused of egging him on.  Bertran was a noted poet and warrior, writing a lot of his poetry about how splendid it was to go to battle and chop people up.      

The present château is imposing and must, over the years, have commandeered the lion’s share of available resources.  Eugene le Roy, a local labourer’s son born in 1836, wrote his novel Jacqou le Croquant about the desperate poverty of the local peasantry compared to the plenty of château owners. 

 In 1929 the château came into the hands of the Baron and Baronne de Bastard (sic) who spent all their lives in restoration work.  In 1968 one of their daughter’s guests (a friend of the little Bastards) was said to have dropped a lighted cigarette whilst walking round the château, which managed to burn everything burnable in a blaze seen across the Dordogne.   The widowed Baronne set to work and restored the château once again and did a good job.  Hautefort  Château is a beautiful building, bullying the landscape for miles around.  It’s especially imposing floodlit at night.  The Bastards gave their name to local streets – even the local football pitch is called Stade de Bastard.  Whether it’s worth devoting the whole of one’s life to a castle, I don’t know.     

 

            
Other news is that Dolly has turned killer.  She flushed a small sparrow like bird, probably a dunnock, out of our laurel bush and chased it down the drive.  It ran like billy-o, but in vain, she pounced on it at the bottom of the drive and now the poor bird is no more.  There were a number of feathers in the laurel bush, and I think it may have been recovering from a prior cat assault and could not fly.  Although the attack was fatal it wasn’t particularly vicious - there was no tearing, rending or crunching on Dolly’s part.  So the small corpse is lying mostly intact near the garage, waiting for one of us to bury it or for another animal to dispose of it.  Dolly has been chastised but whether she took any of it in, I don’t know.   Mike is taking it more seriously than I am.  I was about to give Dolly some scraps from my dinner last night when he said, “Don’t do that – it’s a licence to kill”.   Bertran de Born would have liked it.   

Birds and the Bees

Chez Bernadettes with Mike Bickerton

Our area of France isn’t big on pubs, or even bars that are open all day.  But it’s great on restaurants with cheap weekday lunches so we often socialise this way.  Yesterday morning was the Connect Book Club in St Yrieix and several of us wandered over to Chez Bernadette  afterwards.  This is an old fashioned bar type restaurant where the food is good, plentiful and cheap.  Its only drawback is it has an old fashioned French toilet, a hole in the ground with cut out footholds. 

 

Rebecca and Mike Wood

Over lunch the conversation touched on Mick Philpott, a Derbyshire man currently accused of setting fire to his own house in Derby and thereby causing the death of six of his 17 children.  While it is clearly wrong to believe everything you read in the papers, Philpott does not seem to have any redeeming characteristics.   Described as an unemployed something or other, he is reported as having a penchant for vulnerable teenaged girls, meeting his present wife when she was 18 and he was 42.  The prosecuting counsel accused him of subsequently bullying his wife and leaving her at home with a growing brood of children whilst he wooed another teenager, whom he later moved into the marital home and fathered four of his children by.  “It wasn’t just sex,” said Philpott, “It was decorating, too”.    

Returning home after lunch we find a fact filled magazine from our local commune in the letter box.  We now know that there are only 622 people living in our village, averaging 41.6 people per square kilometre.   This is a bit different from London, where we used to live, which has an estimated 1,510 people per square kilometre (according to Wikipaedia). We do like living here – we like the peace and the cleanliness and the fact that the roads aren’t jammed up.  But we’re both essentially townies and when we’re confronted with trees and flowers and birds and big areas of land, we don’t really know what to do with them other than gawk.

Last year, a bird sang constantly outside our bedroom window.  When I say constantly, it wouldn’t shut up.  It sang on and on through the night and, if you woke up at, say, 2.00, it would be trilling away in the darkness.  “There’s something wrong with that bird,” said Mike. “Yes,” I said, “I think it must have brain damage”.  It was only later we found out that it was a nightingale, they do that and we were supposed to listen with awe.  The male nightingale does the singing to attract a mate.  It keeps on until another nightingale takes it up on its promises. “Come, come,” sings the nightingale, “Come to me – nests, eggs, offspring.  Not only sex – decorating too – decorating too-ra-la-too-ra-la-roo”      

Walking with camels

I do wish the weather would make up its mind what it’s doing.  Sometimes it’s pleasant, early spring sort of weather and sometimes it’s really cold and even snowing.  It did everything yesterday, first cold, then cold sunshine and finally a bit of snow.

 

 

 Mary Rogers, Dolly and I tried to go for a walk round Rouffiac Lake – about 6 or 7 kms.    We started out in sunshine then got the snow about halfway round.   At this point I dragged my hat over my ears as far as possible to ward off the cold. 

 

 

 

Mary and I usually talk about all kinds of things so I can’t remember if our main subject at the time was drink or camels, when Mary told a story about a camel she had known in Suffolk.  She said that she used to go to a riding school (with horses) whose owner offered camel rides as an extra.  She never took a camel ride.  But the camel available for the rides died and the nearest available replacement camel was a young male purchased from Glasgow zoo.  He duly arrived and was found to be rather grumpy and stroppy.   It was arranged to have him castrated as a means of calming him down, rather than cheering him up, and the young camel never recovered from the anaesthetic, but died without regaining consciousness.   A subsequent autopsy found him to be suffering from massive cirrhosis of the liver.  It’s debatable whether the keepers at Glasgow zoo had been slipping him alcohol to calm him down, or whether he was just so used to the booze that he became grumpy going on the wagon in Suffolk.  Glasgow does have a good reputation for boozers, though. 

Perle du Chine

Perigueux is our nearest city.  It has a centre full of medieval buildings, many of them now turned into shops, restaurants and flats.  It also has a beautiful cathedral.  We usually don’t see any of this, though,  when we have a day in Perigueux.  We shop at the supermarket just outside the main town, Mike gets a haircut and we have lunch at the Perle du Chine, the eat as much as you like Chinese restaurant next to C & A.    Which is what we did yesterday. 

Indian restaurants don’t do well in France.  I imagine that the French don’t like curries.  Chinese restaurants are popular, though.  The Perle du Chine was chocker yesterday.  The empty tables behind us in the photographs are there because we were put into the last unoccupied section of a very big restaurant.  Many of the diners eat in a polite French way.  They take a small plate and choose a little starter and then move onto a larger plate for their  main course and finish with a small dessert.  Others seem determined to get their monies worth. “Look at that man,” said Mike, “That’s his fourth helping at least”. He was a large man with a lot of space to fill.

I’m keen on the Perle du Chine.  The food is good – there are pretty pink and yellow lights on the ceiling and the waitresses are ace.  They rush round clearing tables and bringing drinks.  We always have our three courses in the polite, French way. Mike has a small pichet of wine and I have my pot of jasmine tea.   It’s becoming one of our institutions.