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”