Burglars, cameras, quizzes

I am about to be judgemental and say Bugger Burglars.  No, really, bugger the lot of them.  All the nasty, sneaking pick pockets, thieves, conmen, snatch purses and highway robbers at large in the world.  Bunch of bloody spongers - no good for anything but scrounging money off others by horrible methods.  Yvette Bickerton who is a sweet natured, gentle, peace loving woman is now in hospital with a pulmonary embolism, possibly brought on following the robbery which she and her husband, Mike, suffered last month by the Spanish highway.  And not just the robbery – all the hoops and stress they were subsequently put through to be issued with new passports, bank cards and the like.  So bugger burglars – and over-officious passport and bank officers.  And get better soon, Yvette.

We had a really lovely evening out with Mike and Yvette on Friday.  Three of us – Mike, Mary Gargent and I were very kindly treated to a meal in Hautefort to thank us for our help after their robbery.  We went to Table d’Erillac, one of the nicest restaurants in the area.  Apart from the delicious things to eat and the good company, something very wonderful happened.  About 18 months ago we went to England for a family birthday party and subsequently couldn’t find the camera anywhere.  We decided it must have somehow fallen out of our laden car at one of our petrol/food stops on the return journey.   Now we know we were wrong.  Just after we came back from England it was my birthday and we went to Table d’Erillac – and left the camera there.  Although I may call down curses on thieves and conmen there are also righteous people at large in the world. The kind of people who keep a customer’s camera safe for 18 months and return it.  I’m sure we must have eaten in there since then, but maybe the camera keeper wasn’t serving on that day.  As soon as she saw us she brought it to us.  Wonderful.  

We now have to order a new charger for it.  I had given up on it to the extent that I had thrown the original away.          

It has been a busy weekend.  On Sunday three of us had planned a quiz and buffet to raise money for Medecins Sans Frontieres.  Brenda Durham and I did the catering and Anne Ingham set the quiz and shouted it out.  Brenda and I picked up the keys to the village Salle des Fetes on Friday afternoon and went down and laid out tables.  This is not a suitable job for two women.  The tables at the Salle are left folded in the kitchen and are huge and heavy to shift.   We put 9 of them up before staggering home.    

Saturday was entirely taken up with preparing buffet stuff and Sunday was the actual quiz.  People came, quizzed, ate and bought raffle tickets.  It was hard work but we enjoyed it and we’ve made over 400 euros.  And we got some kind men to put the tables away for us.

 

 

Dolly Gray

I think I have misunderstood the dog.  In spite of her treatment of the gate crashing coypu, despatched on our property the other week, I continued to think that she was, in the main, a gentle natured biddable dog, happy in her home and loving in her temperament.    But I may have been wrong. 

We were invited to Paula and Alan Taylor-Moore’s the other night and, as they have two dogs of their own, Dolly was also invited.  She started out fine.  The younger of Paula’s dog, Rosie, the half schnauzer, did the expected barking and growling as a strange dog entered her home.  Dolly did not retaliate and was soon rushing round outside in the very large back garden.   Rosie did some rushing as well and they even, at times, did mutual rushing.  However, as the evening progressed and the stars appeared, Dolly moved in closer to Mike and I at the table and began to defend us from all comers.  She allowed people near us but refused to tolerate either of the other dogs.  She did not bark.   She snarled, she growled and she showed her teeth in a very menacing way.  She did not get as far as biting but we considered putting her in the car and did end up putting her firmly on the lead.  

This could, of course, just be a symptom of having been in a dog rescue shelter for six months before she came to live with us.  Now that she has her own personal mummy and daddy, she may wish to make sure that no other dogs have the use of us.  Or it could be that when she trots down countryside paths by my side, she is actually on duty as my bodyguard, and marches with honour like a samurai warrior or that man in The Godfather whose name I forget who ended up sleeping with the fishes. 

Incidentally, we had a lovely time at Paula and Alan’s sitting outside in the heat of the evening.  Paulette and Norman Peterson were there too and there was good conversation and plenty to eat and drink.   I tried to take pictures but my camera batteries were going and no-one who was there that night would thank me for posting the boss eyed blurry images I managed to capture. 

Here, though, is a picture of Dolly about to make someone an offer they can't refuse.

      

Being ill and other stuff

 A dearth of blogging lately, partly due to being busy, but mainly due to being ill and spending time in bed feeling like a limp dishcloth, but fatter and with the ability to cough.  Our friend Mike Wood came back from Asia some weeks ago with a horrible cough that apparently goes on for about six weeks and which he has shared with friends (the Fu Cough).  In the spirit of Typhoid Mary, he has now taken it to California.  

I could, of course, blame the cough on Leeds.  I flew back last Thursday in the face of rain, howling winds and cold enough to freeze fingers on the short walk from the car park to the airport.  The planes were all delayed for an hour or so until things calmed down a bit.  Wandering round the terminal I saw a selection of “Yorkshire” crisps for sale.  The Yorkshire Chardonnay Wine Vinegar ones particularly caught my eye - from the Chardonnay vines of Tadcaster, presumably.      

Thursday and Friday were busy.  A wine tasting at Shirley and David Gill’s on Thursday afternoon.  The Monsieur from the wine shop in Payzac let us try his wares.  He has a small daughter of, possibly, 11 years old who he is training up in the wine business.  He occasionally asked her to name the grapes in any particular wine.  She also came round with jugs in which to discard untasted wine.  It seems a waste, but if we’d downed all seven glasses offered, we’d never have got home.

Friday morning was the Connect Book Club in St Yrieix and Friday afternoon I managed to trot Dolly round 4 or 5 miles in the back of Tourtoirac. 

Saturday I was beginning to flag but kept  going .  My stint in the St Yrieix charity shop in the morning and, in the evening, a concert at La Rhue, a Dutch run place near Jumilhac.   A woman called Angie Palmer was playing.  She obviously gets about a bit.  My remote genealogy cousin reported going to see her somewhere near Manchester last month.  She had a good voice and a thumping guitar style.  Some of it made me feel uneasy though.  Watching a woman standing along on a stage pounding away at her guitar seems somehow dated and a lot of work for the woman.  She could do with a band and bigger venues.   But she pounded well and with a good heart.

Sunday, I was fit for nothing but languishing in bed till yesterday lunchtime.  Watching a recorded episode of “The Village” I saw a scene in which a mad doctor insisted that a young woman lie prone in bed as a cure for over-excitability and also to break her spirit.  “You will stay here,” he said, “Until you are bent to do the will of a man!”  I am glad to report that it was the other way round in our house, as Mike kindly did the will of a woman and brought hot drinks and bowls of soup to my sick bed.  He also walked Dolly in the afternoons, which isn’t his job.

 The other thing Mike is good at is washing up.  Some of this is a bit barmy as we do have a dishwasher, but he says he prefers the sink method.  I managed to buy him a washing up brush designed for the manly user when I was in England.  I tried to use it myself yesterday but, unfortunately, its head fell off, though I managed to screw it back on as it hissed,  “That’s a man’s washing up brush, you bitch”.    When I took a picture of it to post here, the camera gave out the message, “Blink detected”.   It could be satanic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Leeds

Leeds seems cold and windy.  During the last part of the trip here, on Sunday, the plane swayed violently from side to side over Yorkshire, as younger passengers yelled and older ones made brave clenched faces.  When we finally made the ground the whole cabin applauded though no-one went as far as kissing the tarmac.

I actually came for the funeral of a good man who was my cousin’s husband.  They had been long married - I was one of their bridesmaids 52 years ago dressed in stiff yellow and white organza as my mother howled at the cost of it all.  The organza was first shortened to party length and eventually ended up in my sisters’ dressing up box so it gave value for money.     

 Years ago pictures of bent, white haired couples would appear in the papers over the astonishing news that they had been married for 50 years.   The protagonists usually looked as though they were having trouble holding each other up and would be sinking into the settee with a mug of cocoa as soon as they had cut the cake.   Modern Golden Weddingites are a new breed, though.  My cousin and her husband held expansive and jovial parties, went on world trips and spent a lot of time in Florida, boating, fishing and generally having a good time.  The fact that he went quickly at the end seems a good end to a happy life.

I have no picture to hand of the long ago wedding but am posting one from even longer ago of my cousin, her younger sister and me at the seaside.  I'm the one on the donkey.

Leeds can be a difficult place to live a sunny life.  I’m currently staying with friends in a pleasant house just down the road from Moortown, one of the more expensive areas of the city.  However, this area, apparently, has a “bad” postcode.  Walking to my hire car early yesterday morning, a leashed dog growled and lunged at me.  The spotty and hooded youth who was walking him dragged him back and then clouted him round the head.

Driving the half a mile or so to Moortown, itself, my friend, Jean, took me round a charity shop known for its quality stock offloaded from wealthy homes.  A mink coat was on sale and, almost next to it, a dressing up outfit offering a child a chance to look like a “Factory Worker”.     Apart from anything else, it seems a rather peculiar take on factory clothing with its white overalls and black and white striped polo neck.

 

 

 

Ants and dowries

Mike went into the bathroom yesterday morning and came out saying that we’d been invaded by ants and that they were circling the toilet menacingly.  This sort of thing can happen in our very old wooden floor-boarded house.   Things invade through the cracks in the walls and make their way up the joists.  “Don’t go in there,” said Mike (or perhaps he just said, “Don’t go”) “They’ll get your legs”.  I didn’t fancy having my legs got, so I didn’t go until after they’d been despatched with the ant spray and given a mop and bucket funeral.

I’m currently reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes his battles with bedbugs in cheap French hotels.  Fortunately we are not bug-ridden as I really don’t fancy his tip of sprinkling the bedclothes with pepper.     

Sue and Phil King

In the afternoon we drove to Badefol d’Ans for tea with Sue and Phil King.  Many of the villages round here have the suffix d’Ans.  This is said to come from the time, many years ago, when a rich Dordogne heiress married a presumably rich Belgian and had great chunks of the Dordogne thrown in as her dowry.  “Ans” was then an area in Belgium and, therefore, the dowry villages became “…. D’Ans”.   None of them would appear to belong to Belgium nowadays so it seems that the children of the original union balanced things out. 

 

 

The weather began to lighten in the early evening and, coming home, we stopped the car to stare at a wonderful double rainbow. 

This and that

Yesterday we drove down into the South Dordogne and delivered a car load of books to the Phoenix book fair.  Phoenix is an animal charity, rehoming abandoned household pets in the Dordogne and once or twice a year they hold a huge fund raising book fair.   As the St Yrieix charity shop sometimes has a surplus of books it works well to deliver these to Phoenix. We dropped the books off at a huge barn near Bergerac where books sorters were hard at work, getting ready for the early May fair.  They sort by author name and reckoned they’d got to about “M” but donations, presumably, confuse matters.

In the afternoon we stopped for a drink in Vergt at a very old French bar.  It looked as though it, and its contents, had been there since at least the last war.  Service was slow.  The chap behind the bar took at least 10 minutes to draw a glass of beer and pour a large black coffee.   He seemed pleasant enough but had a large collection of rifles hanging on the walls. 

One of the good things about being English is the ease with which I can take photographs when I’m out.  People just assume I’m a stupid tourist as I smile and snap away.

 

 

This morning was  Excideuil market day.  I’m going to England for a few days next week and have promised to try and obtain some large green olives for a friend.  The best ones are usually on the market stalls but today it was raining and there was no olive stall to be seen.  Plenty of vegetables though and the wonderful Excideuil market fish stall so fish for dinner tonight - cabillaud for Mike and tuna for me (he hates it).

A cup of tea at the Kitsch Cafe on the way home. 

That Thatcher controversy rages on.  Inflation was at 10% when she came to power, and 10% when she left.  But unemployment was up and strikes were down, presumably because there were less jobs.  She did, though, have the assistance of the Saatchi Brothers to put a good spin on things.   

 

Brief thoughts on Thatcher

The fact that Margaret Thatcher died yesterday dominates many media channels and has split opinion.  People have been phoning in to radio channels on both sides of the argument.

 Personally I loathed the woman and what she stood for and side with those holding street parties.   After entering Downing Street offering to bring harmony out of discord, truth from error, faith from doubt and hope from despair, she blatantly failed on all four counts.  Someone on the radio this morning pointed out that, after the closure of 97 British mines, many miners used their redundancy money to buy their own homes under the new Right to Buy Scheme and then had no income with which to live in the said houses as they were jobless and there were no jobs in the area.  Asking people for money to buy shares in institutions that they own already is not just sharp practice but actually amounts to fraud.

I am at a loss to understand Thatcher’s attraction.  It’s fairly easy to up the bank balance if you flog off all the family silver and don’t bother spending money on feeding the children.   Is it just that there is a section of the British public that loves dictators?  She may have been steadfast in her views and actions, but many of us prefer democracy.   And of course there was an alternative. We could have tried behaving like decent human beings. 

 

 

Quiet, cold week

I was thinking that everything that had happened this week had been happening in a quiet, cold sort of way.   But I just walked out with the dog, whose paw is now a great deal better, and realised that it’s not the quiet cold week – it’s me.  Without my daily walk I’m dull, or at any rate a lot more dull than I am with my daily walk. 

It was cold yesterday and this morning; not as cold as England but a nasty biting wind cutting through things.     

 

Mike Brewer, Dino, Sue Murby, Richard Murby

 

Wednesday, though, was fine enough to sit out on the terrace and we had a visit from the Murbys whose elderly short legged dog, Dino, is coming to stay with us for a week in May.  He sat happily chewed a hide bone that Dolly has been ignoring for the past four months until she put a stop to this outrage by claiming it back.  Sue Murby is much better than flowers than we are so we walked her round the field to point things out.   In this picture, everyone appears to be asleep over coffee.  They were actually awake and just chose to all look the other way when I got the camera out.

 

Annita Wright, Paula Taylor-Moore, some pears and some asparagus

 

Thursday was Christian’s cooking class involving making sauces loaded with cream and butter.  We do get to eat the stuff that we cook and there were small slices of steak, asparagus and also chocolate loaded pears.   I will never make a proper chef.  Christian showed us how to carefully peel the pears, leaving a bit on round the stalk at the top, and then how to core them by poking them up from the bottom which is a fiddly business.  The thing is, if you peel them completely without leaving a bit on at the top, then  slice them in half and scoop the cores out, they taste just as good and it’s much easier.  So I will never make a proper chef.

 

Yesterday I was helping shift stuff around in the charity shop.  Everything had to be cleared away from the walls and into the middle of the room or into the back room prior to a clean coat of paint being applied.     Very speedy painters, Alan and Mary Rogers, slapped yellow on the walls in the afternoon and the shop is now ready for summer stock.   Perhaps it’s only when you start shifting stuff in a charity shop that you realise what an amazing load of tat is at loose in the world, though we do have some good stuff as well.      

 

Vets and shopping (and a walk)

A delay in posting blogs, due to the fact that our phone and internet were out of action for over 24 hours – one of the too frequent downsides to living on the outskirts of a small Dordogne village.

 The dog’s paw still continues to bother her; to the extent that I went walking on Monday afternoon and substituted Mary Rogers and Kerstin Wood for Dolly, who was left to hop at the bottom of the garden with Mike.   We went up to Anlhiac through Guimalet Woods and back – probably about 3 kilometres each way.  Anlhiac has a bar that’s usually open so we had a coffee break up there. 

 

Coffee Break

 

 

Coming home we passed the house whose inhabitants tried to assault Mike Bickerton some time ago.  This house is further up the river from ours and I have recently been puzzled by sounds similar to far off thunder.  These are now explained, as a teenaged girl was sitting outside banging a comprehensive drum kit.  If it is the same family who tried to assault our friend, they probably just don’t care.    Further along we crossed the river by bridge.  Mary tried to climb over the bridge for some reason.  I have no idea why, possibly I wasn’t paying proper attention at the time, but here is a picture of her doing it.

 

 

 Tuesday was rather blighted by heavy rain.  As though large holed watering cans were being indiscriminately emptied   I did manage a very wet drive to our local supermarket in the morning.  I don’t wish to speak ill of a supermarket, especially when we do most of our shopping there, but it really isn’t comprehensively stocked.  I think the manager puts stuff out and if he hasn’t sold a certain amount of it during the month, it never appears again.  He did, at one time, have decaffeinated tea which I used to drink a lot of before I converted to rooibos.  When the decaffeinated tea disappeared from the shelves, Mike enquired about it, explaining that his wife drank it.  “Yes,” replied the manager, “My wife won’t drink anything else.  We get ours in Perigueux”.  There were, though, some fresh herbs on the shelf yesterday.  It’s so rare to find fresh herbs here that I pounced on a pack of coriander, although I have no immediate plans for it.  It will enliven a salad.    I also managed to buy a carton of ice cream.  There only seemed to be about six in stock and nothing in the caramel or coconut line.   I annexed the solitary rum and raisin. 

We drove Dolly and her injured paw to the vets in the afternoon.  Our vet is a busy rural one who spends the mornings visiting cows and sheep and is open for an hour and a half in the afternoon for smaller animals.  No appointment system – you just wait your turn.   We shared the small waiting area with three other dogs (on leads), two cats (in carriers) and a goat (in a much larger carrier).  From time to time the goat gave a very small bleat.       

Dolly was mainly good for her examination.  Remaining a dog who detests being brushed, she will not tolerate anything on her body other than a human hand or a towel. So she put up a huge struggle when her paw was shaved for inspection. Mike, the vet’s assistant and I were all holding her down. But she did not attempt to bite anyone, which is a testament to her kind and splendid nature. The paw has been declared unbroken with no immediate problem apparent. Dolly has been prescribed antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. Though she is still limping she seems a lot better.

 

Every day I receive an email from a site called Bite Sized French, feeding me a new French phrase. A recent one translated as, “Neither of us are strangers to love. We both know the rules”. I can’t see that I will have any immediate or future use for this (or that I would have used it at any time in the past for that matter). Mike would choke on his tea if I tried it on him. Perhaps I could use it on the supermarket manager the next time there is a lack of ice cream.   

 

Easter and Immigrants

 

 

The dog has hurt her paw and is currently hopping around on three legs until the vet opens tomorrow.  However she seems quite cheerful about it and is hopping at a good rate.  There’s clearly nothing broken so it’s either a sprain or something stuck deep in the pad which we cannot find. 

 

So, although Easter Sunday was a fine clear day, there was no dog walking and we spent the day lazing about the house.  We had wild flowers on the breakfast table and tried to identify them from a very nice book called Henry Terry’s Flower Album, a facsimile of a Victorian’s paintings for his children.   We think we have wood anemones, cowslips, water violets and something called self-heal at the moment.  We also had Easter eggs.  

 

 

I spent about three quarters of an hour weeding in the garden in the afternoon and made dinner in the evening.  Apart from that, there was some television watching which also involved a little knitting.  I may have filled in the odd Sudoku and done a little reading but that was the day, basically.

 One of the reasons I am mentioning this inactivity is that today I have been reading various official reports about immigration in Britain and do bear with me on this one.   I am getting rather tired of listening to people telling me what a problem immigration is to the British tax payer.  A constantly expressed  view is that immigrants come to Britain in the sole hope of becoming benefit claimants and that (1) they are costing the country a great deal of money and (2) they are generally a bunch of lazy no-goods living it up on job seeker’s allowance and using different identities to make myriad claims.   

It seems that official findings are that migrants are much less likely to claim benefit than UK nationals.  6.4% of claimants to the British benefits system are immigrants.  This percentage includes claims for working tax credits and housing benefit, so is not entirely composed of job seeker’s allowance.  Migrants are much more likely to be in work than claiming.   They come to work or to study and the majority of migrant social security claims are legitimate.  In a study of 9,000 claims, only 125 were found to be unentitled to the benefits which they were claiming. 

NOW the greatest pull on benefits in the UK is old age pensions and related benefits paid to pensioners - to people like me, my husband and many of my friends.  So it’s a very good thing that all those migrants are working away and paying into the UK tax system to support lazy loungers like those of us who have retired to the Dordogne and keep us in wine and Easter eggs and other goodies.   But now that we know all that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Cameron’s government decides to legalise euthanasia very soon – and pops a little note about it in with the next pension mailing.