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.