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.   

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

        

 

 

 

 

This Week

A lot has happened this week.  I didn’t mention it before –I was too preoccupied with the dog flying but we have been living under blue skies and a shimmering sun, eating most meals out  on the terrace.

Jean-Jacques, our friendly farmer, turned up to cut the grass.  It’s a good barter system.  He cuts our two meadows twice a year, bales up the cut grass to feed to his cattle in winter and we have short grass at no cost.  He announced to Mike that his wife had left him and taken the two children with her.  “Oh, dear,” said Mike, “You’ll miss them”.  “Not really,” said Jean-Jacques, “It was all getting very difficult and I like the quiet”.    He seemed cheerful enough and the fields look lovely.

 

I was sitting at the computer the other day when I heard a loud buzzing.  Bizarrely, it seemed to be coming from behind a picture of a dragon, embroidered by my mother.  After a while I realised that a thin kind of wasp was occasionally appearing from behind the picture, flying out of the window and then returning.   When all the buzzing had died down I risked a look and realised that three thin wasps were attempted to build a home behind the picture.  There were two closed cells there and one still open. 

 

 

I don’t know whether wasps have any kind of class system, with an indoor picture home being preferable to an outdoor one, but I was not allowing this to happen so carried the picture carefully downstairs and outside.  “Don’t hurt them,” said Mike, the Bug Champion, gently scraping the cells into a flower pot on the side of the terrace.  A little later a thin wasp entered the house clutching something in its mouth and flapped around for a while where the picture had been.  It must have been intended for the third cell – like Harry Lime.   Their buzzing is a little like zithers playing.

Incidentally, Mike has asked me to say that he does not treat bugs better than people.  So I am saying it.  But I think he is in denial.

Wednesday this week we ran a charity quiz night for Médecins Sans Frontières.   Anne Ingham organized the quiz, I did most of the cooking, Brenda Durham was room arranger, food transporter, cleaner and mopper upper.  She also did sterling work on the washing up with Pamela Roxburgh, who also served food and chopped up vegetables.  Paula Taylor Moore made delicious lemon tarts and Mike ran the bar and took the entrance money.  

 

I always panic at these things – I made cheesy biscuits to start and then paella and worried that people wouldn’t like it, or that the rice would stick together, or that the rice would cool down too soon and kill everyone.  I only made the paella as I thought that one dish would be simple, but then started getting orders for “no seafood/no meat/no meat or seafood”.  But it all went well.  43 people turned up in good temper and brought donations for a raffle.  They enjoyed the quiz, ate up the paella and even asked for seconds.  We made 570 euros for MSF but there are no photos of the night.  I was too busy.

Finally, we have a new dish washing mop.  He is a little like poor Camille, the last mop, but has no face – just bright red hair.  He is also very tough - not an intellectual revolutionary but a faceless assassin.  I think the Hasidim may have included a sect of red headed assassins but I’m not certain.  In view of this and to encourage him not to lose his head, I shall call him Aaron.  I took him to the quiz night and he worked hard.          

 

 

 

Flying

 

 

Early yesterday evening I was lounging in the first floor sitting room trying to catch up with The Borgias.  It's been a busy week and I had wanted to swim in the river but the weather was thick and heavy as though a storm was coming.  So I chose The Borgias instead.   I could hear the dog moving about above me in one of the second floor bedrooms and Cesare Borgia’s man, Migoletto, was just murdering the King of Naples by pushing him in a pond of lampreys.   Suddenly the most awful thing happened – much worse than the lampreys.  Just as they were heaving the murdered king back to his castle, the dog flung herself from a second floor window and hurtled past me head first, heading groundward.   I made a kind of horrible wailing noise – I certainly howled for Mike, who was resting in the bedroom, then staggered downstairs and outside.  I knew I had to get to her but didn’t want to look.  It’s stony immediately outside our house and I was expecting a dead dog – or one that was horribly wounded.  But she wasn’t there.  There was no dog and no blood or hair or broken bits of dog to be seen. 

We started the search for her, calling and shouting and scouring.  There was no barking or whining or response.  “I think she has gone somewhere quiet to die,” I said, becoming increasingly frantic at the thought of a hidden, desperately hurt dog.   We looked behind things and under things, in the barn, through the fields, down by the river,  across the orchard.   Mike drove off to search the village.  “She may have staggered down the road,” he said.  “She could be disorientated.”  I refused to go with him, in case she came home. 

So I was alone when I looked one more time in the wood barn.  And I found her.  She likes it in there, just inside the door - it’s cool and shady.  But this time she had clambered over piles of knobbly chopped up wood and got as far to the back of the barn as possible.  She looked at me and wagged her tail and I climbed over piles of knobbly chopped up wood to get to her.   I don't go in the wood barn much - I’m always afraid of snakes.  Snakes might like it there.   Dolly was pleased to see me.  She got up and walked around and did a bit of wagging and a bit of licking.  And there was nothing wrong with her.  Not a break or a scratch – not even a falter.  I’ve still got bruised legs from slipping on the kitchen floor last week but my dog appears to be indestructible.   She just wants to go somewhere dark and quiet when the weather gets stormy and is perfectly willing to leap out of second floor windows to get there.          

 

Birds and stars (and bugs)

Mike is doorman for the bugs, mice and slugs that enter our house.  He is very fond of them.    I have heard him having kindly conversations with hard backed beetles as he gently ushers them out.   This morning I noticed a very large grasshopper lying on the bedroom floor and requested its eviction.  Mike came upstairs, stared at it briefly and then accusingly at me.  “It’s injured,” he said, “What have you done to it?  You must have trodden on it.”   (I didn’t).  He carried it lovingly to the window.   As he is kinder to bugs than he is to human visitors, perhaps I should suggest that my friends dress in green and wear antennae (or wings).

Summer view from the bedroom window

One of the reasons that our bedroom has good bug access is that there is a large tree outside the back window.  When we first bought the house, we had a perfect view of the night sky but now this is obscured by ever lengthening branches.   I can only glimpse the odd summer star by bending almost in half and contorting my neck.  And, as I like opening the windows in fine weather, it’s just a hop and a skip for little bugs to come visiting.   We are undecided about branch lopping as this could lose us the birds that gather on the tree to visit our window bird feeder.  Birds or stars, birds or stars – there’s a quandary.

Winter bedroom window view

I did an afternoon in the charity shop in St Yrieix on Tuesday.  I keep meaning to give it up, but it’s good for me.  It’s one of the few places I have to speak French.  Tuesday was very hot and we had a heavy influx of wounded people, not well enough to go swimming at the lake or walking in the countryside.  We were handed a large clothes donation, including packets of free socks that are handed out on aeroplane journeys, by a man in a neck brace.  Then we had a nice man who had had a stroke, followed by a very small woman wearing trousers with a waistline about 6 inches too big for her.  “I’ve lost weight,” she said, “I’ve been ill” and told tales of abandonment, cruelty and betrayal.   She did find some trousers that would fit and also a belt to hold up the ones that won’t so I hope life is improving for her. 

The strangest customer, though, was a woman who spoke little but had very staring eyes and kept opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish.   Maybe it’s the heat.



Down river


 The best thing about the weather is that Mike and I have been able to launch our canoe.  This was a new purchase earlier this year but the river has been too rain filled to attempt a jaunt.  We did try it out once but were unable to get past a sort of mill race that thunders by us when the river is full.  Mike screamed instructions a lot and we waved oars and bickered.  So this week’s canoe ride was wonderful.  There is nothing, really nothing, as nice as gently paddling down a Dordogne river surrounded by birds and trees and reflected light.

 

 

 

 

Lost in France

The weather has suddenly improved.  We have had three days in a row of blue skies and bright sunlight and it is as hot as holidays.  Dolly and I celebrated by getting lost in Grange d’Ans on Friday.  There are two Grange d’Ans walks marked on the map from the tourist office – Grange d’Ans Nord and Grange d’Ans Sud.  We have already done the Nord one so we were trying out the one to the Sud.  These walks have helpful little yellow markers to direct your path.  Either the markers ran out or we missed one.  Following the rainy season, every bit of bud and blossom has grown so tall that it is possible that a marker was hidden under leaves.  Trustingly, I had not bought a map.  So we were lost and bamboozled.    I did try to retrace our steps, but our steps had been so varied that that wasn’t any help either. 

 Lots and lots of beautiful countryside spread out in all directions round us without a signpost and hardly a road to steer by.  Occasionally we came upon a hamlet of four or five houses, but saw no-one about to ask the way.  French villages often appear very deserted at all times of the day.  I finally found an old man in a beret and a thick blue work shirt leaning against a barn.   “La direction de Grange d’Ans?” I said politely.  “Uggh?” he replied.  So I repeated my question and he said, “Uggh?” again.  I was so desperate by this time that I had a third go at it.  “Aah,” he said, “La Grange!” and he pointed to the right.  I had this trouble with an old woman in Grange d’Ans the last time I was here.  Unless you can pronounce things like a child born in the area, they cannot understand you.  And it isn’t called La Grange, it’s called Grange d’Ans – or at least it is on the map and the road signs.  I’ve been wearing a pedometer on these walks and we’d done 8 kilometres in the heat by the time we got back to the car.  Dolly was so pleased to collapse in the shade that I had some trouble dragging her onto the back seat for the journey home.

Together with our friends, Mike and Kerstin Wood, Mike and I were responsible for setting a quiz on Tuesday.  Mike did one round consisting entirely of 30 sports questions and someone remarked that they didn’t know he was so interested in sport.  Interested is  too weak a word.  He loves all sports.  We were out to lunch today with our friends, Mary and Alan Rogers and others, when Mike suddenly rose up and said he must be going as he had to get back in time to see the Wimbledon Men’s Finals.  He wanted to watch it in the privacy of our house where he could shout, swear and encourage with gusto.   Anyway, Andy Murray has now won and all the British can be very happy, especially the Scottish British. Mike is delighted.