Derek and James, the men with the broken down car, repaired themselves and arrived on a very hot Thursday. Friday was equally hot and we sat on the terrace in the evening watching the sun go down. First the thunder arrived, then flashes of multi coloured lightning. Before it got ominous it was startlingly pretty. Thankfully we were inside by the time the spectacular hail storm arrived. Enormous hail stones, the size of large golf balls, flew from the sky with the force of bullets. Cringing inside, under siege, we expected the windows to shatter at any moment.
It didn’t last long but, after the onslaught, we found a devastated garden full of broken branches and tiles. An outside plastic table had large holes bored through it and many roof tiles had been snapped in half. There were also dents in Derek and Mike’s cars. We are less badly affected than some of our neighbours. Whereas our roof tiles are the old Dordogne overlapping ones and have been snapped in two at the overlap, with no leakage to the house, others have had holes bored in their roofs and some have had windows and car windscreens shattered. Everyone is calling for “bache” – sheets of tarpaulin used to cover ruined roof tops. The job of covering the roofs has been assigned to the pompiers, who were working flat out taking bache from one house to another and now say they have run out of money. (Hope they don’t do this in the middle of major fires). M Bougeaud, a local roofer, retired last year and passed the business on to his son. He is now back at work, dealing with the clamour on his business. Insurance companies have been telling people they can get estimates from roofers up to 100 kms away.
Generally, people are being wonderful. The mayor has issued a special bulletin offering help to anyone afflicted and listing all the local roofers and workmen with their contact details. Neighbours have called, to see if we are okay. Mike’s telephone services are in demand among some of our English neighbours as his French is so fluent. It’s really not easy having telephone conversations in a foreign language.
In spite of all this, Mary Rogers and I had arranged to go to Paris for the night on Tuesday. Mary is racing round Africa in a truck next month and needed a Mozambique visa. A visit to the Embassy seemed a safer bet than a postal request. We got to Paris safely on the train from Limoges. (This is the line that had a spectacular crash with fatalities last month so we thought we had done well). We negotiated the replacement bus service from Austerlitz to Bastille, that metro line being out. We’re not used to Paris so were still doing well. It was after Mary stuck her card into a machine and bought us 10 metro tickets that things started to go wrong. The metro line was very very crowded. Even at past 10 in the morning it was more like a rush hour service. Halfway to our destination, with the crowd thinning out, a man helpfully pointed out that Mary’s passport was lying on the floor. It transpired that the reason it was lying on the floor was that someone had unzipped the little belt she was wearing and removed her credit cards. Possibly the same someone had also unzipped the front pocket of my wheelie case and removed my kindle. Not nice.
We are brave women, though. We continued. Mary got her visa. We spent an afternoon and evening in Montmartre and another afternoon wandering by the Seine. We found restaurants and ate too many things. It poured with rain on Wednesday. We still had a good time.
Mary subsequently found that whoever lifted the credit cards has managed to also lift a great deal of money which she doesn’t have from her account. We hope giant hail stones land on his head. The bank is supposed to return the money. It bloody better.
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