Four years ago…

Tags

moving house, mud, Rain

…it was raining and we were in the middle of moving.

We’d bought a former vigneron’s house three months earlier and though my husband was keen to move as quickly as possible – he thought it would be “fun” (direct quotation, I swear) to live in the house while it was undergoing practically a complete rebuild, even he had to admit that we ought to stay in our rental while the new roof was put on, a floor was laid upstairs and various other heavy bits of building work were carried out.  So we agreed to move in on April 30th.

The house is literally in the middle of the vines; you get to it by a beaten earth track in one direction and by a chemin rural in the other.  When we first saw it in October there was a layer of stone chippings that kept the surface of the track solid.  In the middle of February it began to rain.  It rained every day in March and nearly every day in April.  And we had builder’s lorries, the Manitou to put the new roof tiles on, and six boy racer workmen charging up and down the track every day.  Not surprisingly the track disintegrated.  The parts that weren’t rutted axle deep were liquid mud; it was also on a slope which made driving down it even more interesting.

Not our track, ours was worse…

By the second week in March ordinary cars had to be left on the road and the OH rang the removers, a firm from Bordeaux, to ask if they were sure they’d be able to get their vans to the house.  ‘We’ve moved people to the tops of mountains,’ said the commerciale blithely.  ‘A little bit of mud doesn’t worry us.’

It went on raining.  The OH came back one day and announced he’d bought a 4 x 4, a 16 year old Toyota Nissan (sorry!) “just in case”.  The rain continued.

Removal Day arrived.  It was raining. We were moving over three days and a team arrived to pack our china.  I’ll spare you the descriptions of how a team “experienced in moving antiques and old furniture” turned out to have experience in moving office furniture destined for the depot vente and not much else.  They loaded up the van for the first load and I took them over to the new house, warning them about the track.  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got boards.’

Their boards were about as much use as a chocolate hammer in a thunderstorm.  Going around knocking on doors to ask if anyone knows someone with a tractor is one way of getting to know your new neighbours I suppose.  Delightful Monsieur Gossum, aged 82, demonstrated that his little blue tractor might be elderly but it was strong.

The movers decided that instead of a big van they’d take two smaller ones the next day and that’d be fine.   M. Gossum had to come out with his tractor again.

Moving Day 3, the last.  We agreed agreed that most of what was left in the rental would have to go into storage and would be delivered when it hadn’t rained for two consecutive days and the track had dried up a little.  According to Meteo France this would be in about a week.  Absolutely essential things like the cooker and bed would be put on a small white van and taken to the house and we’d trust to luck that we didn’t have to call on M. Gossum again.  As sod’s law would have it most of the stuff already in the house were things like boxes of books and things forunfinished rooms which couldn’t be used.  I dashed seizing clean knickers etc out of my chest of drawers as it was going in storage, and forcing tranquilizers down the cats. It was raining.

Definitely stressed

Amazingly enough the small white van didn’t get stuck and our things were practically thrown at the house, the men were in such a hurry to leave and get back to Bordeaux early for the Mayday holiday.  Back at the rental they wanted to leave early too, and tried to pack up at 2.30 with a half empty van and a lot of furniture left in the house.  They were treated to a display of my husband losing his temper and came back to load everything.

It was still raining.  The movers missed the one three-dry-day slot in early May and we didn’t get our furniture until nearly the end of the month.  I was running very short of clothes.

It stopped raining at last.  We ate outside almost every night from mid-May to mid August which was lucky as I had no kitchen, no dining room but that was part of what my husband thought was “fun”.

First Drafts

Tags

Book club, Mommy Porn; First Drafts ;

One of the unexpected pleasures of the Private Eye subscription I gave my husband for his birthday (there’s nothing a present you’re going to enjoy yourself) is their books pages.  There are wonderfully un-sycophantic reviews, literary gossip, and cartoons including a brilliant series called First Drafts which most writers are going to be able to relate to in one way or the other.

I find first drafts murder anyway, as I get older and more and more critical they’re harder and harder to write and description is particularly difficult.  I was trying to discover what sort of state a body would be in after it had been buried in the sandy soil of Les Landes for a few weeks so I could use adjectives other than ‘disgusting’ and ‘stomach churning’ when I saw this:

Since I really don’t fancy asking French officialdom about corpses, ‘But why do you want to know this Madame Corby?  Perhaps you’d like to help us with our enquiries…’ doing this is so tempting.

Several years ago my book club nearly had a riot over reading Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with at least one member threatening to resign if we ever had another book by Scott.  We’d all agree that Scott’s many books would have been much improved if he’d taken the hint below:

I wish I’d seen it when doing the book bunting for the Book Club 10th birthday party, it would have gone nicely alongside the cover of Ivanhoe.

And no, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey but Susie has and apparently it’s quite something.  Naturally I don’t know what this refers to but I’m sure all of those who spent two days glued to the sofa (even if they won’t admit it) know exactly what this is all about..

Expat Blog Hop – The perils of language…

Tags

Blog hop, faux amis, Hippopotamus, language, learning French

I’ll be the first to say that my French is pretty hopeless.  This is partially due to a tin ear, to being told continually as a child that no-one in my family had ever mastered French (despite my father studying it at Oxford, but according to my mother that didn’t count), laziness and acute self-consciousness which makes me freeze if I think there’s any chance of making a mistake.  Which is just about every time I try anything beyond, ‘une baguette s’il vous plait.’

The real minefields are with faux amis – the words that look like they should mean the same thing in both languages but don’t.  The most notorious, of course, is préservatif.  You don’t find préservatifs in jam, wine or bread (those are conservateurs), you’ll find them alongside the till in packs of 12 (the French are ever hopeful) in large, very large and extra large sizes.  Fortunately this is a mistake I’ve avoided making, though a lot of people claim they have, including an Australian winemaker friend who told a group of visiting French wine buffs that the wine he was making was practically bio and had no préservatifs in it.  He was asked if Australian wine often contained condoms.

Not quite so embarrassing but still capable of making you look like a right linguistic prat are the more insidious words that almost mean the same thing but not quite; sensible means sensitive, not down to earth or practical, demander is just to ask and doesn’t have the insistant connotation that it does in English, assumer means to take on and not to presume, a librarie is a bookshop, the place you go to borrow books is a  bibliothèque and if you were to describe someone as spécial you’re saying that they’re a bit odd, not that they’re talented.

The unwary can get badly tripped up by words that sound quite alike, my brother took a business colleague along to a meeting with the bank to discuss a loan and expansively introduced his companion as an ‘ancienne entraineur de hippopotome‘.  Surprisingly enough the bank manager had no qualms about lending money to a former hippopotamus trainer rather than the racehorse trainer (entraineur hippique) he’d been expecting to meet.

The opportunities for linguistic mishaps by mispronunciation are legion.  Susie from Desperate Anglo Housewives Bordeaux did a wonderful post (which I can’t find sadly) on pronouncing words just slightly wrong, one was asking the fishmonger if she could cook the fish she’d just bought in a frying pan.  He looked rather surprised and she realised that instead of saying ‘poêle‘ she’d said ‘poil’, thus asking if she could cook it in the nude. It really doesn’t matter much mixing up your jaunes and jeunes, or your chevaux and cheveux, if you announce you’re going to saddle up your hair people will probably know what you mean , but cou, queue and cul are a different matter.  I’ve never wanted to stuff a duck’s neck but I know that even if I get a desperate urge to do so the chances are nil because I don’t dare risk asking the nice lady in the butchers if I can have a duck’s arse.  Likewise when I took the dog to the vet I merely pointed at his neck to show where he’d hurt himself (he still had the indignity of having a thermometer shoved up his cul though).

This weekend I was in a bakery I don’t usually go to and stacked up on the counter was a pile of the most delicious looking dark chocolate bread.  Needless to say they didn’t call it anything simple like pain chcolat, it was pain cocao. I was halfway through asking for one from someone who looked disconcertingly like the gym teacher at school who’d sigh every time I tried to walk along the upturned bench, when I realised I wasn’t going to get past the a to the o.  Yes, I asked for pain cacca, poo bread.

As part of the blog hop I’m offering to send a copy of the recipe for my chocolate salami (no cacao or difficult to say words in it) to anyone who’d like it.  I’ll say modestly that it’s very good indeed, the last time I made it I was asked for the recipe by a keen French cook…  Just leave a comment below.

Do visit the other blogs which are taking part in the expat blog hop:

1. Steve Bichard. com	2. Expat Alien	3. Books Are Cool
4. Life on La Lune	5. Runquiltknitwrite	6. Out and About in Paris
7. frenchimmersion	8. Older Man Younger Man	9. Grand House Adventure
10. Parlez Vous Loco?	11. The French Village Diaries	12. The American Girls Art Club in Paris
13. HJ Underway	14. My French life @ The Good Life France	15. Paris Weekender
16. Paris Cheapskate	17. Country Skipper	18. un homme et une femme: Lancelot Tales of Paris
19. Victoria Corby

Henri, le chat philosophe

Tags

Henri, philosophical cat

I’ve unashamedly “borrowed this off Patricia Sands’ blog – well she was introduced to Henri on two other blogs herself, and I’m sure she’d agree that his views on life need as wide an audience as possible.

and this is the second one, even better in my opinion

Enjoy!

Surviving Le Spectacle

Tags

fêtes, living in France, spectacles

One of the things you learn very quickly about living in France is that if you do any form of dance or exercise class sometime during the year you’re going to have to perform in public at a spectacle, whether it’s a proper affair with tickets in the Salle de Fêtes or freebies for the Telethon, the Fête de La Musique, your village’s fête or whatever.  This is one of the reasons I do Yoga, no-one has yet come up with a means of turning relaxation sessions into a spectator sport.

Even the Telethon draws the line at entertainment like this.

When the girls started doing ballet we were told iat the first lesson in October when the date of the end of year spectacle was.  One of the mothers said there was a family wedding on that date and her daughter wouldn’t be able to perform and she was told that in that case her child couldn’t come to the classes.  She had a lucky escape, that year was our first introduction to the French Spectacle and set the pattern for most of the ones that followed; they are like French meetings, they start late and they go on for ages…  Admittedly this one hit a particularly low note, the teachers were obviously afraid that the standard of their young pupils wasn’t going to be sufficiently high so in between each set performed by the children the teachers did a dance too.  The result was that the show, held on a stiflingly hot July afternoon, went on for four and a half hours.  And then as a finale the head of the dance school summoned all her young pupils on the stage and before the curtain call announced, with no warning whatsoever, that she was retiring and there’d be no more ballet.  Exit left loads of little girls in floods of tears.

Sadly, none of the kermesses we went to were as much fun as this.

School kermesses  (a sort of school fête with playlets, dance shows, exhibitions and usually a meal) can be particularly tricky; there was the one organised by the pupils where we had to sit through two hours of 11 and 12 year olds  miming to hit records – rap was particularly in that year – and another in collége where a modern dance show following the repas.  One of the girls was dancing so we had to stay.  It started an hour and a half late but by that time my husband and I were well into the second bottle of cheap Spanish pink they were selling to go with the paella so we were beyond caring.  I’d had a frozen shoulder for about three months, it never bothered me again though it took the whole of the next day to get rid of my headache.

The Fête de la Musique can be quite good, largely, I think, because it’s for fun and no-one seems to stay on stage for too long.  The Telethon however is a different matter.  Being ‘in a good cause’ seems to give every group a burning desire to get up on that stage, even when it would be kinder to everyone, especially the audience, to stay at home.  I once saw the local step class gave a demonstation of what they did –  for twenty minutes.  To be fair, it wasn’t all step, they did arm exercises too.

This year my daughter’s Indian Dance group was performing for the Telethon in a large espace culturel in Langon.  It was due to start at three, actual kick off was at quarter to four with the Line Dancing troop who gave us three different line dances – apparently.   I found it hard to distinguish one from the other.  They were followed by the children’s Indian Dancing, the under six Break Dancing, the junior Modern Dance, the Line Dancers came back for a bit of Rock (done at Line Dance speed), my daughter came on stage for all of one minute and was in the back row.  By now two hours had passed and she had two more dances to do.

Claiming there were dogs to walk and feed I meanly snuck out leaving my other daughter to enjoy the performance.  When she returned home at eight o clock she reported that the children’s Improvised Break Dancing had been quite something.

Being gluttons for punishment we went to see the dancing daughter with her African Dancing troop last weekend.  It started only five minutes late, the children’s class was on stage for just two dances, the other acts (four different groups performing together) had been properly rehearsed and no one was allowed to hog the stage.  It lasted for 45 minutes and was a revelation.

The organisers of the village Telethon shows, take note please.

Under An English Heaven

Tags

Bombers, Phoenix Book Sale, Robert Radcliffe, World War II

Books that have World War II bombers on the cover really aren’t my sort of thing, so when my husband handed me Under An English Heaven by Robert Radcliffe, one of the books I’d bought for him at the Phoenix Book Sale *,  and said I must read it, I made polite noises and put it to one side.  I might well have continued making weak excuses every time he asked me if I’d got around to reading it yet if I hadn’t been tidying the piles of books in our bedroom and picked it up.  Among the quotes from reviews at the bottom of the cover was ‘Enthralling – Kate Atkinson’.  She’s one of my favourite authors, someone whose books I buy without even bothering to see what they’re about or read the reviews, so on the basis that if she’d enjoyed it I ought to at least give it a go, I did.  The husband then sat around for the next two days as I buried myself in the book, looking smug and saying, ‘I knew you’d enjoy it…’

The basic plot isn’t so very different from many other war books.  The time is the summer of 1943, the place Bedenham in Suffolk where a base has been built for an American squadron of the huge Flying Fortress B17 bombers that go deep into Germany on bombing raids.  John Hooper, a pilot who can’t bring himself to face up to why he survived a crash and all his crew didn’t, is assigned to a new crew whose pilot was killed on their first mission.  His official mission is to meld his new crew into an efficient fighting machine, his personal mission is to make sure they survive their tour of duty – a statistical improbability.  There’s a street-wise evacuee with secrets of his own who can’t stay away from the base, the family he lodges with – the husband, the local blacksmith, still can’t come to terms with his own war 25 years before, the village schoolmistress who made a wartime marriage and has had no news of a husband she barely knew for over 18 months, her parents in law who live in ‘the Big House’ in the village and don’t really think she’s good enough for their son…

Most books set in wartime have the war as the focus, they’re about missions, battles, being bombed and the characters often act as a means of telling the war story; what makes Under An English Heaven so different is that this book is all about people, the war is almost reduced to a background for the characters – it’s there of course, it brings them together, it puts them in acute danger at times but there’s no grand overview, we see events through their eyes – usually how it affects them and not in terms of the big picture.  The bomber crew fly the missions they’re told to, they don’t speculate about what they’re bombing; one of them is caught in London during an air raid and he wonders if their bombs fall on civilians, but that’s it, he, and the rest of the crew are far more concerned about the next mission and if they’re going to survive it.  The villagers get on with life, try to make do, a teenage girl dreams of beiing old enough to join the ATS so that she can get away from the boredom of rural life.

Robert Radcliffe is obviously knowlegeable about his subject but he wears it very lightly, there aren’t pages of technical descriptions of machinery – there’s a diagram of the bomber on one of the first pages so you can check the details for yourself if you feel like it, instead he concentrates on what it felt like to fly in one of those bombers.  (Not comfortable, freezing cold and frequently terrifying.)  His writing is so vivid that you can feel the dread of the crew as they’re woken at 5 am and told to attend a briefing for their next mission, mortality rates were horrifyingly high so you can understand the constant fear they lived under, likewise you feel the lift to the spirits when the word goes round that the chippy in the village is opening for one night only.  The owner has been saving fat and potatoes for weeks so everyone, villages and staff at the base, can have a treat.   The letter from one of the crew to his parents about his first taste of fish and chips was wonderful.

It’s a marvellously uplifting book and as Kate Atkinson so rightly said, enthralling.  In fact the only quibble I’ve got with it is that the final chapter, set in the 1980’s, is just too pat.  But never mind, this is a book which can easily overcome one fault.  The last major scene of the book in which the crew fly their final mission is almost unbearably tense.  Good books paint a picture that you can see in your mind’s eye, better ones make you enter into their worlds, and with very few you feel that you can remember everything that happened because you lived it, you were there.

This is one of those books.

*  The next Pheonix Book Sale, for any of you who are within reach of Bergerac, is on Saturday May 5th, 10 am – 3 pm in  the Salle Municipale in Campsegret, on the RN21 between Bergerac and Perigaux.   15,000 second hand books in English for 1€ each.

Animal Life

Tags

nightingales, squirrels

I can remember being told before we moved here that there was no wildlife left in the French countryside, ‘The hunters kill everything that moves, don’t you know?  And everything that doesn’t is sprayed so there are no insects or birds.’

It’s true that the hunters do seem to blast everything (though they seem to miss most of the deer and sanglier around here), come October all the birds disappear – though they reappear again the week after the hunting season is over, and I’m frankly appalled at the amount of spraying.  The Bordeaux region is too damp to make bio feasible, if the grapes weren’t sprayed for mildew the growers would lose a large part of the crop most years but even growers who have opted for a semi bio approach, spraying as little as possible, seem to be out there most weeks in the summer putting something or other on the vines.  And let’s not talk about the spraying of the verges and the obsession most gardeners here seem to have with eradicating every single weed with liberal applications of weedkiller.

So is it Silent Spring around here?  Not a bit of it.  I was walking the dogs this afternoon and along the edge of the vines are wild muscari, violets and all sorts of other wild flowers I don’t know the names of.  They have cowslips here which I last saw in England when I was about six and in a few weeks time, I’ll be hoovering up tiny wild strawberries which grow in between the rows of vines.

The first time I saw a Kingfisher was in France, we had woodpeckers in the tree outside our last house and we see hares, such a joyous sight, nearly every week in the vines around the house.

Who wouldn't enjoy this?

I’d never heard a Nightingale until I lived here (there were several of them and jolly noisy they were too), nor a Screech Owl.  That was not a joy as it made its home in the tree outside our bedroom window.  Screech Owls are well named.  Last week my husband saw five Hoopoes in the garden which answered the question of whether we’d been hearing Cuckoos or not.

There are loads of butterflies too, we’ve always happened to live near woods so I suppose that helps, last summer a Purple Emperor came into the kitchen and settled on the tiles for long enough for us to admire his colouring before he fluttered back to the oak trees.  But for me, the things that lifts my spirits more than anything else are the squirrels.

We had two walnut trees in the garden of our first house and it was only a few hundred metres from an experimental nut farm developing new varieties so it’s not surprising that it was squirrel paradise.  I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw a red shape slinking across the grass, I’d never seen a red squirrel outside a zoo.  We got quite used to seeing them, though we were always enchanted.  One of the squirrels was a real Squirrel Nutkin and seemed to go out of his way to bait the cat, unwise of him as the cat had already dealt with the magpie who’d tried much the same trick before…

The inevitable happened, my husband came hurtling in with an enraged cat whom he’d pulled off the squirrel and instructed me to go out and finish the poor thing off.  Me?  I gingerly approached it, wondering if I was going to be able to do the deed and saw that apart from having been sucked it didn’t appear to have any other injuries.  I picked it up,  realising it was simply comatose from shock and gave it a little rub to get its circulation going again.  It had the most wonderful fur, deep, plush and red.  It was astonishing to be so close to such a shy wild creature.  After a couple of minutes it moved, so I put it at the bottom of a tree and a groggy, and throughly ungrateful, squirrel disappeared upwards.

It sensibly never baited the cat again.  It took the cat some time to forgive us.

Pedantry Rules, OK

Tags

Hunger Games

I’d be the first to admit that I’m a pedant.  I get as hot under the collar as Lynne Truss over the misuse of its and it’s, their and there, hear and here and general careless illiteracy and I’m the one who couldn’t watch past the first episode of Downton Abbey because it infuriated me so much.

Another facet of the high school vampire that hadn't occurred to me

When I tried to read Twilight it wasn’t the vampire romance that bothered me, it was the idea of vampires in high school.  Didn’t anyone notice that Edward Cullen et all never seemed to move up a grade?    You can’t take a photograph  of a vampire either so what happened with the class yearbook?  A pencil drawing maybe?  I have to admit I gave up early on in the book so never got the answer to that question nor to the one about why anyone, undead or not, would voluntarily go to school year after year.

One of the things I’m not that pedantic about, well not really, is film adaptations of books, even if I’ve really loved the book.  Films are different, stories have to be adapted, though I reserve the right to get hot under the collar about lousy adaptations.  There were quite a lot of liberties taken with the last version of Pride and Prejudice but it didn’t matter, Kiera Knightly made a wonderful Lizzie, even though the fussy part of me was tut-tutting like mad about her dashing out to see Darcy while still in her nightie.  However, I won’t be going to see One For The Money, I could just about accept Katherine Heigl as Stephanie Plum  though she’s a long way from how I envisage Stephanie but who though that getting a blue eyed, fair skinned Irishman to play  the olive skinned, black eyed, Italian Joe Morelli was a good idea?  Maybe he/she thought that as both nationalities started with an I no-one would notice.

Last week my husband, youngest daughter and I went to see The Hunger Games.  I was telling my middle daughter how good it was and that it stayed really close to the book – she normally never sees films of books because she can’t bear it when the film strays from the original plot.  That’s why she’s one of the few twenty somethings who’s never seen any of the Harry Potter films.  On my recommendation and assurance she wouldn’t be upset by gratuitous plot deviations went to see the film with a couple of friends that evening.

Next morning I asked her what she thought of it.

‘All right, I suppose but I got really annoyed – you know that bit when after Katniss has buried *** and then she sits on the ground and blubs?

‘She didn’t do that in the book.’