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Victoria Corby

~ Reading, writing, living in France

Victoria Corby

Monthly Archives: July 2012

A Round Of Applause For…

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by victoriacorby in France

≈ 6 Comments

We’ve been suffering one of the great irritations of modern life for the last few days – no telephone and therefore no internet.  Orange did tell us that they send us an email to let us know when the phone was back on and sounded surprised when my OH pointed out we needed that you need the phone for the internet.  It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that Blackberry and iPhone saturation has not yet reached 100% in France, especially not in rural sud-Gironde.

In fact we couldn’t get too hot under the collar about the phone even if it did take Orange five days to send a man with a van to look at the line.  Last Thursday morning I was walking the dogs when I saw clouds of pitch black smoke coming up from the road side of our neighbour’s chai.  Initial uncharitable and furious reaction was that he was burning tyres.  Then I heard things exploding repeatedly and sirens  and I realised this was a genuine fire – right underneath the telephone lines.

It was at that moment that my husband was talking to the fisc in Toulouse about a demand for Taxe d’Habitation that they’d sent to our daughter in Italy that she’d never received and didn’t owe anyway but were still threatening to freeze her bank account until she paid it that the fire fried the telephone line.  My OH was not pleased…

Loads of fire engines went past, road blocks were set up which resulted in a certain amount of discussion with the gendarmes manning the road block when I returned from buying bread, ‘Yes we did live down the road,’ ‘no we didn’t have another entrance,’ ‘no you couldn’t see our house from the road because it’s in the vines,’ ‘yes, we were turning off before the fire…’

Of course once things had quietened down a bit I wandered up to see what had been going on – annoyingly enough the back of the chai had blocked our view.  There was a burnt out bus in the middle of the road – so my initial thought about tyres hadn’t been so far off after all – so completely destroyed that it could have come out of a war zone.  What had happened – a man from the bus company told me – was that party of 6 – 8 year olds were on the way to a holiday camp when the bus driver realised there was something wrong.  He saw smoke, stopped the bus without waiting to find a really convenient spot, it was opposite a building and just around a bend and told the animateurs to evacuate the bus immediately.  Twenty seconds after the last of the 44 children got off the bus he saw the first flames…

The man from the bus company said some of the parents had demanded a convocation for that evening to discuss compensation for the loss of their children’s dou-dous.

Now of course the parents want to know why the bus went up in flames, it was a new one too, but compensations for teddies and the sort of things that are taken on a day trip?  In any case if it had been my children on that bus the last thing I’d be thinking about only hours after someone’s quick reactions had saved them from being possibly burnt alive is money.  I’d be too busy hugging my kids and kissing the bus driver and the animateurs in gratitude for the fact that I still had my children.

I do hope some of the parents did.

My Friends and I…

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by victoriacorby in Dogs

≈ 2 Comments

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Dalmatians

have been featured on Marshall Zeringue’s delightful blog Coffee with a Canine. Actually Marshall wanted Desi and Flynn but had to have me along for the ride as well.  I just hope that stardom doesn’t go to their spotted heads and that they don’t start demanding tea and hour earlier.

They will anyway.  They always do.

How Can Anyone Do This?

12 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by victoriacorby in Cats, France

≈ 12 Comments

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Abandoned animals

This is Kevin the Kitten aka Agent K:

Last week Kevin joined the 60,000 club – an unenviable membership – as he became one of the estimated 60,000 cats and dogs abandoned each summer in France at the beginning of the holiday season.  Kevin, who’s about two months old and has obviously been brought up in a house, probably with children as he’s quite used to being handled and cuddles up to you, was dumped on the side of a road in the forest near Villandraut.

Luckily for Kevin my daughter was taking her dog for a walk and heard him mewing.  It was well over a kilometre to the nearest house, far too far for a kitten of that age to go so he can’t have strayed from home and in any case we plastered the area with posters and no one has rung to claim him.

People who live in the forest are used to people just dumping their animals there – when we lived there our neighbours even rescued a hamster from the undergrowth –  usually it’s elderly dogs whose owners don’t want to pay for vets bills or to have them put down but abandoning kittens is also common, there’s an assumption that they’ll be able to look after themselves.  Not at Kevin’s age they don’t, he’s a domestic kitten, not feral, besides he’s far too young to know how to hunt for himself and he’d probably have been supper for a fox or a buzzard within a couple of days.  The vet who looked to see if Kevin had a chip said he’d probably only been  there for a day, if that, as he was still in very good condition.

I’m not going to express my opinion of the person who dumped Kevin – the words would scorch even an electronic page – all I can say is that I hope there’s a special and very painful corner of Hell reserved for all those who see animals as disposable.  But I will ask this, If you can’t be bothered to look after your animals’ progeny properly why don’t you get them sterilised?  The sad truth is that it’s cheaper to leave your unwanted puppies and kittens by the wayside like fast food wrapping than take them to the vet for an op.  And so people like us who do get our pets seen to are usually the ones who pick up the pieces.  If we took Kevin to the SPCA he’ll probably be put down almost immediately, they’re overrun at this time of year and it’s always difficult to rehome black animals in France, they’re regarded as being unlucky.  So it looks like that unless we can find a home for him he’ll end up here.  He’s absolutely enchanting but we’ve already got two cats, one of whom was rescued in similar circs from a woodpile and who is going into a deep depression over this energetic little intruder.

Would anyone like a kitten?  Delightful, housetrained, purrs a lot, will do anything for cheese, used to dogs, Bordeaux area…

Fifty Shades of Whatever

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by victoriacorby in Books, Reading

≈ 10 Comments

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Fifty Shades of Grey

I’d like to point out that I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey.  Naturally I wouldn’t be interested in such stuff (I don’t have a Kindle and each time I’ve been into Bordeaux recently to the bookshop where they do stock it I’ve haad one of my daughters with me so I couldn’t buy it.  Not that I’d want to of course.)

Yesterday I found this link on Book Group Online, I’ve read it four times and it makes me laugh each time.  Especially the bit about his tongue carressing her name.

And a friend sent me this today: Amazon Mother’s Day Commercial

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