Bonjour à tous. Yep, we are connected again: both landline (+33 5 53 56 99 70) and internet operational again. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that it hasn’t gone smoothly and we haven’t ended up with the kind of connection we signed up for. Orange too, it seems, are prone to telling porky pies in order to get you to sign up. I could rant on and on about the infuriating incompetence and laziness of their call staff, the fact that, despite being assured there would be no charge for the (superfluous) visit from the engineer, we have a bill and they expect us to pay it, that our connection is 2 Meg and not the 4 Meg they repeatedly promised us… but I am so sick of the whole thing that I just want to try and forget about it. We have internet, and it is somewhat faster and cheaper than before. It galls me to essentially have been conned again, but I am trying to content myself that we have achieved this much despite all the best efforts of French ISPs (Incompetent Sneaky Pricks, I believe it stands for out here).
So, leaving aside my boiling anger over the whole sorry, sorry fiasco, on with the story. We did have dinner round Sharon’s on Saturday evening. We were joined by Mike & Jean, and Sharon’s sister, Charmaine. Charmaine has officially become client #3 for Sites for Homes and work on her site is underway, which is great. On our way over, we stopped to meet with Karen, our independent agent friend, to update her on the meeting we had with the Notaire and to firm up a few details. Now we are connected again, we can finally start advertising our services properly. So, back to Sharon’s: dinner itself was truly fabulous: she really went to town. The starter was a pear, blue cheese and bacon salad, followed by her divine chicken kievs for the main, and then a trio of desserts (plus Matt’s brownies) including two different ice creams. First class.
It was a lively evening to say the least. We more or less found the rule-book of topics to avoid during polite dinner conversation, threw it out the window and got locked into heated debates about religion, politics, AIDS in Africa and so on. There were some extremely divergent opinions… We left at around 11:30 to see what mischief the wee puddies had been getting into without us all day and soon crashed. As we were still totally cut off, Sunday and Monday won’t take long to blog: nothing happened. It was hot and humid and we pottered in the garden for a few hours – we (ok, Lucien) cut down some bamboo from the front garden, then we trimmed it, cut it, and used it to make frames for the tomatoes and beans in the veg garden. Otherwise, nada.
Tuesday was the absolute latest date by which we could expect to hear from Orange about getting our Livebox, and as expected, it came and went without a word from them, so the darkness continued. It was however interrupted by the Beaufils’, who had invited us to theirs for dinner that evening. We took this as a sign that we are becoming closer friends as an earlier attempt by us to get them round for an evening meal was met with a little awkwardness and a suggestion of coffee instead. We had a really great evening: Lucien got out some excellent Glennfiddich whiskey, as well as 3 home-made liquors for the aperatif(s) so we got off to a good start. All of the food (except the meat) was their own produce – we had foie gras that Mauricette made, beans from the garden plus cepes (porcini) and roasted chestnuts gathered from the woods over the road and red and white wine to match each course. It was all très français, and a lovely evening.
By the end of it, and certainly after a lethal digestif of eau de vie, we had quite a buzz going. We talked about a range of things, learning quite a bit about local politics in the meantime, and made only one slight gaff – we finally plucked up the courage to ask how the previous owner of Port 80, M. Fargeot, died. I don’t know if we have ever mentioned this on the blog, but local rumour has it that he shot himself and we have since been subtly trying to find out more. I don’t know if it is because they didn’t want to talk about it over dinner, if they thought it might freak us out, or if they just dislike gossip, but either way, they both clammed up and said they had no idea. We quickly changed topic to avoid the awkwardness.
Wednesday greeted us with somewhat fuzzy heads – unfortunate really, given that I was due to go behind the wheel of a car for the first time in about 13 years later that day. I was somewhat nervous, but pleased that I remembered how it all worked. Technology must have come along quite a lot though as I still can’t get over how sensitive both the brakes and steering are on the car. Wednesday was also the day when our long, long awaited Livebox arrived in the post. It wasn’t supposed to be posted directly to us, but this is all part of the Incompetent Sneaky Prick fiasco, which I can’t deal with describing, so I will leave it there. We were obviously overjoyed, especially since we installed it with no issues and were connected in minutes. Out of the darkness at last! Several quiet hours of email, facebook and news later, we were again up to speed on everything that had happened for the 2 weeks we were isolated. Tornados in the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden… oh, and some tosh about two rich pricks getting married, or something. Hell of a fortnight to be out of the loop!
We were also able to resurrect our social life and made plans to catch up with our new friend, Barry, for lunch in Brantôme on Thursday. His boyfriend, Simon is currently over on holiday, and we also met a friend of theirs, Lee, who has just moved out here permanently with his boyfriend, Richard. They too live in Villebois (it seems all the gays are in Charente!), but Richard isn’t over here just yet. Both Lee and Simon were very lovely and we had a great, leisurely lunch at one of Brantôme’s finest restaurants, Les Saveurs. I had to watch it on the wine as I had lesson #2 in the afternoon and thought showing up drunk may not go down too well. I was a lot more confident this time and, barring an unfortunate incident where a tractor driver failed to either give way or even look both ways and nearly killed us, I did fine – but it took a few minutes to get over that.
Right, this is already much too long, so I am going to leave it for Matt to pick it up from here, but by way of intro, we picked his aunt, Mimi, up from Angoulême on Friday afternoon and are in the midst of entertaining her. More news soon…