Well, seeing as Matt’s last entry took us up to last Wednesday, this should prove to be a short and sweet one from me! On Thursday we took a very overdue trip to the hairdressers and now both look all the more presentable for it. Matt then hit the shop in the afternoon and had conversation in the evening. Ridigt have been going to this since asking Matt about it a few weeks ago and seem to be liking it.
Workwise we’ve both been clearing our respective decks of all manner of little side projects and other miscellaneous bits. For me this entailed a lot of tedious translation work but it’s nearly all done now. I can now resume working on the beer site – although this too risks falling into the black hole known as “waiting on content” that seems to swallow up most of my projects sooner or later. For Matt, he’s about to tackle the directory site that will likely take several months to finish. He’s driving down to Duras on Wednesday to meet them face to face and get the ball rolling.
There’s little else to add for the week, so I will skip to the weekend. Well in fact, I will skip to Saturday, Friday having been unremarkable apart from the weather.This deserves a special mention for the sun and blue skies that temporarily interrupted the endless drizzle and rain. On Saturday evening, we were invited to Ridgit’s for dinner. They served up a veggie curry that was utterly divine, from the bhajis and poppadoms to the saag daal – all hand-made and all delicious. We stayed for a few hours chatting afterwards and then came home for the usual nightcap and then bed.
On Sunday, we were invited to lunch around our new neighbours’ place, Paul & Nathalie. We’d met them a few times before, but this was the first time we’d been to theirs. Well, that’s technically not true as they bought Jean-Claude and Nadine’s house, which we’d visited many times. It was a little odd seeing it again at first but our hosts made us very welcome. They had a friend of theirs over called Jean-Marc, who lives near Angoulême, and who works in IT and is a “smoker”, so we hit it off. Within minutes, we were joined by Manu, Mathilde and most of their girls. We’d no sooner said hello to them all than Gael & Corinne turned up too, plus their daughter and her boyfriend. We’d assumed we were coming for a quiet lunch for 4 so were pleasantly surprised we got to see everyone.
We normally have band practise at 4pm, but at 1:30 we were still yet to sit down and given the sheer volume of food to be consumed, we realised it wasn’t going to work out, so I ran back home to cancel it. And this was a good thing too as it was after 6 by the time dessert was cleared away. We started with nibbles, then the main was a Vietnamese speciality called Chicken Pho soup. You make up a giant saucepan of broth and then everyone takes some and adds the fillings of their choice : rice pasta, mushrooms, omelette, spices etc. This was followed by a cheese course that a rare gap in the clouds permitted us to enjoy out on their terrace. Dessert was actually desserts plural : Matt made his famous carrot cake, Mathilde made a delicious banana cake, then there was a lemon tarte, a chocolate mousse, and some sort of macaroons that tasted like shortbread. You can imagine how full we were at the end of it all. And we’re definitely chuffed with the new neighbours: they’re a delightful couple. And that’s all I have to say.