April hasn’t hit us with much in the way of showers so far, but it’s cool and cloudy so like the cats, we’re mainly staying indoors. This is unfortunate for me as I have quite literally no work to do at the moment. Neither the car rental or the vineyard client have answered my last emails and all our other clients are eerily quiet too. I’m sure it’s just a blip and that it will pick up again soon. Just a shame these pauses couldn’t coincide with the sunnier days!
Matt’s had a bit of work on, mainly on his Australian project. He’s also been tying up various loose ends in readiness for his trip to Hong Kong to celebrate his friend Paul’s 50th. He’s off tomorrow in fact.
On to the recap. I went to Périgueux on Tuesday for an x-ray of my hip. This showed nothing serious, but apparently there’s a 1,4cm difference in height between my left and right hip, which is certainly what would be causing me the pain. I assume some physio will sort it, I just need to get back to the docs to arrange it.
That evening, Mum and Dad came over for a meal, and so that Mum could print out her boarding pass for her trip back to the UK. She returns tomorrow from a week with Dave, Amy and Elvie and judging by the photos, she managed to get a lot of quality time in with the wee monkey.
Not much else to add for the week so on to our weekend, which was large and kicked off early on the Thursday. This was dinner round Paul & Nathalie’s, along with Françoise. After a drink or two we sat down to a yummy veggie meal of semolina and roast veggies. Matt made the dessert: pineapple upside-down cake, also very tasty. We dint stay too long afterwards, in anticipation of the marathon ahead of us.
On Friday, we entertained at the house. The guest list was Guillaume and Samia, Françoise, Jenny, Loic and Mathias. Guillaume we’ve blogged about before : a “healer” who I did a website for. He split up with his partner Babeth some time ago, but has since met, and fallen in love with Samia. In fact, they are getting married in August, and we’re invited. We don’t know them terribly well but they wanted to celebrate their news with us, hence the occasion. We invited the other guests as backup, and because Jenny already knew Guillaume.
Françoise made the aperitif, in classic Ozzie style. This meant crackers with vegemite, and slices of cheese served with fruit. It utterly perplexed everyone but they happily tucked in all he same. This we washed down with champagne to toast the happy couple. The main was Matt’s new winning combo of minced beef taco-style with lettuce leaves, plus thai green curry, and it went down a storm. Dessert was a selection of patisserie from a baker in Abjat and they were all quite lovely. This too wasn’t a terribly late night, but we did manage to get in a good few drinks all the same.
Saturday, however, was a big night. We’d originally just planned to have Lee over for dinner as we’d not seen him for a while. Then we got a call from Benoit to invite us over to celebrate his birthday. Benoit didn’t mind at all that there were three of us, so we dragged Lee along too. There can sometimes be quite the crowd at B&V’s but this evening it was a far more relaxed affair. Along with us were Virginie’s Mum with her partner, and Fred and Marie, as well as Eva of course. Her boyfriend, Benoit 2, showed up later. The meal was a buffet of various canapés, dips, patés etc – and Fred of course provided the dessert : an “omelette norvegienne”.
We stayed chatting and drinking until the wee hours and then sagely came back to the house and continued to do much the same until around 6am. We didn’t surface till gone noon the next day, and were feeling a little less than great. Lee left after a restorative cup of coffee and we slowly pulled ourselves together in time for our first band practise in weeks. Given the state of us, we expected it to be terrible but actually it was quite polished. Perhaps the knowledge that we’ve got an upcoming gig is sharpening our minds…
Anyway, that’s it from me for the weekly roundup. I’d do a Brexit one but at this point there are no words left. It’s possible the UK will have crashed out by the time this blog is next updated, the mad bloody idiots. We shall see…