Bonjour à tous and welcome back to Mazeroux, where the heatwave shows no signs of abating. Since it began, I don’t think we’ve had a single day where it’s dipped below 30 degrees. This hit a crazy peak early last week: 39 degrees in Milhac, which in 5 years of living here, is the hottest we’ve ever known it. That said, tomorrow is supposed to hit a paltry high of 25 degrees – positively arctic – before we return to the sticky heights of the 30s again.
So what have we been doing in this baking heat? Well, Matt has had some bits of work on. Most notably for his French property client, who currently thinks Matt is the bees knees as their site is getting lots of good feedback. He’s also had some work from his badly-run UK charity client, Media Trust, whose site was recently compromised by hackers: an entirely avoidable situation they were warned about ages ago, and chose to ignore.
For me, work has effectively stalled. No new enquiries seem to be coming in, and though I have, I think, still 4 sites on the go, none of the clients are talking to me, and I can’t proceed until I hear from them. One of these sites is actually for Lee and Richard, for their paint business. We’ve been nagging at them for years to get a website and they’ve finally agreed to take the plunge. As we’ve mentioned before, Rich is going to come around soon and help us with the repainting of our bedrooms/toilet – so, we will of course be doing the site at a big discount to pay him for his time. Lee is – after 9 whole weeks – finally back in France. His grandfather is still not in great health, but he has his family nearby to look after him. Ironically, just days after Lee returned, Rich had to head off to the UK himself, but only for a week fortunately. We hope to have a proper catch up with them both soon.
In other news, we are currently duck-sitting for Giles and Miriam, the new neighbours at the end of our road. As Matt said in the last entry, her mother has been very unwell. In fact, she died on Saturday last week, so they’ve both headed all the way up to Normandy to deal with it all. In the interim, we are in charge of feeding and watering their 2 geese and 6 ducks, 2 of whom are not yet even 2 weeks old and are adorably sweet. G&M initially asked us to bring the little ones round to ours to keep a close eye on them, but with 2 devilish cats in residence, we feared for their lives. We promised to call around 3 times a day instead to check on them in situ.
Ok, on to the weekend, which as the title implies, was decidedly raucous. We kicked off with our first official rehearsal with the kids from Musique en Herbe, on Friday night. In fact, it wasn’t strictly a rehearsal. Every Friday, Musique en Herbe has an open jam session that starts around 9.30pm and goes on till around 1am. The kids that comprise our new band all go, as well as a number of local adults. We got there for 10pm and joined in the jamming as best we could although we didn’t know how to play the majority of the songs they were doing. Later on, we played a few of our regular songs too and then left to escape the blistering heat of their shack-cum-studio.
We already have a gig lined up with the new band: la Fete du Couteau in Nontron on the 8th of August. We’ve never gone to the event before because we didn’t realise it was a big thing, but apparently it draws quite a crowd every year. What with Matt’s imminent departure for the States, we have little time to rehearse, and a number of new songs to learn, some of which are quite tricky. If it weren’t so infernally hot at the moment I would be getting in a lot more practise. I will be going back on Friday, sans Matt, and hopefully then we will whittle down our list of 20 potentials to around 10 or so that I can then concentrate on fully while I’m left holding the fort here.
So, that was Friday. Saturday was a monster of an evening, although it started innocently enough: at Milhac’s annual Fete des Voisins, a sort of picnic where everyone brings a communal dish and we all get to taste a bit of everything. It’s held in the small courtyard by the church. This year we were lucky to have a musical concert too. Jacqui (from Matt’s conversation group) has a couple sons, both in bands. The eldest lives in Bordeaux, where his group do a number of gigs for the pleasure of it. They’d come to the Dordogne to do a gig in Perigueux and as they were in the area, they agreed to come to Milhac too.
There were about 100 people at the event and the band played throughout the evening. Their music was very well received, and consisted largely of original songs. We had been asked to help put away benches afterwards, so were obliged to stay till the bitter end. Along with us were the band and a few others of Milhac’s hard-core partygoers, including Philippe (bien sur) and we ended up staying there till around 3am. At this point, the band invited us all back to Jacqui’s where they planned on carrying on for a bit longer. We hesitated, but her house is literally right on the way home and it was too easy to stop and see what was happening. We ended up out in her garden with the band and a few others, drinking, smoking, singing and laughing until around 6.30am. Guitars kept doing the rounds and we found ourselves singing along at the tops of our voices to a range of classics. It was excellent fun and amazing to witness. Even if they didn’t know a song, you just had to name the key and they were soon belting it out as if they’d been playing it for years.
Daylight brought us to our senses all too late and we beat a retreat. On the way home, we started to remember a few crucial details about the day ahead with a growing sense of dread. These included having a 10:30 meeting with Lee and Richard about their site, needing to feed the ducks, and having been invited earlier that night to a big family lunch by our friend Benoit. Ooops… This latter came with the caveat: “you can’t be late as my father hates to eat after 1pm”. On our way back, we passed Miriam and Giles who were just setting off on their drive up north. We sincerely hope they didn’t notice us!
We passed out immediately upon getting into bed and three or so hours later (it felt like it had only been minutes) we were up again. Lee and Richard were running late, which gave us time to shower, but meant the meeting was very rushed. We were also not at our mentally sharpest to say the least. Afterwards, we charged off to sort the ducks and then went straight on to Benoit’s, where I’m pleased to say we weren’t the last to arrive. A fabulous meal followed out on their terrace, with 3 generations of his family present, as well as some friends, including Jenny and her son. The meal lasted a good few hours and we then went and chilled by his pool for a bit, wishing we’d known he had one so we could have brought trunks.
Our Herculean day of labours wasn’t over yet either. We had one more meeting to go to – to see Alain of Musique en Herbe to discuss song possibilities. This took place at 5pm and was blissfully short. We then returned home, dealt with the ducks and tucked in to some leftovers before collapsing into bed. Our friend Morgan had rung that evening to ask if we were up for a visit, which we most definitely were not, so we invited him around yesterday instead, which was very pleasant. Right, that’s more or less all I have to say. I’ll be taking Matt to Angouleme this Friday for his trip to the States and then I will throw myself into gig preparations! A bientot.