Finally, an election has turned out as we’d hoped. After Brexit and Trump, we didn’t want to get our hopes up about the French presidential election. Not only was Le Pen defeated soundly, but our preferred candidate won. If the outcome had been reversed, we’d be frantically searching for a new place to live.
We watched the results at Emmanuel and Olivier’s place, along with their friend Jean Christophe. We arrived around seven which meant a tense hour of waiting for the initial results, during which we had an apero. After the results, we cracked open a bottle of champagne and then moved on to dinner which was pulled pork served with green beans, followed by cheese and flan for dessert. We stayed to watch M. Macron give his victory speech before heading home around 11.
It was great watching the results there since we’re all Macron supporters and back his policies. For me, the election has been a real eye-opener in terms of understanding French politics. I don’t mean the process, although that too has been interesting, but more the mentality behind supporting / opposing the various candidates. As Will discussed in his last post, many people viewed Macron as negatively as Le Pen, which defies belief. This mostly applies to people on the far left who view a banker as the devil, and think his policies are equivalent to slavery.
We had a mostly quiet week, recovering from the hedonism of the previous long weekend. I’ve still got some cold symptoms, although it’s mostly gone now. What started as a little scratchy throat turned into the mother of all colds. I blame the germ-infested pool since it started the last day I went swimming, during school holidays, with a pool full of kids. I had a Milhac Loisirs meeting here on Tuesday to discuss our next event, a Greek evening. I couldn’t really sing, so skipped choir that night.
Will had his first guitar lesson on Friday, given by Christian where we had dinner the previous week. They mostly worked on music theory and scales which Will found helpful. We stayed in that night, but made up for it the next night with dinner at Benoit and Virginie’s. Their daughter Eva was there along with her new boyfriend, plus Benoit’s two sisters and brother-in-law and one of their grandkids. We brought the ingredients for espresso-tinis and then moved on to other vodka drinks. Dinner was roast chicken with garlic bread stuffing, roast potatoes and sauerkraut, followed by cheese and gooey chocolate dessert.
Around midnight, the cards and games came out. We played a Dutch version of mini-shuffleboard which took some time to figure out. Virginie gave me a refresher of the two most popular French card games: tarot and belote. We’d played them both years ago with Francoise and Philippe, so they were mostly familiar. Around 3am, Eva requested “soupe a l’oignon” which is traditionally eaten in the middle of the night. Benoit obliged and awhile later, the soup magically appeared. This is one of Will’s absolute favourite dishes, so it was a real treat for him. We left around 4 and passed out immediately after returning home.
We did a bit of gardening last week, and are about to put up the fence around the veggie plot. I’m going to fertilise and rotovate it first. The honeysuckle that we planted last week seems to have taken. We were worried since we’ve had some pretty heavy winds since we planted them. Our special crop is doing fairly well: there are five or six very healthy plants, and another four that are lagging way behind. Will found parasites on some of them yesterday so that may explain why they’re not all on good form.
Work continues to keep us both busy. Will mainly has one site that he’s working on and it appears as if they’ve finally agreed the design. It’s been a real pain since it’s design by committee and until now, they’ve not been able to agree on anything. They did their own version of a logo to give him an idea of what they want and it’s unbelievably bad. I’ve got a few projects on the go, and just got the go ahead on a couple of others. So there’ll be no rest for wicked old me for the foreseeable.