Hi. After a week of sheer bedlam back in the UK, things are back to their usual snail’s crawl of a pace for us out in France. Well, there actually has been a degree of productivity, as I shall get to in a mo. First, there are a couple things I wanted to add about our trip back.
On my previous 2 trips to the UK, I have had excellent luck with the trains – all of them had been exactly on time. This time, travelling with Matt, every train on the way out was late, which he says is his experience with French trains in general, so I have concluded he has bad TGV karma. Anyway, I wanted to share two extremely French things about our first train journey on the way out, from Angoulême to Lille. The first is a fine example of the classic oxymoron “French Efficiency”. At French mainline stations, there are handy signs along the platforms telling you whereabouts to stand in order to access the correct coach on the train. Nice in theory, but as our train rolled up, we quickly realised that they had got it utterly wrong, causing mayhem and panic on platform as laden passengers were forced to sprint the length of the platform to find their coach. A shoot and a miss, there…
The second thing that tickled me is the oh-so-French disregard for any EU laws they don’t like. There are large signs up all over train stations that state that EU law expressly prohibits smoking anywhere in French train stations. These are totally ignored – and not just by the passengers: there were SNCF staff lounging about on the platform, puffing merrily away.
Well, Matt has covered our week in England from then on, so all that remains for me to do is thank everyone for my cards, presents, for coming to my party, and generally for making my… ok, I will say it: 30th – birthday a really lovely experience. I am mourning the loss of my camera, not least for the pictures it had on it of the lovely waiter from Saturday night, but what can you do? I am determined that losing expensive possessions is a character flaw of mine that belonged to my 20s only, so no more of that. I think the answer is simply to never leave the house again…
We got back on Tues 1st March and it was cold and cloudy, much like it was back in the UK, but since Thursday, we have been enjoying blue skies, sun and temps of about 13 degrees – glorious. We have been taking advantage of this by sorting out the garden. Well, more specifically, Lucien has been sorting out the garden and we have been trying to observe and learn as much as we can. We’d already arranged for him to pop over when we got back so he could help us trim the grape vine that grows above the front door, so he duly showed up with sheers and a ladder. He did briefly explain his system, but it still somewhat baffles me how he decided what to remove completely and what to leave. In the end though, it seems pretty much all of it was cut back.
Next, he moved on to our rose bushes and flower beds in the front garden. One of the roses is very well established and has a trellis to climb, but several years of neglect had left it unruly and chaotic. I actually think this must have been vaguely bothering him all this time because he seemed to take a lot of satisfaction in cutting it back and taming it, lashing wayward branches to the trellis. He even ran back for a hedge trimmer when he saw a small flowering tree of ours he deemed to be out of control. We helped as best we could with all this, but essentially, he just sorted our whole front garden out for us. We are finding that a desire to keep busy at all times is a wonderful quality to have in a neighbour. The next project is the veg garden. Again thanks to Lucien, we know what we need to do to get the fence put up, and even now have the posts, so we will get onto that in the coming days – and then we can get planting.
I have also been productive on the website side of things: after several days of struggling to come up with a design, I have finally got somewhere on building a site for Matt & I’s next work venture: Sites for Homes. So far, only the home page is live, but I am very pleased with how it came out. Now we need to get moving as far as setting it up as a company and all that jazz.
Louis has just given me a good way to wrap this up: he has just successfully come back inside all by himself. Our house has 2 catflaps: one from the house to the garage and one in the garage door leading to the garden. We introduced the boys to the former one several weeks ago, but the latter one is lockable and it has only been a couple days since we opened it. They both understand in theory that they can go through the second cat flap, but nonetheless, habit still leads them to ask to be let out/in via the front door. Until now: Louis just came sprinting in, chirruping and looking most pleased with himself. He is hardly the more perspicacious of the two, either, so if he has got it, I am sure the Smoo will as well. Ok, that is all. A bientôt.