First off, this post is dedicated to the pusses, who yesterday turned 4 – happy birthday boys! Can’t believe it’s been that long since they came into our lives.
It’s been a very wet and windy week here in the Dordogne, with gusts of up to 70k and near continuous rainfall. While this is far from pleasant, at least we’re escaping the dire storms ravaging the UK where they’ve just had their wettest January since the 1700s and where thousands have had to leave their homes to escape rising flood waters. It’s also still freakishly mild. It’s around 10 in the day and 3-4 at night, which for February is plain weird. None of the locals can remember having a milder winter.
Our week was largely quiet and uneventful. Matt continues to be very busy getting his teeth into his new property website project as well as dealing with the occasional request from other clients at the same time. I’m still waiting on my author client to get the rest of the content over to me for her site, so in the interim, have been occupying myself as best I can with other chores, including a deep clean of the house. Our shower has never been cleaner! The other focus has been band practise. In general, rehearsals have been getting better and better, which is good seeing as by the time we post our next entry on here, it will all be over and done with.
Things picked up at the weekend, which was a full one. Friday was our first curry delivery of 2014. Jenny and Franck already had plans, and Francoise was away up in Paris, so in the absence of the usual crew, we invited Sophie and Dominique over. Long-term readers with very good memories may remember that they’re a couple we met via their foster son, Philippe, who Matt met at the local Job Centre when he was laid off. Philippe invited us over to his for a meal one evening, and we really hit it off with him and his foster parents. Philippe has since moved away and Sophie & Dom have been really busy running their gite, so we hadn’t seen them since they last came to ours in April last year.
Sophie has spent some time in the UK so as well as acquiring very good English, she also developed a taste for Indian food, and the pair of them were very interested to learn about the local takeaway service. They got to ours for around 7 and ended up staying till gone midnight. We had a great time catching up with them and have made plans to see them again soon. Sophie is also going to try out Matt’s weekly conversation class, which is great news because once Francoise goes, there’d be little point in him continuing to go without some new blood to take her place.
Bolstered by our recent spate of successful rehearsals, we decided to use our dinner guests as guinea pigs and play them a few tracks from our set list. This unfortunately did not go at all well. In fairness, we were more than a little tipsy, but for me at least, I was reminded again that no amount of practise can prepare you for playing in front of an audience, regardless of its size. I was instantly nervous and both of us made numerous silly mistakes, and even had to abandon one song half way through. Disaster performance aside, I think the guests enjoyed themselves, and we look forward to seeing more of them.
After our bad concert experience the previous night, we found time for 2 rehearsals on Saturday, both of which were successful, much to my relief. These were fitted in around a cooking marathon in preparation for our next social activity. We had a group of Frenchies over for dinner: Francoise and Phillipe, Francoise’s sister Nadine and her husband Jean-Claude, and mutual friends Manu and Mathilde. The latter brought 2 of their 4 daughters with them too, but they were no bother at all to the grown-ups as they were allowed to play on our Nintendo Wii all evening. They’d never played before but after a few minutes had more than adequately gotten to grips with it and seemed to have a great time.
For the adults, we made a turkey chili dish that we normally serve in bowls, but this time, Matt cooked it in a baking dish topped with a layer of cheese and a polenta topping. It came out very nicely indeed in its new form. Along with this was the usual cheese course and then a sweet potato pie for dessert. Everyone stayed till around 1am, which given the crowd, was very early. Phillipe is a volunteer fireman and was on call that night, so eschewed the vodka for a change, and Francoise and Nadine had only gotten back from Paris that afternoon, so were both a bit tired.
We were surprisingly hangover-free the next morning but nonetheless were tired, so had a lazy TV day interrupted only by 2 (successful) rehearsals. That was the pusses birthday, and after the trauma of 2 social nights in a row, including the despised presence of children in the house, they were very pleased with our decision to provide laps all day. They’re obviously hating the wet weather and when they aren’t curled up asleep, are driving each other and us nuts with their pent-up energy.
In other news, we’re off on one of our regular pilgrimages to the Holy Land (Holland) next weekend. Smoking supplies are running thin, and given the spate of work that Matt has going on, we’ve decided we can stretch to a weekend in Amsterdam. We’ll be going by car and as an added bonus, have made plans to stop and see our friend Laetitia who lives in Belgium on the way back. The following weekend is unfortunately my birthday but to help take my mind off that, we’re looking forward to our first visit since Gerald came out over New Years. Our friend David Cox from London’s coming out for a long weekend. He’s a regular visitor here, and has experienced the delights of a Dordogne winter already, so he should know what he’s let himself in for. Right, c’est tout pour cette semaine. Chiao for now.