I should really have done this entry yesterday to get us back to the beginning of the week but I forgot. Actually, I’m blaming it on the leap year which has gotten me confused about what day it is. Anyway, on with the story.
It was a largely quiet week. I’m close to getting my next site online (for the gardens near Brantôme) and I’m really pleased with how it’s come out. I can only take partial credit for this though as the main reason the site looks as good as it does is the that the gardens themselves are lovely and the client has lots of great photos. We’re meeting them tomorrow to sign off the UK version and then I just have to translate it and it can go live. Work’s still quieter for Matt at present, but he’s taken advantage of half term to get good use out of the pool in Nontron. There should hopefully be some more wok coming in for him via Abby soon too.
There’s not much else to say for the week so I’ll move on to Friday. To kick off the birthday weekend celebrations, we’d decided to swing by the pizzeria in St Pardoux ahead of our usual rehearsal. Normally when we plan on pizza, the restaurant manages to be closed (the dreaded “fermeture exceptionnelle”) but this time around we were lucky and got in. We had the place more or less to ourselves so were in and out fairly quickly, and left feeling very sated.
Rehearsal went about the same as usual: ie, largely fruitless and frustrating. To be fair, there are a few signs of improvement here and there, but neither of us are that enthused about most of the songs we’re learning. The exceptions (for me at least) are the 2 Bowie songs we’re doing (Space Oddity and China Girl) but they’re both musically complex songs and I fear neither of them will ever see the light of day. There’s a custom at Musique en Herbe that if it’s your birthday, you show up with cakes and drinks, so this time it was my turn. Matt took care of the cake part by making a lovely batch of chocolate chip cookies that went down a storm. We were also interrogated on arrival by Alain, who clearly wanted to disprove rumours of our imminent departure by asking about our availability for 2 gigs in July. We tuned both down, so I think he has his answer, although we’ve been warned to expect a huge amount of pressure and resistance from him before we make it out of there.
The only noteworthy bit of news for Saturday concerns our new sofa. We’ve been on the lookout for a second hand one for the mezzanine, and we finally got lucky. A lovely Scottish couple, Jim and Joan, had a sofa going spare for which that they wanted a mere 100€. And as luck would have it, they live just down the road in St Pardoux. Normally, items of furniture advertised on the DVN (our expat network) are snapped up within minutes, so we didn’t rate our chances when we emailed them. But later that day they rang to say it was ours if we wanted it, so we arranged to call and see them the next morning.
The next morning was Sunday, and also my thirty-bloody-fifth birthday. Oh, before I go further: a massive thank you to everyone for the Amazon vouchers! Our first activity was going to Jim and Joan’s to check out the sofa. I was immediately sold on it, but Matt is somewhat more particular than me, to put it mildly, and he had a few reservations. Ultimately though, the price was right and it was an improvement on our current ikea chairs so we said we’d have it. We arranged to pop back the next day to collect it and returned home. We had a quiet day of pottering around at home and then in the evening we went to our new friends Emmanuel and Olivier’s place for dinner. As I think I’ve said before, as well as being huge Bowie fans and both being left-handed, Emmanuel and I share one other thing in common and that’s our birthday. So it was a double celebration. Or as it turned out, a triple one in fact as another guest (a friend of theirs called Crystal) had just celebrated her birthday a couple days beforehand.
We started off with nibbles and champagne and then sat down to a delicious meal of foie gras followed by slow-cooked chicken. We brought a special bottle of wine with us from our cellar, a 2007 St Emilion, that we’d been sitting on for about 5 years, and it was utterly divine. For dessert, they’d bought a really yummy cake from their local bakery that was filled with an apple compote and white chocolate. By about 11:30, things had wound down and as we’d been sensible on the drinking, we decided to drive back home. We had a nightcap in front of a film and then hit the hay. And thus concludes the story of the tamest birthday I’ve celebrated since… well probably since turning 16!
As we’d celebrated on a sunday rather than a saturday, the next day didn’t feel at all monday-ish. Neither of us had much work on either so it was designated a day off instead. Carol invited us down to hers after lunch to sample a dessert she’d made. It was a lemon brandy tiramisu, and was every bit as good as that sounds. She’s been home alone for the last 10 days, but Bryan’s back on Tuesday.
After dessert, we went to collect the sofa. For this we enlisted the help of Jenny, who has a good size van. We felt slightly guilty about asking her as she’s so busy, but she was only too happy to help out. It’s been ages since we properly socialised with her but we’ve invited her for dinner in the week which will be nice. We got the sofa home and safely installed in the Mezzanine, whereupon it was assessed by the cats. Initial suspicion about their new sleeping place has since given way to elation.
I ought to be done here, but as punishment for not blogging yesterday, I’ve now got an extra day to cover! So for today: firstly we received another new client enquiry, for an english butcher looking to set up shop out here. it sounds like he’s been having a nightmare with French bureaucracy but should be ready to open soon and has opted for our full service rather than a ‘cheap n cheerful’ site, so that’s good. I also had an appointment at my tattooist this afternoon to get my Bowie tattoo touched up. Because the design involved a large block of colour, another go was needed to get it all evenly filled. It the first time I’ve had to get a touch-up done, and hopefully the last too – getting tattooed over a tattoo is quite painful. Luckily it was all over very quickly. Now I have another 2 weeks of itching and flaking and then it’s all done.
Right, that’s all from me. It’s cocktail hour at Port 80. A bientôt.