The Other side of me

A Right Pigs ear

2012-01-09T14:25:00.004+01:00

Its been a bit of a bothersome few days. I having been struck down with the gastro bug( as in enteritis not in gastronomy, no really you do not want to know the details) and being unable to move from my bed for 2 days, the youngest two fended amazingly for themselves did not burn the house down or explode the cooker and managed to courageously get homework done and salle hoovered ( after a fashion) and cook sufficiently nutritious meals to give them the energy to play computer games and care for the numerous household animals and livestock that rampage about this place. Meanwhile being a mother I lay there in my rather unpleasant sickbed worrying what would happen if I was really ill and had to go to hospital or worse which is an indication of my temperature rather than a real fear although it did raise a few gremlins in my head and the idea that it might be wise to freeze meals for two along with reheating instructions just in case!

The next day bolstered up by numerous potions and powders and forced on by the need to get boys to college and to various appointments I did the school run and then came home and after domestic duties like feeding chickens went back to bed where I could throw up to my hearts content. Come school pick up time I was feeling a trifle better if light headed so did a bit of shopping en route to college where I bought a fantastically cheap piece of pork, loads of meat on it and looked prime for a slow cooked stew. Got home put it in water to soak and realized as I unwrapped it from its plastic overcoat it was in fact half a pigs head. To be fair they had cut off the ear and wrapped it around the nose and teeth so the whole thing just looked like a hock joint. Ah well needs must, found wonderful recipe which even to my jaded pallet sounded interesting. I sent the link to my whizz of a cook niece then went to bed.

2 days later the plumber was here sorting something or other and he came and had a little chat about the fosse septic, there is a strange not very pleasant smell he said has this happened before? Don't ask me I have no sense of smell. Well he sniffed and poked about with pipes and told me to get the boys to have a good sniff around if they thought it smell like a dodgy fosse to give him a call. I promised to then totally forgot about it.

Yesterday evening I had an email from niece asking about how the pigs head had tasted... it took a while for it to sink in but eventually my feeble brain managed to link pigs head which I had totally forgotten about and which by now had been festering in water in the warm kitchen for 3 days with apparently unidentified stink in laundry room. I went to investigate took the lid off the pan and put it back on very quickly.

So no roast pigs head in white wine for us and a surprise treat for the dogs .

I think I can well and truly say I made a right pigs ear out of that.

A single mother at 53.. what ever next!!

2011-12-05T11:47:00.002+01:00

Well its done and over and I am now a divorcer woman. Who would have thought it here I am single mother at 53 living in a foriegn country with two boys one of whom seems set , unintentionally, on damaging as many parts of his body before Christmas as he can, having got over an emergency appendectamy he has now fallen and ripped all the tendons in his right hand, and the other boy is now an interesting melange of anger and sadness, a combination which makes everyday an emotional roller coaster. I am living with two angry young men. Both of whom blame thier father for abandoning them for his new family. His new partner has two girls about the same age as our boys so there is the added frisson of them thinking he prefers girlsto them and had they been girls he might have stayed . Of course the fact that he hasnt even met these girls despite living with thier mother for 9 months seems to make it worse for them. To them he has chosen a pre-made family of unknown children over those he had himself. No amount of my trying to explain and reassure seems to wash that doubt away. Middle with his painful hand is doubly made sore by his father not contacting him to enquire how he is. Youngest just wants to kill him. In the absence of their father theie anger is turned on each other and on me. Oh what joyful times we live in !

When I say its all done of course it isnt and probably never will be. There is all the paperwork to do now, changing my name on every kind of legal document back to my maiden name, changing the passports, taking over all the standing orders for gas electric, phone, all the taxes, all the bills and desperatly praying that my now ex husband keeps his word and pays the share he has promised. Of course with new contracts to be set up with all the utilities come new deposits as well so in the weeks towards Christmas, when my mind is usually full of finding presents to delight, it is weighed down with worries about where the money is going to come from and how I can stretch my all ready paper thin budget to cover presents from Santa on top of everything else . I want to make this Christmas a happy special one do dispel the spectre of the last one looming, like Dickens ghost of Christmas past ,over everything.

I work all weekend at aChristmas craft fayres to raise some extra money. I stay up way past my bed time to make sure I put the kiln, dishwasher and washing machine on during cheap reate electricity times and nag the kids to turn of lights and anything else that burns electricity and not run the taps when they clean their teeth. I watch in horror as middle shoots up another 6 inches overnight and despair when both come home with holes in the knees of thier jeans from school hoping that the January sales come up with cheap replacements. I have alwasy prided myself on being a good housewife and a frugal one but I am discovereding there is a big differnence between being so because you want to and doing so because you have no safety net to catch you if you don't.

There are of course safety nets here and the French state will do its best for us. I could go to the mairee and ask for food handouts but I think I'm too proud for that at the moment. Ive applied for aid with fuel, school fees and electricity but everything is based on my husbands salary of two years ago so no entitlements there and the children bless them have written santa the shortest wish lists in the history of that tradition. Middle reckons he doesnt deserve anything as patently he must have been very bad bearing in mind all that has happenned to him this year.

But grumbling aside ,and this is all this missive is, me grumbling , its nto me drowning or despairing its jsut letting off steam so I can go on trying my best and not letting off steam at the boys. Even if I can not give the children the sort of Christmas they so much deserve and would love to give them, with careful shopping and a stocking full of cheap and cheerful smiles I plan to make this Chrismtas a good one even if the smiles are paper ones glued on to hide the cracks and there may not be as many presents under the tree as usual.

The advent calendars I made lat year are hanging in the kitchen pockets filed with tiny treats and I am accumilating small delights for thier stockigns. This Father Christmas will instead be Mother Christmas and it will be a happy Christmas to remember , I will make sure of it. It is after all our first with just the 4 of us , when eldest comes back from University we will dress the tree as ever by candlelight with carols on the cd p layer and we will make new traditions and buld on them each year. So if any of you have any family traditions you can share then please let me know so I can steal the appropriate ones and call them my own in years to come, after all Christmas is a time of giving and the gift of sharing costs nothing !!

Last of the summer whine

2011-11-04T09:05:00.006+01:00

When I leave to do the school run, only 15 minutes to the next town and the same back, it is pitch black I usually get there and back before the day has really opened its eyes thus I go dressed in whatever I grab usually a scruffy pair of jeans and an old but warm jumper, no one is going to see me so it doesn't matter. Sometimes I stay like that all day safe in the garden getting muddy or in the studio getting clayee. I always however change and have a brush and scrub up if I'm expecting to have to meet the world in day light. Well almost always.

On one such morning of scarecrow look alike attire returning from the school dash as the dawn was breaking in a breathtaking shimmer of pinks and mauves seen through the mist hugging the ground. Too beautiful to miss I stopped to take this photograph . I stood and gazed in wonder at so much beauty and calm and thanked my guardian angel that I actually had my camera in the car for once. Then I drove off reluctantly. Actually it wasn't just me who drove reluctantly the car was a bit slow to want to budge and by the time I got to the bottom of the hill it became obvious that something was very much not right. I turned into the lane that leads through a now deserted hamlet to our lane and stopped to inspect the car. If you had to define a flat tyre then this was the perfect example totally flat, running on the wheel hub looking like something from a cartoon but without the humour. By now it was daylight. Maize harvest was in full swing and there wasn't a soul around. No friendly locals to ask for help, not enough agility to change a wheel and no chance of passing traffic I resorted to phoning the rescue service which my assurance company provide.

Wonderful. The day was beginning to warm up into one of those clear hot days of an Indian summer and I was stranded in a quiet byway talking french to someone in Paris whose native tongue was obviously something else. Eventually with me resorting to slang we established I had a flat tyre, where was I ? Good question. I gave him as best directions as I could telling him the name of the nearest hamlet and that I was between two larger villages. No problem someone will come within 30 minutes.

I couldn't decide whether to be impressed that he hadn't needed to have the breton place names spelt out or worried, I opted for an optimistic attitude and sat and waited. 1 hours later I began to wonder if I shouldn't have chosen option B and opted for worried, never mind, here I was on a gloriously hot day with all the time in the world to spare, so I gainfully occupied myself collecting great big fat chestnuts and broken branches for the fire. Another hour passed and I had a phone call from the garage, where was I ? Ah , they had sent him to a large town a good 45 minutes from where I was, and I was as it turned out was only 10 minutes from his garage. I waited some more. An hour later he arrived. Meanwhile I sat by the side of the road looking like an old peasant arms full of wood, scruffy jumper, unbrushed hair and pockets bulging with chestnuts catching a few of the suns rays.

Nice young man arrived in his smart tow truck and gave me a pitying look , you know that look, its the , the stupid woman can't even change a tyre look, I smiled back. Then spent over an hour watching him trying to get my very flat tyre off my car which he finally succeeded in doing with the rather unorthodox help of a lump of wood and a hammer. You shouldn't be driving this car he said, it isn't safe he said, your thingywotsit is likely to go at any moment, you need to take it to the nearest garage at once and get it fixed. OK so patently it wasnt the thingywotsit but I have no idea what the english word for it is and Id be surprised if you would be interested to know or, for that matter ever have a need to know the french name of the thing that lets the steering wheel move the tyres in what ever direction you want them to move. I drove tentatively home, as by now it was well into the 2 hour french lunch hour so no one would be open and is the reason that young man did not offer to tow me as he was obviously en route home for his lunch and didn't want his meal getting cold dealing with mad Englishwomen with dodgy thingywotsits.

Having allowed due time for them to eat their lunch and have a little digestive to let the food settle I called the garage to make an appointment to have a new spare tyre fitted and get the thingywotsit done.

The Tyre was no problem the thingwotsit would take 5 days to order, when he changed the tyre the man at the garage told me I really must not drive the car under any circumstances he didn't however come up with any alternatives. In the middle of nowhere which I call home you cant survive without a working thingywotsit or a spare car or failing that kind neighbours, my neighbours car was off the road so I just had to wing it, drive carefully and pray very hard. I managed all that quiet well until I had to collect eldest from Uni on the Shad aturday. I sorted out trains and busses which would get her to the nearest small town to which I felt safe enough to limp in my hazardous vehicle only for her to discover that despite the timetable saying the contrary buses do not run on Saturday. No choice then either she phoned her father to ask for a lift or I risked my thingywotsit snapping like knicker elastic and went and get her. She burst into tears at the first suggestion so knicker elastic it was. It was the longest 45 minutes in my life, no not true, the return journey was worse as I was desperate not to crash the car and kill us both. We got home, we sighed a big sigh of relief and we eventually got the car fixed.

Today has been equally eventful and a tiny bit stressful. We have been fattening a turkey up for Christmas, this morning I found it all forlorn and lying face down in the mud. I scooped it up trotted over to the neighbours with it for some advice followed by my cohort of boys and dogs. The advice was kill and do no eat it. My young neighbour volunteered to do the deed but I know he hates poultry, well not hates but is scared stiff of them, somewhat of a draw back for someone who works in agriculture, so I declined his noble offer and went home to do the deed myself. I should have sharpened the axe first. Not pleasant and not easy but it had to be done. There was no blood. I suspect thing died of shock before I even stretched its thin wight neck out on the block.

We assigned the poor departed thing to a bin bag and went and deposited it in the municipal bins and then cheered ourselves up by collecting yet more chestnuts. We may not have a home grown turkey for Christmas but we will have masses of home made chestnut stuffing!!

Later we cut down the willow and dug a semi circular ditch to plant willow whips in, we have great plans to make a willow arbor by the pond. Whilst we were at it we trimmed off the lower branches of the fir tree so we can at last again see the well which has gradually become hidden by pine branches. Middle is a whizz with the chainsaw, he scares me rigid. We dragged the willow branches over to our chosen spot and started to plant them, then we attempted to tie them together at the top to form a dome, then we went and got the ladder to have another go, then the wretched thing collapsed and we went in and had tea. What we really needed was a strong pair of helping hands but hey ho you can't have everything so we'll try again another day when time is less pressing and we feel less harassed. The water Butt is now stuffed full of willow branches waiting patiently for us to get our second wind and start again.

So all in all we have had, of late, a busy time and have learnt several valuable lessons the biggest being that it is amazing what we can achieve when we have too and that lack of immediate success does not necessarily mean inevitable failure. That goes for Turkey killing and willow arbors alike. Sometimes all it takes is to put on a brave face and carry on and sometimes we could all do with the occasional offer of a little help from our friends even if we choose not to take them up on it.

Life may not always be easy but that doesn't mean we have to accept bad luck when it happens and give in to it, somewhere as long as you look for it there is always a bright side an upside, a good egg to be found among the bad. The art is, as I am learning, to search for the little rays of sunshine in life and enjoy them when I can, even if beheading a turkey isn't one of them!!

Heart's Ease...

2011-10-19T20:54:00.003+02:00

The maize harvest is in full swing with vast machines, the frightening fronts of which consist of a line up of what appear to be giant razorsharp corkscrews rotating at terryfying speed and resemble some sort of a Heath Robinson contraption, persuaded by tractors and trailersat a measured pace into which the machines spew the mulched corn stems leaves cobs and all to be stored under tarpauling in great pits for winter fodder for the cows. The last cut of hay has been made and with it has come warm weather and a plague of biting flies that pester nip and pooh on everything. Its enough to drive anyone mad.

Every day I pass the tractors with their drivers accompanied on wednesdays and at weekends by young sons or cousins or brothers riding in the cabs. The safest place for a farm child to be during the maize harvest is in the cab high above the terrible machines where he can be seen and kept an eye on and not be tempted to wander off into the maize field to be accidently mulched himself.

Farmwork is a family affair, and at Harvest the family grows to include all the other workers who are pulled in to get the job done. This means providing lunch for everyone at midday. My friend was telling me at dinner last night that she had had 2 days of making bouef bourginione for 15 and soup for supper for thier harvesters and at the same time doing the milking and all the other jobs usually shared out because everyone was harvesting the maize. Her husband was telling me of a woman on another bigger farm who had to feed 26 men each day over 3 days and still get a herd of 150 cows brought in and sent out to the fields as well as milking cleaning the milking parlour and feeding the calves.

It was a sobering thought after a week of feeling pathetically sorry for myself and crushed by , what can feel sometimes like the overwhelming responsibility of single parenthood . Weekends are the worst. During the week I can easily occupy my day with all the necessary things that need doing and in the evenings by the time I have fed and watered all living creatures here, both human and animal ,and made sure homework is done, things sorted for the following day , ears are washed behind, teeth are cleaned and bedrooms vaguelly, if not entirely tidied ,before bedtime stories are read I am so tired all I can manange is bed myself. But weekends are full of empty spaces where family life and routine used to be, Sundays especailly. No matter how much fun and chatter we have, how much dog walking and play, no matter how good the sunday roast is or what dessert I make to fill the empty space and the long silences which their father has left in our lives would hang above the days if we let it, even after 7 months, like a brutal grief that as hard as I try I can not eradicate. I hate that.

No that is far too melodramatic many women have gone through far worse than I, many children suffered more and it is important to remember that life before was worse not better. So I have taken the advise of a good friend , when ever I miss him she said, just remember the bad times, the lies the cheating, the drinking, the unpredictable temper and imagine having that all back again. Its a horribly sobering thought. Its no good crying over spilt milk, as my mother used to say, he has left us and he is no longer the man I loved and fell in love with he is someone else now and that man has gone for ever.

Today I took the neighbours small boy and his sister and our combined pack of assorted dogs for a walk through the fields to collect acorns for the goats who munch them with the delight of children gourging themselves on bonbons. The stubble is bursting with delicate colour from the wild pansies which spring up every year after harvest and across the sky arced a vast and perfect rainbow hung over us.

I have many things to be thankful for, my children, our home, 3 mad labradors and above all life itself and the joy of being me.

Days of mellow fruitfulness

2011-10-02T10:40:00.001+02:00

Autumn is open us and despite the searing heat of a late indian summer , the sound of guns from the first of the seasons hunts tell me there is no ignoring the fact that things need doing and that with the morning air is crisp and the grass covered in dew summer is saying its last goodbyes.

So this weekend has been one of picking apples and storing them for winter, collecting hazelnuts and wild plums, lifting the last of the potatoes from the potager and the last of the beans left in the fields after the machines have finished thier work, putting away firewood for the winter to come and trying to get the garden sorted and ready for its long sleep.

I have had 3 trees felled and am busy burning off the pine branches from them, the logs are being cut into rounds so I can lay them as a walkway up to the vegetable patch and soon I am going to cut the wilow and make a living willow arch and fence to screen the now open and sunlit garden from the road. There is an old and rotten wooden barn that needs knocking down too and I need to start work on building the verandah on the front of the house so that in winter the dogs and I have somewhere sheltered to sit and watch the rain and I can sit and drink my early morning coffe before I start the day. Its a project my husband and I had planned for a couple of years we have the wood just never got around to doing it , now I know it is because he had other things on his mind, so I am going to do it alone.

Usually the boys are a great help about the palce but since Middle isnt able to lift anything after his operation and it seems churlish to make youngest pitch in when his brother is busy playing on his computer I am going it alone with the company of the dogs everywhere I go about the garden I am followed by 3 large labradors and a smaller black puppy, in the early morning they bounce and bark and play with the goats in teh heat of the day they waddle and stop adn lie in the shade and only get up and move when I pick up my wheelbarrow or change to another task somewhere else in the jungle that is the garden here.

This mornings early morning task was stripping the ivy from the longere wall , the goats love that and happily munch about my feet and butt my knees gently if I get in the way of a juicy morsel they fancy. Ive been clipping back bramblesw as well before it gets too hot and feeding the fire and the goats with those now my hands are a mess and I think I have broken every nail on my hands but its satisfying work and I sit in the evening as darkness falls watching the stars with the boys and stoking the bonfire breathign in the smoke and making wiht them fresh memories to make up for the ones they want to forget.

Next I must get on balnch and freeze the beans, make beetroot chutney, apple chutney and puree and chop and freeze yet more apples for winter desserts. Its far too much work for one person when I have the rest of life to deal with and two boys to raise but getting a gardener isnt an option and needs must but I have good neighbours and friends who help by appearing with a bag of grain for the chickens or an offer of a hand every now and then and at least I go to bed exhausted and with a feeling of achievement.

We have all grown and moved on in the last months since my husband left, we may be a less orderly household than we were and the kitchen, or for that matter the rest of the house, may not be as tidy as it should be. I may have a list of things to do whihc is dauntingly long and if I let it ,would be overwhelming. There are times when I miss him greatly and wish he was back her helping in the garden doing the wood with me enjoying being a family but he isnt and that was his choice adn we are learnign to live with it. We are, the boys and I, becoming happy again, laughing a lot about silly things, and growing as a family and we work well together.

I have lots of things to be thankful for, and I am.

the painting is Digging Potatoes

By: Carl Larsson (1853 - 1919) I coould do wiht this merry band of women to help me about the garden, I liek this painting of Larssons it is so different to his sugar sweet domestic scenes but still has a lot of love about it

Singleparenthood sucks without friends and neighbours

2011-09-26T15:03:00.001+02:00

It has been an eventful week, like a hamster in a wheel I am spinning like mad and getting nowhere fast. I think I may have to adopt the ostrich pose and return to bed for a morning nap, which, although in some circles that may appear decadent to me it feels a trifle pathetic at 9.30 in the morning. I know its a steep learning curve, learning to do it all alone but frankly I think this journey could do with a few rest stops and the odd comfortable bench on which to sit and catch my breathe before I slog onwards on my journing to independance and being a single mother, whilst attempting to retain my sense of humour and sanity at the same time.

The week started with middle having a tummy ache, being off his food ( unheard of) and complaining of feeling sore and tired. I practise the onwards and upwards method of family nursing ie if you arent actually throwing up, are confined to the toilet or have a broken limb then off to school with you. By the time he came home again he was feeling a little rough still but I sent him off to bed with a hot water bottel and a couple of pain killers, Tuesday I had a message from school to come and fetch him as he was vraiment mal au vent, the French being renowned for their hyperchrondria I suspected nothing much but arrived at school to find him sitting on the wall hardly able to stand up and an fashionable shade of stone grey. We drove straight to the Doctors , who was of course closed for lunch and sat and sat until my patient decided actually he was feeling a lot better and a little light bed rest would do the trick. You can see where this is going can't you ? Wednesday we trotted off to the Doctor who took one look at him, poked him a bit then frowned , do you think its appendisitus he asked me, oh yep I replied but had rather hope you'd tell me it was indigestion. People die of appendisitus don't they said youngest. I could see the tears welling up in his brothers eyes. Nobody panic !!

So there we were, a rush back home to deposit youngest with kind neighbours, a dash to hospital ( if you can call a 30 minute drive a dash) a worrying short time in the waiting room in emergency and a quick diagnosis confirmed by blood and urine tests and a lot of poking patient in the groin. Several hours later, the surgeon having been alerted to the fact that tonight he may need to pop in tout suite to do an emergency apendectomy so it might be a good idea to not get involved in anything he didnt mind dropping at short notice, having settled frightened 13 year old into his bed I staggered home arriving at midnight where kind neighbour was dozing at the kitchen table having lit fires in the woodburners and fed and watered youngest who was fast asleep. Dawn came with a phone call to ask how fast I could be back at the hospital so poor youngest was woken deposited with my amazing standby support team and I shot off to arrive just in time to have to wait whilst middle was washed shaved, in the sort of places 13 year old boys really do not want female nurses to shave them, and doped up ready for surgery.

When they took him away on his bed, leaving me in a suddenly empty room, you have no idea how weird a hospital room looks minus a bed plonked in the middle, they told me he'd be back by midday. I sat and twiddled my fingers I phoned his father to leave an urgent message, I phoned his sister to reassure her and I waited. Five oclock he wasseventually rolled through the door still very dopey, his bodies reluctance to wake up from the anesthetic was the cause of the delay, and a very nasty shade of putty. Another midnight journey home in the fog and then back the follwing day to collect him and bring him home less than 24 hours after surgery.

Home safe and well with daily visits from a nurse still sore but getting better by the day and me ? If ti wasnt for kindness and caring of good friends and neighbours I am not sure how I would have mananged it alone, except I would have had to for ,as my almost X husband used to tell me, tough if you can't cope you don't have an option, which I think sums up single parenthood ina nutshell.

2011-09-19T13:23:00.003+02:00

Today is my first day alone for a long time. The children are all back at thier respective edifaces of educational the friends who were helping me do the bathroom floor have finished and left and are off doing thier own things and despite being busy glazing ceramics, entertaining puppy dog and making large textured beads from porcelain there is an emptiness that no amount of cupbpoard cleaning and other domestic chores seems to dispel. To be fair I think having Adele playing on the computer in the background may not be the best choice of uplifting mood music but its more than that. I know its been seven months now, the pain has gone but there rests an emptiness that no amount of letting go and building our own lives will shift as yet. I know I do not want him back I know I will never trust him again but I miss his friendship just the brief silly conversations we had about the kids about life. I miss him being an active part of the kids lives and mine. It is very strange knowing if I text him or email him he probably won't answer and that he shows no interest in what his children are doing with thier lives. Since I have no idea where he lives, and any post comes back as not known at this address for the only contact address I have for him he has become a sort of a phantom in our lives.

The weekend was busy busy busy, we ,me and the boys, stomped off in the rain to an exhibition on Japan, youngest for Sushi, eldest son for Manga, me for the serenity and beauty of the fabrics and gardens. The boys were persauded to join in a demonstration of a hybrid judo karate type sport using Kodachi, short foam training swords. Eldest son who is shy and at that age when anything public is fraught weith potential humiliation was a reluctant combatant youngest leapt at te chance. After beating all 4 of the trainers into a sweat the two brothers were pitted against each other and would have spent the entire day happily bashing each other ceremoniously about the body with the swords if hunger hadn't set in.Luckily for my limited budget the only club is 2 hours drive from us but it seems a great way to get rid of pent up emotion and I shall put Kodachi swords on thier christmas lists for certain ! Supper was at a friends with superb homemade pizza and since it was walking distance a rare adult night for me where I could enjoy a glass of wine and sit outside in the dark with my hosts watching the stars after the boys had made their excuses and gone home to bed ( which on my somewhat tipsy return turned out to be a euphemism for playing computer games together).

Sunday rose in glorious sunshine with no sign of promised storms and we headed seawards to pick mussels climb rocks and play on the beach at Gwen Zegal where we sat in a cave and ate out picnic lunch sheltering from gale force winds and vertical rain , the promised storms apparently having only been waiting for our arrival before they showed up too.

Gwen Zegal has ancient poles stuck in water trees which have been over the centuries uprooted by the locals striped of thier branches then re rooted in the seabed where, presumably, they are anchored by rocks, today small boats moar on them but in Napoleans time the deminutive dictator used to tie traitors to them at low tide and leave them there to drown as the waters rose, ah those were the days ! There is also a cave with pillars inside which once had iron gates to the roof in which he kept prisoners, sometimes the cave floods to the top sometimes only waist deep either way not a pleasant place to await your death. I'm not sure Bonaparte was an awfully nice man but there you go.I suspect when he sent the message « Not tonight Josphoine » she may well have breathed a sigh of relief !!

Anyway enough rambling and prevarication back to work for me, I have a kiln to fill and a cake to make and peanut cookies to bake for two hungry boys, so forgive my vague air of melancholy it is an indulgence that comes and goes and forgive the erratic spelling my computer is having a french day and refuses to recognise English let alone correct spelling. I will as ever pick myself up and dust myself off and start all over again !!

ps the photo is of Gwen Zegal taken this weekend before the storms set in.

What a swell party that was !

2011-09-12T09:46:00.004+02:00

This year I decided I was going to have a birthday party I love giving parties love any excuse for celebration but over the years I had given up celebrating, my father died the year of my 21^st, my inlaws had a flaming row at the dinner table on my 40th and on my 50^th it rained so hard you could have sailed boats down the street so I decided that if this was my new life I'd start it with a bang. I didn't want presents I didn't want speaches I just wanted fun and a celebration of life and being alive despite everything that had happenned.

Hand made Invitaions went out people from far and wide came, my long lost « aunt » from Australia came back especailly from Italy to be there and we cooked up a storm. We erected a gazebo in the garden of a startling turqoise blue, I slow roasted a marinated joint of pork the cheapest and biggest I could find for five hours in the oven until it melted from the bone, we had fresh salads galore from the vegetable patch, a bulgar wheat salad, potato salad from the potager, 15 bagettes from the boulangerie, heaps of garlic bread, and people bought thier own contributions as well, a fantastic beetroot salad, an amazing tuna and pineapple salad with homemade mayonaise and copious apple tartsI in the best french tradition. I made a variation of Eton mess with raspeberries from the garden and my own recipe of ginger tiramisu for desserts. Add to that barbacued sausages and chicken wings ,slaved over by a kind friend who is a whizz at barbacues, carefully hoarded pink sparkling wine bought from a cut price store and a bucket load of pimms and everything went with a swing.

I'd asked for no presents I just wanted friends to come and mark the day with me but they arrived anyway with flowers, plants and wine and an eldery nieghbour presented me with a great big box full of his freshly dug potatoes.

Everybody mixed well, after several drinks the Bretons sang songs and tried to persuade eldest that she should come to the races with them so that could fix her up with a handsome young jockey. I found out things I had never known about these people who had been friends and neighbours for 7 years , not the least being that one of them who is very timid and quiet was in fact a champion jockey until he had a fall and had to retire. Eldest made a speach in three langauges, English French and Turkish someone made one in Breton. Everyone laughed and joked, ate adn drank, children roared around the place like wild animals and the dogs and cats hid.

The sun shone. Everyone pitched in everyone had fun and I didn't even have to do the tidying up for a change. And at the tale end of the day when the first stars were desperate to come out and I had ousted our younger neighbours by gving them a bottle of rose to take home we sat as a family in the garden and opened a bottle of champagne that I had been saving too long for a special occassion that until that moment had never come . We sat ,we chilled and we drank ,toasted the future and friends and family and patted ouselves on the back for a god fete achieved at minumum cost and fuss . Then there was nudging and whispering and fidgetting from the kids and they dissappeared in a flurry to re appear again with a cardboard box hand decorated by youngest.

That was when I discovered another Breton tradition that I had never come accross before ...the birthday box. Each of my friends had without prompting donated a gift of money with a little note each with words of friendship and love and once opened the box contained an dazzling assortment of cash and cheques and the demand that it must be spent on a frippery for me and me alone, not a new mattress not food or to pay off bills or school fees but a gift for me from them.

There are no words to describe how touched I felt how valued and loved it made me feel so what am I going to buy ? I have always wanted an eternity ring but ,for what turned out to be startling obvious reasons my husband never got around to buying me one and now if he had it would have been a hollow reminder of his betrayal so I am glad he didn't.

I think then I shall buy a friendship a ring so that every time I look at it I will remember that I have friends who care and love me no matter what and that despite everything that has happened in my world over the past few years love can be found in the most unexpected places. And to remind me that life can begin again at 53. So happy birthday to me and I thank God that I am blessed with friendship and love from those who really matter.

ps the illustration is by JayMc phillips a contemporary artist whose very witty bio and more of his work can be found at his website here

More awesome things

2011-08-07T14:45:00.004+02:00

Some days are good some are bad some you hope never to have to relive again. Take this week I received a wonderfully packed parcel of dainty lace and pretty buttons and ribbons from a total stranger over on Marigold Jam blog as part of ED's French village life blog swap. it was a great way to end my week. I'd show you but my Epson hates my Toshiba so no pictures today until my electronic equipment kisses and makes up.

This week has had a few serendipitous things happen. They make up for a lot. I do not care that some days the rottenness and unfairness of life seems to blot out the sun or that I feel as if I may drown from the exhaustion of trying to maintain an even keel for the children and make sure some sort of routine and normality is established now that their world has blown apart. I can even deal with having to keep composed and not giving it away when dragging the kids to the orthodentiste this week we got stuck at an interception and I realized the car cutting slowly across my path was being driven by my not quite husbands mistress and that middle in the from seat recognised her too. When the world weighs heavy on your shoulders there is little choice than to go on so as my father in law used to say "shit happens deal with it". So today all is well and despite the discovery that computer has bitten the dust in a rather dramatic way ( who would think a large black and white Tom Cat landing from a great height onto an open computer screen could smash it ( laptop not cat, cat happily continued to settle down on it regardless of what he had done) I am pleased to have survived another week, even if the laptop hasn't and even although we lost all electrical power to the house on Saturday because of the dodgy writing upstairs..

Sundays are for us the hardest day. Sunday was a family day even when Daddy sometimes stayed in bed until midday it was still a day for a family roast and always a pudding and as much happiness as we could wring out of it. The kids miss that anchor in their week and when it is just the four of us it isn't the same so we make new routines to fill the gap. So today we did something different, we went to a vide grenier in the next village, watched a parade of ancient tractors, bought a ridiculously cheap rhubarb plant and planted it in the fruit garden, dug up some new potatoes for dinner, made small crepes and ate them warm for tea and found a wonderful wooden treasure box for youngest to keep his stone collection in.

Awesome things come in many shapes and sizes, a man at a craft fayre I did last night gave youngest two beautiful semi precious stones for his collection, another stall holder from French Ghiana talked to him for almost an hour about the country's fauna and flora and showed him photographs and told tales of his life there, someone whom I had never met came and introduced herself as having bought several of my pieces over the internet and was pleased to meet me in person and an old friend who I haven't seen for years arrived out of the blue stayed to lunch and gave me kind words of wisdom and support. The world is a good place in which Awesome things happen , such awesome things worth isn't dictated by monetary value diamonds may be a girls best friend but somehow I doubt it. it is for me the little surprises and delights that mean the most. Not, in case the fates are listening , that I wouldn't say thank you to the odd diamond 0f course or even just enough to replace the broken computer and have the upstairs rewired before I blow us all up!

The Art of concentrating on the Awesome as opposed to the Awful

2011-07-31T14:17:00.002+02:00

I want to say firstly an enormous and loud thank you to all you who commented on my blog and offered me such support. at a time when I really need it. I am by nature a very private person naturally averse to exposoing my linen, dirty or otherwise, for public inspection I needed to let out some of my confusion and hurt . I had to say out loud what had happenned in order to make it real I had had enough of keeping things hidden, of lies little and big ones and of making excuses. It took a great deal of courage to put on paper what had happenned,, I felt I would be judged as a poor wife because my husband had left, me for someone else so it came as a shock to find instead total strangers were there to hold my hand when I most needed it. That was indeed awesome.

It has been a hard week for all of us, a young friend with small kids has been diagnosed as Bipolar to say she isnt coping with her life and motherhood is too inadequite a phrase, her house her yard the kids and the numerous animals are uncared for and undernourished, She is faling apart and tearing her family apart with her. We have all been trying to keep her small family safe and afloat a task that is tricky and exhasuitng but when the person who is suffering won't admit or recognise they have a problem there is little else you can do but apply a bandaid as a temporay measure and pray help is on its way. The good news is she is now getting help has recognised her problem and is making efforts to deal with it. It will take time and al our support to get her through this with minimal damage.

Sometimes no matter how caring you are you need to step back before other peoples problems engulfed you, you need to take time to breathe and concentrate on yourself and your family. So yesterday we went to the beach with some friends for some badly needed timeout and the day was Awesome, youngest collected oysters and mussels growing wildon the rocks and we cooked them on the beach barbacue, we swam and slept in the sun and drank in the beauty of nature and revelled in the incredible luck we had to be there with peole who loved us and whom we loved. On the way home stopped at a dairy farm for milkshakes and icecream all made at the farm with thier own milk. At home we adults sat in the failing light and drank wine and talked about projects for the future and what we wanted to do next day.

Over the years I have spent hours searching in books and on the internet for some explanation and help as to why my efforts to make our life happy did nto seem to be working, It wasnt until the last year as his black moods became blacker and longer that I realised , with the help of my Doctor that he was a depressive and that no matter how much I tried nothing I eve did would be good enough. To quote my GP and a psychologist somethng in his head had gone click. I persuaded him to go to see our Doctor, he took his medication for a few days then stopped, he wasnt sick he said he was depressed he was unhappy, I wasnt attractive he didint love me anymore no there was no one else all the usual clap trap al the usual lies and petty betrayals.

Anyway when in the end he left after I decided the children and I couldnt carry on living on a knife edge anymore and here I am alone with my kids and there he is not alone with his new love and life goes on. One of the sites I fell upon by chance during my desperate travels through the internet in search of help was the Ted Talks . It was a serendiptic happenstance that I will always be grateful for and the talks on there are often enlightening often helpful often funny. The one that has perhaps helped me the most and resonated in baby steps of my new life as a single mother and soon to be divorcee is this one....http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_pasricha_the_3_a_s_of_awesome.html .

read it and see if any of it resounds with you and let me know. And if it does pass the message around to anyone who isnt too wrapped up in thier own lives and remind them Life is Awesome, live it.

Goodbye from him..

2011-07-20T20:21:00.003+02:00

Last month I celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary, well Ok I didn't celebrate it as there seemed little point when my one true love and best friend of 28 years had found his one true love and new bestus friend and dumped me and our now rather distressed and bewildered children in her favour . Ah well there is nothing quite like being traded in for a new model and being told you are not attractive to make you realize how someone feels about you. honestly some people will do anything to avoid spending money on thier wives. I say wife but I am not sure what I am anymore , I live now in a limboland of non status, Im still his wife but she is" his new partner " which leaves me sort of without a label. I have become the other woman.It is a very bizzarre feeling. I do not even know where he is.

After the divorce I have to return to my maiden name by French law if I ask the judge to very nicely ask my almost ex husband to give me permisison to keep his name and he agrees I can. I think I have had enough humiliation to last me a lifetime so I shall just revert to my own name.

So here I am kids to comfort and build a new life for, a smile plastered on my face and dreams and future plans that we made together smashed under foot . I am not even sure anymore if I was ever loved at all. After so many lies being placed upon lies I have no idea what the truth was if there was in fact any truth there at all, if he ever really loved me at all.

And that I think is perhaps the greatest betrayal, leaving me for always in doubt that I was ever loved at all. It is a pain I would not wish on my worst enemy. But there you have it life as they assure me goes on.

Reasons to be Grateful.....

2011-02-08T17:42:00.005+01:00

Despite T S Elliots views on April , it is February which is , I am certain, by far the cruellest month. The days are dire, damp and dreer, the worlds spirits droop and the black dog stalks snapping at the heels of those who may be stumbling in the darkness of the bleak mid winter.

So then, short of hibernation which I must admit seems at times rather a fetching option , what can one do to defend ones self against the slings and arrows of whatever it is and the whatsit of adversity? Something must be done and whilst the devil may make work for idle hands February isnt the best time of year to get out and keep those hands busy in the garden , so some sort of more sedentary activity is needed to keep those happy nuerons sparked and perk up all those bits of us that may be flagging .

I never was one to cheerfully roll my sleeves up and make Lemonade when life gave me lemons ( Lemon merignue pie or Morrocan tagine possibly but not lemonade) far more likely to want to cut them up and watch the bubbles rise as they bounce into a glass of icy Bomaby Gin and Tonic. Despite Brian extolling us to " always look on the bright side of life" , I find trying to persaude someone who has fallen into a pit of despair to always look on the bright side in times of distress rather a futile idea vaguelly on a par with telling a man who has just lost a foot that it was a jolly good thing he hadn't bought those new boots then. To be honest there isnt a lot one can do for anothers despair except offer support and love their help must come from within themselves which makes it all the more harder for those who desperatley want to help them. All you can do is remember that like the measles black moods can be terribly contagious and one must take steps to protect ones self so that we do not all end up in the same pit together.

So despite or possibly because of, Julie Andrews cajolling me from my childhood to think of roses and mittens (or was it whiskers on kittens ? ) I have evolved my way of keeping my spirits up when all aroudn are drowning in thiers. My protection against the black dog and my safety net agaainst what my mother used to describe as falling into a treacle well, is my list of things to be grateful for. Everyday when I wake up I take a minute to think of at least three things that make my life worth living. Actually since I am blessed with three wonderful children that one isnt hard but we easily forget all that we have that is good and concentrate on the nasty bits. So during the long winter months and dark days I try, if I catch my heart sinking , to look at the world as if it is new and to register in my minds eye all the wonderful and marvelious things I have around me.

Here then is todays list of reasons to be cheerful, the beauty and warmth of winter sunshine through the car window, old and weather beaten archetecture, bananas, Edith Piaf, Mimosa with its acid yellow balls of sunshine on a bleak day,the smell of orchids and lillies in the supermarket, being woken at night by a cat that wants to be stroked and then curls up and purrs on my hip as I sleep, Bachs rescue rememdy and Bergamot oil, Thai crab cakes and sweet Chilli sauce, home made ice cream and my boys to make it with, the stark outlines of the freshly pruned trees against the winter sky, the inviting chocolate coloured soil of my freshly dug potager, smiles form strangers, massed flocks of starlings trying out their winged acrobatics as the evening falls and the love, prayers and support of friends and strangers at times of need.

So many things in life to be grateful for then if only we looked. Not very eloquently or well put ( or spelt for that matter but one of my other reasons to be cheerful is the fact that for some time my spell check refuses to read my blo so I am free to misspell and miss type to my hearts content and I can blame that) Neil Pasricha does it better ie he explains better about the Awesomeness of life not why I can't spell, and if you have spare time you'd rather the devil didn't fill I advise you to watch his video via the link above.

Just remember that blessings, like pennys from heaven, mount up if you take the time to store them and treasure them.

So there you go some of my reasons to be cheerful ...now what are yours ?

Its snowing outside.. (no it isn't oh yes it is!)

2010-12-03T12:21:00.002+01:00

Well here we are house bound under heaps of cold white stuff with the ducks and chickens stomping about waist high in snow and the dogs refusing to outside at all. After a few days the novelty is wearing thin and distraction is needed! The house is bedecked with damp socks boots and disgarded snow gear and there are melting puddles of ice on the kitchen floor so I think its time we give Wii a rest stop getting stir crazy and do something differnent ! But what? Well what better way to boost morale and get in the approaching holiday spirit than a bit of amateur dramatics ? After all Panto season is nearly upon us!

When we were kids we were always subjecting family to plays and circus performances but modern kids are lucky to have the added bonus of some professional help and hitech activity thanks to the help of Robinsons those ever so famous fruit drinks people who have kindly teamed up with celebrity mum and pantomime star, Tina O’Brien, to introduce a new and interactive website so the family can enjoy some festive frolics even if they can nto get the car out of the drive becasue of the snow drifts! So if you ever wanted to put on your own panto now is your chance and not only is it fun you can help raise some money for a good cause too as Robinsons are donating money to Barnados and so can your friends an family when they view your antics online!

Pop along to - www.pantokaraoke.com – and make yourselves stars for the day with the help of the interactive website, your webcam and some willing actors! And whats more you can then ecard your panto to family and friends or pop it on your blogpage and hey presto a star is born!! What more you don't even have to dig through the dressing up box as they have even got the costumes covered with a bit of computer know how up their sleeves! I wonder if there is a part for me .. alas I think I am less principal boy more pantomine dame but hey ho I'm game for a laugh ! Are you?

Remembering Turkey ....at last...

2010-10-04T12:35:00.004+02:00

Today is one of THOSE days.We got up late so the school run was a dash. I have a hundred things to do, it is raining like the second deluge and my neighbour turned up just after school drop off and stayed the entire morning to chat. She is a young mother with 3 small children and I hadn't the heart to throw her out, we live in the middle of the countryside, she does not have family near by and too well I remember days when I was at home with a small baby and desperate for someone to talk too. I could do with a holiday or for someone to stop time just for a few hours so I can catch my breath.

The rain though reminds me of our trip to Turkey. The night before we left Greece and headed for the Turkish border the heavens opened, the tents leaked and we found ourselves camping in a very large puddle. I spent the night lying watching the mother feral cat sitting under our table outside as she made numerous trips to retrieve her wandering kittens who, judging from their reactions had never met weather like this before.

By the time we got to the border the rain had cleared and we sat amongst carloads of Turks returning home for the summer, the crossing is not easy, there are various checkpoints, numerous stamps and papers to be collected and corrected and money passing hands all amidst frayed tempers and angry travelers and an overpowering feeling that one small step wrong may end badly. Travelling into Turkey by road really is like crossing into a foreign country. With te open door policy in Europe I had forgotten what border crossings were like and how frightening men with large guns and short tempers can be.

Once through we drove onwards into the rain, which had caught us up past mile upon mile of sunflowers ever closer to our destination Istanbul. Somehow I had imagined seeing it in a halo of sunlight, a myriad of minarets glittering under a blue sky. We we saw instead was a frightening busy city which took us three hours to cross in rush hour traffic and heavy rain and being hampered by lack of a decent map and the inability to read Turkish road signs or understand the strange motorway toll system. The volume of noise and movement was daunting. A constant hullaballoo of car horns and sirens assailed our ears and as the night drew in we did not seem to be getting any closer . Eldest had been sitting all afternoon at the Apartment we had rented , sending messages all saying roughly " Are you here yet?, Where are you ?" The answer to both questions being we have no idea! Eventually we turned up exhausted stressed and hungry but so so glad to see her again and to find the apartment a real haven of peace and serenity after a very hard and long day.

The rain cleared and we stood on the balcony arm in arm admiring the city sparkling like a gem in the dark.

And here in the morning light is what we woke too. The sound of river traffic and parrots flying through the trees. The smell of warm damp earth after rain, blue skies, and a beautiful view accross the Bosporous. As I stood looking out across the water from Asia to Europe and saw everywhere fluttering in the breeze the giant red Turkish flags flying proudly over bridges and buildings, it felt like coming home and I for one was in love with the city already.

Now here I am in France, home again, livingin another rainy day in another country, too engaged in looking at photos of our glorious trip across Europe into the unknown to bother about the many things I am meant to be doing in the here and now and thinking about just how lucky I am to have those memories of another wet day in another world to get me through this damp day in October.

Having a whale of a time in Italy and Greece

2010-08-19T22:43:00.002+02:00

Feeling like a dumpling and being used to the site of stick thin French women of all ages with nary an ounce of untoned flesh,I wasn't keen on the idea of exposing my ample flesh to the world and was pretty certain, although the terms pretty and bikini in my case do not marry well, that if I dared to my don a two piece I would very probably be contravening some EEC bylaw .Thus depressed by the vision of myself be sporting white Michelin man rolls of rolling flab to the world I invested in a sensible but chic item of swimwear in a tasteful chocolate brown with a cream trim and sporting a discreet skirt. It is very French and looks great on the model.

Alas having arrived at the beach in Italy I soon discovered that it is probably the biggest fashion error of the century. For here, amongst the cicadas and Oleanders, I discovered that the Adriatic coast is populated with brazen and badly upholstered women of advancing years all of whom regardless of shape, size and assorted wrinkles, wore bikinis in various styles and skimpiness and all wrapped around below their ample girths, a flimsy gossamer scrap bedecked with sequins, as if to emphasize rather than disguise their trembling thighs. I felt, and no doubt looked, like Nanny Ogg (if you do not know you Nanny Ogg is shame on you and go away and read some Terry Pratchett immediately!).

Greek beaches are equally populated with in your face matriarchs and although their flesh is browner the sagging and ungainly bits are just as obvious and unabashedly shown. Women here are women and proud of it. It seems in this heat covering up is not an option, The message here is this...A woman's body is a good thing and if you got it flaunt it no matter if the elastic has gone and it needs a good iron. I now look like a dowager duchess and am seriously considering one of the tents into an item of swimwear more attractive than my current costume. I would go to the shops and search out something but am yet to master the Greek for " Excuse me Madame, do you stock a jauntily cut barrage balloon with matching wrap in my size please?” It is interesting to see here women breast feeding discreetly a large toddler. In France breasts are definitely for sex and men's enjoyment and not for feeding babies, the bottle rules. Here it seems common sense prevails which may be why there seem to be so many happy bouncing toddlers about. This leads one to wonder if French mens obsession with boobs may come from not being breastfed and if they had been they perhaps wouldn’t be quite so oversexed. Now there is a subject for a thesis!

Onwards and upwards across Europe then, my brown barage ballon draping itself wet and ungainly about my legs as I emerge form the sea less like Venus more like the Kraken I look forward to Istanbul where at least I can be reassurred that I will not be expected to display my naked body parts to the world as I am realiably informed that anythign above the knee should be firmly covered up, and if worst comes to worst I can easily purchase an all enveloping garment in slimming black that will cover me from head to toe.. . well thank Allah and the muslim dress code for small mercies say I!

Of course we have to get to Turkey first and that is another story..

Italy and the home of la Dolce Vita and of course...Gormitti...

2010-08-10T21:23:00.008+02:00

The internet is a wonderful thing but it does have its draw backs. One of which is the feeling that with all this information at one so finger tips one should be able to book the perfect camping spot and thus avoid the stressful evenings arriving in a strange country with minimal vocabulary and frayed nerves looking for a place to stop. As an adult I have realized that the reason that Mary and Joseph are always depicted plodding into Bethlehem with her on a donkey looking straight ahead and him stomping in front has less to do with a serene holy family and more to do with her refusing to map read anymore and sitting tight lipped because every hotel they found was either too expensive for what he had budgeted for, didn't have safe parking facilities for the donkey or was in a rough neighbourhood or he was sure he could find a better one at a cheaper price. Jesus was born in a stable because his mother said it was the stable or sod Joseph she was going straight home to her mother and she didn't mind if the straw didn't look fresh she just wanted to lie down. If they had had the internet they would have stayed at 4 star hotel chain and had free continental breakfast throw in for for booking online and very probably free disposable nappies and their photo in the paper as well .

We toyed with buying a GPS before we went on this trip and borrowed my nieces for a few days to see how we would get on. It was a short lived romance as not only did the thing have an aversion to parking under trees, it kept losing its signal thus giving us the option of roasting alive in some Italian parking lot whilst we awaited instructions form the dashboard driver or parking in the shade and admitting we were lost but we also found that French GPS only covers France or at a push a few neighboring countries but nothing as far flung as Greece or Turkey. One did promise to including mapping for 47 European countries ( not including Turkey and Greece) which led to a fun evening trying to name 47 of them only every managing to get as high as 39. Somewhere out there there are 8 nations hidden in Europe of which we know nothing. None of the GPS systems named their 47 countries so in order to answer the question of which ones we would need to spend 300 Euros to buy a GPS so we preferred to live in ignorance or save it for another road trip.Goggle however is my friend and in the months of preparation for this journey I have goggled routes , campsites, places of interest and other exciting details al of which were designed to make the trip as stress free as possible. Thus we arrived via the Mont Blanc Tunnel in Aosta in Italy as night was falling and installed ourselves in a hotel where we ate slabs of pizza with Lorry drivers visited a local supermarket for supplies ( and Gormittis) and drank heady red wine before retiring to the large comfortable beds in our well equiped family room to make use of the ample free toiletries, highly effective power shower, and watch the lights from the mountain chalets glitter in the moonlight. Heidi eat your heart out, we had landed in the land of Gormittis and the boys were in heaven.
The holidays had begun!

(Photo for those happy creatures amongst you who do not possess young boys with a fetish for small Italian plastic creatures here they are Gormittis ...well it could be worse it could be my little ponies)

(photo of the view from our hotel room in Aosta)

Sadly although the route planners were fantastic at navigating us across the vast expanses of pan European motorways and routes national, it had one glaring fault when it came to the finer details. Frankly any idiot, and I include myself in this, can find their way from Paris to Parma by simply following the names on the motorway signs but the devil as they say is in the detail. and that is where Google and all other route planners fall short.

Our first night under canvas was at an Adriatic Beach resort. I had the route map, I had the directions I had Google's careful instructions. "Turn gauche onto the SS16 direction Milan" it commands boldy " after I minute turn droit then gauche and straight on via Enrico fernadez III until it turns right onto via Garabaldi "Google directs with the supreme confidence of a no it all. What it neglects to take into account is that the roads seem to be missing signs giving their names, we have a stream of indignant Italian drivers peeping their horns at you and the city fathers have closed the road which goggle would like you to turn gauche down and you are now lost somewhere in a confusing knot of narrow streets and being buzzed on all sides by zippy little scooters bearing scantily clad Italian youths intent on dying before they reach puberty.

So whilst it may be fair to assume somewhere on our left amongst the 27 options for turning there was undoubtedly a street of that name it is not marked and with every person on the pavements we hailed from the window of the Landrover responded to our yelled "scusee senora!" with the Italian equivalent of " sorry mate no idea I'm a tourist myself". A long stream of traffic building up behind us navigation was interesting but not enjoyable. Luckily Him is not only an able driver but also a cunning linguist ( careful how you say that) despite not speaking Italian he managed after several tries, to spot the natives from the tourists, gather directions from them and locate our destination, a campsite which was like all campsites on the Adriatic coast bulging at the seams and the wrong side of the railway tracks

When Mussolini sorted out the railways and made them run on time it appears he did not have the forethought to envisage the future prospect of tourism of his beloved Italy.The views from the trains must the stunning, the views of the trains are not.The trains run fast, frequently and efficiently all night past each strip of idyllic sand bordered by crystal seas and one tired and grumpy camper restless in her tent surrounded by snoring family .

(Photo of a rare bit of heaven on the Adriatic coast minus the pepetual clang of the trains!)

I love to go a wandering..travels to Turkey and back

2010-08-02T09:49:00.009+02:00

I learnt two interesting things the first night we slept in the Landrover at the beginning of our great adventure heading across Europe towards Istanbul. The first was, Refrigerated lorries keep their motors going all night to keep the cargo cold and the second is that French lorry drivers think nothing of working through until the early hours trying to fix a sick engine even if that means bashing and thumping it into submission with a lump hammer in the pouring rain for hours on end. All this knowledge is what one gains from leaving several hours after one intended to leave in order to rush out and buy amongst other things goldfish food and an extension lead for the cool box cigarette lighter adapter.

Despite well laid plans and printed itineraries which had us due to depart all ship shape and bristol fashion, straight after school on Friday, we left home about 7.30 pm as storm clouds darkened the sky and headed towards Rennes to avoid the bouchon caused by every soul in Paris quiting the capital at midnight and rushing off towards the South on the first day of the Grande summer vaccances.

Our ploy worked and we missed all the traffic, gloating as we sped towards Monte Blanc the next day with traffic reports of the roads south being jammed packed with overheating cars and fractious travellers. The price we paid was choosing to sleep in a motorway service area along with several other smart thinking early birds and the afore mentioned lorry drivers.

In the Early morning light the women trooping out of the various vans and campers and cars emerged looking clean, well rested and dressed for the day I fell out, as only the English can, looking 94 and bearing the appearnace of one who has slept in a hedge. How do French women manage it? I wish I knew or failing that I wish I could look at them and not feel inferior for my inability to look as neat. A womans role here is to look if not a seductress then at least tempting and a great deal of money is spent each year achieiving this goal. As a French friend told us after his wife returned from a 3 hour stint at the hairdressers, women are for thier husbands, an expensive but worthwhile investment. Luckily for our family budget I am the english low maintenance budget option. Amongst the French I stick out like a sore thumb and am long past my sell by date. Happily I find in Greece and Italy even the lorry drivers wink at me and smile , all this and sunshine too I think we may need to relocate, again.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. What were we doing travelling in the height of summer in an ancient but robust tin box across the width of Europe to the very doorsteps of Asia? It isnt after all your normal summer hols is it? It fits neither into the two weeks at the seaside nor the exotic air travel to glamourous places categories so perhaps the trip needs some explanation. Admittedly I had run out of spices and where better than the Egyptian Market on the banks of the Bosperous to restock but even for me that is rather a flimsy excuse for embarkign on yet another voyage, mind you any excuse would have done. I am a sucker for travel, anywhere, anytime but this excursion had a purpose. Eldest, who has been living in Istanbul for the last 10 months learning Turkish and living like a native thanks to a Rotary Scholarship, needed fetching home .

So it was then that we set off across Brittany through the darkening night, him, me, the two boys, and enough clutter to support an entire boyscout troop on their annual camping trip to Ilfracombe in search of our absent daughter, assorted spices and a bit of an adventure.

And we managed all three.....of which I will tell you later....

If this is Spring then I want a refund !

2010-03-23T09:46:00.006+01:00

Sunday was the first day of Spring and as we drove back home the Breton countryside shone and the radio trilled with every French primtemps song ever written and some of them that very probably never should have been. Click the links and you will get a small taster. The lane where we live was flecked with the first dancing heads of the wild daffodils , decked out in their egg yolk splendour, and small birds, daft with the intoxicating joy of spring sunshine, chased each other about the trees, even the ducks, those lovers of mud and ooze, joined in, building themselves a rather make shift nest in the vegetable patch and preening in the unexpected warmth. Having left on Friday in the rain and dark it was like returning home to another world.

We spent the weekend at the coast, he and I, in a village which clings to the coast of Finistere by its toes and stares across white sand to the crashing waves which cover the jagged rocks with spume as they come roaring in all the way from America. Where we live in central Brittany , Spring is far too cautious to have fully throw off her winter cloak just yet but there by the sea the Mimosa was almost past its best, blousy crimson Camilias grown tarnished in their last splendour showed offtheir fading beauty in the gardens and the banks were full of wild garlic daffodils and primroses . Sunshine bracing sea air to blow away the winter cobwebs and lots of clear light to soothe our jaded souls in.

Yesterday, enlivened by sunlight, I made heaps of oatmeal biscuits and piles of fairy cakes saving the shells for an Easter wreaths I plan to make from moss, twisted vines and speckled feathers from the chickens and ducks spring moult. I hung the weekend washing on the line watching it dance in the strong breeze and flap like tethered kites in its own dance to spring.

Today the weather has sobered up and put its sensible clothes back on. The daffodils look more like shipwrecked mariners in their so'westers and winter has slipped down the fields under cover of the night and stolen the sunshine away so that the roads slosh and slide with mud and everything once more looks unappetisingly damp and drear. The tumble dryer rumbles and the dogs are skulking under the table in case I notice them and send them out through the drizzle to sulk in their kennels. I have made bread and put on a pot of potato soup to warm chilled bones and cheer hearts dulled by the leaden sky. Next thing you know I will be forced to go and get more firewood, it is all most unseasonal and provocative and I am not amused in the slightest at this latest turn around.

I would be most grateful if someone would please kindly find out what happenned to this long expected spring and bring it back ?

Mending broken hearts

2010-03-01T13:36:00.003+01:00

I am busy for the past week working on a commission of ceramic hearts, dainty little pieces that are as fragile and breakable as the real thing. I am not sure whether this is extremely appropriate for me at present or whether it is so horribly inappropriate that it is beyond thinking about as I have been, of late, it feels , rather over occupied with damaged broken and slightly chipped hearts whose owners have been washed up at my door, or wail down the telephone in sobs, the flotsam and jetsam of stormy relationships, sudden squalls and all destroying tempests that have battered their fragile beings on the rough waters of the sea of love. ( So mills and Boon! ) Appropriate or not I am not in the mood for doves ,hearts and flowers which makes these pieces rather hard to finish, hence I am here blogging when I should be glazing instead. I may even stoop to putting the washing out soon , anything rather than paint another heart when my heart aint in it.

I am a dab hand at curing slightly bruised young heart mended easily with a hug and a large hot chocolate and a stirring lecture about there being plenty more fish in the sea. Even thoguh I may so myself I am also passibly succesful when it comes to a slightly more damaged one which has been subjected to far too many unkindly knocks for its age and is just getting back on its feet after a long struggle to mend and beat in hope again . But currently I am labouring over one so damaged that I really am not sure that there are enough pieces left intact or in fact whether there is enough vinegar and brown paper in the world to mend it. An old heart past its first bloom which I know over the years has rallied against all odds to crest each wave of betrayal and upset only to find now like a long distance swimmer it isn't sure it has the energy to go forwards and is in fact just treading water and bowing to the inevitable that this time if theie marraige goes under they may well not come up again. That is perhaps the hardest of all to fix. How after all those years does its owner decide enough is enough ? When do they draw the line and say they are worth more than that and that being alone may perhaps be better than loneliness within a relationship where they feel unloved. Who am I to say? Faced with that what advise can I give ? So I say nothing but carry on nodding giving tissues and looking as if I understand their pain, which I do more than they imagine.

I would not have said that I am the most kindly and gentle of women and yet I am the one to whom friends come to in tears or anger, to complain, to seek sympathy and a hug, the one who will soothe and pour balm on wounds, whose advise friends seek in the matter of vile wandering husbands and unruly lovers. As such I am their the port in the storm, the firm rock on which to lean whilst they get they breath, and in a bizzarre way it is quite satisfying feeling one has helped soothe a pain, redress a balance ,when I see them go away with a bit more spring in their step and sparkle in their eyes, a bit more confidence in themselves and the fac that they are loveable. But just as you expect your doctor to at least pretend always be healthy and not tell you about his bunions or constipation so I am barred by definition of that role from ever admitting that at times I too might need a bit of the same. So whilst I phone to check on progress, sigh in sympathy, pat hands and boil the kettle for all they know my own heart might well be ,slowly, bit by bit ,falling apart too . Would they notice? I suspect not, meanwhile like the priest in the confessional I take all on board and listen unjudgmental to the tales of " It just happened it didn't mean anything etc etc" and am sworn to keep my secrets.

Ah well back to the hearts, spring is ,as they say in the air and I can only hope that hearts and that the young and not so young men who at this season traditionally turn to love do so with some prior thought to their actions and the consequences thereof and realise that some of them are at least old enough to know better. I have enough on my plate thank you very much.

Wii meet again

2010-02-18T16:01:00.005+01:00

Since Eldest trotted off to Turkey last August I fear I may have fallen into a bit of a pit of self neglect and indulgence. It was always she, in her self appointed role as my personal trainer. who noticed and commented on how I looked and we all know how far a little bit of friendly encouragement can go especialy when one lives in a houseful of males . Case in point being that two weeks ago I dyed my hair chestnut and the only other adult in residence hasnt yet noticed. Ah well. Hear me and take heed next time I may dye it pink, anything to get a bit of attention around here !

Today I staggered reluctantly Wii-wards propelled thence by a morning ill spent reading travel sites about Turkey online and terrified at the images looming in my minds eye, of myself, hot sweaty and horribly wobbly, slogging around Istanbul in the torrid heat or besporting my girth on Turkeys sweltering beaches in a swimsuit originally designed for the Michelin man.

There comes a time when one must face reality full on and for me the time is now. Like it or not I have to admit that I have put on weight over the last 6 months and, which ever way I look at it ( even in the semi-dark with my eyes squinted shut) I do not like it. Not to mention the fact that my favourite trousers no longer fit which means that, thanks to my patheticaly limited wardrobe it is a choice of either shedding pounds or only accepting social engagements that allow me to wear grubby jeans .

I return then like a repentant sinner to the daily slog of 30 minutes each morning of wii-ness accompanied by the vile cyber essex girl aerobics instructor who struts her stuff without breaking into a smile or a sweat, whilst I strain every inch of my being trying to keep up without falling off theWii board. She has incidently, I note, had a make over for the Wii plus. She sports a new hair style and now wears her straggly locks no longer in a pony tail (that always looked to me as if it were kept in place by a rubber band probably retrieved hastily from the changing room floor) but in a bun with, what I suppose is meant to be a fetching little tuft coming out of the top but to me looks like a dog turd with a feather stuck in it.

Eldest and I never really took to her and suspected she had a thing going with her Essex man co-worker, he who would suddenly pop up as a replacement trainer on early morning sessions, presumably because she had a cyber hang over and had slept in or had to pop out the back for a fag to recharge her battery pack and thus leave him in charge of her workouts. So when I first encountered her new image on Wii Plus today I could not help noticing that she seemed to have got much meatier, big child bearing hips and chunky thighs, I thought she had given up smoking or developed a cyber cream cake fetish. Then I realised that its just we have purchased a new wide screen flat TV since last we met and she hasnt put on weight at all,her body has just been stretched over a larger surface area. We do then have something in common after al, as I am undoubtedly taking up more than my share of surface area here.

Never let it be said however that Nintendo do not have a sense of humour. Despite my long neglect, Wii was most welcoming.

" Do I know you ?" She simpered" ...You look familiar and I never forget a face" she said in that smooth cyber talk " Well W****y hello there, I didn't recognise you". She trilled a flirt in her voice liketeh true slapper she looks. Then delighted in telling me I had not been to visit her for 136 days and that I had mananged to put on a frightening and utterly unrepeatable amount of kilos since I last pounded her board. Great not only have I turned into a lard bucket I now apparently look like my husband. Actually with hindsite the latter wouldnt be so bad as at least he is as reed thin as the day I married him despite doing little or no excercise for the past 25 years, eating anything he likes and making noble attemps to drink the European wine lake dry. There he sits smoking away chomping on hunks of chedda, sauccison and bowls of pistachios , living proof that there is, should I ever need to be reminded yet again of the fact, that there is no justice in this world.

Anyway back to the wicked Wii woman, after I had yelled for support from Middle who knows the workings of her mind and which buttons to press, she relented and told me she was in fact joking. Apparently sadly though only about the name and not the weight gain as she then went into some great detail about just how much I had put on in how much time and how I had regretably failed to attain my set targets and did I really appreciate the seriousness of my foolhardy actions and had I been snacking? No you vile creature I have not been snacking. I have been attempting to fill the void in my life(created by the early departure of my first born to a life full of excitement in far away places )with chocolate, wine and a dazzling repetoire of home made meals created from recipes from around the world. That, oh hateful creature, that is not snacking it is alternative medicine as any real woman would know. Wii surely knows how to make a woman feel wanted.

I guess she must have been programmed by a man.

Snowflakes from Heaven

2010-01-10T22:35:00.009+01:00

For most of the new year our tiny corner of Brittany has looked like a backdrop for a high budget film version of Dr Zhivago and we are becoming habituated to snow. Our neighbours have built a horse drawn sledge on which the chidren have taken jolly rides over a endless white landscape and middle and I have trudged to the village, wrapped up like eastern European refugees, to buy bread . We have got used to stomping through snow each day to the barn to replenish the log baskets, dragging our load by toboggan up through the drifts to the house.

Each morning we wake to the all enveloping silence that only a heavy blanket of snow brings and the dim half light of velux shrouded in a smothering of thick whiteness. At night we go to bed sharing our room with a family of wrens who sneak in through some small gap and sleep in the warmth of our converted barn before dissapearing in the morning in search of food. As the days progress my car gets buried deeper and deeper under drifts, not that it matters as it can not go anywhere in this weather. Today our ancient lanrover drifted into the fosse and had to be persuaded back with the aid of planks and a bit of heaving and shoving onto what was not so long ago a tarmac road. With so much snow it is hard to tell where the road ends and infinity begins.

Youngest returned from his school ski trip today and we parents met in the village square to collect out returning prodginy. It appears we have had more snow than the ski resort which has hosted their jaunt . The road was lined with tractors, farming parents coming in on their work vechiles to pick up off spring. It may not be as smart as a brad new four wheel drives driven by urbanites but you can bet your life its more effient and you would be amazed just how many people you can stuff into a tractor cab if you put the luggage in the bucket at the front.

We have had no school for the past week, not that anyone is complaining. It is, we are told , the whitest winter since the war to end all wars. But we know that end it will and after the snow will come the thaw, and with it the mud. Bearing that in mind I hope it continues to snow until February as many say it will.

And so I sit here in the unearthly silence at or kitchen table as the snow falls relentlessly outside, burying our world steadily in a damask quilt of blinding white and I toast the safe return of our youngest to the fold with a glass or two of Crémant D'Alsace and thank the fates who have given me the chance to be snow bound in Brittany with the owl hooting in the tree outside in the darkness , my boys asleep in their beds and a caring husband asleep in mine.

Let it snow let it snow let it snow..

2009-12-18T19:07:00.003+01:00

All week the children of Brittany have been watching the yellowing skies,holding their breathe and waiting for snow. Last night after the school concert the inhabitants of our small village spilled out into the darkness to find their patience had been rewarded with a world dusted in white crystals. What better gift for Christmas could a child ask for than Snow ? And to arrive on the last day of school had about it the magic of fairy tales.

And arrive the snow did. By morning the countryside was a virginal white ,ripe to be despoiled by young boys eager to build a snowman. At breakfast I had a kitchen full of cats, dogs and puppies tumbling about underfoot. Our dogs are outside dogs.Their kennels are warm and cosy but they sat on the doorstep like abandoned children, their coats slowly being turned white with snowflakes, and I am soft hearted.

Middle stayed home as his school is too far across winding country roads to guarantee a safe journey there and back but youngest went eager to play snowballs with his friends in the school courtyard. By midday flurries had turned to a blizzard and youngest was retrieved early from school before it was too treacherous to drive and the only option became a 45 minutes walk in bitter cold and fading light. He I am sure would have loved it but I wasn't game having done it before in the last heavy snowfall a few years ago when I rashly deiced I ought to walk into the village to buy a baguette. Delightful though it was then to see the deer prints in the snow and revel in the eerie silence of a snowbound landscape the novel wore off quickly after the first hundred metres of stomping up and down hill through thick snow.

After lunch we dragged the toboggan out from its long abandoned corner of the barn and ,wrapped like Eskimos, braved the cold in search of a slippery slope down which to hurl our selves. The first three winters we were here we had heavy snow and used to play in the abandoned orchards behind the empty farm which lay at the bend of the road but it is empty no more and our new neighbours have horses in the orchard. Nevertheless worth a try perhaps if they had kept them in from the cold. We met our young neighbours headed our way coming to see if we were coming to play. They are young farmers and their small children have never seen snow like this before. All afternoon children, and those of us who forgot that we were adults, tumbled with dogs and boys in the snow until toes and noses fingers and feet were frozen beyond feeling and temporary retreat was negotiated with bribes of hot chocolate and cake in front of the fire and the promise of more forays and fun later.

Later came quickly after a change of clothes and a drying out of wet Wellingtons. We resumed our earlier endeavours and raced through the snow covered trees hung heavy with mistletoe Whilst our neighbour fed the horses, ambushing him in a well planned attack from behind the bales and the water buts and running off hollering our victory before he could retaliate. Now it is evening and I have come home armed with mistletoe to hang. The sky, which only 10 minutes ago was pink like ethereal candyfloss against the snow with the twisted arms of the ancient cider apple trees silhouetted in black like some theatrical backdrop, is now deep dark and fathomless.The light has faded and the fires are blazing. There is a big stock pot on the stove gently bubbling with pumpkin and cumin soup and the smell of pine resin and bread baking fills the house.The pile of wet coats drying around the wood burner in the kitchen and soggy clothes by the washing machine has doubled in size since this morning.

This is how the days before Christmas should be. Full of wonder and delights; full of innocent pleasures and laughter . For today at least the sorrow of being nul at dictee, of forgetting your conjugations, of chidings for untidy rooms and lost possessions are all forgotten.. Tonight they will go to bed exhausted dreaming of snow and hoping to wake again to a world of magical whiteness where the slate of all the petty strain and stress of school are wiped clean and joy is born aloft on the first snowball.

Deep dark and damp days in darkest Brittany

2009-11-25T09:25:00.004+01:00

Sunday morning. Besieged by storms ,the solar lights uncharged , we are like pioneers swathed in the gloom of an ancient winter, rain lashing the house outside and casting a sombre pall over everything inside . This house was built long ago, its back turned against the wind, hunkering down into the cleft between the roundness of the hills like an old man crouching in a ditch, trees planted for protection over the centuries dwarfing it.. Outside the light cast through the autumn colours of beech and birch is golden the sky a sickly yellow like a fading bruise from the nights beating.It is 10.30 and so dark I am writing by candle light.

We are not prepared for this sudden jolt back through the centuries to a time before electricity. We have not yet ordered the wood for winter a cold wind whips beneath eh door and no one can remember how to light the oil lamp nor whether it will work on petrol , The torches batteries are either dead or running low and we can not find the matches. We have bottled gas though and candles and jumpers to keep us warm so we play at being cast aways whilst the pressure cooker hisses unkind threats at the chicken ensnared in its belly and the boys play joyfully with their toys in the dark. The last time the power died it took 36 hours to revive it but we have not learnt our lesson believing the EDF ( French electricity) that with the new lines installed it would never happen again. Meanwhile we wait and watch.

Our young neighbour arrives do we have electricity? Nope him neither we lament being at the end of the line. Can he use our mobile to call the EDF his needs charging. We sit and admire his optimism at getting anyone to answer on a Sunday. He calls, we put on the kettle for coffee the gas splutters . EDF play soothing music but sat nothing. We decide they are all good catholics and in church where there are plenty of candles or are bad communist and too lazy to work at weekends. The wind roars, the sky darkens the rain comes again. The gas dies, so much for coffee then. Still EDF plays soothing songs. Young neighbour goes home and my husband goes off in search of a new Gaz bottle in the next town to check if they have any power.The wind continues to howl.

I grew up by the sea and, with each rising crescendo of the gale, instinctively half listen for the crash of the waves as the wind rises but there is no abating and it roars on like a ceaseless argument between sky and land.

What was it like then, before ,to live in the depths of Brittany down in the hollows of the Kreizh Breizh between rocks and woods. The old houses have vast inglenooks deep enough to sit inside and in winter the family lived therein, women on one side men another in the heat and smoke of the fire slowly being kippered so that the old photographs show them dark skinned like Indians from the dirt and soot. The beds were built in boxes "Lit Clos" with doors , giant cupboards to keep out the cold and the animals lived often in the same room for added warmth. With mud and rain in winter once the day light faded people stayed in doors or gathered together in each others houses to talk and drink cidre and play music keep the dark spirits at bay. I imagine the dirt the damp and the smell and think perhaps my own kitchen which to my eyes is badly in need of gutting and replacing, and very probably smelling of cats and wet dogs isn't too bad after all.

Forget the glossy magazines which try to tempt us along the fussy path of foppish floral fripperies , this is real country living not the world of Kath kidson matching apron and oven gloves, recessed ceiling lights and the rustic furniture bought at great expense from some emporium selling lifestyles, the comfy floral sofas and artfully shabby chic cupcake stands, the colour co-ordinated Le Cruesset and the matching Aga and store bought flowers. I do not know one real country person, someone born and bred to the life who has anything but mismatched china, hand me down furniture and and odd assortment of glasses and serving dishes .

Sitting in the half light viewing my world through rain splattered windows I realise ,that as Thanksgiving approaches, I have much to be thankful for. I may not have rural dream which looks so enticing on the glossy page, but what I do have is the rural reality and even without electricity here in rain soaked mud splattered wind torn Brittany I wouldn't ask for more.

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Photograph is an old hand tinted image of a typical Breton interior with lit clos earth floors and an inglenook fireplace.

The lost generation

2009-11-11T08:42:00.003+01:00

In the Great War the Bretons fought for France and had the highest death toll of any region. twenty five per cent of the populace perished, leaving farms to fall into decay and families broken. The whole thing was repeated in second world war. Having grown up in poverty and hardship in a poor agricultural region the country boys of Finistrere, Cotes d'Armor and Morbihan were habituated to walking miles in wooden sabots and working long hours in rain on poor rations. Leather boots and heavy greycoats were for them a great improvement on sacking flung about thier shoulders to keep out the wet which is tradiionally what men wore in winter in the fields.

Today is a national holiday of rememberance, yesterday the school children in each village made wreaths from the last of the flowers in the gardens to lay on the village war memorials. Here , in communities where it is rare to move away from your home village the dead are not forgotten they are still part of the family of the commune.

The poem below by Rupert Brooke marks the lost youth of all those who fought in the "War to end all Wars" and sadly each War that has come with regular monotony after it, regardless of which side ,which nation, which creed or political belief they held they are all lost now and yet it continues. Little changes then except the uniforms.

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

September - October, 1917

If you would like to more about the "war Poets" and the lost generation of modernist writers then you may be interested in this site .

All hail Halloween

2009-10-31T18:49:00.004+01:00

I was rather miffed in an icy English way when trying to make a rendezvous for youngest a couple of weeks ago. The Orthophoniste, leaning over her desk, pen hovering, said “hmm you will be going to England for the holidays so we shall have to book a rendezvous after school re starts”.

“How dare she presume we would be trooping back to England” I growled at youngest en route home, I bristled at been branded with those expats who hurtled backwards and forwards across the channel like demented yo-yo’s . How, I seethed a vrai Madame Grognonne, did she know we were going to England anyway! We rarely go, well only for funerals or the visiting of sick relatives, which is what in fact we were doing this time.

“C’est Toussaint” said youngest with the calm tone reserved for idiots . Thus the truth dropped with an audible clunk. It is indeed Toussaint and of course she would presume we were going “home” nothing to do with my compatriots’ obsession with returning to stock up on sliced white mothers pride or instant gravy browning at all. She had just assumed that, I like any good Breton would be travelling to the land of my fathers to visit and honour the family graves armed with car load of Chrysanthemums like some mad peripatetic paysagist.

Despite the jollity of Chrysanthemums (can they be jolly? I am not sure but in the language of flowers the symbolize Cheerfulness, optimism, rest, truth, long life, joy except bizarrely in Europe where it is the symbol of death and grief so you rarely see them used as garden or house plants here) there is a certain penetrating sadness about Toussaint, it marks the passing of time, the loss of old friends and family and the changing of ways of life. Not many I suspect keep the all night vigil at the graveside as they once did. But at least they are remembered around the dinner table where the family meet in the dark of All Hallows eve and tell old stories of the dead family members, gone but not forgotten. It is important to mark the passing of the year to remember how deep our Racine’s run no matter how far we have grown from our place and people who gave us life.

Historically the Celts started the whole dressing up as ghouls and making a racket thing. They would extinguish their fires dress up as horrible ghouls and wander the village making lots of noise and generally being unpleasant in an effort to discourage lost spirits attempting to hijack the bodies of the living. Summer officially ended on November 1st in the Celtic calendar with the feast of Samhain and it was on the eve of that feast that the barrier which kept apart the worlds between living and dead was weakest thus allowing disenchanted spirits to pop back to the old world to see what they could grab, a bit like the expats with their sliced white loaves I suppose.

Anyway The pumpkins are lit and my two ghouls are all dressed up ready to trot off and maraud about the Bourg as soon as Daddy gets home from work. Meanwhile outside the owls are hooting and the dogs are howling fit to wake the dead and I shall sit in the kitchen preparing dragons blood and witches eyes for tea and remembering those who have gone before us marked one hopes with the sign of peace. I do hope they are marked with the sign of peace, I really do not think I have the wit or wisdom to do battle with evil spirits this evening although I may manage a gin at a push!

What a Hoot!

2009-10-16T09:53:00.002+02:00

Yesterday was a day packed, like a tin of Paimpol Sardines, full of rendezvous. Being a wise old owl I master minded proceedings with the precision of a Napoleonic campaign, dashing about Brittany to ensure both boys were in the right place at the right time with all the necessary accouterments and dressed appropriately for each occasion, clean teeth for the Orthodontist, clean hands for the orthophonist, clean sports kit for Handball and , as always with any expedition involving diminutive Frenchmen , a suitable supply of goutes to keep the ever present loupe of hunger at bay, for as Napoleon famously said "an army marches on its stomach".

On the final leg of the journey , driving along in the pitch blackness of country lanes we were halted by the sight of an Barn owl sitting unperturbed by our headlights in the middle of the road and with no intention it seemed of stirring one feather in flight. Thus we ground to a sedate halt and waited.

"Look boys isn't it beautiful!"

"Is it a Chouette? ( French name for Barn Owl)" asked Middle .

"Yes" I said gleefully proud of his ornithological skills .

" Oh Chouette!( the French for "Oh Great! " ) said youngest.

The French language has a not so endearing trick of using the same word spelt and pronounced the same way to mean a variety of quite diverse things, which has no doubt led to some interesting misunderstandings in history . Any way back to the Owl...

"Someone close to us is going to die" .they both said with typical French resignation.

"Not true" I chirruped " its just a myth" . They gave me one of those slow steady stares reserved for demented elderly relatives who have uttered something particularly stupid.

The problem is that our Breton neighbours believe, and I mean seriously believe, that to see a Chouette and hear its call means someone you love will fall off their proverbial twig in the not to distant future if not before. Rather a fatalistic lot they are at times. Since we live surrounded by woodland and barns all of which are bustling with Chouettes it can make an evening excusion rather a tense event at times. No wonder the locals rarely go out after dark.

"Anyway" I prattled like the vielle chouette that I am ( and that means silly old bag in French, see I told you French vocab was a cunning beast!)

"We aren't Breton so it doesn't apply to us"

My passengers were not convinced and as if to emphasise the inevitability of a dear ones passing each devoured another Madelaine in resigned silence. I could feel their minds working on the list of family and friends crossing of those accounted for and pondering for whom the owl would screech.

After an age the Owl gave a rather Gaelic shrug and took off silently into the night having successfully put a damper on our evening. Not that I believe in those things but I did drive very carefully all the way home!

A Kiss is just a kiss....

2009-10-07T22:52:00.002+02:00

We are going back to Blighty for a brief visit over the Toussaint break. Its not something we do very often our trips to England usually being for death bed scenes, or, if we didn't get there fast enough for those, funerals. It is a long time since our boys have trodden upon their native soil a fact that was brought home today on the school run by youngest.

"Mummy" he said, long pause " Do the English Bisous?"

Another long pause whilst mummy ponders an appropriate answer" Um no , not generally poppet"

Even longer pause as youngest contemplates life without bisous. After all here every day starts with a bisous, friends bisous, family bisous, teenagers slouching at the school gate bisous, life here is one big re-affirming kiss after another.

"Oh how sad " says a wobbly voice from the back seat " French people living in England they must be so lonely having no one to bisous them"

Another long pause "They are very bizarre aren't they..."

"Who darling?"

"The English Mummy"

Oh Môn Dieu my own little diminutive Froglet if only you knew!!!

Today is a day for biting back.

2009-09-17T11:24:00.004+02:00

Today is not a good day. Today is a day for being someone else. Today is a day for running away to sea, for joining the foreign legion for being anything but what I am. Yesterday was not a good day but today definitely stinks.

Today is so bad I may have to attack the kitchen. I have already embarked upon a blitzkrieg of my studio under cover of darkness and look and smell like something the cat has peed in so what do I have to lose if I now scrub the work surfaces with some vile toxic potion guaranteed to kill all the jolly microbes in the fosse septic? Not my equilibrium that has gone already. Nope, today I am not a happy woman.

It is blowing a gale outside, how apt as I am brewign up a storm inside too, and autumn, freshly arrived with a scowl, has brought an air so thick with damp that my joints ache and my fingers are too stiff to paint and I keep dropping things. Our Broadband hates bad weather and the only thing that has managed to fight its way through cyber space is an invitation from a women’s international expat group to ask me if I will blog about life in France. Ladies today is not a good day, my writing is not going to encourage or inspire people to travel and embrace the expat life. They will read my blog and weep.

The morning started if not with joy at least with hope. Hope that after yesterday things might in fact have improved. I was woken at 5 by a nightmare which involved my trying to recapture our Labradors whilst being berated by a small dark French woman complaining that they should not be allowed to roam free. I totally agree madam, no need to invade my already distressed psyche to tell me that but if you can find a way to repair the electric fence then please be my guest because it stumps me. Breakfast was fine if you ignore the fact that it was eaten at 7am to the accompaniment of the sound of the wind impersoanting a train outside and one of the cats licking blood from the floor, he having caught his own breakfast, and another of them savaging me as I went past to put the kettle on. The school run was bearable and, on the way home, we even remembered to post the terribly urgent letter we forgot to post on the way there.

At home I collected the eggs, only dropped one, got youngest mustered for school and we were doing fine despite the contents of the kiln looking as if they have developed small pox because of a glazing fault. I was ignoring the feeling of rising panic in my chest, ( you know that feeling when something tells you that you are really should runaway very fast whilst your brain is ignoring it,?) until we got to school and I kissed smallest on head and said have a good day and try hard with your writing at which he dropped his head and he said “I always try my hardest but my teacher doesn’t believe me she says I don’t. But it’s Ok you don’t have to go in and see her.She thiks there is nothgin wrong with me I just don't try”

Is manslaughter still considered a crime of Passion in France because I may well have to kill this woman? Woman? Well actually barely out of college so more a post teenager, a new teacher determined to be firm and sure that we parents are just being namby pamby English and if we only pushed him harder he would be fine. A teacher who has, it seems, decided that in the one term she is gong to be there (she is covering maternity leave for yet another new teacher) she will cower him into writing neatly by sheer force of her scowl and meanness. The school knows he has dyslexic and dysorthographie but she it seems with all the conviction of youth knows better than the orthophoniste ,,to whom he goes once a week to help him fathom the unfathomable depths of writing, the specialist well, no actually the two specialists, who conducted a barrage of tests on him and have decided that is what he is and are trying to decide what can be done to help him. Nope this new teacher says, he must try harder at writing, keeps him in at break time because he doesn’t finish his work, rolls his eyes when he comes back at the end of the day to collect the books he has forgotten and has told him no, he can not use the specially shaped pens recommended by all the aforementioned professionals he must use the ones school provides, which are basically cheap and flimsy and terribly for handwriting but hey what would I know I am only a mother and a teacher and old enough to be her mother at that and if I was I would box her ears.

I know any child needs to be encouraged to develop a positive, determined attitude and that hard work is necessary to overcome the obstacles presented by dyslexia. I also know children will reflect the attitudes of their parents and teachers so authority figures in the child’s life need to help develop personal confidence and inspire the child not to give up, not demoralise them even further when they already feel they are letting everyone down by falling so far behind their siblings and school mates.

And I write this not for sympathy nor for effect but to so I will keep my promise and not go into see teacher and I will not give in to my strongest of urges to run away with him and protect him form all those people who think deep down that its just laziness and pure bloody-mindedness and quite frankly a bit of an embarrassment to have a 9 year old who can’t write as well as his friends.

This is why today is a bad day and which is why next time the cat bites me in passing I may have to go and bite the cat back.

Moving pictures and a Bolt from the Blue-Ray

2009-07-08T13:34:00.003+02:00

I have seen a lot of movies in my time, I think the first one was sound of music which my brother and I and two friends snuck into to watch at the Rex Cinema in a small fading Victorian coastal resort on the Isle of Wight, we watched it one and a half times before we were discovered and turned out but it was worth every minute of crouching in the dark. At school the nuns would dig out some old black and white film for the end of term, sitting in serried ranks cross legged on the polished parquet floors in our navy blue knickers. One year I remember watching something which I think was called The Red shoes; I can remember nothing of the plot except that it involved her pride and greed to possess the ruddy footwear and that the poor 1950’s beauty in the starring role seemed to be stuck into her ballet shoes and danced herself to death. Very sobering for a small child with limited experience, and I am sure cured all of us of any desire to have red shoes or do ballet for that matter. I can not imagine what the sisters were thinking of!

Cinema trips with my Father were of a much more grown up, the cinema a very plush Gaumont with gold baroque architraves and red velvet curtains on the boxes and an entire flotilla of cherubim and seraphim cavorting about the ceiling. The nuns would not have approved I fear. I always wanted to sit in a box, still haven’t done it yet and now I suspect most cinemas are multiplexes in England so if I ever go back I have lost my chance to watch a re-run of War and Peace in regal splendour. Our local cinema here is very twee, A tiny thing and awfully friendly. Tickets are 3 Euros in the school holidays, no need to sneak in without paying at that price, and everyone knows everyone and the entire audience sits in a clump in the middle leaving the rest of the small auditorium free for tourists and “Johnny no friends”, so that it looks as if they have been dropped from a great height into their seats or swept there by the cleaners .

These days most of my cinematic experience is home based. I suspect we may have one of the largest DVD collections in Brittany and it growing ungainly, I shall have to perform some judicious pruning before we are swamped even further with each new enticing release from Pixar or Disney. If I ever give up buying movies I suspect the entire industry might fall into recession. It is a great responsibility to carry on ones shoulders.

Sad to say many of the DVD’s we have did not lived up to their trailers or our expectations. At least that makes it easier to humanely cull some of them, but it is disappointing when something you see on a trailer turns out to be such a let down. Recently we have seen several movies which promised high flying comedy of a family kind only to reveal itself, once seen in total, as excruciatingly dull bar the scenes selected for the trailers themselves. I hate that when it happens. It is like biting into a cake only to find the cream is in fact artificial not fresh and the icing not chocolate by only coloured to look that way. I wonder is there a law one might invoke to save the consumer from such travesties or is it merely buyer beware and on my own head be it?
One film that has not fallen short of expectations is the new Walt Disney animation “Bolt”. I was all set for a mildly dire evening watching yet another disappointing kids DVD, albeit in glorious Blue-Ray( no, I don’t know what it is either but there you are it tells me on the box it gives me a pristine picture and theatre quality sound) starring Disney’s newest hero and was amazed to find it was really very good indeed. All of us loved it, even our resident theatre critic. I won’t spoil the plot, oh yes it has one honestly, but here is a trailer
http://video.google.fr/videosearch?q=trailer+Bolt&hl=fr&emb=0&aq=f#
so you can see for yourself. It is I think one of the rare family movies we will be watching again and again. So if you are looking for a little light relief for the school holidays do seek out this one it actually delivers more than it promises which is a pleasant change!

A book at bedtime.

2009-05-20T20:20:00.006+02:00

Youngest and I are reading the Borrowers omnibus by Mary Norton as our bedtime story at the moment. We love it. It is nothing I hasten to add at all like the film starring Jim Broadbent, which is why I suspect it has captured the hearts of children for so long, it is far more believable and far more realistic, it holds both the harsh terror children feel at being small in a large world and the frustration of trying to live under someone else’s rules. The land of the borrowers is a world in which one can disappear and a land where anything is believable. I remember reading it at my son’s age and wishing desperately for it to be real, for them to be real. I made small shelters for them amongst the shrubbery in the garden and built furniture from cotton reels and left them lying about in odd corners , yearning for them to be retrieved by tiny invisible hands.
Is it still I wonder every child’s hearts desire as I remember it was mine, to live part of the stories they read and are read to? For a story and its characters to come to life? Do little girls still imagine themselves to be a princess stolen at birth by gypsies or boys see themselves as great heroes on horseback, galloping across the plains chasing Indians or is that all too politically incorrect now? Oh dear I do hope not!

Eldest who has gone beyond believing in fairytales has grown into the font of all knowledge about the film industry. She can name obscure actors and recite their entire careers at the drop of a hat. It is not unlike watching a movie with a Cannes film festival judge, “Ah yes” she will say as we catch a fleeting glimpse of some dark shadow darting across camera in a crowd scene, “Look! Of course that’s so and so, he was better, I think, as the small one legged Eskimo in such and such directed by so and so , although some would argue his appearance in the now banned blah blah blah was really his greatest triumph”. She can recite entire scripts after only one hearing ( great when we are travelling with her younger brothers, car journeys go much faster with her keeping them enthralled with her one man performance of “Lilo and stitch” or” Shrek one, two and three” complete with voices and music). She does not, I hasten to add, get it from me. I am hard pressed to remember anyone’s names let alone a cast of thousands.

Anyway as ever I digress, back to the world of fantasy meeting fiction, Eldest is for ever emailing me you tube clips for promising films which she thinks I will enjoy ( and obviously should buy as she wants to see them too). They are of a wide spectrum with a heavy emphasis on family films; she has for instance decided that although she wants to see Dark Knight or whatever the batman movie is called it is highly unsuitable for our suggestible and sensitive middle son who would have nightmares for weeks. Despite his constant pleading she has instituted her own censorship programme on our DVD collection and her suggested purchase list comes with appropriate comments like “Daddy would not enjoy this far too girly but I think we might” or “too much violence for the boys perhaps we might buy it (note the royal we!) And watch when they are in bed“. Sometimes she is so sensible and grown up it puts her parents to shame.

This months offerings have included several on a similar theme, which ,oh good and patient reader ,leads me back and links to my opening meanderings , that of stories engulfing readers and drawing them into their plots in a truly physical sense. This isn’t a new theme I know, after all look at Jimanji, (or if you are like me, don’t look at it far far too frightening) or the Never Ending story (and it really is never ending but half way through I was begging for it to finish).

The two top of her list though are far more subtle and less threatening by far than some, the first being Inkheart with Jim Broadbent again and Brendan Fraser has been voted thrilling but possibly unsuitable for those smaller family members of a nervous disposition. The unanimous favourite stars Adam Sandler ( whom we all agreed was wonderful in 50 first dates, only upstaged by a vomiting walrus ). We the selection committee, have watched all the you tube trailers and extracts, we have read the blurb, it has been approved by the family previewing and censorship board ( Eldest and I) and so tonight that is we are having the family premiere performance of , “Bedtime Stories” http://www2.disney.co.uk/DisneyDVDs/DVDs/bedtime_stories.jsp

Watch it and see what you think…and remember a good book and bring its words to life, and I think a good film can perhaps do the same for a good book?

ps I had a wonderful embedded link but it jsut won't work so I hope the one above will surfice instead..

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The illustration is one of the original line drawings from the first edition of the borrowers Homily in her kitchen, by Diana Stanley, 1952, for 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton

I wanted to be me ( not Me-ed)

2009-04-29T16:53:00.005+02:00

I have been mee me meed. Thanks to Fennie (http://corner-cupboard.blogspot.com/) who is , I fear, alas still avenging the departure of Loic the one legged gardener prone to catatonic episodes from this world, and is using meedom as a form of sadistic punishment. It is my fault he has gone, I stopped writing him. Well then here we go if I must pay for my sins, even if they are ones of omission I had better get down on my knees and start otherwise we shall still be here next christmas.

What are your current obsessions?

What ever makes you think I may have an obsession? Are you perchance obsessive yourself? You can get help I understand these days you know, its just a case of knowing where to look, now there you go you can obsessive over where to find help for obsessions that will keep you quiet for a while, there must be a blog in that someone surely?! An obsessive to me is someone who is constantly compelled to fluff cushions as soon as someone gets up, or has to have all the jars in the cupboard facing the same way, or put the corners of the newspapers straight. I once knew a woman who was totally obsessed with Tupperware. She kept everything in her kitchen in it, all colour coded to some bizarre system, very odd. It was like some manic form of lucky dip if you tried to find tea bags and didn’t know her system you ended up with gravy granules. No, I do not have obsessions.

I do have interests though, and that is a very different matter all together. I have several life long interests but I do not think they are all controlling, well not quite yet anyway. For instance I find old kitchen utensils hard to resist and am, at present, trying to reason with myself against the purchase of a sky blue vintage Spong runner bean slicer I have seen recently on ebay, something that is as my aunt would have said "a long felt want”. I also am a terror with books, our house has more books than the local library, when visitors come for the first time they tend to be rather overcome by the number, “ have you read them all?” they ask, a a strange question, of course I have, people don’t buy books for decoration surely? I am particularly prone to cookery books; they are a weakness of mine. I used to ferret about in charity shops and car boot sales in the UK and seek them out but today rely upon Amazon.fr. When I start cataloguing them by Dewey system or colour of spine then it will have become an obsession, now they just lurk all over the place like loitering literary refugees, a fact that implies that I am not truly obsessive at all.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?

Wardrobe? What wardrobe, one of the joys of living as a foreigner is that I am not confined by the social mores of dress so living in deep rural tranquillity I live in Jeans or trousers, I am not a skirt or dress person I hate shoes of all sorts but luckily since most of our friends are farmers wellingtons work very well. I have however found one is not expected to wear wellingtons to funerals which leave me somewhat scuppered on such occasions.

First spring thing?

Youngest has a rather fine collection of springs of various sizes including some old ones he dug out of the garden but I suspect you are talking printemps not bong bong so let us trill over the joys of nature in all her abundance. The sudden acid green awaking of the countryside, cherry blossom in the hedgerows and the joy of mornings lightening and evenings lengthening. Apple trees heavy with pink flower and the cuckoo in the woods.

What's for dinner?

Now lets see how pretentious can one be and get away with this sort of question I wonder?
We tend to eat lunch rather than dinner during the week so supper tonight will be Home made country Terrine with home pain complet made with flour from a local mill. I have recently gone back to bread making, tempted by the wide range of different flours one can get here and have been making pate since I first learned to cook. I used to make it in the UK because you could never get a decent pate de campagne only smooth liver pate which I don’t like but I make them here because it’s so therapeutic and simple.

Where are you planning to travel to next?

Well each day come rain or shine ( or both) I venture out on short forays to the far flung regions of my empire ( ie doing the school run or fetching and carrying offspring to various activities, or popping over to the farm to collect fresh milk and yoghurt) The next notable jot of travelling is I think going to be a jaunt down south to the camargue in southern France (http://www.travel.hickerphoto.com/camargue_provence_france_information.jsp) this summer en Famille. Please hear and take note that I am being very brave and noble about our abandoned plans to visit Italy again this year. I will not mention it again.

What on earth possesses you to blog and read blogs?

Ha, I do hope that gets you thinking! This is my question, the one that I have popped in to replace another one far, far to dull to write about ( see me me me rules at the bottom..) I used to dutifully blog everyday the tales of Un Peu Loufoque and Madame Grognonne Chronicles but have I think firmly put them to bed now. They may of course be somewhere else fighting their way through life’s bizarre and taxing events but at least they are, for now at least, not waking me at 4 in the morning demanding to be heard. Recently I have hardly blogged at all, I am busy writing other things and working on my ceramics and doing all the wife and motherly things that make up my day (and not brooding about not going to Italy, did I mention that before?) Having broken the habit, I can now sit back, breathe and ponder what it is about blogging that is so seductive. Does one blog to be seen? To reach out to change others lives? To fill a gaping hole in one's own life that otherwise would fill with all those festering doubts to which one may fall prey to if one isn’t careful? To become another person for a short time pretending to be someone you are not if only in the eyes of others? So why do you blog? And what do you look for in other people’s blogs? Do try and answer that one honestly, I think blogging is a fascinating phenomena.

Last thing you bought?

If one excludes such things as duck and chicken feed, and other dull domestic trivia I think the last thing I bought was a mismatched set of old French baking tins in various shapes and sizes. Ah no I tell a lie I bought a whole pile of Donna Leon novels with her Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti , on Amazon just now at 1 cent each who can resist buying just one more at that price!

Flower of the moment?

Bluebells. I recently bought several hundred wild bluebell seeds from the excellent and extremely helpful people at http://www.farnellfarm.co.uk/ . Come June I intend to plant them around the edge of our property under the hazel trees and apple trees in the banks to try and re-establish the colonies of them that would have been native here a few centuries ago before farming became more intensive. We already have vast amounts of wild violets, wood anenomies , ( can’t spell them but you know what I mean) wild garlic and primroses.

What are you listening to?

You mean apart from the ruthless clatter of my fingers on the keyboard? Shush a minute and I will see. If you concentrate too you may hear the birds songs , the bees in the apple trees and the hens and ducks in the garden , also less prosaically the sound of French children’s television wafting through the open doors of the salle, and any minute now I will hear “ Maman j’ai faim !” This is a coded way of saying the boys want chocolate cake. It’s that time of day again.

Favourite ever film?

Don’t be ridiculous one can no more have a favourite film for ever or book for that matter unless ones tastes remain constant and static from birth to death. As ones experience grows and we develop and change so do our likes and dislikes surely? The option being stagnation, give me change over stagnation any day. At 8 years old or so I loved Mary Poppins,I used to think at 13 years old that Zefferreli’s Romeo and Juliet was the best film ever, at 27 the Mission. My taste is varied and changeable. But I do enjoy movies like Un long dimanche de fiançailles or la gloire de mon pere ; le chateau de ma mere (http://www.amazon.fr/Coffret-marcel-pagnol-gloire-chateau/dp/B0014JKMI6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241009542&sr=1-1) all of which are good romantic escapist films about love in its various guises and constancy. Oh dear does that say something deep and meaningful about my psyche? I do hope not!

Care to share some wisdom?

OOH tricky no one really wants to hear pearls of wisdom unless it happens to agree with what they think. But hey ho! It is, at the risk of sounding like an aged aunt from another era, in my experience, always dangerous to feel superior either about oneself or about ones offspring or lifestyles. Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by ( see http://www.blurtit.com/q155209.html if you have no idea who she is, may I suggest you might consider suing both your parents or the authorities in charge of your schooling for if you really have no idea who she is then they failed you miserably )
Smugness is invariably followed at some distance by a sobering slap about the visage with the proverbial wet kipper. Enjoy who you are and what you choose to do or believe without thinking firstly that anything makes your superior to others or that others should feel the same way. Humble pie is hard to digest and tends to repeat on you thus keeping you awake at night.

If you were a god/goddess who would you be?

You mean I am not already? Oh dear me how frightfully disappointing life can be! Oh well if I must be one, I think TohKap the small household god of lost socks will suit very well thank you if the job is vacant. Think what a following one might have, and what power deciding which sock to steal and which to preserve! Each house could have a tiny altar in the laundry with offerings of small china bowls of fabric softener competed with Fabric freshener spray and those strange little sheets of nappy wipes like things scented with some bizarre exotic flower or other that people stuff in their tumble driers to make believe it makes their clothes small fresh.

There we go then, penance done Fennie and I have no doubt either bored, estranged or angered several bloggers in the process unless no one bothered to read this anyway which is a real possibility. Now I must pass the poison chalice to some other soul, so Milla I choose you, as you so bleatingly cried that no one loved you, Blossom and the sheep down her road if they care to join in , Withy brook, salle de bain, Bayou, @TM and PG and of course anyone else who feels the need to be mee mee meed please go ahead and say I sent you!

What one is meant to do is Respond and rework the above questions on your own blog. Replace one question with one of your own. Tag 8 people or however many you want to. Now off you go and annoy the world some of us have things to do.
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The photograph is of the apple trees in our garden where I even now am sitting, listening to the bird song, well obviously no I am not in the photo, even Tohkap can not be in two places at once, I think its only luckluk the god of the headless chicken who can truly claim to do that! And yes incidently I am aware th grass needs cutting but I'm writing this so unless Luckluk is free to pitch in then it has to wait.

La Petite Souris strikes again.

2009-03-05T20:48:00.006+01:00

We have been visited by mice Chez Nous; they came, like rodent thieves in the night, in search, not of cheese but of teeth.

Ah yes and bien sur, It has certainly been a busy week for the tooth mouse here. Both boys having dropped a dent , one from natural causes and one rather more reluctantly with a bit of help and a lot of brute force from the dentist ,a nice chap, camp as a row of boy scout tents ,with a chin stud, its him who has the chin stud not the tents, and alas a great deal of blood and tears (from middle not the dentist).

Here in France as in Italy, Spain and parts of South America children do not have anything as namby pamby as a fairy to collect their tumbling teeth, oh no, they have a little mouse. Traditionally the recognised currency for a tooth in France is a small toy, hence you put your tooth under the pillow and in the morning hey presto, or as it is France “Bam”, you awake to find the tooth gone and as if by magic, a matchbox car or its Gallic equivalent has appeared in its place, and very possibly permanently embedded itself in your ear. Since having a supply of suitable small toys involves a lot of forward planning, and in the case of it being embedded in ears a bit of medical intervention, over timethe international currency has altered so that generally the mouse whips the tooth and its gummy giver gets a Euro coin.

They say that the tooth mouse originated in France ( well the French would say that wouldn’t they?)and first showed up in an 18th century French fairy tale “La Bonne Petite Souris” in which a good fairy helps a poor brow beaten queen in distress by turning herself into a mouse, hiding under the kings pillow and smashing his teeth out, thus teaching him to behave more kindly. Apparently the same tradition is found in parts of Lowland Scotland where it’s a white fairy rat that does the business. Sounds horribly like a Glaswegian bedtime story to me, well you've heard of a Glasgow kiss haven't you?

Of course the questin arises that, if one happens to be teh family tooth mouse what doe sone do with all those teeth? After all you really can not be too careful with teeth. Before the mystical arrival of the mouse with attitude, milk teeth were buried when they fell out with a plant n top to keep them safe. In almost every culture across the globe, Teeth are recognised as valuable things , and not just because without them it makes eating pork and crackling a trifle difficult, you can’t leave them lying about for just anyone to find, after all witches might steal them and thus gain power over your body and soul. Interesting that since not too many years ago they discovered you can extract DNA or something from discarded baby teeth and grow cells form them which gives them the potential for treating all sorts of horrible things that the now grown up owner of the tooth might develop in later life.

Each of our kids have their own personal tooth fairies, I know, I know they should be mice as we live in France and the kids are more French than English but old habits die hard. You can’t expect a fairy to morph into a mouse mid childhood it would be like Father Christmas having a sex change. Eldest one is called Flossy but since Eldest has all her grown up teeth we don’t use her services anymore. Anyway, Flossy would have to use a pair of wire cutters to get any more teeth out of that mouth as its wired up with a brace, hence Flossy, who in her prime I seem to remember had fluorescent pink hair, has gone into retirement.

Middle has a small dark scruffy haired butch sort of fairy called Molar Gumbo and smallest has Dentina who is without doubt a dainty little thing on gossamer wings. Molar Gumbo has to be big and tough because middle is a right softy and doesn’t give his teeth up without a lot of blood and waling so needs a great hunky tooth fairy on hand for moral support and a positive role model. Youngest needs a soft caring creature as mother here,very cruelly ,did not pass on her enamel to her baby ( doubly remiss of me as I seemed to have managed to pass him the gift of dyslexia which he could well have done without) several of his baby teeth had to be removed at a very tender age and she does a nice line in telling him how brave he has been.Our little tooth fairies send letters to their charges, tiny things in spidery writing on minute rectangles of paper, reminding them politely to brush their teeth and be good to their sibings and aged parents. Sometimes, if written late at night after the surprise uprooting of a tooth and too much wine being imbibed by parents ,the writing is even more spidery and indecipherable than normal. Occasionally the tooth fairies get letters sent back with a thank you or as in this week missive from youngest, with demands for information such as

“How big is a tooth fairy? “(Bigger than a speck of dust and smaller than a mouse)

“Where do you live?”” (Here there and everywhere)

“What do you do with the teeth? (Mind your own bloody business and go to sleep otherwise you don’t get the euro comprendre?)

On Monday night youngest built his fairy a fine little house from white paper complete with windows, shutters and a door and was terribly saddened and disappointed that she didn’t take it with her. Luckily swift witted mother said she probably wanted to leave it by his bed to use as a holiday cottage or a stopover on long haul flights. Of course had Dentina taken the small house that might well have been wrong too. Life is never simple in fairyland. He had wanted to make her a small set of clothes as well but it was getting late and Mummy wanted to go to bed even if he was happy to stay up to prepare her a trousseau, so after much foot stamping, by me, he settled for a sleeping bag instead , hastily made by him from from a cotton wall balls and one of his sisters hankies, his being far to rough and masculine for one so dainty, not to mention of course he can never find one when he needs one.

Sadly the Dentist has decided that Middle needs 3 more teeth removed in order that he too may have a mouth full of wire like his sister, and eventually one hopes a dazzling smile. which I suppose means that poor old Molar Gumbo may be kept quiet busy for a while. I wonder if Dentina might consider sub letting him her sleeping bag and tiny paper house ? I can see another flurry of letters to the tooth fairies in the offing. I suspect it would be a lot easier if we had settled for a French tooth Mouse with aggresive tendancies I am pretty sure they don't charge half as m,uch as the Dentist !

Ah well ,better go and practise my spidery writing .

The Chicken and the Egg

2009-02-22T10:55:00.007+01:00

I have always had a soft spot for chickens, which is surprising really as my Mother was terrified of them, and every other feathered creature on earth. When I was little I used to frighten her witless as I trotted off to the local Farm twice a day to collect fresh milk in my billycan and would be found several hours later sitting in the barn full of brown hens and listening whilst Clive the dairyman played his guitar to them. We used to call them his bedtime chickens. I suspect he played to them as they were the only living creatures who didn’t complain about his pronounced musical ability or rather lack of it. I adored Clive and his chickens as only a 4 year old can. I have been enamoured ever since, of chickens, not Clive, I went off him when he threw a bucket of fresh milk over me but that is another story entirely.

Anyway back to chickens. When we lived in the rolling hills of southern England we had a fine large hen house and a terribly grand assortment of rare breed fowl thanks to a friend who was a national feather and fur judge at all the county shows, he would rescue the “also rans” who didn’t get prizes and turn up at the kitchen doorstep at strange hours, with cardboard boxes bound with baling twine for me, on the understanding that I'd give stray hens a home rather than let them go to the pot. Showing birds is very competitive and there is no room for sentiment, if your chook isn’t a winner it gets the chop.

When we moved to France my friend Grouse gave me a lot of sound advice on going into egg elevage ( or whatever the technical term is in English) but our research showed this area ofBrittany has more than enough of them already, every farmer we know has a shed with layers as a side line so economically it wasn’t worth it. I was sorely tempted and we do sometimes get a call to go out and help unload boxes of small chicks when they arrive in friends barns, youngest adores that as a way to spend the afternoon, he and his best friend get all the straw down in the house then tip toe about the yellow cheeping fluffy things about their feet. It’s all I can do to stop him bringing them home in his pockets. As a precaution we frisk him on the way out. Meanwhile our own fine chicken house stands empty waiting for Spring and the next flock to arrive and I look forward to the day I can start collecting my own eggs again.

Anyway back to my friend Grouse. Grouse is a woman to envy in many ways. She has lived the dream of the environmentally conscious who, of eco sound thinking, would love to move to somewhere self sustaining surrounded by England’s green and pleasant land without a blot on the landscape and a means of earning a loaf, and a fine dream it is too. You note, I do not say crust here as we are talking a jolly decent living even in these economically tough times, or possibly because of them, eggs are becoming more and more popular as a cheap healthy food and easy to cook for the more culinary challenged. Omelettes were the first thing my lot learnt to cook and there is nothing better than cooking your own omelette, made from eggs from your own hens.

Grouse and her family built their farm up from nothing on the edge of the moors that is a National park and close to the Chatsworth Park Estate, and those of you who know her blogs of old will vouch that it is a veritable haven for wildlife, not a thing to spoil the view, nor ever will be, and a thriving business to boot with ecologically sound and very splendid home attached, with its own reed beds and a kitchen to kill for.

Since the death of her husband she has been running the farm single handed with a part time helper two days a week. She sent me her house details as she is moving on now and if it was not for the fact that I love living here too much I would be sorely tempted to put in a bid on her fantastic place. I have her kind permission to ooze over it here and share it with you just on the off chance you might be looking for a change of direction yourself. And you know you don’t have to be a dyed in the wool farmer to run this business, when we looked at the possibility of starting from scratch here, she talked me through the whole thing and it is something that you could swiftly learn especially as she would be happy to be on hand to advise if you wanted a guiding hand on your first steps into farming. Anyone could do it, except my mother of course, although to be fair to her I did manage to cure her of her phobia of birds at least sufficiently to allow her to experience of the joy of egg collecting with her grandchildren in her later years!

So here we have it, an ideal business opportunity, a chance to escape the rat race and breathe the fresh air, to raise your family surrounded by beauty that is forever England and to earn your living comfortably whilst you do it. Think on, stop dreaming and take that step toward the self sufficient life you always promised yourself. Live your dream but hurry, bids have to be in by 16th April and you do not want to miss your chance. Sometimes you just have to stop saying I wish and take a chance in order to live that dream.

And think of it you need never run out of things for supper again, there is, after all, more than one way to crack an egg.

If you want to see the farm and are tempted to stop dreaming and start living then the details are here at http://www.bagshaws.com/prop_det.asp?htm=B90006&pdf=&postcode=DE4%202NN

Lost in Translation

2009-02-17T10:49:00.006+01:00

I have a mind that by habit wanders off on its own journey, tempted by a tantalizing image, conjured by a single word. I trot off down some twisted path, the thread of my thoughts caught on the bramble bush of some phrase , only to find as I look up that the conversation has all but unravelled behind me and I am happily lost. I can do this in any language but must admit it is far easier in French. As it is my second language I am not hampered as I ma in English by years of being told to concentrate, to focus, and if my mind wanders others simply assume that I have lost the thread and not that I am happily being entertained somewhere far more interesting “dans ma tete”.

Give me a word and it paints a picture in my head far more interesting and bright than any its mundane meaning conveys. Say tree and I am gone amidst the myriad forests of trees I have explored in my travels, the tortured pine by a greek beach that Jacko and I climbed one hot afternoon when we were very young and far to drunk ,the apple trees in the gardens of my childhood, the date palms of upper Egypt all flit like fairies through my head and I pause and stop and ponder, lost, as the French say, “dans la lune” until jolted back to the present where I have to tune back into reality and look attentive and hope no one has noted my absence.

Songs are a constant joy, French ones all seem to hold stories that weave such pretty pictures. They sing so fast and play with words so cleverly that sometimes you need a doctorate to understand them but what matters that to me? I can love a song to tears , dragged into it by the exquisite story it paints only to find later upon closer examination that the real meaning is utterly unrelated to the one I have given it. French songs are like poetry with depths upon depths of hidden meaning each open to interpretation, we discuss them for hours. And then there is the misheard mot which makes them, for me, even more exciting. So many French words have similar sounds and quite different meanings and thus I happily sing my own version only to have it shattered by one of my diminutive Anglo French offspring. Mummy he says he is like a wet dog (chien mouille) nor a crème brulee! Well to be fair Renan Luc’s lyrics are so wonderfully bizarre, this one seems to be about can his Russian security officer girlfriend who beats him up for excitement, stinks of vodka and sings like a bath ( do not ask my why the French sing like baths but just for once believe me he swears she does)I think him feeling like a crème brulee works just as well, its certainly more palatable than a wet dog.

My current favourite is Christophe Maé who wrote and sings “Mon P’tit Gars” for his son. For months I have been singing the line”Je te bois comme un Grande cafe “( “I could drink you like a big cup of cafe”) how exquisite a line, how evocative of parental all consuming love, after all don’t we tell babies we could eat them up they are so yummy? It is such a wonderful expressive image it makes my toes curl with glee, it reminds me of when the children were babies and I nibbled their ears until they giggled. The children were horrified, the French do not devour their children they tell me what he is saying is ”Je te vois comme un grand guerrier” which means “ I see you as a great warrior” hmm personally I think coffee works better, one of those big milky breakfast cups with a pain au chocolat or a buttery croissant would do nicely thank you.

Well you listen to it see what you think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6f8Grl8Fho&feature=related

Marie Antoinette knows best...

2009-02-11T13:18:00.007+01:00

I seem to have divided the past few days between frantically driving about the wilds of the countryside running errands ,and children ,to different places and engaged in high speed food production. The small citizens of France eat a lot. When Marie Antoine said" let them eat cake" this was nothing to do with her indifference to the suffering of the masses, she just knew that it was inevitable that they had eaten everything else in the place already.

Today, up at an ungodly hour, I made crepe batter for breakfast, organised a vegetarian risotto from the left over’s in the fridge and trawled the depths of the freezer for fish for lunch, toyed fleetingly with making a chocolate cake then settled for a life saving batch of biscuits instead.

Thus at 10.30 I could be found swathed in my apron , like a vrai drudge ( me not the apron) and rubbing butter into flour with the help of Francis Cabrel and Renan Luce. They may not be much practical help with the baking side of things but there is nothing quite like them for raising the spirits with song, and bless them they don’t mind when I belt out the wrong lyrics at full volume nor quibble when I yell "Mais me, je suis un homme..." when ,obviously built as I am , I am not and never shall be one..an homme that is.

All morning as me and my French crooners busied ourselves about the cuisine ,them safely ensconced in the CD player ,me flitting at speed between oven fridge and larder, we had a steady stream of visitors as the diminutive sons and daughters of the revolution played cache cache. As is proper we stoically ignored them as they hid under the sofa, behind the chairs and beneath the tablecloth . I rolled and kneaded pate for biscuits , Francis pondered on whether God was still there and Renan went on about wrongly delivered post.

Softly and slowly like small boats drifting, shoreward’s on the tide the petits citoyens all bobbed up around the kitchen table and watched, in silence , as I cut out trays of biscuits on the slab of granite I use as a pastry board. They looked from me ,to the board ,to my sons with their oh so French raised eye brows elevated in wordless questioning.

"She is making biscuits" explained Middle.

"Ahh" came their perplexed reply.

I don't think they have ever seen anyone make biscuits. I don't think I have ever seen a child who has never seen someone make biscuits so we each stared back at each other in barely disguised disbelief.

They stood and watched as if this bizzarre English activity were some new spectator sport and then, suddenly, along with Renan, they all started singing. Totally spontaneous, totally unselfconscious ,totally in tune and in time with the song they stood watching me make biscuits singing their hearts out. The song finished they all turned around and walked off chatting to continue with their game of hide and seek as if it was all some well choreographed scene from a Francois Truffaut movie.

Upon reflection, I think my entire life here is part of some strange French movie. Sadly I do not however look at all like Audrey Tautou which is a shame really.

Ah well, Mais C'est las vie!

If you want to hear what they were singing then click the link here..http://www.wikio.fr/video/15705

And the rain it raineth every day...

2009-02-09T14:14:00.005+01:00

The winter break is here and the walls ring with the sounds of strident French film makers intent on a brand new produciton of Anthony and Cleopatra. The production team had planned to film outside with our vast bamboo groves as a back drop but sadly it is raging a storm and the rain is lashing down and the Queen of Egypt has rather an annoying cough so they have retired to the upper floors to soldier on regardless.

Fool that I am I have scooped up several waifs and strays this weekend, off spring of working parents,who have inexplicably taken up residence with us for a few days. Out to dinner and under the influence of too much Vin moussant on Saturday night I apparently volunteered to have our hostesses brood to play . "Superbe" she said "but we go to work very early so I will drop them with you on Sunday night"... her husband she said "will pop in on tuesday about 3 o'clock to retrieve eldest for her harp lesson " , nothing about retrouving younger one as well.. I fear if I am not sure footed I will find I will have them for the entire fourtnight, by which time I shall be more than slightly mad.

Our little visitors live in a large beautiful modern house where everything sparkles and matches. The walls are aubergine, the floors slate. We live in an ancient farmhouse in need of renovation , our walls are decorated with an interesting patina of small boys grubby fingers and wet dog cleverly designed to show off our ecletic mix of furniture referred to by a dear friend "as early American Mother in Law" Everything we have is either a cast off, a hand me down, found at a charity shop or retrieved from a skip somewhere. I have serious house envy.

My only comfort is that living though they do amidst the best that modern French interior design can offer, my guests "Cher maman" is the only French woman I have met who seriously can not cook., hence the over imbibing of vin moussant. Everything that emerged form her imaculate kitchen is cremated at a fierce heat, entombed within a dark gritty outer crust be it cake or roast pork and even her gallettes as carbonized . Perversly her frites are soggy.

My little guests happily gobble up all I put before them in vast quantities each mouthful adorned with copious "mmmm" and yammm" exclamations I do love an appreciative audience . They are mazed at my pasta adn pesto, overcome by the homemade bread, lusting for my crepes. Even I though must draw the line somewhere. Thus this morning I made a creme Anglais with the aid of a tin of Birds custard powder in which to drown the bland doughy and carbon coated apple cake which "Cher maman" made especially for us. I know custard powder is hardly haute cuisine but is it wise to waste a dozen eggs and fresh cream on burnt cake ? I think not, charcoal needs something stronger to smother it. If that doesn't disguise the taste perhaps I shall have to flambe it in cognac.

Cleopatra ,Anthony and entourage are now playing with the wii fit in the salle, working off thier vast lunch and building up an appertite for tonight. I have promised they may make home made pizza for thier suppers, something that has elevated me to Goddess status in their eyes.

Ha! I may not have a hand hewn dinigin table in polished chestnut with matching chairs and sideboard made by a little known order of trapist monks in the Perigord but I sure know how to cook. Mrs Beeton eat your heart out!

Stop look and listen...and look out for giant squirrels

2009-01-26T15:05:00.003+01:00

Friday night was a busy one . As the children’s book goes, it twas a dark and stormy night, well actuellement, to be honest it had also been a pretty dark and murky morning, afternoon and more or less pitch black evening too. We live “plein compagne”, i.e. stuck out in the middle of the nowhere with nothing but owls, deer and the odd wild boar for company, no street lights and no other houses in sight, when I say black you will appreciate I mean really black, not just a trifle on the dark side.

We tossed a coin to see who was going to trot off to have aperitifs with the “voisins” ( nearest thing we have to neighbours ) and who would have the pleasure of picking middle child up from handball and join the others for drinks later. Sort of devil and the deep blue sea choice really as one involved walking through the aforementioned pitch black clasping the hands of two children in order to navigate ones way past our boisterous Labradors ( who think anyone going out after dark is mad and thus needs barking and bouncing at) through the mud in our drive, along the lane with its beautiful, brimming, boggy drainage ditches either side (and no street lights)round the bend, up the hill and through the even muddier mud of the neighbours drive, and the other driving to the next town along roads covered in mud ( and don’t forget , no street lights) lots of interesting bends and black ice.

Now I don’t mind driving in the dark if it’s down country lanes where I can whack the lights on full beam and the only one I am going to dazzle is a passing fox. I do not mind driving though the well lit village (blink at the wrong time and you‘d miss our nearest village but at least it has lighting) but as soon as you pass the cemetery on the outskirts you are plunged into blackness and that I hate. It is like leaving a floodlit stage and walking out into nothingness. There are no road markings, (no street lights, did I mention that before?) and, as the road twists and rises, any passing traffic blinds you with their headlights even on low beam. The Bretons tend not to go out at night. The question... is this because there are no street lights or are there no street lights because they don’t go out at night?

I got to drive. So it was with a heavy heart I set out to collect sporty offspring and managed the entire journey without mishap until I turned gratefully into the area of pot holed mud which masquerades as the sports hall car park and almost squashed a pair of boys running about in the dark (ah yes you’ve guessed of course that the car park has no street lights haven’t you? There's a sort o fthem emerging isn't there?). I did a very effective emergency stop, managing to aquaplane across the puddles, missing both boys, and put my extensive vernacular French to good use by yelling at them in my very angry school teacher voice. Luckily in France this is a perfectly acceptable response to children who are being dangerously stupid and even administrating a thick ear would have been allowed, but happily before I had finished my tirade another adult emerged from the gloom and added his own selection of bon mots , which saved me from getting out and risking drowning in the mud.

The thing is that children are children and, as adults, it is our job to teach them appropriate behaviour and to teach them to be safe. I suspect that between my shouting and the angry bellwoing from avenging adult they have learnt their lesson. As it turned out my well phrased French was wasted as they little cherubs were not natives being visitors from England but at least they will go home with a firm grasp of vernacular French.

When I was a kid we had a red squirrel called Tufty to teach us road safety then there was the jolly green giant who did road crossing when he wasn’t advertising sweet corn( no honestly) and we all were given bright orange and silver arm bands to wear over our blazers. I was telling middle about this on the way home. He now thinks I am totally mad. Our kids here learn road safety in school, the police come in and teach them good practice and after which ,if they pass, the local mayor presents them with a pedestrians certificate. Its all very jolly, the parents come along and everyone has drinks and nibbles and the local press take a photo for the paper. Lots of kids coats have reflective bands on them and many kids have shiny dangly things like the Scanglo reflectors ( http://www.scanglo.co.uk/ ) actually our dogs have too but thats another story.

In England the Dft has a road safety campaign called “Tales of the Road” which they launched a few months ago, you can go to the website which even has games on it for the kids (http://talesoftheroad.direct.gov.uk/be-bright.php ). What I want to know is, dear to my heart as the topic is after my recent experience, are you and your kids aware of the Dft campaign and do you think it effective? Personally having looked at it on youtube ( http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=n-stmrbw_xg ) I think its all very Tim Burton in a gory corpses bride sort of way although I was a little disconcerted as “The girl who didn’t dress bright” is wearing my old school uniform, good gracious in my day the nuns would never have let her out looking like that!

Off now to try and master the road crossing game on the website, So far I have not managed to cross the road in a safe place once but then I think deep down I am still waiting for a jolly green giant to appear to hold my hand or perhaps I am still squirrel fixated...

.................................................................................................................................................................

And for those too young to remember him, that at the top of the page is Tufty the red squirrel terrifying small children into behaving sensibly on the roads..well would you argue with a squirrel who was twice your size?

Enter headless chicken disguised as a housewife

2009-01-16T15:19:00.009+01:00

Come in! Sit down! Oh Gads! No not there, you fool, I’ve just cleaned that, on second thoughts, seeing the state of your trousers, (how on earth did you get that all over them, it looks disgusting? No don’t tell me I haven’t time and frankly I am beyond caring about what you do to yourself). Perhaps you had better stand, No you can’t smoke and if you want a coffee you will have to go and make it and drink it in the kitchen. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES EAT THE BISCUITS they are reserved for VIPS! If you want to talk to me then you will have to shout over the hovering.

We have a visitation tomorrow. No dear not from the Pope, although I suspect he would be less trouble. Eldest has been awarded a prestigious scholarship to study for a year in a far flung realm and we had a call from the Gods last night to say one of them is descending from on high tomorrow morning to warmly shake our hands and help with the once verdant rainforest which has now been transformed into the necessary accompanying paperwork with which the entire scholarship is carefully encased, in triplicate and two languages.

I am trying to gauge how old this visiting deity will be, if he is over 60 then the chances are he has prostrate trouble and thus may wish to avail himself of our amenities, in which case do I have time to whitewash the downstairs loo? Yes of course it’s a serious question. You know full well the previous owner, no doubt under the influence of intoxicating liquor or some illegal substances, covered the walls with Neolithic style cave paintings of an emaciated but unmistakably male hunter in pursuit of something which , judging by the direction his spear is pointing, has hidden itself behind the loo. For reasons known only to himself he used ,what I take to be ,his left over glazes some of which have very earthy tones ,giving the entire work the air of an IRA dirty protest, terribly retro and not more than a little unsettling. As if that isn’t enough he covered the ceiling and door in mirrored glass. It can be quite startling if you don’t expect it. Oh God, I do hope he hasn’t got a weak heart.

My plan is to clean the Salle vigorously, bearing in mind we are still experiencing freak dust storms after Claude’s stair installation, fill vast vases with heavily scented Lillies, to disguise any unpleasant aromas , left over from when the cats got frightened and peed on the curtains , and attempt to keep him confined therein for the duration of his visit. Of course this means someone standing guard at the French windows so that we can head him in the right direction and catch the dogs before they leap all over him. I don’t imagine Gods are used to having their best suits daubed with mud prints from over excited Labradors. Please don’t let it rain or he will have to wade through the small and charming riverette which flows merrily down the drive on such occasions bearing with it a great deal of the neighbours fumier(Cow pooh to you).

I had better dig out the porcelain demi-tasse, where the hell is they? We don’t usually use them. What do you mean why not! Most of our visitors are farmers they drink their café in sturdy mugs their iron grip being likely to crush anything finer. What about napkins? Do you think I need napkins and small tea plates or not? Well yes of course I know the protocol in England but its France for goodness sake! I’ll dig out the apostle spoons anyway. I think the Georgian coffee pot may be going a bit far even for a God don’t you?

I know why he is really coming though. He has met the father, met the award winning offspring and now wants to meet mother of aforesaid ie ME. Do you think there is anyway I can lose 10 stone grow a foot and perfect my conjugations over night? Nope didn’t think so. Ah well. Back to plan A then.. where’s the white wash ? Grab that brush and you can start on the loo..

A letter to Santa

2008-12-17T22:49:00.004+01:00

Dear Father Christmas,

I know you are very possibly a trifle pre-occupied at present and that I am cutting it a little fine when it comes to putting in last minute requests but I wonder if I might have a quiet word?

I was sitting here last night, minding my own business and clipping my toe nails, inadvertently harpooning a passing cat with a rogue nail in the process, when I was led to ponder upon the injustices of life and the cruel vagaries of Mother Nature and how they might be addressed.

Why for instance is it that my toe nails grow long, strong, white and elegant as flowers of the field flourish on neglect, whilst their cousins who dally on the extremities of my fingers are frail and brittle, as prone as a Jane Austin heroine to go flaky at the slightest provocation? Better suited to being imprisoned inside sturdy boots and thick socks far from the gaze of society than my toes which despite rarely getting the chance to appear out of wellingtons, carry themselves with the air of having recently been visited by an expensive french manicurist ?

It is I know self inflicted; years of thrusting my hands unwillingly into vats of vile smelling glazes, thumping clods of clay into submission and domestic drudgery have all taken their inevitable toll.

It is no unconsidered happenstance that finds Cinderella losing a glass slipper and not a ring. One look at her hands after years of shifting cinders and scrubbing floors and the Prince wouldn't have given her a second look. No doubt she wore delicate lace gloves to the ball so he wouldn't notice how stubby her nails were or how dire her digits, after all Fairy Godmothers can only perform so many miracles when given a sow's ear to work with. Her feet were, I have no doubt, her best feature.

My mother had beautiful fine elegant fingers and long perfectly behaved nails which remained polished and pampered until her death. I suspect her secret lay not in copious creams and massages, as she never visited a manicurist, but more in the judicious employment of a housekeeper and gardener, thus saving her the anxiety of her hands being placed on an at risk register. Is there an at risk register for deprived and neglected appendages do you think? If so there is, I fear, every chance my entire body might be taken into care for its own protection, the little attention I pay it.

Not for me the glossy magazine lifestyle of my forebears. As I write my entire world is shrouded in dust; it rolls, as smoke across the battlefield after some vast conflict, leaving as it passes a blanket of granite and slate particles over all I possess.

Claude the carpenter is putting in a new backdoor, which despite his careful measuring appears to be 3 sizes too small for the aperture; he has decided by dint of some bizarre French logic that the remedy is not to plane off the door but to make the hole bigger. An act of folly only outshone by his neglecting to forewarn me or cover anything with dust sheets. He has also removed the stairs in order to give himself more room to work, leaving me marooned, cut off from any possible retreat to the top floor, in the kitchen.He has now gone to lunch, abandoning me to the Armageddon that was once my drawing room and the prospect of a night spent sleeping on the sofa.

This is a big house. My mother in Law arrives on Friday, the earthly personification of all that is clean and ordered. I am all that stands between my family and the icy blast of her disapproval if all dust has not been vanquished. She is of my mother's generation, has never decorated in her life nor cared for a large family whilst running the house like clockwork and juggling her own business. Like my mother she governed from above, far away from the heat of domestic traumas and always staff to do the grotty bits. I am staring social disaster in the face. Or rather would be if I could see it through the dust...alas all the joy I had hoped for this Christmas will be peppered with well aimed shots regarding domestic goddesses and the state of my domain.

Please Santa, I have tried to be a good but with only a sick Hoover and a stiff broom to keep the detritus at bay what can one expect? If you have run out of Fairy Godmothers, could you perhaps rustle up a ferry strike for Christmas ? Failing that a bout of berry berry ?

Yours sincerely,

A most ungodly domestic.

Uncontrolled ramblings upon the subject of Hermits, Queen Victoria and wet weather walks

2008-09-27T10:19:00.006+02:00

Last night I couldn’t sleep, well there’s a change, I lay there listening to the owls, contemplating life and its goings on and I thought ,you know being a Hermit one might not suffer from Insomnia as it seems to moi , tis the troubles of the world that keeps ones mind a spinning and if you live up a cliff in a cave and have nothing to occupy yourself with other than the state of your toe nails then perhaps you sleep like something that sleeps better than I do ? Perhaps that is why Hermits become hermits? Except the odd balls like St. Simon Stylites who lived atop a pillar in which case falling asleep might not be a good idea at all.

There used to a hermit near us when I was a child. To be more accurate it was just his vacant cave as he had long died. Least ways, I presume he was dead but who can tell with a hermit?

I remember my mother telling me that the young Victoria, before she was Queenicated and was still a mere princess, used to be taken there as a spindly child to drink the restorative water from the natural spring in the Hermits cave, it being full of iron and her not being awfully robust and all that, and her mother being understandably rather keen that she should stay around long enough to make her Queen Mother or something regal. To be fair to Victoria (whose real name, by the way, was Alexandria and whose first language was German not English) she probably wasn’t sickly at all but her mother was rather over protective to the point of paranoia, but then, if you had 3 rotten uncles showing tendencies to wish to pop you off so that their illegitimate offspring could take your place as future monarch of the realm your mother might have been a trifle more anxious about your well being than she was. Anyway as I was saying, the cave was high in a cliff face and the spring had a brass bowl on a chain from which the healing water was drunk.

It was one of our “bad weather day” walks to go clambering across the untamed landslip to the accompaniment of the educational ramblings of my mother pointing out the old abandoned carp lakes below us and tell the story of the shipwrecks, princesses and the hermit. Once a teacher always a teacher. Fog and foul weather added to the mystery of course. The path was perilous. To cross to the bottom of the cliff and from thence to climb up it to the dark mouth of the cave to taste the waters, one had to teeter across a plank of drift wood to avoid the sinking sand that lay there ready to suck you down. I was never allowed to follow my brother across the plank for fear of my falling. I imagined inside lurked a scrawny man with limbs like sticks dressed in a dirty tunic with a beard down to his legs who would be bobbing about like Benn Gunn by the stream and saying things like “there you go that will be thruppence please” and “don’t forget to wipe the bowl after you have drink you don’t want to give any one your cold do you?” to anyone who managed navigate the dangerous route to his door.

I would gaze upwards at the cave , its mouth a gloomy black hole ringed with stones high in the cliff, and wonder how the future empress of India had managed it in button boots and holding a servants hand, She had to hold a servants hand whenever she went walking in case she fell. I told you her mother was a little anxious. It didn’t help matters that my Mother also told us that, having had her dose of restorative waters, the future Queen would clatter off in her carriage to the local hostelry for a slice of cake and sandwiches. Many a happy evening I spent there, in the local pub, admiring the geraniums whilst slurping coke through a straw trying to imagine the prim royal doing the same.

Anyway back to Hermits and Insomnia. By the time I was old enough to scale the cliff, the cliff, the hermits cave, brass bowl spring had all had fallen into the sea. Ah well such is life.

We had another Hermit in the village as well although not possibly at the same time I am a bit dodgy with dates. His isolated eerie was on another of our bad weather walks. We had a lot of bad weather walks in England; it has something to do with British summers. Anyway the second Hermits job was to live in a cold windy oratory and intone prayers for those lost at sea and make sure he kept the light burning at all times as an aid to shipping, as ,you see, the oratory was a sort of primitive lighthouse high on the downs above the English Channel. The local lord of the manner once made the mistake of being caught with a cellar full of contraband French wine which had been en route to the Bishop of London. Our village was rather good at that sort of thing, hence the punishment of building and manning the oratory by that I mean stealing other peoples wine not getting caught. Actually they were very good at NOT getting caught but that is another story. Of course it was rather far from the sea so it lured ships in storms on the rocky coast rather than warned them off. Well that and the hobbled donkeys tethered to the cliff paths at night with lit lanterns on their backs to make them look like ships at anchor in a bay.

The villager’s have always taken great pains to welcome visitors, especially those who came ashore at night having been wrecked on the reef. Welcoming parties would be held on the beach, of course if any of the visitors managed to make it to shore alive they used to club them to death, but well tourism is a hard trade as anyone will tell you and having been repeatedly attacked over the centuries by everyone from the Romans to the French they were naturally a bit wary of foreigners. To be honest they still feel the same way, which is hardly surprising when you see what the invasion of outsiders seeking to escape the rat race has done to house prices. I don’t think they club them to death anymore, actually I wouldn’t swear to that.

Perhaps its possible that the there was only ever one hermit and that the first hermit in his cave with desirable sea views over unspoilt countryside didn’t die off at all ,perhaps he fancied a change and moved to the new oratory with more distance sea views and a free supply of fire wood? Or it may have been the other way around and him in the oratory may have moved down to the cave when some bright spark from London noticed that as a lighthouse it was having rather a more negative effect on shipping safety that they had envisaged and so began a new lighthouse closer to the shore.

Of course it may be that the Hermit in the oratory moved down to the cave as the light was keeping him awake at night which would prove that my fledgling theory was correct and that Hermits do not suffer from insomnia.

Any one know of any caves going cheap?

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The portrait is of princess Victoria and her mother by an unkown artist. Well I'm sure he knew who he was and I am pretty certain Victoria 's mother knew everything about him including what he had for breakfast and the colour of his toothbrush as she was bound to have had him vetted before he was allowed within a brush stroke of her daughter, but I have no idea what his name is so we shall leave it at that.

The Road to Morocco.. part two

2008-09-11T17:52:00.014+02:00

The summer has ended but for me, what a summer it has been, lit as it was ,with the light of foreign skies and heated by the sun.It is raining and cold here, so I sit huddled in the damp of a dull day and remember Morocco to keep myself warm.

Our first resting place in Morocco was down on the Atlantic coast in Essaoira, staying in a restored Dal inside the walls of the Medina. Hidden up a dark and unlit alley it was like many Moroccan houses a jewel secreted behind blank walls.Once inside the Ancient wooden door the house went up and up again to a sun filled roof terrace with views across rooftops to the sea. From there we moved north to Marrakesh to another Riad down an equally anonymous alley near the famous Djemaa el Fna square, the sounds and smells of which hung in the air all night.

Djemaa el Fnasquare at night

Marrakesh , which means in Berber "Land of God",was intoxicating, all the colours of the souks,the myriad shops, some smaller than a phone box selling so many enticing things to temp the palate of a jaded refugee of western conspicious consumption. Each trade has its own area of the Medina, the metal workers at Souk Hadaddine, clothes sellers at Souk Smarine, carpets at Souk Zrabia, slippers adn belts at Souk Smata and of course the tanners with their foul smelling vats of animal hides curing in chicken excrement confined to the very outskirts of the city walls, some hidden in streets so narrow two people could barely pass. Then in the main square itself the snake charmers adn story tellers adn acrobats and dancers and the purveyors of black magic with their dried hedgehogs, very useful for expelling jinns from houses. Jinns being apparently always female and prone to wreak havoc about the house ,upsetting the servants, causing strife amongst the children .If you upset a jinn they might do anything from giving you a small dose of gippy tummy to full grown manic climbing the walls madness, bit like mother in laws really except they can be 15 metres high and have breathe that would singe your nostril hairs.Don't fancy a mother in law like that thank you.

There is so much to see and do in Marrakesh that its hard to know where to start. I wanted to show the children something of a world that is fast disappearing so we went to the Debbaghine tanneries to see how the leather was cured and dyed. The place was off a large empty square covered with what looked like grey rags but turned out to be hides left to dry in the sun.

We arrived by horse drawn calleche and were greeted by a man thrusting great clumps of fresh mint leaves into our hands . We declined, he insisted, we declined, he insisted ,we smiled and took the mint bouquets. Strange man we thought. He led us through an arch between the city wall and a house and down a short alley in to the vast open space filled row upon row of concrete vats amongst which men worked .

The vats

It stinks, here, which explained the mint, not like something has crawled under the floorboards and died , imagine the stench of urine, chicken and pigeon shit and rotting flesh all fermented under a blazing sky at 55 degrees then left to moulder. Right in the middle sat a group of small boys dangling their legs chatting as kids in a playground do, we didn't stay long but we were lucky as it was a quiet day and early in the morning so stench had not yet reached asphyxiating levels. They say the kids get used to the smell very quickly. Id rather not. Its enough to put you offer leather handbags for life.

Little Tanners "faite-ing a petite pause"

Next stop the carpet weavers. The men do the simple flat weaving the women do the embroidered patterns and complex ones, can't imagine why...

Happy little weaver folk

As well as rugs they weave shawls, throws and stunning fabrics out of a cactus fibre...AND its fire retardant. I know this with certainty as every fabric stall owner attempted top set light to them by way of demonstration..mind you I suppose they could all just be failed pyromaniacs..

and what they were weaving..

After all that we needed some fresh air so we did what all the locals do if they can .

we went in a Taxi to the 1oom high waterfalls at Ouzoud to cool off, a day of pootling by the river, lunch at a Berber restaurant ......

and an amble through the olive groves to meet the locals...

What better way to spend your day ...

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Ah well next stop Greece...

The Road to Morocco.. part the first...

2008-08-11T17:40:00.013+02:00

"Morocco is like a tree whose roots lie in Africa but whose leaves breathe in European air"

King Hassan II 1929 - 1999.

I am not sure whether it was watching, with childish delight, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s adventures in the film Road to Morocco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpbLJvdXFww&feature=related (whilst riding my rocking horse and dressed in a genuine Fes from the dressing up box and my fathers red and white stripped beach robe, just so you get the whole picture )or whether it is just the wanderlust deep rooted inside me, but I have had for too many years what my aunt would have called “ a long felt want “ to travel to Morocco and at last I have been .

How to describe the experience? Like a child bouncing about with pent up excitement desperate to tell someone about all the wonders they have seen but only able to say "WOW' I am so overwhelmed with the sheer wonderfulness of it all that I am lost for words.

I loved the heat , it was 55 in Marrakesh when we were there, I loved the bustle of the city and the calm of the wild spaces in the desert. I loved hearing the Muessin call the faithful to prayer. I loved the smells and sights and sounds of the souks, the smiling faces of the people and their unending kindness to strangers and I loved the way they lived life at their own untroubled pace sure in the belief that Allah would take care of them. In Morocco they take time to sit and smell the roses or ,more aptly the mint tea for at this time of year the sun has scorched the roses into pot pourri on their bushes, baked to a crisp in situ on their stems.. Gosh it was great.

Practical details..well we flew easyjet from Paris to Marrakesh, cheap flight ,jolly and efficient cabin crew great with kids. We stayed in two wonderful places DALSAL http://www.villarenters.com/villas/essaouira--villa-to-rent-21022-sum.asp in Essaouira and at a small Riad hotel in Marrakesh http://chouiachouia.online.fr/ run by the charming Monsieur Olive and his staff. I would happily stay in either place again.

Peter Bowles the author translator, composer, and ethnomusicologist often asked of fellow Americans he encountered in Morocco what they thought to find on their travels to North Africa, and he claimed , almost all without exception answered the same thing” regardless of the way they expressed it, the answer…is a sense of mystery. They expect mystery, and they find it.” He should know he lived in Morocco for over 50 years. I don’t know what I was looking for in Morocco, whatever it was it has captured my heart.

I have over a thousand photographs, ah the joys of digital photography, and even allowing for the removal of family ones of small children playing in the sand that is far too many to share with you without reducing you to a catatonic trance. So what to do ? For I am sure its the pretty pictures and not the travellers tales you will sigh over. These do not do justice, the whole place is just so magnificent that nothign will convey it in its true entirety. Here then a few vignettes that caught my eye. enjoy them and then go and visit yourself. There is after all only a fine line between armchair traveller and couch potato.

Our first resting place was the old town of Essaoura..fortifications built by a student of the architect who designed St Malo and once called the port of Timbuktu as it was the gate to the east and the import of spices.. fought over by French and Portuguese and later loved by Jimmy Hendrix....

Music whilst you dine madame? your delight and delectation are the musicians at Essaoura with their home made instruments made from car parts and discarded hose pipe. Eat your heart out Blue Peter.

My friend the camel on whom I trotted across desert sands along the edge of the sea , just him and his brothers and us and a friendly Berber guide. Please note his rather fine rag rug saddle cover. There is a 6 day trip rom here to Agadir by camel..if you lose me you know where to find me...

The local bread shop and the spice stalls

Fishing boats and there catch..

They don't do the place jsutice, they only remind me of small things I saw and that happened so mean littel to you. But none the less they are Morocco for me. Later, one I have caught up with my own tale I shall tell you abit about Marrakech and bore you with more photographs...you can either hold your breath in eager anticipation or change channel. The choice is yours. Meanwhile as the Morrocans say..May you travel with God.

The Art of Insomnia

2008-07-05T13:14:00.003+02:00

I do not do sleep with any great efficiency, having never quite grasped the art nor purpose of it as a pastime. It is I suspect a genes thing. I come from a long line of incompetent sleepers on the distaff side. Stretching back across the centuries are women of my ilk who have occupied themselves in the long dark hours of night contemplating the worlds wonders and pondering the unanswerable questions of life whilst next to them their husbands snored. Or more probably lay alone, as the men in the family tended do be “orf” exploring far flung continents and purchasing tea and trinkets from the natives for extended periods, probably to avoid their restless wives. Brave men to a man, cresting waves and conquering continents, driven onwards in their search not of worldly riches but selfishly seeking somewhere to lie sloth like and undisturbed by their insomniac spouses.

As children we were given purses with pennies to play with in our cots to wile away the wee hours, a wicked wheeze my mother learnt from her mother who learnt it from her grandmother. Of course with the advent of decimalization that went out the window as a pastime, the modern penny being rather too small for prudent child play. I can however still remember the taste of an old penny if anyone is interested. Cloth books replaced them but frankly they weren’t half as satisfying. They lacked that metallic bite.

So how to fill these sleepless hours? As a small child I would watch the patterns on the walls, as a teenager I would write and think and plan and commit poetry to memory, as a student I would embark on long walks and see the dawn rise over the sea. Very early one morning sitting atop the Victorian balustrades of Bognor seafront, wistfully watching the early light of morning bounce in on the crystal waves, I was wrestled from behind by an over anxious police office ,intent on preventing me from hurling myself to oblivion into the sea. I did try and convince him that should I be attempting suicide I was perfectly able to see that the end of the pier afforded a far better venue than the 4 foot drop onto the dry sand below where I sat dangling my toes but he was unconvinced and insisted on accompanying me home. After which my flat mate made me promise not to go out on dawn dawdles or, at the very least, to give her advance warning so she could prepare breakfast and some suitable attire for another visit from the Sussex constabulary.
People who sleep do , on the whole, are not awfully understanding of the nocturnal activities of their less sluggish partners. I frequently enjoyed myself re arranging the furniture at night or painting walls until my husband pointed out that he found it a terribly disconcerting to wake up to find the room, in which he awoke was radically different to that in which he had gone to sleep several hours before. Some people have no sense of adventure.

Anyway in an effort to draw myself in line with the rest of the world I have purchased for my edification a CD on relaxation designed to ease me into sleep. The trouble is I start in good spirit dutifully counting backwards to 300 and then get distracted by the bad syntax and the tone of voice of the speaker. What does he mean “Its best to be lying down when I listen to the CD” there is something in his tone that reminds me of doctors in those wonderful old black and white matinee films when they say to the slightly harrowed but brave little woman, who is invariably wearing some sort of hat at a jaunty angle, “I have something to tell you, I think you had better sit down”. And as for his suggestion that I really shouldn’t be driving a car or operating heavy machinery whilst listening to the recording does the man think I am an idiot, the object is to get me to sleep why on earth would I be contemplating driving machinery at the same time?

Sometimes my lack of sleeping annoys me as much as it annoys my husband. There are nights I yearn for rest, to close my eyes , to sleep perchance to dream, and wake in the morning refreshed and reinvigorated. The first part is easily achieved with a steady and determined consummation of liberal quantities of red wine, alas that inevitably results in the latter being replaced by a head like a motorway under going construction complete with sound effects and flashing lights. Drugs only leave me feeling as if my brain has been removed for cleaning and replaced with cotton wool padding to prevent my cranium collapsing. Neither are overly attractive options.

Perhaps after all I should just give in and accept that this is me an avid insomniac and be damned. After all deep down in my heart I feel it is all such a waste of precious time, why sleep when there are so many interesting things to do and think about and plan? After all I have some of my best ideas when the world is sleeping. Maybe then, it’s not me who is out of sync with the world but the world that is out of step with me? Either way I know I shan’t be losing any sleep over it.

The painting by the way is "Sleep and His Half-Brother Death" by John William Waterhouse. Hmm I think that says it all...

Down in the Deep Dark woods I dwell...

2008-05-31T10:47:00.009+02:00

Deep amidst a green pool of leafery, where the air is clear and tinged with the colour of oak, birch and beech , where the light filters down through an abundance of ancient trees, the branches covered with lichen, long ago, when France still had Kings and Brittany was a “Foreign Provence” , not truly part of France at all, someone built a stone longère from local granite, with a vast fire place either end. The first house to be recorded in this commune. A place of stature, solid as the rock from which it was hued.

Hidden in a small valley in a place by itself, someone built their stone house, there to raise children and to plough the land and plant. Here then, in “Kreizh Breizh “the secretive heart of Brittany,we live now, deep in the Argoat ('Land of the Woods'). Over the centuries that intervened families were raised in the house and the farm grew as did the trees and sons went off to fight for France a country not their own where the other soldiers spoke another language they did not understand and now it is our home.

The original house, the old longere was abandoned, the great slabs of granite that hooded the fire smashed in two, by whom? I do not know, Napoleon's soldiers , so they say, broke them to punish the Bretons so that their fires smoked and they were forced to abandon their homes. Perhaps it was Napoleon's men then and the longere stood abandoned for centuries until the new house was built? I can not say. After the Great War a new house was added to the barn, a sign of hope for a family to thrive here once more? Perhaps the longere was lived in even then with its orchard planted with apple trees and plums , whilst the returning soldier brought his young wife home to the new house next to his parents home and tilled the land with his father.

Perhaps after the second war there were no more sons left and the old people lived on in poverty n their family farm and the daughters moved away. No one is alive who remembers, no one is left to tell. Much later though I know the barn became part of the now not so new house, the home of a potter and his family . It was his art gallery and the longère his studio and it was from them we bought it. One potter to another, just as we had sold my pottery studio in England to a potter too. Beads on the necklace of life making pretty coincidences.

Now we live here, wrapped in centuries of peace, in a house built of granite under a long slate roof with the kitchen walls covered with huge slabs of granite and slate larger than a man and doors one must stoop to walk through.

We sleep above the old barn and every spring the swifts return and fly through the open window to do a lap of the nesting sites of their ancestors. Carpets cover the floors where the cows were tethered and book shelves line the walls where once sacks of feed were stored. The great rusty pot used for cooking pig swill stands filled with flowers and spring bulbs and the heart in the longere lies cold.

We hear little in our tranquility but bird song and the distance call of cows to one another. We eat the apples from the trees that those other lost generations planted , and our children run wild, their shrill voices yelling in French and English from high in the branches. I wonder what the house thinks when it hears them? I hope it feels our happiness and is glad.

A humph and a haircut

2008-04-30T12:12:00.008+02:00

For the past couple of days I have been feeling Grognonne, not I hasten to add Madame Grognonne, which would be a totally different thing all together. Nope I have had, as the say here a touch of the cockroaches.., a fit of the glums and I am royally peed off because chaps that just ain't me.

I put it down to the book I am reading, forced upon me by a friend who said , the gleam of a zealot in her eye, "oh you must read this"OK, looks promising thinks I , well "One woman's search for everything across Italy India and Indonesia" certainly sounds as if it might be a rollicking read n'est pas? I like travel logs. Ha!! Travel log my arse!!

It is one of those books..one of those terribly worthy American tomes on the road to enlightenment, written to do you good and help you grow. It is the introspective examination, by the female author ,of her own fluff filled belly button in search of a better understanding of what lies therein and why. I am not given to navel contemplation.

Naval contemplation is another matter of course. I have happily, in my time spent an hour or so of harmless contemplation of the worlds various and numerous matelots in their jolly attire, or not as the case may be. I 0once went out with a Brazilian sailor .He had a wonderful uniform complete with a sort of woolly bobble on his hat Ah me those were the days .

I digress. The book in question is entitled, beguilingly, "eat pray love".. and is by Marybeth something or other, no I tell a lie its by someone called Elizabeth Gilbert, see ,its so wonderful I cant even remember the writers name . I should have seen the signs when she commenced with " An introduction or How this book works or the 109th bead" and given up then. Time (note not the THE Times) described it as "An engaging intelligent and highly entertaining memoir". I hate to think what they were comparing it to, possible the San Francisco telephone directory.

Well regardless of whether or not she is a "Readable Funny writer", which the Washington Post assures me she is, she depressed me no end so I decided a boost to the old ego was needed. A spot of pandering to the feminine side, a little bit of self indulgence warranted , thus, this morning after doing two lots of school runs and various chores at double quick time I trotted off, eyes a glow and armed with a sense of purpose, to have my hair done.

I don't do the makeup, hair "oohh pretty shoes must have now "thingy so this is a red letter day. I visit hair dressers under duress or in dire emergencies . Those of you old enough and sad enough to remember one of my first blogs concerning my argument with the village hairdresser regarding whether or not my hair is naturally curly will sigh sagely and know any trip made by me to the hairdresser is an act of hope over experience. I do not do hairdressers well. It is long established that I missed that gene along with the shopping one . My sister got them. This is grossly unfair as she also got the tall slim blond genes as well.

En route to Hairdresser I note my mind is wandering badly, off dans la lune . I get to the hairdresser to find the one man in world who understands my hair is occupied, but oh happy day, not so occupied that he can not spare a minute to explain, complete with handsignals, to his assistant ,that my hair needs this ,this and definitely that done to it so that is OK. Now problem is assistant is about 10 months pregnant . I notice this as she has great difficult getting close enough to the chair to reach me her bump being in the way. Ive been there had three little dears and know all about braincells going AWOL add to the equation then that with my brain going AWOL too and we find ourselves drifting in dangerous waters without a pilot. Our combined lack of attention on this fine morning inevitably comes to the not so pretty pass .

She snips my hair abstractedly for about 15 minutes I stare out of the window and wonder when it will stop raining. I snap back into reality about the same time as she does and we both stare at my head in horrid stifled shocked sort of way at the sudden realisation that both of us thought the other was concentrating on the hair cut where as she was probably mentally choosing bay names and I was contemplating whether I really needed to go food shopping afterwards or not..

Result was that ,alas too late ,we both realise I have very short hair. Actually, very very, short hair. Of the sort of style revolting french peasants used to give to suspected collaborators in world war 2. On close inspection I suspect they trained her. We both looked at my hair in silence. The only man understands my hair looks up from the perming rods he is inserting in an old woman's hair and lets out an audible eek sound. The Salon is so quiet you could hear a curl drop..if I had any left to drop.

I am wondering whether I had all those furrows etched into my forehead before I started practising eyebrow raising techniques earlier in the week and she wondering how woman underneath her scissors has magically been transformed into a saggy faced ancient tortoise, her head sticking out of the leaded apron as if it were a carapace. On a side note ,why is it hairdressers now stick lead weighted rubber mats about ones neck when they cut ones hair ? Is there something radio active in the hair gel they use? Matters were made worse by her liberal application of a wax thingy which is meant to make one's natural curls bounce and glimmer but made mine curl up their toes into tiny fetal lumps like terrified baby hedgehogs.

Then the daft bint sprayed it.

So today my poor hair has been washed with toxic shampoo, conditioned to within an inch of its life, layered and cut , gunked and sprayed. It is not happy. Neither am I. I tip her because I can't stand to be rude and spend next hour standing lost in a space in aisle nine of the supermarche staring blankly at magazines. I think its the radio active gel working its way into my brain. Eventually I go home.

After about an hour Husband, who has been looking quizzically at me from odd angles asks if I have had my hair cut. "Yes" I say "OH" he says..and that about sums it up. I am wondering if I can sue the "witty Compulsively readable Ms Gilbert" for her part in my decline and fall and what words Eldest (who is so well endowed with shopping ,hair ,and makeup genes that she is unable to pass a shoes shop without clapping her hands in glee and jumping up and down like an excited puppy) will find to describe my hair.

If she says "oh" too I am going right out buy a large paper bag to wear.

The photograph is of a Giant Galapagos Tortoise, imagine it with a tightly curled mop on the very top of its head and that is roughly what my new hair cut looks like..it is also the nearest you are ever going to get to seeing a photograph of me.

Seven Deadly Sins

2008-03-30T20:12:00.005+02:00

I know it has been an age since I have blogged so long in fact that many of you will have forgotten who I am and the rest had perhaps presumed, nay hoped ,I had died or been arrested. But no matter no one forces you to read this drivel you know, you could go out and save the planet or do something useful instead.

Anyway, I digress, I am rather good at digressing,even if I do say it myself. I think I did it for A level although it may have been S level combined with Greek literature and advanced origami, it was a long long time ago and some things are best forgotten. As I was saying before I headed off on a dubious educational side track, as some sort of sadistic punishment for my long silence I have been hit heatedly about the head with a wet fish by Muddyboots. I think this may be an old Yorkshire custom instigated by the wives of trawler men from Hull. A similar habit was prevalent amongst the sardine gutters of Paimpol during the height of their popularity at the turn of the century. Here, therefore, we have dear and patient reader, seven incredibly boring and dull things you probably never felt the need to know about me, none of which will leave you any the wiser nor change your life , however any complaints please address to Pondside who tagged Muddyboots who tagged me in return….

1. As a child I had an impressive collection of tiger claws and teeth, Courtesy of a family friend who was a zoo and circus vet. I wonder what ever happened to them…the teeth and claws not the vet. I know what happened to the vet.

2. I was taught to ride horses by a very stout Bedouin called Magdi who did the stunt riding for, amongst other films, Gallipoli, hence he would have me racing at speed down sand dunes around the pyramids leaning forward in my saddle whist waving an imaginary sword and yelling loudly to the accompaniment of his singing various snatches of film theme music as loudly as his capacious lungs would let him. As a result I now ride one handed like and Arab with the constant soundtrack of his voice in my head.

3.I love skinny dipping, and have spent many a happy hour in various bits of various oceans about the world swimming about stark naked and cursing the idiot who has inevitably chosen ,out of miles of deserted beach, to perch on the one rock where my clothes and towel lie.

4. The New Zealand Ambassadors cricket team once performed a private Hakka for my friends and I on a fellucca on the Nile, much to the consternation of the local boatman and the annoyance of the British Ambassador for whom they had refused to perform the night before.

5. I grew up with a ghost and was surprised to discover that other people did not have ghosts at their houses nor did some people believe in them.

6. I have watched whirling Dervishes in action under the light of a full moon.

7. I once camped on a beach only to find in the morning it was mined. It was a great deal easier getting on the beach than it was getting off it I can tell you! It did not however put me off camping wild.

Now I suspect ,like transmitting some terribly anti social disease, I must pass on this little germ to seven other poor soul so if you have not been inoculated against this then Toady, Milla, Francis, Littlebrowndog,Faith, Camilla and Ivy please go ahead tell us your seven secrets…or you could just pretend to be deaf and sing very loudly then claim you never heard my call…. I promise I shall not let on!

The photograph is not alas of me but it is definitely Un Peu Loufoque Queen of the desert don’t you think and it alleviates the seven boring bits above a trifle!

Feeling a little blue...

2008-01-21T11:11:00.000+01:00

Today I feel a little like the White Rabbit from ALice in Wonderland, I have so much to do and am rushing about chasing my tale. I am indeed late for an important date, I applied to join the prestigious internet shop "Not on the High street" in December, had my work accepted and dutifully paid my dues tehn thought I would wait until January to set up my shop there. Well january is well progressed and is hurtling at an ungainnly speed towards February and still I hestitate on the threshold dancing from foot to foot adn not quite sure what do do next! I am sure once I have set it all up adn launched it all will be fine and in a few months I will look back adn laugh at all this angst I feel now but meanwhile I am trying to divert myself and avoid the task of choosing tiels and other trucs to show case on there by photographing the latest editions to my tile portfolio. The probelm is as ever, I love the creative side and detest the admnistastive bit!

So here we have my new blue and white tile collection for you and if any one wants to pop over here in the next hour and load my store front for me and sort out my paper work please you are more than welcome!!!

Thoughts addressed to my thirteen year old self.

2007-12-31T18:05:00.000+01:00

I have been called upon to address myself to you, to guide you, like some ships pilot, through the choppy waters through which life is steering you towards the safe seas of adult hood, to pass to you, like the oracle of Delphi, some words of reassurance, of knowledge, of truth, that may send you onwards into the light and out of the troubling darkness that is adolescence.

Hard luck chummy you are on your own.

In the words of Jacques Prévert's poem "Je suis comme je suis, Je suis faite comme ça" and you my dear are you however uncomfortable that may be to yourself and others. For, dear heart, should I change you, alert you,to the false steps you might take upon life"s stairs, what would become of me? The plot of the play through which you will grow and become me will change too, then I would no longer be me for, by my over solicitous whispering, like some great farce or ancient greek tragedy, I will have altered you and in doing so find myself altered and I would not wish myself changed.

Talking of stairs it might, perhaps at this juncture,be prudent just to say without giving away too many of lifes lsmall secrets,it might be kind if I suggest to you that you may be wise to pack a tube of Arnica gel in your luggage and to be careful should you ever find yourself, one late evening in August 1984 crossing the channel on a rolling sea, when climbing down a ships ladder in most inappropriate foot wear whilst holding a large bowl of salt,it might be more than a trifel wise to be careful, should you wish to avoid some very interesting bruising on parts of you you might prefer not to display to the ships doctor.To say more would ruin it.

We are, surely each of us, the sum of all that is past, not only in our own lives but in the generations that have come before and made their genes our own. It was their choices that made us what we will become, that and how we choose to use those gifts they gave us. For, as sure as cheese is cheese, and mice love it, had not your grandmother run off to live in secret with a captain of the guards, been found out by her father and dragged home, as a result of which she married an american first world war pilot in a fit of pique you and I would not be here now.

I think one can either concentrate on the good or the bad, the sunlight or the darkness in ones childhood. Sweeping aside those who are seriously malfunctioning on all cyclnders and those who plot themselves a course to self destruction, one must, I think, do the best one can under the circumstances and within our own limitations embrace what life throws at us.

I think all I can advise is to try your best with all you do and hope that along the way you remember to concentrate on the joy and not the anguish that washes about the shores of your existence, I am afraid I do not agree with John Donne, Everyman is an Island, we are born alone and we die alone and we live in between in a world which we make ourselves largley in our heads. We can furnish that Island with regrets and feel sorrow for ourselves for all that life has failed to shower us with or we can be thankful for all that is good in it. It is our choice since both extremes are inevitable in childhood and life and if we look hard enough we can find them. That in itself is a good thing for without the one how can one appreciate the other?

So run along with you, carry on with your life and remember you are what you are and what you make of yourself. No matter what life brings you there will, as your mother used to say there will always be those far better off and also those far worse off than you so enjoy what you have and live life to the full.

Life is life deal, with it and most of all enjoy.

Bon chance my dear!

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Incidentally the photogrpah is not of me at thirteen but of Anne Franks taken when she was about that age. Look at that smile, the joy in those eyes. Proof in itself I think that sometimes it is better not to know what life holds ahead for you but to embrace each day as it comes with your whole heart.

The website is launched!! Hoorahs all around, I'll drink to that!!

2007-12-06T13:13:00.002+01:00

Here , amidst much jubilation and glee my website for handpainted tiles, tile panels and other ceramic creations has been launched upon the internet and I can at long last lovingly lay my wares at the worlds door for all and sundry who might feel their lives are lacking in something tremendous in the handpainted tile area: here's the address http://www.unpeuloufoque.com/! I would have said lay them at the world's feet but I don't do floor tiles...yet...

So come one and all, feast your eyes and start re-designing your kitchens, bathrooms, fire surrounds and whatevers with something un peu loufoque, you know you want to!!

http://www.unpeuloufoque.com/

ps I have just unearthed a fantastic source of large 30 x 20 cm unglazed tiles to play with which I am sure are going to prove ideal for house names etc so let your imagination go wild!!

My slideshow (by Jackofall)

2007-10-21T18:39:00.000+02:00

Ok when he says My Slide show by Jackofall what it really means is that Jacko has very kindly made me a slide show of my tiles so that I reveal to the world what I do for a living when I am not wittering away about mad french people and life here generally. So here you are feel free to nibble.. this is what I do on the other side of me when I am not being un peu loufoque! Look upon it as a small aperitif to wet your appewtite for my website which will be seeing the light of day soon ...very soon... I hope!!

Reasons to be cheerful...

2007-09-05T09:18:00.001+02:00

Blossom, good old Blossom, here we are, homework done, at last, but just a little differently, not quite 12 things that might call to me over the great abyss and bring me back to the land of the living, more a mishmash, a ramble . If I were teaching I would write ”you have not answered the question” on this pice of homework, but then we all must answer life’s questions in our own way, n’est pas?

Smells used to create enormous pictures in my head until I lost my sense of smell and rarely now it return to me, then only as a faint wisp of something familiar, although I suppose a sharp tap on the noggin might just jolt it back!! I remember smells, like some half forgotten language. Roses with their rich velvet scent, big blousy blooms in sugary pink and peach hued popcorn colours heady, I know, with sweetness. The smell of tar and dust on a hot road after rain, the delicious caramel aroma of my childrens hair when they were tiny, sea salt dried on sun kissed skin after a day at the beach. Sometimes suddenly I get a whiff of something and when I do catch a scent it is such an unexpected surprise it sets my heart singing. Recently in a hot open drained street in the South of France I caught the sickly rotten smell of Cairo’s dirty markets and I was transported back to my days living there, all before me in my minds eye like a photo album thrown open and the pictures spilling out , So much joy from one brief breath.

And sounds? Oh yes give me a rousing tune or a song with sentiment, music can stir up deep emotions in me out of all proportion to the situation or the song. When we were on holiday this summer, we walked across one of those old metal bridges that looks like something from a world war II film set ,and when we came out into the sunlight the other side found ourselves in the midst of a dedication ceremony to a band of resistance fighters who held the bridge against the Germans in 1944. There they all were, the old soldiers, very few of them left, the flags were lowered and the band played the Marseilles and I burst into choking sobs and had to turn away and hide my face, much to the consternation of the children and the other villagers. I suspect they now will tell the tale of the strange woman who turned up at the dedication ceremony and wept for France, by this time next year I shall no doubt have been reinvented as the long lost illegitimate daughter of a dead resistance fighter. I do that sometimes ( cry not masquerade as a by- blow of the marquis)I have never been sure why but it is like some primeval grief, mourning for all the lost souls in the world. Terribly inconvenient believe me!! Land of hope and glory does it too, which is why I can only watch last night of the proms in private!

And songs? Well once a long time ago I went to a concertand a singer sang a song which goes “ the rivers wide I can’t cross ‘ore nor have I wongs with which to fly..” and it set every nerve in my body jangling. Somewhere, sometimes someone used to sing me to sleep with that song. I don’t know who, but I remembered the song and it fell into my memory like a tiny fragment of jigsaw which I thought I had lost. Now I sing my children to sleep with it if they ask which thankfully they still sometimes do.

Words... So many words to spark that tingle...When he says he loves me totally unexpectedly and for no reason. Or when he makes us choke at dinner by telling the children they must have “CONSTANT VIGILLANCE” suddenly very loudly like mad eyed moody in the Harry Potter stories. The sound of him reading to the children and doing all the voices. Or just catching his unexpected smile. The children, just thinking of the children and all that they are, cascading into one large swift dashing piece of film footage inside my head. Sometimes just a glimpse of something insignificant can make my whole soul glow.

So instead of a list of things that might bring me back to the world of the living should I ever fall into that dark place I seem to have given instead a list of things I feel blessed by, that I have had the capacity to be happy , to love and to have been loved and to be alive. After all is said, despite what we or those we leave behind might wish not all those who fall can be brought back by a kind word, a soft touch , a kiss, but they can live on in other ways, in our hearts and memories and for that we should all feel blessed.

Walking for beginners!

2007-07-08T00:40:00.001+02:00

I was very bad in a past life. I have not, in all honestly ,improved much in this one either really, and as punishment I am forced to do many things by fate in atonement…like accompanying 60 school children for a forest walk, in the rain, and only being allowed to speak French as I had to on Thursday . It could have been far worse of course, it could have been 60 English Kids on a day trip to Alton Towers in any weather, so perhaps I haven’t been as bad as I like to think…must try harder!

I write this in the sure knowledge that when I try to leap up from my ancient metal swivel chair here, I will find my legs have seized up and that I am unable to straighten my knees, giving me the rather unattractive gait of an obese and drunken sailor on shore leave. You see although I am impressively qualified in the teaching bit of school and I can organize, evaluate and plan so hard your eyes will pop and your toes curl in amazement , my English teacher training did not prepare me for, that Olympian event of the French education system , the school walk. Here I think it only fair to point out, to save other expat mothers from future pain; the term walk is only used in its broadest sense.

I have a battered old Citroen Ax, it is car, Malcolm Campbell’s had a sunbeam called blue bird. Both cars, the difference is, in 1924 he broke the land speed record in his; I am lucky if I can get to the village and back in mine. It is a matter of speed and endurance and that is the difference between a French School walk and an English one, the French school walk is the Malcolm Campbell version.

We were due to go by coach to a vast forest some 20 minutes away but mud put pay to that so when Eldest and I arrived for duty we were told sadly that our day had been cancelled. Quelle Damage!! I had just enough time to let the idea of a day in front of the computer and a good cup of strong French café make itself comfortable in my imagination , when it was announced that all was saved and we would all walk to St Roc instead, now where is that I asked, only two of the teachers knew and they were very vague about directions but since we had the 5 and 6 year olds it wouldn’t be far. I have been on village walks with school kids in England before, I know the ropes.

So, off we set, weather a trifle grey and cool for July but no rain and the going was dry through the village. It was a local social history, on foot, stop to look at the Lavoire and hear about how the everyone’s granny (except ours)washed their dirty laundry in public, stop at the window and talk to the old man who is leaning out dead heading his geraniums and hear all about how he was the old shoemaker and when everyone’s Mummy( except ours) was little he made and mended all the shoes, we passed everyone’s house (except ours, we live on the other side of the village, right in the middle of nowhere, strange Anglais that we are) and pointed out where everyone’s aunties lived and who was who’s cousin, (except ours ).

We saw where the deer and badgers came to drink at night in the path by the stream, we saw where the foxes hid to catch the rabbits, we saw the tiny slate house that some mad Anglais has brought, (did we know them? NO? How odd!) At the same time we ate our slice of fresh bread and hunk of chocolate to keep us going and we ate it on the hoof. No time to stop places to go things to see.

We arrived at the Biscuiterie for an impromptu goutêau of hot biscuits straight from the oven. Show me somewhere else where a teacher could happily turn up at a biscuit factory unannounced and expect to be given a fresh batch of biscuits for 60 children and I will eat my melon (a melon is a bowler hat) Ah but here, of course, it is France and Maitresse is married to the head Patissier and her sister is married to the owner and everyone’s mother has worked here as a student at some time or other in their youth and everyone knows everyone so why not? So 16 small little French children and my small little Foreigner,, who is now after 3 years just as French as the rest of them, sit down on the door step and they eat hot buttery galletttes with jam in them until the bigger children arrive for their share and we all set off again, leaving 21 slightly bigger French children and my other slighter bigger foreigner, who is now every bit as French as his little brother, to lick their fingers and tuck in whilst they wait for the big classes to arrive for their share.

On we trot up the hill, and trot is the word here, at the sort of pace reserved for rushing to catch a bus whilst still attempting some remnant of decorum and they do it without a moan or a pause for breath.

We look at the birds , we name the crops we name the breeds of cows and identify the agricultural machinery, we do not pick this plant as it is poisonous we do not stop to tie are laces as they were all well tied before we left and we do not need to stop to pee. We are a well oiled walking machine with 29 pairs of striding legs and two pairs of English ones, mine and Eldest, manfully keeping up the rear. Ca Va? Oui! Of course nothing better than a route march across country to build up an appetite for lunch. No wonder the Bretons are so short, they have had a lifetime of their legs being worn down by speed walking!

We head downhill, and they all run and roar with delight. What is this called asks Maitresse, never missing a stride, a mountain someone replies, oh no says Maitresse not a mountain it is only a little colleen. Oh believe me Maitresse when you are 5 0r 6 hills seem as big as mountains when you gaze upon them, and feel like them too if you are an out of condition English teacher like me too I have discovered. Oh mince (pronounce mass, which means good gracious with attitude) here we go again up the other side. Lots of little French legs running and mine lumbering after them wishing I had been built for speed.

Past Ancient chapel de St Roc, now derelict, history of said saint and chapel given at speed as we pass, past fontaine in the woods, past pine trees past wild flowers past ancient stone walls hidden in undergrowth. Come to Roman foot bridge, vast slabs of smooth and slippy granite slabs lain flat on large granite rocks to act as pillars, over deep and fast running river that should be almost dry at this time of year but is not. One by one we cross the bridge, Eldest at the front to catch them if they slip, maitresse in the middle to hurry them along and me bringing up the rear, Just in case any one falls in.

Trot trot trip trap along muddy path slim and slippery by the side of the gushing rushing river and then into the clearing where we stop and holler like red Indians at the middle class who are following close behind.

Soon the clearing, under its thick green canopy of ancient oaks is full of rushing jumping whooping children climbing trees, swinging on branches, play sword fighting and being Ninjas running up and down the steep hill to the vast granite rocks at the top, and a small huddle of teachers on the waters edge acting as a safety net to trap any who descend the hill to fast and can not stop in time before reaching the river, whilst at the same time having a pause for a cigarette…teachers not children…I am thinking of taking up smoking. It is obviously good for the lungs, after all none of them are out of breath and they all smoke!

Across the river and through the trees we see a car arrive and stop,It is Momseiur le Directore who has brought lunch, he arrives and clapping his hands recuperates his class from amongst the bustling throng of children and off they go back and forth across the slippery bridge like worker ants transporting the vast cardboard boxes filled with ham ,pate and cheese baguettes, a hundred or so apples, individually wrapped cheeses, crisps and bottles of water. Each class assembles together in their group and line up to get their share, small ones first adults last, no pushing no shoving every one trots off and there is plenty for all, they ask where the bins are.. How thoughtless of nature not to provide them, but they empty a cardboard box into its mate and use that. Visions of hordes of small wild English school parties despoiling the countryside with their abandoned crisp packets spring to memory.

On the river we can see the rain is falling thick and vast but here under our acid green umbrella of leaves we are dry. I am being bitten by mosquitoes. I scratch and comment on the fact to Maitress, she says come with me, I have just the thing and we disappear behind a giant oak were I find all the other teachers happily drinking Kir, thoughtfully provided by Monseuir Le Directore for us. Good lord I think to myself Ofsted would shoot the lot of them! Even Eldest was given a
glass, oh lawks! Think what the Daily Mail would say!

Ah well looking at watches, Gendarmes and Madame Le Mayor arriving in two hours to present Middle’s class with their permis for passing their test on how to conduct oneself on a public pavement (gosh thank goodness they had all passed otherwise today might well have been riddled with health and safety issues!). So off we all set, Monsieur Le Directore takes all the remainders of our lunchtime repas in his car and no a sign of our brief sojourn is left behind, except for the apple cores that an afternoon snack for the woodland creatures.

The walk home was accomplished at the same breakneck pace. We left last, following in the wake of the bigger children, but arrived back at school only slightly later than them, what with having to make several pee stops on route, boys on one side of the lane, girls on the other, no peeking thank you, and stopping to listen to the explanation of the new recycling system with its smart wooden bins, the big ponds outside the village which are in fact sewage plant and clean all the village waste water(except ours of course), the old railway tracks now converted to public footpaths and to wave at Sophie’s grand mere who makes crepes on Friday night, big communal sigh as it is not a Friday.

Back at school I realize that no one has done a head count all day but we still didn’t lose a soul. There was no need to worry, it really is not a school at all but one big French family, where no one is going to get left behind. There is a big pot of strong French café at school waiting for us but Eldest and I sneak away to catch up on things at home, things like a long nap, after all we have walked for about 4 hours at a cracking speed and we are justifiable a trifle worn out.

The children of course carry along with their day and when we return to pick up ours at the end of the afternoon they bounce out like happy bunnies, no one would guess they had walked so far and so fast.

Me and Eldest? Well we could quite happily sleep for a week!

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And to prove my stories are, as ever true, here is the photograph of the slippery granite bridge which the Romans built and over which , so many lifetimes later, we all tripped trapped over on a wet drippy Thursday and no one not a soul , fell in.

And here at last are the Elephants

2007-07-06T10:03:00.001+02:00

You would think, wouldn't you, that having got this far in life, travelled half way around the world and back that I might have some sort of plan or even, failing that, an inkling as to where it was all leading and what I am going to do next? Well apparently not. But whilst I am teetering, trepidacious, on the edge of today staring up at the foothills of tomorrow I might as well look back at the plains of the past and talk about Elephants. All those not interested in Elephants turn away now.I have never seen an elephant in the wild but I have met several in captivity. Great creatures with sad soulful eyes who turn their great heads and look down with an expression of betrayal that mankind has brought them to this.
When I was very small my Father was very ill, actually my Father was dying, he spent my entire childhood dying in small degrees, stroke by stroke you might say.but that has very little to do with Elephants so we shall leave that well alone. You can dwell on the uncomfortableness of your past, the injustices of it, you can blame your own shortcomings on it, you can build a camp and live there or you can pack up and move on. I always think it far to choose the latter option. This has very little to do with Elephants so we shall choose not to rest here but move on. Never a good idea to keep an Elepahnt waiting.
The family house was no place for a little girl ,too old for her years and full off silent questions stored behind all knowing eyes. I was sent off in various directions to spend time in so thought safer places wiht kind people as was the custom. to protect me from what was happening. One such surrogate home was of a wonderful woman ,the like of whom my mother would not have under other circumstances entrusted any of her children too.
She was someone who did not possess a butter knife and picked up her chicken bones to eat in her fingers, who watched all in wrestling on television, who wore far too much makeup and fake jewellery and had a vast upholstered bust in which I would be hauled. She was Liverpool Irish and where on earth my Mother and she had met I have no idea. I know , looking back from the foothills here and catching the echoes of things seen and said, that each thought the other terrible, but she had an alcoholic husband and my mother had a dying one so they had that odd bond of women tossed together in hopeless circumstances giving what mutual support they could.
Anyway it was by the grace of this woman that I saw, quite by accident, my first Elephant.
There was a circus in a great public park outside the city and the animals had been brought up from the docks through the tiny Georgian streets ,which once had housed wealthy merchants families but by then were decaying and impoverished in the days before urban regeneration, en route to there engagement. I remember it well, it being the first time I had ever been the wrong side of the tracks as it were and I was terrified. It was as as far from anything I had ever known as anything can be, coming as I did from a world of playrooms and gardeners and housekeepers and rocking horses and apple trees to play in and the grocer coming to the back door to deliver his order and bobbing his head and taking off his cap at my mother if he saw her.
We had crossed the great avenue that divided the good end of town from the less acceptable end, in the heart of which she lived, when she must have heard the sound of a parade and, although I can not remember any sounds, I can see her face as she pulled me along after her and ran down what must have been at one time a country lane, but was by then a scruffy inner city street and I was lifted up to sit on a red pillar box to see the parade go by.
There were great old and battered trucks, trundling along the street,each with a a cage on its back decked out with gaudy flags and paintings, in which there were Lions and Tigers, I was convinced they would escape and eat me! Dwarves dressed as clowns, men on stilts and fire eaters in spangled tights, bare chested, one had a black goatee beard and a gold loop earring and there was a girl too, very much mutton dressed as the proverbial lamb, wearing a dusty and very probably ancient faded pink tutu, prancing about him with great gold hoops which she threw and twirled. It was like something from a Victorian painting , I was very lucky, for, very possibly, it was one of the last of its kind for I have never seen anything like it since anywhere in the world.
At the front of the parade was a man with a red tail coat and black hat and behind him the very large Elephant, plodding and shackled, bellowing the odd bellow for theatrical effect. He wore an embroidered cover over his head with pinks and gold with long tarnished tassels and a man rode astride his neck with a stick rested across his knees but I have no clear image of the man for I was lost in the intelligence of the elephants eyes.
Later I rode Elephants briefly in England at other circuses as children and tourists do. I think I even rode one at London zoo once, but would not swear to it. I forgot all about elephants until I took our Eldest to Singapore Zoo many many years later and we saw the elephants there, standing shackled in the shade waiting to give rides . One of them turned his head towards me and I recognised the same look in his eyes. I told Eldest a story I once read and this is it.
There was once an Elephant, a very famous one I believe, in London Zoo, long ago before zoos are what they have become ,what they are today, and he would not do as he was told and bellowed and trumpeted and broke down his flimsy fence about his enclosure so that the Zoo keepers were frightened he would run amok and rampage amongst the visitors so they sent for a man to shoot him , as beating him seemed to have no effect.
A man stepped from the crowd, a small dark man with glasses, foreign looking perhaps but nothing very special to look at, he walked up to the Elephant and, so it is said, looked into the Elephants eyes and placed his hand on the creatures trunk and, leaning his head against it he spoke to it quietly until it calmed and swayed gently and swung its head back and forth as they do. Everyone, so they say for it was many, many years before my time and, for all I know, may just be a charming story the likes of which are told to children, everyone was amazed and thought he had used magic, but he explained quietly that the Elephant was Indian and he did not understand the language spoken to him by his keeper so was frightened and confused but all he really needed was a kind hand and a soft voice speaking in words in his native tongue he could understand to reassure him. The man was Rudyard Kipling, who of course grew up in India and missed it apparently as much as the Elephant . It is said after that he visited the Elephant frequently when he could and spoke to it in Urdu or Hindi or which ever Indian tongue they both knew , as much for his own sake as the Elephants. And that oh my best beloveds as Kipling would say is the end of the story.
Children are a bit like Elephants I suppose, a soft caress and simple word spoken kindly can go an awfully long way and it does not really matter where that kindness comes from as long as it comes.
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Anyway there you are ,you asked for Elephants and now you have them. Look in this elephants eyes and tell me you don't see the inteliigence and a touch of sadness in that eye. He, by the way, was painted for an American art exhibition, by Britain's famed artist "Banksy", as the exhibition's centrepiece, painted to look like pink floral wallpaper - a reference, so he claims, to weighty problems such as poverty. I think upon reflection it might have been altogether to have painted the artist to resemble flocked wallpaper and let the elephant be. But then, what would I know?
Oh and as an after thought, with reference to my Father's prolonged death bed, I think I had an incredibly lucky childhood all things considered, I was never hungry, I was not sent up chimneys to clean them at the age of four nor was I sold into slavery... my mother on the other hard had an incredibly hard adult life as a result of his illness, despite which she did her best, which is all any of us can hope to do. I do think sometimes it is tempting to see what we have from the negative side instead of counting our blessings.

I moved this post from a misplaced spot in july so here are the earleir comments...

Elizabethd has left a new comment on your post "And here are the Elephants you ordered...": What a lovely piece of writing..though nearly missed it as it's escaped back into June.Elephants, I feel, look as though they know more than we realise, they have that long suffering but patient gaze.

Faith has left a new comment on your post "And here are the Elephants you ordered...": I'm not even sure why there are tears in my eyes..... because your blog is so beautifully written? because I hope the Rudyard Kipling story is true? because the elephant in the picture is painted... and shouldnt be (or maybe it doesnt mind).... all this emotion is too much so early in the morning!I think it was amazing that you saw such a procession - definitely one of the last of its kind.

Keeping up ones pecker in five easy steps...

2007-07-02T20:51:00.000+02:00

Or where to find a happy place when you have lost yours...!!!

I have been tagged, quite unexpectedly and out of the blue, from someone out there in the big bad world, and it could not have come at a better or more appropriate time because I have been a real nightmare of a Madame Grognonne lately! For which to all whom it may concern I am very very sorry...honestly..

This isn’t a tag for listing how clever you are or how well travelled or how bizarre you are or who you know who is famous, or your 7 most favourite films. It is a really helpful tag about what you do to keep try and keep your pecker up and stay positive so here goes!!We all have our coping strategies or what ever you want to call them so here are mine to deal with that old black mongrel of depression. This is what I do if I am feeling a touch of “Le Cafard” as the French say ….or rather what I know I should do but don't always do well enough...

1 Dredge up a memory of a happy moment. If I remind myself how very happy I felt and recapture it, I know I can feel that way again...and that fact makes me smile. Think of one small thing that made you smile, and you watch along will come another, and another and another…They are like London Buses…

2 Do something, anything, iron, clean, cook, sort through a mountain of paper work, blitz the kids bedrooms, or weed the veggie patch. Even better, go and do something for someone else. What goes around comes around, and some of the most incredible people I have met, I met through getting off my bottom and going out to give someone a hand. Activity takes my mind of me.

3 Play Carl Orff ‘s “Carmine Burana” very loud or the sound tracks of South Pacific or Oklahoma or something with so much life and energy stuffed into it that it is pouring out of the seams. If the Wombles do it for you, go for it!

4 Walk and walk and walk, and look around me and remind myself how incredible the world is and how much out there I do not even know about yet. You can do that anywhere inner city shopping centre, out on a lone moor on a train, but do be careful if you do it when you are driving!!!

5 stop feeling so self indulgently sorry for myself and start remembering how lucky I am. How lucky I am to get to be the age I am, living where I am, and not dying of Aids in some hovel in Africa, or watching my children die of starvation in some worn torn God forsaken place, or many of the myriad things I am lucky not to have experienced.

Yes bad things happen in life but I can make the choice to leave them behind or I can sit and go over and over and over them. As the French say C’est Fini. Now move on.

It is clichéd but its true, most peoples lives are as happy as they want them to be, you can either decide everything is terrible and sit and list all the things that make you miserable and wallow in it or pump up the volume and concentrate on the positive things and all the things you have achieved .

And if you don’t feel you have achieved anything, look again. If you are reading this, then you can read, millions can't, if you are having this read to you then you are lucky to have someone who has taken the time to do that for you.

If you blog, then you can write and have access to a computer, many have neither access or skill or opportunity. No one made you do any of those things. It was your choice so now go and look in the mirror and remind yourself of how marvelous life is and how extremely lucky you are.

And on a final note, we are not talking Bipolar disorder or clinical depression here we are talking about the odd touch of the blues, the sort of thing that comes form having too much time on ones hands and over indulging in poor me syndrome. So there you are I have passed on the Baton.. on to Pondside, Fennie, Grouse, ChrisH. and Snailbeachshepherdess..go girls run like the wind!!!

The wonderful illustration I can not find artist or title for but it just sums up the whole keep going up and don't look back thing, start looking down and you end up frozen with fear , like Dory in Finding Nemo you just have to keep on swimming...oh and for anyone reading my blog for the first time, welcome ,and the funny stuff is under the adventures of un peu loufoque this is the other side of me... ...and lastly but by no means least a very big thank you to American Scot for tagging me...

Well since you asked...Camels..

2007-06-18T10:48:00.001+02:00

Long ago, I lived in Egypt on an Island called Zamalek in the middle of the river, in a place with long wide balconies which hung over the sluggish waters of the Nile. It was an Island of grand houses built in the French style, and decaying colonial architecture , hedges of vivid bougainvillea , dust dirt noise heat and traffic everywhere, It was as they say a charmed life, I drank Hibiscus tea at the exclusive El Gezira Club and In the very early morning rode Arab horses past the pyramids and watched the camel corps on exercise plodding their stately way over across the modern flyovers towards Mena House and the Desert where, having hit the sands, they raced off with the speed of the silent wind disappearing in a cloud of shimmering dust of their own making.

In summer, when it became unbearable to ride in the glare of the sun we took out horses through the orange groves in the shade where we passed women in villages untouched by time, sitting outside mud brick houses beneath date palms ,wearing gold hawk faced masks to cover their faces from strangers eyes.

When time allowed we would escape Cairo very early in the morning and travel to the bitter lakes where the water was like thick warm pea soup and there was nothing to do but lie in it and watch the Bedouin girls, dressed in black with fuchsia sashes, languidly herding their flat tailed sheep through the sparse grass, foraging.

During Ramadan Cairo is mad with heat and hunger and the whole city simmers and rolls like a pot coming to the boil. So we would brace ourselves for a long days drive across the city and out into the sand dunes to wait an hour or so in a car park in the middle of nothing for enough vehicles to be gathered to form a convoy through the tunnel under the canal to the Sinai desert.

Once on the other side we would drive for hours along empty roads, passing vast Egyptian army camps with bunkers filled with tanks and aircraft hidden under camouflage netting. If you stopped to stretch you legs and watched carefully, in the seeming nothingness of the sands, a tiny movement would alert you to a soldier appearing like a rabbit from a manhole cover to see what you were up to. We would drive on until it got dark to camp on a beach by the water and to sleep lying on blankets by the land rovers with nothing but the stars above us and the moon rising red over the mountains. Lying there in the silence and nothingness listening to the desert breathe.

There was a place way beyond western eyes where hot springs bubbled out of the sand and rocks and the Bedouin came to bathe. We sat on the sand dunes and watched the women fully clothed in white tents bobbing in the pools like discarded laundry.

Sometimes, as we sat drinking and eating around our campfire, the camel trains would pass us in the night, a long line of camels roped together, travelling down the desert roads heading to Cairo to the market across the shifting sands, their dozing drivers swathed in cloaks , plodding on in silence, rocked to sleep by the swaying motion of their ships of the desert.

I have visited the camel market, very early on a Sunday morning. It was held inside a mud brick walled compound where great fat Pashas reclined on wooden benches against cushions ,drinking mint tea and smoking hookah pipes and men lent discreetly down to catch their words and whisper in their ears, and then rushed off to fetch whom ever or whatever it was that they had been dispatched to do. Hopeful traders paraded camels of all sizes in front of them, the baby camels knees bound in rags to keep their legs rigid so that they did not collapse into crumpled furry heaps in the dust, and the air bursting with the sound of Arabs calling out and camels bellowing and the smell of 'Eesh baladi’ bread and fool medames (egyptian bean stew).

It was long ago and I lived in another world then.

A shy womans quiet night out...

2007-06-16T18:26:00.001+02:00

Last night I was dragged sulking and bad tempered to partake of le Pot by way of celebrating the theatre group’s latest success in their recent production of A star in the countryside, as described by un peu Loufoque in her night at the theatre what seems like a life time ago . Strange how the worlds of fact and fiction collide!

I am an excruciatingly shy being. I throw my angst like some overblown toddler tantrum. Frankly I ought to give myself a good slap or at the very least a stern talking to but since I am usually far too occupied with being vexed and vexatious about what to wear, whether anyone will speak to me and what I will find to say if they do, add to that the fact that I must do it all in French and you can begin to see that my idea of how I wanted to spend last night did not include being the only non native speaker amongst 35 Bretons and tons of couscous in a confined space. I know husband is not really a native speaker either, but they all love him dearly and he can chatter in colloquial French with the best of them so that just leaves me. Glued to his side with gritted teeth whist trying to look interesting and interested in anything and everyone and wishing I was in Nova Scotia or Skegness. You can see now why I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper can’t you?

Anyway off we trolled, me behaving very much like Madame Grognonne on a bad day and perversely complaining that we were going to be late. First stop was at someone’s for aperitifs. After drive through forgotten Brittany down miles of tranquility over tracks through pine forests, past rivers and rocks over hills and finally into a farmyard, at which stage I decide that I would rather like to go home now thank you. Before I can we are spotted and solemnly kissed by assorted children who stop their football game to come and do so.
We enter the largest kitchen I have seen outside Brighton Pavilion, to face a long table around which are seated 25 people some of whom I know vaguely and about 3 of whom I can name, on a good day. This group is not the same lot we usually meet socially and none of my usual French friends were there to hold my hand. We do the tour of the table and bisou each and every one of them and say salut , ca va until we arrive back to the beginning at which stage we sit down and have a drink. I cannot help thinking that if we had arrived earlier we only would have needed to kiss about 10 and could have got to the drinking bit quicker. Over the next hour the stragglers arrive and each has to do the whole kissing routine , so by the time everyone is there I have air kissed or cheek pecked about 35 people on two cheeks and bearing in mind some of them went for three kisses and that is not including the babies toddlers and children that is a lot of kissing for a shy woman!
At 9.45 someone suggests we go and eat, not a bad idea I feel as we are booked at the restaurant at 9 pm. So we all have another drink for the road. Glasses emptied…well plastic cups actually; no pretensions here then, all shoot off in different directions as everyone knows a short cut. We go the way we came because after two hours of drinking white frothy wine (me)and le jaune (pernod, him) neither of us is game to get lost in those now dark forests en route.
We arrive at the village square at the same time as everyone else, short cuts not so short then obviously, and all disembark towards the restaurant where two long tables are laid beautifully on one side of the room and a large space has been left on the other. Please God do not let them make me dance.
We then have to all bisou the owner’s wife who is also, of course, our youngest’s teacher’s sister in-law and probably everyone else’s cousin, except ours. Teacher asks how youngest knee is and I learn that he has spent the day hobbling. Wonderful, now I shall get home to find his leg has dropped off. Bad bad mother!
Half the party attempt to stand out side on the very small pavement for a smoke, a pavement which incidentally was not designed for 17 odd Bretons to stand on simultaneously so they are forced to huddle together, the rest of us loiter inside chatting, or in my case tossing up between a) trying to prevent husband from gong outside for a smoke or b) taking up the wicked weed myself in order to avoid being marooned in a sea of foreigners!
Eventually after about 30 minutes someone yells Á table and everyone shifts towards the tables obviously all trying to avoid having to sit with the mad English woman in case she speaks tries to speak french.We sit at the end of one table and Claude and Sylvie luck out and sit opposite us. To be fair they are our nearest neighbors, albeit 15 minutes away from us across country on foot and their daughter is in Middle’s class and she and he vie for top place in each and every test they have at school so I suppose it is probably their duty to fraternize with the foreigners.

Claude is very charming, despite starting the conversation by asking me did I really speak no French at all, funny I thought had been speaking it all evening so far, but never mind.
We have yet more aperitifs and nibbles, which incidentally are called gateau so next time the vicar comes to drinkies you can offer him une gateau as you pass him the crisps and have immense fun watching his face run the gamut of confusion before your very eyes. This is to tide us over whilst the children, who have taken over the far end of the other table can be served their own meal of ham and fried potatoes washed down with Witt, which is an acid green drink of some sort, that thankfully since ours are safely at home with Eldest watching Wallace and Grommit in French, I will not be expected to try. Youngest does like to educate my palate. The label on the bottle say Witt depuis (since)1905 , I find this amusing and ask what they did for humour before 1905… which I regret as I have to repeat it twice as no one seems able to understand, oh you know wit as in humour? Husband repeats it and we discover that actually in French it is not funny at all.

Thankfully, the couscous arrives, followed by a vast bowl of chicken pieces, then another, of vegetables in spicy sauce followed by a dish of lamb and small bowls of very hot and spicy sauce and of course water, wine and baskets of bread. It is like a self assembly meal on a production line as the dishes work their way along the tables.

Chief Patissier is declared to be very Breton as he butters his bread. I however do not nor do I like salted butter it is discovered so am very much the foreigner .I decide now would not be a good time to tell that where I come from it is defiantly not the done thing to butter ones bread and that husband is in fact an uncouth colonial.

We discuss films, having just seen a new film about the African soldiers who fought for France in the Second World War. The general opinion t our end of the table is that they were paid to do it so what is the problem, after all Bretons died in their thousands doing the same thing. Whilst I point out that sending Arab boys to fight in snow wearing nothing but cotton shifts and open toes sandals is not on especially when they did not even speak the lingo. I then remember that Bretons did not speak it either. I add topic to my list of things not to discuss in society, along with salted butter and the question of why the Bretons hold their forks in their right hand.

Excellent Peach Melbas for dessert and over coffee and cigarettes I am declared to be tres bourgeoisies as I recall my mother having sobrani cocktail cigarettes the same colour as her evening dresses. I realize too late that no ones mother here ever had evening dresses let alone smoked cocktail cigarettes and feel like a wicked imperialist. Add evening dress and coloured cigarettes to growing list of unmentionable topics.

We are treated to Claude doing his impromptu singing this time in French which is a real joy as he is a beautiful singer and I can understand the French which is more than I can do if he sings n Breton. He sings a love song, with which every one joins in although no one by this stage can remember what happens in verse 2 so they keep going back to the beginning to give it another go just in case someone remembers.

Happily the clear space turns out to a combined football pitch and disco for the children ,who climb up and down on everyone’s knees and are generally accepted as being small humans with the right to speak and be spoken to. No one shouts, or complains about them and there is not one grumpy faced adult even when they turn up the music so loud everyone turns around and tells them to turn it down or when we get engaged in a paper ball flicking fight across the room. Honestly I did not start it. Well alright I may have done.

It was a wonderful evening, no ceremony, no vapid social chit chat just talk and the chance to practice my French amongst people who didn’t fall off their chairs laughing at my efforts. I was even promised an interview in the local paper to show of my ceramics.

I came home feeling a happy if somewhat inebriated bunny.

Now if I can only train myself to go through evenings like that without the 3 days of fear and loathing before hand and if my poor liver can learn to stand it and I remember not to mention butter, evening dresses and cutlery then I may be on to a winner!

The picture is an old postcard of ancient Bretons, as opposed to ancient Britons, having a quick drink and a smoke chez Eux. I really ought to say generally speaking they do not dress like this now, except on special occasion.. or if there is a full moon..or its raining of course..