Testosterone Surge

1st April
Barney, The Director’s son arrived at the weekend and is going to stay and work with us for a while, Spider Man has come back to continue logging and will stay over for the week, Félix is also here today setting up the tanks for the underwater creatures.

A couple of weeks ago I posted some notes about the existing housemates
it ony seems fair to do the same for the new boys:

Barney:
just got some very fancy sunglasses and won’t take them off – he probably sleeps wearing them, he never wears a jacket, in fact he generally dresses in a very impractical manner, he makes a great Pavlova - towering edifices that take an entire afternoon to construct.


Spider Man:
Rarely speaks, when he takes breaks from the computer he goes outside and swishes a big net around, then he examines what he’s caught and makes notes in the book he always carries with him, his favourite food is aubergine, he’s a bit rubbish at jam-making, he gave me a jar of his tomato jam – I wanted to taste it but I couldn’t find an implement strong enough to slice a piece out of the jar so, insane with curiosity, I had to just lick the surface of it.

Félix:
collects wild food, invited me for supper and served nettle soup (pretty good actually, sprinkled with ground sesame and salt), he lives with his mother, he runs a seed bank, one evening last week he turned up with a compartmentalised box hung on a strap round his neck from which he dispensed seeds for my vegetable garden. The tomato seeds are stuck on sheets of kitchen roll with the variety written on the paper.

Miss Whiplash isn’t coming until next week, by which time the odour of smelly socks might have become overwhelming and we’ll have to run off together and set up our own salon

More Ants - Hooray!

Monday 30th March
The weekend was chaotic; Mrs Druid reckoned she could sneak her sheep onto the new grazing without my noticing - Saturday morning I arrived back from shopping to discover the house surrounded by a bleating herd of the woolly bastards. Mrs Druid relies on her blind and nervous old dog to help her control the sheep which is a touching but losing battle. In the midst of all this a carload of house guests pulled in to the drive behind me. The electric fence didn’t work very well and during the course of the weekend there were many escaped sheep alerts.

On Saturday evening we turned the main room into a grand banqueting hall for The Director's birthday party, I planted lots of big candles round the room in mounds of clay (we spent quite a long time trying to make them not look like dog turds but had to give that up as it was too time-consuming) the overall effect struck me as quite gothic.

Obviously there was loads of food but I’m beyond going into all that, I will say that if you had some raspberries and cream but had run out of time to do anything fancy, especially if a large man had just sat on the bag of macaroons, the day can be saved - just with whip the cream, mix in the raspberries and the bits of macaroons - it’s terrific.

Over the weekend our guests got fed up with rounding up sheep and went off on a walk. Somewhere along the way someone tripped over an ants nest – a great big one right on a path in the wood (easy camera access - hurrah!). This is great because it makes our captive ant catastrophe less of a catastrophe.

Weekly Round Up

Friday 27th
We’ve had some trials this week; someone went out every morning to set up a timelapse sequence and every day the focus was out. Spider Man was due to turn up on Monday to start logging our footage, he phoned to say that he’d written off his car so we arranged that I’d pick him up at the train station and he’d stay over at our place for a couple of days. On the journey from the station I asked him what happened with his car, he told me that he’d been out on a moth hunt and fell asleep on his way home, he woke the next morning upside down in a field. I might have to rethink the name I've given him.

Mrs Druid has been around a lot over the last few days putting up an electric fence on our land in preparation for bringing her sheep in to graze, she is actually quite lecherous and keeps luring the Camera Boys away from filming to help her bang in her posts. I am now experiencing quite a lot of irritable feelings towards her so I’ve asked her to take the weekend off and we’ll help her bring her sheep in next week*.

It’s gone quiet for a moment, we’ve had lunch, I’ve just taken Spider/Moth/WhateverMan back to the station and one of the Camera Boys has gone back to the UK for a week, the rest of the afternoon is for tidying up. I’m a bit distracted though, The Director has arrived at a significant birthday and soon people are going to start turning up for the weekend celebrations.


* we’ve been bribed with the promise of half a lamb in return for the grazing, there is a lot of grassland here and we can’t afford a mower because we’ve still not got the money from the Big Controller that was due last year

Animal Update
Julie the bereaved cat: has transformed into quite a friendly thing, still very timid but she hangs around us while we’re outside and lets me stroke her sometimes.

Ants: none of them have survived last week's attack, the other relocations we tried in more controlled conditions were also unsuccessful.

Bumble Bees: have made their special wooden box comfy with mud and moss and are happily flying in and out of their new home - we will be filming them next week.

An Offer I Can’t Refuse

25th March
After yesterday’s Ada holiday , I’m back on track in the World of Weird that is this little filming project, I’ll catch you up on the insect and cat news later, but I’ve been champing at the bit to unburden myself of a recent adventure:

I had a swift response to Friday’s canvassing for garden-related stuff, the following afternoon a battered Mercedes scrunched into our driveway. M. Mullet got out, swaggered round to the car boot and opened it with a flourish to reveal a pile of ceramic flower pots and plastic seed trays. I thanked him and said that I’d be happy to buy them.

Oh no, they’re just sitting there taking up space in our garage, they are a gift

M. Mullet has a wolfy leer about him, clearly this was not going to be the end of it, his eyes were scanning the property over my shoulder, taking note that no other car was in view, he finally asked if I was on my own (I was).

Goodness me no, my husband is filming behind the house – shall I call him?

He didn’t call my bluff and headed off, but the following day his wife knocked on our front door and asked me if I would like to have an aperitif with her that evening, I said that would be lovely thank you
then she said Good you will join my home maintenance party

She saw my puzzled look and explained that she was hosting a party for housewives where we would be introduced to some house cleaning products, I wanted to laugh, my idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

The penny dropped - this was how I had to pay for the car-load of pots

The Mullet’s place was easy to spot due to the broken lorry blocking the road outside, but then I had to negotiate quite a lot of big car parts and dog poo before I got to the front door, M. Mullet opened the door and there was  a tussle to stop the dogs savaging me. The 'party’ was going to be run by a large severe-looking lady in a tight suit, M.Mullet left for the bar and we were all given catalogues, there were 5 other 'guests', all French except for Brenda*, I was the only non-smoker in the room.

Brenda hissed at me that she’d tried to decline her invitation by saying that there’d be no point as she didn’t understand French, They told me you were coming to translate – why didn’t you say no?

I hissed back: Why didn’t you?

We were then treated to the Stanhome Experience which is exclusively directed at women and emphasizes their responsibility to provide family security through cleanliness. The Tight-suited Lady stood and lectured us, pausing now and again while I turned to Brenda and rendered her words into English.

There is nothing that will remove as many stains as Spunkoff, here are my husband’s white cricket trousers, they were covered with sperm and grass stains, see how new they look now

Mme Mullet was to receive a commission from the sales, she told us that she hoped to reach a target that would win her the bonus prize, I asked her what that would be

A magic squeegee**

Finally order forms were passed around, I selected a cleaning sponge and some hand cream at the sort of price I would pay for good Champagne and smoked salmon. Everyone else placed their order and went home but Mme Mullet had insisted that Brenda and I stay for aperitifs, we waited while the evening’s sales were totalled.

The squeegee target was not reached, Tight-suit lady handed us all a Stanhome-branded coaster and left. M. Mullet came back from the bar, poured us some warm whiskey and tried to comfort his distraught wife about her tight-fisted friends. It was an uncomfortable evening on every level.

* Brenda is great value - a chain-smoking septuagenarian party girl from Liverpool, recipient of multiple implants and facelifts

** Obviously if I could’ve just bought her the mop as an exchange for the pots I would have happily done so – but mere money won’t buy such a glorious thing.

Customer Survey

22nd March
I made a business trip to the village bar on Friday evening - to let it be known that I’m in the market for any old garden-related stuff that people are throwing out or won’t be needing for a while. I’m going to use it to dress the garden sets.

I took the new bar manager Shane shopping again last week and the trip was decorated by some colourful swearing. He cursed the tight-fisted a******s who are refusing to buy his fancy wines. This is mainly due to unrealistic expectations on his part, I suspected that our village society might not have the right profile for his plans and decided to conduct a survey of his existing clientele on a typical Friday night:

Old Dad
Turns up wearing fat slippers, usually drinks Ricard, rarely eats out, likes to see a piece of meat and plenty of chips on his plate.

Herisson
Comes in for beer after long day farming, lives with his parents, his Italian mother would be volubly upset if he ate away from home.

Frank and Philippe
Pétanque club captain and his best mate, they wear unfashionable jeans, drink beer mixed with mint syrup then Ricard chasers, their idea of evening entertainment = burping contests, when they’ve got drunk enough they go for a pizza.

Mimi
Philippe’s wife, she’s very smart but as a perpetually designated driver she just drinks Coke.

The Mullet* family
Mme Mullet is a hairdresser and does the family hair, her husband does stuff with used vehicles and leers shamelessly at other women in front of his wife, she watches miserably clutching a Kalua-based cocktail. There are two doughy-faced sons in biker leathers, their mullets resplendent enough to gain free entry to a Guns n Roses convention. The boys drink beer but M. Mullet surprised me by drinking what amounted to about a pint of Muscat (an inexpensive sweet white wine) They do eat out together a lot, I’ve seen them at Jeanne’s café, they tell me that for a special treat they would go to the Macdonalds in the out of town shopping mall.

Lost Bloke Asking Directions
No purchase

Me**
I hung with Mimi and put rum in my coke.

* The Mullet family are French, I was curious to discover what the French might call this cut and came across this place and this one
discovering along the way that

the French term is Coupe à la Waddle, referring to Chris Waddle, the English football player who adopted this haircut in the 1980s while he played for Olympique Marseille.

** I went to the bar on my own, The Director wanted to stay in and finish making a ratchet-sprung gnat-catcher and the Camera Boys took the car to go find somewhere a little more lively.

Housing Crisis

19th March
On Tuesday the weather was looking good for rehousing the carpenter ant colony. One of the prepared tree trunks was set nice and firm by the garden shed, the ants had been taken out of the fridge the day before and left in a cool place to acclimatise. We placed them by the entry hole on the tree trunk with some sugar water nearby, they wandered around a bit and gradually disappeared into the trunk - Hooray.

We were just slapping high fives when the TNT van pulled in to the drive, the driver had got out of the cab and we could see her gesticulating at us.

The driver, Sylvie, knows us quite well by now, it turns out that she lives in a town an hour’s drive from here, next door to the mother of the woman who lives three houses away from me, with this degree of neighbourly proximity we’re practically sisters - Sylvie usually stops for coffee after she’s handed over a box of creatures.

On Tuesday Sylvie didn’t stay for coffee, she was a bit irate, she told us that she’d heard buzzing and realised that her cab was filling with bumble bees, she pulled over, slapped a bit of parcel tape over the tear in our package and continued, a little faster than she should've, to us.

Now all our attention was on the bumble bees, we could feel through the outer wrapping that the inner casing was broken. We had prepared a wooden box to house these bees and were keen to transfer them to this as soon as possible - how to get the bees out of the broken package without them all just flying away?

Bees can’t see red light and won’t fly in the dark, we already had a dark room in one of the stables where we’d been filming the blossom, there was even a work table in there, so we set up a red light and undid the package on the table, the bees all tumbled out, they fell off the table and were crawling around on the floor, someone went to find things to scoop them up with.

At this point we heard The Director yelling something about the carpenter ants being under attack. The Camera Boys stayed to herd the bumble bees and I ran off to the ants, arriving on a scene of devastation, lots of tiny black ants had swarmed over our great big carpenter ants who, by this time, had fallen off the tree trunk and were lying around in the grass clearly in a bad way, The Director was sweeping away the black ants and trying to resuscitate the wounded carpenters. We tried to poke the unwounded ants back in their ant hole but they kept coming back out to look for their comrades.

We’ve set up an ant hospital in a margarine container where we hope the survivors might recover...

Blackthorn Blossom

The Food At The Bar Goes La Di Da

16th March
Shane has transformed our scruffy spit-and-sawdust café into a gastrodome, he's bought new white tablecloths and fine glassware, there are pretty candle holders on the tables and he has introduced a wine list. He is quite meticulous and sculpts all the tomatoes and carrots into roses which means that it takes a while for the food to actually make it to the table - but I mustn't be mean, he did serve an impressive meal to the pétanque club this weekend.

The pétanqueuers didn’t quite know what to make of this, they ordered their carafes of House Red as usual, peered suspiciously at the little towers of food on their plates and dipped fingers gingerly into the raspberry sauce that had been trickled around the edges of their plates, but by the end of the evening while Naughty Vera was running the selection process for who would be entertaining her later on, Shane was regaling a happy bunch of chaps with tall tales of how many Spanish prostitutes he could fit into his ski chalet.

Meanwhile on the filming lot...
We love timelapse filming, I’ve already gone on about it here. For spring we're filming flowers opening. This involves setting up stills cameras to take a series of photographs at regular intervals. We've now got beautiful dandelions opening in a nearby field - starting at dawn, the path of the sun is clearly marked by the shadows of the flowers as they open up. Daisies and celandines are really good too. We’ve also blacked out one of the sheds and placed branches of tightly shut blackthorn blossom in sugared water, these are lit constantly, cameras are left pointing at them and clicking away for a week or so until they’ve fully opened.

Tomorrow we rehouse the ants ...

Ant Condos

13th March
We’ve been preparing the new homes for the ant colonies that are hibernating in the fridge. We have some fat logs and tree stumps ready for the carpenter ants, a section is sliced off the log and holes are drilled to make a network of chambers, most of the holes will be bunged up on the outside with little corks leaving just two exits/entrances for the ants, when they have settled in we can unbung a hole and put in an endoscope to film what’s going on.

meanwhile down at the bar...
Shane has arrived to run the village bar, Kurt’s younger brother and chief adversary. Kurt was nursing a black eye when I took him and his wife to the airport.

Shane works out a lot, his body is waxed and his hair shorn with a number two blade, he wears neatly pressed white shirts, black trousers and shiny Doc Martin boots. He also has an intense dislike of women, non-French people and anyone over 30 ... he does not possess a driving license. Our village is a 20-minute drive from the nearest shop. Because I would like the bar to survive I have agreed to take him shopping with me once a week until his friend arrives to help him out next month.

Our first run to the shops didn’t go particularly well because I resent being treated like his personal chauffeuse and he doesn’t seem to like the sharp edge of my tongue.

Breaking The Ice

11th March
Félix came over last night, he is very shy and speaks no English so we welcomed him by showing him a darts game we'd just invented:

Who fetches the beer?
Someone throws a dart to make the challenge, everyone in the room has to grab a dart and throw it at the board from wherever they were when the challenge was declared. furthest from the bull gets the beer (from the insect fridge in the cold back kitchen). If you're facing away from the board when the challenge is made - tough the dart has to be thrown over your shoulder.

Félix thought that one was great so we invented some more games including:

How many darts can you get into a board in a single throw?
Funnily enough cramming your fist with loads of darts and hurling them at the board doesn’t mean that more stick in, just throwing two or three has more success than six at once.

How far can you be from the board and still get a dart in?
You can get a sightline to the dartboard from the back of the next room but no-one has been able to throw that far yet.

Félix did end up having to fetch a lot of beer, but he went home happy with a big net and a list of dragonfly larvae species to hunt down.

Pussy Galore

8th March
My neighbour in the posh house down the road, Madame Bontette, has some New Best Friends, last night she invited The Director and me to a dinner party so we could meet them. The Director doesn’t like dinner parties so I made his excuses and went alone.

I’d already had a tour of the dining room at Chateau Bontette – a symphony of layered drapes in shades of tangerine and crushed raspberry, coloured glass chandeliers, crazy metal candle holders and statuettes of toga-clad women in extravagant poses. Knowing that Naughty Vera would be there and that Mme B has a taste for leather trousers and slutty shoes, I decided to lift my mood with an outfit that involved shiny crimson stiletto-heeled boots, fishnet tights, a psychedelic mini-dress and big jewellery. The NBFs turned out to be a surly old couple in suits, the hosts and other guests had, bizarrely, also opted for bank manager outfits.

A mutual dislike quickly became apparent between myself and the NBFs and awkward silence broke out, our attention wandered over to Naughty Vera who was flirting heavily with the man seated next to her, food and company disregarded, their chairs were turned 90 degrees from the table towards each other. Suddenly the Bontette’s very fluffy cat jumped up on Vera’s lap and they both set about stroking the animal with increasing fervour.

In another situation I’d have passed comment but in that strained atmosphere I left my mouth open and let M. Bontette launch into an animated dissertation about an asbestos problem at the local school.

Manure

7th March
For the filming there’s a real sense of urgency as spring is rushing in and there’s so much to get done. These projects feel like an obstacle race as one emergency looms up after another:

On Wednesday we carried all the filming equipment into the new studio, it was a little dusty so we pushed a broom over it, but it became dustier and then it seemed as though the floor was dissolving back into powder which sent us into a major panic, we finally calmed down sufficiently to call the Tall Builder who’d laid the floor, he came and painted it with PVA which seems to have stabilised it.

There’s considerable tension because we’ve run out of money again and can’t get the next tranche of funds until April and the Big Controller’s new financial year

We can only get one computer to connect to the internet and we’re all fighting over it. There’s emailing and ordering to be done online, the Camera Boys, having left behind their partners, want to spend the evenings Skyping - so no surfing for me.

My immediate job is to prepare the garden for planting. I went to see my neighbour and gardener-extraordinaire M. Bert (the man who showed me round this place when I first came to look at it.) His illness is progressing, his wife watches him anxiously while we chat about cabbages.

I’m off to a stableyard now to fill the car with horse manure.

Cat Update:
Thank you for all the lovely messages of sympathy about Kevin, he was one naughty, funny Jack the Lad sort of cat and I really miss him. His sister is still very upset, she stays close to anyone who’s outside without actually letting anyone near enough to touch her.

R.I.P Kevin

6th March
Driving a large van and an overloaded estate car, The Director, two Camera Boys and myself set off for France in the very early hours of Tuesday morning, it was a long drive and my putting diesel into a petrol-fuelled vehicle didn’t make the trip any faster.

We got to the Lovely House well after midnight and got the kit and computers locked away before we fell in to bed. The cats are still pretty wild so I’d expected them to stay well out of our way for a while. In the morning I heard an awful sound, outside I found Julie pacing around in front of the house howling, Kevin’s body was lying by one of the outbuildings, we think he must’ve got swiped by a car and used his last energy to make a dash for the house.

A Visit To The Lovely House part three

2nd March
I've finally got it together to get one of those flicker accounts and put up the photos of when we first arrived at the Lovely House (if the slideshow actually turns up on the sidebar). I have already gone on about this place at length here and here.

Rubbery Housework Opportunity

28th February
I’ve come back to the UK where our house has been completely taken over by preparations for filming - it’s chaos.

The Director and Camera Boys are busy making devices to hold and move cameras, this involves drilling metal plates, attaching the bits together and adding motors to Heath Robinson-inspired contraptions. The obvious place to do this is the kitchen table, stray screws and metal shavings find their way into the sugar bag and worse. Food preparation would be asking for trouble so we’re taking turns to go out and forage for sandwiches and curry.

The kit is tested out in the garden and a muddy path now leads inwards from the back door showing the boys movements around the house. After 24 hours of this I started looking for escape routes and came across this ad on Gumtree

Cleaner required for various hours at small 6 bed B&B.
All equipment supplied.
Rubber uniform provided and must be worn.
£8 per hour for experienced and open minded cleaner.
Replies required asap

It didn’t strike me as very well paid so I showed the ad to our Production Manager Miss Whiplash, she told me that her friend in Cheam has a man in rubber who comes round to do the cleaning for free ... she has to follow him around a bit and humiliate him - but she doesn’t have to touch him or anything

Lost in Translation

25th February
A French man called Gaston works for the family I spent last week with, he was explaining in English to the Man why the cooker didn't work. When he had gone, the Man turned to me and said

Normally I don't understand French, but I can understand Gaston perfectly

How To Make Friends And Influence People

21st February
There are still a couple of weeks to go before Bug Film Lift Off, so I’m going to write about the job I’ve been doing this week.

In another life I am a cook, a couple of weeks ago I got a call from one of my clients, a Man With a Chateau, asking if I could go and cook for him and his teenage children during the half term holiday. They are a funny, happy family and most of them, including the Man have asperger’s syndrome.

The Man is mostly thinking about numbers, he’s really good at them (this activity has made him very wealthy) his idea of fun is to compile lists of naval personnel on WWII warships. He has the same sort of problems understanding social interaction as I have with string theory but he realises that Other People are an unavoidable fact of life and that he has to help his children negotiate the World of Other People, and here we have it, my principle purpose is not so much about cooking - I’m a target for social skills practise

Lesson one: How to make conversation (Tip: People like compliments especially women)
The Man comes in to the kitchen with Lilly and casts around for something to compliment, he focuses on the very ordinary cardigan I am wearing and says, That’s a nice … er… woven thing… what is it? Did you make it?

Lilly has a go, Is that your hair?

Lesson Two: avoiding confrontation (i) everything gets a positive answer
Me: What would you like for supper, are there any dislikes or allergies I should know about?

The Man: We like everything
Lilly: I like Miley Cyrus

In reality everyone in the family has very complicated food issues. The Man can’t remember what they are, if he goes to the supermarket he comes back with bags full of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, coco pops and fizzy drinks, the aisles of produce are simply too overwhelming to deal with. What normally happens is that they eat out a lot. I ask what they’d order in a restaurant

The Man says, Meat, I think, and ice cream


I ask Lilly what she likes eating but she can only hear white noise coming out of my mouth, she has learned that it is polite to stay quiet and look at me while I am making this noise (and remember to smile a bit – but don’t laugh) she has also understood that when I stop making the noise she is expected to say something, so she says whatever is going on in her head. I must wait until her chat cycles round to food, finally it happens:

Yeah, no bits, I don’t like stuff in food, will you make a carrot cake? I’m gonna tell you how to do it – right? You’ve got to get whitey stuff right, but without bits in it? Then you make it flat and put it in a thing and you put that in the oven. Then you cook it all day then you take it out and cover it with whitey icing – right?

By now I know that the only food Lilly willingly eats is Fanta (is that food?) and cake, the cake becomes a bribe - she gets to slather the cake with 'whitey' icing while I make lasagne, at suppertime the cake must sit on the table in all it’s drippy glory until she has eaten enough lasagne.

Lilly eats some lasagne - but there is one more hurdle

lesson three: lying
The Man: The lasagne was nice wasn’t it?
Lilly: yes

the cake is hers

It's been an interesting week, I have watched the Man struggling to eat a grapefruit with a knife and fork, I’ve made hamburger lollipops and chocolate cheese. This is a household where people take off their clothes to dance in the kitchen, see no reason to close the door when they’re using the lavatory and if I’m careless enough to bring my handbag into the kitchen it will be sorted through for 'interesting things’. It's all this that makes the village of hair rubbing and druids seem completely normal.

Death In The Afternoon

15th February
I am not sportive and I’m certainly not competitive about anything that requires me to freeze, get sweaty or wear unflattering clothes in public.

While the weather was pleasant I enjoyed the weekly pétanque games at the local bar, I viewed these events as a sort of themed cocktail party. Kitty and I set standards in the hat, eyewear and daft shoe departments, the men talked about lawnmowers and concrete and we all poked fun at each other. The French club members meanwhile made moves to get the club registered so that we could become sérieux. The rest of us joked around and failed to forsee the consequences of all their activity, or at least I did until today when I found Courtney and the club captain on my doorstep and discovered what signing up for a French pétanque club really means:

The first interclub tournament of the season was starting this afternoon, if we didn’t put up a team for the first match, our club would be disgraced. It is cold outside and the interclub boulodrome is distant. No-one had turned up for the rendez-vous at the bar – Courtney felt sorry for the captain and volunteered hers and my services, I tried pleading ill health, lack of interest and incompetence but was battered into submission and found myself climbing into an unroadworthy ashtray of a vehicle that tipped us out, semi-kippered, at the ‘boulodrome’ .

A boulodrome is like a big car park with a shed in the middle. Hundreds of people were milling around, wearing ill-fitting jeans and lurid sweatshirts blazing dayglo slogans declaring allegiance to their club. During the drive we had been lectured on our comportment: it is forbidden to walk around during a match, we must be quiet. We were also warned that there are a lot of rules about clothing, our appearance for this first match would be overlooked but in future we must all be dressed in a team uniform, like the other participants.

Serious pétanque matches involve a lot of heated discussion and the measuring of spaces between boules. It is like being trapped in a statistics conference in a walk-in freezer. We lost every game, by the time I was returned to my house I was so traumatized by the experience that I had developed one of those stupefied Frankenstein Monster walks.

I’ve had a bath and thawed out, but the house is still filled with the odour of pub carpet that is emanating from my coat in the hallway.

Bar Strife

12th February
In order to keep up with any hot insect-related gossip and generally find out who’s who around here, my best networking territory is the village bar, so I have a vested interest in it’s continued existence.

Mr and Mrs Strange (a British couple) took over the bar last summer, the pétanque club got started, supper events happened, it was popular with the French, British and Dutch communities - then Mr Strange needed to disappear.

One day the Strange parents were replaced* by their eldest son Kurt, a goth rocker/death metal fan and his Scandanavian wife, Courtney. This couple have spent the last few months looking as though they had accidentally pressed the wrong buttons on the teleporter.

Mrs Strange recently came back to visit her bar and there was a big shouting match, this resulted in her son buying air tickets back to Denmark, he has not mentioned this to his mother. Courtney asked me to keep quiet about it because they wanted to break the news at an 'appropriate moment’.

The 'appropriate moment’ didn’t happen and Mrs Strange has gone away again. Courtney said that she thinks the news will sound better in an email. She’d like me to stay quiet about their departure because they are hoping that the other, younger, brother will turn up to take over - a minor obstacle being that he doesn’t want to.

I’m useless at secrets and I really don’t want to keep this one. The pétanque club has just become registered to host tournaments at the village bar, the process has taken months, when it was finalised there was huge joy from the players, match dates for the year are now fixed.

*Mrs Strange did tell me about their flit some time before they left. I was sworn to secrecy on pain of death.

Sleazeball Cat

Build your own Blingee


10th Feb
After the overfeeding incident the cats are more or less back in shape, Julie is hunting again but Kevin has decided to become a full time pimp. His coat is looking luxuriant and he has got ridiculously cocky, he will now jump up on the table to steal my food if I try to eat outside.

I put out some food for the cats now and again, they each have bowls placed as far apart as possible, Kevin hangs around waiting for me to feed him. Passing the woodshed this morning I heard a commotion in the pidgeon loft. I looked up and saw Julie having a fight with another, smaller, creature, I left them to it and went back a bit later to see Julie perched on some logs looking very grumpy - Kevin was guarding a dead mouse draped over the edge of his food bowl. I gave both cats some food and transferred the mouse to Julie’s bowl. Kevin hissed at his sister, scoffed both bowls of food, then picked the mouse up and replaced it, delicately, in his own bowl.

Introducing Mr Fabre

8th February
I have just received a scribbling award from Saucy Scarlet Blue, a lady who’s been making me laugh a lot lately - thank you Scarlet I feel very honoured and flattered. Apparently I have earned it for my quirky style, I'm supposed to pass it on but am crippled by indecision, I'm enjoying too many blogs to make a top 4 - if you're on my side bar I bestow it on you.

If you like quirky, the French entomologist JH Fabre is the man for you. Fabre’s books have been a great resource on this insect-ridden project, but the man deserves several programmes devoted to himself.

A teacher, scientist and author, Fabre was writing copiously at the end of the nineteenth century on the subject of natural history and in particular the insect world. An extraordinary character emerges through his writings. He records his experiments and observations with charm and humour; I’ve just been reading his description of a pair of dung beetles who have finally managed to roll a ball of dung into a burrow, they block the entrance to prevent interruption, and prepare to feast;

…the ball by itself fills almost the whole of the room; the rich repast rises from floor to ceiling ... here sit the banqueters, two at most ... belly to table, backs to the wall. Once the seat is chosen, no one stirs; all the vital forces are absorbed by the digestive faculties.

Fabre’s writing is florid, poetic and at times hilarious, his style was questioned by the more establishment figures of the time. Reading about Fabre I came across a quote that I had trouble understanding and asked my friend Florence for her translation of his thoughts on willfully obscure writing by academics;

Should one page bristling with barbarian and so-called scientific locutions come to my attention then I would say to myself: “take care! This author does not know exactly what he is talking about, otherwise he would have found among the vocabulary hammered out by great minds, the proper way to express clearly his thoughts"

Well quite

Luftwaffe Gretcha

5th February
The day after the Hair Rubbing Supper I made an English Sunday Roast lunch for my French neighbours. They found many aspects of the meal bizarre, I demonstrated pouring gravy over my chicken and roast vegetables, my friends watched agog and commented that it was un idée trés original, in a tone that translated as 'that looks weird and disgusting'.

Chicken eaten and cleared away. I am about to serve my best walnut-and-treacle-tart but am interrupted by the sound of a car drawing up outside. One of the guests said 

That's  Bic and his wife, I have asked them to bring my ducks here.

The Bics came in and agreed to join us for dessert and coffee, the ducks, being of the deceased variety, were popped in the (food) fridge* and I once again prepared to put  knife to tart... but once again, the sound of another car this one squealing into the yard, then someone pushing open the front door, shouting. An elderly lady burst into the dining room waving a shoebox, telling us in her strong German accent that she was Gretcha ... had seen the November film show ... wanted to donate her butterfly collection ... kept forgetting ... came straight over before she forgot again.

We all stood up and peered in as Gretcha lifted the box lid revealing a mass of jumbled up bits of butterflies and moths. I accepted the gift and thanked her. There was more.  Gretcha pulled out a screwed up knob of tissue from her pocket and handed it to me with much gravity. 

I unwrapped a grey and rapidly decomposing leech. Everyone recoiled. 

I said
Lovely, I’ll put it in the fridge with the others
There was quiet, people were looking at me strangely.

* I have two fridges, one for the usual reasons and the other for dormant ants, butterfly pupae and any other creature we might find useful for filming later on

A Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul

3rd February
Mrs Strange came by for coffee - and a rant about her slutty daughter-in-law. I didn't mention the tickets already bought for their return to Denmark but I did ask what will happen if they decide to leave.
That won't happen!
There is so much and nothing to say - luckily my house is too uncomfortable for anyone to want to stay long.

I'm a bit tired of all this and missing The Director. Going back to the UK would be worse, our house there is full of people getting ready for the next session of filming (there will be a machine to knurl metal clamped to the kitchen table and the floor will be scattered with polystyrene peanuts). There will also be people on phones arguing about contracts, scripts and money.

It seemed churlish not to attend the fundraising supper in the village at the weekend, but I hadn't reckoned on Bruno The Knob Destroyer. Bruno's been turning up here with bags of knobbly vegetables a lot lately. I've noticed that his drinking problem is getting worse, his wife has left him again and he smells of wee.

When I got to the hall, a phalanx of big-chested ladies were taking ticket money for the meal. Bruno was waiting at the door and had already bought my ticket, the ladies beamed at me. I gave in and went and sat opposite him on a long table, Bruno attempted to eat soup and focus his watery eyes on me at the same time – it was not a success.

At some point during the meal Mrs Druid got up, stood behind the man seated next to her and started massaging his neck. I find it fascinating what is and isn't tolerated around here, my neighbours believe that Mrs Druid is a member of a (probably) harmless cult, the massage provoked a lot of joking and general ribaldry. Bruno, slowly got up and swayed his way round the table until he was behind me and started stirring his hands around on my head, it was like the pretend hair washing I used to do on my Nan as a child. This had everyone falling about, I managed to convince Bruno that he had achieved miraculous results, even with a very small amount of stirring, he then went round the whole table rubbing everyone’s head a little bit until he found his seat again - He passed out soon after that.

More Secrets and Lies

2nd February
Mrs Strange has come back to France to visit her bar and see how her son and his new wife are coping. I thought it would be nice to drop by for a coffee and say hello - too late I realised that I’d stepped into the aftermath of a massive row. Mrs Strange has stormed off to town and Courtney is steaming behind the bar. She has been online booking tickets for a flight back to Denmark at the end of the month, she tells me this adding:
Don’t mention it to anyone as we have to wait until the cow has calmed down before we tell her
This has happened to me before

Scarecut Trio

30th January
I'm dealing with my hair horror by using hats and avoiding mirrors. I also only go out if I'm not likely to be seen by many people.

A couple of days ago I attended an anti-pesticide film showing at Jeanne's café - an event put on by Félix, a young man who engulfs his skinny body with big knobbly jumpers, an assortment of scarves and an oversized duffle coat, his face is almost entirely hidden by his dreadlocks and profuse beard.

Félix has a degree in ecology, I invited him for lunch with a view to him working on our project, he brought along his friend who is a spider specialist.

Spider Man is scrubbed very clean, wiry ginger hair scraped into a ponytail, his beige turtleneck tucked neatly into his smartly ironed, high-waisted jeans. Spider Man doesn’t do small talk and Félix is extremely shy. I spent the long silences wondering if we should capitalise on our hair and form a pop group, we could become famous as singers on a chat show. All we need is a catchy name ...

Home Again - a Bit Pissed Off

26th January
I set off back to The Lovely House in a bad mood having paid good money for a terrible colour job on my hair. Then, keen to make headway through France before I got tired, I found a lovely empty stretch of autoroute – just for me. Too late, I spotted the uniformed men pointing a hairdryer at me, and as I arrived at the peage (toll booths) some policemen were waiting for me and escorted me to a Portacabin. One man laboriously typed out the full report of my misdemeanor with his left little finger, while the other eight officers stood around watching and making wisecracks.
Vous etes pressée madame?
Sarky bastards

Finally back at the Lovely House, I found the cats inflated like a pair of furry Marigolds, they had wanted to run out of my way as usual but could barely move - one had to give the other a push to squeeze out of the catflap.

I’d asked Mrs Druid to pop by while I was away and put a little food out for the cats. As a keeper of sheep, dogs and hens, I assumed she knew something about animals, I hadn’t taken into account the fact that she only started with the druidery and animal husbandry fairly recently when she retired from her job with social services.

Arriving for feeding duty the day after I left, Mrs Druid had emptied an entire sack of cat food into the two hoppers attached to the feeding bowls so the cats could eat continuously. Coming back the following day she spotted the food was all eaten so she went out and bought a supersize sack to keep those hoppers full.

Shed Quest

22nd January
Over the winter I have been looking for potting sheds; we need two similar garden sheds for the filming. One to put in the kitchen garden to film exteriors and a larger one that could accommodate lights, cameras and people for the interior shots.

I imagined there’d be plenty of ramshackle sheds knocking around in France that the owners would like to replace with a new one and I started asking around. Scary Eena told me that Mr Potato Head was planning to pull one down at the woodyard, so I went to see him. The shed in question was currently housing two large agricultural vehicles, from what I could tell by the prongs and blades sticking out through the piles of newspapers, rags, pallets and plastic bags.

I realised that although I’d registered that there were sheds in the area, the ones around here were quite particular to the region, some had at least one stone wall and many had tiled roofs.

It wasn’t looking good in France and I’m back in the UK for a visit. Someone has tipped us off about a disused allotment that is sited alongside a motorway and is to be built on. Enquiries were made and we have been given permission to take away as many sheds as we like.

A disused allotment is a melancholy sight, the weedy plots still in neat rows and next to each the lovingly customised shed of it’s former gardener. Most of the sheds on this patch had started off with the same basic form but have branched out as successive incumbents added porches, verandah’s and windows. Some of these places looked as though they’d been lived in and it wasn’t hard to imagine the community that must’ve existed here once, annoying each other with their barbeque parties and letting their lots grow too weedy or planting something invasive.

We found a pair of fairly plain ox-blood red sheds one the bigger brother to the other and made an arrangement to come back at a later date and dismantle them.

Filming Notes

19th January
I've been tagged by A Lady with Bichons in Brittany (finish the limerick and get an extra prize) to put up the 4th image in the 4th folder on my computer and talk about it.

The 4th folder is my filming notes archive, where I keep the stuff I've photographed to record our filming process, this is the 4th image. Close up one of those bits of paper looks like this;

All the programmes in the series are broken down into sequences, the sequences are broken down into the separate shots which are described and a note is made of how long the shot should be, then the cumulative total of the sequence. These notes are printed up and stuck to the wall, at the end of the day/week we add colour coded notes. I think it's self-explanatory but do say if it isn't

I have to tag 4 others so here you are;
Bill
The Projectivist
Donn
Deborah

I am The Booby

18th January
The competitive pétanque season will start next month and the club captain is keen that we go forth and win prizes. In order to develop our killer instinct, a tournament was played outside the bar yesterday, with prizes for the winner. Due to lack of talent I played spectacularly badly. My performance was so bad that at the end of the prize-giving ceremony I was presented with a booby prize for being the worst.

The pétanque club are pretty much the last surviving customers of our village bar which is dying a death. The newly married goth couple who are currently running it are fed up and want to go home - they complain that it’s just a village of old people. I’m not sure how they know because they only ever leave their house to get in a car and drive to town – Lord knows I’ve tried to get Courtney to come to yoga with me, when the postlady gets back from maternity leave there’ll be at least one other person under 50 in that class. Neither was Courtney interested in the village charabanc trip to Andorra*, and that was quite a hoot once we’d got everyone who needed lavatories sorted out, then rounded up the ones that had wandered off and got lost during the lavatory chaos.

Kurt has assigned himself the job of chef and lets his wife run the bar. Kurt rarely cooks though, passing his days mostly on the computer while his new wife opens up the bar and sits on her own watching tv downstairs. She’s missing her friends in Denmark and is sad about the marriage. Courtney tells me that she’s not even known her husband for a year yet. He invites his heavily tattooed friends over for poker evenings, the motorbikes parked outside until the early hours tell the villagers all they need to know about the place and Mme Bontette adds speculative layers of salacious gossip.

Kurt is British, his mother and wife (who don’t speak French) both think that Kurt can speak French quite well, but I know that he can’t - which might account for his refusal to be in the bar or write his bar flyers and menus in French. I also know that Kurt’s mother (who owns the place) has decided to come and pay a visit soon to see how they’re getting on.

*Andorra is a duty free principality in the Pyrenees. The French get very excited about going there to buy tax-free butter, I was very excited by the lovely big tin of olives I got for half the price I’d pay in France, that plus the big plastic jerry can of 'Port’ for 5 euros.

Boom Box Stalker

16th January
The optimism of the rural Frenchman in his sexual ambitions is irrepressible;

It is only the totally unsuitable who pursue me, usually very old, sometimes very young. If the man hitting on me is somewhere near my own age I’d put money on the fact that he has never actually been successful in wooing any woman.

I had formed a theory that these men think I will be dazzled by their exotic foreignness. But then I went for lunch at Jeanne’s café with Florence, her pregnant belly resplendent. She is stunning, a more gorgeous version of Audrey Tatou. Not surprisingly I was totally ignored by the gappy-toothed, the boss-eyed and the lame, they were all after Florence who had to fend off several attempts at inappropriate touching and general suggestiveness.

On a dull day before Christmas, Florence and I set out on a walk. When we heard the thump of a sound system coming up behind us, we looked back and saw a fat teenager with a massive boom box strapped precariously in a crate on the back of his bicycle. It was a funny sight and we danced and sang along as he passed. Naturally he took that as an invitation to have sex with him and cycled in wobbly circles alongside us, making encouraging noises and generally trying to tempt us.

Unconcerned, we walked off the road into the forest assuming he’d get lost. Half an hour later we came to another piece of road , it had started drizzling slightly now - Boom Box Boy was there waiting. We crossed the road and went back into the forest walking on for another hour or so ending up back at Florence’s village, it was by now pouring and we were freezing as we squelched our way down the tarmac - boom box man was there, waiting, when he spotted us he started pedalling hopefully towards us.

January Review

14th January
The Bar and La Salle des Fetes:
The rift widened over new year. The Salle des Fetes advertised a St Silvestre Dinner Disco. Kurt 'n' Courtney hosted an evening of New Year jollity with beer and pies at the bar, the bar posters were in English so it was interpreted by the villagers as being an exclusively British event – which it was.

The Pétanque Club:
still meets up at the bar for a weekly game – the club has now become registered and official, the first inter-club tournament will be played next month, we are summoned to start training in earnest this weekend.

The Cats:
hang out on top of a tall basket full of knobbly ropes in the back kitchen, if I walk in there, they shoot out through the cat hole to the wood shed but Kevin will immediately poke his head back through the hole to see if I’ve got food - he is excessively greedy.

Florence:
my friend is roundly and hugely pregnant. Yesterday we visited some thermal baths and wallowed around like a pair of whales then loafed in the Jacuzzi on the roof where it snowed on us. The big hole in the wall of her house has now got a window in it.

Dormant Creatures:
are now sleeping in a second fridge plugged in just for their use, currently only ants and butterfly cocoons in residence.

The Director:
is still editing last year's material in the UK he is expecting a visit from me next week.

Back Home

12th January
... On Saturday it was Freddie's turn for cooking, Saturday night is Spaghetti Night.

The Ranch is an extremely organised household - the month’s menu is fixed in advance and they do a monthly shop for everything in one go, this involves 4 shopping trolleys.

I didn’t see much of Nina, she works out a lot in the home gym, she is tiny, twitchy and boyish. Nina also has OCD and there are quite a lot of rules - I think my visit was quite taxing for her.

I got back to the Lovely House yesterday morning, the water fell from the attic which runs along the back of the house into a downstairs room which isn't used during the winter. The water did wash through into the main front room where the fireplace is, the unglazed terracotta tiles are placed straight on the raw clay which was scraped flat to build the house on (no foundations) so the floor is still damp but the fire is going and the weather has really warmed up now - it’s great to be home.

A Stay At The Ranch

11th January
...I’d not even washed my face when I arrived at the dinner party on Friday night, I nipped into the bathroom and washed off the dirt a bit but frankly I looked considerably worse when the full horror of my blotchy swollen face was revealed.

It was decided that Freddie and Nina should take me in for that night and then Freddie would help me sort things out at my place in the morning.

Freddie and Nina live in a huge new-looking house on a hilltop. It is regarded by many as a monstrosity with it’s glossy tan tudoresque beams criss-crossing neatly across a gleaming white façade. Freddie has built it around the skeleton of some farm buildings following Nina’s directions, she explained how they first found the place and the vision she immediately saw for it’s future;
It was just a fallen down barn - no roof, Freddie said to me 'This is too far gone for us Nina’ and I said 'Freddie. Look up there, that’s where we’ll have our corner bath’.

Freddie is ex-RAF and quite a bit older than Nina. He is a bit like my Nan and remorselessly hospitable
... would you like 3 or 4 sugars in your tea, or would you prefer coffee, I’ll make you cocoa, look lovely hot milk, are you warm enough, let me make you a hot water bottle...

Freddie and Nina have insisted that I stay at their place until I’ve got The Lovely House dried out. Their house is blazing hot and I couldn’t sleep on Friday night, I had a banging headache and everything ached yesterday morning. I dressed and wandered into the kitchen where Freddie reeled off breakfast options;
Do you like eggs? I could scramble you some eggs and I’ve got some lovely sausages, would you like 4 or 5 eggs, you could have 10 sausages, I’ve got loads. Or would you prefer fried eggs, I expect I can find bacon, or maybe you’re a cereal sort of person...

I started giggling at this barrage and then started crying again, Freddie made me a very sweet coffee and patted my shoulder, waiting until I’d dried out enough to make sense.

After breakfast Freddie put some paraffin heaters in his van and drove me back down to the Lovely House. I checked the cats, ants and whatever else is living in the fridge at the moment, then I waited until the electrician came. I spent the day there with the fires going and would have been happy to stay but Freddie had seen in my fridge and insisted that I go back for supper with them and stay at the ranch for a second night …

The Deluge

10th January
The freeze went on for a few days and wasn’t a huge problem. I was using the fire for cooking anyway, the ironware fixed in the chimney (the cremaliere) includes a hook to hang cauldrons of lake water over the fire to heat for washing with. A few days ago My Dutch neighbours came by to see if I was OK and stayed for lunch – Kitty is petite and has showbiz pzazz, her voice is a husky purr, her enormous husband has a champion moustache. As they were leaving Kitty told me to call if ever I needed a beer and a warm up with her and the Walrus.

Then mid-morning yesterday Bruno the Knob Destroyer turned up with a bag of beetroot. He found me working outside.

You frozen up then?
Yup
Landlord never wanted to pay to wrap up the pipes – happens every year. You got any leaks?
It’s still frozen, I don’t know yet
Better go and have a look then

We went into the icy attic and looked where the pipes run along the wall - there was a slow drip from one place, it didn’t look serious but I went and turned the stopcock off, Bruno identified the source with a chalk mark and I left a phone message for the plumber.

Bruno went off and I went back out to work until the plumber came, I got completely lost clearing another area of brambles to feed my ongoing bonfire. I wandered back to the house in a filthy state, starving for lunch, it was much later than I thought. Then I heard a gushing noise as I approached the front door. I ran in, saw the flood, called the plumber - a little more hysterically this time, then set to work sweeping the water out of the house. The plumber arrived quite quickly he fixed the pipe and I continued to sweep the water. It turned out that the damage was in the hot pipe, a whole tank of hot water had emptied into the house.

When the worst of the water was out of the house, I sopped up the last puddles with a big cloth, using my hands to wring out the water into a bucket. The house walls are made from clay bricks mixed with ash, the water was very soapy and I realised that the hot water had washed down the bricks making the water caustic, I didn’t notice at the time because my hands were numb with cold.

I worked manically for hours but it was under control, I couldn’t see any lasting damage, it had happened during the day … could be a lot worse etc.,

It was only when I sat down and waited for a kettle to boil that I realised how tired I was and that my hands hurt. I then discovered that we had no electricity in the main part of the house (the Landlord had done the rewiring here himself because he hadn’t wanted to pay to have it done). Suddenly the house seemed like a cold wet monster and it was dark by this time.

I went into the bathroom with a torch and saw my face in the mirror – I looked like I’d been blasted from a cannon, I laughed at myself – then I started crying. I pulled myself together, had a cup of tea and decided that if there was ever a time to call Kitty for a beer and a warm up - now was it, I picked up the phone;

Hi Kitty are you busy this evening?
Yes darling we have guests for dinner
Oh never mind, another time
Is everything OK darling?

I assured her that everything was fine but she couldn’t understand what I was saying through my gulping and snotty hiccupping tears. Within ten minutes The Walrus had come round and made me get in his car.

The dinner party was in progress as I arrived and everyone insisted that I joined them, the other guests were two English couples, I knew them slightly but my disaster bonded us all in a sort of Dunkirk Spirit and soon everybody was fighting over who got to take me home.

I’ve ended up at Freddie and Nina’s ranch and it’s quite funny there …

Salmon Supper

8th January
We celebrated the first yoga class of the new year with an after-class supper, I attempted to take some initiative with this one, proposing that I could contribute a big tart. Mme B, astonished that I still misunderstood the etiquette of these events put me firmly in my place:
I will bring a whole salmon, we will have it cold with mayonnaise, Mme Bic can make her salad, Mme Eena will bring rillettes, you bring bread

We decided to hijack the maire's conference room for our meal this time - it has a nicer table, The Bontettes, The Bic Biros, Church Cleaning Lady, The Bank Manager, The Sheep Farmers, Scary Eena, The Instructor and myself all eating Scary Eena's rillettes under the gaze of Sarko. My neighbours are forthright in a way that some people might find rude, mostly I find it amusing. During supper the conversation turned to 'The English’, I’m used to this conversation now, it usually starts with someone asking me a question like;
Do the English eat soup?
The questions can get a bit repetitive and sometimes I answer in a way that amuses me but my flippancy will always come back to bite me and I will be informed at a later date that 'The English think soup has aphrodisiac properties’ or 'soup is only drunk at midnight in England’.

After the soup conversation we got down to the real business
The English certainly do like a drink don't they?

During Sunday's Tart Party, Bic Biro toured the tables constantly with bottles of cider, the village ladies have explained to me that the polite rule here is to accept no more than a glass or two, no matter how much the host insists. English participants, who don’t understand this game and wanting to be seen to join in properly will accept more than the correct amount of glasses - the side effect being that their French improves.

M. Bontette suggested that
The English are not a nation of alcoholics they are just Bon Viveurs

Mme B actually snorted at her husband
But they are incontinent in all ways … sex, drink, food, it’s all stories of bottoms with them … they don’t know when to stop

Not Enough Lagging

6th January
My pipes are frozen, I've borrowed and stolen as many buckets as I can lay my hands on and fetched up water from the lake (after cracking through the surface ice). The buckets all have to be in the living room to stop them freezing over, the ants are keeping warm in the fridge. I've been round Mme B's house filling bottles with drinking water (she's properly lagged of course). It's not too bad in the day because I can go off on bracing walks but once in the house I have to wear every item of clothing I own.

The cats are making me laugh though. Julie kills stuff and Kevin steals it, then parades around pretending it's his, this is Kev showing me a bit of the rat Julie just caught.

Epiphany

5th January
I took the Director to the airport last night so I was a bit sad and lonely this morning - and then the ants arrived.

Yup, this morning a lovely box full with test tubes of starter ant colonies arrived, here’s the email to explain everything;

Dear Lulu,

Best thing is to put the ants in the fridge, make sure they look like they are hibernating. They might look wrinkled, if they are moving around too much they will need to be cooled down gradually to 5-8 degrees C (don’t let them get affected by the frost). It is important to make sure they have enough water but not too much, most ants don’t make it through the winter because of either drowning or dehydration.

Best Wishes etc

I have been inspecting them anxiously all day for signs of wrinkling or death or life

Before setting off to the airport we had time to attend the annual epiphany tea party at the Salles Des Fetes; on the first Sunday of the new year the Maire invites our village and the two tiny communes next to us to join him for cider and special epiphany tarts, Gallette de Roi. Hidden inside each tart is a ceramic charm, the person who breaks a tooth on one of these charms gets to wear a crown and be king (or queen) for the day. We sat at the white plastic tables while smartly dressed village officials came around with trays of Galletes de Roi, chocolates and cider it is a polite sort of event.


The English man that I have unkindly named Fat Dad was there with his offspring. The French children sat with their parents all dressed in their Sunday Best while FD’s kids careened around like banshees grabbing at chocolates, keeping their mouths full as they shrieked at each other. Fat Dad was beaming as I went to wish him Happy New Year.
We don’t allow any sugar or refined or processed food in our house, so this is a real treat for them – aren’t they having a great time

A Handy Guide To Oyster Measuring

4th January
I went to yesterday's market and bought celebrational food. Later, when we were in the bar, The Director asked me what I'd bought:
Me: Oh loads of things ... oysters...
TD: How many oysters did you buy?
Me: I can't remember
TD: Did it feel as though you were carrying one cat in the bag or two?
Me: Just the one
TD: You've only got a dozen then

Yessssss

3rd January
I was woken with a phone call from the landlord, he tells that he won’t be putting the Lovely House on the market until we choose to leave, and we can stay as long as we want, and yes he’ll put that in writing.

How did that come about you may ask?
After the landlord's call before Christmas to say that the house would be on the market and after I’d got the flames coming out of my nose under control, I deduced that he was hoping that we'd buy the house, and anyway it would be easier to sell while inhabited – and he’d still be getting our rent.

Clearly the man is a No Good Duplicitous Rotter. I asked Mme B. to help me write a letter explaining that due to the security risks of unknown visitors and the disruption ensuing we would have to find other premises forthwith – I now feel so euphoric, triumphant and smug I've just had to hang that dartboard and fling a few darts at this image, which is as close as I can get to a likeness of the landlord.

New Year - French style

2nd January
We were at the Village Hall for New Year’s Eve. My chum Mme B organised the bash and as she has fallen out with half the French people in the village and, as I'm a bit scared of her, I was press-ganged in to make up numbers. The Director isn’t naturally sociable and he doesn’t speak much French - he doesn’t like staying out late either so I realised that I wasn’t giving him much of a treat when I bought the tickets.

Mme B called me to make sure that we’d be there prompt at 8, this was so we could stand around drinking warm whisky and cheap port for two hours. At ten we noticed that the old people had sat down and were clenching cutlery in their hands, we followed suit and soon the the giblet salads appeared. We were just beginning to think that it might all be ok when the disco started - an elderly swinger in tight white pants and toupee put Agadoo on his decks and everybody got up to dance.

There was at least an hour of dancing between each course. The French people round here really like interactive dancing, Discoman played lots of brass oompah tunes and everyone knew what to do, all the arms in the air at the same time, kicking in unison, I suppose it’s a version of line dancing but I don’t know how to do that either. The funny thing was, how nobody noticed when midnight came, The Director looked at his watch and said it’s 12.30 in an incredulous tone that meant and we’ve only just had soup.

The main course (duck breast) arrived at 2am and still there was cheese, salad and dessert to come, then there would be bubbly and as there weren't many of us in the first place, there was no going home before the frizzante.

I had to sling The Director over my shoulder and give him a Fireman's Lift home. After I put him to bed I went down for breakfast and noticed that the dartboard I gave him two weeks ago is still on the floor behind the chair.