Brenda Steps In

5th May
Since our village bar was sold last year it has languished in an ever-deepening Vale of Tears. A British couple called Strange bought it for tuppence from a lady desperate to make a quick sale, Mrs Strange thought that a bar would be a nice retirement hobby for her husband but after a few months they suddenly needed to disappear, leaving their eldest son in charge. Kurt The Goth spent the winter emptying the bar’s bank account ... then he also needed to leave, he persuaded his brother Shane The Fascist to come to the village and take over...


Shane is the only member of the Strange family who speaks French, he is an angry young man with a long list of dislikes; top of the list are British people, women and anyone over thirty. He doesn’t drive - for his first few weeks in the village Shane relied solely on the kindness of elderly British women to take him shopping. One day Shane's lovely and extremely camp friend Zizi arrived to help run the bar and do the driving.

Mrs Strange only discovered that Shane replaced Kurt a couple of weeks ago, she has returned and Zizi has gone. I was told that Zizi’s girlfriend was unhappy about him working at the bar - so he’s had to leave - unfortunately.

There is a bright spot on the horizon however – Brenda* has decided to liven things up. While seated at the bar listening to the update of this story my eye wandered over to a pile of bright flyers written in English and using the full array of jokey fonts currently available:

Friday Nite is Brenda’s Nite
For Fun, Frolics and Mayhem
Bring an instrument and a song
At the *** ***** Bar
8 til late

* Brenda is a Liverpudlian septuagenarian, chain smoker, owner of many wigs and recipient of some very large implants.

Arrested

May 4th
Our village is buzzing with gossip about the arrest for fraud of our notorious local estate agent. It was impossible to buy a property around here without Madame Vilaine being involved, new occupiers of property who’d just been (unknowingly) fleeced by her would be approached with the suggestion that they in turn act as agents, introducing their house-hunting friends in return for a cut of any resulting sale. These semi-retired incomers were flattered that their prowess in the property market was finally being recognised and they worked quite hard to deliver more victims to the Vilaine business.

I had an audience with Mme V when I first arrived in the area, I was only looking to rent and I’d happened on a rare day when she was in the office. Seated on a Louis XV chair, she’d sniffed at me and handed over the details of a property that was clearly a garden shed on a rubbish dump, I declined, she heaved her bosom, sighed heavily and told me that I couldn’t be helped - I was dismissed.

I’ve been hearing stories that make my hair freeze, like the one about properties rotten with termites that had been waved through by the surveyors Mme V appointed, but her most common trick was the 10% deposit scam:

In France when the buyer's offer on a property is accepted, they hand over 10% of the agreed price as a non-refundable deposit. This should be held by an independent notaire (legal person). Mme V managed to persuade many of her naïve foreign buyers to give her this deposit directly, she used these deposits to support her other illegal activities, (we’ve been loving speculating on these) using various stalling tactics the sale then progressed very very slowly. This scam depended on a high turnover of sales and a constant influx of deposits and is the reason her empire has now unravelled.

Eighteen months ago The Strange family made a very low offer on the village bar for sale through Madame Vilaine. The previous owner was trying to avoid bankruptcy and agreed to the price for a quick sale. Mrs Strange handed her deposit to Madame V who held onto it for six months, this had catastrophic results for the vendor who still lives in the village.

French Farce

1st May
I’m not readjusting well to being back. Yesterday morning, I completely forgot that I was supposed to be collecting Spider Man* from the station, he called to see where I was just as I’d started washing my hair in the shower, so I had to do all that cartoony hopping around with an arm in one sleeve while trying to get my shoes and pants on at the same time and soaking myself with my own hair.

I was still trying to get an arm through the other sleeve and do my zip while backing the car out of the drive and I failed to put a mobile phone in my bag. Spider Man meanwhile had decided to get on another train, I arrived at a deserted station and then had to work out where to get a phone card and the matching call box to find out where he’d got to.

We have recently acquired an old blue Laguna that used to belong to the police (gendarmes), while I was running around after Spider Man it ran low on diesel so I stopped at an unmanned fuel station - I hadn’t refuelled this car before. I'd spent a full half hour hunting for a release button to open the petrol flap by the time a passing gendarme found me frothing at the mouth trying to forcibly prise the wretched thing off with my finger tips, he kept his distance and pointed out that I had to turn off the central locking to get at the petrol tank.

*Spider Man comes and stays for a few days now and then while he logs our material, he is French and unnaturally fond of spiders

Sexy Cockroach Girl

30th April
That last roachy post got me a Sexy Blogger Award - I’m beginning to worry about the sort of men I’m attracting:

The deal with the SBA is that I have to tell you 5 sexy things about me;

1. I’m probably even sexier now that I’ve had a wash - apparently some men find cockroaches repulsive and think girls should smell nice

2. I tend not to bother putting a top on, and now that it’s officially Spring I’ve removed the hat

3. I must be sexy because many of the local octogenarians have offered to 'entertain’ me, a fat boy on a bike stalked me last autumn (although it was probabably my friend he was really after) – and Bruno is still hanging his knobbly roots on my gate post

At this point I’m casting around for help, the Camera Boys and Barney have snorted beer out of their noses ...

4. Miss Whiplash says she would snog me - under different circumstances - but I'm a work colleague and she's a consummate professional

5. The Director says that I would be more sexy if I stopped typing and help him find his glasses

I think the SBA is a like an STD that I’m supposed to pass on to others, Madame Defarge can consider herself doubly infected - she is so sexy that she's already picked it up from Emerson - everyone else, please have a go ...

Keep Your Cockroaches Secure

29th April
Back in France I find I’ve not been missed, Miss Whiplash and the boys have become regular pizza-eaters at the Belleville Rendezvous, (something bad has happened at our village bar but I’m not sure what). My newly made garden is thriving, the insects in the fridge are all surviving, some cockroaches and house crickets have been delivered and our white board has been updated.





The board is our record of who’s living where and their special needs. Just in case you can’t read that bottom line here’s a close up.



Some of the cockroaches are in the fridge, but as we don’t know exactly what effect refrigeration will have on their performance we have some in a glass tank in the guest bedroom with a weighted lid on and the top two inches of the inside of the tank have been coated with petroleum jelly so they won’t reach the top of the glass sides*. There are cardboard egg-box trays in the tank for them to hide in.

Tomorrow I go and get supplies to build the cockroach film set.

* If left unjellied the cockroaches will all gather on the underside of the lid ready to pour out and up our arms when we take the lid off!

Elephants In The Room

24th April

The email in the previous post is probably connected to my attempt to introduce our Production Manager to village society before I left her there to fend for herself.

Soon after she arrived in France, I took Miss Whiplash to the village yoga class. I am a good head higher than the tallest woman in the village, we have all got used to me being the village giant, when I brought along a new classmate who stands head and shoulders above me.

Miss W tried her best to mingle but the local accent is strong, her French didn’t work and she and the villagers found each other mutually unintelligible, so although the class were impressed by her height and leopard skin leotard, everyone became too embarrassed by this failure to communicate and soon got on with their business as though she weren’t there (there is always a half hour of gossip before the class starts). Miss W spent the evening with a grin clamped on her face to prove that she is basically friendly, but being ignored makes one feel invisible.

I am currently obsessed with the idea of invisibility/visibility partly because I have taken a couple of weeks away from the insect filming to do a job in an Arabic country. I am transfixed by the way the Arabs float around in their flowing robes while the western visitors walk among them looking like raw sausages.

There are plenty of muslim women with their faces completely uncovered and they easily make eye contact with me but the ladies who peep out through a letter box in their face coverings and the ones who are completely covered behave as though they are invisible. What I hadn’t realised was how different these garments can be, there is an abaya shop close to where I am staying, in the window are styles cut in different ways, decorated with pearls, diamante and embroidery, I was particularly struck by a pleated and diamante-studded abaya that clearly inspired the Darleks. Outside this shop swings a large sign with a painted image of a woman wearing a black abaya, her hands and face originally in the painting are now covered over by three crude blocks of black paint


*no time to do a fancy image today, that one’s straight out of the tin from Crazy Spandex Girls

Whiplash Strikes Out

22nd April

Latest email from Whiplash…

… went for pizza to that bar in Belleville, the one with people/cow creatures painted on the windows - you HAVE to go. There are all these photos up of the people who go there having orgies, it was a bit embarrassing because I was looking at them and then I looked closer and said to Barney (and I might have been a bit loud) 'Christ it’s another gay bar' and it went all quiet then someone said, 'We do understand English you know' and there were these two girls snogging really hard in the corner and someone else said, 'We welcome everybody here'.

You didn’t tell me they understand English, I have made a complete plonker of myself.


W
xx


PS They do good pizza

Correspondence From Miss Whiplash

21st April
Miss W is holding the fort back in France. There are a few things puzzling her, I thought I'd share some of the emails ...

Friday
I can’t deal with your kitchen - I’m going out to buy a load of bread and we’re just doing sandwiches til you get back.

Saturday
Those jars in the fridge – should I tip everything out and check whatever's in the damn thing when I change the damp tissue? I can’t tell which are the bits of twig and dirt and what’s alive and I’m frightened that a bug might be in the stuff that gets on the floor

Sunday
That woman came over to put her sheep back in - WTF!!!, the boys spent the morning with her!!! – she got right on my tits - do we invoice her??!

Surprise Holiday

19th April
The journey door to door France to UK takes 16 hours. On Thursday at 5am The Director slammed the car boot shut ready to start the drive.

Then it dawned on me that we weren’t supposed to be leaving until the following day. Builders have been busy in our house and we’d agreed that they could destroy the place until Friday tea time, then it all had to be cleaned up. After a lot of tutting and eye-rolling we decided to set off anyway and stop somewhere en route - a surprise holiday.

I did a quick internet search and found an interesting-sounding place to stay that night, nearly all the B&B’s in France are run by British citizens, this one had a Russian proprietress (novelty value) and was in a rural area we were unfamiliar with.

Svetlana is as extraordinary as her house which is a combination of royal hunting lodge and the sort of sweetie-trap that Hansel and Gretel wandered into, our bedroom ceiling all pointy wooden slopes, the walls lined with deep-coloured, ornate fabric. Throughout the house there is curly-legged antique furniture and lots of gilt, in the salon a shiny grand piano. An astonishing dinner (for dessert: hot strawberries in port) was cooked and served by Svetlana who modelled a full-length, shiny turquoise evening dress. over the course of the evening we listened to her life story; she’d been a concert pianist but with the arrival of her children she’d become a music teacher at a school in an area with a lot of social problems, apparently the teachers there were expected to act as a sort of über-social worker, she’d visit the children in their homes and they stayed with her when their parents were ill or in prison.

She met her English husband in Russia and he convinced her to go to England with him for a 'better life’. In the UK she worked as a shop assistant at WH Smiths, newsagents, an isolated and friendless existence with scratchy teenage children but she persisted, got promoted and a few years ago, children now away working, she exchanged her Surrey semi for the gingerbread house.

Hanging Up Butterflies

15th April
Last week we hung up the swallowtail pupae, they had been in the fridge since arriving by post in January, we wanted to film the butterflies emerging, but first we needed to get them into their launching position

In the wild, pumped up on a diet of fluffy fennel tops, the swallowtail caterpillar finally stops eating and looks for somewhere to pupate. He wanders around in the undergrowth until he finds a woody stem to climb up. Once in place, he spits out some thread, sticks it to the stem and makes a loop which he ducks his head under, held by this safety harness he hangs on the twig until he's ready to emerge.

We emulated this marvel of nature with superglue and dental floss. A series of forked twigs were lined up, each stuck in a flowerpot and ballasted with clay - we spent two evenings hanging the sleeping pupae.

The butterflies kept emerging when we weren’t looking so we put a 24-hour watch on them, cameras at the ready. During my watch and becoming increasingly cold and numb and bored one of the pupae twitched, I jumped and shrieked and everyone ran in to see what was happening – nothing - a Braxton Hicks contraction, a false alarm. The butterfly emereged 4 hours later - and we finally managed to record it .

Rain Stops Play

14th April
Due to all the hymenopteran emergencies and the pressing need to film Spring, we’ve not been down to the bar for a while, but this weekend I lobbied successfully for a day off.

A pétanque tournament was scheduled at the village bar for Saturday. Shane the new landlord has been pushing a roller over the gravel courts and tanning his smooth, oiled torso. There was going to be a barbeque and proper official referees - the evening was bound to end in an excellent party.

Nothing went to plan, by midday on Saturday the rain was steady and the pétanque match got called off. Miss Whiplash was struck down by the plague and took to her bed, we had to go to the bar without her.

Shane’s friend Zizi* has finally arrived, he’s lovely and gossipy with a great line in tight sparkly t-shirts. He put lots of Abba and Aretha Franklin on the cd player for us to sing along to, he’s like an anti-Shane.

*Shane’s mother owns the bar and has left her son in charge but he has no driving license. Shane will be running the bar with Zizi who does drive. Worried that people might think he or Zizi are gay, Shane is pedalling his heterosexuality vigorously using a product known locally as Lad Guff.

The Arrival Of Miss Whiplash

11th April
The hormonal balance has been restored by the arrival of Miss Whiplash, a lady whose real job is performing by night in selected venues where she sings and shakes her bottom around the stage in a series of exotic catsuits.

As Miss W is very good at sums and she’s taller than the rest of us we asked her to be our grown up which means that two or three times a week she gets up before tea time, puts on her Production Manager’s uniform - consisting mainly of outsize leopard-print sunglasses and thigh boots - and she whips our production into shape by making up schedules and contracts and scaring us about money.

She's come out to France to top up her tan and make sure that we’re all behaving. The boys have to be told off for buying too much Boy Stuff (lenses, hard drives, air guitars...) and I have to promise that we’ll eat nettles twice a week until the next tranche of money arrives from the Big Controller.

Tonight we’re taking Miss W to our village bar – my choice of venue because I’m quite keen to see how long it takes before she pushes Shane’s teeth down his throat.

Bees And Birds

9th April
I’m getting a lot of flak from The Director, he says that I’m giving the impression that it’s all studio filming here. So, lets get this straight, most of the filming is outside, mostly nearby but some of it involves packing up a car and driving for an hour or so.

These kind of trips usually need two people – a camera person and an assistant, sometimes, someone gets the short straw and has to take me out with them. I’m good at all sorts of things but I can’t get the hang of camera stuff or technology and all the cabley/connector-ey/knobby stuff that goes with it. I only get picked for camera assistant if there is no other option.

Recently, The Director had to take me with him to film the relationship between solitary bees and bee orchids. We drove the car as close to the spot as we could and then fought our way on foot through scratchy bushy stuff the last few miles uphill to the filming location.

Loaded with unwieldy cases, tripods and rucksacks, we decided not to completely empty the vehicle – that would’ve been silly, we just made a couple of trips carrying as much as we could. As the day wore on, if a different tripod or lens was needed, the assistant would run back to get it.

Insects really hate being breathed on so you need to stay as far away as possible for them to keep doing their thing - as an assistant you can’t really see what’s going on.

It wasn’t until I saw the material being logged that I realised what had been filmed that day. When the male bees hatch and emerge blinking into the sunshine they’re not sure what a girl is exactly - like excitable boys they experiment with the nearest likely object. The bee orchid, growing cunningly near the bee colony, has a flower that is a bit like a female bee, the male bees snuggle into them and rub themselves around while the orchid plants yellow deeley boppers of pollen on their heads. After a while the male bee meets a real female, then he feels a chump for having been fooled earlier and he doesn’t visit the orchids quite as enthusiastically any more, but by this time he and his mates have pollinated the orchids ready for another year’s April Fool.

In Search Of The Pétomane

7th April
The Coleopterist stayed with us for a few days, he is reknowned for his uncanny ability to find bugs, previously he has supplied us with potter wasps and female earwigs sitting on batches of eggs. We have been searching fruitlessly for the bombardier beetle, an extraordinary beast who keeps two gases in separate chambers in it’s back end, when expelled they combine to make a hot smelly explosion (This is no ordinary fart – there is actually smoke). Thermodynamics scientists have long been trying to mimic the bombardier’s mechanism and there’s also a side story going on with this creature being used to support the creationist argument (mentioned in the two previous links – so I’m not going there).

The Coleopterist spent his first day searching for the bombardier in nearby forests without any luck, then just before supper, while wandering around at the back of the Lovely House he happened across a colony of the shiny green and brown beetles on a weedy bit of broken-up concrete.

These were a smaller variety of bombardier than the ones we were hoping to find, but it was still a result. There was a suitable set ready in the studio so we put one of the beetles on stage to see if he’d perform for us, it was all getting really fiddly and we were just about despairing that we’d never make it work when we noticed a really nice large species of bombardier wandering around on the studio floor.

During his stay, The Coleopterist collected lots of insects including two queen hornets hibernating in bits of rotting log. All these animals are now in the fridge, the hornets still in their logs with an elastic band keeping the bits bound together, the rest neatly stored with a piece of damp tissue in screw-top pots. The cold makes them snooze, then they don’t waste energy running around trying to escape, care for sleeping insects is simple, the jars have to be opened to allow a fresh supply of air in and the damp tissue changed once a week

*The bombardier beetle has only a superficial similarity to French music hall performer le pétomane but I can’t get his image out of my head.

Listing Dangerously

3rd April
The Operations Room is now entirely papered with annotated lists; lists of sequences in the can and those still to be filmed, lists of all the invertebrates that we want to film with notes regarding dates to expect certain behaviour, lists of people coming and going - and then there are the job lists, here’s our weekend job list:

Butterflies:
1) Take some of the Cabbage White pupae out of the fridge and lay them out on corrugated cardboard under a gauze tent in the guest bedroom.

2) Cut a bunch of similar looking forked twigs and set one each in a flowerpot filled with clay, Take the swallowtail pupae out of the fridge and attach one to each twig with a fine thread.

3) Make sets for filming the butterflies emerging

Hymenoptera:
1) film inside the bumble bee box

2) film the Wood Ants that were found a week ago

General:
• order cockroaches and crickets
• make a very good plan to contain the cockroaches
• collect pieces of glass ordered earlier in the week along with several tubes of aquarium glue
• make lots of glass boxes
• take Spider Man back to the station then go on to the airport to collect a Coleopterist and a Camera Boy
• go looking for beetles
• change bedding, get many trolley loads of food

We're gonna shoot our way through that list 'til there's nothing left of it!

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