I was against having chickens for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately no one else in the house understood any of them. Continue reading
Life
Ditched
The quality of this photo reflects the mental state of the photographer
“Opp.”
That’s the soft little exclamation many French people make at those unexpected wee moments in life.
A coin slips from your grip. you spill a little wine, you crash your car into the ditch…
Opp.
That was the sound of Sabbatical Man’s perfect driving record evaporating in one teeth-suckingly embarrassing moment when our leased car nudged, teetered, then hurtled off the road, scraping, banging and crashing its way along a steep trench.
Yes, the very road referred to in an earlier blog.
The absence of Dog
Dog gone
All is not right.
This is the year of our dreams.
Almost everything is better than we had dared hope when we decided to take a break from real life and spend a year in the French countryside.
But there is no Dog. Continue reading
Eating local
You really can’t get more local than your own driveway.
The cherry tree is the size of a small house and heavily laden but we hadn’t noticed the fruit was almost ready until the truck delivering the new fridge took out a branch and knocked a couple of hundred to the ground.
What a day! A cherry harvest and a new fridge (there simply wasn’t enough room in the tiny temporary one for both rosé and food for the children. Sacrifices had to be made).
Perils of the home straight
Nerves of steel are required to drive this road every day
Whoever dares to question French courageousness needs to drive on my road.
Countless fearless Aixois commuters do it every day of the week. Twice. At speed.
The road is as wide as a catwalk model’s ankle.
Steep ditches line each side of it.
Huge trucks travel at ferocious speeds on it.
Tractors and trailers, graders and even horses and carts can be seen on it.
Yet the only one who is terrified is me – leaning pointlessly toward to the centre of the car where it feels a tiny bit safer.
De-texting in France
First it was the horror of data roaming charges that stopped me texting home.
Bah non
Then the time difference set in – when I am free to text, my friends and family are often asleep or busy.
And now? Well, now it’s a French conspiracy to cure me of my texting addiction altogether.
There are 65.7 million people living in this country and not one of them wants to text me.
Best cure for misery
Pavillon Vendôme, Aix en Provence. Hard place to be miserable.
Tissues, nose drops, paracetamol, lemons, ginger, honey – a shopping list of misery.
Now, pack your miserable self, your miserable list and your miserable head cold to the centre of Aix-en-Provence on a sunny day and do your shopping.
Continue reading
Chat fight
Smack!
That’s a slap on the face.
Pow! That’s a lot of shouty words I haven’t learned in French class.
Bif! That’s another slap.
Nothing this exciting ever happened at school drop-off back home.
To kiss or not to kiss
Oh là là, the French like to kiss.
Yes, I knew this before I came here, but there are times it takes you by surprise.
The other evening I noticed a French policewoman kiss a couple of stroppy looking teenagers on both cheeks before taking out her notebook and questioning them. Clearly something had gone down as there were a few police milling around and the smell of something distinctly weedy in the air.
It made me smile for a long time – the idea of kissing your suspects before you start interrogating them.
The neighbours
Hanging out for a dinner invitation from the neighbours.
We’ve been here three weeks so I’ll give them another couple of weeks before I pop over with a bottle of chardy, packet of chips and a couple of kids.