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Like Ships in the Night

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100 years of Solitude? Maybe not, but two and half weeks felt close. Anna, my wife, went to Aberdeen at the start of the month, to look after her mum, who was having her third hip replacement, leaving me to fend for myself.  After the novelty of eating Super Noodles every night, unlimited wine and 24/7 ownership of the remote control wore off, the loneliness set in. Like Tom Hanks in Castaway, I grew an enormous beard and started talking to inanimate objects around the house “Hello Lamp”, that sort of thing. While Florence Nightingale was living it up in Scotland, cooking, cleaning, listening to her dad shouting at the TV...I sat at home, trying to keep body and mind together, under my electric blanket, in darkest January...with only the cat and a mouse (who has been residing behind the plasterboard), to keep me company. I lay awake at night, listening to the little fella nibbling on electric cables, my mind started playing tricks on me...a moaning filled the house as the wind whis...
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Time Warp

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By the time you read this, Christmas will be a dim and distant memory. A time when you ate your own body weight in turkey, your bank balance took a pounding and granny choked on a mince pie. You want to move on, I get that, but now, as I write (on 30 Dec), I've got nothing else to talk about! So forgive me. We (Anna, my wife and I), were driving back to the UK to spend the season of goodwill with family. To break up the monotonous journey, we had decided to stop off in Le Mans. And if you haven't been, I thoroughly recommend it; a bustling university town full of young people (something we don't have in the Deux-Sévres), a vibrant old town with oodles of shops, restaurants and an amazing cathedral perched on a hill, with more buttresses than you can shake a gargoyle at. 'When in Rome', we thought, and consumed a slap up curry at The Taj Mahal. We had a smooth run up the péage and then hit the Euro Tunnel terminus, which was chaos. Cars pointing in all directions, fu...
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A Sorry Tale

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Anna, my wife, has had several good ideas in our 33 year marriage, but getting a kitten to keep our resident feral cat company was not one of them; in fact, I would say, it was in her top three stinkers. Earlier in the year I recounted our travails at trying to introduce the cats to each other, without big cat (Pantoufle) killing the little cat (Mimolette). Time is a great healer... but in this case it wasn't and things went from bad to worse. Our hallway became the 38th parallel, keeping the warring factions apart. Now, demilitarized zones are all well and good, until someone (Anna) leaves a door open! There was a lot of screeching, hissing, clawing, fur flying... and that was just Anna. At one point big cat had little cat in her mouth! Anna managed to separate the two by hurling a cushion at big cat. It was horrible. The kitten had been clawed in the eye and a rivulet of blood was running down his cheek. We felt terrible. What had we (particularly Anna) subjected this poor kitten...
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A Magic Carpet Ride

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Like two characters from a Samuel Beckett play, we sat in our van, in a car park, on a Sunday morning, in a place called Moutiers-les-Mauxfaits (no I hadn't heard of it either), waiting...waiting for a man, we had never met before, to arrive. We didn't know if he would arrive...he said he would. 'I need the toilet,' I said.  'You shouldn't have had that second coffee,' Anna, my wife, said sympathetically. 'There's a public toilet over there,' she added.  'I've already checked it out and it doesn't meet my hygiene requirements,' I said...'I'll wait'.  A car swung into the almost empty car park.  'Is that him?'  'It might be'. Let me contextualise. We have a very big bedroom, enormous. It would take two to three minutes to walk around the perimeter... no exaggeration. What we lack in downstairs toilet, we make up for in bedroom. You could swing a cat, swing your pants, anything you care to swing could be ...
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If I Could Talk To the Animals...

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I had just been spat at, on the back of my head, by a large Alpaca. I felt like a pebbledashed wall. There was no malice towards me, I was just caught in the crossfire. My son, daughter-in-law, granddaughter and daughter were visiting and we were enjoying the Alpaca experience in Sanzay. We spent a thoroughly enjoyable hour learning about, feeding, patting (though never on their backside), even kissing these intriguing animals. As I was picking the regurgitated Alpaca feed from my hair, Anna, my wife, informed me we had to make a small detour on the way home. She had seen three kittens on Facebook, who needed a home. Oh gawd, I thought, this is only going one way. As we stared at three Walt Disney kittens, and under mild pressure from certain family members we decided to have one. Wouldn't it be wonderful for our feral cat, who had been living with us for three years now, to have a little companion. How wrong we were. Our cat is named Pantoufle (my wife's choice), but for the s...
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A Week of Highs and Lows

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Anna, my wife, had been sneezing for the last five hours; peppering the dashboard with mucus (we even had to make an unscheduled pit stop to buy a jumbo packet of tissues)... I was amazed that such a small head could contain so much moisture. Hay fever? An allergy? I don't know what it was, except very irritating. Every sneeze was accompanied by a shrill scream, which was not doing my tinnitus any favours and did not bode well for our summer holiday.   We had always found the notion of driving down to Spain very romantic, although with all the sneezing and moist tissues, the romance was limited. We were on our way to the Basque Country; San Sebastian. Five hours south, hit the Pyrenees, hang a right, cross the border, bingo!  When we arrived, I was all ready to plonk myself on the beautiful La Concha beach, drink copious amounts of sangria and stuff a variety of pintxos into me moosh. However, Anna informed me our hotel was a little bit out of town. Fifty minutes later, having...
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Homeward Bound

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Ulysses went on his Odyssey, Hannibal crossed the Alps, Bilbo Baggins journeyed through Middle Earth. Me? I have been slagging back and forth to Calais for the past ten years in a Dacia Sandero. Part of me looks forward to the journey; the excitement of what lies ahead, a frisson at the adventures waiting just over the horizon. But, when I hit the péage at Saumur, my heart sinks as the novelty wanes. Six hours, six long hours - Saumur, Le Mans, Rouen, Calais. I pride myself on an ability to do very repetitive, mundane jobs for a long time, but that journey pushes me to some very dark places...I-spy, Count the buzzards sitting along the side of the motorway, What number am I thinking of? Sangatte. We could've moved to Sangatte...I hear it's very pleasant this time of year, only ten minutes drive from the tunnel. But, oh no! Anna, my wife, wanted to move halfway down France. She tries helping out; she will put in a solid 30 minutes before I notice her driving with one eye closed,...
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