Life In 79

Anna, my wife, had been wanting one for ages; ever since we moved to France. Sports car? Motorhome? Botox? Helipad? I hear you ask. Yes, she has asked for all these things at some point (except the helipad), but the thing her heart desired the most was an outside toilet. Well, call me Mr Dream-Maker, but I wanted to do this special thing for her. It's easy for us fellas, when we're in the garden and that little tingly sensation comes a-knocking; like Superman stepping into his phone booth, we sidestep behind the nearest rose bush and relieve ourselves (I'm talking 'number 1s' here, not 'number 2s'...that would be gross). But when the ladies are poolside, having imbibed in one too many piña coladas and the call of nature comes a-calling, they have to traipse across the garden...into the house...up the stairs and bingo bongo. Leaving a trail of grass and wet footprints across the kitchen floor (which can be a deathtrap for me, in my non-grip slippers; many a t...

Spring, spring, I love spring, springy, spring, spring. If only it could be spring everyday of the year. If given the choice, Anna, my wife, would choose summer...SUMMER! Three words: watering, sunburn, flies.  The spring grass is greener, the sky bluer, our windowsills are crammed with seedlings vying for sunlight, much to Anna's irritation. But I have to put up with her demijohns of home-brew, bubbling endlessly, whilst I'm trying to watch The Repair Shop - although I'm not to mention the subject, as the other day we had a glass of the 2025 brew, before the bottling process began, and it had a nasty aftertaste, so we had to pour four demijohns of the Shaws' Shite White (as we call it), down the drain.  She puts so much time, effort (and expense) into her brewing hobby. Now that our children are all grown and flown the nest she needs an outlet for her maternal juices, which she does by keeping her demijohns warm, feeding them, watching them bubble, she even WhatsApps p...

You wouldn't have the Deux-Sèvres down as a holiday destination in February; “Come to the Deux-Sèvres, slop about in the mud, enjoy the flooding and marvel at the high river levels, watch a farmer chop a hedge”. But February, it appears, is the new August. We had a busy old month welcoming friends and family to our soggy part of France.  It meant that our New Year's resolutions were blown out of the water as Anna, my wife, and I took the opportunity to eat and drink to excess.  But where to go and what to do when the weather is rubbish and everything's shut? My brother had to use up some annual leave so popped over for a few days. He is very easily pleased; he gets excited when we take him to a French supermarket, wandering around the aisles like a small child oohing and ahhing at the goodies on offer... buying a lump of pâté to remind himself of the day ...asking if he can have his photo taken near the fish counter.  The only thing better than a supermarket for my brothe...

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...

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...

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...