Life In 79

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...

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 ...

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...