Life In 79

To knock the edge off the dizzying night-time temperatures, Anna, my wife, had purchased a machine that looked like an industrial paper shredder. But instead of shredding paper you fill it with water and ice packs from the freezer and listen to its low hum as it blasts cool mist across the bed, similar to the vegetable misters you see at Intermarché. Our boudoir had become so intolerably hot, Anna had taken to sleeping in the hammock en terrace . Even though her sleep was much improved, her posture had started to resemble that of a banana. We had guests staying, and being the generous soul she is, Anna had offered them the paper shredder, which they had accepted. So we were back on two fans blasting warm air at us. Most of our guests are happy to lounge around the swimming pool, drinking and eating to excess...maybe the odd excursion to the supermarket. We had been doing this for two or three days and were going a bit stir-crazy, so a picnic was suggested and agreed upon. The picnic ha...

On waking at 4.30am, I was confused; my surroundings weren't familiar and why was a light aircraft landing near my head? Was I back in 'Nam? No... I was in our living room, on the sofa. Had Anna, my wife, and I had a drunken argument and I had been forced to relocate to the sofa, to think about what I'd done? No, I noticed her on the other sofa.  Then the fog cleared and I remembered; our bedroom was so hot last night, we had both decamped downstairs. I peeled myself from the sofa and turned the fan, that was blowing churned up warm air into my face, off. It had been 41 degrees yesterday, 41 the day before yesterday, it was going to be 41 today and tomorrow... then, thankfully, it would drop to a balmy 39...and it was only June! I love a sunny day as much as the next fella, but I didn't sign up for this. Jeez. Our bedroom was like an oven, and I was the sausage roll, oozing fatty fluids as I basted in my own juices. I took a sip of tepid water to try and lube the tubes....

It took me by surprise, when Anna, my wife, announced we were spending a weekend away in the south. She'd booked an Airbnb and we were off for a romantic weekend; rekindling the flame. We've visited some wonderful places in southern France, Villefranche, Nice, Cannes...no, no, my wife interrupted, not the south of the country, the south of the Deux-Sèvres. Well, that threw the cat amongst the pigeons. Trying to hide my disappointment, I was given three guesses...after, about 40 minutes, she told me. I'm going to be honest, this was not in my top-ten places to visit before I die. Where (I hear you ask), was this holiday destination? Have a guess, dear reader...no,...no,...nooo...okay, I'll give you a clue, it begins with an 'R'...no,...no...it begins with an 'R' and ends in with a 'uffec'. RUFFEC! We were going to spend 24 hours in Ruffec! That was my reaction too.  A few years ago Anna fell asleep at the wheel, drove into a ditch, hit a tree, wro...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Anna, my wife, has left me. My lover, friend, mentor, spiritual guide, soulmate, has naffed off to the Azores for a week with a friend to visit another friend who lives there (how many friends does one person need?). 'Where are the Azores?' I hear you ask...in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean... and judging by the photos she's sending back it looks similar to Scotland on a bad weather day. Yet, in the Deux-Sèvres, we bask in heady sunshine and temperatures in the early twenties...that, my friends, is karma. So while she is off gallivanting, I'm left keeping the show on the road: cooking, washing-up, feeding the fish, feeding the cat, feeding the chickens, feeding myself! Going to the mailbox EVERY DAY, collecting the chickens' eggs (who, incidentally, are now pushing out five a day...my cholesterol is going through the roof), putting the wheelie bins out, bringing them back in again. Work, work, work, give, give, give. Every now and then I feel a little vibration in...

Our first lot of chickens sadly died, I think from bird flu. One by one they started staggering about, and then, even the staggering ceased and they just sat on the spot looking at the ground. I then had to dispatch them, which was a very upsetting business. So when Anna, my wife, suggested getting some more, I wasn't keen. As usual she ground me down with the promise that if there was any dispatching to be done, she was head of dispatchments. The other thing that swung it was that all chickens are vaccinated now against bird flu.  Anna was going to Thouars market on Friday to poultry purchase so I had a few days to get the coop and orchard chicken-ready; the door had warped and a few fencing panels needed adding. Amazingly, two years on, the electronic door we bought from China was still working with a set of new batteries.  Anna produced a metal feeder she had bought for 50€. '50€!' I shrieked like a girl, 'what's wrong with the old one?'. The new one looks li...

After selling our Airbnb, Anna, my wife, was worried about having nothing to do with her time and becoming bored. I suggested the novel idea of getting a job, at which she laughed. I said a couple of days at the local abattoir would get her out of the house, enable her to practise her French, meet new friends as well as bringing in a few pennies, and maybe some offcuts. But she wasn't interested. What about gardening? The great outdoors, exercise, good for your mental health (as Monty Don keeps banging on about), etc. I love gardening and have always wanted to get Anna interested. To feel the earth between your fingers, to taste your own home-grown produce and to smell your home-made nettle liquid manure, maturing in the shed. But she says it's not her 'thing'. She loves being outside, appreciating the garden, but from her sun-lounger with a pina colada to hand.  We would be like Jean de Florette and his good lady wife, Mrs Florette (the opera singer), I told her. Tilli...

I'm not sorry to bid a fond farewell to February...my least favourite month. Unlike Anna, my wife, I don't suffer from Seasonal affective disorder (SAD); she goes into decline in September and emerges from her torpor around May/June. If I say to her the days are getting shorter, a little muscle above her eye starts twitching. February, the month when: our honey solidifies in its jar and the olive oil turns grainy because the kitchen is so cold ('boo'); all my geraniums that I thought might last the winter don't ('boo'); the Six Nations Rugby is on the telly ('hurrah' from me, 'boo' from Anna). One thing I'll say in February's favour...it's short ('hurrah'). With the incessant rain our garden turns into a quagmire; it's like walking on a giant lasagne, slipping and sliding about. Outside our front door it resembles the Somme and when hanging out the washing one is prone to trench foot. As well as the interminable rain t...