Life In 79

A quick catch up. Two days before Christmas Anna returned from Australia, where she had been visiting her sister on the Gold Coast for three weeks. She had been eating turkey in sweltering heat, avoiding bushfires and attending numerous Great Gatsby-style parties. I stayed at home, with the cat, the never-ending rain, a long list of DIY jobs and constant texts from Down Under telling me what a fabulous time she was having.  Fabergé, our feral French cat, for an outdoor cat, seems to be spending a lot of time lounging on the sofa. He has weedled his way into Anna’s affections and I fear we could be approaching the ‘it’s him or me’ scenario. I might find myself living in the barn, before long, sleeping on a pile of logs and going to the tiolet in a pile of builder’s sand. We placed a cowl or (spinney thing) on top of the chimney to stop smoke being blown back into the kitchen. At first it made no sound, it whizzed round in the strongest of winds with not a squeak. Now, when the north...

Visiting Bordeaux, the city of wine, during sober October was foolhardy, to say the least. We usually head north when leaping in the car with a bag packed, so turning right on to the D938 was a novelty. The weather forcast was terrible, but we were determined to make the best of it.   The two and a half hours in the car flew by compared with the usual six hours to the   Tunnel sous la Manche .  I was feeling guilty that I had twisted Anna's arm into booking a rather 'basic' hotel, which was a lot cheaper than her booking of choice. So was apprehensive. The hotel was marketed as an environmentally friendly establishment, which meant their was a communal pot of apricot jam at breakfast, the toilet paper was an off white colour, you only got one pillow and the room resembled a rather nice prison cell. I embraced the marmalade and loo paper, but one pillow!   After much apologising it was time to do some exploring. Our hotel/hostel was on the east bank, opposite the main...

Noah had forty days and forty nights of rain. Well, he got off lightly. It hasn’t stopped chucking it down for what feels like weeks. My wellies are full of water when I venture outside, the grass is like a paddy field and very slippery I have discovered, as I went into some forced splits on my way to the post box. But to look on the bright side the pond has never been so full and the drainage channel I dug last year to guide water away from our back door is working a treat. I can stand for hours watching the water as it whizzes down my flume.  Life can seem like a long list of things to fix and mend. Particularly living with Anna who is not known for her delicate touch. I wince every night as I hear her yanking the curtains shut. We don’t own a cup or mug that isn’t chipped. I am the tortoise to her hare. Slowly, slowly catchy monkey. Some jobs are lovely and fill one with a sense of pride when complete. Some jobs are infuriating and will send me into an apoplectic rage, like Basi...

Outside 'tis icy-cold and a thick layer of snow covers every available surface. Inside they are keeping warm by drinking hot toddies, roasting chestnuts and singing carols as they huddle around ye olde... pellet burner.'  It's  not the same is it....doesn't have the same romance of a log burner and yet everyone seems to be getting one. You can't enter a supermarket without having to navigate a pallet-load of bagged pellets.  We are thinking of upgrading our heating source and asking ourselves the question 'pellet' or 'log'? We have two log burners at present, one at either end of the house. The one in the kitchen is a modern model which we bought last year, the only problem is that when the wind blows in a certain direction smoke is blown back into the house and we have to open a window... which defeats the object of a log burner, I know; I appreciate this is not the fault of the burner but our 'draw'. We have tried opening the top vent and c...

Anna and I are at that age when things start failing us or dropping off. I am going deaf, according to Anna, who will only ever communicate with me from another room, if I am using a power tool or have an electric toothbrush in my mouth. The fact of the matter is that Anna mumbles and her Scottish accent doesn’t help. A lot of the time she talks to herself, so it is often hard to tell if she requires an answer. Our eyesight is not what it used to be either. I have trouble focussing on things far away and close-up (hold something two feet from the end of my nose and I can see perfectly). Anna is long-sighted. I go to an opticians for my glasses, Anna goes to Poundland. We have a plethora of glasses dotted about the house, all very similar in style. A great chunk of my day is taken up locating the correct glasses I need for a specific job. I know if I have accidentally put on a pair of Anna’s glasses because everything is enormous, the lenses are covered in fingerprints and she has a ver...

Just as we thought we had said farewell to the last of our visitors... I was doing some light hoeing in the vegetable patch when I heard a ‘chomping’ noise behind me. On looking round I saw a large creature on the compost heap munching on a decomposing courgette. Ascertaining it was a cat and not a rat, and that we don’t have a cat, I called Anna to come and have a look. Her motherly instincts kicked in and she beetled off to get some tuna for the emaciated puss, which it wolfed down. The following day I left for a week in the UK. On my return, the cat is still with us, having two hearty meals a day, has its own food and water bowl, a fluffy cat bed and is called Fabergé.  Having two children allergic to cats and not wanting Fabergé squirting his scent on our furniture, if he wants to stay, he will have to live in the outhouse. We have been a dog family for the past fourteen years and are not used to the ways of Br’er cat. Having lunch we heard a scrabbling at the back door and saw...

As the summer draws to an end, so does the long list of friends and relations who have come to visit. On holiday one has a tendency to eat, drink and make merry, but when hosting, it can become one long summer of over indulgence and the swimming trunks can start to chafe. Anna becomes a frenetic red coat, leading the activities: croquet, pétanque, badminton. This may sound grander than it is. In reality the croquet pitch is an undulating paddock with molehills, the pétanque ‘pitch’ is our drive and we use a potato for a jack and there is a high chance of standing on a thistle when shuttlecocking. We have a shortlist of excursions we repeat throughout summer. I have been to the Oriental gardens in Maulévrier four times this summer and am there so much, often get mistaken for a gardener. When Anna’s sister and family from Australia came to stay we visited La Rochelle for a day and a night. What a wonderful place, the harbour, the history, the shopping, the street entertainers. W...