Annual Ramblings, 2011

The year’s headline is Martyn’s retirement, following a long and varied career of 39 years. Administration in HM Dockyards, then at the Admiralty Arch; he was promoted into the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity in Bognor and later Kennington; transferred to training, promoted to the Department of Health, then training again for the Benefits Agency until voluntary redundancy; undergraduate study leading to a good 2:1; postgraduate study in education, teaching in a SE London comprehensive, and finally lecturing in further and higher education. As I write, he is already fighting off the head-hunters... Makes me feel a real stick-in-the-mud for staying with one employer for all those years. We are no longer tied to school timetables, so can travel when we feel like it, and do more together at last.

It worries us that there isn’t a political party worth voting for in these parts.  Our party did not put up a candidate for the local elections. There’s no question of our supporting the Tories, far less UKIP, and the LibDems have sold what little remained of their soul.  So for the first time, I endorsed my ballot paper with ‘None of these’.  (I rejoined Labour this year, but am so far unimpressed by the emails from Balls, Hain et al). Where are the statesmen these days?  Not in the Commons so far as I can see.  As for the EU, I start to feel that my emotional attachment to the concept of European Union and the single currency may have been sadly misplaced.  Just as we’re being lectured on austerity, by the way, a French daily reports that David Cameron’s one night in Cannes during the G20 conference landed us UK taxpayers with a bill for €1950.  Sarko’s room only cost us French taxpayers, between €6000 and 7000 for a two-night stay.  Well, that’s all right then.

With investment proving a waste of time, our plan is to have a few more treats in future.  As a wise friend puts it, what’s the point of saving for a rainy day – it’s drizzling now. 

Best wishes for 2012!

Martyn & David

The garden has kept us quite busy this year as usual, and we’re discovering by trial and error what does well and what doesn’t.  Achilleas are fine if you have herbaceous borders the size of those at Chartwell or Sissinghurst, but not a good idea dotted around small borders.  So they’re out.  So are a euonymous by the steps up to the grass, a rather diseased lupin, an ugly laurel against the side fence and sundry other disappointing subjects.  In are a helenium (The Bishop, appropriately enough), a new pink floribunda (The Justice of the Peace, ditto) and two perennial rudbeckias (I failed twice at growing them from seed).

We’ve ordered a few packets of seed for next year, and saved countless more from the garden, so it’s black fingernails in the spring as usual.  We’re hoping for some new colours of oriental poppy, having nicked seeds from Immy and Jon’s. This year’s big success was the crop of cuttings from the New Guinea impatiens that we got last year from our friend Jane when she moved house.  The common or garden busy lizzies, so successful in years past, all turned their toes up – like everyone else’s. 

Wheels

The VW has been back to the garage a couple of times, since there’s a nasty noise from the transmission under load.  Still no fix, so we may have to thole it.  In all other respects, it’s an excellent car, with a very modest thirst given its weight and performance.  It impressed us with its mountain goat insouciance when we threw it at the Canigou.  It’s equally at home devouring the miles on the motorway.  While it was in the garage, I was supplied with a very boring Golf with a small diesel engine and crazily high gearing, plus the initially unnerving stop-start technology.  The rented Mégane was a nice surprise: lively, thrifty and with sports car handling.  We wished it wasn’t so low-slung, and would have preferred fewer gears – and no gearchange prompts.    Guess I’m getting old.

Arrivals ê

We haven’t entertained much this year, but have had a few nice little gatherings at home in Langton and in Lagrasse.  John and Margaret and friends from Australia spent a week or so in Lagrasse in the spring after THE wedding of the year. Mihaela, Roger and Roselynn house-sat for us while we were in the UK in August, joining us first for lunch with  Immy, Jon, and four of their girls.  Lasagne in industrial quantities.  Never fails.

Food & Drink

  We had another meal on a Bâteau-Mouche in the summer: still a fine experience, though less impressive this time, and the price had gone up.  Closer to home, we’ve used Terracotta in Cranbrook a couple of times, and dined on Martyn’s birthday at La Dolce Vita in Lamberhurst.  Both excellent: the latter’s rack of lamb, served with spinach and just a few sauté potatoes, was rather special. 

We’ve bought two bread machines this year.  The first Kenwood machine gave up the ghost after only four years.  There’s now a dirt-cheap and correspondingly hideous machine in Lagrasse, and a new Kenwood in Langton.  The olive and walnut rolls are tempting.  The pesto and garlic rolls are quasi-obscene.

Martyn does a fine line in bruschette: olive oil, garlic and basil, halved cherry plum tomatoes.  I’ll sow basil and tomatoes early in the spring! 

We have a weakness for Wiener schnitzel, and indulge it sparingly.  Our preference is for pork fillet; thick slices hammered out to a few millimetres, floured, egged, crumbed and fried, and served with pasta, Neapolitan sauce and salad.  But in a tiny gesture to our BMIs, we sometimes do saltimbocca instead...

Disappointments: the place where we often stop in the Auvergne on the way south.  Awful meal, high price.  The pizza shop over the hills, where the plat du jour, Cannelloni maison turned out to be a sausage of hamburger meat, grossly over-garlicked and under-seasoned, wrapped in a sheet of lasagna and left in the oven for a few hours, sprinkled with gradually hardening grated mousetrap.  I hate being served something that even I can do better myself.  It’s easy now to eat badly in France.  And the tandoori shop near us in UK was poor. 

Work on the kitchen has meant much business for the Rusthall takeaways.  Slight preference for the Happy Valley over the Chippy...

Clan

Richard and Anna were married back in May: it was a lovely day for us all.  It was the first time I’d seen many of Margaret’s family since she and John were married in 1969 (when I was just finishing my first year at St Andrews). 

More weddings in 2012: Martyn’s niece Nina will become Mrs Stephen Smith, and my cousin’s daughter Ceri Mrs Paul Young.  Martyn’s cousin Jan and Mark have married: we’re delighted: they’re lovely people. 

Sad to report, though, that Margaret’s father died this year.  Years of poor health didn’t hinder an active, independent life until the last months.

Arts

Martyn is greatly enjoying his digital piano, which has excellent tone and endless versatility.  (My hands might be better if I started practising my scales....) 

We’ve only been to the theatre once this year, to a peculiar piece: Five Blue-Haired Ladies Sitting on a Green Park Bench, before and after they died....  Been to the cinema a couple of times, though: we loved The Help. 

We’re both reading a lot, having quickly taken to our Kindles.  Martyn has read quite a few biographies (his preferred genre) and I’ve been through this year’s curious Booker shortlist, plus a few classics that I managed to avoid at school, like Cranford, Lorna Doone and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  On the lighter side, I’ve just finished Jo Nesbo’s Oslo trilogy. 

I’ve played about a little with watercolours again this year.  They force me to be a bit more economical and decisive. 

Orbieu at Lagrasse, watercolour sketch

But I’m more comfortable with acrylics – you can paint over the cock-ups.

Departures ì

We’ve been to Lagrasse three times this year, for Martyn’s last Easter Holiday, for a long spell in the summer and again in November.  At Easter, for the first time, we bought firewood from a fellow near Narbonne who runs a really practical system: you drive on the weighbridge and get out, then fill the car with wood – a mix of chestnut and holm oak as a rule – then weigh the car again and pay for the difference.  The fire works pretty well once it’s warmed through, but it sulks a bit when there isn’t much wind.  A rare problem hereabouts.

We tend to have our favourite outings – pizzas in Limoux, fish at La Franqui, views of the mountains at Bouisse, gentle exercise on the bikes by the Canal du Midi.  Both of our usual  eating places have disappointed us this year – grotesquely over-salted moules (sent back) at La Franqui, and the plat du jour in Limoux that I ate only because I was hungry. 

Years ago, we tried to take a tricky road up the Canigou, but were stopped by a sign saying it was open only if you had four-wheel drive.  Now that we have  the same, we (or rather, I) decided to have a crack at it.  And soon wished I hadn’t.  Narrow, extremely rough  mule track, with jagged rocks on one side, and sickening drops on the other.  The only thing that stopped us turning round and going back was the fact that we knew how awful it had been so far and could only hope for better ahead.  Wrong.  We crept up in first gear most of the way, hoping against hope that we wouldn’t meet anyone coming down.  Fortunately, we’d reached the col before a Land Rover hurtled down the track from the summit and proceeded to hurtle on down the way we’d come.  Gulp!

Managed to connect with a few friends on our travels – Jan and Mark in Puylaroque and Annie in Sigalens.  We also called in on two former colleagues of mine from BT France days, Martin Cooper and François Vivier.  Excellent experiences both: neither had met Martyn, and we hadn’t met Patricia Cooper or Danielle Vivier.  Both took us to local bonnes adresses, where we regaled ourselves with good food, surroundings and company.  We’ll be back!

Oh, and we found a good and reasonable hotel in Paris: the Ibis on the quai in Courbevoie, which was doing a summer special offer at €50-something a night.  It was fine, triple-glazed, spacious enough, free parking and Wi-fi, but a bit of a trek from the métro. 

We also had an enjoyable stay with Annie in Yorkshire, and experienced some local sights like Beverley and York Minsters, the  National Rail Museum and the captivating Spurn Head. 

The journeys there and back were awful, however: next time we’ll take out a mortgage and go by train rather than drive.

We went with friends in October for fish and chips on the Spa Valley Railway.  Fun, but I like my fish and chips a bit hotter! The week before Christmas, we four are treating ourselves to an extravagant day out by steam train from Tonbridge to Bath, with Pullman-style champagne breakfast, and dinner on the way back. 

stop press

The kitchen is at last more or less as we want it: new sink, hob and tiles make all the difference.  Martyn has worked wonders on the tired old beech working surfaces, using a judicious mixture of elbow grease and Danish oil.  I found a third kitchen stool in a charity shop recently, and had just enough of the grey velvet left to upholster it to match the others.  If I find a fourth, it’ll have to be beige tweed all round.

Back to normal...

...or nearly.  We left for the UK last Tuesday pretty much as soon as we'd finished putting the house into hibernation.  We could have done with a bright, blowy day to get the laundry out and dried, but didn't get one, so have a lot of taking down and putting away to do next time we're there: every available indoor line, rail and airer is solid with drying clothes, bedding and towels.  We decided to leave early for the airport and get there in daylight, since the prospect of the Toulouse périphérique in the rain after dark is more than one can contemplate with equanimity.  Fortunately, the café-restaurant in the top floor of the terminal building has now been refitted, and is a very comfortable and pleasant place to spend the odd five hours reading, nattering over a glass of wine and enjoying a leisurely dinner.  It offers a view across the field, and we were amazed at just how busy the airport is with domestic and international traffic, not to mention operations at the Airbus works.  The flight back to Gatwick did what it said it would, but was a stark reminder of how little I like being stuck in an uncomfortable seat in a confined space in close proximity to people sharing inanities too loud in disagreable tones.

Meanwhile, our domestic surroundings improve little by little: we have our new sink and gas hob, and the floor and walls were re-tiled while we were away.  While I was hob-nobbing with wife-beaters yesterday, Martyn was treating the working surfaces with Danish oil, so we're starting to look right posh.    Outside, it's another story.  The grass is too wet now to cut, though the mild autumn means that it's still growing.  I managed to get the worst of the ash leaves up before we went away, but the rest of them are still lying, and the oak is still shedding.  I wouldn't find it so irksome if they were our trees.  Oh well, it's good in the other half of the year to live in leafy surroundings.  I've done a bit of chopping back and dead-heading in the garden, and have re-planted a few containers.  While we were buying potting compost for the latter job, a chap drove into the garden shop car park in a van that advertised gutter-clearing services, so we collared him, and he's coming on Thursday.  So that just leaves insulating the roof, fixing the downstairs loo, getting the drive tarmacked, taking out the hedge and the tall leylandii at the front, decorating and carpeting the hall, stairs and landing, replacing the front door and then we can start all over again.

Visual

We set off for the seaside the other day, but finished up heading for the mountains, since the views were good.  The air was quite clear up at the Château de Quéribus, so we had good views of snowy Pyrenees. 

We finished up in Limoux for a late lunch at our usual place.  Disappointing: we decided against our usual pizzas, and my canelloni maison was awful.  Martyn's steak, ordered à point arrived bleu, but benefited from another wave at the flame.

I've been trying to find subjects that I might like to paint, but the rain has knocked out most of the colour in the vineyards.  A bit late now anyway, since we leave for England tomorrow.  So we've really done rather a lot of not much, or I have at least.  Martyn has been making great strides with his new model railway layout, which is now functioning: he reckons he may have to replace the points, since the short wheelbase engines tend to stop on the dead frogs......ask him...

We've done another trip to the wood yard, since the first lot of wood burned down fast.  We'll have enough left over to give us a couple of nights' fires when we come back in the spring.  It has been very dull and grey, so the fire has been on constantly since we got here.  We're ready to get back to central heating now.

Audio...

The characteristic sounds of France change over time.  For decades, the quality of telephone service was so poor that they used to say it took two years to get a telephone, then two hours each time to get a dialling tone.  When I came to France first in 1966, my host family had no telephone; neither did any of the people we visited.  One went to the Post Office to make a call: the counter clerk set up the call for you, and then sent you to a cubicle to speak to your correspondent.  In much the same way as African countries have leapfrogged fixed telecommunications networks and gone straight to mobile, France pretty much by-passed the slow Strowger exchanges that constituted close to 100% of the UK telephone network, and went straight to the fast electro-mechanical Crossbar type of exchange, and the countryside is liberally strewn with microwave towers, which quickly created a trunk network for them to talk to each other over.  So France never had much copper in the trunk network.  In one way, however, the French PTT resembled GPO Telephones: there was one telephone handset to be had, and the bells all sounded the same.  Rather tinny, but unmistakeably urgent.  I bought one for a couple of Euros from our delightful Post Office counter clerk Jean-Luc when he’d set up a stall outside his house on one of the summer brocante days.  (Judging by the number of handsets he was flogging, I guess he must have swept up all the handsets when they put in a new PBX at the Post Office.)  So I have a telephone with metal bells and a dial.  It’s a pity my register at the exchange doesn’t recognise the old loop-disconnect pulse signalling, but I can take incoming calls, and it emits that tinny ringing that used to be a characteristic sound of France.

Another disappearing sound of France is that of the flat-twin air-cooled motor car engine.  These high-revving unburstable little engines used to provide the motive power for much of rural France, mostly in the Citroën family, but also in the stylish – and fast – Panhards.  Monsieur Poudou, our local beekeeper, used to park his 2CV at the end of our street when he came into town, and his was one of the last of the little thrummers around.  A neighbour has, however, recently bought himself a beat-up Dyane, so until it thrums its last, we have some relief from the now universal diesel noises.  Brings a smile to the face.

A recurrent sound of modern France is me swearing about problems of internet access.  Did all the usual tricks – reboot PCs and router, switch the filter, check and correct router settings.  I’m not certain my blood pressure can stand another round of calls to France Telecom, so maybe I’ll just have to do without the internet for the next 9 days.  Or so I was starting to think.  We got our network password from Frogtel with remarkably little trouble over the telephone – I just had to give details of the bank that pays our monthly sub for ADSL service.  But when I tried to reconfigure the router, guess what?  Internet Explorer cannot connect to this site.  At this point we thought ‘it has to be the router’.  Off we went to the prefecture town, returning with a nice new Belkin router in a pretty box that said ‘easy instant connection to the internet’ or some such which.  It wasn’t till we’d stripped the cellophane off the box and opened it up that we discovered that we needed a separate modem as well. 

A few more tries with the original wireless router, then we were in the car, back to said prefecture town, having decided to get a router from Frogtel.  Good job it wasn’t raining: you have to queue down the street to see the triage nurse, as it were, and he then takes a note of what you want on a high-tech pad of scrap paper, and tells you to go and wait in a corner.  Well, half an hour later, we emerged with the router, after a nice chat about old times at Frogtel with one of the clerks thereof.  Think, though: when did you last see a BT shop that you could walk into and transact with?  Next port of call, E. Leclerc, from whom we’d bought the misleadingly packaged router earlier.  All explained to receptionist 1, who sent me to receptionist 2 to get an ‘avoir’ (credit note).  Goes without saying that she send me back to receptionist 1, who...  By the time I was at deuce in the ping-pong match between receptionists, which gets a bit bruising when you’re the ball, I started to get assertive.  Can I use this in any E. Leclerc?  No, this shop only.  Not even at your petrol station?  No: if it’s a credit for a purchase in the shop, it can only be redeemed in the shop.  All in tones that put me, the customer, firmly in the wrong.  Well, sez I, that’s no good to me: I’m not here very often (laying on the foreign accent even more thickly): can’t I have a refund?  A phone call to a Higher Power, and authority was finally given for a cash refund.  From another desk, of course.  Well, once all that was out of the way, and my wallet was rather fatter than when we first left home (they plainly couldn’t be arsed to do the admin for a Visa card refund), off we jolly well set on our second ride home. 

Only to face exactly the same frustrations as we’d had with the old router.  Cutting a long and hypertensive story short, I set up the new device upstairs, and it works with the laptop.  Which we could probably have done with the original router.  Paciência.  If I feel strong tomorrow, I’ll have a further crack at hooking up the desk computer.  But the chances are that it’s a fault with the telephone socket which, after all, spent a while under water in 1999.

The weather is mild, but damp, so we have kept the fire burning since we got here.  It’s doing pretty well, but I think we’ll have to go and buy some more wood, our reserve stock and a first car load being much depleted after just five days.  We quite like this errand: you weigh the car before and after filling it yourself with firewood, paying for the difference.  Not cheap, however: but then, nothing is these days in France. 

Back to civilisation

Hardly a civilised start to the day, though, with a drive to Gatwick on dark wet roads.  But tea and a bacon sandwich, exorbitant airport prices notwithstanding, tend to restore one's sang-froid.  Flight unexceptional, Toulouse nice and mild, hire car serviceable if very shabby - it's worth going round it to spot the new dents and scrapes: ever the conspiracy theorist, I suspect they declare two dents on the contract, then expect the current renter to pay again for five more that the previous renter picked up.  Cela dit, the car is competent once you've found out that the 'on' switch for the cruise control is in the armrest - though, as Martyn pointed out, the Toulouse rocade is not really the place to try to workout where the minor controls are.

 A 5:00 am start followed by two airport experiences are enough for Day 1, so we haven't ventured far afield today since we arrived.  A little stroll up to the girls' shop on the Prom for essentials like saucisson, and jambon de pays for tomorrows saltinbocca. Firewood trip tomorrow, and a visit to our favourite Cave Co-op in Camplong.  I have paints, brushes and canvases, so have diversions planned for the forecast days of wet weather.  Not sandbag filling just yet, though neighbouring départements are on flood alert.