Travels

It’s a shame one so often sleeps badly before a long drive, but at the time of writing we’re installed in a Campanile at Issoire in the Auvergne, and the car is fuelled up for the next leg of the journey tomorrow.  This time we've had no trouble persuading pumps to accept the Gaga card, and it was interesting to note that they read the card and drop into English, though it was a little startling to be instructed to ‘grab the nozzle’.  The fact that it was ‘fueling’ suggests a transatlantic influence at work.  The anglophone tendency are nevertheless expected to understand retirez votre carte.  The fuel, however delivered, is a fair bit cheaper here in France than in the UK.  As I have mentioned before, this is a bit of a conundrum, since the old annual vignette (price varied by département and the curious gallic horse-steam coefficient of the car concerned) was long since abolished as a vehicle excise and factored, as is right and proper, into fuel tax.  Is it just that Gideon and his predecessors have been too rapacious when it comes to both flavours of tax?  We’re being bled from both arms.

The approaches to Paris were packed, as ever, with suicidal lunatics, but we survived them: it’s a matter of learning to expect anything and leave room to deal with it.  More alarming was the behaviour of a Brit-registered left-hand drive Tranny van soon after we joined the A16.  It was wandering all over the motorway, but at least we got the chance to zip past it when it had wandered on to the shoulder.  Yes, you got it: the driver was looking fixedly at the screen of his mobile phone, iPad or some such.  It’s enough to turn one into a vigilante.

The weather has been kind to us.  As we drove across Kent, the mist was still hanging in the valleys, lit by the low morning sun – quite magical.  As we have driven down through France, it has stayed fine and warm, and we could stand out in the sunshine for our sandwich breaks.  We’re used to the heckling of a chaffinch at the aire near the toll gate just north of Paris, and there he was, true to form.  What we hadn’t encountered there before were flowers on a couple of (I think) jacaranda trees.  OK, with the amount one pays in tolls, it’s fair to expect a nice environment at rest stops.  We again used the faintly surreal duplex tunnel under the western outskirts of Paris.  It seems to be free for télépéage users, though whether that’s just on Sundays, I know not. 

The fine weather stands in sharp contrast to the glacial reception at the hotel.  Don’t know what this dame’s problem is, but she should know better than bring it to work with her.  She was at least civil, if uncommunicative, in the restaurant, where we had the best meal we’ve had in a Campanile.  This is not saying much, I know, but it was fit to eat, if a shade on the copious side. I’ve only myself to blame.

Later:  Lovely views of snowy mountains as we drove south: the Auvergne was beautiful as always, and as we battled our way along a manic A9 (I’d left that bit to Martyn…) the views of the Pyrenees were amazing. 

Back here in Another Place, the building work is moving along very well, and with luck, it’ll be done and dusted before we head back north.  With the end wall not quite finished (it has been gratefully swallowing lime wash at a rate greater than anticipated) it’s looking pretty good.  The fresh paint is rather strikingly yellow/orange, but it will mellow fast, and is a vast improvement on the scabby old rendering. 

Family wedding

A dull day for a family wedding, but a joyful one nonetheless.  About 100 people were there to watch Fran and Rob do the legal stuff, and they spoiled us all with a generous reception at Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich.  A bit of fuss was made of the fact that three of the newly discovered cousins were there (Philippa, John and myself), and it was heart-warming to meet so many members of the family we so recently didn't know we had. 

All in all, the occasion more than justified the risk of

Door security, Burnford-Jones marriage

a venture into bandit country north of the river, and it was fun to get dressed up for a change, even if we did look like the bouncers.  I'd been planning to go in a lounge suit despite the black tie orders, but was persuaded at a late stage to conform, and wear a dinner jacket.  Glad I did, since we'd have been in a small minority otherwise.  One of our number could still get into his dinner jacket trousers: another had to make an emergency journey to M&S at a late stage, the 1968 and 1990 trousers having shrunk radically in the wardrobe.  I don't think the new one has the quality of the 1968 job (17 guineas: thank you, indulgent late parents!), but it did the job.
 

Cousins

Of course, some of us turned out in full effnic regalia: Mr Engineer Smith appeared in the kilt (Smith tartan, no less, with a McPherson pin, in honour of Maisie of that ilk, who carried us both to the font, and died suddenly and young).

The discovery of this new branch of the family has been startling in so many ways, but particularly in the choice of the 'new' family's names.  Frances was no doubt named after her grandfather, my uncle Frank.  But her brother is David, and his daughter is Philippa, like my cousin.  She, Pip, has been digging a little further, and finds that Grandpa named Frank as a dependent child on joining up in the Great War, not that we needed convincing, having seen Frank's photograph on an election flyer.

So there you have it.  As we leave these shores tomorrow before the sparrow's tummy has so much as rumbled on an expedition to chivvy French artisans, we leave Forges-l'Evêque in the hands of local ditto, and hope to return to find a new raised bed, a re-profiled patch of grass, non-lethal paving on the terrace and a new paved quadrant at the top of the garden.  More anon from furrin parts.

Wildlife and things

We're fairly sure it's the same male (Arthur) that has been visiting us each year.  A little research suggests that mallards mate and stay mated only until the chicks hatch, then Arthur and his pals go off and gang-bang any female in sight.  Behaviour here is slightly different from past years, though: most days, they fly in at daybreak, eat, swim, sleep, shit, and don't fly off until dusk.  Today, though, they have pushed off in a huff because we'd run out of bird seed.  The wren is less demanding, but noisy!  It's amazing that such a tiny creature sings so loudly.  We've had a few sightings of goldfinches, but on one visit, the presence of the mallards at the base of the bird table seems to have dissuaded them from feeding on the nijer seed we put out at the last sighting thereof.  The blackbirds are raising a family, and the juvs are feeding themselves - except when there's a mug of a parent nearby.  Apologies for my inveterate anthropomorphism!

Today we have been to our neighbouring semi-homophonous town to visit an exhibition of paintings by the people who use our Thursday venue on Fridays.  Some jolly good work in there (we bought two) at very modest prices.  You're too late!  It closed at 15:30. 

Highly frustrating day yesterday at the hobby, but of course I can't say why.  Suffice it to say that I shall not be too sad when I reach the mandatory retirement age, unlike many of my co-hobbyists.

We have taken a deep breath and instructed landscapers to deal with our uneven and amateur paving, and to do some of the muscle work on the bed by the new fence.  Given this and the work in something akin to progress in Another Place, don't come looking for a sub.

Communications through the ages

It occurred to me a while ago that the box of stamp albums I came by at UPU Congresses and elsewhere over the years might have a value other than its nuisance value in taking up space.  The local stamp shop man called in today and went through them, concluding that they might fetch £320 at auction, hence that he'd give me £180 for them.  Well, some of the albums are quite attractive, and they remind me of happy (as well as less happy) times at UPU bashes, so at that price I'm disinclined to part with them until I'm really short of a bob.  If that's their current value, one wonders why Stanley Gibbons sent a representative to Rio de Janeiro etc to buy them up from Congress participants. (I had hoped they might pay to repave the terrace.  Pauvre con.)

Turning to how we communicate forty years later, I'm having the usual frustrations with machines.  The upstairs desk computer developed a serious dose of the vapours this morning, refusing to hook up to the router.  I've given the network adaptor (the computer is so old that it lacks a built-in thingy) a good smacking, and it is hooking up again satisfactorily.  The laptop meanwhile declines to connect to facebook other than via a text-only screen, having pulled a similar stunt with yahoo mail last week.  The iPad does what it does as well as it usually does, which is usually not very well. Paciência.

Our spies report that work has begun in Another Place, and the builder has been in touch to confirm the same.  We'll see what has been done in just under three weeks' time.

Meanwhile, spring is bringing new colours to the garden every day.  While I was out playing at my hobby yesterday, Martyn added some rocks and chippings to the rock garden, together with a few new alpines.  I've killed the antirrhinum seedlings by overwatering, dammit, but have sown more, as well as some cosmos.  Probably a bit late, but they'll do one thing or the other.

Priorities

Splendid veggie lunch yesterday with our friends in Faversham - now there's a handsome oasis in a sometimes depressing North Kent.  Mérite un détour.  Our route takes us along Seven Mile Lane, and as we come down to the junction with the Tonbridge-Maidstone road, the outlook is depressing.  The attractive rolling countryside is liberally coated with polytunnels, no doubt a means of producing uniform fruit and veg for the 2:2* Management Trainee twats in supermarket chains who think their customers want such produce.  Welcome to the plastic County of Kent, Garden of the Land of Mediocre Consumerism.  We were afflicted by other forms of lurid plastic en route: a gang of bikers came hurtling past us at various points, taking awful risks.  Sunday in the spring.  Hope they made it to supper.

I sat at the machine a week or two back to try to set priorities for the necessary projects here at Forges-l'Evêque.  It is seven years and a day since we moved in, and we're still living with many of those 'well, that's the first thing to go!' items that we identified back then (though the pelmet and the front door curtain were easy early targets).  With the passing of the years priorities vary, and we're now looking at the terrace out the back, since uneven paving slabs are not a great idea at this point in the curriculum vitae.  Some years ago, Martyn slapped down some leftover slabs at the top of the garden, where we enjoy sitting in the dappled shade of some young trees (though too many of them, planted far too close together by the Previous Administration).  Time, we think to get it paved properly.  In the course of a stroll round the block the other day, we nabbed a landscaper who was doing a bit of work in the next street, and he came for a look today.  He has nice ideas for the top terrace, and we'll await the estimate...  As a dear friend says, what's the point of saving for a rainy day?  It's drizzling now.

In Another Place, my spy tells me that Mr Builder and his friend have been there today, bearing vast lengths of rope.  They used to work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and hence are experienced cordistes, which saves them having to put up scaffolding.  This approach is likely to be somewhat demanding on the roof tiles, but those are two-a-penny.  We'll be there three weeks today to see how it has all gone.

We're at last able to get out to do some gardening, even though the unusually mild and wet winter brought its own problems.  The grass is fed and weeded (at great expense), and cut.  Between us, following application of shears and the half-moon cutter, we've defined its edges better than of late.  We've hauled out a bin's worth of edgings, weedings and clippings (including, at a conservative estimate, a mile and a half of brambles), and are starting to look at cuttings, sowings and prunings.  Some of last year's cuttings have already moved on to friends' gardens, and those with vacancies for penstemons and cistus purpurea should address themselves to yr. obed. servt., who will report in due course on the fortunes of the fuchsia cuttings.  Next target for cuttings: Pieris.

*Desmonds ain't wot they used to be, and my degree was of course nowhere near such a level.

Cost of living

The concept these days has to include computing and related costs.  My desktop and laptop machines are getting a bit long in the tooth, and for example are at that stage of life at which they take forever to boot up and shut down.  Indeed, the desktop often refuses to shut down until I've pulled the plug on it.  I hate to think how many printers I've thrown away over the years.  We took two unserviceable printers to the tip yesterday, and returned with a new one (from the shop, not the tip...).  When I connected it to the power, it made ghastly noises that told me that the paper transport gears were not meshing, and the thing sounded a bit like a Morris Minor being asked to engage reverse while going forward.  It then put up a message saying that the printer head was damaged.  On setting it up, I found that the paper guide was about as substantial as one of those plastic cups you get at the water cooler, so on returning it to the shop, we decided to look for something a bit heftier.  So was the price tag on the one we chose (a small office-grade machine), but at least the bugger works.  It's clever enough to work wirelessly from the desktop computers, the laptops and the iPad.  It says it also copies, scans and faxes, so I just hope it continues to do so for a while.

In the course of our double-length travels yesterday, we saw no fewer than three old double-decker buses decked out for weddings.  This seems very much the fashion at the moment, and quite fun I guess, if your wedding party numbers 65 or fewer (of whom not more than 8 may travel standing).  Reporting the fact on facebook brought numerous other such sightings from friends.  Talking of double-deckers, I looked out yesterday morning to see a skip truck teetering down the street with two fully-laden skips full of rubble, and the upper one was rocking alarmingly.  I hope it either got to its destination or was stopped before it killed anyone. 

Flora, fauna etc

Much of the remaining eleagnus is now in the bin, together with a lot of bird-sown cotoneasters.  The former is starting to revert, so as its main reason for survival is the variegated foliage for winter colour, its days may be numbered.  We've put out a feeler or two for the muscle work needed to dig over and improve the bed in front of the new fence and to reshape and edge the grass.  Overgrown for so long, a lot of it's now mostly moss or bare earth anyway.  We're also thinking of some slightly more radical landscaping: we put down some spare slabs in the shade of the trees at the top of the garden some years ago, and find that we enjoy sitting up there on warm days, so a bigger, professionally paved area would be nice.  The terrace at the back of the house needs to be lifted and relaid, and the retaining wall to the back garden is looking sorry for itself in places.  And there's also the small matter of the leaking pond...

The magnolia is starting to look really good, but the crocuses and daffodils are getting to the untidy stage.  Fritillaries are in flower, as are the tulips.  One potentilla is in flower, but the others seem to be debating whether to live or die, and the question remains unresolved.  Martyn chopped back the penstemons the other day, and I've potted up the cuttings taken from them last August (most now well rooted).  I seem to have taken cuttings with some enthusiasm that day last August: I have also potted up box, sage and a couple of varieties of cistus.

Our neighbourhood wren is much in evidence, more aural than visual, although it was down at the primrose pots on the terrace just now.  Blue tits too are around: there was quite a racket from their alarm calls at lunchtime, when we had a visit from a sparrowhawk.  Another visitor around the same time was a goldfinch, which we rarely see here.  Nijer seed and feeder now on shopping list.  We see far fewer squirrels at the moment.  I think they used to nest in the ash tree, the removal of which has made a big difference to the light.  We stopped feeding the badgers, much as we loved to see them each evening, when they started digging the garden up.  They've been at it again to a modest extent, so I've been filling holes and sowing grass yet again.

Of the taller fauna, no further signs of life from the conservatory people, and the double glazing fitter who was due to replace a sealed unit in my study yesterday has thrown a sickie.  Rebooked for the middle of the month.

Nice lunch here yesterday with Immy, Jon and their youngest daughter, Lottie.  Ages since we'd had them here, though we have hosted them for lunch in Lagrasse a couple of times when they have been returning from Spain.  We knocked out a big home-made pizza and salad, followed by a fresh strawberry crumble, and had a pleasant couple of hours catching up.  They now run a smallholding twenty minutes or so from here, and arrived bearing a dozen fresh eggs and a couple of chorizos: their latest venture.  I sometimes feel I'd like to send some of my feckless customers down there to hear how our friends have coped with financial and health shocks in recent years.  Another recent venture is the purchase of an Airstream caravan with a view to letting it by the week in the summer.  There is no end to these guys' enterprise: I wish I had an ounce of it.