Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Friday 17 February 2006
Before leaving LNL last week I had my hair cut again; it wasn’t that long since the last time but it was getting very floppy over my face, and here - much more than in Cambridge - going to the hairdresser is a kind of luxurious therapy. It was quite crowded, four stylists at work, and the lady from the traiteur was waiting while her little daughter had her hair cut and plaited. The proprietress did my hair this time, very well indeed; I took along a photo from several years ago which I had found in the suitcase of old photos, and it is a really well-shaped short cut. She is still surprised at the thickness of my hair, and I keep telling her it used to be much thicker!
I am now back in LNL again, having come for the first time by train and bus. This was because N can only get the car back on Saturday morning, and then wanted to stay on for a colleague’s concert on Sunday afternoon; I would like to have gone too, but there is so much that needs doing here, that I decided to come today and go back next Wednesday, in time for Madeleine arriving on Thursday, and at the same time trying out the bus and train connections.
I had three days in Paris, and did a variety of different things. On the way back in the car on Monday afternoon we suddenly realised that it was St Valentine’s Day the next day, and that neither of us had been anywhere near a shop to be able to do anything about it, so we decided to go out for dinner at the local Chinese restaurant in Saint-Denis, where we had not been for a long time. Tuesday morning started with N getting up early to take the car to the garage for 7.30, and bringing back croissants for breakfast, which I said I thought was a very suitable St Valentine’s Day gesture. I managed to do my Pilates video exercises, for the first time for some time (very stiff after kneeling to paint the bookshelves the day before)
I wanted to try and get to the mardi musical at the Eglise Saint- Roch, but there was nothing happening; I assume it was « les vacances de février » a kind of half-term holiday for everybody. Before this I had been to BHV to get replacement door & drawer handles for two bedside cupboards from Italy, and also found reduced cushion covers and a hook for the washroom door. I was surprised to see long queues outside the Hôtel de Ville waiting to see the Willy Ronis exhibition which we saw in the autumn; it’s difficult to believe everybody hasn’t seen it!
I bought a little salmon & spinach quiche from a wonderful shop called Gargantua next door to the church and sat and ate it on the steps looking at the Rue St Honoré and getting my bearings, and then it was quite a surprise to find no concert going on in the church. I looked round at the monuments and paintings instead, and then made my way to the Monoprix in the Avenue de l’Opéra. It was full of spring and summer clothes, which was optimistic, and so was the household section - even there was nothing I needed as so many things have just come from Italy, but the designs were wonderful and much improved from what I remember of Monoprix from years ago.
I then took the metro up to Montmartre to my favourite curtain shop, to look for red material for the kitchen curtains and found some wonderful stuff with tomatoes on it; there was barely enough left on the roll but a nice flirtatious man let me have it at a reduced price while claiming he couldn’t believe I was English, I must be Italian. I said I took this as a compliment, and he said that was how it was intended. Anyway, the material is far too wide and not quite long enough; I shall have to do some clever stuff with false hems. In any case, the kitchen curtains can’t go up till the walls have been painted, and probably not until the new kitchen has been fitted, so no hurry yet. Also in the nearby cut-price shops I found a very good red fleece for 6.99 euros, and while having tea in a café decided it was such a bargain I ought to get another one, and after much rummaging and trying on bought a cream one too.
We had a very enjoyable Chinese dinner at the Lotus D’Or, despite N ordering far too much food, and then managing to eat most of it. The restaurant was very crowded, mainly with couples; I wondered if it was like that every Tuesday, but it was probably only because of Valentine’s day. N bought me a red rose from a wandering rose seller, which was a nice end to the day.
Wednesday was a day for catching up with cleaning, washing, changing the bed and shopping at Carrefour; not only food needed for while we were at Saint-Dennis, but things to take back to LNL; pillow cases and a spaghetti tin - three open packets of spaghetti came with the things from the Italian kitchen and needed housing somewhere. In the afternoon we had a visit from the Vietnamese artist N has finally chosen to draw his portrait; for a long time there was no reply from him - we had seen his stall in the Christmas market - and then he was happy to draw it from a photo, but N thought they should meet. We found him interesting and I think he found us interesting too; he said it certainly helped to meet the subject of the portrait, and told us about his work and life - he arrived in France from Vietnam aged 5 - and was very impressed by the Ursulines building; like many people he was surprised there was something so fine in Saint-Denis. He promises to have the portrait finished within a week or so, in which case I will be entrusted with the delivery of it when I go to Cambridge at the beginning of March.
Also on Wednesday we discovered a leak in the cistern of the loo - similar, but not quite the same as the problem at LNL. (I don’t know what we have done to deserve all these plumbing problems….) N had only that morning spied a plumber’s van outside and noted the name and number, but they turned out only to work with businesses. So he found - yet another! - name in the yellow pages and in the middle of Thursday morning two very young plumbers arrived, and said that the cistern would need replacing. The loo is a very ancient avocado one, left over from the previous owner of the apartment, and the new cistern can only be in white, so it should look very unusual!
Anyway, the fact that all this happened in the morning meant that we could go out in the afternoon as planned; N wanted to show me the Quartier de l’Horloge which I had never visited; an area near the Pompidou Centre with a (fairly new) mechanical clock which chimed and moved on the hour. There was also a good lighting shop nearby, N said, and we still hadn’t solved the problem of all the hall and landing lights. We arrived at about 2.20, and discovered that the lighting shop had been transformed into a supermarket, but that close by there was now a branch of Leroy Merlin. N thought we could get done all we needed and see the clock at 3.00; I thought this was a bit optimistic, and was right, there was so much to see - N thought more than in the Saint-Denis branch, but I think was just all closer together. We found lights for the hall and landings, drill bits and things to hold up the new mirror, and looked again at curtain fittings, and all sorts of other things, and by the time we came out - carrying our bags of glass lights very carefully - it was about 3.30.
In order to kill time we went into a German bookshop, about which N was more excited than I was, although he did buy me a dual language (French/German) text version of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung which I (was supposed to have) studied for German A level and have always felt I should look at again. By then it was 3.40, so we took up positions in a café opposite the clock and had hot chocolate and a look at our German books. By four o’clock there were several groups of people standing about looking at the clock, but it was all a great anticlimax; it struck four just like any other clock, but nothing else happened at all! N asked about it when he paid the bill, and they said it used to do a lot more but hasn’t for some time now. (Probably keeping quiet about it while customers install themselves in readiness in their café)
Undaunted, we set off for our next destinations, the Grande Poste near the Louvre, where N always stocks up with stamps, and then on to the Gare St Lazare, as I wanted to get my ticket to Evreux for the next day and to see where the train was likely to leave from - it was due to leave at 8.00 am, so I didn’t want to leave any earlier than I had to. Fortunately we arrived home with all our lights intact, and put them ready to come by car next week.
The Gare St Lazare is conveniently not far down the line from Saint-Denis, so I left home at about 7.10 and was there by 7.45. The journey went very smoothly as planned; comfortable, punctual train, lots of nice sunny Norman countryside and none of the wind and rain forecast the previous evening. I had about half an hour to wait at Evreux station before the bus left, (I was the only passenger for the entire journey!) and got to LNL as scheduled at 10.20, very pleased that it can be done; it’s just unfortunate that the best connection was so early in the morning.
Saturday 18 February 2006
Since arriving here I have filled my newly painted bookshelves with paperbacks and other small books, and the wardrobe with clothes, hats, shoes and bags. It will be a real treat at last to have all my clothes ready in the room where I am sleeping for the first time since September; my underwear, nightwear, stockings and socks were also pleased to find themselves finally at rest in a spacious Italian chest of drawers after the nomadic existence they have led over the last five months. I also found in the post the estimate for the shutters from Monsieur P the carpenter, and my « dossiers » from Lapeyre; these are the revised estimates for the new bathroom and kitchen, and I have signed and sent them back with large cheques representing half of the total cost.
This morning I have been to L’Aigle on the bus, as I did two weeks ago. I felt I should support the bus company as much as possible! But was also anxious to have news of the curtain material I ordered as I had heard nothing and could not get through to the shop on the phone. I spoke to the husband of the proprietress, who said they had not forgotten me, but that the order was a long time coming and they would be in touch and deliver, as promised. So that was OK, and I then had a lot of time to spend in L’Aigle in the rain, although at least it was a little warmer than two weeks ago. I found a café where I had hot chocolate, also the Tourist Office - I got off and on the bus before the station this time, which was an improvement - and looked at different shops and bought food from a traiteur, and daffodils. There is a very large market at L’Aigle on Tuesdays, the third largest in France; the artisan from Lapeyre told us this when he was here as he lives in L’Aigle, so I think I shall go again on Tuesday and have a look.
Sunday 19 February 2006
A very frustrating start to this morning - I was very keen to do one of the exercise videos Madeleine had set me, having had a look at it on Friday evening, but the picture froze at the point I had finished watching it, and despite trying for about half an hour, I could do nothing with it. In the end I had to give up and have breakfast, and by the time I had got dressed and gone out to get the bread and post a letter, it was halfway through the morning.
The main activity of the day was the curtains in the grande pièce, which I’m glad to say are now up. It took the whole of the rest of the morning to clean inside and outside of all four windows - which I thought I’d better do before hanging clean white lace curtains up at them, and to hoover up all the dust from the outside shutters and the mess from the drilling when N put up the supports for the curtains last week. It was the first time the two shutters onto the street had been opened together for any length of time, and I should think it would not have gone unnoticed in the village (I see her at number three has got her front shutters open, and not before time…) and I was sorry Marie-Antoinette was not around to see. She appears to be away as her shutters have been firmly closed for a few days, probably on « vacances de février », but when we first met her in September said that the front shutters in this house had not been opened for over three years and you couldn’t imagine how depressing it was living opposite closed shutters. Hopefully now the curtains are up they can be opened more often.
After lunch I laid the 17 metres of IKEA voile out on to the big Italian dining-room table and divided it into eight lengths, and hemmed the tops and bottoms, fortunately the sides were scalloped and didn’t need doing. With a short tea break (when amazingly, I found the Eastenders Omnibus on my television!) I finally got them all up by seven o’clock, although as N had warned, the two poles on the street side were not straight, and it was difficult to get them back in the supports, and there is an unequal length of pole at each end. When N phoned he said he would look at this next week (even at the top of the ladder I am not really high enough to do anything about it) and also made helpful suggestions about the DVD, which I have yet to try, and most interesting of all, that he had decided it was silly to have a half green/half white loo, so had ordered a brand new white one, which was working very well indeed.
Tuesday 21 February 2006
I made slight progress with the DVD player yesterday morning, at least got the disc out, and was all ready to do my regular Pilates one instead, but that refused to work as well. Very frustrating, so this morning decided not to bother at all, but to take them both back to Saint-Denis, and to let N have a look at the machine when he is here.
Yesterday morning I went to the market here in the village, and bought some wonderful home-smoked salmon from the fish man. It’s very thick and succulent and bears no resemblance to the thin, bright pink stuff you get between sheets of plastic. We had a little chat about the best kind of white wine to go with it; can’t see that happening in ASDA. Fortunately, N had brought back some marvellous Italian white wine, which accompanied it beautifully. I was also interested to see a chair re-caning stall on the market, as there is a very elegant chair with a hole in the seat which was left here, and which I would like to have re-done. I was all ready to run home and fetch it, but the man said he hadn’t got the cane for that kind of seat at the moment; it wasn’t the season. So I suppose I’ll just have to wait. Sometimes when crossing the market square between the boulangerie and the post office I have the absurd impression that I am part of Camberwick Green or Trumpton.
I spent a lot of the rest of the day catching up with vast amounts of ironing, hoovering the ground floor and trying to put the new handles on the bedside cupboards, with only partial success, in between watching a variety of things on my various TV channels: part of the film Bloody Sunday, Olympic ice skating and the BAFTA awards.
This morning I have been to L’Aigle on the bus to look at the market; it snowed all the time, that thin wet snow which melts on contact, and the temperature was 1 degree! The market was very impressive however and I couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it all must be in the summer. It stretches throughout the whole town, in several large squares and car parks, and also in the streets. Lots of wonderful things to eat: crèpes, chicken, paella, roast potatoes, honey, Vietnamese food; and fruit & veg., flowers, clothes, household things, and one or two stalls I recognised from La Neuve-Lyre Monday market; the cheese man and the cobbler’s van. There was also an impressive fish and shellfish stall, with a map showing whereabouts on the northern coast the fish was caught each night.
I bought white tulips, and got given some free orange roses with them, I’m not sure why; and celery for my soup, and a large piece of N’s favourite cheese - Cantal Entre Deux, a very small chopping board and what seems like a wonderful pair of pyjamas for 5 euros - we shall see! I called in at my - now regular - bistro for a cup of hot chocolate, and its useful - if draughty - outside loo. This is in one of the squares where there are lots of market stalls, and again I thought it must be totally different experience in the summer, sitting at a table outside.
This afternoon I have made Delia Smith’s pea soup with some Italian dried peas N brought back from Italy, while watching the snow out of the window. There is now space to do « proper » cooking as the little oven has been moved to the other side of the kitchen (courtesy of Emanuel’s extra electric points) which makes more room next to the hob. There is also now a large red Italian pot to make soup in. I have also arranged all my new flowers and unpacked some more small pieces of china which came from Ainsworth Street; these are on a bookcase which needs altering, so I was waiting, but decided today they might as well be unpacked. There is so much china, glass and cutlery in this house now, I wonder if we shall ever manage to use it all.
Wednesday 22 February 2006
This morning I have hoovered all of the top two floors and stairs and cleaned the bathroom, prior to going back to Paris on the bus/train this afternoon. I received a phone call from the man at the curtain material shop saying they could deliver tomorrow; when I explained I would not be here he said they would come today between 12.00 and 2.00. I shall look forward to being able to make up the curtains at last, when we get back next week, after Madeleine’s visit. It’s all very well having an old curtain hung permanently over the window; I would like to be able to see the garden sometimes.
Afternoon: the curtain lady duly arrived with my material on a roll, and apologies for it being late. Fortunately, I like it even more now than I did when I chose it. She said I had a « maison charmante » but I managed to stop her from coming in and inspecting any of my curtains. She asked if I was living half here, half in England; I said no - half here, half in Paris, and she said didn’t it break my heart to leave here? I said, yes especially when there was so much to do! I had made her a cheque for the remaining amount, I am sure it will be worth it. I realised I had forgotten to get dark red thread, but am sure I can find that in Paris on my shopping day with Madeleine.
As it has stopped raining/snowing I have been out on my bike again and taken a large collection of glass and bottles to the bottle bank.
During lunch - a very large hot goat cheese salad, to use up various things before leaving - I discovered a new and interesting channel on the TV, called Mezzo, which I thought might be Italian but is in fact snippets of classical music performances, some old and in black & white, some modern and some bits of opera; you never know what’s coming next.
Before leaving LNL last week I had my hair cut again; it wasn’t that long since the last time but it was getting very floppy over my face, and here - much more than in Cambridge - going to the hairdresser is a kind of luxurious therapy. It was quite crowded, four stylists at work, and the lady from the traiteur was waiting while her little daughter had her hair cut and plaited. The proprietress did my hair this time, very well indeed; I took along a photo from several years ago which I had found in the suitcase of old photos, and it is a really well-shaped short cut. She is still surprised at the thickness of my hair, and I keep telling her it used to be much thicker!
I am now back in LNL again, having come for the first time by train and bus. This was because N can only get the car back on Saturday morning, and then wanted to stay on for a colleague’s concert on Sunday afternoon; I would like to have gone too, but there is so much that needs doing here, that I decided to come today and go back next Wednesday, in time for Madeleine arriving on Thursday, and at the same time trying out the bus and train connections.
I had three days in Paris, and did a variety of different things. On the way back in the car on Monday afternoon we suddenly realised that it was St Valentine’s Day the next day, and that neither of us had been anywhere near a shop to be able to do anything about it, so we decided to go out for dinner at the local Chinese restaurant in Saint-Denis, where we had not been for a long time. Tuesday morning started with N getting up early to take the car to the garage for 7.30, and bringing back croissants for breakfast, which I said I thought was a very suitable St Valentine’s Day gesture. I managed to do my Pilates video exercises, for the first time for some time (very stiff after kneeling to paint the bookshelves the day before)
I wanted to try and get to the mardi musical at the Eglise Saint- Roch, but there was nothing happening; I assume it was « les vacances de février » a kind of half-term holiday for everybody. Before this I had been to BHV to get replacement door & drawer handles for two bedside cupboards from Italy, and also found reduced cushion covers and a hook for the washroom door. I was surprised to see long queues outside the Hôtel de Ville waiting to see the Willy Ronis exhibition which we saw in the autumn; it’s difficult to believe everybody hasn’t seen it!
I bought a little salmon & spinach quiche from a wonderful shop called Gargantua next door to the church and sat and ate it on the steps looking at the Rue St Honoré and getting my bearings, and then it was quite a surprise to find no concert going on in the church. I looked round at the monuments and paintings instead, and then made my way to the Monoprix in the Avenue de l’Opéra. It was full of spring and summer clothes, which was optimistic, and so was the household section - even there was nothing I needed as so many things have just come from Italy, but the designs were wonderful and much improved from what I remember of Monoprix from years ago.
I then took the metro up to Montmartre to my favourite curtain shop, to look for red material for the kitchen curtains and found some wonderful stuff with tomatoes on it; there was barely enough left on the roll but a nice flirtatious man let me have it at a reduced price while claiming he couldn’t believe I was English, I must be Italian. I said I took this as a compliment, and he said that was how it was intended. Anyway, the material is far too wide and not quite long enough; I shall have to do some clever stuff with false hems. In any case, the kitchen curtains can’t go up till the walls have been painted, and probably not until the new kitchen has been fitted, so no hurry yet. Also in the nearby cut-price shops I found a very good red fleece for 6.99 euros, and while having tea in a café decided it was such a bargain I ought to get another one, and after much rummaging and trying on bought a cream one too.
We had a very enjoyable Chinese dinner at the Lotus D’Or, despite N ordering far too much food, and then managing to eat most of it. The restaurant was very crowded, mainly with couples; I wondered if it was like that every Tuesday, but it was probably only because of Valentine’s day. N bought me a red rose from a wandering rose seller, which was a nice end to the day.
Wednesday was a day for catching up with cleaning, washing, changing the bed and shopping at Carrefour; not only food needed for while we were at Saint-Dennis, but things to take back to LNL; pillow cases and a spaghetti tin - three open packets of spaghetti came with the things from the Italian kitchen and needed housing somewhere. In the afternoon we had a visit from the Vietnamese artist N has finally chosen to draw his portrait; for a long time there was no reply from him - we had seen his stall in the Christmas market - and then he was happy to draw it from a photo, but N thought they should meet. We found him interesting and I think he found us interesting too; he said it certainly helped to meet the subject of the portrait, and told us about his work and life - he arrived in France from Vietnam aged 5 - and was very impressed by the Ursulines building; like many people he was surprised there was something so fine in Saint-Denis. He promises to have the portrait finished within a week or so, in which case I will be entrusted with the delivery of it when I go to Cambridge at the beginning of March.
Also on Wednesday we discovered a leak in the cistern of the loo - similar, but not quite the same as the problem at LNL. (I don’t know what we have done to deserve all these plumbing problems….) N had only that morning spied a plumber’s van outside and noted the name and number, but they turned out only to work with businesses. So he found - yet another! - name in the yellow pages and in the middle of Thursday morning two very young plumbers arrived, and said that the cistern would need replacing. The loo is a very ancient avocado one, left over from the previous owner of the apartment, and the new cistern can only be in white, so it should look very unusual!
Anyway, the fact that all this happened in the morning meant that we could go out in the afternoon as planned; N wanted to show me the Quartier de l’Horloge which I had never visited; an area near the Pompidou Centre with a (fairly new) mechanical clock which chimed and moved on the hour. There was also a good lighting shop nearby, N said, and we still hadn’t solved the problem of all the hall and landing lights. We arrived at about 2.20, and discovered that the lighting shop had been transformed into a supermarket, but that close by there was now a branch of Leroy Merlin. N thought we could get done all we needed and see the clock at 3.00; I thought this was a bit optimistic, and was right, there was so much to see - N thought more than in the Saint-Denis branch, but I think was just all closer together. We found lights for the hall and landings, drill bits and things to hold up the new mirror, and looked again at curtain fittings, and all sorts of other things, and by the time we came out - carrying our bags of glass lights very carefully - it was about 3.30.
In order to kill time we went into a German bookshop, about which N was more excited than I was, although he did buy me a dual language (French/German) text version of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung which I (was supposed to have) studied for German A level and have always felt I should look at again. By then it was 3.40, so we took up positions in a café opposite the clock and had hot chocolate and a look at our German books. By four o’clock there were several groups of people standing about looking at the clock, but it was all a great anticlimax; it struck four just like any other clock, but nothing else happened at all! N asked about it when he paid the bill, and they said it used to do a lot more but hasn’t for some time now. (Probably keeping quiet about it while customers install themselves in readiness in their café)
Undaunted, we set off for our next destinations, the Grande Poste near the Louvre, where N always stocks up with stamps, and then on to the Gare St Lazare, as I wanted to get my ticket to Evreux for the next day and to see where the train was likely to leave from - it was due to leave at 8.00 am, so I didn’t want to leave any earlier than I had to. Fortunately we arrived home with all our lights intact, and put them ready to come by car next week.
The Gare St Lazare is conveniently not far down the line from Saint-Denis, so I left home at about 7.10 and was there by 7.45. The journey went very smoothly as planned; comfortable, punctual train, lots of nice sunny Norman countryside and none of the wind and rain forecast the previous evening. I had about half an hour to wait at Evreux station before the bus left, (I was the only passenger for the entire journey!) and got to LNL as scheduled at 10.20, very pleased that it can be done; it’s just unfortunate that the best connection was so early in the morning.
Saturday 18 February 2006
Since arriving here I have filled my newly painted bookshelves with paperbacks and other small books, and the wardrobe with clothes, hats, shoes and bags. It will be a real treat at last to have all my clothes ready in the room where I am sleeping for the first time since September; my underwear, nightwear, stockings and socks were also pleased to find themselves finally at rest in a spacious Italian chest of drawers after the nomadic existence they have led over the last five months. I also found in the post the estimate for the shutters from Monsieur P the carpenter, and my « dossiers » from Lapeyre; these are the revised estimates for the new bathroom and kitchen, and I have signed and sent them back with large cheques representing half of the total cost.
This morning I have been to L’Aigle on the bus, as I did two weeks ago. I felt I should support the bus company as much as possible! But was also anxious to have news of the curtain material I ordered as I had heard nothing and could not get through to the shop on the phone. I spoke to the husband of the proprietress, who said they had not forgotten me, but that the order was a long time coming and they would be in touch and deliver, as promised. So that was OK, and I then had a lot of time to spend in L’Aigle in the rain, although at least it was a little warmer than two weeks ago. I found a café where I had hot chocolate, also the Tourist Office - I got off and on the bus before the station this time, which was an improvement - and looked at different shops and bought food from a traiteur, and daffodils. There is a very large market at L’Aigle on Tuesdays, the third largest in France; the artisan from Lapeyre told us this when he was here as he lives in L’Aigle, so I think I shall go again on Tuesday and have a look.
Sunday 19 February 2006
A very frustrating start to this morning - I was very keen to do one of the exercise videos Madeleine had set me, having had a look at it on Friday evening, but the picture froze at the point I had finished watching it, and despite trying for about half an hour, I could do nothing with it. In the end I had to give up and have breakfast, and by the time I had got dressed and gone out to get the bread and post a letter, it was halfway through the morning.
The main activity of the day was the curtains in the grande pièce, which I’m glad to say are now up. It took the whole of the rest of the morning to clean inside and outside of all four windows - which I thought I’d better do before hanging clean white lace curtains up at them, and to hoover up all the dust from the outside shutters and the mess from the drilling when N put up the supports for the curtains last week. It was the first time the two shutters onto the street had been opened together for any length of time, and I should think it would not have gone unnoticed in the village (I see her at number three has got her front shutters open, and not before time…) and I was sorry Marie-Antoinette was not around to see. She appears to be away as her shutters have been firmly closed for a few days, probably on « vacances de février », but when we first met her in September said that the front shutters in this house had not been opened for over three years and you couldn’t imagine how depressing it was living opposite closed shutters. Hopefully now the curtains are up they can be opened more often.
After lunch I laid the 17 metres of IKEA voile out on to the big Italian dining-room table and divided it into eight lengths, and hemmed the tops and bottoms, fortunately the sides were scalloped and didn’t need doing. With a short tea break (when amazingly, I found the Eastenders Omnibus on my television!) I finally got them all up by seven o’clock, although as N had warned, the two poles on the street side were not straight, and it was difficult to get them back in the supports, and there is an unequal length of pole at each end. When N phoned he said he would look at this next week (even at the top of the ladder I am not really high enough to do anything about it) and also made helpful suggestions about the DVD, which I have yet to try, and most interesting of all, that he had decided it was silly to have a half green/half white loo, so had ordered a brand new white one, which was working very well indeed.
Tuesday 21 February 2006
I made slight progress with the DVD player yesterday morning, at least got the disc out, and was all ready to do my regular Pilates one instead, but that refused to work as well. Very frustrating, so this morning decided not to bother at all, but to take them both back to Saint-Denis, and to let N have a look at the machine when he is here.
Yesterday morning I went to the market here in the village, and bought some wonderful home-smoked salmon from the fish man. It’s very thick and succulent and bears no resemblance to the thin, bright pink stuff you get between sheets of plastic. We had a little chat about the best kind of white wine to go with it; can’t see that happening in ASDA. Fortunately, N had brought back some marvellous Italian white wine, which accompanied it beautifully. I was also interested to see a chair re-caning stall on the market, as there is a very elegant chair with a hole in the seat which was left here, and which I would like to have re-done. I was all ready to run home and fetch it, but the man said he hadn’t got the cane for that kind of seat at the moment; it wasn’t the season. So I suppose I’ll just have to wait. Sometimes when crossing the market square between the boulangerie and the post office I have the absurd impression that I am part of Camberwick Green or Trumpton.
I spent a lot of the rest of the day catching up with vast amounts of ironing, hoovering the ground floor and trying to put the new handles on the bedside cupboards, with only partial success, in between watching a variety of things on my various TV channels: part of the film Bloody Sunday, Olympic ice skating and the BAFTA awards.
This morning I have been to L’Aigle on the bus to look at the market; it snowed all the time, that thin wet snow which melts on contact, and the temperature was 1 degree! The market was very impressive however and I couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it all must be in the summer. It stretches throughout the whole town, in several large squares and car parks, and also in the streets. Lots of wonderful things to eat: crèpes, chicken, paella, roast potatoes, honey, Vietnamese food; and fruit & veg., flowers, clothes, household things, and one or two stalls I recognised from La Neuve-Lyre Monday market; the cheese man and the cobbler’s van. There was also an impressive fish and shellfish stall, with a map showing whereabouts on the northern coast the fish was caught each night.
I bought white tulips, and got given some free orange roses with them, I’m not sure why; and celery for my soup, and a large piece of N’s favourite cheese - Cantal Entre Deux, a very small chopping board and what seems like a wonderful pair of pyjamas for 5 euros - we shall see! I called in at my - now regular - bistro for a cup of hot chocolate, and its useful - if draughty - outside loo. This is in one of the squares where there are lots of market stalls, and again I thought it must be totally different experience in the summer, sitting at a table outside.
This afternoon I have made Delia Smith’s pea soup with some Italian dried peas N brought back from Italy, while watching the snow out of the window. There is now space to do « proper » cooking as the little oven has been moved to the other side of the kitchen (courtesy of Emanuel’s extra electric points) which makes more room next to the hob. There is also now a large red Italian pot to make soup in. I have also arranged all my new flowers and unpacked some more small pieces of china which came from Ainsworth Street; these are on a bookcase which needs altering, so I was waiting, but decided today they might as well be unpacked. There is so much china, glass and cutlery in this house now, I wonder if we shall ever manage to use it all.
Wednesday 22 February 2006
This morning I have hoovered all of the top two floors and stairs and cleaned the bathroom, prior to going back to Paris on the bus/train this afternoon. I received a phone call from the man at the curtain material shop saying they could deliver tomorrow; when I explained I would not be here he said they would come today between 12.00 and 2.00. I shall look forward to being able to make up the curtains at last, when we get back next week, after Madeleine’s visit. It’s all very well having an old curtain hung permanently over the window; I would like to be able to see the garden sometimes.
Afternoon: the curtain lady duly arrived with my material on a roll, and apologies for it being late. Fortunately, I like it even more now than I did when I chose it. She said I had a « maison charmante » but I managed to stop her from coming in and inspecting any of my curtains. She asked if I was living half here, half in England; I said no - half here, half in Paris, and she said didn’t it break my heart to leave here? I said, yes especially when there was so much to do! I had made her a cheque for the remaining amount, I am sure it will be worth it. I realised I had forgotten to get dark red thread, but am sure I can find that in Paris on my shopping day with Madeleine.
As it has stopped raining/snowing I have been out on my bike again and taken a large collection of glass and bottles to the bottle bank.
During lunch - a very large hot goat cheese salad, to use up various things before leaving - I discovered a new and interesting channel on the TV, called Mezzo, which I thought might be Italian but is in fact snippets of classical music performances, some old and in black & white, some modern and some bits of opera; you never know what’s coming next.
# posted by Chez Katherine @ 6:27 AM 
