Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sunday 19 August 2007
For some time now N has been hatching a plan to build some kind of wide brick doorstep outside the verandah door as when it rains a puddle collects and seeps under the wooden threshold. So on Friday morning we drove to Point P at Conches, where he ordered a square metre’s worth of pale square bricks and also some planks for kneeling on in the vegetable garden (apparently lots of people buy them for that purpose.) All this will be delivered next Thursday. Meanwhile I caught up with shopping at the Champion supermarket over the road. As always when I go there I am pleasantly surprised to find how much non-food stuff there is. An extra surprise was some very good reasonably-priced reines claudes (greengages) so after a little thought and calculation I bought 2 kilos and made jam that afternoon - fortunately not quite so bad on the hands as the plums! It was the first time I have ever made greengage jam, never having had access to the fruit before. It is a beautiful colour! and has also finished up our entire supply of empty jam jars, antique and otherwise, plus the frilly covers, so no more jam-making for the moment until we get hold of (or empty) some more.
Before going home we went on another « brick » expedition, to the Grange des Ongliers, the antique barn we last went to in April with Bobbie and Guthrie. N was looking for - and successfully found - old bricks to repair a gap in the corner of the brick floor in the second outhouse. I was looking at garden furniture, as I have decided it is time to replace the plastic table and two chairs from Cambridge, my so-called luxury garden furniture. As I expected, there were no complete sets there, only old tables, mostly rectangular, but it was useful to look. What I am really looking for is a smallish round white wrought iron table (big enough for breakfast!) and two chairs; either old or old in appearance. If the table top comes off or folds flat then that would be useful for storage and transport.
We had a good look round all the rest of the Grange des Ongliers but didn’t buy anything; we looked for large gilt-framed mirrors to go over the fireplace in the salon, but there were far fewer than last time, and all too big or to small. Apart from the bricks (and a couple of shop ledgers from 1911 and 1913) the most interesting thing there was a large tabby & white cat asleep on a beautifully upholstered chair, but he wasn’t for sale.
After finishing the greengage jam in the afternoon, I made a second plum cake with the rest of the Victorias from Wednesday, as the first one was such a success. (A small plum crumble had also been made and eaten in between.) This is a recipe I have had for years, officially for an apple cake, but I substituted plums when I had a plum tree in Cambridge. When it is served on a glass cake dish complete with pedestal, and dredged in icing sugar, it looks like something from a very exclusive cake shop!
This weekend the weather has been cold and chilly; not much more than 16 degrees. Yesterday morning I caught up with new and exciting exercise DVD and resulting shower, hair wash etc, while N laid his new bricks in the second outhouse and started preparing the beams and the intervening plaster for re-surfacing. He had intended to renovate it completely during the summer, but it hasn’t been that kind of summer; the same goes for my plans to paint the ground floor windowsills.
Today we planned to go to two bric-à-brac fairs and then return via the Grange des Ongliers, as N found he was about five bricks short for the outhouse floor. It was raining, always disappointing for fairs and the first one was in a village not far away on the road to Conches, called Sainte Marthe. As before, it was interesting to see the centre of a village we only know from a signpost, and if it had been fine I think we’d have enjoyed it more. There were some intriguing metal labels on sale for pricing various kinds of cheese - in francs! - and a small dog sitting in a travel cot accompanied by two dolls; it was difficult to make out just what was for sale.
N found two large bottles for his collection, and all I bought was three kilos of apples, from the same vendors as one of the bottles. They made the usual joke about the bottle being empty, and the woman said yes, she had finished it that morning before setting out. Last autumn the idea of buying apples would have seemed ridiculous as we thought we had enough to last for ever, but our apple tree seems to be having a gap year; at last we hope that’s all it is, and N keeps asking when I am going to make more mint jelly with the vast amounts of strong Italian mint in the garden. For the moment I have stored them on the « apple shelf » in the first outhouse, where luckily we still have enough small jelly jars.
We then went on to Droisy, an obscure little village some way away where - according to a newspaper supplement - we hoped to find a second foire à tout. For the first time, however, the place was completely deserted, with no sign of life - or foire - at all. On the way we passed a Chocolatarium, a sort of chocolate factory, a most unusual thing to find in the middle of the Normandy countryside where normally the economy revolves round grain, cows, cider and antiques. After calling in once again at the Grange des Ongliers to get our extra bricks we went home for lunch, buying our bread this time at a nearby village called Chandai.
Tuesday 21 August 2007
After having enjoyed Lark Rise to Candleford, N is now reading Flora Thompson’s Country Calendar, and is pleased to find that she too observed swallows flying in and out of a garden building where they had made their nests. She also talks of hanging up herbs to dry in the sunshine, in the same way as we have dried mint and verveine. On Sunday afternoon we sat at the verandah table, N polishing his recently bought wooden clogs, and me stripping the dried mint from its twigs and putting it in a large glass jar which came from Italy, and N said it was good to be involved in such country pursuits. There is a smaller Italian jar which should be the right size for the bunch of sage now drying; the verveine is in the square glass conserves maison jar I bought at a sale a few weeks ago. Afterwards I polished some silver, including the wine bottle holder bought last week, and it is now sitting on the sideboard with a bottle each of Pommeau and Calvados in it.
I have now finished the third volume of Les Thibault, a fascinating story of the relationships between the members of two families, set against a back-drop of Paris, Maisons Lafitte, Le Havre and Marseilles in the early 1900’s. I have also had a look at the 1926 book of advice to a young girl which I bought recently; although it is addressed to girls leaving school, and gives plenty of information on equipping kitchens, first aid and nutrition and mentions the importance of looking after husbands and babies (a long chapter, this) it gives absolutely no idea about how one obtains either a husband or a baby! Though, strangely, there is quite a long section at the back on divorce. It also makes reference more than once to « our brave soldiers » who have recently given their lives in the Great War. There are also some interesting pictures and diagrams, mostly of unappetizing cuts of meat, and layouts of furniture in sitting rooms.
Today we have had a guest for lunch, for the first time in ages. (No unappetizing cuts of meat.) It was Professor J, who came visited us at Saint-Denis last autumn, and this time he was calling in on the way to visit his daughter near Giverny. We had hoped we might have lunch in the garden - a not unreasonable idea in August - but the weather is still not at all reliable, (though better predicted for the weekend!) so we had salade niçoise indoors, preceded by some of last year’s spinach & orange soup from the freezer, and followed by a selection of local cheeses from the market and a tarte Normande from the village boulangerie. The soup was excellent and N suggested I made more this year with the threatened glut of spinach in the potager; I had no memory of the recipe so have done a little research and am pleased to report that I have now found it.
As always it was very enjoyable to show someone new around the house and garden and outhouses, and fortunately in between showers it was dry and even sunny for the visit to the vegetable garden and new flower bed. Professor J was duly amazed by the recording studio, the system of linked water butts, the jam and chutney store and the second outhouse which N is half-way through restoring; yesterday he finished up the contents of several different half-empty pots of creosote, wood preserver and brown stain on the beams in the ceiling. After we’d had coffee in the verandah, N took our guest to his study to show him Sibelius (computer system for transcribing, composing and printing music) rather like a small boy taking his friend to his room to show off his train set.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Today the weather is terrible; dark clouds and constant rain all day. It is like winter and I found myself wrapping up to go and get the bread and then going straight away to the outhouse to get what was needed there for the rest of the day, just as I do in winter. While I was there I sorted out and rationalised the jam and chutney store; there is so much now that all the jams are on the original wooden shelves and all the chutney sorted into baskets on the new plastic shelving. It’s amazing how much time this sort of thing takes! I also labelled the jars of dried mint etc; as with things in the freezer you start by thinking you can’t possibly forget what they all are, but the more there are, the more you forget.
N can’t get on any further with his outhouse renovating project because of the weather, so is looking through his newly acquired purchases of stamps complete with an up-to-date Stanley Gibbons catalogue, just in case any of them are worth thousands of pounds. They haven’t been so far, but there are a couple of dozen or more worth £2 or £3, so not a bad investment on an album costing 10 euros.
Thursday 23 August 2007
A drier day, well at least a drier morning. I got some washing almost dry and N, in his new role of bricklayer manqué, waited for the delivery of two kinds of bricks, sand, and his two garden planks. (Lots of jokes about two short thick planks…) All this arrived towards the end of the morning, so lunch was late; I was busy with the spinach and orange soup in any case; one kilo of spinach fills two sinks! and he filled in the cement around the bricks in the corner of the second outhouse and after lunch designed and laid a brick « doorstep » in front of the verandah door. He filled in the cement in the rain, and covered it all in plastic to protect it. Hopefully both sets of bricks will dry nicely while we are away, as tomorrow we set off for Saint-Denis for the first time in about two and a half months - the longest we‘ve ever been away, I think.
For some time now N has been hatching a plan to build some kind of wide brick doorstep outside the verandah door as when it rains a puddle collects and seeps under the wooden threshold. So on Friday morning we drove to Point P at Conches, where he ordered a square metre’s worth of pale square bricks and also some planks for kneeling on in the vegetable garden (apparently lots of people buy them for that purpose.) All this will be delivered next Thursday. Meanwhile I caught up with shopping at the Champion supermarket over the road. As always when I go there I am pleasantly surprised to find how much non-food stuff there is. An extra surprise was some very good reasonably-priced reines claudes (greengages) so after a little thought and calculation I bought 2 kilos and made jam that afternoon - fortunately not quite so bad on the hands as the plums! It was the first time I have ever made greengage jam, never having had access to the fruit before. It is a beautiful colour! and has also finished up our entire supply of empty jam jars, antique and otherwise, plus the frilly covers, so no more jam-making for the moment until we get hold of (or empty) some more.
Before going home we went on another « brick » expedition, to the Grange des Ongliers, the antique barn we last went to in April with Bobbie and Guthrie. N was looking for - and successfully found - old bricks to repair a gap in the corner of the brick floor in the second outhouse. I was looking at garden furniture, as I have decided it is time to replace the plastic table and two chairs from Cambridge, my so-called luxury garden furniture. As I expected, there were no complete sets there, only old tables, mostly rectangular, but it was useful to look. What I am really looking for is a smallish round white wrought iron table (big enough for breakfast!) and two chairs; either old or old in appearance. If the table top comes off or folds flat then that would be useful for storage and transport.
We had a good look round all the rest of the Grange des Ongliers but didn’t buy anything; we looked for large gilt-framed mirrors to go over the fireplace in the salon, but there were far fewer than last time, and all too big or to small. Apart from the bricks (and a couple of shop ledgers from 1911 and 1913) the most interesting thing there was a large tabby & white cat asleep on a beautifully upholstered chair, but he wasn’t for sale.
After finishing the greengage jam in the afternoon, I made a second plum cake with the rest of the Victorias from Wednesday, as the first one was such a success. (A small plum crumble had also been made and eaten in between.) This is a recipe I have had for years, officially for an apple cake, but I substituted plums when I had a plum tree in Cambridge. When it is served on a glass cake dish complete with pedestal, and dredged in icing sugar, it looks like something from a very exclusive cake shop!
This weekend the weather has been cold and chilly; not much more than 16 degrees. Yesterday morning I caught up with new and exciting exercise DVD and resulting shower, hair wash etc, while N laid his new bricks in the second outhouse and started preparing the beams and the intervening plaster for re-surfacing. He had intended to renovate it completely during the summer, but it hasn’t been that kind of summer; the same goes for my plans to paint the ground floor windowsills.
Today we planned to go to two bric-à-brac fairs and then return via the Grange des Ongliers, as N found he was about five bricks short for the outhouse floor. It was raining, always disappointing for fairs and the first one was in a village not far away on the road to Conches, called Sainte Marthe. As before, it was interesting to see the centre of a village we only know from a signpost, and if it had been fine I think we’d have enjoyed it more. There were some intriguing metal labels on sale for pricing various kinds of cheese - in francs! - and a small dog sitting in a travel cot accompanied by two dolls; it was difficult to make out just what was for sale.
N found two large bottles for his collection, and all I bought was three kilos of apples, from the same vendors as one of the bottles. They made the usual joke about the bottle being empty, and the woman said yes, she had finished it that morning before setting out. Last autumn the idea of buying apples would have seemed ridiculous as we thought we had enough to last for ever, but our apple tree seems to be having a gap year; at last we hope that’s all it is, and N keeps asking when I am going to make more mint jelly with the vast amounts of strong Italian mint in the garden. For the moment I have stored them on the « apple shelf » in the first outhouse, where luckily we still have enough small jelly jars.
We then went on to Droisy, an obscure little village some way away where - according to a newspaper supplement - we hoped to find a second foire à tout. For the first time, however, the place was completely deserted, with no sign of life - or foire - at all. On the way we passed a Chocolatarium, a sort of chocolate factory, a most unusual thing to find in the middle of the Normandy countryside where normally the economy revolves round grain, cows, cider and antiques. After calling in once again at the Grange des Ongliers to get our extra bricks we went home for lunch, buying our bread this time at a nearby village called Chandai.
Tuesday 21 August 2007
After having enjoyed Lark Rise to Candleford, N is now reading Flora Thompson’s Country Calendar, and is pleased to find that she too observed swallows flying in and out of a garden building where they had made their nests. She also talks of hanging up herbs to dry in the sunshine, in the same way as we have dried mint and verveine. On Sunday afternoon we sat at the verandah table, N polishing his recently bought wooden clogs, and me stripping the dried mint from its twigs and putting it in a large glass jar which came from Italy, and N said it was good to be involved in such country pursuits. There is a smaller Italian jar which should be the right size for the bunch of sage now drying; the verveine is in the square glass conserves maison jar I bought at a sale a few weeks ago. Afterwards I polished some silver, including the wine bottle holder bought last week, and it is now sitting on the sideboard with a bottle each of Pommeau and Calvados in it.
I have now finished the third volume of Les Thibault, a fascinating story of the relationships between the members of two families, set against a back-drop of Paris, Maisons Lafitte, Le Havre and Marseilles in the early 1900’s. I have also had a look at the 1926 book of advice to a young girl which I bought recently; although it is addressed to girls leaving school, and gives plenty of information on equipping kitchens, first aid and nutrition and mentions the importance of looking after husbands and babies (a long chapter, this) it gives absolutely no idea about how one obtains either a husband or a baby! Though, strangely, there is quite a long section at the back on divorce. It also makes reference more than once to « our brave soldiers » who have recently given their lives in the Great War. There are also some interesting pictures and diagrams, mostly of unappetizing cuts of meat, and layouts of furniture in sitting rooms.
Today we have had a guest for lunch, for the first time in ages. (No unappetizing cuts of meat.) It was Professor J, who came visited us at Saint-Denis last autumn, and this time he was calling in on the way to visit his daughter near Giverny. We had hoped we might have lunch in the garden - a not unreasonable idea in August - but the weather is still not at all reliable, (though better predicted for the weekend!) so we had salade niçoise indoors, preceded by some of last year’s spinach & orange soup from the freezer, and followed by a selection of local cheeses from the market and a tarte Normande from the village boulangerie. The soup was excellent and N suggested I made more this year with the threatened glut of spinach in the potager; I had no memory of the recipe so have done a little research and am pleased to report that I have now found it.
As always it was very enjoyable to show someone new around the house and garden and outhouses, and fortunately in between showers it was dry and even sunny for the visit to the vegetable garden and new flower bed. Professor J was duly amazed by the recording studio, the system of linked water butts, the jam and chutney store and the second outhouse which N is half-way through restoring; yesterday he finished up the contents of several different half-empty pots of creosote, wood preserver and brown stain on the beams in the ceiling. After we’d had coffee in the verandah, N took our guest to his study to show him Sibelius (computer system for transcribing, composing and printing music) rather like a small boy taking his friend to his room to show off his train set.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Today the weather is terrible; dark clouds and constant rain all day. It is like winter and I found myself wrapping up to go and get the bread and then going straight away to the outhouse to get what was needed there for the rest of the day, just as I do in winter. While I was there I sorted out and rationalised the jam and chutney store; there is so much now that all the jams are on the original wooden shelves and all the chutney sorted into baskets on the new plastic shelving. It’s amazing how much time this sort of thing takes! I also labelled the jars of dried mint etc; as with things in the freezer you start by thinking you can’t possibly forget what they all are, but the more there are, the more you forget.
N can’t get on any further with his outhouse renovating project because of the weather, so is looking through his newly acquired purchases of stamps complete with an up-to-date Stanley Gibbons catalogue, just in case any of them are worth thousands of pounds. They haven’t been so far, but there are a couple of dozen or more worth £2 or £3, so not a bad investment on an album costing 10 euros.
Thursday 23 August 2007
A drier day, well at least a drier morning. I got some washing almost dry and N, in his new role of bricklayer manqué, waited for the delivery of two kinds of bricks, sand, and his two garden planks. (Lots of jokes about two short thick planks…) All this arrived towards the end of the morning, so lunch was late; I was busy with the spinach and orange soup in any case; one kilo of spinach fills two sinks! and he filled in the cement around the bricks in the corner of the second outhouse and after lunch designed and laid a brick « doorstep » in front of the verandah door. He filled in the cement in the rain, and covered it all in plastic to protect it. Hopefully both sets of bricks will dry nicely while we are away, as tomorrow we set off for Saint-Denis for the first time in about two and a half months - the longest we‘ve ever been away, I think.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Saturday 11 August 2007
Last week I paid a longer visit to the new traiteur in the village; I saw in the window some nice little avocados stuffed with tuna and mayonnaise, but unfortunately the customer in front of me bought the lot! I asked whether there were more, and was told they could be prepared for me while I waited. So I did, and observed customers coming in for all sorts of things, and was able to read all the certificates on the wall regarding prizes for sausages, boudin, rillettes, and various, and to buy some very fresh-looking eggs wrapped in a cloth in a basket, as opposed to a cardboard egg box. Both the eggs and the avocados were delicious, and I hope I have become a « known » customer.
This is obviously what I am at the the boulangerie; this morning (and on other occasions) as soon as I came through the door my baguette was taken out of a rack just arrived warm from the kitchen at the back, and not from those out in the shop. I noticed this, as when we sometimes need to get bread in other villages and towns where I am not a « regular » , this doesn’t happen!
Apart from harvesting vegetables fruit and flowers, we have been cutting occasional leaves of verveine (lemon verbena) and mint to put in a cup or teapot to make tisane or herbal tea. There was such a large crop of verveine that N cut it all down and we hung it up to dry in the sunny verandah, where it made the most delicious smell as it dried. I spread it all on cloth and carefully stripped off the leaves into a glass jar to keep in the kitchen. Today we have done the same with a huge bush of Italian mint - once again to clear space in the garden, and the verandah now smells strongly of mint.
N is very pleased with an edging he has made in the vegetable garden between one side of the vegetable patch and the path surrounding it - the other three sides already had some sort of border - using and recycling a pile of roof tiles which has been in the woodshed since we arrived here. As well as looking much neater it keeps the weeds from trailing over from the grass verge into the vegetables.
I have received a letter from the customer services department of the SNCF, responding to my letter of June 23rd. (!) Not surprisingly, they have not refunded my ticket money, but gave some vague explanation about the most important thing during a strike being getting passengers where they needed to go. I suppose they thought that as I wanted to get to Paris, and I got there, that was OK, however long and however uncomfortable it was.
A much more pleasant letter however, was one from the local tax office explaining the reason for a nice windfall which had recently arrived in my current account; the result of having declared the expenses involved in the new (green) heating system we had installed last year. I do like the French tax system; all they have done so far is give me money, and I haven’t needed to give them any at all! I am even excused paying for a TV licence; this is included with income tax to make it easier to collect, but below a certain income is not payable at all.
Monday 13 August 2007
On Friday we had a lovely day out at the seaside, a day well chosen as it was beautifully clear, sunny and warm despite being only 22 degrees and since then it has been quite overcast.
We drove to Cabourg on the north coast, not far from Deauville and famous for its connections with Marcel Proust who stayed in the Grand Hotel there between 1907 and 1914 and wrote at length about the resort and the Hotel in « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu » and in many private letters. I had been there once before about 20 years ago out of season, so was prepared for some changes.
The town was far more Proust-aware; roads, shops, bars and restaurants all named after him or things connected with him and notice-boards with Proust quotations every so often in both the Hotel and outside in the streets. Twenty years go in October the beach had been deserted and the « digue » (a kind of rough promenade) almost deserted too; but last Friday both were filled with holiday-makers, dogs, children, kites, beach chairs, ice-cream stalls and tents.
After a little walk - it had taken us most of the morning to get there - we had lunch in the Grand Hotel. This was exactly as I remembered it, (except that last time there had been a dish of madeleines on the reception desk) although since my visit I had seen it more recently in the film « Le Temps Retrouvé », a spectacular cinema version of the last volume of « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu », with relevant scenes filmed in the Hotel itself.
The hotel restaurant has large glass windows looking out on to the digue and the beach; Proust likened it to an aquarium where outsiders could look in at the diners as though they were rare fish and I saw that a nearby bar had been named L’Aquarium. There were very few other diners that day, the service was excellent and the meal exquisite - delicious small courses that did not leave one stuffed! Both our first courses were served in long rectangular plates with the different components in a line, placed diagonally in front of us; then N had meat and I had fish, together with a wonderful chilled Chablis, and we finished with a mango creation and a chocolate cream dessert respectively.
Afterwards we looked in glass display cases in the Hotel vestibule and I noted a new edition in the series of strip cartoon books of « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu », which I bought to add to my collection. We sat in the coffee lounge for as long as we could and finely regretfully left the hotel, (after I had visited the magnificent Ladies room twice!) walked through the garden at the front into the town. We strolled slowly along a street full of little shops - souvenirs, postcards, clothes and local food and drink similar to those in Brittany. N bought a newspaper and went to read it on the seafront; I looked at some of the shops again, bought cards and a box of Brittany biscuits to begin a collection of things to take to Plymouth when we visit.
I then rejoined him in front of the hotel and we watched the passers-by for a little longer, and the kites and a sandcastle competition going on on the beach in the sunshine, and thought we really ought to be going home.
The journey home took some time as we stopped twice; first of all at a car wash where we had to queue, as for some weeks now the car has been covered in droppings from the swallows’ nests in the rafters of the garage. (N is threatening to remove the most badly-placed nest as soon as they have all flown off to South Africa; I think they’ll just rebuild it when they get back. I managed to take a photo of the young birds all looking out of the « nest with the extension » ; I thought they would all fly off the minute I put up the ladder, or when they saw the flash - but they just stayed put and looked at me. Perhaps like the young thrush we found a few weeks ago, they haven’t yet learned to be frightened.)
Our second stop was at a supermarket to catch up; one called Super-U which we often see advertised on television, but had never visited before.
Tuesday 14 August 2007
I had a note in my diary for a Foire at Beaumesnil for Sunday 12th, but had seen no posters recently so got the phone number of the tourist office from the website and rang to check. They said yes, but that there was also another bigger one somewhere else whose name I then forgot. We set off for Beaumesnil, for the first time in a long while, and found a fair similar to the smaller one we had been to last year.
The first thing I saw was something I had been looking for on and off for some time, but was always the wrong colour or too expensive, or in bad condition. This time it was exactly right - a traditional set of five china kitchen containers in graduating sizes, labelled farine, café, épices, sucre, sel, in a lovely red and white design! So I bought it; I am sure no French country kitchen should be without such a set, like the copper saucepans N bought last year. We have put them on the top of the kitchen cupboards, where they can be seen from as far away as the grande pièce. I also bought a very cheap round flat basket for bread on the table; and most importantly, some very good and inexpensive home-grown Victoria plums, which I made into jam the same afternoon. I was very pleased to find Victorias, as they are not well known here, and are my favourite. N bought a large pair of wooden clogs; I am not quite sure why, but they are now in front of the fireplace, and a pretty silver (?) stand for two bottles of wine. This will be better when I have had time to clean it.
This was all over quite quickly, and we decided it would be nice to go on to the second fair if only we knew where it was, so called in at the tourist office where there was no-one to help but a pile of handbills on the counter advertising a huge foire à tout at a village called Gisay le Coudre, which I recognised as the name I had been given over the phone. Fortunately the car’s satellite navigation was able to direct us there; it was not far.
It was small village with a very big church, and a very big fair in a large field; all in rows, much easier to navigate than fairs around the streets, but as always sometimes progress is slow when a group of four or five people meets another group they know and everybody in the first group has to kiss everybody in the second group…….. The fair was very entertaining too, lots of families clearing out all sorts of objects, and some making a day of it and eating lunch en famille around a long table under two umbrellas. There was the usual selection of common and uncommon items; old sewing machines, washbasins, calendars for 1916, horse collars, old toys, top hats, mugs with risqué captions, 1970’s coffee cups, fondue plates, baby clothes, pairs of cups labelled Moi and Toi (how do you know whose is whose?), ash trays and a whole box of china lids, of which I bought one which vaguely matches the Italian cherry jar we got a few weeks ago. N found another painted champagne bottle, the same design as before but smaller, and I bought two books; one published in 1926 giving advice to a young girl; mostly about how to equip a kitchen, but also on becoming a mother; have not had much chance to look at it yet. The other was a book on walks around Normandy with Proust; in the same series as the book of walks round Normandy with Flaubert which we bought at one of the first fairs here. There are two more in the series, published in the mid-1980’s, so we must keep a look out. I also bought an unusual white oval china plate with a gold pattern.
Yesterday the weather was warm again, like Friday; N mowed the lawns and I did two loads of washing, and we were able to have lunch in the garden. This morning I have been to L’Aigle market on the bus - it was far more crowded than usual - and got some smoked haddock, pork rillettes, salad, vegetable cakes and a vintage white tablecloth and two napkins to replace some of those lost in the washing machine disaster. While waiting for the bus to get there I talked again to two elderly ladies I had met on previous occasions; one lives in La Neuve-Lyre and the other, who I think must be her sister, always gets the bus as far as Rugles. We talk about the weather and the lateness or otherwise of the bus, and today the « sister » shook hands with me, which I think is progress!
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Over the weekend our downstairs TV developed a strange symptom; the picture was squashed into the middle of the screen leaving a black strip at the top and the bottom, and all the characters rather foreshortened. It was just the same with my exercise DVD; so it wasn’t a TPS problem. On Monday morning N phoned our TV « doctor » Monsieur B, but was only able to leave a message. We had no response all day, and N wondered if he was on holiday for the whole of August; I thought he could just be closed on Mondays, which seemed to be the case as he phoned back early on Tuesday morning, said it was a problem which could be solved and that he would come in the afternoon. N dealt with him and I only came in just as he was leaving - he had to take our TV set away, but had brought us another one to keep us company - with a far bigger screen! I wished we had had it the night before, when we had watched the very early James Bond film « Thunderball », which surprisingly neither of us had ever seen before, and which would have benefited from not being squashed into the centre of the screen; James Bond appearing rather short and squat. Since then we keep going into the room just to see what is on and what it looks like in the new larger, non-squashed format, rather as I remember doing when I first had colour TV.
Today, the « Quinze Août » (fifteenth of August) is a national holiday, and as last year, we went to a foire à tout in the streets of Bernay. It was quite small but entertaining and there was not a lot we needed to buy; N got two almost new stamp albums with British stamps from the last few decades and space for a lot more; and apart from another antique jam jar for my collection my only purchase was a teapot.
It is a small white classic French café design with « Thé Lyons » printed on it in red, cost 3 euros, and the woman who sold it to me said it belonged to her mother who adored tea, but you couldn’t keep everything, could you? I said I would remember that when I used it. It certainly looks as though it has had a lot of tea in it, and I am anxious to see what it is like after a turn in the dishwasher.
We also found more Victoria plums on sale and I decided against making another vast quantity of jam, as my hands and nails had only just recovered from halving and stoning the last lot. I bought just one kilo, and will make a plum dessert cake this afternoon and we will probably eat the rest although N is talking of Plum Crumble.
Before leaving Bernay we called in at the Italian delicatessen, where N bought far too much as usual, especially as I had stocked up at L’Aigle market yesterday, but I had to admit the Gorgonzola looked - and tasted - delicious, and there is nothing like real thinly cut Parma ham.
Last week I paid a longer visit to the new traiteur in the village; I saw in the window some nice little avocados stuffed with tuna and mayonnaise, but unfortunately the customer in front of me bought the lot! I asked whether there were more, and was told they could be prepared for me while I waited. So I did, and observed customers coming in for all sorts of things, and was able to read all the certificates on the wall regarding prizes for sausages, boudin, rillettes, and various, and to buy some very fresh-looking eggs wrapped in a cloth in a basket, as opposed to a cardboard egg box. Both the eggs and the avocados were delicious, and I hope I have become a « known » customer.
This is obviously what I am at the the boulangerie; this morning (and on other occasions) as soon as I came through the door my baguette was taken out of a rack just arrived warm from the kitchen at the back, and not from those out in the shop. I noticed this, as when we sometimes need to get bread in other villages and towns where I am not a « regular » , this doesn’t happen!
Apart from harvesting vegetables fruit and flowers, we have been cutting occasional leaves of verveine (lemon verbena) and mint to put in a cup or teapot to make tisane or herbal tea. There was such a large crop of verveine that N cut it all down and we hung it up to dry in the sunny verandah, where it made the most delicious smell as it dried. I spread it all on cloth and carefully stripped off the leaves into a glass jar to keep in the kitchen. Today we have done the same with a huge bush of Italian mint - once again to clear space in the garden, and the verandah now smells strongly of mint.
N is very pleased with an edging he has made in the vegetable garden between one side of the vegetable patch and the path surrounding it - the other three sides already had some sort of border - using and recycling a pile of roof tiles which has been in the woodshed since we arrived here. As well as looking much neater it keeps the weeds from trailing over from the grass verge into the vegetables.
I have received a letter from the customer services department of the SNCF, responding to my letter of June 23rd. (!) Not surprisingly, they have not refunded my ticket money, but gave some vague explanation about the most important thing during a strike being getting passengers where they needed to go. I suppose they thought that as I wanted to get to Paris, and I got there, that was OK, however long and however uncomfortable it was.
A much more pleasant letter however, was one from the local tax office explaining the reason for a nice windfall which had recently arrived in my current account; the result of having declared the expenses involved in the new (green) heating system we had installed last year. I do like the French tax system; all they have done so far is give me money, and I haven’t needed to give them any at all! I am even excused paying for a TV licence; this is included with income tax to make it easier to collect, but below a certain income is not payable at all.
Monday 13 August 2007
On Friday we had a lovely day out at the seaside, a day well chosen as it was beautifully clear, sunny and warm despite being only 22 degrees and since then it has been quite overcast.
We drove to Cabourg on the north coast, not far from Deauville and famous for its connections with Marcel Proust who stayed in the Grand Hotel there between 1907 and 1914 and wrote at length about the resort and the Hotel in « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu » and in many private letters. I had been there once before about 20 years ago out of season, so was prepared for some changes.
The town was far more Proust-aware; roads, shops, bars and restaurants all named after him or things connected with him and notice-boards with Proust quotations every so often in both the Hotel and outside in the streets. Twenty years go in October the beach had been deserted and the « digue » (a kind of rough promenade) almost deserted too; but last Friday both were filled with holiday-makers, dogs, children, kites, beach chairs, ice-cream stalls and tents.
After a little walk - it had taken us most of the morning to get there - we had lunch in the Grand Hotel. This was exactly as I remembered it, (except that last time there had been a dish of madeleines on the reception desk) although since my visit I had seen it more recently in the film « Le Temps Retrouvé », a spectacular cinema version of the last volume of « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu », with relevant scenes filmed in the Hotel itself.
The hotel restaurant has large glass windows looking out on to the digue and the beach; Proust likened it to an aquarium where outsiders could look in at the diners as though they were rare fish and I saw that a nearby bar had been named L’Aquarium. There were very few other diners that day, the service was excellent and the meal exquisite - delicious small courses that did not leave one stuffed! Both our first courses were served in long rectangular plates with the different components in a line, placed diagonally in front of us; then N had meat and I had fish, together with a wonderful chilled Chablis, and we finished with a mango creation and a chocolate cream dessert respectively.
Afterwards we looked in glass display cases in the Hotel vestibule and I noted a new edition in the series of strip cartoon books of « A la Recherche du Temps Perdu », which I bought to add to my collection. We sat in the coffee lounge for as long as we could and finely regretfully left the hotel, (after I had visited the magnificent Ladies room twice!) walked through the garden at the front into the town. We strolled slowly along a street full of little shops - souvenirs, postcards, clothes and local food and drink similar to those in Brittany. N bought a newspaper and went to read it on the seafront; I looked at some of the shops again, bought cards and a box of Brittany biscuits to begin a collection of things to take to Plymouth when we visit.
I then rejoined him in front of the hotel and we watched the passers-by for a little longer, and the kites and a sandcastle competition going on on the beach in the sunshine, and thought we really ought to be going home.
The journey home took some time as we stopped twice; first of all at a car wash where we had to queue, as for some weeks now the car has been covered in droppings from the swallows’ nests in the rafters of the garage. (N is threatening to remove the most badly-placed nest as soon as they have all flown off to South Africa; I think they’ll just rebuild it when they get back. I managed to take a photo of the young birds all looking out of the « nest with the extension » ; I thought they would all fly off the minute I put up the ladder, or when they saw the flash - but they just stayed put and looked at me. Perhaps like the young thrush we found a few weeks ago, they haven’t yet learned to be frightened.)
Our second stop was at a supermarket to catch up; one called Super-U which we often see advertised on television, but had never visited before.
Tuesday 14 August 2007
I had a note in my diary for a Foire at Beaumesnil for Sunday 12th, but had seen no posters recently so got the phone number of the tourist office from the website and rang to check. They said yes, but that there was also another bigger one somewhere else whose name I then forgot. We set off for Beaumesnil, for the first time in a long while, and found a fair similar to the smaller one we had been to last year.
The first thing I saw was something I had been looking for on and off for some time, but was always the wrong colour or too expensive, or in bad condition. This time it was exactly right - a traditional set of five china kitchen containers in graduating sizes, labelled farine, café, épices, sucre, sel, in a lovely red and white design! So I bought it; I am sure no French country kitchen should be without such a set, like the copper saucepans N bought last year. We have put them on the top of the kitchen cupboards, where they can be seen from as far away as the grande pièce. I also bought a very cheap round flat basket for bread on the table; and most importantly, some very good and inexpensive home-grown Victoria plums, which I made into jam the same afternoon. I was very pleased to find Victorias, as they are not well known here, and are my favourite. N bought a large pair of wooden clogs; I am not quite sure why, but they are now in front of the fireplace, and a pretty silver (?) stand for two bottles of wine. This will be better when I have had time to clean it.
This was all over quite quickly, and we decided it would be nice to go on to the second fair if only we knew where it was, so called in at the tourist office where there was no-one to help but a pile of handbills on the counter advertising a huge foire à tout at a village called Gisay le Coudre, which I recognised as the name I had been given over the phone. Fortunately the car’s satellite navigation was able to direct us there; it was not far.
It was small village with a very big church, and a very big fair in a large field; all in rows, much easier to navigate than fairs around the streets, but as always sometimes progress is slow when a group of four or five people meets another group they know and everybody in the first group has to kiss everybody in the second group…….. The fair was very entertaining too, lots of families clearing out all sorts of objects, and some making a day of it and eating lunch en famille around a long table under two umbrellas. There was the usual selection of common and uncommon items; old sewing machines, washbasins, calendars for 1916, horse collars, old toys, top hats, mugs with risqué captions, 1970’s coffee cups, fondue plates, baby clothes, pairs of cups labelled Moi and Toi (how do you know whose is whose?), ash trays and a whole box of china lids, of which I bought one which vaguely matches the Italian cherry jar we got a few weeks ago. N found another painted champagne bottle, the same design as before but smaller, and I bought two books; one published in 1926 giving advice to a young girl; mostly about how to equip a kitchen, but also on becoming a mother; have not had much chance to look at it yet. The other was a book on walks around Normandy with Proust; in the same series as the book of walks round Normandy with Flaubert which we bought at one of the first fairs here. There are two more in the series, published in the mid-1980’s, so we must keep a look out. I also bought an unusual white oval china plate with a gold pattern.
Yesterday the weather was warm again, like Friday; N mowed the lawns and I did two loads of washing, and we were able to have lunch in the garden. This morning I have been to L’Aigle market on the bus - it was far more crowded than usual - and got some smoked haddock, pork rillettes, salad, vegetable cakes and a vintage white tablecloth and two napkins to replace some of those lost in the washing machine disaster. While waiting for the bus to get there I talked again to two elderly ladies I had met on previous occasions; one lives in La Neuve-Lyre and the other, who I think must be her sister, always gets the bus as far as Rugles. We talk about the weather and the lateness or otherwise of the bus, and today the « sister » shook hands with me, which I think is progress!
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Over the weekend our downstairs TV developed a strange symptom; the picture was squashed into the middle of the screen leaving a black strip at the top and the bottom, and all the characters rather foreshortened. It was just the same with my exercise DVD; so it wasn’t a TPS problem. On Monday morning N phoned our TV « doctor » Monsieur B, but was only able to leave a message. We had no response all day, and N wondered if he was on holiday for the whole of August; I thought he could just be closed on Mondays, which seemed to be the case as he phoned back early on Tuesday morning, said it was a problem which could be solved and that he would come in the afternoon. N dealt with him and I only came in just as he was leaving - he had to take our TV set away, but had brought us another one to keep us company - with a far bigger screen! I wished we had had it the night before, when we had watched the very early James Bond film « Thunderball », which surprisingly neither of us had ever seen before, and which would have benefited from not being squashed into the centre of the screen; James Bond appearing rather short and squat. Since then we keep going into the room just to see what is on and what it looks like in the new larger, non-squashed format, rather as I remember doing when I first had colour TV.
Today, the « Quinze Août » (fifteenth of August) is a national holiday, and as last year, we went to a foire à tout in the streets of Bernay. It was quite small but entertaining and there was not a lot we needed to buy; N got two almost new stamp albums with British stamps from the last few decades and space for a lot more; and apart from another antique jam jar for my collection my only purchase was a teapot.
It is a small white classic French café design with « Thé Lyons » printed on it in red, cost 3 euros, and the woman who sold it to me said it belonged to her mother who adored tea, but you couldn’t keep everything, could you? I said I would remember that when I used it. It certainly looks as though it has had a lot of tea in it, and I am anxious to see what it is like after a turn in the dishwasher.
We also found more Victoria plums on sale and I decided against making another vast quantity of jam, as my hands and nails had only just recovered from halving and stoning the last lot. I bought just one kilo, and will make a plum dessert cake this afternoon and we will probably eat the rest although N is talking of Plum Crumble.
Before leaving Bernay we called in at the Italian delicatessen, where N bought far too much as usual, especially as I had stocked up at L’Aigle market yesterday, but I had to admit the Gorgonzola looked - and tasted - delicious, and there is nothing like real thinly cut Parma ham.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Thursday 2 August 2007
Last week I went to London for a few days, to visit daughter Madeleine who has just moved into a little flat near Clapham Junction. For the first time I went straight from Normandy without staying overnight in Paris; a journey which proved rather fraught, as the train I had carefully researched from Conches to Paris did not exist during school holidays (despite what it said on the SNCF website.)
There then followed a hair-raising few hours during which N raced me to Evreux to see if I could pick up a different train, a woman in the SNCF office tried to alter my Eurostar ticket and then suggested we drive to Mantes-la-Jolie and pick up another train there; another race in the car and a missed train. N decided he ought to go home, so we said goodbye and I waited a half an hour in hot sunshine at a café in Mantes-la-Jolie for the next train to Paris; the SNCF office man at Mantes said my Eurostar ticket was not transferable, but in any case he thought I should just make it if I took the RER Line E between the Gare St Lazare and the Gare du Nord. I hadn’t known about this link; only one stop and it took 20 minutes in all but I arrived at the Gare du Nord 10 minutes after my scheduled Eurostar had left.
I went to the ticket office, as N said, having had many chances to get my story straight by that time and prepared to pay a hefty sum for a completely new ticket, and was amazed when I was just handed a boarding card and told to take the next Eurostar train due to leave in about 45 minutes! Relieved, I phoned N and then Madeleine and boarded soon after, enjoying the - air conditioned! - train journey even more than usual, as it was so hot by that time; and a welcome cup of tea and snack as it had been a very long busy time since lunch.
Fortunately the visit itself was quite uneventful in comparison, although I enjoyed seeing several parts of London I had never visited before. First of these was a tour of parts of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, courtesy of younger daughter Caroline, who has been working there a few months now. We saw sumptuous rooms and courtyards, a sneaky view of the front door of 10 Downing Street, Horse Guards’ Parade and the outside of the Foreign Secretary’s office windows, before crossing Trafalgar Square, and stopping to have tea. Another part of London I didn’t know - apart from a brief acquaintance on the Monopoly board - was the Angel, Islington, where we went that evening for shopping and dinner in a large pub. There was also a French market outside, selling many familiar things like jams, mustards and Brittany biscuits!
Over the next few days Madeleine and I visited Pimlico, where we went to the Tate Gallery and saw a fascinating exhibition of British photographs that I had read about in the London Review of Books, Putney High Street which I had known well as a student in the late 1960’s, (here we had tea and read the Sunday papers) the Northcote Road near Clapham Junction, full of fascinating little shops and market stalls; we took a tram from Wimbledon to an IKEA near Croydon, and we walked the whole length of the South Bank of the Thames, culminating at the Festival Hall. We had started at the other end, having met Caroline again to visit the V & A to look at an exhibition she had helped with, and then gone on to Borough Market - a food, fruit, vegetable and flower market I had been to a couple of times when I lived in Cambridge - where we started our riverside walk by the Globe Theatre. I also managed to have my eyebrows done very well and cheaply at a Thai Beauty Salon in Lavender Hill.
I travelled back to Paris early Monday afternoon and having noted that there was a Left Luggage Office at Waterloo, said goodbye to Madeleine as she set off for work, deposited my bag and had a pleasant morning’s shopping in Oxford Street. This included quite a long time in Marks & Spencer’s underwear department - always a must for ex-pats! - and the purchase of several t-shirts to replace those lost in the Great Washing Machine Disaster. (Purchase of new t-shirts had been going on since I arrived in London.)
The journey back by Eurostar went smoothly and thanks to the newly discovered RER link I was able to get an even earlier train from the Gare Saint-Lazare, so that by the time N arrived to fetch me at Evreux I had been sitting outside the station for some 20 minutes! The weather was warm and sunny, and the difference between the peace of La Neuve-Lyre and the noise and crowds of Clapham Junction quite amazing. N had mowed the lawns that afternoon, and the garden looked a picture. When I asked his news it mostly referred to birds and vegetables - apart from having chatted to a couple of Englishmen in the boulangerie - but he also mentioned that he was still waiting for Monsieur A‘s man to come and mend the chimney, having got up early every morning to open the woodshed door.
The next day I had a very odd phone conversation with Monsieur A who was rather surprised. Apparently the man had come at 7.30 a.m. on Thursday and found everything closed up, came again a little later on Friday, couldn’t make anyone hear, mended the chimney and left, not needing access to verandah or indoors. When N and I went to look at the chimney we agreed it did look rather different, and have since received Monsieur A’s bill and paid it. It is very good not to have the woodshed door open all day! (or to get up early in the morning to open it.) And I have finally cleaned the verandah floor and paintwork of oil, although there are yellow splashes on the rough-cast walls which will need repainting.
Tuesday 7 August 2007
The next few days (apart from Friday) were warm and sunny and we sat and ate in the garden, dealt with flowers and vegetables, and got lots of washing dry. I also caught up with the rest of the housework, and we went shopping to Bernay, where N bought amongst other things, a second huge (and more expensive) vase for gladioli! I thought this rather missed the point of buying the first one so cheaply, but he said that way we could have gladioli in more than one room, which in fact is now the case - red ones in the grande pièce and yellow ones in the salon. And it has to be admitted, they do look good.
At the weekend the weather forecast kept it’s promises for once, and we had a couple of cloudless hot days just like July last year, with temperatures of nearly 30 degrees. I decided it was time for a project I had been thinking about last month when the weather certainly wasn’t up to it - painting the frames of the ground-floor windows along the garden side of the house. These were not included in last year’s painting when the new shutters were installed, as they have roll-down shutters, and N said they could be done another year, but he somehow lost his enthusiasm, and I could see if it was to be done, I would have to do it.
There are four windows - one each for the kitchen and dining room, two for the grande pièce and between them an outside door, with small panes and a window above. I did the first two on Saturday and the latter two on Sunday, leaving the door for the next spell of hot dry weather. I seemed to spend most of the time moving the ladder from inside to outside and sticking and removing masking tape around the panes. At the same time it seemed a good plan to paint the windowsills, once N had got the lid off the paint tin, and we decided it would make sense to do all the windowsills in the house while I was at it. Some at the front had been included in the painting of the façade, and then had got all dirty again when the roof was power-washed and cleaned of moss. I had painted windowsills at Ainsworth Street and found it very satisfying and effective. On Saturday afternoon at the front of the house however, it was so hot that the paint was almost drying as it came out of the tin, and I found myself hurrying up in order to get back in the shade again. Out of interest I placed the thermometer by the front door; when I checked later it read almost 40 degrees! I also repainted the long-handled white basket I had bought a few weeks ago; a great success and it now looks worth far more than the euro I paid for it. When I walk round the garden with cut flowers in it N says I could almost be in an operetta; I think I look more like something out of a Noel Coward play.
On Sunday morning we went to a bric-à-brac fair at Ambenay, a little village not far away which we pass through on the way to Rugles. N thought as it was such a small village it wouldn’t be up to much, but it was surprisingly interesting, and everyone good- natured and friendly because of the fine weather. N bought some stamps, a blue vase he thought might be Dutch but later found was Italian (and chipped) and yet another set of green-stemmed glasses from Alsace, admittedly more delicate and elegant than the first set. It’s just a pity white Alsatian wine disagrees with him! I bought four very small white porcelain plates, two blue and white eggcups, a small carafe and - bargain of the day - a shallow square basket with wooden handles for 0.50 euros! Ideal for storing or transporting vegetables from garden to kitchen. We also bought a brioche for tea, from a boulangerie stall, unusual for these events. It was nice to see the back roads of Ambenay, and we stood for some time admiring an elegantly tidy vegetable garden, N enjoying seeing how someone else’s garden grew, and even picking up a few tips.
In the afternoon I was late in getting back to my painting, as at N’s suggestion we watched a long procession of Breton music, dance and costume on television. Well, it was mostly Breton and was coming live from Brittany, but there were several guest Celtic ensembles and bands from Ireland, Scotland, Spain and even the Lebanon! It gave an idea of what there was to see on a return visit to Brittany in the future. Yesterday morning I tided up after all the painting, finally closed all the windows (fortunately we were able to leave them open with the shutters closed overnight) moved back the furniture in the grande pièce, put the ladder away and replaced all the herb pots and window boxes on the newly-painted windowsills.
Wednesday 8 August 2007
N has been busy planning for the future; he has organised a week in November for us in Vienna, somewhere we have both wanted to visit for a long time; there is also the possibility of booking various concerts and activities in advance, which we will consider when we have time, but the flights and hotel are booked. He has also arranged for us to visit his sister and her husband (who visited us here in Normandy in April) in Plymouth next October, and booked crossings from Caen to Portsmouth.
Before I set off for London, I had just reached the part in the book of Mozart’s letters where he went to work in Vienna, so must return to those. I had managed (courtesy of the Amazon website) to buy a paperback copy of Up the Junction and DVD of The Lavender Hill Mob to take as housewarming presents to Madeleine, and had left off reading Mozart to read Up the Junction - rather a clash of styles - before I left. Mozart’s letters were too heavy to take to London on the train, so I finally began Volume One of Les Thibault - a family saga written and set in Paris during and just before WW1, which I had read some years ago courtesy of Cambridge library, and which I found again a few months ago in eight ancient paperback volumes (one euro per volume) on a second-hand book stall in Saint-Denis market. I am about to start Volume Three, and it is even better than I remembered. It is very quick to read: the pages are thick, the print large and the margins wide.
We have been watching some interesting things on television too; on Monday evening the sixties film « Blow-up », very slow but beautiful to look at, and last night a fascinating French-made documentary about the life of Queen Marie- Antoinette.
And a little piece of good news from my ironing basket - when I got round to ironing the new jacket which had suffered so in the Great Washing Machine Disaster, I decided it was still just about wearable; it doesn’t go with as many things as it did when it was off-white, and is rather a patchy pale golden yellow, but is still just as comfortable.
Last week I went to London for a few days, to visit daughter Madeleine who has just moved into a little flat near Clapham Junction. For the first time I went straight from Normandy without staying overnight in Paris; a journey which proved rather fraught, as the train I had carefully researched from Conches to Paris did not exist during school holidays (despite what it said on the SNCF website.)
There then followed a hair-raising few hours during which N raced me to Evreux to see if I could pick up a different train, a woman in the SNCF office tried to alter my Eurostar ticket and then suggested we drive to Mantes-la-Jolie and pick up another train there; another race in the car and a missed train. N decided he ought to go home, so we said goodbye and I waited a half an hour in hot sunshine at a café in Mantes-la-Jolie for the next train to Paris; the SNCF office man at Mantes said my Eurostar ticket was not transferable, but in any case he thought I should just make it if I took the RER Line E between the Gare St Lazare and the Gare du Nord. I hadn’t known about this link; only one stop and it took 20 minutes in all but I arrived at the Gare du Nord 10 minutes after my scheduled Eurostar had left.
I went to the ticket office, as N said, having had many chances to get my story straight by that time and prepared to pay a hefty sum for a completely new ticket, and was amazed when I was just handed a boarding card and told to take the next Eurostar train due to leave in about 45 minutes! Relieved, I phoned N and then Madeleine and boarded soon after, enjoying the - air conditioned! - train journey even more than usual, as it was so hot by that time; and a welcome cup of tea and snack as it had been a very long busy time since lunch.
Fortunately the visit itself was quite uneventful in comparison, although I enjoyed seeing several parts of London I had never visited before. First of these was a tour of parts of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, courtesy of younger daughter Caroline, who has been working there a few months now. We saw sumptuous rooms and courtyards, a sneaky view of the front door of 10 Downing Street, Horse Guards’ Parade and the outside of the Foreign Secretary’s office windows, before crossing Trafalgar Square, and stopping to have tea. Another part of London I didn’t know - apart from a brief acquaintance on the Monopoly board - was the Angel, Islington, where we went that evening for shopping and dinner in a large pub. There was also a French market outside, selling many familiar things like jams, mustards and Brittany biscuits!
Over the next few days Madeleine and I visited Pimlico, where we went to the Tate Gallery and saw a fascinating exhibition of British photographs that I had read about in the London Review of Books, Putney High Street which I had known well as a student in the late 1960’s, (here we had tea and read the Sunday papers) the Northcote Road near Clapham Junction, full of fascinating little shops and market stalls; we took a tram from Wimbledon to an IKEA near Croydon, and we walked the whole length of the South Bank of the Thames, culminating at the Festival Hall. We had started at the other end, having met Caroline again to visit the V & A to look at an exhibition she had helped with, and then gone on to Borough Market - a food, fruit, vegetable and flower market I had been to a couple of times when I lived in Cambridge - where we started our riverside walk by the Globe Theatre. I also managed to have my eyebrows done very well and cheaply at a Thai Beauty Salon in Lavender Hill.
I travelled back to Paris early Monday afternoon and having noted that there was a Left Luggage Office at Waterloo, said goodbye to Madeleine as she set off for work, deposited my bag and had a pleasant morning’s shopping in Oxford Street. This included quite a long time in Marks & Spencer’s underwear department - always a must for ex-pats! - and the purchase of several t-shirts to replace those lost in the Great Washing Machine Disaster. (Purchase of new t-shirts had been going on since I arrived in London.)
The journey back by Eurostar went smoothly and thanks to the newly discovered RER link I was able to get an even earlier train from the Gare Saint-Lazare, so that by the time N arrived to fetch me at Evreux I had been sitting outside the station for some 20 minutes! The weather was warm and sunny, and the difference between the peace of La Neuve-Lyre and the noise and crowds of Clapham Junction quite amazing. N had mowed the lawns that afternoon, and the garden looked a picture. When I asked his news it mostly referred to birds and vegetables - apart from having chatted to a couple of Englishmen in the boulangerie - but he also mentioned that he was still waiting for Monsieur A‘s man to come and mend the chimney, having got up early every morning to open the woodshed door.
The next day I had a very odd phone conversation with Monsieur A who was rather surprised. Apparently the man had come at 7.30 a.m. on Thursday and found everything closed up, came again a little later on Friday, couldn’t make anyone hear, mended the chimney and left, not needing access to verandah or indoors. When N and I went to look at the chimney we agreed it did look rather different, and have since received Monsieur A’s bill and paid it. It is very good not to have the woodshed door open all day! (or to get up early in the morning to open it.) And I have finally cleaned the verandah floor and paintwork of oil, although there are yellow splashes on the rough-cast walls which will need repainting.
Tuesday 7 August 2007
The next few days (apart from Friday) were warm and sunny and we sat and ate in the garden, dealt with flowers and vegetables, and got lots of washing dry. I also caught up with the rest of the housework, and we went shopping to Bernay, where N bought amongst other things, a second huge (and more expensive) vase for gladioli! I thought this rather missed the point of buying the first one so cheaply, but he said that way we could have gladioli in more than one room, which in fact is now the case - red ones in the grande pièce and yellow ones in the salon. And it has to be admitted, they do look good.
At the weekend the weather forecast kept it’s promises for once, and we had a couple of cloudless hot days just like July last year, with temperatures of nearly 30 degrees. I decided it was time for a project I had been thinking about last month when the weather certainly wasn’t up to it - painting the frames of the ground-floor windows along the garden side of the house. These were not included in last year’s painting when the new shutters were installed, as they have roll-down shutters, and N said they could be done another year, but he somehow lost his enthusiasm, and I could see if it was to be done, I would have to do it.
There are four windows - one each for the kitchen and dining room, two for the grande pièce and between them an outside door, with small panes and a window above. I did the first two on Saturday and the latter two on Sunday, leaving the door for the next spell of hot dry weather. I seemed to spend most of the time moving the ladder from inside to outside and sticking and removing masking tape around the panes. At the same time it seemed a good plan to paint the windowsills, once N had got the lid off the paint tin, and we decided it would make sense to do all the windowsills in the house while I was at it. Some at the front had been included in the painting of the façade, and then had got all dirty again when the roof was power-washed and cleaned of moss. I had painted windowsills at Ainsworth Street and found it very satisfying and effective. On Saturday afternoon at the front of the house however, it was so hot that the paint was almost drying as it came out of the tin, and I found myself hurrying up in order to get back in the shade again. Out of interest I placed the thermometer by the front door; when I checked later it read almost 40 degrees! I also repainted the long-handled white basket I had bought a few weeks ago; a great success and it now looks worth far more than the euro I paid for it. When I walk round the garden with cut flowers in it N says I could almost be in an operetta; I think I look more like something out of a Noel Coward play.
On Sunday morning we went to a bric-à-brac fair at Ambenay, a little village not far away which we pass through on the way to Rugles. N thought as it was such a small village it wouldn’t be up to much, but it was surprisingly interesting, and everyone good- natured and friendly because of the fine weather. N bought some stamps, a blue vase he thought might be Dutch but later found was Italian (and chipped) and yet another set of green-stemmed glasses from Alsace, admittedly more delicate and elegant than the first set. It’s just a pity white Alsatian wine disagrees with him! I bought four very small white porcelain plates, two blue and white eggcups, a small carafe and - bargain of the day - a shallow square basket with wooden handles for 0.50 euros! Ideal for storing or transporting vegetables from garden to kitchen. We also bought a brioche for tea, from a boulangerie stall, unusual for these events. It was nice to see the back roads of Ambenay, and we stood for some time admiring an elegantly tidy vegetable garden, N enjoying seeing how someone else’s garden grew, and even picking up a few tips.
In the afternoon I was late in getting back to my painting, as at N’s suggestion we watched a long procession of Breton music, dance and costume on television. Well, it was mostly Breton and was coming live from Brittany, but there were several guest Celtic ensembles and bands from Ireland, Scotland, Spain and even the Lebanon! It gave an idea of what there was to see on a return visit to Brittany in the future. Yesterday morning I tided up after all the painting, finally closed all the windows (fortunately we were able to leave them open with the shutters closed overnight) moved back the furniture in the grande pièce, put the ladder away and replaced all the herb pots and window boxes on the newly-painted windowsills.
Wednesday 8 August 2007
N has been busy planning for the future; he has organised a week in November for us in Vienna, somewhere we have both wanted to visit for a long time; there is also the possibility of booking various concerts and activities in advance, which we will consider when we have time, but the flights and hotel are booked. He has also arranged for us to visit his sister and her husband (who visited us here in Normandy in April) in Plymouth next October, and booked crossings from Caen to Portsmouth.
Before I set off for London, I had just reached the part in the book of Mozart’s letters where he went to work in Vienna, so must return to those. I had managed (courtesy of the Amazon website) to buy a paperback copy of Up the Junction and DVD of The Lavender Hill Mob to take as housewarming presents to Madeleine, and had left off reading Mozart to read Up the Junction - rather a clash of styles - before I left. Mozart’s letters were too heavy to take to London on the train, so I finally began Volume One of Les Thibault - a family saga written and set in Paris during and just before WW1, which I had read some years ago courtesy of Cambridge library, and which I found again a few months ago in eight ancient paperback volumes (one euro per volume) on a second-hand book stall in Saint-Denis market. I am about to start Volume Three, and it is even better than I remembered. It is very quick to read: the pages are thick, the print large and the margins wide.
We have been watching some interesting things on television too; on Monday evening the sixties film « Blow-up », very slow but beautiful to look at, and last night a fascinating French-made documentary about the life of Queen Marie- Antoinette.
And a little piece of good news from my ironing basket - when I got round to ironing the new jacket which had suffered so in the Great Washing Machine Disaster, I decided it was still just about wearable; it doesn’t go with as many things as it did when it was off-white, and is rather a patchy pale golden yellow, but is still just as comfortable.
