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.
# posted by Chez Katherine @ 7:11 AM 
