Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Thursday 22 November 2007
After arriving back from Vienna on the Monday evening we only stayed in Saint-Denis until Wednesday, trying to warm up the apartment and having trouble working out what day it was. I did a little washing and took my coat and N’s suit to the dry cleaner’s and on Tuesday evening we watched the second episode of a new French TV adaptation of War and Peace, having missed the first part as we were away. We have since seen the third episode here in Normandy and it gets better and better; ever since last Tuesday I keep wondering how they’re all getting on at the Battle of Borodino.
We eventually left Saint-Denis later than planned; N went to fetch the car from the municipal car park and I came out about 20 minutes later to open the big street doors, and waited there for the best part of an hour! All sorts of possibilities were running though my head but when he and the car finally turned up, it transpired that the battery had run flat during the ten days or so in the car park and it had taken him some time to find some to help.
While I was standing out there the gardienne handed me an envelope containing the bill for the broken window back in September; we had expected to find this in the post box when we arrived in Saint-Denis the week before - when we didn’t, N wrote to the Portuguese handyman asking him to post it to LNL; I suspect that the gardienne had had it all the time. The bill was rather larger than we expected, and as I had said I would pay it, was glad it hadn’t come before I bought my new jackets! The gardienne also said we could sign and take the famous door entry « badges », which I did; if I hadn’t been hanging around outside for an hour would we ever have had the bill and the badges??
Once back at LNL it took even longer to warm up the house than at Saint-Denis, as our arrival coincided with a sharp drop in temperature; we had thought Vienna was a lot colder than Paris but now it was just as cold in Normandy! Between zero and three degrees. We kept closing internal doors, shut the bedroom shutters at night, discussed having thicker «winter» curtains at the bedroom windows, and set the heating to come on earlier in the morning and switch off later at night. However, it’s much milder again now, and as the weather forecaster said, winter is over for the moment and we’re back to autumn, and we have turned down the heating by a few degrees.
But as is often the case when we’re away for a week or two, the seasons have rolled around a little; Halloween and the All Saints Day chrysanthemums are over; there is a wreath on the War Memorial left over from Armistice Day, and even the Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived in the village shop! And this week the Christmas lights have been put up in the village streets. Amazingly, there were four roses in bloom in the garden, which I cut and brought indoors; I think they must be the last, but the Christmas roses are out!
We have had one trip into Bernay so far, for supermarket shopping and to book the car in for its one-year service at the Renault garage there, as the garage in Saint-Denis where it was bought has just closed down. We also called in at Vive le Jardin! and admired the Christmas displays and had few words with the cat; I bought a straw frame and pins to make a door wreath like last year, and N optimistically bought a nectarine tree and some more currant bushes, to plant in the potager as those under the cherry tree had not been very happy or productive. This was on one of the coldest days, so the new tree and bushes had to wait in the shelter of the garage until yesterday when it was mild enough to plant them.
Whether due to standing outside in the cold for an hour, or perhaps to some Viennese germs, or to leaving all my vitamins behind in Normandy, I developed a cold towards the end of last week, and yesterday woke up with a breathless cough. This time when N suggested going to see the doctor I agreed, and went along in time for the afternoon surgery. It was only the second time I had ever been, so handed him the form to sign and stamp, agreeing to be my GP, which I then sent back to the office in Bernay. (All this paperwork had taken place over a year ago, so I had to refresh my memory!) The doctor was nicer than I remembered from last time, and made no mention of blood tests or anything else extra - made various « English » jokes; about the weather and when I said no, I was not taking any medication, said « Except tea! » He took my blood pressure which was fine and spent a long time listening to my back and chest while I breathed heavily, and then gave me my first French prescription. So I went straight along to the pharmacie and used my Carte Vitale for the first time. (And unlike Boots, they didn’t say come back in 20 minutes, but went and got it straight away.) I have three different kinds of médicaments to dissolve in water; none of them taste very nice. It’s a good job we have a large collection of odd small glasses as I take them three times a day. I do feel slightly better, though.
On Monday we had a delivery of frozen fish, from a frozen food company who had got in touch about a month ago. It seemed a good idea, as we can only get it when we go to a supermarket or to L‘Aigle market, and I was used to having individually wrapped pieces of fish in the freezer when I lived in Cambridge. There is a catalogue with lots of other products, a bit like those at Picard, the freezer company just round the corner in Saint-Denis.
Friday 23 November 2007
Since coming back we have been keeping abreast of the transport and other strikes going on in Paris and on all the main train lines and being very glad that we are here and not needing Paris transport for the moment. We are also hoping that things will still be running smoothly when our Paris visitors arrive next month.
I remembered enjoying a Carol Service at the American Cathedral in Paris last December, and that the Cathedral had a very good website, so decided to check the date of this year’s service; as I suspected it takes place just before Christmas when we shall be back here in Normandy. While looking at their calendar however, amongst various things which didn’t interest me at all - like Sung Eucharist and Alcoholics Anonymous - my eye was caught by a Messiah Sing-Along! This sounded much more entertaining and is when we are in Paris, on a Sunday afternoon. Not a lot of singing, mainly just joining in the choruses, but more than I’ve had for a long time and I do love the music.
I have now finished reading the biography of Sisi, Empress of Austria, and have been pleased at all the Austrian and European history I have learned along the way. It was rather depressing towards the end just before her death, when she had become so tired and old and ill and slightly mad, and had lost all her beauty, and was about the age I am now! I’m afraid Kafka’s Die Verwandlung never did get finished and is not likely to be for the moment; I am currently catching up with two back editions of The London Review of Books before starting on the final volume of Les Thibault, where WW1 is just about to start. N is reading poems by Robert Burns.
As always, we have been thinking about trips for the future. N has booked Boulogne/Dover ferries at the beginning of February for a trip to Ipswich to visit my family, and had been talking about another trip for March, possibly Italy, when one morning he handed me a printed e-mail to read and said « I’ve been summoned to Switzerland. » He has not been to Switzerland to play in the string quartet weeks at all this year; his friends Simone and Jean have been, but he began to wonder whether or not he could still play well enough, and recently has done hardly any playing or practising at all, saying there was nothing to practise for! So when the message came saying he was needed to take part in a Brahms quartet at the end of March, I said it must be Fate.
He then asked if I would like to go too this time, having always said although that the scenery, the flowers, the mountains and the wooden chalets are beautiful, there is absolutely nothing at all for a « hanger-on » to do. I said yes, I would like to go and will look on it as a sort of Enforced Reading Week. It will also mean learning some more German, I’m afraid, if only to speak at meal times. (N said it was a pity I couldn’t enrol in a yodelling class or a cuckoo clock-making course.....)
We were just getting used to this idea, and N had embarked on an intensified programme of several hours’ viola practise a day, when yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from the woman I’d contacted some months ago about feeding cats in Tuscany this winter - the people she had lined up were looking doubtful and were we still available???? We weren’t really, but we consulted diaries and sucked pencils and discussed it at length, and I sent a message back saying we could really only offer the second half of February if she was really pushed, and she thanked us for replying quickly and said she had other people on her back-up list she would try first. N thought it was important to stay on her back-up list for the future.
This morning we rang Monsieur B our « TV engineer » to see whether we could fetch our (hopefully) repaired hoover and radio. He said he had been able to repair the hoover, so we planned to fetch that and my framed sampler from the shop in L’Aigle in the same trip. Unfortunately the car wouldn’t start again, so N went to see the people at the garage over the road (the first time we have ever needed them) while I filled in time by going to the cash machine, getting some eggs from the traiteur and posting the letters. By the time I got back, the engine was going; N said they had been very friendly and helpful but he hadn’t any money to pay them - we stopped at the garage on our way, they charged 5 euros!
This meant that we needed to stop at the Renault garage in L’Aigle; we collected the hoover first, (the radio was too old to repair) and then went into L’Aigle to the garage and I walked across town to collect the sampler with which I am really pleased. I have hung it on the kitchen wall, where it looks very good. Anyway, when I got back to the garage they were talking about replacing the battery - fortunately still under guarantee - as apparently the car has so many computerized features that it uses a lot of battery even when it isn’t going anywhere, particularly if not driven very often, as is sometimes our case. All this took half and hour or more, so by the time we eventually got home it was lunchtime, and the end of a very eventful morning. While passing Monsieur P’s turning on the way home, we discussed whether or not to let him know we were going away next week, as we hadn’t heard from him about the new verandah door and outhouse window frame. But happily he called in this afternoon and can come and fit them on Tuesday morning, the day before we leave on Wednesday. He had cycled all the way and looked very cold and pinched, the way I used to feel when cycling in this kind of weather. More bills, says N, but the new door will make such a difference, not only to the verandah but to the whole of the back of the house, especially when one arrives via the garage. I am hoping we will have lots of visitors next spring and summer; this year there were not many visitors or sunshine after the brilliant beginning in April, so it’s nice on these grey damp November days to think there might be lots of people here in the garden with us next summer.
Monday 26 November 2007
A nice quiet ordinary weekend; we lit the fire yesterday and finished reading The Wind in the Willows after roast chicken for lunch and baked apples stuffed with mincemeat. In fact the two weeks we have had here since returning from Paris and Vienna have been nicely quiet and dull; just as well as we are going back to Paris soon for the first two of three lots of December visitors. This morning I did my exercise DVD for the first time in a long while - first we were away and then I was too full of a cough and cold, but am getting better fast, thanks to the exercises and to colouring my hair, I feel almost human again!
Tuesday 27 November 2007
We saw two excellent television programmes yesterday. The first, in between tea and dinner on Mezzo (the Classical Music channel) was a documentary about Mahler, narrated by Leonard Bernstein in English, and was an old BBC programme. It was fascinating for anyone who had just read Mahler’s life and just visited Vienna! The second programme, in the evening on the History Channel, was about Archimedes; mainly concerning how his ideas were written down in the tenth century on paper later used for a prayer book, and how this manuscript turned up at auction in London, after having been bought in Turkey in about 1910 and lain in a drawer in Paris for several decades. A team in America are now trying to decipher it.
This morning we got up very early in the dark and Monsieur P’s man arrived at about 8.35. He finished in the early afternoon, and as expected the new door looks wonderful - he put in a new door frame too, and it all fits remarkably well. It came with a new lock and key - we had hoped to keep the old lock, and not need new keys - but we can see that this looks much better. It is already much warmer and less draughty in the verandah. The new little window frame in the second outhouse took very little time, and that is a great improvement too. So far Monsieur P has not been for his bill - he is usually very prompt and knows we are going away tomorrow, so we expect him any time now.
While this was going on this morning I went to the hairdressers, and amongst other things heard how they had both cooked the parsnip we had given them last time; a little like Ready, Steady, Cook, I think they must have shared it. They said it had an interesting taste; I wonder if that means they liked it! While I was sitting there, a lorry drove into the village square carrying two huge Christmas trees, ready to be put either side of the church door.
Afterwards I went to the Post Office to make sure I got all the stamps ready for my Christmas cards here, to avoid having to queue for them in Paris, and also to ask Estelle the postmistress to look after all our post while we are away, to save it getting damp in the box outside. She noted it and said we must tell Nicolas the postman; I said we’d already told him, so now everyone knew! Once again, I wonder how we would have managed in a village without a Post Office. Other village news: The traiteur has a notice in the window saying they have just won a prize for their boudin blanc (white sausage) and I am now on Bonjour terms with the man at the garage.
After arriving back from Vienna on the Monday evening we only stayed in Saint-Denis until Wednesday, trying to warm up the apartment and having trouble working out what day it was. I did a little washing and took my coat and N’s suit to the dry cleaner’s and on Tuesday evening we watched the second episode of a new French TV adaptation of War and Peace, having missed the first part as we were away. We have since seen the third episode here in Normandy and it gets better and better; ever since last Tuesday I keep wondering how they’re all getting on at the Battle of Borodino.
We eventually left Saint-Denis later than planned; N went to fetch the car from the municipal car park and I came out about 20 minutes later to open the big street doors, and waited there for the best part of an hour! All sorts of possibilities were running though my head but when he and the car finally turned up, it transpired that the battery had run flat during the ten days or so in the car park and it had taken him some time to find some to help.
While I was standing out there the gardienne handed me an envelope containing the bill for the broken window back in September; we had expected to find this in the post box when we arrived in Saint-Denis the week before - when we didn’t, N wrote to the Portuguese handyman asking him to post it to LNL; I suspect that the gardienne had had it all the time. The bill was rather larger than we expected, and as I had said I would pay it, was glad it hadn’t come before I bought my new jackets! The gardienne also said we could sign and take the famous door entry « badges », which I did; if I hadn’t been hanging around outside for an hour would we ever have had the bill and the badges??
Once back at LNL it took even longer to warm up the house than at Saint-Denis, as our arrival coincided with a sharp drop in temperature; we had thought Vienna was a lot colder than Paris but now it was just as cold in Normandy! Between zero and three degrees. We kept closing internal doors, shut the bedroom shutters at night, discussed having thicker «winter» curtains at the bedroom windows, and set the heating to come on earlier in the morning and switch off later at night. However, it’s much milder again now, and as the weather forecaster said, winter is over for the moment and we’re back to autumn, and we have turned down the heating by a few degrees.
But as is often the case when we’re away for a week or two, the seasons have rolled around a little; Halloween and the All Saints Day chrysanthemums are over; there is a wreath on the War Memorial left over from Armistice Day, and even the Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived in the village shop! And this week the Christmas lights have been put up in the village streets. Amazingly, there were four roses in bloom in the garden, which I cut and brought indoors; I think they must be the last, but the Christmas roses are out!
We have had one trip into Bernay so far, for supermarket shopping and to book the car in for its one-year service at the Renault garage there, as the garage in Saint-Denis where it was bought has just closed down. We also called in at Vive le Jardin! and admired the Christmas displays and had few words with the cat; I bought a straw frame and pins to make a door wreath like last year, and N optimistically bought a nectarine tree and some more currant bushes, to plant in the potager as those under the cherry tree had not been very happy or productive. This was on one of the coldest days, so the new tree and bushes had to wait in the shelter of the garage until yesterday when it was mild enough to plant them.
Whether due to standing outside in the cold for an hour, or perhaps to some Viennese germs, or to leaving all my vitamins behind in Normandy, I developed a cold towards the end of last week, and yesterday woke up with a breathless cough. This time when N suggested going to see the doctor I agreed, and went along in time for the afternoon surgery. It was only the second time I had ever been, so handed him the form to sign and stamp, agreeing to be my GP, which I then sent back to the office in Bernay. (All this paperwork had taken place over a year ago, so I had to refresh my memory!) The doctor was nicer than I remembered from last time, and made no mention of blood tests or anything else extra - made various « English » jokes; about the weather and when I said no, I was not taking any medication, said « Except tea! » He took my blood pressure which was fine and spent a long time listening to my back and chest while I breathed heavily, and then gave me my first French prescription. So I went straight along to the pharmacie and used my Carte Vitale for the first time. (And unlike Boots, they didn’t say come back in 20 minutes, but went and got it straight away.) I have three different kinds of médicaments to dissolve in water; none of them taste very nice. It’s a good job we have a large collection of odd small glasses as I take them three times a day. I do feel slightly better, though.
On Monday we had a delivery of frozen fish, from a frozen food company who had got in touch about a month ago. It seemed a good idea, as we can only get it when we go to a supermarket or to L‘Aigle market, and I was used to having individually wrapped pieces of fish in the freezer when I lived in Cambridge. There is a catalogue with lots of other products, a bit like those at Picard, the freezer company just round the corner in Saint-Denis.
Friday 23 November 2007
Since coming back we have been keeping abreast of the transport and other strikes going on in Paris and on all the main train lines and being very glad that we are here and not needing Paris transport for the moment. We are also hoping that things will still be running smoothly when our Paris visitors arrive next month.
I remembered enjoying a Carol Service at the American Cathedral in Paris last December, and that the Cathedral had a very good website, so decided to check the date of this year’s service; as I suspected it takes place just before Christmas when we shall be back here in Normandy. While looking at their calendar however, amongst various things which didn’t interest me at all - like Sung Eucharist and Alcoholics Anonymous - my eye was caught by a Messiah Sing-Along! This sounded much more entertaining and is when we are in Paris, on a Sunday afternoon. Not a lot of singing, mainly just joining in the choruses, but more than I’ve had for a long time and I do love the music.
I have now finished reading the biography of Sisi, Empress of Austria, and have been pleased at all the Austrian and European history I have learned along the way. It was rather depressing towards the end just before her death, when she had become so tired and old and ill and slightly mad, and had lost all her beauty, and was about the age I am now! I’m afraid Kafka’s Die Verwandlung never did get finished and is not likely to be for the moment; I am currently catching up with two back editions of The London Review of Books before starting on the final volume of Les Thibault, where WW1 is just about to start. N is reading poems by Robert Burns.
As always, we have been thinking about trips for the future. N has booked Boulogne/Dover ferries at the beginning of February for a trip to Ipswich to visit my family, and had been talking about another trip for March, possibly Italy, when one morning he handed me a printed e-mail to read and said « I’ve been summoned to Switzerland. » He has not been to Switzerland to play in the string quartet weeks at all this year; his friends Simone and Jean have been, but he began to wonder whether or not he could still play well enough, and recently has done hardly any playing or practising at all, saying there was nothing to practise for! So when the message came saying he was needed to take part in a Brahms quartet at the end of March, I said it must be Fate.
He then asked if I would like to go too this time, having always said although that the scenery, the flowers, the mountains and the wooden chalets are beautiful, there is absolutely nothing at all for a « hanger-on » to do. I said yes, I would like to go and will look on it as a sort of Enforced Reading Week. It will also mean learning some more German, I’m afraid, if only to speak at meal times. (N said it was a pity I couldn’t enrol in a yodelling class or a cuckoo clock-making course.....)
We were just getting used to this idea, and N had embarked on an intensified programme of several hours’ viola practise a day, when yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from the woman I’d contacted some months ago about feeding cats in Tuscany this winter - the people she had lined up were looking doubtful and were we still available???? We weren’t really, but we consulted diaries and sucked pencils and discussed it at length, and I sent a message back saying we could really only offer the second half of February if she was really pushed, and she thanked us for replying quickly and said she had other people on her back-up list she would try first. N thought it was important to stay on her back-up list for the future.
This morning we rang Monsieur B our « TV engineer » to see whether we could fetch our (hopefully) repaired hoover and radio. He said he had been able to repair the hoover, so we planned to fetch that and my framed sampler from the shop in L’Aigle in the same trip. Unfortunately the car wouldn’t start again, so N went to see the people at the garage over the road (the first time we have ever needed them) while I filled in time by going to the cash machine, getting some eggs from the traiteur and posting the letters. By the time I got back, the engine was going; N said they had been very friendly and helpful but he hadn’t any money to pay them - we stopped at the garage on our way, they charged 5 euros!
This meant that we needed to stop at the Renault garage in L’Aigle; we collected the hoover first, (the radio was too old to repair) and then went into L’Aigle to the garage and I walked across town to collect the sampler with which I am really pleased. I have hung it on the kitchen wall, where it looks very good. Anyway, when I got back to the garage they were talking about replacing the battery - fortunately still under guarantee - as apparently the car has so many computerized features that it uses a lot of battery even when it isn’t going anywhere, particularly if not driven very often, as is sometimes our case. All this took half and hour or more, so by the time we eventually got home it was lunchtime, and the end of a very eventful morning. While passing Monsieur P’s turning on the way home, we discussed whether or not to let him know we were going away next week, as we hadn’t heard from him about the new verandah door and outhouse window frame. But happily he called in this afternoon and can come and fit them on Tuesday morning, the day before we leave on Wednesday. He had cycled all the way and looked very cold and pinched, the way I used to feel when cycling in this kind of weather. More bills, says N, but the new door will make such a difference, not only to the verandah but to the whole of the back of the house, especially when one arrives via the garage. I am hoping we will have lots of visitors next spring and summer; this year there were not many visitors or sunshine after the brilliant beginning in April, so it’s nice on these grey damp November days to think there might be lots of people here in the garden with us next summer.
Monday 26 November 2007
A nice quiet ordinary weekend; we lit the fire yesterday and finished reading The Wind in the Willows after roast chicken for lunch and baked apples stuffed with mincemeat. In fact the two weeks we have had here since returning from Paris and Vienna have been nicely quiet and dull; just as well as we are going back to Paris soon for the first two of three lots of December visitors. This morning I did my exercise DVD for the first time in a long while - first we were away and then I was too full of a cough and cold, but am getting better fast, thanks to the exercises and to colouring my hair, I feel almost human again!
Tuesday 27 November 2007
We saw two excellent television programmes yesterday. The first, in between tea and dinner on Mezzo (the Classical Music channel) was a documentary about Mahler, narrated by Leonard Bernstein in English, and was an old BBC programme. It was fascinating for anyone who had just read Mahler’s life and just visited Vienna! The second programme, in the evening on the History Channel, was about Archimedes; mainly concerning how his ideas were written down in the tenth century on paper later used for a prayer book, and how this manuscript turned up at auction in London, after having been bought in Turkey in about 1910 and lain in a drawer in Paris for several decades. A team in America are now trying to decipher it.
This morning we got up very early in the dark and Monsieur P’s man arrived at about 8.35. He finished in the early afternoon, and as expected the new door looks wonderful - he put in a new door frame too, and it all fits remarkably well. It came with a new lock and key - we had hoped to keep the old lock, and not need new keys - but we can see that this looks much better. It is already much warmer and less draughty in the verandah. The new little window frame in the second outhouse took very little time, and that is a great improvement too. So far Monsieur P has not been for his bill - he is usually very prompt and knows we are going away tomorrow, so we expect him any time now.
While this was going on this morning I went to the hairdressers, and amongst other things heard how they had both cooked the parsnip we had given them last time; a little like Ready, Steady, Cook, I think they must have shared it. They said it had an interesting taste; I wonder if that means they liked it! While I was sitting there, a lorry drove into the village square carrying two huge Christmas trees, ready to be put either side of the church door.
Afterwards I went to the Post Office to make sure I got all the stamps ready for my Christmas cards here, to avoid having to queue for them in Paris, and also to ask Estelle the postmistress to look after all our post while we are away, to save it getting damp in the box outside. She noted it and said we must tell Nicolas the postman; I said we’d already told him, so now everyone knew! Once again, I wonder how we would have managed in a village without a Post Office. Other village news: The traiteur has a notice in the window saying they have just won a prize for their boudin blanc (white sausage) and I am now on Bonjour terms with the man at the garage.
# posted by Chez Katherine @ 8:50 AM 
