And still we wait! In spite of the week seeming to have
flown by, all it really means is yet another week without our permits to stay
here. Both of us are getting quite despondent about the whole matter as there
seems to be no-one that we can approach to find out why everything is taking so
long, or whether anyone is doing anything at all. The house purchase is in
limbo as it can only go ahead when we have permission to stay and the exciting
part like going to second-hand sales and car boot sales to see what ‘treasures’
we can pick up to put into the house has had to be put on hold. What a good
thing we have delayed our return date to the 28th June.
I say that the week has flown past but we have done
practically nothing all week. We roused ourselves out of our depression on
Wednesday to work on the car which was a much needed job. Ever since the mice
got into the engine compartment of the car before last year’s trip to France,
the three speed interior fan has had only one speed – flat out. So first of all
we researched the matter via the Internet and found that most people advised
buying a new fan motor. Not good news at all for my Mr Fix-it! More bad news
was that he would have to remove the whole dashboard of the car to get to said
motor. The online car parts sites were even worse. They informed us that a new
motor would set us back about 300 Euros. Too much! Then we discovered a
wonderful person (on line) who pooh-poohed all the above and gave a completely
different diagnosis for the problem, which, if it was correct, could be
relatively easily be fixed.
No sooner said than done! In minutes we had the car in the
driveway and parts strewn around to enable us to get to the part we needed to
remove. It took a while and some contortions but eventually it was out. The
whole job was made a lot more difficult because the car was originally designed
for left-hand drive and our car is right-hand drive and as the fan motor sits
more or less above the steering column, one needed double jointed hands and
wrists to get it out and to replace it. After some time it finally got done and
the repair worked, so we could put it all together again and now we have a
three-speed fan again, just in time for summer! I am glad that we were alone on
the day as I can’t imagine what we must have looked like when we were trying to
extricate the thing. Neels was half kneeling on the ground next to the car with
his upper body in the driver’s side foot well, twisted around so that he could
see up into the works behind the steering wheel, while I was lying on the
passenger seat on my back with my head also in the driver’s side foot well,
shining a torch vaguely in the direction of where he wanted light. Thank
heavens no-one was around with a camera!
Thursday started off misty but, as so often is the case,
brightened up and turned into a brilliant afternoon. Now all fired with
enthusiasm for ‘doing things on the car’, we went to hunt down a second-hand
car parts shop in one of the industrial areas of Villefranche. (We get to some
really exciting places, don’t we?!) After a while there, without buying
anything in the end, and as we were already on the road to somewhere called
Monteils, we thought we may as well enjoy the good sunshine and carry on.
We didn’t think the village of Monteils was anything special
but they have a most lovely park with a river running through it which I
imagine would be packed with people over the weekends. The lawn between the
trees is all beautifully trimmed and certainly looks an inviting place to
picnic. We took a different route back which brought us through Sanvensa which
we had bypassed on a previous occasion.
This small village is built in an oval shape around what was
previously the grounds of the chateau and its church. The name is a corruption
of St. Vincent, original patron of the church. Today, the chateau and the
church are quite separate and the houses have spread beyond the original oval
but it is a dear little village with pretty flowers wherever they can find
place for them.
Friday the 8th May is a Public Holiday in France,
it being the commemoration of VE day. (Victory in Europe) There are bound to be
ceremonies all over France and wreaths laid at all the war memorials in honour
of the fallen. But it is not all serious stuff. Some of the bigger centres have
brass bands and other activities going on. In Vabre Tizac, for example, they
organised a sponsored run as part of the day. There is a path that leads down
to the village, next to the house where we are staying – one of those ‘five
minutes down and five hours back’ kind of paths – which formed the first half
kilometre of the run. What a way to start! By the time the ‘runners’ got up to
us here, they were puffing and panting and reduced to walking, and this was
only the beginning! Actually, I later found out that some people had done a
single lap of the route while others, made of stronger stuff, had completed a
double lap, As this included doing the steep uphill section twice and I must
have seen them on their second lap, and now feel they were fully entitled to be
puffing and panting. And all of this was going on in the rain too!
This afternoon when the two men went off to play cars with a
friend down the road, I took my embroidery and sat out on the patio in the
shade. It was heaven! Whenever I looked up I was confronted by the fifty shades
of green that I wrote about before only now they have become even more intense.
Masses of birds were twittering and calling; a raucous crow had a lot to say; and
once again, down in the forest in the valley, the cuckoo was striking the
hours. Some sort of beetle was making a continuous rasping noise but it was not
unpleasant, while two huge birds of prey that possibly have a nest in the same
forest as the cuckoo, flew up and up and up, soaring higher and higher until
they were out of sight.
I am sure I have said this before, but I am always struck by
the number of blue flowers that we see in France. Perhaps we notice them
because there are fewer of them in South Africa. Our own Spring flowers seem to
be more reds, oranges and yellows while here we see blue, mauve, purple and
violet. Perhaps it is because blue is my favourite colour that my eye is drawn to
them but whatever the case, they are very pretty.
Hold thumbs that we hear about our permits during this
coming week.
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