Our place in France Chapter 10

Sorry folks!

No pictures; no words; so no blog.
Back next week

Our place in France Chapter 9

After the disappointment of not selling our little Peugeot last weekend, there was nothing to do except advertise it again. There is a wonderful website here called AngloInfo which is similar to Gumtree in South Africa and is where a lot of English-speaking people advertise anything and everything. As I already had pictures of the car, it was a simple matter of writing something to encourage the buyers to flock to our door. Sadly, it hasn’t worked……..yet. Mind you there are not a lot of people just longing to buy a seventeen-year-old, right-hand-drive car, in France. Even if if it is going for a song. However, there are cars on the same website that have been there far longer and are also not yet sold, so I’m still hoping.

The bird community continue to entertain us in the mornings as we sit in bed drinking our coffee. There are now several nests in the various cracks in the church wall but I am not sufficiently well informed to be able to say what sort of birds they are. They all look like sparrows to me. Unfortunately, Mrs Pigeon turned down the ‘Des. Res.’ that Mr Pigeon had picked out for them as that would have been perfect for bird watching. The hole in the wall is right opposite our bedroom window and we were so looking forward to watching the chicks develop. Other birds have arrived in the area though and they are the most delightful singers. It sounds for all the world as if we have a whole cage of canaries outside the window. And then there are a few birds whose name I DO know and they are the Redstarts who make a strange rattling sound when they are alarmed. For such a tiny bird, it is a very loud call.

Something we didn’t much enjoy was when we went outside some day in the middle of the week, we found thousands of flies all over the veranda. As soon as the sun went behind a cloud, they all disappeared again, but when it reappeared, there they all were. Downstairs, outside the cellar, was just as bad with flies crawling all over the grass and soil. We spoke to a man in the hardware shop about it and he just shrugged his shoulders and more or less said ‘It happens’. And although there are dozens of sprays for bees , wasps , hornets and mosquitoes, we only found one at the supermarket for flies, which was useless, and a slightly better one in the same hardware shop. I seem to remember that on one of the days when we came to view the house before we bought it, there were flies everywhere and there again, the agent just shrugged and said ‘It happens’. No-one seems the slightest bit put out by the hordes of huge black buzzing things. Perhaps we are not yet French enough!

Another good job done and dusted was the completion of the repairs to the cellar windows and shutters. We think that in an earlier age, the road past the house was much lower but now after many years of rebuilding and resurfacing, the cellar window is level with the road. When we arrived here, the shutters were hanging by one hinge each and the glass panes in the window were broken. Because the window has a rather unusual fastening device, Neels  took pains to restore it as well as he could and then started on the shutters which had rotted at the bottom end. He tried to re-use as much of the original timber as possible and has done a good job. When our neighbour, the previous owner, saw what he was doing, his comment was ‘You can pick those shutters up really cheaply at any hardware store’ but we think he missed the point.

We have also finally got the carpet laid in the lounge which was a heavy job for us. It was lying rolled up to one side of the room which meant that nothing on that side could be pushed back to where it should stand. This meant that all the lounge chairs were standing in a group on the other side of the room. So we decided that it was time to unroll it. Everything first had to be moved out of the way; the underlay unrolled and the carpet rolled up again behind it. (Did I mention that the two layers had been rolled together?) The furniture then had to be lifted over the double roll so that we could finish the unrolling. Then we could match the two edges of carpet and underlay and go back again! But it is done now and we are delighted to have a proper lounge at last. All we need now is to invite some of our friends over to come and sit in it.

Two other small things completed our exertions for the week. One was to get the necessary troughs and brackets from the supermarket and then to get some flowers and soil to fill them up. Right outside the supermarket a large marquee tent has been erected and this is done every Spring, and is where one goes to buy seedlings and plants of all sorts. Of course we bought geraniums, what else?! Only the flowers on our geraniums are not red, white or pink, they are mauve and are beautiful. I have been told, however, that when they re-flower, they could possibly be red or white. Perhaps it is just a dye in the soil. I still think they are really pretty.

The final job on our to-do list for this week was to paint sealer on the quarry tiles in the fireplace. It was a job that needed doing long ago before the stove was put in, but we ran out of time and then couldn’t do it while we were making fires every afternoon and evening. Now though, it has been done and will probably get a second coat to make them shine to make them shine but they look better already with a deeper colour.

The overall ‘to-do’ list is getting shorter by the week but there are still some big jobs ahead – proper hanging space in the bedrooms, for a start, to replace camping cupboards that fall over in the night! And bookshelves that are long and low and will fit in to the minimal vertical wall space we have upstairs. The list could go on and on, of course, but I will try not to be too greedy.

Our place in France Chapter 8

For several weeks now, on our frequent visits to the local supermarket, we have noticed a sign pointing down the same road, to a ‘Pre-Roman Church’. As we are always keen to see old things and visit old buildings, we thought that we should really go and see what it meant. There was no  indication of how far away it was, so we just carried on driving on what appeared to be ‘main’ road, until Neels eventually said, ‘No, no. This is going nowhere. I’ll find a place to turn around’. And, would you believe it, at the next turn-off was another sign that said ‘Pre-Roman Church’. And there it was. What a strange looking building! Built of stone and about ten metres high, it was twenty to thirty metres long but the only windows we could find in the walls were two tiny slit windows near what I would presume would be the altar end of the building. Unfortunately the doors were locked but I doubt if there would have been anything to see inside. A noticeboard outside said, if I understood it correctly, that it was built in the 8^th and 9^th century and stood on the site of an earlier church dating from the 5^th and 6^th century. Amazing! There it stands on a little piece of land where someone has cut the grass neatly while right next door is a large house, also three storeys high which is obviously deserted. Some of the windows are boarded up and others are broken and it looks very sad. What I found quite poignant though was that on the door facing the church was fastened a St James shell, the sign of the Compostela pilgrims. Seeing one on a door, anywhere, generally means that there is accommodation for pilgrims available, but it would be a very brave person who spent a night in this tumbledown place.

I mentioned last week how difficult this language is to learn. Pronunciation has to be spot on or you will find yourself saying something quite different to that which you intended. A good example happened this week. Our friend Christian had popped in for a coffee and seeing that he is so completely bilingual, I decided to ask him the meaning of a word I seen a number of times on posters along the side of the road. The word is ‘QUINE’ and knowing that one has to pronounce the ‘e’ at the end of a word, I asked him the meaning of the word, pronouncing it ‘Keen-a’. He looked puzzled. “Do you mean ‘enthusiastic’”, he asked. I told him it was a French word and he just looked more puzzled. So out came the paper and pencil and I wrote what I had seen on the posters. Light  dawned. “Ah! You mean quine?” he said, pronouncing it ‘keen-a’. “But that’s what I just said” I complained. He pointed out that I hadn’t pronounced the final ‘e’ strongly enough and without that, it meant nothing to him. And after all that, it turned out to be another name for a kind of Bingo game that is very popular around here.

Seeing that I am writing this chapter a day later than usual, and there is no real excuse for that, I feel that I should include yesterday as we actually did something and went somewhere!

I think I mentioned that we had sold our faithful little Peugeot 106 and replaced it with a slightly bigger model. It was a stroke of luck really, because few people want a right-hand drive car in France, but this buyer was really keen. There were various delays but finally we got word that he was going to take it. Then we discovered that a car may not change ownership if there are less than four months left on the roadworthy certificate. Cars in France have to be tested every two years and brought up to standard failed. So we phoned the new ‘owner’ and told him this and he agreed to pay for the test if we would put it through. We did this and the little car passed with flying colours. So we took it to the Wishy-washy too, so that she was all clean and sparkling. The new owner said that they would be here on Sunday to collect and although we had had other plans for Sunday, we agreed. We had wanted to drive over to Rodez, where we will have to go to renew our residence permits at the end of this month and having not been there before, we thought Sunday would be a good day for a recce. We planned to find the best parking area to use and then to have a lovely lunch and wander around the old part of the city with no danger of being run over by a hasty motorist. However, we would be going back there in a couple of weeks’ time so we cut short our sightseeing trip to be back home again in time to hand over the car. The mobile phone coverage is not all that good when one is out and about, and when we got home, there was a message on my phone from the buyer to say they were very sorry but they would not be taking the car after all. To say that we were fed up was putting it mildly. Without a buyer in sight we would not have gone for the roadworthy test and may even have scrapped the car. Oh well! C’est la vie!

Our place in France Chapter 7

Although there are still at least five large boxes of books downstairs in the cave, we couldn’t bear to let a lovely day go by without putting it to good use. So, after making a short detour to visit the recycling centre again, we went off in a completely new direction. We had no real destination and were just ambling along to see what turned up. The first village we came to was Salles-Courbaties looking very picture-postcardish in the afternoon sunlight. It is probably a lot bigger than one gets at first impression but we thought it delightful – a collection of old houses clustered around a village pond, complete with swan and wild duck. There were signs of commercial enterprises along the street but a resident who came past us to post a letter at the Post Office, which does still operate, told us that everything had been closed for several years. What a shame. The ex-coffee shop had had a wonderful position at the bottom end of the pond and I could easily imagine people sitting out on the terrace on a day such as the one we saw it on but I suppose two people a day would not have kept them in business.

She also told us that she still lived in what was an old mill, also at the bottom end of the pond, where a stream had been diverted to feed it but that it, too had long since ceased to operate. Since she didn’t offer to show it to us, we didn’t get to see it, sadly.

Continuing along the same road, we were amazed at the amount of water flowing everywhere. It has certainly rained a lot lately, but it was almost as if we were driving across a marsh with drainage furrows every now and again. But sunshine and water always makes for a pretty scene and we enjoyed our drive. Further along, still on the same road, we came to St Igest, nestled in a valley.  With only a few inhabitants less than 200, one could hardly imagine it would require  a large and elaborate church, but in1927 a local man was given permission to build a new church to replace the crumbling Neo-Roman building. I am not sure what happened to the old church but the new one stands in the centre of the village in a quite beautiful setting, and is a very beautiful building, if you like ornate decoration, which we do. In the meadow-like grounds of the church is a replica of the Lourdes Grotto, dedicated to Saint Theresa and once a year pilgrims gather there and special services are held. There is an amazingly peaceful feel about the whole place.

Apart from that one excursion we have continued pottering around the house and trying to improve our French. What an extremely difficult language it is! Trying to learn from the written version makes it even more difficult. Half the letters are not pronounced, especially at the end of a word, but every now and again they are pronounced – just to make things more interesting perhaps. So, although one calls a small village in the Gers ‘Lupiac’ saying all the letters as they are written, another town up near us called Carjac is pronounced Kuh-zha. And there is no rule to learn that tells when a letter is pronounced and when not. The best way to learn, of course, is to talk to the locals and try to work out just what they are saying, and say it like that next time!

It was towards the end of last week, I think that I became hugely despondent when a whole batch of my favourite art works had not turned up, although we had emptied every box. Among them my very favourite embroidery of the Edwardian Lady and two water colour paintings done by a relation of mine many moons ago, of Hermanus and Betty’s Bay. Not wanting to show how devastated I was, I kept opening box after box in the cave, labelled ‘Books’ in the vain hope of finding them. No luck! I really couldn’t believe they were gone. I knew there had been nothing left in the house when we finally left, and I was equally certain that no boxes had been left behind in the container. They had  to be here. Back and forth we both went; up and down the stairs. In and out of every room again and again. Then I heard a yell from upstairs – ‘I’ve found it!’ And he had. Somehow it had got pushed behind a chest of drawers in a corner, with an empty suitcase and by looking casually I had only seen the suitcase Was I relieved?! Needless to say they were among the very next things to be put in their right places.

Neels has been busy repairing some shutters on a window that opens straight on to the road outside the cave. As the bottom end of the wooden boards had been at road level for very long time, they had rotted quite badly and needed painting too. At the time of writing the repairs have been done and the shutters given their first coat of paint – a pale lavender blue, of course. Of course!