Our place in France Chapter 14

What a waste of a week! After all the activity of the previous weeks, this one was not worth writing about. I think I picked up a ‘bug’ while standing in the queue in the Prefecture in Rodez and by Sunday was coughing well. Monday was raining hard, as was Tuesday although Wednesday did clear up in the late afternoon and became a perfect evening. The antibiotics I had started on Monday kicked in and I was feeling much better but still had a cough to make any heavy smoker proud, so on  Thursday we added a delicious cough syrup to the mix and from then on things really started to improve.

Needless to say, what with the inclement weather and the inconvenient malady, it was not a very active or exciting week. But we did watch a lot of TV and followed, with a sort of morbid fascination, the relentless rise of the flood waters in northern and eastern France and Germany. How horrible and how terrifying for all those people. And how long is it going to take to go down again? I read somewhere that in similar floods in about 1910, it took three months for the water to recede and only then could they begin to clear the mud from their homes It is hard to imagine the losses incurred.

Acquaintances of ours who live about twenty to thirty kilometres away told us that on the Sunday, they had taken their daughter to the airport at Brive- le-Gaillard (a drive of about 50 kilometers from where they live) and when they got home again the storm had passed through their village dumping 180 mms of rain in just 20 minutes. The water poured down the road and as their house is at the bottom of the hill, went straight into their house and out the other side. I had to admire her cheerfulness as she told me that it was a good thing it was still raining on Monday and Tuesday so they didn’t need to go out to their work of cutting lawns, and could start clearing the house instead!

Neels spent the time usefully by renovating an old World War II anti-aircraft ammunition box which had brought some of his tools over here. Being a sturdy design, and made of wood, he thought it would make a good storage box for extra towels or other linen. It had been painted a pale air force blue with the words ‘20 mm Oerlikon’ stencilled on the front. Having  sanded it all down, he then painted the whole box the same blue as the window shutters, finishing up with a good coat of white paint for the metal work. The inside then got a couple of coats of bright white paint too and the finished result is very ‘Beach House’ style. I am delighted as storage space is still at a premium here.

After the bad weather at the start of the week, the forecast is looking good for the week to come which is very good news as we are expecting my sister and her husband to stay for a week, and good weather would be very welcome.

The window blind which we had ordered before our previous visitor arrived  is giving us great grief. The order arrived on the same day as our visitor, so we picked them both up and came on home only to find that the wrong blind had been ordered. So we phoned and they said ‘Bring it back and we’ll order the right one” but it was weekend, so our poor visitor had to make do with a sheet of cardboard taped into the window. On returning the blind we discovered that another one had not yet been ordered, but that was rectified straight away and it was promised for Tuesday this week. Well it hasn’t arrived yet so our next visitors will have to put up with a sheet of cardboard too. I wouldn’t normally bother as all our bedroom windows are skylights and only someone sitting on the church roof would be able to peer in, but at this time of the year, with the sun coming up at about 7 am, it shines through the window and directly on to the pillows of the bed in the spare room. I feel that a blind is a must. Hopefully, it will arrive before they leave again next weekend!