Well, here we are again. Trying to fit in a bit of writing
in our busy lives.
As I said last week, the beginning of the week was a bit of
a washout and then speeded up to the weekend leaving me suddenly with no time
to write. But all for a good cause. Tilly arrived on Saturday to be in good
time to vote the following day. Then Pieter arrived on the Sunday with the
intention of staying for a few days. More about that later. The voting process
turned out to be quite interesting as we all went along to watch the votes
being counted after the voting station closed on Sunday evening. There are only
about 120 registered voters in the village and its surrounding commune and of
those, only 97 turned out to vote so counting didn’t take very long. There were
five people involved in the actual count – two who opened the votes and read
out the names on them; two who wrote down the totals for each candidate and the
Mayor, who had to send in the final tally. By this stage of the election there
were only two candidates still in the running so it really wasn’t very
complicated, but all very serious and as I said quite interesting, seeing that
even the smallest villages get taken seriously. It was a bit like the American
election where neither candidate was really the one everyone wanted to vote
for, which may account for the fairly poor turnout. In the end, the lesser of
the two evils came out on top but no-one was really rejoicing, just glad that
the other candidate didn’t win.
Pieter’s few days at home was disrupted by him having to
attend a meeting in Monaco on Monday morning, and so the two of them took off at
the crack of dawn on Monday to be there in time, and only returned on Tuesday
evening. Then Tilly had to leave again on Wednesday and Pieter left again on
Thursday Goodness me! Where did the weekend go?!
The next week, this last week, was relatively quiet, but as
the weather was grey and gloomy for most of the time, we were rather glad. It
brightened up towards the end though and the past couple of days have been
simply beautiful. The countryside is stunning ta the moment with all the trees
in full leaf and the fields full of lush green grass. It really is the
prettiest time of the year. In a few weeks, the farmers will start to cut the
grass for hay and then it goes brown until the next lot grows through but it is
never as good as the first growth. The French are very enthusiastic gardeners
and everyone’s gardens are a blaze of colour. We shall definitely have to make
a plan about improving our piece of ‘veld’. Cutting the grass regularly has
made a difference to the look of it but there is a pile of rocks to one side
just begging to be made into a rockery and
masse of ground that could be growing vegetables. At the moment all that
is growing there are some sweetcorn which, the seed packet tells us, will be ready
to harvest in August. Not sure we can wait until then but we will have to take good
care of them in the mean time.
We have two very busy weeks coming up with guests coming and
going and overlapping so there may not be another chapter next week but I will
try my best.
Thank you all for being so patient.
No comments:
Post a Comment