A New Look

A small interjection from John here. The radio is playing 'Sympathy for the Devil' and I'd swear the pigeons in the garden are joining in with the backing singers going 'coo coo'.

This summer we had a visit from our university friend and 'house mate' Bob Rae and his wife Maggie. Bob's a keen photographer and the panorama shot of our house I've used for the heading was done by him. Thanks Bob. It was great to spend some time together, having not seen them for 18 years, and realise that what made us friends 40 plus years ago still holds true.

Some Old Stuff

3 August 2018

I decided that it would be good for me to continue keeping the blog since life still hasn't settled down!  Since we are still doing quite a lot of work and John's life isn't as good as it used to be (Parkinson's) I decided I would like to continue the online. As I logged on again, though, I saw the following draft, and thought I must at least include it, then continue with the life now on the next post!

October 2016

Saturday 1st

Well, our life is the start of something new, so it needed a blog to record it!  Monday, 8 August 2016 we finalised the sale of our Normandy house and got lots of cash!! Since Brexit was 23rd June, it was perfect timing to get lots of euros.  Le Bourg Dun now has to get used to having another foreigner in the village - a Russian! Mind you, she speaks French well, and no English, so perhaps they'll forget she's foreign.

So now we are getting some of the major work sorted out, starting with changing the windows; mind you, according to my schedule it's still going to take a couple of years to finish all the work!  Still, such is life.

We have at least finished the building of the bread/pizza oven and are having a small soiree on 15 October to use it (and also to celebrate John's birthday!).  Before that we've got to get it started - on the first day we should only have the fire going for 1 hour, then 2, 3 and 4 hours in the following days before  we can use it for actual cooking. So we'll start tomorrow, and then try cooking a pizza at the weekend. Goodness knows what we'll do if it doesn't work!!!

It was amazing when we were in bed just after midnight.  I was still playing games on the IPAD, John was asleep, and I suddenly heard some noise that I thought was possibly people shooting at wild animals (they do that quite often in the country). John woke up and we realised it wasn't that, but was a firework display from the Vignaud where there was a wedding reception. The display went on for about 15 minutes and what we could see was absolutely fantastic (though a little late since there's not supposed to be any noise after midnight!).  Many of the weddings in the abbey in the village have their receptions at the Vignaud garden. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago we went to the wedding ceremony of the daughter of our friend Patrice (this was from his first marriage - he and Marie have no joint children).  We had a girl I used to work with, Mary-Anne, with us and we went to our first wedding ceremony in France. It was slightly different because they had actually done all the legal paperwork the day before at the Town Hall.  Afterwards the wedding reception for 3 hours was in the garden of the Vignaud and luckily the weather was good! Unfortunately we could only stay for about 15 minutes because Mary-Anne was flying back to the UK, but at least we had a glass of wine and some nibbles. What else do you want at a reception???

Thursday 6th

a.m.

Today is the first day we're using the pizza oven!!! We've spend the last 3 days warming it up slowly and it's only cracked in one place - and that's not too bad anyway. We want to try it out as soon as possible, though, because we've got a soiree on 15th to inaugurate it - and, of course, to celebrate John's birthday, but as I said in my invite to the friends, the oven is the main reason!!!  As for the last few days, John's been working on the oven and rubbing down the gates, and I've been rubbing down and re-varnishing the garden chairs, so all 'really' exciting stuff!!  This afternoon we're back at the French lessons, so will have to stop doing this now and get on with the homework!

p.m.

OK, so we need more practice with the pizza oven! The temperature was high, but I don't think we left it long enough for the tiles in the base to get hot enough. The pizza was OK, but not cooked enough at the bottom, and overcooked at the top where John had added more fire.  Have to have another go tomorrow and leave the oven for a while whilst it is hot so the base tiles get heated. John admitted he added the pizza about 5 minutes after it had got to temperature.

The French lesson was interesting. The teacher gave us a short article last week to read and discuss. Part of what it included was details of a museum which had a display about the 2WW and beating the Germans.  (Quite why the French down here in the middle/south of France are implying they helped I don't know. This was Vichy France and it is really obvious when you look at the war memorials - in most of the towns/villages there are lots of people listed who died in the First WW, but only a couple for WW2.  The visiting places are different too. In Normandy virtually every village and beach has a plaque for foreigners as well as the French -  British, American and around Dieppe lots of Canadians as well. Here in south Vendee it's only the French. Weird differences which we never noticed in the UK where nearly everyone was affected in a similar way, though some more than others of course! My home town of Brighton was pretty damaged, as was Coventry.)  Anyway, going back to the French lesson, the teacher asked me what I thought about the article and I replied that I didn't really enjoy it because of my German background (my mum was German, if you didn't know). Then another girl said her father was German! What a coincidence! He was a war prisoner in France and then was transferred to England, where he met her mother working on a farm as many war prisoners did. What was weird, was that we both had exactly opposite upbringings with the German link. She went to Germany as a child every summer to stay with the family and even worked in a local shop. Her mother and father spoke English and German, so she was brought up bilingual and now is a teacher for German. 

That's me standing, Vera sitting and Oma (grandmother)

hiding behind the bush.

For my family, we never spoke German, even my half-sister who was born in Germany with a German father. In fact, I didn't know she was German until I was about 11 when she wanted to come to France as an au pair and had to get a German passport. According to mum's history, she met my dad when he was a driver for the British forces running Germany after the war. They got married in Germany, and a year later came to the UK, when his family had a major meeting to decide whether they would accept my mum!!!! 

It wasn't until the late 1960s that we heard mum speak German as we had visitors linked to a German relative who lived in Birmingham. And then she had to translate for both Vera and me!!!

We visited Germany once when I was about 2, as you can see from the photo, although I have no memories of it.


The second visit was in the 1980s after mum had died and John was working closely with a German company. So we visited his colleagues in Frankfurt and then travelled around Germany a little before going north to see Lemgo which is where mum and dad met. We even made another photo to link with one from that first visit!

I couldn't even learn German at school because I was in the top half and we did Latin. The teachers said my mother could teach me German, but mum could only tell me what to say, not why, so that wasn't much use! When I was about 17 I did start a correspondence course, and found German very simple (especially compared with Latin!) but I've never kept it up. 

What a weird French lesson we had!!!

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So, that's the old stuff, tomorrow I'll start with the new ones!!