Snow - because everyone else has posted one

Yes we had snow Friday through to Saturday evening and managed around 12 inches of the white stuff before the sun came out on Sunday and started to kill it off.

Now Madame tells me that she likes the snow and indeed over the weekend she was to be seen in the garden photographing things. She has a new digital camera and has sent me and her friends. Here are three of them: Her powered gnome light and what I call "small dog" but whose real name is Liloo

Today is Wednesday. Yesterday I drove back from my weekly shopping trip to LeClerc. Despite having cleared the snow plough hills along the front of my parking area yesterday, I got stuck with the rear of my car still out in the main road. Fortunately the road was not busy and I was able to reverse out onto the road and try again. There was about 6 inches either side, between the wall pillar and Madame’s car, so it was a bit of a gamble. It took two attempts and luckily I did not hit either obstacle.

I put my shopping away and spent about 2 hours chopping away at the compacted icy snow, from the road to the rear wheels of the cars.


I noticed that Beeboy’s car (which he has left parked at a wonky angle for the last few weeks) had bits of red and amber coloured plastic from the rear, driver side lights, lying on the snow. I can only assume that he hit it while parking his van.


Now the sun is shining and the snow is starting to melt faster. On the news last night they showed how heavy snow has brought many parts of France to a standstill, with no schools open, school transport cancelled etc.


We seem to have been let off lightly. The snow ploughs had been out here, but there was not much evidence of salt or grit being used. The main roads were very treacherous even yesterday.


There was supposed to be an additional choir practice on Monday evening, but it was thankfully cancelled due to the weather. I had decided not to go anyway.


I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but this year we are performing a piece which has been written by our choir master, called “Le pecheur et sa femme”.


The fisherman and his wife. It is based on a Grimm fairy tale. There will be a children’s choir involved too, a couple of soloists and a narrator. It is a tricky piece, and I am not enjoying it at all. The CD that I was given which is


supposed to emphasise the tenor part, is worse than useless, and I cannot distinguish the tenor part even in the bits that we have already learned.

WII are the champions

During my brief stay in Blighty, I joined a band called the Beatles. S’s son M has a WII, Xboxes etc. There was a little drum kit, with 4 drums, a bass guitar and a microphone. Other instruments and singer could be added.

The music appears on the Television screen and each instrument had its own road of notes.


I got quite reasonable scores on the “Easy” setting and only the foot pedal spoiled my game play.


I had a red, yellow, blue, and a green drum to hit as well as my foot pedal.


My colours to hit appeared on the graphic of a neck of a guitar, relentlessly scrolling towards me. Yes they still kept coming even when I was in bed half asleep.


There is a video and one or two photos of me in action, but fortunately S does not know how to get the photos off her phone, and the video files are probably too large to email to me. What a shame!


What will they think of next? A moving to another country game, where you can buy a property, hire a removal firm, deal with lots of bureaucracy, try and understand the locals, shop for strange foods, try new recipes using pig’s heads, join local associations, buy reconditioned furniture from small local shops, pay taxes, open a bank account,,,,, How long would it be before the novelty wore off and it got put back in its box for good?

Back in the USSR

I decided to sneak back across the border into the UK for Christmas and New Year. I had it all worked out. Flights booked, lifts arranged.

By chance I went on the Internet early in the morning on the day of my departure. A brief look at Toulouse airport flights showed me that planes seemed to be arriving and departing as per normal, with only one flight cancelled. I was going to leave it at that, but something made me click on page 4, where my flight was listed. Cancelled. Well that was okay then.


CAncELLED!! There must be some mistake. On to the EasyJet website and I got a message that said that my flight had been cancelled due to the weather.


We had had about an inch of snow a few days before, and I know that Bristol had not snow. I managed to change my flight to the following day, but this meant that I would not be able to catch my next flight, Bristol to Inverness as I would not arrive in Bristol in time.


I should have just left my Inverness flight alone, but I changed it to a date later in the year. Admin charge £50. As it turned out the flight was cancelled very close to departure, so I would have been able to transfer it to another date for free.....


In the event it was lucky that I did not get to Inverness, as the airport remained closed for many days and only reopened the day that I flew back to France. The papers carried a story of a lighthouse-keeper’s wife who had gone to Inverness to buy a turkey for Christmas dinner, who was still stranded in Inverness 15 days later.


Half way through the holiday, S knackered her back so more travelling was not an option. Fortunately we had managed to visit the Clark's Village shopping outlet at Street, before her back went, and also a trip to Dunelm (soft furnishings) and PCWorld (1.5 Tb external drive) so the essential shopping was covered.


The flight back to France was uneventful, except that we arrived about 2 hours late. The plane had had to find cabin crew from other flights to man our plane. Then the baggage took 35 minutes to arrive......


I hate driving in the dark. At least it wasn’t snowing or raining.


Which reminds me. There are all sorts of madness in this world, and a lot of it happens in the UK. Every New year’s day the life saving club at Clevedon, put on their Victorian swimming gear and take a dip in the sea.


This year was no exception and I met up with H and D by the Marine lake to watch human ice cubes being made. They were about 10 minutes late coming out of the pub, where they had got changed. This was very inconsiderate as I had not put on a hat, scarf or gloves, it was freezing cold, and there was a biting breeze.


They marched out of the pub and down to where we were standing. It was time for them to have a sing-song. Then it was time to sing Auld lang Syne.

Would they ever get into the sea so that we could return home to thaw out?

Then they set off towards the sea and entered the dirty water of the Bristol Channel which was glinting invitingly in the sunshine. The water looked blue. The day before it had been its usual muddy brown colour. The hills in the background are in Wales, the other side of the Bristol Channel.

The photos above were taken by D and H as my camera batteries died.  To see 12 photos taken by the local newspaper look here

Happy New Year everyone!

I am slightly miffed that the UK government did not offer me £3k to leave the country. If I had been Albanian it would probably have been a different story. Am I a victim of discrimination?

More work

Yesterday I received a letter from the college that teaches students nursing.

Way back in the year I had written a letter on spec to them, as I had been alerted that a change in policy meant that all future nursing staff needed to be able to speak English to a level that they could greet and register patients. Over three years this builds up to a level where they have to be able to read and understand medical articles in journals, medical letters and also write on the subject of medical care of patients.


I had a meeting with the director of the college. Next contact was months later, when I met with one of the teaching staff. There would be three of us teaching. Her, me and a former student of the college who had also been an English teacher for several years. She would be in touch by email and would send me a copy of the minutes of our meeting etc. Our next chat would be on the 17 December, when the three of us would meet up to plan the course etc.


No further info was received until yesterday when I received a letter from the director of the College reminding me of Thursday’s meeting between 1 and 2pm. There was also something about meeting the students and teaching.


I arrived and I met the other 2 teachers. Next thing I knew, I was in a room with 55 students.


Apparently I was going to introduce myself, then I was going to go the female teacher to another room with half the students, to start their course.....


So that was fun then. Fortunately the other two had decided to concentrate on greeting new patients with page 1 of the patient registration form, and a sheet with a conversation which had gaps in. They had to slot the correct phrase into the correct gap.


The teaching is for 20 hrs per term. Most of them have done some English at school. For some of them that would have been 20 years ago. One or two have done no English but as far as I know they weren’t in my group.


Future sessions will last 3 or 4 hours, but there will be a 15 minute break......



Meanwhile on the school front. Just as I was leaving on Tuesday, the head teacher told me that the class would be going skiing every Tuesday for 5 weeks, and could I teach them on a Thursday instead. I said I would get back to her once I had found out my nurse teaching hours. So tomorrow, I have to unravel and negotiate, because if she still wants me to teach the CP/CM1 class on Tuesday, I would have to hang around somewhere from 11.45 until 3pm to teach them...

Well that's it for this year. Unless something startling happens, I'm blogging off until a few days into the New Year. So a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my reader. Ho!, Ho! Ho!
p.s. Dad, If this red bit comes out green, try cleaning the nozzles on your ink-jet printer .

The rope

Last Tuesday I was sitting in my car in the public car park next to one of the primary schools that I teach at. Two mini buses arrived and after some manoeuvrings finally switched off their engines. There were two adults per bus and about 13 children aged around 4 years old, in total.

The tots wandered around aimlessly while the adults looked at a map, and waved their arms vaguely towards the town centre.


One of the adults then went back to one of the buses and came back with a length of blue nylon rope which was joined to a length of green rope. There were knots at regular intervals along the length of the rope.


Now I was parked with a fast flowing river behind me and on my right there was a bridge crossing the river.


Were they going to tie the children together and throw them into the river?


Everyone milled around a bit more, arms were waved and pointed and there was at last a feeling that something might actually happen.


Two adults each took the hand of two children. The remaining 2 adults took one end of the rope each and stretched it to full length, one at each end. Children then deployed themselves between the knots, on alternate sides of the rope. The convoy then moved off with no soundtrack from the Jungle Book. Progress was slow. It was okay for the adult at the back end of the line, they walked forwards. The adult at the front of the line walked backwards, facing the children.


By the time I returned about an hour later, the mini buses had gone, so I can only assume that the pushmepullyou had successfully completed its mission.

The old contes

Last night our local resident’s amicable society put on a storytelling evening.

A group of 5 storytellers travelled down from Toulouse to entertain us with an hour and a half of stories.


The event took place in the local primary school main hall. Tickets were 2 euros per adult and free for the under 15’s. I got there 10 minutes before kick-off and installed myself in the third row from the front.


The scene was set with a black velvet cloth strung across the end of the room as a backdrop. There was a table with a propped up, open book. Pairs of socks hung from the top edge of the backdrop and there was a small Christmas tree.


The hall filled up rapidly and children outnumbered adults about 3 to 1. The youngest children there would have been about 4 years old and would prove to have a limited attention span for this sort of thing.


The lights were dimmed and 2 portable spot lights lit the “stage”. Out trooped 4 women and a man, each carrying a small stone lamp with a candle burning inside it.


There followed a mixture of carols, rhymes, mottos and of course, stories.


Being that this was France, none of the stories were in English, but I understood most of what was said.


They tried their best. They spoke rather quietly, so I don’t know if my 87 year old friend Rene who was a few rows further back than me, heard it all.


One of the ladies “froze” occasionally as though she had forgotten what came next, but just as I had decided that I had had enough of concentrating, the stories finished. The hour and a half was actually an hour.


I had never heard any of the stories before, but C the mother of my French family, said that she had heard all of them except one.


I now know that spiders were responsible for today’s custom of hanging garlands on Christmas trees. How St Nicholas brought three lost children who had been butchered by a butcher and their body parts hung to cure in his cellar for 7 years, back to life. No body knows what happened to the greedy mother and daughter who had demanded strawberries, violets and red apples in January. They lost their way in the snow and were never seen again...... The Cinderella type daughter that they left behind them got their cottage and a year later she married a handsome young man who was passing by, looking for work. There was also a tale of a teddy bear who was mistreated by the girl who owned him, ran away into the snowy night and ended up helping the Santa Queen to deliver presents. Of course the presents ran out just as they reached the house of a very sick little girl. Of course it was a far far better thing and a far far better place etc and teddy made the ultimate sacrifice, jumping into the little girl’s stocking which was hanging in the fireplace.


I chatted to Rene and his wife afterwards and he said that it brought back his childhood.


The next event will be in 2010 with a drink and galette to celebrate the New Year. The round galettes contain one or two small china figures, so you have to watch when you bite into a piece. If you find one of the figures you will have good fortune, and / or a broken tooth. Who says I’m not a romantic?
What? all of you?       Bast****ds!!!

Pussy whipped?

I thought that I would take a moment to bring you up to date with the lives of Bee Boy and Madame.

Longtime readers may remember that Madame’s youngest cat was knocked down and killed earlier this year, and now lies buried in my garden.


A month or so later, she acquired another stray cat, which was living on the streets of a nearby town and was being fed by the staff working at the Secu.


He was given the name Romeo and was as black and shiny as coal. Aged around 3 years old, it took some time for him to get used to return from his roaming to Madame’s flat for bed and board, but eventually a routine was established. Old cat, small dog and Romeo lived together in relative harmony, although I did not hear them practicing much.


Then, one day, the tear-stained face of Madame informed me that Romeo had disappeared. She was sure that someone had stolen him. She had had a cat stolen previously. She does not believe in putting collars with name and address on her pets, in case they get trapped in something by it. I suspect that as small dog and Romeo like running across roads in front of traffic, that it would not lead the injured parties to her door, but I do not know this for sure.


Moving swiftly some months and she now has another stray. A kitten of about 3 months, I wonder how long this one will last. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen it for a few weeks....


Early summer saw Bee boy sidelining his ladyfriend and her small boy child. This made way for the trickle of young ladies who came to him for bee-keeping training. One day I could smell burning meat and popped my head out of my window. There was Madame cooking on her BBQ while David and his disciples lounged around her terrace table eating their aperitif fare.


He has now got another young lady, so we will see what happens. He isn’t spending many nights here at the moment. He was 30 this summer so perhaps he will settle down with this one.


He rented the flat here a few years ago and left to set up home with someone. Unfortunately the relationship didn’t last.


My tiny studio is still unlet, so financially that is a bit of a bugger and Bee-boy is looking for a house with a garage or grange for storage.