French Life-expat France

It’s only about two weeks until we open our doors to the first of this years visitors (we are ‘closed’ October to April) so we are busy making sure everything is looking good in the house and garden.

This becomes less of a chore each year, but there are always things to do in a house that has had a few months full of holidaymakers and then been left empty for a few months - mending dripping taps, regrouting bathroom tiling, checking gas tanks actually have a bit of gas in them and so on.

While I tinker in the house, spending a quiet morning touching up chipped paintwork or quietly flicking at cobwebs, Mrs B is outside making superhuman efforts to stop weeds taking over the garden. More or less a lost cause really but I shout a few words of encouragement from the window occasionally…

…”get on with it”, “can’t you work any faster’, you know the kind of thing. Rude and objectionable, of course, but said with a kind of half-smile so she doesn’t know if I’m being rude and objectionable or just trying to be amusing in my own peculiar way.

She usually shouts something back but I don’t hear what it is because I have the radio on quite loud so I can sing along to Cherie FM (’all your favourites from the good old days’) and also I have the kettle constantly boiling so I can get through my habitual 20 cups of coffe a day.

We have ordered new sofas for the gites, but they haven’t been delivered yet. Hopefully they will come soon otherwise holidaymakers will have to sit on deckchairs in the lounge. We have also bought a new bed, for a reason I can’t quite remember. Every year we seem to need to buy a new bed, but I don’t know how the old ones seem to go missing or where they have gone.

Outside, we are creating an additional parking area this year, in an effort to stop people driving around the courtyard knocking over large pot plants and small animals. Unfortunately this new parking does involve me in quite a lot of raking and shovelling (actually a very great deal - several days of very hard work), but otherwise I try and keep my garden activities to sit-on lawnmowing and a spot of light pruning. And younger daughter is showing quite a talent for driving our little tractor, so hopefully she can take over mowing soon as well.

To get away from all this bustling activity I went out cycling yesterday and promptly got a puncture in the middle of the Gavaudun Valley, a good few kilometres from anywhere at all. It was a slow puncture, so I decided to keep going and pump up the tyre every few kilometres, rather than replace it it in the middle of nowhere - sometimes replacement inner tubes also immediately puncture if the thorn or whatever caused the puncture hasn’t been found.

I didn’t have a phone with me although we bought one a few months ago specifically so this situation wouldn’t arise (I forgot to take it), and I was wearing cycling shoes which it is not possible to walk in, so I didn’t want to take the risk of being completely stranded for hours on end.

Anyway net result was, I got home (slowly), but the bike ride was about as much pleasure as pulling brambles out with your teeth and I was quite pleased to get back to my grouting.