New Year resolutions abandoned!
I have failed miserably to keep my New Years resolution to write more regularly, oops. This is partly because one of my winter time duties each year is to return the gites to their former glory in readiness for the next season - replace dripping washers, mend toilet seats and shower heads, repaint where necessary etc, and that is what I’ve been doing.
For a reason I haven’t fathomed, anything to do with plumbing on our property seems to stop working or break after a few months. Toilets that won’t flush, shower head holders too weak to support a shower head, leaking taps etc. However much we try, and buy the best possible fittings, they always seem to fail.
It’s a similar story with light switches in the barn. After about a year of use they start buzzing, then stop working altogether. It’s not because it’s a bad batch of switches, because the same happens with the replacements I’ve added since. They only cost about 2 euros and are easy to change, but in my whole life up to now I never knew one light switch to fail. Curious.
I’ve also been reading! When I used to commute into London every day I would read all the time, but have got out of the habit since coming to France. For the record I have just been reading ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini. I would happily tell you it’s the best book I’ve read for ages - but it’s also the first book I’ve read in ages so that wouldn’t help you much. Anyway it is a VERY GOOD BOOK and I very highly suggest you rush out and buy it.
What other excuses can I find for my tardiness? Ah yes, our swimming pool liner is being inspected again today, by the ’specialist acting for the lawyers of the manufacturer’ if memory serves, presumably in a last ditch attempt to hold us responsible for its wrinkled state. I’ll write a full update when the saga of the pool is resolved, assuming the internet still exists that far into the future. We are at the ‘there is definitely a problem but it’s definitely not my fault’ stage at the moment.
Mrs B hasn’t been able to keep me off the computer altogether, and I’ve added little maps for most of the places in France on the site. See the map towards the bottom of the page at Ile-de-Molene in Brittany for what must surely be one of the quieter holiday destinations in France.
The idea is that you can find a place on a map before you book your gite for next summer, and hopefully spot that it is in the middle of the Atlantic before you hand over your hard-earned cash and find you have to row for two hours to buy your morning croissants.
If you’ve never used a google map before be sure to play around a bit. Click on the words ’satellite’ and ‘hybrid’ on the map, then drag the map around or zoom in using the ‘+’ and ‘-’ thingies on the left. I would tell you the coordinates of our own gites for you to take a close-up look, but Mrs B was sunbathing the day the spy plane flew over our little piece of France, so probably best if you don’t know.
