life in the Limousin

As you may have noticed (anybody who is still bothering to look at this), the blogging has come to an end for a while whilst batteries are recharged and we all find something to say which doesn’t involve snow.

We were supposed to be having a party tonight at ours but the snow has been so bad for the last couple of days that the roads are pretty much impassable so we had to cancel it this morning and reschedule it for next week - when hopefully the weather, and we, will be more organised.
Alfie and his mate are on decks in the middle barn.
‘Mate’ came back from England the day before yesterday and mentioned that he’d picked up some old vinyls over there that I might like ….as he’d got them from his gran! It was said without an ounce of irony, the cheeky scoundrel. For perhaps the first time it struck me just how old we are to people 20 years younger and the danger of the territory we are about to embark upon ….. which is rave dancing in our house with our son and his friend as DJ’s.
Really it could go either way and either he will or will not ever speak to us again. Either way we win.
Anyway here are some photos of the weather.
I can report that this is the wrong type of snow for making snowballs, igloos or snowmen, but everyone seemed to find something diverting to do with it nevertheless.

‘I’m sure I brought some legs with me’

Half sloth, half poodle :

Kids in snowball rage incident with Mr Roche the neighbour:

Today has been one of the biggest wind-up days in a long while. It largely began at the Mairie in Oradour, with Elodie the secretary trying to get in touch with the head of the DDE, Mr Gouhaud, who is systematically either ‘en retard’, ‘ en communication’ or ‘en congé’. This morning it transpired that he was ‘en reunion’ and proceeded to be for the entire day.
The day ended at another Mairie, on our home turf in Champsac, where I went to try and change the carte grise for the car that Matt bought in England.
Although it has a Bordeaux immatriculation, because the dodgy Greek guy we bought it from in Luton wasn’t au fait with the French system and didn’t forsee the urgent need to change the carte grise to his own name for the duration of it’s stay on his forecourt ( in England), it officially doesn’t exist.
‘You’ll need to go to the Prefecture and see what they say’, said secretary n°1, which is like a kidney punch at the best of times, to be followed by the body slam from secretary n° 2 saying :
‘Well good luck. They’re ‘en greve’ at the moment and when they’re back at work there’ll be a huge back log.’
Inspiring words.
In between these two events we met the Mairie of Dournazac who is a lovely woman but can talk for an hour without taking a breath. We met at Bort with a notaire who was making a valuation on the house next door to the one Alfie is living in.
If a picture paints a thousand words then the rest of the day needs no explanation. If Munch was trying to capture the mindset of the day ( with a camera) he would have come out with something like this.
It’s worth considering too, when admiring the integrity and simplicity of this French paysan lifestyle, that the man whose house this is was living there but months ago before he was carted off to the Maison de Retraite from which he is still trying to escape so that he come back and live in this room of shoes.
You may notice the lack of any toilet. Not a problem when you have a corrugated iron wood shed…..with no door.

I was going to be posting a highly entertaining Youtube video this evening of Alfie, Matt and Laurent putting the granite top on to the fireplace that Alfie’s carved for Negrelat - but having waited over an hour for the video to download (at which point it was still only half way done) I accidentally closed the window so have had to start all over again. I can’t say that the action was particularly rivetting even at the time …..more scary than anything - but a reminder of why people nowadays use modern materials in building.
Instead some random photos taken on the dog-walk this morning….all a bit on the blurred side but that’s a hazard of the job when one hand is attached to a hound with a scent in his nose. As you can see from these pictures the weather was very mild again today. Perfect mushroom weather, although the cepes remain as allusive as ever.

A fantastic tree:

This is the fireplace….a prelude to what’s to come tomorrow:

There isn’t a problem writing the blog tonight - it’s something to take my mind off putting up the christmas decorations. Is it really still too early?
Apart from the modern perennial of the father christmas on neon ladder set-up, hanging randomly from the occasional wall, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of anything else. The fir trees which are donated by the commune to each of the shops in the village remain baubleless. I think everyone’s waiting for it to become more wintery before taking the plunge but apart from getting a tiny bit colder it still doesn’t feel that christmas is only a couple of weeks away. Not even the Marché de Noel that we went to yesterday in St Laurent sur Gorre, where father christmas, sporting a nylon wig that was on the bluer side of white, rode around the streets on a camel could do the job.
When I was growing up in Manchester, where people seemed to go early with the tinsel, the christmas tree was always put up on the 5th of December because it’s my birthday but when it came to taking the decorations down life seemed so dull without the glitter having lived with it for so long that now I try to limit the fun to 2 weeks max.
Time spent not putting up decorations was then, this birthday, spent in bed eating chocolates and drinking tea until past 11am, a bit of post lunch toing and froing to football etc with the kids, followed by a televisual odyssey which began at 5.30pm with Come dine with me, travelled past You’ ve been Framed, Harry Hill, the X Factor finally arrived at Being Alan Bennett late in the evening - all washed down with Matt’s Saturday night speciality of Magret de Canard in an apple jus, a bottle of Champagne and more chocolates. I defy anyone to invent a better birthday than that. In fact don’t bother - it can’t be done. In fact the only thing that could have made my day even more complete had already happened the week before when I received my Michael Winner christmas card, signed in thick blue felt pen by the old pantomime dame himself. He’d mentioned in his Winner’s dinners column a couple of weeks ago that if people sent him their address he’d send them a card and he’s nothing if not a man of his word. It has taken pride of place in the card collection ever since - but as we only have 4 it isn’t that difficult. I shall, of course, be framing said article when the festive season comes to an end so that life retains some of it’s glitter.

Well guilt has finally got the better of me and it’s time to put fingers to keyboard and write some stuff. Hopefully in doing so I’ll remember some of the things that I should have put in my diary - which I haven’t written up for ages either. Sadly that’s the way of it now. Once I would have been writing down things that were happening in the future but now it’s all reminders of things that have been because I’ll have forgotten in a couple of days. Not great from an organisation point of view but interesting to read at the end of the year.
So what’s happened in the last two weeks? Tons of stuff.
Most of the time (in between the normal round of life with it’s associated seasonal illnesses, working to pay the bills and needy children) has been spent concentrating on the land at Les Ollieres, which we need to get in order before the weather turns. It’s amazing how much tidying and burning there is to do there. It all looks in order from a distance but closer up it’s a different story and incredibly hard work. One day we may even get round to filling the lake up again - now that the grass seed has started to grow on the banks. We went there yesterday and all of a sudden it’s sprung up from nowhere which is is great news because apparently we need to leave it for 6 months to settle before putting any fish into it. Hopefully Alan and Neil can come over in the summer and fish nap our carp back from Ian Grey’s lake next door which has been their home for the last year and a half, although it took Ian days to catch even one fish last time he was over so it may take more than two of them. Apart from anything else they’ll both be legless on homemade cider by about 11am and scaring the pond life away with raucous laughter.

We planted an avenue of 30 sycamore trees there too at the weekend which was incredibly satisfying work, especially for me who was doing a bit of light digging and filling in the holes- less so for Matt who had to put in the 2m20 chestnut stakes with a lump hammer.
We managed to plant 16 whilst the kids were playing football and missed Etienne’s ( who is a defender) glory goal of the season and perhaps his whole footballing career. Matt’s shoulder was killing him for days after so we got Alfie in to help later in the week with the other trees and he did them in about half the time with youth and a post driver on his side. For the first time ever Matt has conceded that it’s time to pass the mantle to the next generation and butt out of trying to do anything physical. He spent the day plastering yesterday and couldn’t move either of his shoulders today. You know it’s getting serious when it’s a struggle to pick up a glass.
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Talking of Alfie - he found treasure in the chimney of the fireplace at Bort the other day. He saw something glinting in the chimney breast and thought it might be a Napoleonic coin or something as exciting.
Everyone who has bought an old house in France will have been through the same thing at some point in their renovating career as the air is thick with rumours of peasants bricking up their treasures behind fireplaces and then dying and leaving them there.
Sadly we’ve never found even a centime but Alfie got his tools out and after a lot of patience(which is a first for him), managed to work the coin out, only to discover that it was an old freemason’s token with exactly the same hammer and chisel motif on it as the ones he had used to work it free.
Obviously he took that as a sign that he was destined to claim the house as his own, which is handy. It has a view of the Chateau of Montbrun and he was asked over by the owner last week to see about repairing a stone cross for the roof.
The whole area round there is full of mystery and glamour. Not only are the innards of Richard Coeur de Lion to be found under a burial mound at the side of the chateau but it was also there that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie twice visited with a view to buy and things don’t get much more glamorous than that in these parts. I think I mentioned in a blog at the time that the neighbour was telling us that Brad ‘Pip’ had been spotted in La Taverne - the Chateau’s bar/restaurant

Anyway I’ve got to stop writing now - there’s an increasingly irrate queue for the computer.

Following on from Roz’s blog it seems a bit harsh to call a kitten an imbecile heureux just because it has an eye infection and a dodgy heart but there we have it- just one more thing to add to my list of reasons not to trust French vets……or more precisely the young(ish) one in Chalus.
This is the man who came out of the room when we went to pick the dog up after he’d had his bits chopped and said in English,‘ Sorry, he’s dead’. Ha ha. A Frenchman with a sense of humour we thought. Indeed. Little did we realise at the time that it was merely a distraction technique so that when we came to hand over the money we’d be so wildly happy that he hadn’t in fact killed him that we wouldn’t notice the extortionate amount we were paying. Still as this was a first for both of us and we didn’t have a clue how much it should have cost we paid over the 220 euros and left hoping that that would be the last time the dog would run away/bark/have relations with a cushion etc. It was only about a year later when I was talking to Dave Butcher (patron of Dallage 87 - makes very nice and very competitively priced flagstones and concrete borders) and who had just taken his dog in to the same place for the same operation but at a cost of 70 euros less. He told me that he’d been talking to the vet and the expense was related to the amount of anaesthetic used - so the bigger the dog the more expensive. Ours is a sausage dog and his is a Labrador. We haven’t been back since….. anyway enough of thievery.
The weather was fantastic again today (19 degrees C) and again this evening we didn’t really need to put a fire on, although we did anyway because it’s nice isn’t it.

The man from the new Casse Auto in St Mathieu came round yesterday afternoon to take Matt’s BMW away finally. Etienne said that he caught his dad blowing a kiss to it as it was hauled off on the back of the trailer. It may have been this heightened emotional state which had something to do with the mini-drama which occurred later when, having gone to pick Etienne up from football training at the stade in Champsac, he was floored by a chain fence which is about 1cm from the ground and serves no function whatsoever except to trip people up. To add to the indignity he had gone wearing a pair of slippers, thinking that no one would notice in the dark, which landed on the gravel and had to be picked up by the other parents who he’d been chatting to only seconds earlier. Matt said that he could see the laughing faces in the floodlights as he did the drive of shame home. Still it’ll make a change to have something to laugh at at the match on Saturday other than the team, who in representative form lost 8-0 last week.

Etienne was off school today with some flu or another, which gave us the perfect excuse to lie on the sofa watching Return of the Pink Panther with honey and lemon drinks. He’ll be off again tomorrow too by the look of things so I’ll have to crack on and check the tv listings to see what tomorrow has in store. I wonder if he’d be up for This Morning?

Having spent the past two days doing the books and VAT it was a welcome change to get out to Les Ollieres this afternoon to burn the last of the trees. When they were cut months ago we piled them all in the lake ready for a huge fire, but the summer was so long and the ground so dry that the ‘official’ burning period was put back until mid October - so now it’s a race to get them burnt before the rains set in. Then we can finish sowing grass seed on the bank and get on with filling the lake up. It was 18°C and we were down to t shirts after 5 mintues.

Wednesday was a holiday for Armistice day so it provided the perfect excuse to fit in a mid – week roast.
We went to the war monument in Champsac at 11am, where there were about 50 of us, and then went for a walk down the old railway line which runs from Chalus to Oradour. It’s the place to be if you run, cycle or roller blade, although the leaves, which all seem to have fallen at once, are proving to be a bit of a problem at the moment. God knows what it would have been like when it actually was a train track. There’d have been a broom based job for just about everyone in the commune in those day. As someone who loves sweeping up it would have been my dream job. Just look at those leaves ….!


This is a photo of Alfie carving a stone fireplace from recuperated granite stones.

They’re all completely different sizes and shapes, so god knows what it’s going to look like, but we’re trying to renovate the house without spending any money on it – that old chestnut. In fact we’ve spent most of the week trying to cut down our outgoings so that for the first time ever we might go into the New Year not owing thousands of euros and have terminated our mobile phone and internet contracts, for which we were paying an absolute fortune.
Yesterday, as part of the drive to get organised, I spent the afternoon cleaning up the computer and taking off all of the programmes we don’t use, but somehow managed to get rid of Quicktime which then meant that itunes wouldn’t work. I don’t know what I got involved in then but ended up wiping off my whole library of about 4000 songs. Annoyingly and somewhat unbelievably Matt walked in about 10 minutes later with an external drive, which he’d just bought in Office Depot. Still it was probably time to ring the changes.

The other good thing about autumn, apart from the pyjamas thing, is that there is tons of free food around. Mostly in the guise of an apple or a chestnut the most prolific food around at the moment due to the warm, damp conditions is without doubt the mushroom.

Just about every morning the field at the back of the house is covered in them, which for the first 3 or 4 days was about as exciting as it gets here. Then you realise that there’s a limit to what can be achieved with your common or garden champignon de Paris and the sights are set on the ultimate prize……the Cepe de Bordeaux.
Everyone who has lived in a rural area for a couple of years and who knows anything about anything will have found a secret spot where they might find a couple and the right to privacy is fiercely guarded and respected. There are cars parked up all over the roadsides at the moment and their drivers shadowy figures wandering amongst the forests with sticks and plastic bags. Obviously we haven’t got a clue where to find them. We did find one under the swing a few years back but didn’t realise that if you pull the whole thing from the ground instead of cutting it with a knife they won’t grow back. So that was our secret stash out of the window.
Anyway on Saturday morning Matt went to the boulangerie in Champsac for the bread and there on the counter was a huge basket of Cepes which Firmin, the boulanger, had found in his secret spot in Bussiere Galant. He’d found 10kg apparently all at once, Matt told us when he came back. Etienne said that he should have bought some to go with the magret de canard we were having that evening ( a Saturday ritual of excess when Matt does the cooking and pours duck fat and a ton of salt over everything - and makes the tastiest meal of the week by far). After that we couldn’t let the idea lie so decided to dedicate the day trying to find some/one/a stalk….anything, and went off to Les Ollieres to see if there were any beneath the oak trees, which is their fabled home of choice.
Obviously anyone living in the village would have tried here already but we decided to plough on regardless through intermittent driving/drizzling rain. Not a sausage.
We went over to Ian Grey’s lake and had a shuftie around there where the kids, who still have the gift of sight, managed to find quite a few interesting looking things - although not the illusive green foamed one we were after.
Later in the evening we got the champignon book out to find that most of the stuff we’d found wasn’t edible or looked almost exactly like ones which could have been either bon comestible or toxique grave.
Anyway Matt popped into the boulangerie again on the way back from our unsuccessful forage to buy a token cepe for the duck and came out looking ashen.
He’d only picked one - which had happened to weigh over half a kilo and it had cost 8€. Perleeeaaaassssee……………
Here is a photo of the cepe in question and the finished item which filled half a bowl. It was delicious though. The secret, for anyone who hasn’t cooked them before, is to cook them until they’re crisp, and definitely not to the melted mucus stage which is sometimes how you find them in jars ……. or maybe that’s just a personal preference!

You know the other day I ended the blog with ‘what can possibly go wrong’ or something of that sort when talking about Matt going over to England to pick up a car we’d seen on Ebay. Well……for the most part the journey went well. He was given a lift to England by Robert, in his state of the art BMW, in good time and without incident, although they arrived to find Calais under a blanket of pouring rain. The next call came from the train station in London, to where he’d travelled from Ashford and where he was meeting Robin, a friend with whom he was staying the evening. He said that he’d been there 10 minutes, couldn’t find him anywhere and that it was freezing. Not taking a coat proved to be an optimistic move and was where the rot started….refusing to take heed of the old scouting maxim ‘be prepared’.
I got a phone call from him yesterday lunchtime to say that he’d arrived at Luton, had been picked up by the car dealer, and was sat in his office.
‘Are you ready to do a Paypal transfer?’ Matt asked me. But of course. I’d been sat at the kitchen table tied to a game of Monopoly for 2 hours waiting to spring into action at the drop of a phone call.
‘I don’t take Paypal mate’ I heard the Greek voice boom in the background.
‘He doesn’t do Paypal’, Matt repeated.
‘Why?, I asked
‘Why?, Matt asked him.
‘Charges are too expensive – I’d end up paying about 200 quid on £2000’.
‘Can’t you just use the credit card then’, I asked.
‘I’ve already asked. He doesn’t take them’
‘What kind of operation’s he running there?’
‘A cash one obviously’, Matt replied and turning to the car dealer suggested that the only recourse left would be to go to the bank and get cash out with his French Visa card.
‘You won’t get any cash out of a bank with that’, said Panos helpfully.

Whilst he was queuing in the bank I had a look on the internet to find that the Paypal fees for a £2000 transaction were infact £55, so phoned Matt to suggest that he just added the extra to the price which would save having to traipse around looking for a bank but when I got through he was already in the RBS getting the money out. He’d walked out of the first bank after 10minutes of arguing with the cashier who refused to give him any money on account of the fact that his signature was different from the one on his driving license 29 years ago – and despite the fact that he had his passport with him. Anyway , after much to do, money changed hands, the car was started and off he went.
The next call came from the Hotel Richelieu in Calais at 7pm. The photo on the internet with their star room on the front page sporting toile de Jouy wallpaper and leopard print carpet should have been fair warning of what lay ahead but I thought it looked funky. Apparently it smelt it too. It was raining outside and dark and the windscreen wipers on the car weren’t working so he’d had to drive around looking for the hotel with his head out of the window.
At 9.15am this morning I phoned to see if he’s left yet. He had and was at a garage, minus the car - which was still at the hotel with a flat battery. The battery on the mobile was about to go too so there was a worrying lack of communication all morning and uncertainty as to whether he or the car would be making it back today….or ever. The problem with the windscreen wipers, they said, might be the motor and as they were completely blocked that day and couldn’t look at the car until tomorrow suggested going to the Carrefour garage to pick up some product which stops water from sticking to the windscreen. Very helpful advice pre an 8hr journey home. It seemed that another night in the leopard suite beckoned.
Luckily, after a lot of walking around he found another garage, a father and son team, who sorted it out so that at 12.30pm I had a call saying that he was on his way back. I don’t know what the matter with it was or how much it’s all cost but that, and any tales of the journey home, of which there are sure to be many will have to wait for another day and another blog.
About 10 minutes after writing that I had a call, at 5pm, having travelled for 4 and a half hours, saying that he’s just stopped at a service station south of Paris, which it’s taken him hours to get round and hopefully he’ll be back in about 4hours.
How quickly the memories come flooding back of life before the airport at Limoges.