life in the Limousin

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Helen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.