life in the Limousin

Am feeling a little sheepish today. It was my friend Paul’s 40^th last night in Huddersfield, an event we’ve been looking forward to for ages. In the event, it was threatened by the weather with snow blizzards throughout the day making the roads hazardous. However, everyone gamely battled to get there and a great time was had by all……..well perhaps not all. One of my friends has two boys one an absolute angel and the other an absolute devil child aged 9. He is rude beyond belief, has absolutely no manners and argues the toss about absolutely everything. At one point he dumped a load of sweet wrappers over the floor and then refused my requests for him to pick them up. His Dad didn’t seem too bothered and was also unfazed by him telling me to ‘piss off’.

Thirty minutes later, as he and his party left a drink fuelled snowball fight developed. Snowballs were flying in all directions but I had spotted my target. I could see him in the distance gathering up snow for his next snowball and I seized my opportunity, aiming low and hard.

As he stood up to launch his next missile the whole affair played out in remarkable slow motion culminating in my snowball planting fairly and squarely in his face and almost knocking him off his feet. He turned angrily towards me like some kind of feral monkey and then promptly burst into tears. His Dad didn’t look too pleased but everybody else found it quite amusing and I didn’t particularly care until I woke up this morning feeling slightly guilty about the whole thing.

We had a great time last night but I’m suffering a bit today and haven’t ventured back out into the ever snowier conditions.

Yesterday, Fred (my Father-in-law) and I sat down to commence our planning for the work in France next year. I’m starting to feel enthused about the whole project once more. Due to the economy, exchange rate and uncertainty in our finances we haven’t done any work on the holiday home barn conversion for over a year. Therefore I haven’t though about it in too much detail and I really enjoyed the process of envisioning how things will look on completion.

There are many Gites and Chambre d’hotes in the area but our property will have four bedrooms, each ensuite and will therefore cater for 8 people in total. It will eventually have a pool and lovely terrace but that will come at the end of the development.

We plan to start again in February and yesterday we agreed the priorities and approach that we are going to take. Fred and Pat are travelling out in February to oversee the work and Fred will do some of the work himself. We’re really fortunate to have Fred’s expertise and experience and I know he is as keen as we are to see the project through to completion.

We had planned a week in France ourselves in January but we have made a radical decision instead to spend a week in Tenerife soaking up some sun. We haven’t holidayed anywhere else apart from France in 3 years and having both worked so hard recently we could use a relaxing break without stressing about my ever expanding list of jobs that need to be completed in France.

So our next trip to France will not be until April unless we go for a cheeky weekend in the interim. This makes me feel a little sad but our enthusiasm for our project and living in France remains undiminished.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Alan. 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.