18 Is My Lucky Number - Monday 18th August

An update on the bean progress with the bare garage wall behind

You may have read the headlines “Tourists in France attacked by mountain dogs guarding sheep”. Well, I bet you don’t read the one that says “English woman savaged by goat and cow disguised as cheese”.

We tried the bed switch last night and at 3.00am I was awake and in pain and decided that the time had come to stop blaming the bed and have a serious think about my eating and drinking patterns over the past week. The scorching heat had abated last Monday and with it went our ability to drink water like thirsty camels arriving at an oasis. We still drank some, but nothing near the amounts that we had been getting through. My clever habit of drinking wine mixed with water and ice had gone out of the window when I had started sampling some of the bottles that we had purchased during the wine fete at Le Clerc, and we don’t even want to discuss the baguette, croissants and the pain au chocolat! Of course, there was no let up in the consumption of brie, camembert, goat cheese, and all the other wonderful cheeses on offer. Not having eaten cheese for the past five years unless it was a bit of parmesan sprinkled onto spaghetti or the occasional slice of pizza, and never keeping bread in the house, my liver was making a very clear statement.

“Step away from the pate, the cheese and pork stuffing meat. Put down the wine glass and pick up the water glass. Avoid the supermarket and the boulangerie and head for the fruit stalls”.

So from this morning, I am surrounded by bottles of water, slices of apple, and as soon as we head out to do some shopping, I will be stocking up on melons. You see before you a reformed citizen of France who has to stop acting like a tourist on a five week binge and settle down to being a responsible and slim permanent resident.

We nearly fell out of the window with excitement this morning when a truck loaded with cement and a concrete drilling machine parked outside the house and started digging up the road. This could mean one of three things.

1. They were going to install a speed hump to reduce the noise and the manic racetrack behaviour on our stretch of road.
2. They were digging up the “tout è l’e gout” which is the extension of our rather smelly sewage system.
3. France Telecom had arrived to lay a new line to the house.

It turned out to be number three, but before you get excited on our behalf, they weren’t laying a new line but fixing the concrete around the manhole cover that was starting to sink into the road surface. I was all for offering them coffee and the use of the loo if they would just chuck in a speed hump while they were at it, but sadly, like workmen all around the world, their job is specific and their worksheet is unbending.

Jean is marching around with an assortment of tools in his hands and making various banging noises around the corner out of sight of the terrace. When I ask him what he is doing, he merely says “Helping the guys” which I know is a big fat lie. Eventually curiosity will get the better of me and I will go and see what clever plan he has come up with this time. When I think that we arrived on the farm in Africa and neither of us had the first idea how to set about doing anything much, by the time we left, Jean could strip the gears on the windmill, service the diesel engine, string a tight wire fence and even put his hand inside a cow and produce a calf. After five years in Miami doing nothing much other than pounding the keys of a computer, it is so good to see him with a hammer and a chisel in his hand, and a look of deep satisfaction when he sees a job well done.

Curiosity has been satisfied. Clever man has moved a row of rocks that were cemented in to the edge of the driveway. He had made some changes a while back but it still wasn't enough, and reversing out is always a bit of a trick and we really don’t want to damage Michelle’s car despite its considerable age. In moving the line of rocks back by a couple of feet, he has not only made the drivers life far easier, but he has left a nice little border into which can go an assortment of bedding plants that will create a lovely splash of colour on the rocks.

The sun is playing hide-and-seek today which means that the temperature is far more pleasant, and the plumbago is looking far brighter, and hopefully by lunchtime, so will I. Right now I feel like a walking swimming pool with about three litres of water sloshing about inside and a rather muggy head from the effects of the de-toxing that must be going on. I can hear you saying “we have no sympathy for you – anyone who tries to commit suicide by eating cheese and washing it down with wine deserves all they get”.

Another project is underway. We are determined to grow some of the very pretty climber that seems to do well on sunny walls. The bare garage wall that forms the side of the courtyard gets full sun and a covering of the red and gold leaves in autumn would be so pretty. The pounding has begun as Jean attempts to break a hole in the concrete in order to get a root going. Now where did I put the last two headache pills?

You’ve probably heard the theory that stolen plants always grow better. We’ve been really trying to do the legal thing and buy some of the climber but a trip to the garden centre this afternoon proved fruitless because “the green man” who knows about everything wasn’t there today. We went down to the quarry in the hopes of finding some rambling over the old stone walls, but once again were disappointed. Refusing to be beaten, we then drove all around the back of the village and out into the vineyards.

The lovely buildings of St Jean de l’Arbousiers winery are covered with the stuff but we didn’t want to get nicked by the watchman in the process of stripping his walls so we bypassed that and continued to St Drezery. Jean’s old friend Joseph lives there but despite several phone calls, we couldn’t raise him. Perhaps we should just nip in and check up on him. Oh dear, no Joseph, but his walls were covered in the much sought after climber! I can’t think of anyone who would more willingly give us a few cuttings, so we filched a couple and have put them into the hole in the concrete next to the garage wall. Now all we have to do is hope that they take a liking to the surface and in no time, we will have a thick coating of leaves adorning the building.

I haven’t mentioned the “you know what” so far today, but of course we still don’t have a “you know what” but Jean is right this moment making his daily phone call. The moment he got through, they asked if he was Mr Fagalde, so clearly we are making some sort of headway. She says that red lights are flashing on her screen so we seem to have got to the top of some sort of lost of jobs needing urgent attention, but regardless of the encouraging sound of her voice, it is not the sound that we wish to hear. What we need to hear is a loud ringing sound. It is five weeks to the day since we arrived and the phone was ordered in the first week. We are assured of a phone call tomorrow morning from the technician himself and it starts to look as though they only really got working on the problem last Thursday just before the long weekend. Never try and get anything done in France in August.