Cruel Disappointment - Tuesday 12th August

The front of our little L shaped house after the first two weeks

We went all the way into Montpellier this morning and found our little Arab-run internet café in the back streets near the station. The proprietor welcomed us warmly, plugged us in and pointed out the coffee machine and left us to try and clear some of the backlog.

We had arrived a bit before opening time and had walked to the central station nearby in order to make use of the facilities, and there at the platform was the huge TGV train straining at the leash ready to make its run up to Paris. There is something so exciting and powerful about this train and having travelled on it once or twice, I know how thrilling it is to be racing across France at breakneck speed while sitting in comfort with a good book, sipping an excellent cup of coffee and ordering a hot meal. When the time comes for me to nip up to England to visit my mother, this will be one of my options, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I have to disembark at the Gare du Lyon and make my way across Paris to the Gare du Nord in order to link up with the Eurostar, it would be a very tempting trip. My next problem is that from St Pancras in London, I still have to make my way across London to Marylebone before another train trip out into the wilds of Buckinghamshire, so maybe the quick flight from Montpellier to Luton will be the best way to go even though it is somewhat boring by comparison.

We had been beavering away on the computers for nearly two hours when my cell phone bleeped and there was the message that we had been waiting for.

“France Telecom are happy to inform you that the problem on your phone line has been sorted out and your service is ready for use”.

We quickly closed up shop, nipped round the corner to the station and jumped on the first tram out to Sabblasou where the car was parked. Bursting in through the front door, we grabbed the receiver only to hear a big fat NOTHING!!

Jean is now on the cell phone to them and I am finding it hard to type as my fingers are crossed.

Something I did do while on the computer this morning was to email the shippers in Miami and try and shake them up a bit. Apparently they are dragging their feet with some paperwork that will allow the English shippers to expedite our delivery. It’s very hard knowing that you are blitzing someone and then realising that they are still fast asleep in bed and won’t get your blitz for another six hours.

The temperature has dropped considerably and with spells of rain and drizzle, we actually put on trousers and slightly warmer tops and carried an umbrella with us this morning. After four weeks of unbroken sunshine and excessive heat, it has been something of a relief to have cloudy skies, but it was strange to see the citizens of Montpellier clad in jackets and long pants instead seeing pretty girls, bare-shouldered and sun tanned, dressed in diaphanous tops and short skirts, and the men in their open necked shirts and open toed sandals.

Hey Ho. The man on the other end of the cell phone admits that we were sent a message by mistake and in fact there is still no connection. At least a technician is coming to the house tomorrow and will see if he can work out where the problem lies. As Churchill so aptly said, “This is nonsense up with which I will not put”.

For a while we sat in a heap like a pair of miserable hound dogs who had lost the scent. The annoying thing was that we had been getting on quite well at the little Internet Café and we had stopped what we were doing and had raced home only to be disappointed. Well, no point in sitting around doing nothing, so we drove back through Castries to the garden shop and although we couldn’t find the right size of piping to extend the irrigation system, we did find a couple of peach coloured oleander bushes to brighten up the entrance, a glorious blue plumbago which will wind its way up over the big metal frame in the front garden, a honeysuckle to put on the right side of the front door to match the one already working its way up the frame on the left, plus a few little ground covers. The rain held off just long enough for us to get everything into place and now we are resting on the terrace, telling ourselves that we can actually hear our vegetables growing in this lovely cool damp weather.

We have potted up a selection of cactus plants that we are going to take down to the cemetery later on if it stops raining. Jean was all for going now, but quite honestly, cemeteries are sufficiently doleful places even when the sun is shining, and right now the rain is coming down quite hard. He’s pretending it isn’t raining and has gone off to saw the big pile of wood into the right length to fit them onto the trailer. It is the payment to Michelle for the loan thereof and I think she’ll be wanting her trailer in September, and at the speed at which the weeks are whizzing by, I guess we had better be ready and loaded.

We also bought a packet of onion and a packet of spinach seed in the garden shop, and if all goes well I plan to have the deep freeze well stocked before the cold weather really gets going. Nothing like a steaming bowl of fresh vegetable soup when the mistral is howling and it’s bitterly cold outside. Now there’s a thought that never occurred to me while we were living in Miami!

It’s 6pm and just to confuse us, the sun is trying hard to come out even though there is still quite heavy rain. As my dear father used to say “It’s going to be a sunny night” after having watched the enthusiasm of the British weather man trying to make the best of a lousy day.

We zipped down to the cemetery and quickly scooped up the plaque engraved to the memory of Robert, Mamy’s second husband. It had a couple of chunks knocked off it, but Jean is quite sure that with a tube of superglue, he can put it to rights. We dropped off the cactus plant and a rather good pot of deep red silk geraniums. I’m not a great one for artificial flowers in a graveyard, but the battle against the hot dry wind here means that nothing natural will survive for any time at all. In many cases, there has been a serious amount of “gilding the lily” and the pots and baskets of plastic and silk flowers flow from every surface. I was quite glad that ours looked fairly realistic, but we are going to have to weight it down in a pot full of stones or the first blast of wind and it will fly off the Fagalde-Laurencont chest and end up decorating the grave of the mayor’s family who is two doors down.

“Snails” went up the triumphant cry that I was dreading. “Tons of snails in the garden – come and help collect them”

I thought of all sorts of excuses about not having any parsley or garlic on hand, but fortunately my beloved was taken off course by another animal.

“Quick – rescue mission needed” he called, and reckoning that this didn’t sound like something edible, I went out to find that he had discovered a very fat hedgehog who had fallen into the old cold frame. Curled up in a corner in a tight prickly ball, he was sadly situated next to the remains of a very flat ex-hedgehog who had clearly expired there a long time ago. With a spade, we carefully scooped him up and I did the only thing I knew about hedgehogs, and went and got him a saucer of milk. Five minutes later, he deigned to uncurl himself, stick his nose into the milk and then he stuck his nose into the air and off he sauntered under the bay tree hedge.

Maybe French hedgehogs have a more refined taste in milk or maybe the fact that the plate was plastic wasn’t good enough for him, but I have left the milk out just in case he returns. Either he will drink it, or else the neighbours cat who casually walks through our courtyard as if he owns the place will find that he has an unexpected treat waiting for him. He’d better not let Jean see him because with Jean’s well known apathy for cats, he might find he has another sort of treat waiting for him.