Waiting for Godot - Monday 4th August

Jean at work with the rotovator

I can’t recall the plot of the play but I do remember that it went on and on and became increasingly boring. Very similar to our wait for the internet. Jean phoned to customer services this morning and was assured that by this afternoon, we would have the equivalent of “a man up a pole” getting our line fixed. Of course in France, rather than ruin the landscape, a great number of the telephone and electricity wires are laid underground so presumably we will have “a man down a hole” doing what is required. It is now 5.30 and we are becoming concerned that the end of the working day is approaching (or else it has been so hot that the technician hasn’t even started his working day) and we are due for another disappointment.

Knowing that we would have no luck this morning, we drove down to St Aunes where the massive Le Clerc supermarket is situated. Just over the road is the equally huge Leroy Merlin which offers every gadget and gizmo that any handyman worth his salt could ever require. Taking into account that with the temperature knocking the 100 degree farenheit mark, we thought we had better delay purchasing our cool box groceries until we could make a quick run for home, so we tackled Leroy first.

Now that we have two neat rows of deeply rotovated soil which has been enriched with a few barrow loads of dried horse manure and some rich compost, we have to work out a better mode of watering it than Papy’s system which you may recall required him to be sitting on his flat rock with a sock on the end of his hose. When we were farming during one of the worst droughts ever seen in South Africa, we came across a very clever Israeli drip irrigation system which we installed in our small vegetable garden, and in no time at all we were picking, packing and freezing large quantities of green beans, spinach, radishes and peas.

We couldn’t find the exact thing in the irrigation department at Leroys, but we did come across a reasonable replica, so into the shopping cart it went, along with a piece of board, some small strips of wood and a tube of glue.

When our erstwhile employer told us to seek out large expensive offices in Miami, he also required us to furnish them, and by the time we had pulled all this together, he was paying out somewhere in the region of $15,000 a month for Jean to sit at a desk. The piece of wood, the strips of edging and the glue came to a grand total of about $6.00 and will work perfectly to hold Jean’s laptop while he continues to create a very useful monthly income from his own internet business.

We were determined to stock up with sensible items at Le Clerc. The fridge was empty and the deep freeze totally devoid of any form of sustenance so we trawled the aisles, loading up on cereal, chicken breasts, sausages, cheese, bread that could be frozen, fresh fruit and vegetables and the usual gallons of drinking water. Only when we got to the check-out did we realise that somehow a large box of pain au chocolat and two mille feulles had managed to sneak into the trolley without our noticing them. They were hiding behind a box of apricots and four large red peppers, hoping that they wouldn’t be noticed until it was too late. Well we showed them and promptly ate two of the pain au chocolates while pushing the trolley across to the car!

The parking at Le Clerc is well worth a mention. Acres of carpark are set up underneath roofing which not only supplies desperately needed shade for the vehicles, but which also supports large solar panels that in turn provide all the electricity for the supermarket. How clever is that?

I had a bad night last night. Not only were the beasties attacking me again, but I had a lousy backache. I suppose the backache could have been brought on by lifting a large bag of empty paint tins out of the trailer, loading a stack of branches into the trailer, helping Jean lift the rotovator into place, and forking over the compost pit. It never occurred to me to crawl out of bed and spray the sheets with bug spray and then stumble to the bathroom cabinet and find a pain killer.

The English couple that we met through Michelle told us that whenever anyone is coming from England to visit them, they always request large amounts of Nurofen Plus. I sympathised with them and said that whenever I visited my mother while I was living in America, I would go from chemist to chemist in the High Street and stock up. Why is it that the Americans and the French find it necessary to restrict our access to the best pain killer in the business, but you can buy it over the counter in England? If we’ve got the wit to stop smoking and restrict our alcohol intake, surely we are big enough to take it easy with the iboprufen.

We have quickly realised that whereas in the large supermarkets of America and England, it is possible to purchase just about any sort of “do it yourself” medication that the pharmaceutical companies have dreamed up, here in France, you have to find a Pharmacie and grovel to the pharmacist for day to day remedies like aspirin and nasal spray. You can buy as much pate de fois gras and other liver exploding items as you want in any supermarket you care to visit, but to purchase the antidote, you have to find parking and stand in a long queue to be issued with the much needed little yellow pills. You can buy wine in a box so large that it takes two of you to lift it, but you try and buy the pain killers that will offset the headache that ensues from trying to lighten the box too quickly.

There seems to be two sorts of pharmacies. One of them looks highly medical until you start to realise that the entire shop is given over to beautifying the body. Care of the corps in France is a full time job and every little village will have at least two hairdressers and probably a small salon which specialises in soothing, smoothing, massaging and generally pandering to the body beautiful.

French women really do have that certain something and I tried hard to work out what it was while we were at the féte champêtre. Accessorizing is half the trick and a good piece of jewellery or a carefully worn scarf can turn what appears to be a very ordinary dress into a fashion statement. Of course the sun tan is very big here still, and on the whole, women keep their figures neat and trim, and the combined factors certainly do create a very polished look.

As far as the men go, a loose shirt, a comfortable pair of chinos and what Jean insists on describing as Nigerian taxi driver shoes seems to be de rigueur but secretly I think they get away with it knowing that everyone is going to be looking at their wives rather than at them. Of course in some cases, a sun tan, a good haircut and the right dark glasses do go a long way to presenting the magazine image that we ladies occasionally have in our minds.