The herb collection growing steadilyIt occurred to me today, while I was standing in the electric drill section of Leroy Merlin (these people should be paying me for free advertising) that I had picked up odd bits of different languages in rather strange places. My smattering of Sesotho had been learned largely in the Lesotho mountain trading station of Malealea in southern Africa, when my first husband and I went there as newly weds to run the station for a week. We arrived in the depths of winter, whereupon it promptly snowed, thus closing down the tiny airstrip and the only road which carried any traffic. Cut off from civilisation, we kept ourselves amused by taking all the money out of the safe in the shop and building our own monopoly board using the various trading stations around the country as properties, and airstrips instead of railway stations.
It was my job to hand out tickets for sweets to the little herdboys who would come in with sacks filled with old bones. With bare feet and runny noses, they would line up at the counter waiting for me to hand over the amount due to them once their bones had been weighed, but of course I always gave them more than they had earned, thus throwing out the book-keeping. But at least I did pick up quite a bit of the language between them and the excellent cook who ran the household.
My next language lesson was Afrikaans. It wasn't spoken in Lesotho, but I had already picked up a bit while watching my husband pound around a South African rugby field every weekend, and I picked up a bit more when I went into the cottage hospital across the border in order to give birth to my two children. But on the whole, the ability to be able to converse about rugby and medical matters didn’t much help once Jean and I started farming. I did make an effort to concentrate while in the farm Co-op, and it fell to me to relay instructions from my French husband to the Basotho staff who had a slight working knowledge of Afrikaans. No wonder that rows of beans turned out to be rows of potatoes, and cattle were put into the field on the left instead of the one on the right.
So here I was today, waiting patiently while Jean chose just the right drill bit in order to make some impression on our two foot thick solid stone walls, and listening to the sales pitch on the little TV screen. Now my knowledge (in French) of electric drills and the secrets to great irrigation systems has increased enormously, but once again, I doubt that these topics of conversation will come up all that much.
While I am on the subject of Leroy Merlin, I have to congratulate them on having not only lots of staff, but cheerful young agile staff who are ready, willing and able to find exactly what you want. The young ladies on the till are all trim, well turned out, smiling and efficient, and I am sorry to say that in most cases, the people doing a similar job in the shops of south Florida could do with a major training overhaul. In France, it would appear as though the customer is always right and he is there to be helped in order to make his shopping experience a pleasant one. What a strange concept!
Jean has finally conquered his irrigation systems, and it is now possible to simply turn on a tap, and the potager waters itself. He has also installed hosepipes to the front and back garden. This morning, he arrived in the kitchen and announced that he had completed the “vendange” and he placed a small bowl of deliciously sweet grapes onto the table. I think it took us all of five minutes to eat our harvest, but next year, we will have the four vines laden with fruit, and hopefully the plum, pear and peach trees similarly abundant.
Gone are the evenings when we would sit out on the terrace and have supper and then stay out there and read and work on the computers. By six thirty, we are starting to pull on jerseys and tracksuit pants and begin closing the windows. However, it was bliss to sit in the sun after lunch and have a snooze without being either burned or over-heated. We are thinking about the prospect of building some sort of decking in our sloping courtyard so that we will have a place for our table during winter, when our suntrap will be the best place to sit. Jean says that “I” am thinking about the decking, whereas he is still thinking about the curtains which need to go up, the pictures which have to be hung and the fact that we still need to work a few hours each day on the computers in order to make a living.
Having listened to some of the woeful financial reports currently rocking the various markets, we were swapping well known English sayings such as “cut your coat according to your cloth” when Jean came up with a French one.
“Never fart higher than your backside”. I leave it up to you to make what you will of that!
It was my job to hand out tickets for sweets to the little herdboys who would come in with sacks filled with old bones. With bare feet and runny noses, they would line up at the counter waiting for me to hand over the amount due to them once their bones had been weighed, but of course I always gave them more than they had earned, thus throwing out the book-keeping. But at least I did pick up quite a bit of the language between them and the excellent cook who ran the household.
My next language lesson was Afrikaans. It wasn't spoken in Lesotho, but I had already picked up a bit while watching my husband pound around a South African rugby field every weekend, and I picked up a bit more when I went into the cottage hospital across the border in order to give birth to my two children. But on the whole, the ability to be able to converse about rugby and medical matters didn’t much help once Jean and I started farming. I did make an effort to concentrate while in the farm Co-op, and it fell to me to relay instructions from my French husband to the Basotho staff who had a slight working knowledge of Afrikaans. No wonder that rows of beans turned out to be rows of potatoes, and cattle were put into the field on the left instead of the one on the right.
So here I was today, waiting patiently while Jean chose just the right drill bit in order to make some impression on our two foot thick solid stone walls, and listening to the sales pitch on the little TV screen. Now my knowledge (in French) of electric drills and the secrets to great irrigation systems has increased enormously, but once again, I doubt that these topics of conversation will come up all that much.
While I am on the subject of Leroy Merlin, I have to congratulate them on having not only lots of staff, but cheerful young agile staff who are ready, willing and able to find exactly what you want. The young ladies on the till are all trim, well turned out, smiling and efficient, and I am sorry to say that in most cases, the people doing a similar job in the shops of south Florida could do with a major training overhaul. In France, it would appear as though the customer is always right and he is there to be helped in order to make his shopping experience a pleasant one. What a strange concept!
Jean has finally conquered his irrigation systems, and it is now possible to simply turn on a tap, and the potager waters itself. He has also installed hosepipes to the front and back garden. This morning, he arrived in the kitchen and announced that he had completed the “vendange” and he placed a small bowl of deliciously sweet grapes onto the table. I think it took us all of five minutes to eat our harvest, but next year, we will have the four vines laden with fruit, and hopefully the plum, pear and peach trees similarly abundant.
Gone are the evenings when we would sit out on the terrace and have supper and then stay out there and read and work on the computers. By six thirty, we are starting to pull on jerseys and tracksuit pants and begin closing the windows. However, it was bliss to sit in the sun after lunch and have a snooze without being either burned or over-heated. We are thinking about the prospect of building some sort of decking in our sloping courtyard so that we will have a place for our table during winter, when our suntrap will be the best place to sit. Jean says that “I” am thinking about the decking, whereas he is still thinking about the curtains which need to go up, the pictures which have to be hung and the fact that we still need to work a few hours each day on the computers in order to make a living.
Having listened to some of the woeful financial reports currently rocking the various markets, we were swapping well known English sayings such as “cut your coat according to your cloth” when Jean came up with a French one.
“Never fart higher than your backside”. I leave it up to you to make what you will of that!
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