Of Trees, Cats and Neanderthals

Timber

It’s tree pruning and felling season again and over the past month we’ve taken down a lot of wood, cut it, stacked it and shredded the unusable bits. As you might imagine, cutting down sizable trees with a chainsaw is not a risk-free business. For some years I’ve been intending to buy a hard hat but haven’t got round to it. So this year I diligently added ‘hard hat’ to our shopping list. Blow me down but the very next day a tree trunk fell on my head! It’s true! It was quite a small one really but capable of doing a bit of damage. What a pity I hadn’t been to the shops since I wrote ‘hard hat’ on the list. So the damage – a mere scalp wound – was done. But guess what; I’ve got a hard hat now!


Terminator 2 – The Liquid Phase

We’re pleased to report that Maisie has now settled in. She has now realised that this is in fact her house and at the slightest sign of boredom or hunger, one or both of the human occupants will drop everything to attend to her needs. She’s been very gracious in allowing to keep our old bedroom and to get a few hours sleep each night but otherwise she’s a hard taskmistress.

She was quite poorly over Christmas and New Year with a really horrid cold (although this didn’t stop her beating the living daylights out of the Blessèd Virgin Mary on the Christmas tree on a daily basis – a true Protestant our cat. The poor old BVM must have been relieved when she was returned to her box on 6 January. As the photo shows, Maisie ‘helped’ us to take down the decorations).




She spent days sneezing over everybody and everything in sight, a truly organic experience. Eventually she had to have some hideously expensive trips to the vet. Unfortunately, the antibiotics designed to dry her up at the front had the opposite effect at the other end! We preferred the exploding nose to the erupting rear. Happily she’s fine now and utterly adorable (a considerable shock for the previously cat-indifferent Mr A and a huge change from her predecessor).


Gymknacka

Thanks to our local free monthly ‘Creuse News’ we discovered that a new gym has opened in our local town. This, we felt, was really good news.

In England we’d been members of an excellent gym for 10 years or so and we found it great for keeping fit and for managing stress. Although we thought that a gym would be unnecessary here – our outside work keeps us reasonably fit and stress is not exactly present at the same levels as before – we did try the municipal gym a few years ago. This was not a success. Not only were many of the machines in poor repair, some of them could only be used when a member of staff was present. Since this amounted to only about 10 hours a week, that wasn’t much use to us. The final factor was the clientele. All gyms have them, the young male body-builders. You know the type, the mouth-breathers with the ridge over the eyes and the knuckles scraping the ground. Unfortunately, this gym had a preponderance of them and, frankly, they’re a bit off-putting, especially to Mrs A.

The opening of a new, well-equipped gym with a membership comprising mostly homo sapiens sapiens was therefore of some interest, especially to me as I don’t get out much these days. So I took out a month’s trial membership and off I went. I was quite nervous since it’s a good 6 years since I did any serious aerobic exercise but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I could do. I soon returned to a routine of 3 visits per week doing 40 minutes of running, skiing, cycling and rowing per session. And it didn’t take long before this healthy exercise began make its mark. I’m now sitting at home with a calf strain. B*gger!

Of pet shops and Christmas activities

It’s an Aladdin’s Cave! Since Maisie arrived (see last blog and picture) we’ve found ourselves visiting a shop



which specialises in items for pets. We haven’t had to do that for 20 years are our eyes have been opened. It’s not just the vitamin pills, the food for cats with delicate stomachs, the compounds and formulae to strengthen teeth, the several varieties of special cat-litter. We were absolutely intrigued to find toys (e.g. a ‘cat tree’ which has a little niche for curling-up and sleeping at ground level surmounted by a ‘trunk’ which doubles as a scratching post and which has a viewing platform at its summit) costing upwards of 50 euros and which the cat will almost certainly ignore completely. How can any self-respecting cat be seen out without a designer-labelled collar? Say goodbye to pet halitosis - buy a toothbrush and some toothpaste. (You'll probably also need elastoplast and Savlon if you are going to try to use these on your cat.) Want to stop your dog from destructive chewing? No problem; buy it a large bag of dried pigs ears (honest)! Going away for a few days and don't want your cat to (a) starve and (b) get lonely? Buy an electronic cat-feeder and record a message to be played to the cat each time it eats! But best of all are the clothes for dogs. Ranging from waterproof anoraks in a range of tasteful fabrics and colours to knickers (chastity-belts?) for females in heat, you can fritter away a fortune on haute couture for your little darling. It’s great!

As Christmas approaches, we have engaged in two of our traditional pre-Christmas treats. On Saturday we went to Clermont Ferrand to visit the Christmas market and to have our ‘Office Christmas Lunch’ in our

favourite restaurant. Both were great but the undoubted highlight was the journey. The weather has been VERY cold here recently but we’ve had no snow so far. However, in the high areas we cross between here and

Clermont, they’ve had snow to go with the temperatures. The volcanoes look stunning in the snow. (In case you aren’t aware, if you click on the photos, you can see them at full size.) And it certainly was cold there. As we reached the Col des Goules (970m) at around 10 a.m. it was still only –8°C. That had moderated to a balmy –6°C on our return journey.

Yesterday we went to a local Christmas market, in Moutier d’Ahun. Again it was very cold but we’re not sure even that justified this lady sticking her head up a sheep’s bottom!

TERMINATOR 2

Some 4 months after the demise of Gin, our cat of 20 years’ standing, a rush of blood to the head has seen us acquire another. Meet Maisie, a real troublemaker if ever we saw one.

We found Maisie at a rescue centre. Apparently, very large numbers of animals are lost or abandoned in this part of France. The rescue centre had 40 or 50 cats, half-a-dozen dogs, three goats, several ducks and a goose, all of which had been rescued. All of the cats were kept indoors and we’ll leave you to imagine the stench.

Because Maisie has spent virtually all her life with all these cats and has come into contact only with the two people who have fed her, it took almost three weeks before she would let us touch her. Prior to that, if we tried to touch her she hid In a cupboard (good) or displayed extremely effective use of her claws (very bad).

Now that she’s discovered the joys of being stroked, she’s become obsessed. There are, however, two drawbacks to this. One, she insists on being stroked under the kitchen table or one of the kitchen chairs. This is a bit inconvenient but bearable. Two, she gets so carried away she almost always farts. This is not at all bearable!

She’s outside now so I’m just off to take the clothes peg off my nose.

Time to Kill and other stuff

Time to kill

There‘s no doubt about it, when you move to another country there are elements of the local culture which take some getting used to. France, of course, is no exception. Double-parking outside the Boulangerie or the Tabac; not indicating on roundabouts and driving all the way around the outside of them; parking on roundabouts; surly and unhelpful shop assistants; the sudden disappearance - for weeks on end – from supermarket shelves of staple items; the inordinate length of time necessary to complete relatively minor road-works are among many things we’ve had to adjust to since we moved here but, except on bad days, we cope with them quite well now. However, there is one difference in particular that we, well at least Mr A, has not been able to adjust to: NOTHING starts on time.

Take last Friday as an example. We decided we’d go to a concert given by a Ukulele Swing Jazz Band. The concert was advertised to start at 8.30 pm. When did it start? At 9.10 pm. This is quite normal. In fact, our French friends often ask us if we’ve become used to ‘Le petit quart d’heure Creusois’ or ‘Le petit quart d’heure Limousin’ (the little Creuse/Limousin ¼ hour), their way of referring to the fact that nothing starts less than 15 minutes later than advertised. Well the answer, at least in Mr A’s case, is a resounding ‘No!’

Mr A, of course, is a well-known fighter of lost causes, a sort of modern King Canute who is unable to recognise that the considerable force of his will cannot change the ingrained habits of thousands of people. He therefore burns hundreds of calories and raises his blood-pressure pointlessly by fuming when a film starts late because people are still arriving, or when he has to sit in an uncomfortable and stiflingly hot/freezing cold church waiting for a concert to start.

‘Don’t people realise’, he is wont to rant, ‘that as long as they hold up the start for the late-comers, people will never learn to arrive on time?’

And as his words just melt into the air, Mrs A gives a little sigh and wonders how many more times in her life she’ll have to listen to this.

Migrants

They’re off. For the last couple of weeks the cranes have been flying overhead, heading towards North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. It’s always a wonderful sight but, of course, it heralds the cold days of winter. They’ll be back in February though.

A load of old bull

Mr A and Miss A encountered this fine figure of a Charolais bull when walking recently. Doesn’t he look friendly?

Nuts

Mrs A was amused to find some hazelnuts and nesting material in one of her hiking boots in the barn the other day. We doubt if this little visitor was the culprit but it would have been something equally furry and cute.

A Summer Summary – Not Too Summery!

I find that more than a month has passed since I last posted. I’ve no idea where the time has gone but here, to catch up, is a little summary of our summer.

June:- In the house the highlight was the replacement of 20 windows with new, wood-framed double glazed units. In the garden, in between spells of rain, we stood and watched all our tomato plants die from blight and listened to the grass growing at a rate of an inch a day. Socially, June is the pinnacle of the choir’s year and we sang in 5 concerts and had the end of year party. Mrs A played the ‘cello in a couple of ‘School of Music’, or ‘Conservatoire’ as we now have to call it, concerts, one of which Mr A attended and thoroughly enjoyed. Our friends Sue and John spent a night here on their mini-tour of France.

July:- In the house, Mrs A started staining the new window-frames. Unfortunately the new backdoor for the kitchen was not made before the factory’s annual closure in August so we had to spend the whole month with a mattress stuck in the gap with the consequent loss of light. In the garden, the wet, cool weather continued to impede the progress of virtually everything. However, we did have the compensation of finding a blackbird nest full of youngsters under the eves of the barn AND we saw two golden orioles flying around in the garden. We often hear these beautiful summer visitors but rarely see them. We also saw a hoopoe when we out in the car one day. We said goodbye to our cat of 20 years when we took her on a one-way trip to the vet. The quality of her life had deteriorated so much it was the kindest thing to do. Socially, we had David and Anne for a week at the beginning of the month and our mothers for fortnight later. Poor David and Anne. They’ve only been once before and had a week of rotten weather in the middle of an otherwise decent summer. This year they had a very patchy week in the middle of a rotten summer. As usual, our mothers had the best weather of the summer, not that that’s saying much.

Aug:- See previous blog.

Sep:- The backdoor is fitted. Whoopee! In the garden, we find that deer are now regular and unwelcome visitors. The garden is now festooned with dead CDs and carrier bags in an attempt to ward them off. We were delighted to find that we have a resident glow-worm. Not much by way of social life but we did have a GREAT week away in the Cévennes. It was sunny, hot and wonderfully relaxing. Discovered that Mrs A will be working again this year. We had mixed feelings about that but it does help us with the dominant issue we’re facing at the moment (see next blog).

There, you're up-to-date. Now watch out for the big stuff in the next posting!

There's nothing like a nice, relaxing holiday...

We’ve done it again. Ten days after returning from our summer holiday, we’re still suffering from exhaustion. How do we manage so often to come back from holidays even more tired than when we went? Here are a few handy tips.

Make sure that you leave home at a spectacularly stupid time of day. We had to rise at 4 a.m. for this particular holiday. That itself would have worn us out but…

Try to arrange for a particularly long journey to your destination, ideally by a very tiring form of transport. We left the house at 5.30 in the morning. We arrived at our destination at 8.30 p.m. the following day. We passed the 39 intervening hours in a car (20 hours) and on a ferry (19 hours). The ferry, while not bad, was quite old and not

fantastically comfortable. We were a bit nervous when we saw the captain (pictured) but couldn’t find out any more about him. We tried to get some information out of Tom the cabin boy, but he just smiled and said nothing. (This probably means something to older British readers!)

Arrange an itinerary when you arrive which means spending several hours in the car each day, seeing some wonderful sights, but having little time to get out and enjoy them. Make that special by having the driving duties dumped on you without notice, ensuring that you spend hours behind the wheel of a elderly left-hand drive people-carrier on some of the narrowest, drive-on-the-left roads in western Europe.

Best of all, go away with 8 other people with whom you have to spend virtually every minute of every waking hour. To add extra spice, make sure that 3 or 4 of them are completely batty and have an approach to food, organisation, personal space, peace & quiet and share of work during the holiday diametrically opposed to your own.

Finish the holiday with a return journey as punishing as the outward trip. Returning home to find an acre of knee-high grass and horrible cold, wet weather just adds the final touch!

We’ve recently been to Ireland. We went with two French families with whom we are very friendly and with whom we spent a week in Provence last year. These are lovely people who are generous of spirit and mean no-one any harm. However, we did find a fortnight a bit of a strain this time. We travelled in two cars, neither ours, and by Irish Ferries to Roslare and then spent a week in Kerry and a second in Sligo.

In truth, we tried to do far too much sightseeing although there was so much to see that none of us wanted to miss anything. Unfortunately, one of the families lost their nerve about driving on the left so Mr and Mrs A spent too much time observing the scenery from behind the wheel of a car or while navigating.



What a spectacularly beautiful place the west of Ireland is and what a fantastically expensive country it has become. One of our group was expecting to find Ireland unchanged since she last visited, 31 years ago. She was sorely disappointed with respect to prices. (The prices don't seem to have scared away the tourists though. Everywhere was very busy and we were struck by the omnipresence of French people in large numbers.) However, there is still much to enjoy, not least the endless opportunities to drink a pint of Guinness while listening to some excellent diddley-aye music in the pub.



Mrs A and I will definitely go back and when we do, we’ll definitely go ON OUR OWN! In the meantime, we’re having a week away soon to get over it all.

Spoilsports

Governments eh! What are they like? They just can't seem to cope with the electorate enjoying itself.

Back in the UK, the ban on smoking in public places came into force on Sunday. From 2008, a similar ban will come into force in France. You see what I mean? The wholly innocent pleasures of sitting in a pub, staining the ceiling and your lungs brown and making sure that your clothes and hair, as well as those of all present, reek of smoke are now deemed unacceptable by our over-centralised, po-faced, Governments. As people are wont to say, 'They've done this off their own back. It's the nanny state gone mad. It's all part and parcel of modern life, and, without a doubt, rightly so. It mustn't be allowed to happen in any way, shape or form. At the end of the day, let's hope it's a damp squid.'

Worse than this outrageous attack on people's human right to smoke is the French Government's attempt to make car journeys much less interesting. At present, all private cars have a number-plate on which the final two digits identify the Departement (county) the car comes from. As well as providing a useful tool for quasi academic research, e.g. how many Creusois, the people of our 'middle-of-nowhere' departement, ever widen their horizons by travelling, and of giving you some idea where you are (the majority of the cars you see carry '43'? You're probably somewhere near St Etienne.) it also provides the means for hurling much more inventive abuse at drivers who upset you on the road. 'Stupid berk' (if you'll pardon the rather extreme language) can be replaced by 'Stupid Breton berk' or 'Just what you'd expect from some sun-addled nit-wit from the Côte d'Azur'. I think you'll agree that these more specific forms of words are just so much more cutting.

The official reason for this measure is, unusually for France, to reduce bureaucracy. Currently, if you move from one departement to another you have to re-register the car. This provides loads of jobs, and opportunities to be unthinkingly officious, to the vast army of 'fonctionnaires' (civil servants. Roughly one in four people in work in France work for the Government.) However, I suspect a different motive.

To say that Parisiens are unpopular might be a world record-breaking understatement. Their perceived arrogance and 'flashness' is a constant irritant to those outside the 'Ile de France' region. Believe me, if you thought my examples of the invective which might be directed towards those from St Malo or Nice were shockingly harsh, you should hear some of the stuff hurled at those bearing the tell-tale '75' on their number-plates. The driver of the Twingo parked next to the Scenic registered in the Creuse (above) probably had to wait until dark to return to the car.

From 1 January 2008, the requirement to have the departmental numeric code on the number-plate will be removed for new registrations, although individuals may add the code to the plate if they wish. In her book 'Journey to the South', Annie Hawes notes that in similar circumstances in Italy, voluntary declaration became the norm. The question here is whether Parisiens will volunteer. And if they don't, will everyone without the code on their plates be assumed to be Parisien and have to suffer the consequences? We shall see.


Postman Pat




Cars such as this one are reasonably commonplace in our neck of the woods. Despite what you might expect, they are not electric but diesel-powered. The typical engine size is 400cc and they are slooooow. Sixty kph (40 mph) seems to be about their top speed but since, oddly, many of them seem to be the transport of choice of enormously fat people, they usually only reach those speeds going downhill. I call them 'Postman Pat' cars, not because they are all red - they come in a variety of colours - but because they are not much bigger than the 'Postman Pat' rides kids love in supermarkets.

More Beasties



Further examples of our local wildlife. Note that the shrew is hunting in quite small-calibre gravel. That gives you an idea of how tiny it was.