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| Plage du Platin, France |
The weather here has moved properly into autumn now, with
temperatures sometimes dropping to just below 10°C at night though still in the
upper teens and twenties every day and usually sunny and dry, up to this last
week or so. Leaves are just falling from
the trees here and there are lots of nice autumn colours. The pool’s a bit on the cool side though –
about 14°C at present and you have to be very, er.., keen to swim in that
temperature. However, we've also continuued to explore new places locally and went to St-Palais-Sur-Mer last week, taking a walk along the wind-blown but warm and sunny coast to Plage du Platin.
We’ve kept our social life
healthily busy too and are planning our winter activities. We’ve booked a Christmas spectacle, Le Mystère de Noël, at Puy du Fou for
the end of November. Puy du Fou is said to be France’s top theme park after
Euro-Disney, but it doesn’t have rides, it has medieval and historically themed
displays and spectacles. It also gives
us an opportunity to try Dusty in a cattery for the first time. We’ve nothing arranged for early next year yet
but we’re planning to fit in a trip or two to the UK and a snowy holiday as
soon as we can do so comfortably. We are
investigating the possibility of a house/pet sitter for next year to fit in a spring
or summer holiday – any volunteers?
Renovations
Our days are still busy, with plenty of work on the house
getting done, lots more plans for things to do on and around it developing and
at last a builder sorted to do our drive for us. He finished this week and it’s all looking
much better. He also shifted several
tons of spoil from the demolished barn so we’ve been able to make a little
progress on that as well.
The pointing along the back wall of the house is
complete; pointing other walls and rendering continues more slowly and a new
project has started to replace the ditch along the side of the back garden with
a proper soakaway.
The drainage from the
drive at the front as well as a lot of gutters will run into it so it needs to
be better than at present. We’ve also
started removing the giant leylandii hedge to make way for a more manageable one to
plant this winter.
Around the house
Crops from the potager
have finished now for the season though we still had a few raspberries, strawberries
and peppers up to a couple of weeks ago, and of course we have a good stock of
our own potatoes and onions. We picked the
grapes off the vines and as well as grape juice from them we have a little wine
fermenting, and the walnut tree is busy shedding nuts for us at present – they
seem to be better than last year’s, as is the apple crop. Dusty the cat is regularly bringing in voles
and mice to play with and sometimes eat. (Yuk!) We’re trying to discourage her
from bringing them in but we don’t know what she gets up to outside or when we’re
out.
We now have four night storage heaters working, keeping the
place toasty as the temperatures drop, and together with the log burners and
heat exchangers we’re sure we’re not going to be cold in the house. Night rate electricity is relatively cheap
here so we think it’s the most economic way of getting background central heating;
together with the heat exchangers we hope we’ll be keeping our electricity
bills down. Lots of friends locally
cannot afford the oil or gas for their central heating systems, and we reckon
that’s only going to get worse, medium to long term. Here in France more than 75% of electricity comes from nuclear generation and there is a slight risk that as these are run down green energy - eg from the hundreds of wind farms etc. - won't replace it fast enough, but it's still more secure than fossil fuel.
And we’ve lots of firewood stored up – enough for at least
two winters at present, and a couple of old trees yet to cut down for
more. We’ve only lit one of the fires
two or three times so far but expect to do so more often in the coming
weeks. We are also putting together an
order for new saplings together which, with a dozen or so oak seedlings to plant,
will give us a lot more trees on the land – to create a small woodland at the
bottom by the stream.
Chickens
We get way more eggs than we can eat so we frequently give
them away to friends and they do seem to be a welcome gift. We ‘acquired’ an extra chicken a few weeks ago.
She is a very pretty Light Sussex variety and we’d absolutely no idea where she’d
come from. Jeanne went in to secure the chicken coop door one evening and there
amongst our brown chickens was this white one settling in for the night. She’s
bigger than our chickens and ate much more food than they do but we didn’t have
had any eggs from her. We’ve no idea how
she got into our chicken field as the fence is too high for her to have got
over it; we asked the neighbours and one has now come round to claim her, but
she’ll be surprised to be back home and will have to settle in there all over
again.
Health
Rhys is progressing steadily, (downhill in some respects –
eyesight, hearing, twinges etc. due to age no doubt! But otherwise improving gradually) and
Jeanne has had to have a couple of days in the clinique for a small operation.
As a result we’re still great fans of the French healthcare
system which is a mix of state funded (actually paid for by our previous national
insurance/social charges) and a portion paid for directly by the patient.
Basically most things are paid for 70% or in the case of hospitalisation 80% by
the state and you pay the difference yourself. You can take out insurance to
pay for your contribution. As the charges are not high (23 euros to see your GP
of which you pay 6 euros) we chose to pay top-up insurance for hospitalisation
only which costs 58 euros per month for both of us; if you go into hospital you
just have to pay ‘board and lodging’ which is about 86 euros per day for a
single room.
Jeanne first saw our GP at the end of July, saw the consultant
mid-August and he asked if she wanted to have the op in September. She said this wasn’t convenient as we had
visitors so we scheduled for October instead! When we visited the clinic to see
the anaesthetist the week before surgery and to reserve a room we were told
that 100% of the costs of the surgery were being met by CPAM (like NHS) as it
was considered ‘essential’, so we or the insurance would only have to pay for
the board and lodging element. The net result is that even if we’d no insurance
the bill would have been easily affordable.
However we do have one whinge – the hospital food is
generally awful! The day of the operation for her evening (only) meal Jeanne
got a bowl of unidentifiable soup (same as the previous day’s soup) with a
stale roll, a plate of mashed potato in a swirl (it tasted like instant mash)
and a slice of boiled ham followed by apple puree. However as the anaesthetic
hadn’t worn off she threw up every time she took a mouthful so it was no great
hardship!
Rhys and Jeanne
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