This is a catch-up blog covering from August 2018 to Summer 2019. Not too much detail but hopefully interesting to those of you who don’t catch up with us as much as you and we might have liked.
Our daughter-in-law, Lianne, was taken ill early in the year with what appeared to be a flu-like virus that got into her heart and caused her heart to fail. Once the medics worked out what was happening she was admitted to Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham and had a heart transplant in March. A great shock to all the family. Lianne has recovered very well and is back home but continuing to be monitored by the hospital's heart team, who seem to be well on the boil picking up issues that come up. We had some trips over as a result and as a family we were all very grateful for and delighted with the positive support and prayers of so many friends and more distant family, as well, of course, for the wonderful treatment she received at the QE.
We managed to tack on a visit to attend an André Rieu concert in Maastricht n the way back from the UK on one of our trips. So pleased with it we plan to go again later in the year.
I joined the local archery club in Pons and have been enjoying getting back into something I did donkeys’ years ago when I was fitter, but now my progress feels depressingly slow and I am the only anglais in the club, so its social aspect is not as good as I’d like. I had to buy a new bow and all the kit in spring as the basic club equipment was holding me back, but I can practice at home now as well as at the club. Getting quite reasonable scores now, but not quite competition standard yet!
Work on our house continued at a much slower pace than previously, largely because we have completed most of the big jobs and some of the longer term work is subject to the weather, and it has often been too hot and dry, or too wet, or too cold to work with lime mortar on the old walls. However, spring and summer brought some opportunities for progress which we were able to take, but we’ve found it difficult to get local tradesmen to actually carry out work that they agreed to do. So we’ve had an ever-growing hedge that one local bod promised to top last October, still not done after a year of promises, and another person told us it would take three days and sacked the job when we queried why. (He had told us he and his partner would do it from the back of their pick-up truck driving along the straight row of 100 meters. Sounded to me like a half-day job!) So I may have to buy a long-handled motor hedge cutter and do it myself, though we’re still trying to find someone to do it for us as it’s a bit too strenuous for me now.
Some jobs got completed though. We at last had a new front door installed and a new door and window in the apartment, so we are 100% double glazed now. The dining room ceiling has been done with insulation and plasterboard between the beams, so looks a lot better and reduces noise transmission. And we had the stone feature chimney-breast in the salon completed by the original mason, so it’s looking good.
We’ve had more trips away. After last winter’s calamitous trip to the UK we tried a holiday in Italy for the New Year, and went to St Vincent in the Aosta Valley. Good hotel, great little town (with some great restaurants that we enjoyed using) but no snow. In fact people were sunbathing at the hotel in mid 20s °C. Heading back to France there was a lot of snow the other side of the Mt Blanc tunnel, but not much use to us! However we had a different calamity on that holiday when our car broke down and we were left fighting Mercedes for six months afterwards before they admitted their fault and paid up.
But other trips were more successful, fortunately. We had been failing to agree on a main holiday destination for this year since we decided to cancel our originally planned trip to the USA and Caribbean when Lianne became ill. A friend had told us about a cruise she’d just returned from so we though perhaps we’d try that, and so we took our very first cruise from Barcelona around the western Mediterranean for a week. We went to Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, Messina and Valletta and back to Barcelona, and enjoyed the whole thing overall, and would do it again. But we also learned a lot and would do any repeat a little differently.
Our potager has, with mostly Jeanne’s labour, continued to provide us with great crops of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, courgettes, squash, melons, berry fruits, and various other things, even better this year, and our hens were continuing to give us lots of eggs up to the beginning of July when we went off for a UK trip. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet got back up to volume yet, but we’re hopeful they’ll recover soon.
The weather was cool and wet early this year but very hot and dry right through summer, and broke with the solstice, so we’ve had a period of wet weeks. However, the ground needs it, and the cooler temperatures will be more amenable to getting things done, between showers!
Locally, our village café-bar and the boulangerie continue to be an asset to the village. The old agri-silo round the corner from us has been demolished, removing a huge eyesore, and the land may be used to build some houses in due course.
We went to a meeting at the department Prefecture to apply for our Cartes de Sejour, or residence permits, taking a stack of evidence to prove our right to residence here in the event of Britain leaving the EU and us becoming no longer EU citizens. Hopefully this will give us a little protection from the most important of the bad effects of Brexit. It won’t cover everything though, so we wait to see what we will have to accept to remain here, but much of it is still undecided – not by France, but by Britain.
Hopefully next update will not be so long coming. Best wishes everyone.
