The Barbecue.

As expected, I woke to A Deluge, but I had said five Hail Mary’s the night before, so I spent the day in hope.  Although I am not entirely sure that this is what Hail Mary’s are supposed to be about.

It stopped raining at 3 o’clock and the sun came out.  Thank You, God.  Always say Thank You.  It is so easy to ask, and then forget who dun it.

We had a fine evening and good company.  The Potato Salad, as ever, was excellent.  Not sure about the food.  I didn’t cook that.

I retired to bed at 9pm, exhausted by all of my efforts, and left them to get on with it.  Heaven knows what time they all went home.

Food was left on the table so Marauding Stray Cat had a lovely time overnight, and probably a large number of his starving relatives.  He has got a lot of those.  Someone needs to do something about the cat problem around here.  Some of the kittens are in a pitiful state,  but The French don’t really care about cats, and I can’t gainsay them.  I just don’t know how.  My English neighbour has had five cats castrated or sterilised so far, but this was expensive.  And they still keep on coming.

God alone knows the whereabouts of Robin Dominic.  He could be lying in a ditch somewhere for all I know.  He has bogged off somewhere, and leaving me with no car and no tobacco.  I shall have his guts for garters when he gets home.

Dom’s lady friend brought me a CD by Andrea Bocelli.  Totally unexpected.  I cried….

Barbecue.

I am throwing a barbecue tomorrow.  If it doesn’t rain.  But every barbecue I have ever threatened brings on a deluge despite the forty day promise.  You can forget St. Swithin’s Day.  I long ago put a curse on that one.

Barbecues take planning you see.  Or perhaps that is the real problem.  I am totally incapable of acting spontaneously.

So softly, softly at the moment.  Done the Potato Salad, but we can eat that anyway, eventually.

The rest is just taking stuff out of the freezer tomorrow, and making sure that the marauding, stray cat can’t get at it.  He is such a pretty thing, but with such an anxious face.  I doubt that he will ever trust me.  So I could be wasting my time on this one. Let’s face it it, we all hope for something back when we feed abandoned animals.  So what to do when nothing is forthcoming?  Why does human kind expect something in return from the animals that they feed?

Enough already about Charlotte the Pug.  Yep, she is still with us.  Still blind, incontinent and flea ridden, no matter how hard I try.  God knows who named her Charlotte.  She is a Sidney if ever I saw one.  One brave little soul.  The truth is that I want her to die peacefully, but I very much doubt that she will do that any time soon.

Don’t go gentle into that dark night.  My thoughts precisely.  So perhaps we have things in common after all.

Rein de Tout.

Write about something, for God’s sake.

Went to The Food Bank.  This was good.  Loads of food yet again.  And such nice people.  This has changed my life.  Although perhaps not for obvious reasons.

Sat in the garden while my son made a hache of sharpening his Chain Saw.  My Chain Saw actually, but we won’t go into that.  Personally I just bought a new chain when the old one went blunt, and then took it to the shop for them to sharpen.  Two hours he spent while I got pissed from sheer boredom because he needed me to talk to him while he did it.  Horses for courses, our kid.  It’s worth paying them 5 Euros to do this for you when you can earn 20 Euros an hour using it.  Am I wrong or am I wrong?  Buy me another carton of wine and I will talk to you forever.  It would be cheaper to let them do it.  But Robin Dominic isn’t hot on economics as yet.

Demain.  I have absolutely nothing to do tomorrow, although no doubt my Christian soul will kick in, and I will be forced to find something to do.  Sitting on one’s backside doing nothing just isn’t on.  But I am getting old now and the bones ache from time to time.

I don’t know how this happened.  It crept up on me, so these days I do a small bit at a time, have a cup of tea, and then do another small bit.  Old age isn’t a lot of fun, but nothing much to do about it.  It just happens.

I have a way to go yet.  A Stick to help me walk one day?  And I have already thought of a way to help me to get into the shower when I need it, but not just yet.  Just let’s not be silly about this.

There is nothing at all depressing about my life.  It’s how you deal with it that counts.

Personally, I long wished to be like Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  Lying around in bed with consumption and writing poetry.  I did have consumption and wrote a lot of poetry, but the lying around in bed never happened, and nor did I ever get whisked away by the love of my life.  But there you go.  Two out of three wasn’t bad.  How do I love thee.  Let me count the ways.  But that’s another story.

Saint John the Baptiste.

Dom and I went to The Fete de Jean le Baptiste last week. An impromptu picnic in the middle of a field in the middle of bloody nowhere, on the eve of the birth of John the Baptist. All quite lovely, and everyone knows everyone.

Two of the locals nearly had a punch up, but that was down to Gil who has spent far too long in Canada. But no one actually hit anyone.  The women stepped in.

Shades of past lives. Gil grew up here before his parents moved to Paris and then Gil to Canada, so I think he feels a bit out of the loop since most of us Anglais have live here longer than him. And his mother owns the house he now lives in.

Alain, who has never been even remotely unpleasant to anyone, and has lived here for all of his life, was the one who took the flack. But you need to know a bit about the history of these families and the fact that Alain’s grandfather owned all of the land around here once upon a time.  Perhaps a bit of snark.

I live in the house of Alain’s grandfather.  The house that began the Hamlet.  My privilege.  My house hasn’t changed much since then. It is still a hovel. But I like it.  Although I did get around to tiling the dirt floor, albeit not much else.

These people are so nice to me, although I doubt that they know who I am.  I suspect sometimes that they wish they hadn’t sold this house.  It is far better than their New Builds, on land that he gave them.  But I now own their heritage.  I live in peace in a house that they thought wasn’t worth having.  I am just sad for them.  They did have happy times in my house because they told me so.

Actually, they probably think that I am crackers.  For twenty five years I have lived here in the house of their grandfather.  The pleasure has always been mine.