The Feast of Stephen.

And a quiet moment of reflection.  I am sitting here over a large Bloody Mary, the last of the Vodka.  Thank God for that.

It is all down hill to Spring now.  This is what The Winter Solstice is all about.  Give me Pagans any day of the week.  Survive.  Okay.  All will be well.  Some of us do better than others.  I am an optimist.  I was born that way.

The Spring bulbs are already coming up and The Camillia has finally started to bloom.  Very late this year, but such a beautiful thing.  This bush must be about fifty years old now.  I seriously hack it back every now and again.  It has often grown to ten feet, but it never blames me.  Such a pity that it has no scent.  But the most beautiful of flowers often don’t.

I grow Roses instead, many of them are now twenty five years old.  They all smell amazing.  I give them all a dose of recycled Tea at least once a year.

Not that I have any real idea of growing things.  My vegetable growing is never good.  I try, and often fail miserably.

Growing children is a trifle more difficult unless one wishes to produce clones of oneself.  This is not a good idea.  Trust me.  I am at least aware of my greater faults.  And my children don’t need any of that old crap.

Hope.  This is all that matters.  Hope changes with age and becomes less demanding.  Just wake up every day and be glad to be alive.

 

 

 

 

 

Noel. 2019.

All organized and ready to go.  My 27th Christmas in Brittany and not alone for the third of those years in succession.  Although I sometimes have vague feelings of nostalgia.  But we won’t go into that in detail.

Humans are Herd People and The Caves are now brick built boxes, unless you live where I do, in which case it is bloody great rocks.  Brittany is one huge great rock.

Humans generally don’t do well alone.  I don’t know why.  I managed and got to like it.

Just about to make The Bloody Mary’s.  More Bloody and less Mary this year, until I get pissed, in which case God help us all.

I still so love it here.  It’s The Celt you see.  We Celts aren’t very complicated people.  Sufficient unto the day in Pagan Terminology.   The Bretons are Celts.

Something good always comes from disasters.  We are optimists.  I only ever get depressed at Full Moon, and then not for very long.  I think it’s the Negative Gravity.  I briefly feel disconnected to  Planet Earth.  Taurians are Earth People, so this is total logic to me.

I am an utterly Dog Person.  And never doubt that the rotten little swine knows exactly who in in charge.  Me.  Mama Wolf.  He just pushes his luck from time to time.  He is a little more challenging than any other dog that I have owned, but he is so fucking beautiful.  Snake Eyes without a doubt.  His head is almost Egyptian.

Anyway, sorry about the ramble.  Time for the not so Mary Bloodies.

Christmas Eve. 2019.

Where’s The Saint Emoticom? I’ve been at it for days and everything is done, bar cooking The Turkey. I’ve even parboiled The Sprouts, which on reflection will probably be quite enough for them. And they will almost certainly all be drunk by the time the turkey is cooked so won’t care anyway. I might just join them.  The dinner guests that is and not The Sprouts.  Perhaps I will chuck some Vodka into The Sprouts  One has to do something with them after all.

I’ve even Brined The Turkey.  A quaint not so old American custom.

Food Bank later today and I’ve still got to buy the makings for Bucks Fizz.  Lidl is best.  Their Pop is 1 Euro 50 centimes a bottle.  Six bottles of that will hopefully be enough, although I could always buy two cases at that price.  There is always The Feast of Stephen.  That’s Boxing Day, for the uninitiated..  And no one I know can tell the difference between Lidl Pop and Champagne, not even me.  By the way, who in their right mind puts Orange Juice in Champagne?

2020.  That I should have lived this long.  Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than 2019.  A lesser tough old cookie than me would be dead by now, but I haven’t screwed enough out of The Pension yet.  Ha Ha!  They obviously didn’t see me coming.  Beside, my Not Best Friend is still alive.  No way am I going first.  I will miss her, but then I always have.

O’Connor?  The less said about him then the better for the moment.  He is awfully sweet and so very funny.  Love ya to bits, you horrible little swine.

I did pay homage to The God of The Winter Solstice, which is what it’s all about for me, although God knows who that one is.  I am a Lunar Person so I’ll go for that one.

Have a good year, you all.

 

 

 

That Time Again.

The Dinner for Old People.  I decided not to go this year.  I did it once but that was enough for me.  I can’t sit on a hard chair for four hours anymore, while listening to some delightful old man practising his excellent English on me.  And I don’t think he wanted to Marry me.  Never a word do I get to say in my still ghastly French.  So no gain there.

This is the way things are these day.  Long gone are the days when absolutely no French person spoke English in any shape or form.  Although I suspect that at least some of them were fibbing.  Probably because they were afraid of making fools of themselves.  Haven’t we all been there.

So I was decidedly in the wilderness for quite some time.  The best I knew was Ouvrez la Porte.  Portes being feminine, as if that matters.  The genders are no joke.   There are no rules pertain to that.  I won’t go into the EZ on the end.

Anyway, back to basics.  I then got this lovely food parcel, which I have had in the past.  I just didn’t compute it to not going to The Dinner.  I can be a bit thick sometimes.

Two very nice jars of excellent Pate.  A box of lovely chocolate biscuits.  A bottle of not half bad wine.  Bugger, my brain has just switched off again.  I can’t remember what else.  But at least I have decided that senility in what ever form is going to be a laugh.  Why should it not be?  It doesn’t offend me.  It’s only other people getting cross that is the worry.

I have a vast wealth of words in my head, some of which I now find hard to retrieve, so I guess that my brain has put some of them on the back burner.  Perhaps because they weren’t important in the first place.  I can always think of something else, albeit not frightfully well educated at times.

Meanwhile, my OCD remains supreme.  Just so long as everything in my world sits in straight lines then I will be okay.

O’Connor?  Rotten little horror.  What did I do, God?  My garden is wrecked and still no Badgers.  He has the occasional run in with The Hedgehog, but he won’t win that one, and he probably just wants to play anyway.

This is actually a lost cause.  Robin Dominic encourages O’Connor to be silly when I never would have done.  Dogs, like children, have a place in my house, and more or less the same.   What can possibly be wrong with that?  Behave yourself, okay.

My Leaseholders continue to bamboozle me.  Okay, fine, burn the house down with incompetence.  I no longer care.  Managing a Leasehold Property isn’t easy, but I no longer have any Rights, so they will have to get on with it.

In the meantime my Managing Agent isn’t frightfully happy either. Tough shit.  Nor am I.

Leaseholders Rule.  And there is nothing to be done until it all goes tits up, which it always does.  Why would anyone want to spend endless hours running a Leasehold Property  for no financial gain when the cost to a Managing Agent is not much more than peanuts?

I really don’t understand this.  But for the moment it is no longer my problem.  It took me a while to get there.

Noel will be fine here.  It always is.  I do so love France.  I would have preferred  to live in a similar hovel in Scotland but that was way out of my price range, so here it had to be.

Bonne Noel.  Did I get the gender right?