Tuscan sojourn

 

 

Forgive me, but just at the moment WordPress isn’t allowing me to name the photos from our recent trip to Tuscany – neither will it let me turn around the photo that is the wrong way.  I will do my best to repair this when I can.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the photos.

Cinta senese at our kitchen door

The Ponte Vecchio – Florence

Piazza del Campo – Siena

Doctor, doctor

After three years since I last saw a doctor, this morning I woke up with vertigo.

I tried not to have to go, but with our impending trip to Italy next week, I thought I should get checked out.  After all, if I see the leaning tower of Pisa and it isn’t leaning, or I’m leaning more than it, I might feel cheated.

So Jon bundled me in the car to the local GPs house. 

It’s like going back many years in the UK.  You wander into what appears to be someone’s house (and actually, it is) and take a seat, having of course exchanged ‘bonjours’  with anyone else who happens to be in there.  Eventually it will be your turn.

Monsieur le docteur, wearing jeans and looking like an ex-rugby prop, greets you at his door, shakes hands and leads you in to his surgery which is the untidiest room I have seen since our girls grew up and left home.

After a few preliminaries, filling in a form to register, I explained what was wrong and he led me to his examination room which, although cluttered, was a little tidier.  He checked my blood pressure which was deemed to be OK then checked my eyes.  He then grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me onto the couch.

‘It’s a good job Jon is just the other side of that partition wall’, I thought, wondering if this was normal practice for a French GP. 

Monsieur le docteur sat me up again and looked carefully at my eyes.  After a while the room stopped spinning.  He then explained that he was going to do the same thing but turning my head to the side this time.  I braced myself and ooooh, off the world went again, leaving me behind.  He then went back into his surgery telling me to follow when the world was back to normal again.

He then relieved me of 22 Euros and sent me to the pharmacy with my prescription.

The pharmacy then relieved me of a further 26 Euros and gave me three different types of pill.   I suppose the theory is that one of them will stop the giddiness eventually.

Now we need to work out how to get our money back from the French health service and our insurers. 

Meanwhile, if you hear a strange rattling noise next week anywhere between here and Italy, it’s probably me having taken all those pills.

Can you hear that?

Nope? Neither can we. Silence is golden….

We have just had a wonderful, if noisy, week with three of  the grandchildren in residence.  They left yesterday morning and there is a strange silence now hovers over the valley.  No more splashing in the pool, no running feet across the floor, no bottles to find because someone is crying, no toy cars to trip over.

The cats are happy again though!

Riley was a star from his first breakfast

Yoghurt face!

to a doze in the pool…

he was attached to Dad, promise!

Leo, loved the pool but hated his water wings and rubber ring!

Does my tum look big in this?

and wanted to become a native Indian in the garden

Where's the door gone?

Jack, big brother extraordinaire, had his first taste of escargot

What exactly does 'escargot' mean, Dad?

and tried to dam the Dordogne (without success)

Don't look behind you!!!

The sun shone, the evenings were incredibly warm and we had a super week.

Boys together

Happy days

Strawberry or choc mint chip?

The bad news is that there’s a squatter in the teepee!!

My new home. Thanks chaps!

A Question

What makes a sound like a cross between a duck and a frog seven times and then shuts up for an hour or so, and is invisble?

Something was doing this yesterday while we were pottering between the kitchen and the cave.  Whenever we went to investigate we couldn’t find anything.  We wondered, frog?  Cicada?  Bird?  Nothing was evident and it remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, after dark we went out to watch the meteor showers.  We didn’t stay out long (owing to being eaten by bugs) and didn’t see that many, but those that we did see were just amazing.  The sky was incredibly clear before the moon came up, and the stars were so bright. 

Just another magical moment in La Vie En Rose!

Much Ado About a Picnic

The Donjon of Montcuq is the perfect setting for an evening picnic.  A group of 13 of us (lucky, not unlucky) bringing a dish of food each collected together with other groups of picnickers and enjoyed the evening sunshine, the setting and the ambiance to share our picnic with a few dozen hungry wasps.

Our reading group had decided that we would throw in an additional book this summer, a bit of good old English Shakespeare, and go and watch a performance.  Each year a group of players, Antic Disposition, lay on several outdoor performances for the entertainment of the British and the bemusement of the French, in various villages throughout Quercy.  This year’s play was Much Ado About Nothing.

As we enjoyed Beatrice and Benedick’s verbal sparring and Claudio and Hero’s love affair, the sun set in the most beautiful way in the background.

We had elected not to sit on the benches provided but placed our own, more comfortable, picnic chairs in the ‘dress circle’ a flat area on the way up to the donjon, offering us this excellent view of the stage with the sunset in the background.  A magical night.

Much Ado about Mamma Mia

Finally we’ve had a reasonable amount of rain. 

It started in the early hours on Sunday morning and continued on and off for some hours.  Hopefully it was enough to lay the dust and possibly even seep through into the garden.  It  won’t of course have been enough to help the potagers  or the farmers but it has taken the heaviness out of the air.

We were supposed to be going to an open air cinema last night to see Mamma Mia (we’ve only even seen it on our tiny TV screen before and I rather fancied seeing if Colin Firth was looking any older than when he was in P&P all those years ago), but we decided after lunch that it was already far too wet under foot for us to sit around for a few hours in a damp field.

However, tonight we are off to another local village to see a touring English company’s producion of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ with our reading group friends.  Ten of us are bringing a contribution to a picnic and then watching the play.

Although is it cloudy this Monday morning, the forecast for the rest of the week is hot and sunny again, starting around 4pm today, so we are just hoping that Mr Meteo has got it right for once!

Who dunnit?

Someone has pinched my muse.  They must have. 

There’s tons going on here but I haven’t been inspired to blot recently.

• Jon has been busy making banisters to stop the rug rats falling out of the loft when they arrive. What a fantastic job he has done (pictures to follow)
• We’re still battling against the drought and trying not to lose our new plants.
• We have new desks each in the loft/study/bedroom, and very nice they are too.
• I’ve been organising the paperwork and trying to tidy, de-clutter and generally reduce the paper mountain
• We have a bit of a social life too.

But my muse has been missing.

Maybe I’ll find her under the paper mountain when I get to the bottom of it.

Seriously hot

Now before you start loading the guns for the firing squad, we do know that the British summer hasn’t been, nor is forecast to be, particularly great.  We’re very sorry that you aren’t getting the weather the Met Office promised you earlier in the year.

I’d blame Mr Brown, if I were you.

However, the hot, dry weather we have been having here is taking its toll.  We’ve not had any serious rain for a great many weeks.  The few storms we have had have been a flash, a rumble and 6 drops of rain.  Gardens are seriously drying out, not too worrying for flowers but seriously worrying for veggie plots and even more so for farmers.  Some villages in this area have already been told no more watering, no pool topping up, and the next stage may well be the turning off of water for a few hours a day. 

Today’s local newspaper is obviously aimed at the tourists.  ‘If July had heavy storms over the region, then  August is going to be warmer and much dryer’.  It claims, adding that the weather will seem ‘heavy’ because of the high pressure sitting over the Atlantic sea.

‘The region’ covers the area from here down to the Pyrennees and across to the Mediterranean.  It is the mountain area that had most of the storms and rain, far too many miles from here to make a difference to the drought we are experiencing.

‘They’ have promised us storms and rain overnight tonight.  But we aren’t holding our breath.

Walking boots or dancing shoes?

We have had a long hot dry spell here but we really could do with some rain.

Festival time has arrived again.  Our local towns and villages are spattered with signs inviting us to a local village fête here and a festival there.  We have been looking forward to the Souillac Jazz Festival again.  For the past couple of years we have gone to the town on a Sunday morning to spend a couple of hours listening to bands playing outside some of the bars and restaurants.

This year we decided that we would join the Randonnée Jazz; a walk that we had seen advertised which takes place on the Sunday afternoon of Jazz festival week.  We were told that the afternoon started with a picnic.  This would be very civilised, we thought and together with our friends Sue and John we packed our sarnies and went to find the picnic site.

Expecting a nice shady village green, we were somewhat surprised to find ourselves in the middle of a Sunday market outside the village Mairie, in big marquee, along with dozens of others sitting at trestle tables eating our little packed lunches.  Around us large parties of French people were tucking into bottles of wine, chips and a barbeque which had been organised by the local commune.

Never mind, we enjoyed our lunches which were supplemented by apricots and peaches bought from the market stalls.

We paid our subscriptions (that we hadn’t been forewarned about), collected our ‘free’ bottle of water and (whoopi-do!) badges and moved into an area of shade under a tree.  By now the sun had been beating down for several hours and it was hot.  Around 32 degrees.

The walk had been scheduled to start at 1.30pm but by the time the obligatory speeches had been completed (the French can never start anything without at least 3 speeches), the stragglers had been rounded up and forced to pay their subscriptions and collect their badges, it was around 2pm.  So, quite a prompt start really, for a French ‘do’.

102 French people and ten mad English set off on the long walk, which we were pleased to discover was mostly in the shade alongside a small river. 

As the path here was narrow, it made for one very long crocodile which ground to a halt occasionally if someone had decided to take a photo or when we all had to play ‘spot the cicada’ which was hanging under a branch of a scrub oak.  I think everybody did spot it and so we were awarded a brownie point each.

The riverside path ended and we crossed a field in the full sun before being marshalled across the road by two men wearing reflective jackets who were there to hold up the traffic (what traffic?).  The next path was fortunately back in the shade and wound its way up a long, long hill.  There was a lot of puffing and panting, red faces and people began to pour their ‘free’ bottles of water over their heads in an effort to cool down a little.  Finally we came to the top, there was a clearing and just one tree giving enough shade for all 112 of us to sit or stand.

An odd noise emanated from the undergrowth and our jazz band appeared. 

Le mystère des éléphants; three chaps on saxophones of various sizes and one with a homemade drum contraption slung around his neck then proceeded to entertain us for our 15 minute break with their superb music and slightly warped sense of humour.    You can visit their MySpace page here

 

 

 They then insisted that we gather ourselves together and move on for the downward descent back into the village to their musical accompaniment. 

It was an excellent afternoon, finished off with a cold drink back home in the shade and a very pleasant supper here with our friends in the evening.

Walk the walk

The tourist season is in full swing.  The roads are busy, the towns and villages are full and we see cars registered in the UK, Holland and Germany everywhere.  Only one in three or four cars is locally registered as the rest of France has also descended on our normally tranquil area.  Friends were telling us that the had to queue to get into the supermarket carpark one day this week – now that IS unheard of.  So it was with some trepidation that we headed off to the supermarket this Saturday morning.  We normally avoid Saturdays if we can. 

We were amazed to find it all very quiet.  Perhaps everyone was in town at the market and we just sped up and down the aisles and bought our few items without a hitch.  So where are all the tourists?

I recently bought a book of local walks.  We’ve exhausted all the beauty spots and feel the need to explore a bit more of the countryside so that future visitors can be directed to good local walks.  We are on a boundary here, to our west we have an area known as the Bouriane; rolling hills, farms, trees and forests of pine and chestnut.  To the east we have limestone hills, rough ground and sheep grazing.  One of the walks in the new book took us across this rougher ground and through some scrub covered copses.  

There was one other car in the car park (how dare it!).  It had a Parisian number plate.  We set off following the instructions on the map having first checked out the helpful sign at the beginning of the walk on a noticeboard.

‘Please do not enter into the rock chasms.  Unlike the first one, many are not fenced off’.

Having checked the helpful plan of some of the chasms, we had no intention of venturing into dark deep caves where there may be water (or worse, snakes!) thank you.

We walked for over two hours and didn’t see another soul.  One car, loads of sheep droppings and many, many butterflies, but not one person.

Absolute bliss.  But where are all the tourists?