Relocation to France – Page 7 – Poshbird with Passion

Wit, Wisdom and Winnie the Pooh

I am flattered to have been nominated for the quote challenge again, this time by Osyth of Half Baked in Paradise, whose posts I always look forward to. She used wonderful quotes in her own blog, quotes which express the beauty and depth of love and life. I have, as she did, also invented my own ‘rules’ to work with here. Please do take a look at Osyth’s post

https://osyth.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/saving-the-trouble-of-thinking-for-oneself/

The last time I took this challenge I realised what an abundance of witty and insightful quotes we can call upon, and all without paying royalties! I had trouble whittling down the quotes for the three day format, and eventually I chose a few which resonated and had just enough in common to mesh together. So excuse me if I over-indulge again today

Last time’s efforts were:

https://poshbirdyblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/like-a-rabbit-in-the-headlights-winstonisms/

https://poshbirdyblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/14/3-days-3-quotes-how-not-to-be-a-quitter/

https://poshbirdyblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/one-mans-humour-is-another-mans-squirming-discomfort/

An additional quote on Osyth’s post was from A.A. Milne’s ‘A Record Lie’, an essay I had never read, but which I immediately typed into Google. I would suggest that anyone reading this post does the same. It holds a real truth and it decided for me the quotes I would include here:

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing” – Albert Einstein, all-round genius

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants” – Albert Camus, French Philosopher

and perhaps the most poignant right now….

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek” – Barack Obama, President of the US

………………………………………………………………………..

Of course, one could look at the above quotes and think this a rather grave post so let me provide an antidote in the form of three further quotes, courtesy of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and perfect for an upcoming St Valentine’s Day:

“Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart”

“Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave”

“How do you spell ‘love’?” – Piglet “You don’t spell it…you feel it.” – Pooh

Through no fault of their own, I nominate the following bloggers for this challenge:

Coteetcampagne https://coteetcampagne.wordpress.com

who, like me, loves all things old and troubled and beautiful

Colin Bisset http://colinbisset.wordpress.com

great thoughts on architecture, and I want to know more

Just Midlife https://justmidlife.wordpress.com

who I have only just started following, and who has already made me smile (P.S. Oops, how embarrassing as I realise that Suzy took this challenge just over a week ago, so please ignore this!)

All are well worth a visit

The ultimate romantic gesture

I have allowed my face to be moulded and ‘splodged’ in latex, come face to face with myself made out of plaster of Paris (a very strange experience) and been photographed throughout as C did weird stuff to me towards her Art GCSE. But I long for the time and space to do my own projects and I fear the time slipping past

When my ‘big’ birthday arrived in September there were generous gifts of chocolates, money and booze – many and varied booze(s), in fact – and an extravagant evening out. So imagine my delight when Baz, the love of my life, presented me with his gift

A gas-fuelled soldering iron/ blow torch

Jason at work compared this to the time when his dad gave his mum a set of saucepans one Christmas (apparently she was livid – imagine!). But for me this little beauty is just what I will need to repair my Jugendstil chandelier, and to experiment with countless other glass and metal projects I have in mind

Ah, the fun I will have…

But more than that, I believe this gift is Baz’s way of saying ‘It doesn’t bother me that you fill our lives with unco-ordinated tat that needs mending. It’s OK that you never want nice modern things like other people.’

It’s obviously his full acceptance of my obsession with old crap and therefore a licence for me to continue to attempt to resurrect dying things, and perhaps even finish a project one day

At least that is what I get from it. Am I wrong?

Plumber (smiley face) Me (sad face)

Hubby has told me to remove this, so have done so

(haven’t mastered WordPress yet!)

‘Vibrant’ – the Weekly Photo Challenge

There’s a vase of yellow roses in the living room. I love the abstracts that flowers give and they are a wonderful colour, so I thought I’d try the ‘Vibrant’ Photo Challenge for the first time. Here goes…

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/vibrant/

Gerty’s Gorgeous Green Gifts

After a five month sabbatical, Gertrude has decided to lay again. This is a real joy as her eggs are not only very delicious, but very beautiful too. They have a colour which defies green and a texture that makes eggshell sound way too ordinary. An egg from Gerty is something to touch and to hold, a photo waiting to be taken

The closest colour I can find is Farrow and Ball’s French Gray. Though they are slightly paler, they have exactly the same balance of colours

Once, due to the girls taking meds we were not allowed to eat her eggs for 28 days. At that time she was laying every day so I stockpiled the eggs. They looked amazing as a group, but eventually I threw them out for fear of someone dropping the bowl!

They make a lovely half dozen, don’t they?

Watching and Waiting/ the French Fear

There’s something about the front bedroom on our second floor, known for good reason as the bedroom with the head in a bag. I have noticed that people are inevitably drawn to throw open the right-hand window and shutter when they go in there, even though this room is every bit as derelict as the rest of the house. Actually, I realise as I write this, it’s probably because there is no electricity in there and so no light. Aha! Now it all makes sense …

Except the head, which wasn’t a head at all in the end, but was and is still in a paper bag

Despite the impressive three-storey ~~leak~~ indoor water feature over our stairway we keep the house as secure and weatherproof as possible. So, when a friend texted me in December that this window was left open and the curtain was billowing – the builders had been in to measure up – another friend kindly went to the rescue and closed it for me

In the loft there are the signs and smells of a vast previous pigeon infestation. When I originally viewed the house I only saw one pigeon up there, but there were eggs too, and so I assumed the worst. I love birds but we could not co-habit. Yet when I returned in August the same eggs were still there and there was something resembling a very dead bird, sort of squished on the floor. The problem was thereby unintentionally solved, and we remain to date a pigeon-free zone

When the builder came to meet me he predictably threw open the window and shutter in question (again), and the sound of pigeons was immediately audible. There were three, lined up on the window ledge directly opposite and peering intently at us, just waiting for someone to make a mistake and provide access to their well-appointed former abode

Some days later as I waited outside for my lift to the airport, I looked up and three of them were again lurking and watching from the loft windowsill, in a pigeon two-fingered salute

There is a fear called ‘Anatidaephobia’, described by M. Google as ‘a pervasive, irrational fear that one is being watched by a duck’ . Disappointingly I now understand that this is an invented condition, though C still claims she has it. It is completely separate from ‘Ornithophobia’, a fear of birds in general, which no-one in our household – not even Mlle C – suffers from (it would make chicken-keeping a challenge)

There is no shortage of pigeons or of semi-derelict properties, particularly in France. Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel there must be a recognised fear of pigeons waiting for you to screw up and leave a window open so that they can get back into your house

The Mighty Quinn – my first ‘pet’ spider?

The only water tap at the house is over a massive stone laundry sink in the furthest part of the garage, and the installation of this tap was greatly anticipated because we had no water source at all when we arrived at the house in August

Quinnsite — I was too scared to include my finger in the pic for scale

Arriving at midnight for my first solo visit in October, I was none too happy (terrified, actually) to discover that an enormous spider lives on the windowsill above this tap. On the first morning when I went to get water he marched right out of his web and across the sill to take a look at me. I dropped the empty bottle I was holding, and backed off in a cold sweat

waterbottlessite — All empty – time to say ‘Rebonjour’ to Quinn

I calmed down when he returned to the entrance to his web, where he remained for the rest of that week, observing me

With no way of getting around the water situation – I needed to fill bottles with at least 25 litres a day for flushing the loo, cleaning myself and the house and for making camomile tea – I could not avoid at least one visit a day to the sink of terror. So I reminded myself that he was here first, and to curb my extreme fear I named him ‘Quinn’. Through the week greeted him each morning and evening as my fellow resident, nattering away to him in French as I leaned over the tap

As a coping mechanism the friendly approach worked. I am not crazy enough to imagine that it was social interaction for ‘Quinn’ and for the whole week I didn’t take my eyes off this huge ancient spider faded to a shade of dark blond (did I actually just make a spider sound like Brad Pitt?), but I was no longer so scared and was at times actually glad of the company

Charlotte was horrified to hear about my regular chats with him, until she saw his photo – it’s hard not to be impressed by him. When I returned from my January visit she was as disappointed as I was that there had been no sign of him at the entrance to his web. I hope he’s OK and hasn’t decided to move on from his comfy domain. I have tried to be a good housemate

Coincidences and who is ‘Serge’?

Must be a very French ‘thing’ to leave Xmas decs up so long?

So after our strenuous afternoon moving the charbonne, we shared a bottle of Cremant as an apero, and went for pizza. We then strolled through the remaining Christmas decorations to have a drink at a local sports bar I have only been to once before. Of course, in small French towns it is unusual for two women to go out for a drink at ten in the evening, and when we sat down the three men at the bar turned and said ‘Bonsoir’. It didn’t feel entirely comfortable but we were not to be easily dissuaded, so we sat and ordered our drinks

During our second drink, the tallest guy stood up, walked the few paces over to us, and asked in fairly good and friendly English where we hailed from. When told which region of France my friend currently lives in, he asked whereabouts and she named the small village. He suddenly became very animated and even doubtful at first, because apparently this obscure village with only one hundred inhabitants is his family village and they still own two houses there. It transpired that they actually know the same people: (‘Oh yes, Serge is doing the driveway’ and ‘Oh, the one with only three fingers’, etc). When she mentioned a concert she’d attended in a house near the church before Christmas, he even knew who had played there

How? Because it was his sister’s house, of course!

Such coincidences can defy belief. She was only with me for a second night due to car trouble, the guy in the bar was spending just two nights in town on business, having never visited the area before

Around midnight we headed off to our respective dorms, all with a couple of hundred yards of each other. The fact that they made individual random visits to this town – this bar – at the same time is incredible to me

Spotted in McDs in Limoux the next day and it made me giggle. Go on, say it out loud..

Wouldn’t it be Nice (nice)

That’s ‘nice’, actually, not ‘Nice’. This was the view from the attic window when I braved the pigeon poo-covered floor, looking due west to the hills. What a shame we cannot have a terrace to enjoy it. A friend tells me that the mountain I can see in the distance to the north is actually Andorra. How amazing that these peaks are so close and are only blocked by the hills surrounding the town

Inspiration and Help from a Friend

A friend came to visit from Provence on Tuesday. She arrived mid-afternoon, bearing bread, cheese and champagne (she even brought champagne flutes) so I abandoned yanking fabric from the walls and we enjoyed a lovely boozy afternoon snack. Her plan was to stay overnight but due to car trouble she has been here for two. This has been priceless because she had brought her work clothes and she helped me with the dirtiest jobs possible – clearing things from the attic, and bagging up about half a tonne of charbonne from the second floor (we carried it down all the stairs to drop it in the garage with the other several tonnes). It would have been impossible for me to do alone and it took the entire afternoon, working solidly. We looked like Dickensian chimney sweeps when we finished, but it is a relief to have achieved it. Of course, the house is once again filthy throughout, covered in black dust!

The other unexpected bonus is that she has been staying at a quirky B and B down the road, an enormous house which I have wanted to go inside ever since I first came here. We went down to check her in and the owner, Guy, very kindly offered to show us around. It has amazing original belle epoch ceilings and is a masterpiece of recycling. He even has a terrace with a fantastic view of the mountains, something we can never have

This incredible paper sculpture dominates the courtyard. It was made by a Brazilian artist who stayed at Guy’s house. He was full of ideas, and suggested using our courtyard to screen films, projecting them onto the huge wall. Well, we just have to do that, don’t we!

Guy knew the lady who owned our house. Apparently she fell totally in love with the house but her husband would not move from Castelnaudary. So she never got to live in it, which was a source of great sadness to her. He was clearly very fond of her, and he spoke about how she was a very attractive lady, not very tall, and always well-dressed. She didn’t walk well towards the end, he said. A few years back she was paying Taxe d’Habitation because there was furniture in the house, and she called him to ask him to clear the everything out. It must have been terribly difficult for her, because she was giving up on her dream of living there. Apparently she hoped that whoever bought the house would be in love with it the same way, so it seems that fate has played a part here

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