Apologies to my reader for the lack of a blog last week and my late posting tonight. We have just got back in from our holiday in France. The return journey was spent in the usual silence as leaving Gouhaut seems to get harder and harder each time we visit.

I had planned to do a blog posting from my new broadband setup last Sunday, but it seems that things in France are never straightforward. Firstly, the telephone aspect of our package is super duper, in fact for some reason we have two phones, one normal, one internet, both with separate numbers. But the wireless internet aspect of the service is somewhat puzzling. It is served by a huge white box (router) which is just a little bit smaller than our dining room. This box seemingly fires out a wireless internet service in 20 second bursts every 10 minutes or so. It could just be that my legendary technical skills are on the wane but I couldn’t get it to work consistently and rather than persevere I chose more Cider instead. So no blog last week……..

As usual, we had an absolutely lovely time, ate too much food, drank too much wine/cider, slept like the dead and revelled in the beautiful nature. I also managed to complete three of my list of my twelve planned practical jobs so all in all quite a successful trip.

I made the mistake of turning on Sky news on Monday morning which confirmed that the world was still hurtling headlong into the abyss so I vowed there and then that I would bury my head in the sand for the remainder of the week. A quick trolley dash to Carre Four was required as it is always a good fix for the soul and having filled my trolley with the finest French delicacies and alcoholic products known to man, everything was well in my world again.

Our ‘hire car trick’ of ordering the cheapest hire car in the knowledge that they have to offer you an upgrade due to a lack of crap cars backfired spectacularly. Mel had changed our hire car company in an effort to save 50p and unfortunately they did have a veritable fleet of crap cars. Therefore our travels in the Limousin were undertaken in a vehicle which was a cross between a Sinclair C5 and one of those invalidity scooters. It was in fact so bad that when we were home we parked it behind the house and camouflaged it with branches and twigs in case anyone saw us. It really was ridiculously small with two small bags of shopping in the back forcing both of our faces against the windscreen.

I managed to use the chainsaw twice without killing myself although I could hardly walk the next day as my wood cutting muscles are severely out of shape. I painted the walls in our living room, hung some ornament thing that Mel bought and cleared the triffids on the drive that our builder had promised us would be weed free.

Dinner with Matt & Helen, Kevin and Morag was a lovely end to our week (all hail to the Almond Pie) and the conversation flowed, or more accurately bounced from one subject to another. American politics, Chinese restaurants, Bobby Sands impersonators, bad presents, oil rich football clubs and divining for water with sticks were just a small selection of the conversational fare on offer.

Saturday was a write off due to the previous late night but was illuminated by a visit from Helen and Matt who had decided that he would prove his theory that divining for water with twigs really works. The four of us headed across the road where Matt chose his “divining rods” or Baguettes as he tried to convince me the French call them. He did an admirable job of convincing me there was something in it, but I cant help feeling that it’s a bit like people pushing a glass round a ouija board without actually realising they have done it (called the idiomotor effect I think). More experiments will undoubtedly ensue.

Now back to real life in Manchester until Xmas when we will return to France to celebrate New Year with friends. Hopefully we will get the central heating working again before we get there otherwise it will be a very chilly affair with 26 jumpers each. Mind you that’s twelve weeks away and theres a good chance that there will only be one bank left by that point and everybody in the world will be technically bankrupt, so a dodgy central heating boiler should in fact be the least of my worries.