posted on 23 February 2008 11:58
by
Christine Phillips
22/02/08 A quiet time
Things have been very quiet this month really. We have been going about all our usual tasks with out much excitement. We have our first visitors of the year in the gite at the moment – a very large family consisting of parents, 5 children and a dog. There were also 3 extra grown up children there at the weekend too. Goodness knows where they all slept! They have all gone off today to visit Mont Dore in search of some snow. They brought their toboggan so I hope they have a good day there.
They also asked us to provide some “produits de terroir” for their arrival so I had fun doing that. I found a great local produce outlet in Issoire which satisfied most of my needs and it also gave me the chance to visit a little biscuit and gateau factory shop which we have driven past many times but not really explored fully. It was wonderful, the smell was fantastic and I came out with a bag of biscuits for the guests and some extra tasties for us – of course! Geoff also asked Jeannot at the bar if any of the farmers ever had stuff to sell direct. Mistake! He found a farmer for us who had some ham he would sell us – a whole leg of cured ham, all 10 kilos of it! We declined politely!
After this week though, we will be closing the gite and B&B for a couple of weeks whilst we have our new kitchen fitted in the house. Our plan is to decamp into the gite whilst the work is being done. We have chosen the kitchen. It’s all nice and light as the back of the house is quite dark with only one small window giving any natural light. We have now also chosen the floor tiles and we are in the process of choosing tiles for the walls. Its quite a logistical nightmare to get all the components and the workmen here at the same time as the kitchen is coming from one place, the floor tiles from somewhere else and I suspect the wall tiles from another place again. Plus we have to buy things like the taps (I never realised how many types of taps you can get) and gas pipes for the cooker, ourselves. Hopefully though it will all come together in the next two weeks…………watch this space!
Last week saw the Croix Rouge elections and I got my first taste of being part of French democracy as I registered my vote alongside all the other volunteers. It was different to voting in England – what a surprise eh? – in that instead of putting your cross beside the names you were choosing there was a long list of names and you had to put a line through those you did not want to vote for. Out of 18 candidates, 11 have been elected to be the “conseil”(committee) and those 11 met the other night to vote amongst themselves to elect the president, vice president etc. Apparently it is the same system as in the municipal elections which will take place next month. In St Etienne sur Usson there are now two lists of possible “conseils” – although it seems that you can choose names from either list, and the final conseil can be a mix of people from the two groups. They will then decide who will be the new mayor. We are looking forward to this election and we think we know enough of the people on both the lists to be able to vote properly. We are not allowed to vote in the Presidential elections – you have to have French citizenship for that- but we can vote in these municipal elections and European elections.
This month is proving an expensive one for us as all the tax and cotisation (medical cover, pensions etc) bills are arriving. It’s quite complicated trying to work out what is due when, so Geoff has gone off to the tax office for a chat today. We have also the problem of all the various monies having to be paid to different tax offices. Sometimes I get all nostalgic for good old PAYE and NI contributions going out of my salary without any input from me!
The enquiries for the gite and B&B are still coming in steadily, thank goodness. However we are also getting lots of scam e-mails too which are a pain in the neck. The lengths that some of these folk will go to is amazing. We had an “enquiry” last week supposedly for four doctors from an Indian infertility clinic who “wanted somewhere to stay whilst they attended some research event”! Just why they would want to stay in the middle of the French countryside surprised me a bit!! Of course the messages all then follow the same pattern – they will send a cheque for the accommodation plus car hire or air fare, etc, etc and we are supposed to send the difference to a third party! It’s a scam of course but it does take up time and a lot of my patience!