Goodness me these blog entries are getting to be almost weekly! Hope the quantity isn't diminishing the undoubted quality too much (haha)! This week, the aforementioned English Food Box was bought. This is what it comprises so far (with two English cheeses to be added a few days before we move to France):
Coconut milk x 3
Baked beans x 4
Tinned ravioli x 2
Corned beef x 2
Old Speckled Hen x 8
Salad cream
Brown sauce
Worcestershire sauce
English mustard
Curry powder x 2
Soy sauce
Curry paste x 3
Cornflakes
Bran Flakes
Chilli sauce
Earl Grey teabags
Now, obviously I'll mostly be cooking the finest French provincial Lizzy David-inspired nosh, but there is always a time and a place in life, or at least in my life, for a corned beef and tomato sandwich, which tastes all the better in a French baguette, so I make no apologies.....
On the subject of food, Squidge (partner-in-emigration) is planning to revoke her long-held vegetarian beliefs when she becomes a French resident, an occasion to be marked by her eating a ceremonial steak on the final ferry crossing. Whether or not this bold move back to the sins of the flesh will see her laid up in bed, stomach unable to cope, when we're supposed to be househunting is open to debate, but her mind is made up. The thought of eating omelette nature et frites at every restaurant she ever uses from now on was too much to bear.
(Hmmm, I wonder if I'll get a few stray Googlers reading the blog by placing phrases like 'sins of the flesh' and 'laid up in bed' next to each other......)
However, despite this carnivorous trend, veg is set to play a significant part in our new life. We've been trying to find out what, if anything, will come up in our patch in the Vendée over winter if we plant it in the first few days of October. We've got seeds of a type/breed/strain (?!) of radish whose packet reassuringly proclaims that they'll spring up from December onwards. As I'm sure is apparent, I know nothing about this sort of thing, but I've never seen radishes growing anywhere in winter, so I'm sceptical. My father, who is certainly not new to any of this, scoffed at the very notion, giving us a look of horror, disbelief and disdain. Well, they're going in - and we'll see who's right! If I'm not in a position to serve him home grown radishes with his Christmas dinner when he and my mother come to stay in December, I'll get some flown in at vast expense and just fib. I also hope he won't notice when his 'turkey' has a suspiciously corned beefy quality to it.
Not much else to report at the moment really. Excitement is growing with an unbelievable 38 DAYS TO GO, and as Cassis found just before his move to France (in a comment he made further down), I'm finding that more and more of my time between Monday and Friday is spent doing things I'm not paid to do! This afternoon, I'm going to email about 20 immobiliers across the Pyrenees - I'm not sure whether it's best to book appointments with them or just turn up, but hopefully by giving them a bit of notice they can respond one way or the other, if they respond at all!
I can't remember if I mentioned this previously, but we got a set of Michel Thomas CDs via the Daily Express a while ago, and I've been going through them. I think they're helping, but I've had to decide whether to unlearn quite a bit of what I already know and start again from scratch using his structures, or adopt a mixture of the two. I know nothing about the science behind his techniques, but what I've deduced is that he's using sentence structures which are perhaps easier to learn, and possibly correlate more closely to English ones, but have a tendency to sound a little clumsy, and not as elegant as the French I've picked up from school and from French people themselves. Having said that, he does offer up several invaluable tips and shortcuts, if one can ignore the fact that he sounds a little creepy, almost as creepy as the sycophantic pair of students he's addressing.
Otherwise, we're just counting the days, having exhausted Cheltenham Blockbuster's rather thin selection of French films.
More soon.....
A bientot
I've been working my way through back issues of French Cosmopolitan magazine this week, in an effort to improve my language skills. I don't know if you've noticed, but in many of the petrol station shops off the autoroutes they sell packs of three old Cosmos for about one euro, and my partner-in-emigration (hereafter to be referred to as Squidge, for that is her name, sort of) seems to snap them up each time we fill up with gazole. Consequently, we now have lots of them scattered around our cottage in England. They are excellent for learning unusual abbreviations and slang, but I do wonder whether knowing all the linguistic tips for capturing and holding on to my dream man will be as useful as knowing the word for plasterboard, for instance.
In addition to the swathes of Cosmos, we also have a number of post-it notes stuck to the walls around the cottage, in strategic places where we often cast our eyes, such as around the bathroom mirror. That sounds a bit narcissistic, but you know, it is a wall you spend more time facing than you might think! So each morning and evening, we gaze upon a wall of yellow, upon which are scrawled black marker translations of words like 'wave', 'rock' and, er, 'dwarf' (these were considered important by Squidge; I suspect she may be taking drugs), and after a few days, you do become familiar with the French words.
Last night, over a gin and tonic or two, we got the map out and plotted our October househunting route across the Pyrenees from Rennes les Bains to Cauterets. The realisation that we could conceivably be putting an offer in on a place within two months was hugely exciting, and for once I felt none of the usual accompanying trepidation. For the first time, after a year or more of distractedly looking at houses to get a feel for prices, we are now looking at houses we could realistically be making offers on in the very near future. Where once, when things were merely theoretical, I was looking at heaps of rubble proclaiming them to be full of potential, I'm now, after realising the imminence of it all, looking at new-builds thinking, 'hmm, less likely to saw my legs off in this one'.
Since deciding to embark on this whole project, I've read numerous magazine articles in which people give the reasons for their emigration. It's odd, but the driving force for many, possibly even the majority, seems to be a negative one. There is just the teeniest bit of smugness about those insightful British emigrées who have seen 'the writing on the wall' and jumped ship, suggesting that Britain is doomed and that France or wherever is a faultless nirvana. Which writing? High unemployment? Nope. Prohibitive business start-up charges? Nope. An unfashionable language? Nope. Excruciating Europop? Nope (well, ok, occassionally). Britain is an absolutely brilliant place to live (seemingly much better than Poland, at least!), and I'll miss lots of things about it, but in my case I wanted to do what we're doing simply for the challenge and the adventure. And ok, the cheap booze. And proper mountains.
If the price I have to pay is to look at myself in the shaving mirror each morning reciting the French word for dwarf (le nain, by the way, but you knew that), so be it.
Right, I'm off to get a proper-sized birth certificate.
A bientot.