Life as an Imminent Emigrant

Mardi Gras!!

Possibly doing a bit of househunting this week.  Seems utterly masochistic as we’ve only been in the present house a month and a bit, and I hate moving (does anyone actually enjoy it?), but we’ve been thinking…..

We’re not going to need much money each year to continue living in the Ariege, but we’re probably going to need a bit more than what we stand to make from our fledgling B&B business.  Squidge made £1500 the other day gambling on the football, but that’s not exactly going to be a consistent income stream - I guess.  So, we’re going to investigate the option of buying a second house and living in that whilst letting out the current one as a gite (shouldn’t be long before it’s finished, hahaha!!!).  If and when we ever finish doing up the second one, we can then choose which one to live in and which one to let, or live in one in the summer and one in the winter. Given that our househunting budget will be rather amusing, I would imagine that the one we’re in now will be the winter one, since it has walls and a roof, whereas the new one, if it falls within our price bracket, probably wouldn’t.

So that’s the idea.  We’re viewing one on Tuesday in a blummin’ nice valley a few kilometres south towards Spain and the Guzet Neige ski resort.  We drove through it a few weeks ago and it was on fire, so it’ll be nice and warm there, which is a palpable bonus when you’re without walls and roof. 

Meanwhile, here chez nous, our neighbour very kindly lent us some of her land at the foot of the village last week, after we’d dropped strategic hints that we were on the lookout for a veg patch.  It’s a good sized plot, about twice the size of my dad’s old one at Foley Street, although that’s probably not a particularly helpful yardstick for very, very, very nearly all of you.

We gave her a small posy of flowers in return, which seemed a remarkably good deal, with the promise that she would get to taste the first spud to emerge out of the earth. 

We’ve therefore been spending half an hour or so each day digging up the turf and creating the plot, in between DIY jobs, and occasionally getting caught in showers.  Most of the village overlooks the plot, and I get a distinct Jean de Florette type feeling when we are digging in the rain, with the villagers peeping at us, chuckling at the fact that they’ve given the mad, wet English a plot no-one else wanted because it’s at the foot of the village where everyone’s, erm, fertilizer ends up.  All I’d need to complete the paranoiac fantasy would be a hunchback, and with all the digging I’m not far off.  But even if it is going to get smelly in the summer, it has possibly the best view one could wish of any allotment, better perhaps than the view of Foley Street Trading Estate my father enjoyed for years from his own patch.

It was Mardi Gras here on Tuesday.  The several villages which make up our commune were all en fete, to one degree or another.  St Pierre saw the goats herded ceremonially through the village, clearly delighting in the noise of the fireworks launched around them by the loveable local children, who were sporting an array of unfathomably alien takes on the fancy dress theme - the children that is, rather than the goats, who came as they were.  Our local druid guy looked on, inscrutably, gaiters glistening, boots polished, ZZ Top beard twitching in the breeze, and further up the road was an utter, utter loony - indescribable - possibly been taking goat tranquiliser, clinging desperately to a wall, entirely unnecessarily given that his feet were placed on the ground, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood to contemplate the benefit of safe havens such as ‘the ground’. 

There was a very minor event in Boussan as well, featuring a handful of the local feral kids and a man in full drag, who spoke with the sort of high pitched voice Hollywood reserves only for the naughtiest of serial killers, guiding them around door to door asking for sweets.  It was all hallucinatory pagan freakery - genuinely disturbing rather than celebratory.  Can’t wait for next year.  Must get the goat tranqilisers in.

Joining us for the Mardi Gras nut-fest were Squidge’s parents, who have spent the week here.  They were able to employ cunning parenty DIY tricks, the like of which we know nothing about, to further bring the house into line with basic levels of health and safety.  Much of the tricky jobs have now been done, and the stuff that’s left isn’t too intimidating, and is also the sort of thing that can transform the look of a bedroom from shell to swanky in an afternoon, so perhaps we’ll have a paying guest or two by Easter after all.   

That’s all for now, more very soon, told you it would be more regular now - stay tuned!!

A bientot.