Window Cleaner's Nightmare!

Stairway to heaven

Happy Couple

Pumkin Take-over

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009

Greetings

OK, so the road to getting Christmas letters written in Good Time is as paved with good intentions as is the one going to the underworld. Not as many demons trotting about with pitchforks, perhaps, although a the furries will narrow a fiendish feline eye at you if you’re too slow opening the door or too quick to suggest that they get off the bed.

So, with a hey ho and a hey nonny tra la, here we go again. It is Boxing Day. Not sure what that is in French* but it’s covered in snow, would you believe, with fog in the gaps. Rather anglais, in fact. Christmas Day itself was so thickly swathed in fog that I had the impression for a moment that there was nobody but us in the entire universe. That expands the mind a bit. I didn’t dwell on it too long, to avoid mental meltdown, and was glad to hear a tractor a couple of fields away, suggesting that we were not completely alone.
*have just looked it up (goody-goody teacher) and am thrilled to report that in French it is The Day After Christmas. Really…

Short pause while Marek finds a small black cricket doing an impersonation of a clove, in his mulled wine. It must have been in the faux-medieval goblet from which we felt beholden to drink the mulled wine – dead already I assume. It is a type of rotten-wood-eating cricket, which looks just like a clove even when alive. The jumping sort of clove, obviously. We find them at all times of year, very often with a hind leg missing, which may be due to the attentions of the furries, which cramps their style a bit but doesn’t prevent them from doing gravity-defying leaps when approached. They form part of an impressive array of insectabilia that feel that our home is theirs, and buzz, scurry, creep and jump all over it with a healthy lack of respect for ownership and an enduring lack of understanding of the phenomenon of glass. Being the tender-hearted soul that I am, I’m forever helping them outside or sweeping them sadly up should they insist on hanging around the skylight windows until their only option is to drop dead below. An enormous swarm of bees arrived last spring and took up residence in the roof before we could get a bee-keeping neighbour round to try and tempt them into one of his hives, which was alarming to begin with, but we got used to them fairly quickly, as we did to the two hornets’ nests in the back wall… A surreptitious bit of filler will probably discourage the hornets but the bees may have to stay. You can hear them pattering about on the plasterboard in the spare room. Certain visitors express (understandable) horror at the idea of being sandwiched between hornet hide-outs and bee-barracks, but the bees only ever seem to go up, up and away and the hornets are ferociously loud (big wings, big noise) but not ferocious otherwise. Not that I go around annoying them, mind you, and I wouldn’t try and take a rotting plum off one…

Now, I could pretend that it is still Boxing Day, but something happened to the space-time continuum between then and now and it is now – oh shameful! – 19th January. I have no idea how it happened, Officer, and it certainly had nothing to do with over-imbibing, as we spent Christmas à deux and New Year’s Eve at home with an over-60 friend, sipping (not supping) mulled wine and watching Ice Age 2. Now, that is terribly uncool, I hear you cry, and you are absolutely right - there is a part of me that feels embarrassed to admit to being so very uncool, but frankly I don’t give a damn and 2009 will probably be my least cool year yet, although I will be resisting the crimplene tros and blue curls for a bit longer. Do thoughts of this kind come to all of us once we hit 50? The fear of being mouton dressed up as agneau? Startling thoughts regarding mortality and the purpose of being here at all float in too, which, they tell me, is normal. I now also have to wear reading glasses over the top of my contact lenses – something it had never occurred to me was even possible! On a jollier note, if I live as long as Dad, I’ve got practically my whole life to live again. Being 50 was a great excuse for a party, which filled the house up with people and fabulous music from a band of gypsy musicians who left us all breathless with what they could do with an odd kind of oboe, a squeeze-box and a tuba…

Now, I suppose the biggest difference between this year and last is that the house is finished, if you don’t count the central heating and the light shades and the crevices awaiting filler and the bath water going out through a hose pipe and the bit that Marek has just demolished to make a kitchen. (We do have a kitchen already, but it is so dark that we have to have 350 watts of light on during the day in winter to dispel the gloom.) It’s excellent fun going upstairs and not having to get out of bed onto ice-cold tiles. In fact, our old bedroom is now the pantry because of its fridge-like temperature. Talking of going upstairs, the pièce de résistance is a spiral staircase in the living room made entirely by His Brilliance Marek, out of a tree he cut down himself and looking like something out of a fairy tale. I decked it with boughs of holly, glass baubles and fairy lights instead of having a Christmas tree and but for a few fauns lurking in the greenery you’d think you were in Narnia.

Have just read through last year’s letter to avoid repetition and to maintain some semblance of a flow of events for those of you who can actually remember what I wittered on about last time. So, the following subjects should perhaps be touched upon:

The Treehouse. Nowt has happened to it at all since last year, as it was finish that or finish the house… but it is still there, no slippage or spillage, and waiting for the spring and Marek’s renewed efforts. It should take three of them about two months, so anyone coming to visit this summer may have the option of sleeping in a leafy bower.
The Strawbale House. Nowt there, neither. Mainly due to the planning request being turned down like a bedspread. A new law came in about only building round villages but we don’t have a village, so does that mean we can’t have any new houses and our teeny tiny parish will have to sink into oblivion, we wonder? It is not only us being affected, obviously, and the mayor is valiantly tackling the problem (he’s a karate whizz, so may have hidden ways to persuade the chaps at the Prefecture) so it may take twenty years and a lot of gallic shrugging, but I’m sure they’ll eventually let us have our straw-bale-goat-on-the roof number.
Selling the House. Well, lets face it, this is not the moment to sell a house – three of the local estate agents have packed up and scurried off and I hear that some people, dependent on UK funds, which are reduced, of course, to a shadow of their former worth, are simply locking the door and legging it back ‘home’. So, that little plan will have to wait – I think we are relieved, really, as we moved six times in seven years in England, and always just as we’d finished putting in the finishing touches.
So, we’ve tightened our pieces of baler twine and will be living on dandelions and nettle soup. And anyway, we haven’t got anything else to live in, apart from the greenhouse, and I can tell you, that’s a bit parky at –5.
The Council. Well, I got voted in, which was gratifying and they’ve put me in charge of keeping the lay-by/lookout point tidy and checking that the other British residents are happy, rather than roads, electricity or drainage, which involve interminable meetings that I don’t think I’m up to making sense of. Mind you, the French don’t like them either, and one or two of the councillors have refused point blank to go to any big meetings, as they say that nobody says anything worth hearing and it’s all sent to the mayor in paper form anyway, when they can read it at their leisure. Even our council meetings can go on for three hours and are mostly about wild boar and engines. Any romantic ideas that a small commune would necessarily be one small happy family bit the dust during the election and there were accusations of foul play which are probably true. Fortunately, I can let most of it go over my head as it is to do with old family rivalries where somebody probably did the dirty on somebody elses’s great-great granny or something. A shame, though.
Cats (quickly, now). Fatty Poops, Feisty Tigs and Cutest Of All have all pushed off! Looking at it baldly, they have probably a) been flattened on the road, although no evidence has been found, b) got unwisely involved with a hunting dog (I can imagine Tigs doing this) or c) found an alternative human who puts the food down quicker and lets them sleep on the bed. There is always, of course, the chance that they will turn out to be Cats That Come Home After 10 Years… We’ve still got four to be going on with, who have all taken umbrage at present as we have Big Hairy Dog Tanya staying for a month and they cannot believe it. BHDT even gets to sleep in the house at night because of her arthriticky hips. Feline disgust knows no bounds, as they all have to go out at night.
Polish. Did I mention I was learning Polish? Well, ‘learning’ is a bit of an exaggeration, as my initial enthusiasm waned, as initial enthusiasm tends to, although I can say ‘This car is white,’ and ‘The bull is running,’ which should get me what I want should I find myself unexpectedly in Poland.
The Veggie Patch. Certain that this year we would curb our planting madness, we planted only four pumpkin plants, which promptly took over the world and grew ten enormous pumpkins, at least three of which I could barely lift. Sadly, pumpkin is not the most exciting of vegetables, although we have eaten more roast, mashed, souped, baked, curried, and grated than we would have thought possible and there are still five enormous pumpkins left in the pantry. We also had a mountain of butternut squash, which are superior in texture and flavour, in my humble opinion, which we are still munching our way through. Mind you, our friend Jeanette grew a hundred b.n. squashes. I think she’s having to have therapy…

We are currently going through the exciting, everything-in-quadruplicate process of setting Marek up as a business. The French government has just come up with a system for small businesses that is, in theory, much easier than the current set-up and less likely to result in bankruptcy after three years, so we are putting our faith in it and have signed on the dotted. We haven’t heard back yet, and they may well have been so swamped with applications that it’ll take them three years to get through them all and we’ll all go bankrupt while waiting…

So, the end of the page draweth nigh, so we’ll wish you a very Merry Christmas Past, a happy Newish Year and many good things in 2009.With love, laughs and a slice of pumpkin,