It hasn’t been really cold yet, so no one is sporting ski hats. But what does the well dressed Frenchman and Frenchwoman wear in the Vosges for everyday activities? Well perhaps the Vosges isn’t typically elegant. But below are a few winter fashion hints.

For tarmac laying The other day I was driving over the hill to St Dié. There are a lot of road works at the moment. There’s the super departmental highway being commercially widened and re-laid into the village, and there are also seasonal ditching and repair works being undertaken by each commune and also bits of private earth shifting along the back road out of the village. So I was not entirely surprised to find the back road blocked by the smart yellow machine of the commune. What did surprise me was the tarmac laying attire of our Commune employee. It gave him the aristocratic look of a minor royal on a grouse moor. Whereas the commercial road-layers all have filthy old overalls and grubby old shoes, Alain Duhaut, who is tall and slim (and rather vain), was wearing immaculately pressed field-green overalls, a crisp new-looking tweed cap at a dashing angle, and immaculate green boots. Mind you, this is the man who, after the gales had ripped off our roof in winter 1999, when all the other volunteer firemen turned up in their red baseball caps, produced an immaculate shiny silver helmet with smoked “glass” visor. (Maybe it obscured his view slightly, as he was the only one who stepped through the soggy plasterboard which had been our ceiling).

For scaling house walls I haven’t seen any builders recently, but as December 1st approached, various inflatable Santas in red bobble hats have begun to scale local house walls. The first one appeared outside the bar in Saulcy. He is now surrounded by a grotto of white branches into which he has almost vanished. It must be confusing for small children as Santa is simultaneously ascending the wall of the house opposite the bar. He hasn’t reached the dizzy heights of the gutter there, where he remained stranded till February last year before being rescued and deflated. It’s all a bit confusing as it’s really St Nicholas dressed in bishop’s mitre and robes who brings the presents and judges whether children are worthy to receive them. He is due it visit the elderly and children on December 1st in Entre-deux-Eaux (I don’t think we quite qualify although we did get an invite in the letterbox), but won’t reach St. Dié until December 7th (we’ll probably watch the huge procession with its marching bands, drum majorettes, mulled wine, and fireworks, the lot). Jean Robert is preparing to bake batches of St Nicholas brioches for the hundreds of excited children who will come into the shop (ever the optimist!) – but he also sells a type of solid bread pudding.

For tractor driving Rotund Farmer Duhaut gave up his pink shorts and brown T shirt some time ago, and is more sombrely dressed these days in a navy woolly hat and dark pullover and trousers (more of a jolly fisherman than a dedicated farmer look), whilst lean Farmer Vozelle accompanies his cows to muddy pastures wearing a turquoise overall for added warmth. Like us, he seems to be getting later as winter approaches. Cows were last seen setting out at 2pm for pasture (after we’d had our lunch!). It is dark by 5pm. Poor things probably didn’t get brought back and milked much before midnight at that rate – his cows being driven back to their barn at night, on unlighted roads, can be a hazard.

For foreigners to merge into the background I spotted the perfect gear for John. Our former agricultural co-operative has opened a new superstore, and now offers a wider range of accessories in addition to seeds, fruit trees, apple presses, jam jars, and ploughs. I spotted some fetching wellington boots covered with an ivy and oak leave pattern, with matching anorak and trousers for ultimate camouflage. And for headgear, when not using the anorak hood, you can select from a range of genuine Australian leather bushman/ cowboy hats. (I did also wonder whether our local birdlife would like to take refuge in one of their fashionable last branch saloon birdhouses.)

For village elders at Christmas markets We have just got back from an evening Christmas market in the barns of a village some way from here. It was just so picturesque in the dark. The old farmhouses were ranged in a rough circle, with the Church and Mairie on one side. Being a small village, there was no street lighting but house lights blazed and the arches above the massive barn doors (high enough for loaded haywains to enter in the old days) were lit up with fairy lights. Inside some of the barns were decorated with pine branches, straw decorations, holly wreaths and candles. There were barns with wine, some with food, others dedicated to watercolours, pottery, honey, chocolate-making, breads, and lots with home made items in cross stitch, lace, patchwork. We drank coffee in the local bar and ate Croque Monsieurs in one of the barns alongside Christmas wreaths, mistletoe, and Burgundy wines. The most unusual barn interior had a loaded trestle of dried sausages on one side and perfume bottles, with a lady spraying their sickly scents, on the other! It was in this barn that we spotted an old man in the most extraordinary bright orange floppy woolly hat of the proportions of a rasta hat. He was involved in an earnest discussion of the relative merits of Spanish cold meats.

For Keep Fit The only required wear for this is plimsolls with white soles. Most people dress relatively unadventurously. So I was rather taken with the outfit of a lady in her seventies. She has short white hair and Edna Everidge glasses. She is heavily built, with cyclist’s muscular bandy legs and she wears those tight black nylon cycling shorts that were fashionable twelve or so years ago. At home time she puts on a white, cowboy, fringed, leather jacket and also some very high heels. I always wonder what she does next in this eye-catching attire.

And finally, for walks This has long been a popular pastime in the Vosges, and everyone has their own idea of appropriate gear. I rather admired the green three quarter length corduroy trousers surmounted by green waterproof jacket in front of me. The leather hunters’ hats seem popular among the older men. But I was rather surprised to see the walks organiser, a very tall, angular man, produce and wave an umbrella, whose presence he claimed was keeping the rain away. As conversation progressed he produced his other deterrent, a black beret, and put that on. You could not have conceived of a more perfect caricature of a Frenchman! – Oh, did I forget to mention that he was also wearing a striped T-shirt?

And now for the real news …

The construction of the superhighway from the crossroads to the village boundary continues with much earth moving, spreading of mounds of gravel and reconstructing or creating new ditches. They’ve also taken the opportunity to bury the telephone cable to the village – although they seem just to have put the cable into the subsoil, often under the path of the road, rather than putting it in a ducting, in case of future problems. Hopefully there is enough spare capacity in the cable for any further telephone requirements (although, according to France Telecom, we aren’t on the list to get ADSL in the near future – too far from the exchange?). It can’t be long before the tarmac goes down; they’ll want to do that before the frosts really set in. At present, it looks as though there would be enough space for three lanes but it will probably turn into two normal width lanes with wide verges. All this for a village of four hundred inhabitants – most of whom live in the other two communes a couple of kilometres over the hills. They will not benefit from the new road as, within the village the road reverts to narrow lanes; and anyway, they probably don’t use this stretch much as “their” side of the village leads both to St Dié and to a main road which goes over the mountains to Alsace.

Furnishing the “west wing” is starting, even if, at present, we are mainly just looking to see what is available. We have decided on the book shelving and its layout. That should give the 50 or so metres of shelving we think we need – we’ve never had all our books in one room before so it hasn’t been too easy to estimate. John had originally hoped to build the shelving from all the old oak planking we have stashed away in the barns and above the atelier, but there is still much else to do (and the atelier doesn’t have power or heat and John would need to buy some big wood-working machinery), so we’ve opted to buy shelving from IKEA! We’ve now installed light fittings in the main living room, so no more dangling bare bulbs. You’ll understand we’re carefully avoiding the French look of heavy, dark, ornate oak furniture. We’re also planning our bedroom furniture, though are somewhat constrained by both its size and the position of the door. We haven’t yet firmly decided on anything which makes optimum use of the available space so will spend another week browsing catalogues and furniture stores (“I can see that you like to be left alone to make your own decisions” observed one rather exasperated wardrobe sales lady – but we’re the ones who have to sleep with the wardrobe looming over us and mirrors frightening us with our reflections as we wake up!)

In between looking at furniture, there have also been the UCP lecture on Monday, and keep fit and a walk on Thursday. The lecture was on Islam, was given by an army doctor, and had accompanying slides and music. He said it would last an hour and a quarter, at which there was a slight rustle, as lectures are usually about an hour, but everyone settled down. Well, I don’t know whether it was the large auditorium, or the splendid sound system which caused him to declaim slowly and pause for effect, but the result was a lecture that lasted an hour and three quarters, and when the new president leapt up to thank him he started off again with a quarter hour discourse which could not be interrupted, though people began to walk out. Needless to say the President did not ask if there we any questions. It was, however very interesting and his slides were good too, and I think people were interested, though concentration became a problem!

The walk was also pleasant. It was mainly on roads this week, as it was anticipated that the forest footpaths could be very muddy. But we had some lovely views and passed an interesting village cross from c. 1624, with its figures intact. It was quite a sociable excursion, with 51 walkers (and no stragglers, this is the core group!).

We had a visit from Humbert, the draughtsman drew up the plans for our alterations (he freelances for our builder, De Freitas), as we’d called him to say we had some coins for him. He has collected coins since he was a boy and is trying to complete a collection of Elizabeth II coins from the UK (not one of every coin of every year, just every different style, not worried about quality, and ignoring sovereigns, etc.). For the past few years John has been sorting through bags of coins from banks and buying coins from a dealer in Nottingham for him; it has become increasingly difficult to find coins at a reasonable price, as many of the missing coins were only issued in special annual sets rather than for general circulation. This time John had the most recent £5 coins, and a couple of others. Humbert’s British collection must now be nearly complete as he has now asked for John to try to get some Guernsey coins – and set a limit of no more than 3 Euro each. This visit also gave us the opportunity to ask him about a recent form we’d received which has to be completed once building work has been completed so local taxes can be re-assessed. After a quick look at the work he said we could delay submission of the form as we didn’t have a working kitchen tap! And his wife, who had come with him, works in that tax department, so was able to get our records updated the next day.

Nicola reports the cheap Ryanair flights may be having an impact on some other routes. There is now a regular £100 Air France fare from Gatwick to Strasbourg – down from around £180 pounds last year – which her mother is using for a Christmas visit. Unfortunately no impact on the costs of the flight from Birmingham to Basel. And, unsurprisingly, bmiBaby France don’t have any news of (or are unwilling to release any information on) the possible East Midlands-Basel route.

Now that November has finished, many of the seasonal strikes seem to be over. The farmers finished their blockades last Sunday, a few hours before the transport drivers started theirs, causing flurries at the petrol pumps before the anticipated blocking of petrol depots as well as the usual border crossings etc. However, this year all was all resolved quite quickly by the simple ploy of the government announcing strikers could strike but not hinder others; and it would impound any vehicles blocking roads. The air controllers can now no longer come out in sympathy, so their next strike will be over Europeanisation of the air control (and their continuing use of French for domestic air traffic rather than the standard use of English as the common language of air control). Vive la France!

It seems a while since I sat at the keyboard. But we’ve been playing our bit in the launch of the new Ryanair service (mentioned in the last newsletter) between Stansted and Strasbourg. One friend, Alistair nobly came out on the very first flight to cheer us in the November gloom (and he could have been cruising down the sunny Nile with his wife and sister!), then John and I returned to the UK to see respective mothers, family and friends, then another friend, Ann, returned with us to participate and encourage us in the continuing renovations. I realised as we drove back from our UK visit over the Vosges from Strasbourg Airport to Entre-deux-Eaux in the clear light of the full moon, stars, and milky way, how much this feels like home after six months.

It was wonderful to see Alistair emerge from the airport baggage hall wearing his familiar distinctive leather hat and carrying, as his sole luggage, a large blue canoeing barrel – and no, there wasn’t any Ryanair champagne to celebrate the launch, just orange juice, brioche, and television crews at Strasbourg airport. Thereafter, all car journeys involved a slowing down to assess the height and flow of all local rivers. As seems to have been the case everywhere, there has been a lot of rain in the Vosges recently and the water has been pouring off the mountains, swelling the rivers.

One day, after yet more overnight rain, John and Alistair loaded John’s Dagger Legend Canadian canoe onto Snowy (our little white Yaris) and I drove them into St Dié to a launching site below one of the weirs. The river had changed totally after all the rain, and I was quite alarmed as they swept rapidly out of view in the direction of Baccarat. In summer the wide river Meurthe meanders lazily towards the glassmaking town of Baccarat. In the old days whole rafts of timber logs would be floated downstream to the saw mills and beyond. But on this occasion it looked quite dangerous and otherwise deserted. Initially there was some trepidation as Alistair and John hadn’t paddled together for nearly a year or in anything like these conditions for a couple of years, on a flooded River Tees.

The Meurthe seemed, for those knowing some of the UK rivers they’ve paddled in the past, to be like a raging Washburn! The canoe was carried around the first weir out of St Dié as they were still assessing water conditions; the torrent, six foot drop, and the possibility of an early spill gave way to caution, and they carried the canoe round the weir. They successfully negotiated the next, lower, weirs. But then the river widened out for a short stretch on a bend; there sandbanks and part of a fallen tree blocked the obvious, deeper water canoeing line. An attempt to avoid it by taking an alternative narrower flow, resulted in a near spill as they clipped a partially submerged branch. But fine balancing, after thoughts of a swim, kept the boat upright with both occupants on board, although stuck on a rock. Getting started again, and avoiding the next, almost immediate hazard, was achieved with relief. More weirs and standing waves were successfully negotiated.

Then they came upon the section where, a couple of years ago after the December 1999 tempest, the river had been completely blocked by fallen trees. Most had now been removed and piles of short sections of cut tree trunks lined the banks. But the river got more “everglade” like with flows in several directions and no obvious canoeing line as the water swept around and over some still fallen trees. And a right-angle bend didn’t help in assessing the situation. Avoiding what looked to be an impossible fast flowing section without any possibility of inspection, one of the minor flows was taken. But they ended up in shallows and more trees. Some canoe hauling was required to get past this section; getting back onto the river again was exhilarating as the river was still constrained by narrow banks with tree roots giving added swirls. A clear but rapid section then brought them to another narrow, fast flowing section with a partially submerged tree across the width which they hit, spilling John out over the trunk and Alistair out on the canoe side. As John was swept away he managed to rescue the paddles and then took a “breather” and assessed his situation, up to his shoulders in water, while just about managing to stay in one place against an overhanging branch. The current was far too strong to edge along the branch to the bank and as soon as he moved one foot from the bottom, he was swept off downstream in the current. Fortunately the river widened and John managed eventually to swim out of the flow to the opposite bank to Alistair and about 100 metres downstream. By this time Alistair, who had been very near the bank, and had managed to salvage the canoe, found a driftwood plank, and proceeded to paddle across the flow and collected John from the bank. Time for refreshments. Fortunately the Trax pile canoe clothing drains rapidly and, with exercise, remains warm. And then off into more fast-flowing river currents.

At Etival, where they could have got out and phoned me to pick them up, in the now steadily pouring rain, they decided not to go down the “canoe shoot” past the paper mill weir as there was a huge “stopper” and standing wave at the bottom. And the river past the weir looked reasonably benign so they set out again. But just round the first bend it was back to a fast flow, standing waves, and more adrenaline flow. However, all went well and the only concern was some three foot waves over a broken weir just before Raon l’Etape. By the time I picked them up at Raon l’Etape, three hours after they started, it was still pouring with rain but they were paddling quite normally again! Back at St Dié, the river had probably risen another foot and was flowing even faster – which would have been enough for them to have not even considered setting out in the first place.

The stretches of rivers nearer to the mountains are either nearly dry in summer or become raging torrents in winter. This was the first time John had really had a chance to inspect them at this time of year and to see them start their winter fill. There is obviously a fairly fine balance point between them being too shallow and too fast and full. And it seems to take the water about twelve hours from rain at the top to make it’s way down to our level. Near to the top (including the Meurthe from St Dié to Raon l’Etape) they are marked on canoeing (actually kayaking) maps as red (or occasionally purple). More into the plane they are green; more placid, and paddleable most of the year.
Ann is also a keen kayaker and occasional canoeist, and, quite reasonably, she prefers to stay in the boat and avoid the added spice of unplanned capsizes. So as the rivers continued to swell and thresh even more in the continuing rain, she and John opted for the relative tranquillity of exploring the large lake at Pierre Percée north-east of Raon l’Etape. This is a relatively recent artificial lake formed from damming a valley, to provide a constant source of cooling water for electricity power stations in Alsace, and has lots more interesting little inlets than the old glacial lakes round Gérardmer. (Ann had seen mention of a perimeter walk being over 30 km). Again the weather was pretty foul. Ann and John paddled off into the rain and mist looking like something out of “The Last of the Mohicans”. But the rain lifted as they turned northwards around the first bend and they seemed to be alone on the lake (only later did they come across a couple of fishermen on a bank and another in a boat). The scenery, with the steep high, wood-covered, banks, partly covered in mist and low cloud, was very attractive. Along the shore line, mostly sandy, it was more open with some shrubs and occasional grass, but under the dark pines there was nothing. To keep the shoreline open, trees had been felled and their remaining stumps formed interesting patterns and shapes. Despite part of the lake being a bird sanctuary, they only saw a few cormorants and herons. A break for coffee and biscuits was made at the northern extremity at what they named “Bent Birch Bay” – so others should know when they’ve reached the same point! There was almost no wind for most of the trip and the lake was just about flat although there was a slight sign of surface disturbance out of the shelter of the westerly bank sides. However, as they paddled to the western extremity (where there was a deserted sailing club) they noticed the canoe suddenly pulled by an ill-defined current and slightly choppy water surface so had to think more about paddling and less about looking at the scenery.
Meanwhile I’d climbed up to the remains of the old chateau of Salm, hoping to get a good view of them on the lake below. However a layer of mist and low cloud below the rocky outcrop blotted out any view of the lake. The chateau of must once have dominated the valley, but after a chequered history, being passed around as an inheritance or dowry, it was finally dismantled under the orders of Richelieu. All that remains is a ruined tower silhouetted on the overhanging ridge (which looked very mysterious through the mist and pine trees) and the well shaft which was bored 100 feet down into the solid rock (hence, probably, the name Pierre Percée). In the damp and mist I was quite glad of the company of a brown dog which met me in the village and escorted me up and back. Despite various viewpoints around the lake, I saw nothing of the red canoe and Ann and John for nearly three hours, so was quite relieved to see them paddling back up the inlet they launched from having paddled, according to John’s GPS, just over 10 km (the GPS was taken in case the mists thickened and obscured the shores and their starting point). They were wet, but only from rain rather than total immersion, and pleasantly tired from the last stretch, paddling back to the eastern shore across the open lake and current. They hadn’t managed to circumnavigate the entire lake – just three of the major inlets!

Another watery trip was a walk from the Cascade des Molières, above St Dié, (mentioned in an earlier letter after John and I had walked up to this Victorian feature). Ann and I discovered that the water was tumbling down the hillside rapidly and picturesquely, but the Victorian “improvement” had been switched off, probably to avoid the pipe freezing in winter, so the cascade over the huge boulder just wasn’t there! We walked on up the hillside, all the time hearing the tumbling natural waterfalls, but didn’t have time to reach the viewpoint on the ridge at the Sapin Sec before we’d arranged to meet John (who’d kindly been shopping as we explored).

I shall remember the spectacular red sunsets of other walks (which seemed to miraculously have escaped the forecast rain). Alistair and I scrambled down a footpath from the prehistoric hilltop of Le Chastel (I’m not wholly convinced
that the “dolmen” at the top was an ancient one) as the mountains turned blue and the sun set (and the car seemed quite a way off!). Ann discovered that Farmer Duhaut’s cowshed led to a perfect view of sunsets, and we took to strolling up there in the evenings, as the ground mists advanced and the sun declined. I shall also remember a walk with Ann up the lane at the side of Mme Laine’s and along the forest ridge to Saulcy village cemetery (full of brilliant yellow, pink and crimson potted chrysanthemums placed on the graves at All Saints), through the War Grave cemetery (with its Armistice day wreath) and back over the fields past a solitary man digging potatoes (wasn’t he risking his crop as we’d had heavy frosts weeks ago?). After that (dry) walk, Ann and I went down to the village Mairie to upbraid the mayor about the ditch immediately outside our house which is overflowing (as it hasn’t been cleared for several years), covering the road (where it will be a hazard when it freezes into an ice sheet), and squelching down to our barns (far too muddy to get the car in and out) where guttering John put in a few years ago is managing to divert the rapid flow from seeping straight into the house walls, foundations and cellar.

Despite frequent rain, we’ve between us done a lot of clearing outside the house. One day John decided to create more space in the atelier, the former workshop of the old owner, M. Fresse, who was an electrician. (The atelier is a single story detached building beyond the barns). I was busy planting out a hazel tree (I hope it’s name “Nottingham” is a favourable augury!) when I heard a steady chugging sound in the atelier. I looked up and saw John driving the old fifties Deutz tractor out of the atelier onto the road. I hope he didn’t need a licence – the name Fresse is in large letters on a plate on the back! This clear out produced stuff for the bonfire and rubbish for the tip (not the tractor, of course). Alistair (who would appear to be a secret pyromaniac) had been promised a bonfire. So soon after his arrival, which coincided with a couple of relatively dry days, he and John set to on the piles of rotting wood from an old porch and end barn wall and soon we had a blazing bonfire of a height and intense heat worthy of a Viking pyre. Alistair, in his enthusiasm to stoke the blaze, managed to singe his hair and eyebrows, twice. Some of the wood, oak, was not rotten, and was saved for future use. As the fire blazed all day, they turned their attention to “pruning” the thicket of damson saplings – but fortunately spared a few. The rain started in the evening, but the bonfire glowed on throughout the night and was still smoking in the pouring rain in the morning (and still steaming the next day, after the wet canoeing trip)! Later, whilst I was clearing our stacks of cardboard from one of the old cow troughs in the barn, I decided to lay cardboard and plastic in one of the newly cleared areas to prevent an invasion of nettles and thistles. One day we’ll have a new flower or herb garden there, where once there were rotting piles of wood.

We didn’t force our visitors to work throughout their holidays (though I haven’t mentioned that Alistair got involved in the next batch of apple pressing – this time for cider – and that Ann had a grand clean up of the “West Wing”, in readiness for our eventual winter migration when the weather turns cold and we can look forward to the under floor heating in insulated splendour!). Diversions with Alistair included viewing the magnificent astronomical clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, a quest for oversize ski boots (finally satisfied in Gérardmer), a craft fair in St Dié, a food fair in a nearby village hall, and Sunday lunch at a busy auberge up at Le Valtin (Alistair was eyeing the huge chimney and barbecue with great interest – more interesting fire possibilities – and wouldn’t it be good if we put one in our new room?). Oh yes, and we finished up at a mediaeval village in Alsace, Riquewihr, with its glittering Christmas decorations shop (far more exciting than Santa’s grotto).

And with Ann we explored the Friday market at Fraize, where we bought a large cauliflower and some very interesting purple potatoes (this was not the skins – it was the insides that were purple!) which turned out to be delicious with, as the man said, a slight chestnutty flavour and texture, but somewhat expensive for everyday consumption at four euro for 500g (we’ll have to try planting some next year!). Ann had also read that Luneville had a chateau like a miniature Versailles. So we spent a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon exploring Luneville’s old streets, squares, overblown baroque cathedral (huge cherubs on the façade, wonderful shafts of sunlight on chrome yellow pillars inside), the formal gardens of the chateau, and the small museum in one wing of the chateau. And our farewell meal with Ann at the appropriately named “les Voyageurs” Restaurant was most enjoyable.

We’ve enjoyed having our latest voyageurs sharing our Vosgian adventure, and it goes without saying that it was most satisfying to be able to “pop” back to England so easily and see both mothers, Toby, Leila, John’s sister and friends, and even to indulge in a bit of shopping (things like packs of Christmas cards, Camden tablets, and fabric first aid plasters which are hard to find here!).

The Ryanair flights have been OK; the downside is the relative inaccessibility of Stansted from Nottingham by public transport if you don’t have access to  a car (we still await the East Midlands-Basel bmiBaby service). Alistair and I flew to Stansted in an older 737-300, with the first and last six rows not in use (“too bendy” suggested Alistair). But all the other flights have been in new 737-800 planes, on time, and each nearly full, with around 175 passengers. And does that mean the 1.99 euro flights will soon be history? (although Nicola has booked her mother on an Air France flight from Gatwick to Strasbourg over the Christmas/New Year period for the lowest ever fare of just over £100). And Snowy now knows how to get to and from Strasbourg airport in a fairly consistent 75 minutes be it dry, misty, or raining, and day or night.

Au revoir!

At the fork in the road, trestle tables were set out in the sunshine under the yellowing leaves of an old tree. Over the arch of the barn door a hand-made sign proclaimed “buvette” (refreshment stall). The strong smell of barbecued sausage was alluring. “My treat” said Nicola, and we joined the queue. The first group were served their spicy sausages in chewy-looking baguettes without any problems. Then it was the turn of the woman in front of us to order for four people. First her baguette chunks were too short, then the sausages too small, then the larger sausages too charred. The man at the barbecue looked grim as he started a fresh batch. I don’t know if she ever got the perfect sausages – if she did, I expect the mustard and mayonnaise were the wrong kind. We are obviously totally undiscriminating as we enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, watching the world go by and eating our sausages and chips (or baguette, in John’s case). I realise I’ve mentioned the sun twice, mainly because these occasional days of sunshine are such a pleasure, surrounded as they’ve been by days of damp mist, driving rain, or even, as today, hail storms.

And where was this village idyll? I’m sorry to say, for those of you who are already well bored with flea-markets, that it was a tiny village called Vimenil whose streets were lined with villagers and their stalls. We’d already had conversations with two macho men about a battery-powered motor bike (for the possible use of Nicola’s grandson), and with other stall holders about marble-topped bedside tables and a wall pendulum clock. As we walked on, there were puppies advertised for sale on a notice on a car window, a wonderful old house covered with crimson Virginia creeper (out came John’s camera), a leather belt embossed with Flintstones characters (it rather taxed our collective French to explain to the three elderly ladies on the stall who the Flintstones are and why Nicola’s grandson would love the belt – we failed to mention Nicola knowing her daughter would not approve). But, apart from the belt, purchased for a pittance, it was the wall clock that really tugged at Nicola’s heart strings, though the vendor wouldn’t come down in price. So we pooled our euros, notes and coins to show we were at our limit without any cash machine within 20 km, Nicola bought the clock, and we drove off with the chimes murmuring gently (depending on the road surface) in the back of the car, despite the careful wrapping. (When Nicola finally unbent the rods and adjusted the spring tensions later that night she had it chiming on the hour, and every quarter and playing Ave Maria – and all through the night!).

“We’ll follow up our sausages and chips with coffee and cake at the next flea market,” we promised ourselves, as we headed towards Luneville. Luneville has a huge neglected chateau which the town likes to think of (and promote) as a smaller Versailles, and we’d assumed that their flea market would be in the huge square outside the chateau, which would have been very picturesque, surrounded by all the shops selling colourful modern Luneville pottery. Instead, after a visit to the tourist office (open on Sunday in October!) we found it was at a crossroads of high apartment buildings wedged between one forbidding wall of a military barracks and the railway station. And there were no village cakes and coffee here. The only food was an enormous stall of unsold fungi of all shapes and sizes, run by a man with walnut coloured skin and pointy ears who looked like a pixie; there was also candy-floss and more barbecued food from a stall in the mini (commercial) fair on the green at the cross-roads. The whole place felt rather daunting although the flea market had a certain buzz as it was very urban. A Revolutionary story with the guillotine would have filmed well here.

Week 24’s trip over to Marlenheim in Alsace was very different. For a start it was their wine harvest festival. Outside the Hotel de Ville sweet white and red grapes were being given away, for all to join in the celebration, by men dressed in regional costume, standing high above the thronging crowds on a wooden wagon; they were pressing more of the grapes in a huge wooden press; and both the grape juice from the spout below the press and new, still fermenting wine from an adjacent barrel could be tasted by those who had paid their two euro for their tasting glass. And there were plenty of sausage and doner kebab stalls, and endless stalls with coffee, cakes and fruit tarts. We watched Alsatian dances and looked at antiques and munched our spicy sausages and kebabs. And I bought a one euro paté dish. It felt a very pleasant way to round off the flea market season.

And now for Culture. The three groups whose existence the Museum finally divulged to us back in May when we were first investigating the cultural scene were: The Friends of the Library and Museum, the University of Permanent Culture (UCP) and the “Philomatique”. The latter publishes all the local history magazines and booklets and is currently doing sessions in the villages to involve villagers in their history (and to get them contributing their memories). A bit like our reminiscence sessions at St Ann’s Library! So on Saturday I braved the heavy rain and ventured into the Mairie of an unknown village. The first of three talks was on the register of local parcels of land drawn up some time after the Revolution. It was lovely to see the fascination of the forty participants as the names of the plots were explained (apparently the French officials were unfamiliar with local dialect so transcribed the names very roughly). I longed to ask about our plot name, les Irotes, which no one in Entre-deux-Eaux can explain (not that anyone is definitely sure of the origin of the village name), but the speaker was besieged in the interval – and I was from a totally different village. In fact I slipped out at the drinks interval (at about 10pm) as my concentration was beginning to lapse after two further sessions on roads and on the First World War.

A few days later, I noticed on our shop door that a nearer community, St Leonard, was doing something similar this weekend. Sunday 27th was appallingly wet and windy and outdoor activities were out of the question, but looking at photos and local family trees sounded quite appealing, so we both went along. St Leonard was one of the many small towns along the main road which was deliberately and totally destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944 only a few days before they were liberated (and only a few days before that, all remaining men and boys had been rounded up and transported) and so doesn’t have the charm of the older villages like ours. Of the seven hundred houses in the commune, less than fifty remained intact. So it was fascinating to see the photos of the old church, the two hostelries, the old textile works by the stream (now occupied by a scrap car dealer), the old school – a whole vanished world. There were detailed family trees of famous Vosgians (to whom, presumably villagers would have distant links) in the community room, where, at 2.30pm there was still a lively meal going on between the display boards, with sounds of raised voices and great mirth (perhaps they were discussing genealogy!). The photos were in the Mairie, where people were identifying people in old village school photographs and we got involved in the building of the railway, the times of the “diligence” routes, the building of the barracks, the temporary wooden housing put up when some of the menfolk finally returned from the deportation, labour camps, etc. in Germany (if they hadn’t been shot or died there). There were accounts of the timber which shrank (all the local timber had been requisitioned and sent to Germany during the war), leaving great gaps between the boards of the walls, of butter that froze in winter and melted in summer, then the slow rebuilding of the village. And then there were floods in 1955 which washed away the bridge over the Meurthe that joined the two parts of the village. On the aerial photo of 1959, the village was taking shape, but the Church was still a wooden hut, though the new Mairie was there. Over at one of the former hotel-restaurants, the “Salmon”, there were old postcards, books, coins and recent videos for sale, and we could have stopped to listen to a talk about “when our grandparents married.”

Then, on the level of national rather than local culture, the Monday lectures of the UCP (see above) have started. On both Mondays it has been pouring with rain. So a warm lecture hall was more appealing than a wet field or a chilly barn. A friend has suggested that the UCP might be very similar to the University of the Third Age in the UK, but I don’t know the latter. Perhaps someone could enlighten me – though not many of you mere youngsters qualify for the third age! Their first session in the plush auditorium of the Museum started with pomp and ceremony with the presence of the Mayor of St Dié, who no doubt sees himself as a patron of the arts (he was instrumental in starting the Geography Festivals 13 years ago and running them since – he even contributed his own watercolour exhibition during the recent festival). However, after that, the news was bad – the speaker was still sitting on a train which had been delayed between Nancy and Luneville – so the mayor suggested that we looked round the latest exhibition of paintings (not his) which he’d opened on the floor above us at the Museum only two days earlier. I never did find out what the train delay was about – although for an hour or so it felt as if we were back in the UK with all its rail travel uncertainties. However I later read that on the following day five bomb threats had been issued in and around Nancy, claiming to be linked to Al-Quaida and the rail system had come to a halt for two hours. The culprit was later discovered (via his mobile phone) to be an employee who’d worked for SNCF, the rail network, for 25 years. Psychologists are still trying to discover his motivation. Ah yes, the lecture and slide show on Velasquez was excellent when the Professor of Art finally arrived by taxi.

The next week’s UCP lecture was on the divorce law. The lawyer was very entertaining. He really played to the gallery of mainly women getting gasps of horror at the very recent barbarity of French laws. An interesting insight into the cultural trips organised by UCP was provided before the lecture itself. A group had travelled to Prague (well before the recent floods) and had not found it an enlightening experience. There had been no food on the aeroplane; the cultural guide, Joseph, had spoken very poor French; there had been no illuminations on the “Prague illuminated” tour as it had to be undertaken before the evening meal and it was still daylight; and the waiters in the restaurants were rude and didn’t speak French (it all reminded me a bit of English tourists complaining about Paris, apart from the illuminations). However, as a letter of response from the tour company was read aloud the murmurs from the audience indicated that this was still a very sore subject and the ten euro refund per participant was not thought to cover the discomforts and affronts they’d suffered on their travels.

Continuing the transport theme, the quarterly regional newsletter arrived recently and one item of interest included details of the new TGV Est, which has recently started construction. Unlike previous TGVs this one is not wholly funded directly by the state and RFF (the French equivalent of Railtrack/Network Rail), but with the aid of regional (and Luxembourg) money as well. As well as raising environmental, geological, and archaeological issues which need to be solved, the new style contracts seem to have caused delays, so the project is a year behind schedule and over budget. However in (late?) 2006 there should be direct trains running from St Dié to Paris with a journey time of 2 hr 20 min as well as connecting services with French TGVs to western (Nancy-Bordeaux in less than five hours), south-eastern, and northern France (including the Channel Tunnel and onwards to London, as well as to Brussels and Amsterdam), and the German high-speed train system to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich (and on to Italy?).

And there are still bargains on the Ryanair Strasbourg–Stansted route with single fares from 1.79 euro (plus about 10 euro for airport charges/taxes – adding up to 31 euro for a return fare with credit card booking fee). I’ve booked a cheap fare from 4–12 November, mainly to see my mother who’s had a couple of falls, but I’m looking forward to catching up with Leila and Toby and with friends in Nottingham. And John has booked a shorter trip travelling out on 10 November to see his mother and sister (then we’ll return together). At these prices one can afford to just “pop over”.

And finally back to food again – is one ever far away from the topic in France? Over recent years we’ve established a tradition of celebrating John’s birthday at different three-star restaurants within easy striking distance. Last year he was most affronted to have to have a kidney stone removed in Nottingham, rather than dining out in Alsace. This year he chose to go back to a restaurant we’d enjoyed with my mother, the Belle Vue in Saulxures (which really has got a superb view through its large picture windows) since the restaurant in Ammerschwir, identified for the previous year, has been slipping down the rankings. We did a slight detour on our way to Saulxures. A friend had asked if John had read crime writer Nicholas Freeling’s cookery books. As he hadn’t heard about them, I got them for his birthday along with the book by Monsieur Emil Jung from the Crocodile Restaurant (who presided over the gastronomy tent at the Geography Festival, as described in the last newsletter). Fired up by his present (I like to think), John discovered (via the internet) that Freeling had also written about his village of Grandfontaine in the Vosges. We ordered that as my mother’s present to John, then set off for lunch via Grandfontaine (with Nicola, as that’s also become part of the tradition). After passing through the sprawling, faded agricultural Lorraine villages we cross the border into Alsace where the mountain villages feel colder, more self-contained, and a bit hostile (till you get down to the warmer, brightly coloured tourist villages of the grape belt). Grandfontaine looked cold and boring. What a disappointment. It will be interesting to read about it now we’ve seen it.

I’ll hand over to John for a description of the food – “it was lunchtime and Helen and Nicola opted for the dishes from the “standard” menu. In summary, and rather baldly, between them they had egg on chestnuts, terrine in filo pastry, salmon, beef, cheese, and a desert of breton pancakes; since I was there to celebrate, I opted for the “menu au marché”, starting with snails on a light soufflé, fried fish on a bed of greens surrounded by shellfish (including mussels – I don’t know whether Helen noticed – but they didn’t have the effect she always attributes to them and dreads!!), sliced pig’s trotter on a bed of foie gras (perhaps unfortunately all these had a slight over-dominance of the in-season fungi), followed by a delicate prune tart. With an aromatic Tokay pinot gris from Hunnwihr and a rouge de Marlenheim (a dark rosé which we’d not previously had but had noted for sale the previous week at the Marlenheim festival)”.

Our own food production has slowed down somewhat. We did do our own grape harvest last week, but the grapes were small and limited in quantity. On the microwave sits a plastic bottle containing his year’ output – one litre of grape juice – fermenting.

However, we are planning ahead. We’ve finally planted out John LAST year’s birthday present of a mulberry tree (should be spectacular in 40 years time!), two apple trees and a peach tree. We’d not wanted to plant them out in summer in case the ground got too dry. But now, planting them out at the correct time, and on one of the days with a good weather forecast, rain still had the effrontery to halt digging and by evening my holes were full of water. When we finally resumed planting two days later, it was nice and dry but there was a strong wind, which was drying the washing well. We looked up at a slight sound and saw our yellow gazebo, which has sheltered us on the terrace from sun, wind and rain, lifting into the air, complete with upper poles, and coming to rest near our holes; the only “cheap nylon” guy rope John hadn’t already replaced had snapped as it had suffered too much UV and become brittle. So there was a pause to dismantle the remains properly (more bent poles to add to collections from previous disasters). Then just as the last tree was planted, a Dutch car stopped; a family from Rotterdam had got lost on their way to their gîte. The village shop must have sent them on to us as the nearest foreigners. Street names haven’t been used or displayed in this or the surrounding villages until quite recently – and there are no street maps either on entering villages or outside their Mairies. So the rue Lattre de Tassigny meant nothing our neighbours (nor to us!). When I phoned the number on the Dutch instructions, the gite owners turned out to be the Saulcy end of the road that everyone knows as the route de Saulcy, as, if you’re going from here to Saulcy, that is the road you take.

We hope that you are all OK on that side of the Channel despite the gales that have been rocking the UK, and that, like us, you have nothing more serious than the odd bent gazebo pole to cope with.

A bientot.

We so-recent-townies have been enjoying the novel sensation of being food growers as well as consumers, as you will have gathered from earlier ravings about green beans, rocket and beetroot. However the cabbage seedlings which our neighbour Madame Laine gave us and which have fattened nicely have not really engendered the same enthusiasm. It was only this week, when the smell of decaying outer leaves made our little garden smell like the huge cabbage fields around Broadstairs (minus the associated smell of rotting seaweed), that we decided that Something Must be Done. John manfully set too with a huge chopping knife and cauldrons of boiling water, whilst I went off to sniff (and apply) more blue paint. The vegetable freezer in the second barn now smells like Broadstairs in winter, with a tray full of blanched cabbage (21 one-litre ice cream tubs). There will be intermittent southerly winds this winter, comments John! However, combined with some of the windfall apples, onions, an spices some of the cabbage made a tasty (and not too smelly) accompaniment to a pork casserole.

We mentioned in the last newsletter the prestigious International Geography Festival in St Dié (and were delighted that one of our correspondents had just read a newspaper article about the St Dié monk who first put America on the map). We were puzzled as to how the great chefs would work the Festival’s theme of Religion and Geography into their demonstrations. The last two managed magnificently. One, who was programmed to prepare three Mediterranean dishes, explained that they would nourish the heart, the spirit, and the soul (nice one!) and the second chef, from Alsace spoke of amity and love between Alsace and Lorraine and the marriage of ingredients of each, the trout of the Vosges (in Lorraine) and the horseradish of Alsace. (Such orators, the French!). At this point the compere (a well-known presenter of TV cookery programmes, we deduced, who was there, we presumed, to chat during the quiet bits, though he interrupted constantly and even talked over the chefs at times), demanded an explanation of where horseradish came from – obviously not much used in Paris cuisines. It was pointed out that horseradish was a root but that no-one prepared their own as it was so strong (as John knows, being an obviously rare regular horseradish grater). It was also interesting to see how as a Parisian, the compere struggled with how to pronounce local place names we once found difficult like Xonrupt Longuemer (ending sounds like “mare”), the home of the first restaurateur, and Liepvre, home of the second chef. The audience soon put him right though. And he thought he had got it all sorted after his errors with Gérardmer the previous day (ending sounds like “may”) (not sure how the American war time guide would have put them phonetically).

The trout and horseradish woman was very vivacious, and had lots she wanted to tell us, but at this point, onto the stage wandered M. Emil Jung, renowned chef/owner of the Crocodile at Strasbourg (one of the three-star restaurants that was John’s birthday treat a couple of years ago). He seems to be highly regarded by all the up and coming chefs. “You wait, he’ll get a spoon and start tasting everything” whispered John, who’d seen him test out previous chefs’ dishes. Sure enough, M. Emil started rummaging, though the spoons were well hidden by now. Most of the chefs listened humbly when M. Emil pronounced and suggested improvements, but Mme Horseradish was not to be deflected “No, no lemon juice”, she said firmly, “that would alter the flavour I wish to achieve”, and she set him to making some more béchamel as if he was a mere underling. Meanwhile the compere was chatting to the audience and sending a boy round with tasters “No. don’t take it near that dog!” Frantic barking. Later the boy was induced to play the recorder (rather well, fortunately). The final bow was taken by the horseradish chef, the famous TV presenter, the renowned Crocodile chef, the recorder player, another boy who wanted to be a chef with M. Emil, and the dog barked even more loudly. Who would have imagined cookery demonstrations could be such fun! (And the food samples tasted good too).

The scene in our own kitchen was almost as much fun on Thursday, the day after I’d collected five buckets and one wheel-barrow full of windfall apples. We had the kitchen table at a rakish tilt. At the lower end was the fruit press which we’d bought for a farthing (well, not exactly, but a very satisfactory fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry price) at the Corcieux flea market, which needed to be at the tilt for the apple juice to drain into a bowl. At the upper end was a chopping board and the Kenwood Chef, with an assortment of attachments. John experimented with blender and various other bits and settled for the shredder, whilst I washed and chopped the apples. We ended up with 10 litres (also in litre ice cream tubs) of juice in the freezer from the apples in buckets, lots of pulp on the compost heap, a permanently dyed formerly white sack and a very sticky kitchen floor (and we still have a wheelbarrow and a bucket to do!). The wheel-barrow full will be done next week – and we may have to start making cider as freezer space is limited.

It’s been interesting how many of you have commented on our new-found interest in flea markets, as it was never a passion in the UK. I think part of it is a form of voyeurism. You get to experience a cross section of all these tiny villages you’d normally drive straight through. Often the big barns are opened up, and all the stalls are discarding the bric a brac of yesteryear, – they’re like little time capsules. There’s a lot of chat going on between stallholders, and some of them team up to produce Sunday lunch. And of course, there’s the occasional real bargain to celebrate, like our apple press, some silverware, and the pleasure of our slowly expanding French library. Flea markets seem to have some seasonal items – in the last few weeks there has been a selection of cross-country and downhill skis for sale (usually for 5-10 euro) .

The flea markets are also our weekly treat after a week of hard (?) labour (another reason for regretting their imminent demise – or rather, hibernation). So what have the labourers done this week? John has built a wall across the hayloft incorporating some of the wooden trusses, so that the main part is over the barn extension and half of the farmhouse and is illuminated by the three Velux windows. He opened his fourth (or is it fifth) box of 1000 plasterboard screws – thanking whoever invented the portable electric screwdriver! A small room remains on the other side, which needed a dwarf-sized door (because of a horizontal beam above it which could not be removed) to gain access to this storage area over the farmhouse sitting room and “children’s” bedroom. In the end John bought a full-size door and cut the bottom off, so the handle is low down (it will be even lower when the floor level in that bit of the attic is eventually raised 25cm to match the rest of the floor!). Walking through the diminutive door reminded me of the children exploring the attics in “The Magician’s Nephew” – it does indeed look the kind of door you could open into a world of fauns, dwarves and centaurs. (and if we change worlds via that door, we do have a very impressive old wardrobe in the bedroom below, which always used to have some “The lion the witch and the wardrobe” type clues leading to it in children’s treasure hunts). And talking of other worlds, I was just finishing off the Philip Pullman trilogy when he was interviewed on Desert Island Discs (which I listened to whilst painting yet another shutter blue). I gather that there were many complaints to the BBC following his revelation of the ending, but it didn’t spoil it for me. Perhaps I’d better alter this paragraph before John complains I’ve been doing too much reading and not enough work! However, his treat came on Friday when we went to a huge DIY exhibition at a nearby builders’ merchant. We saw lots of doors there, some of them, including the ones we fancied, seemed extremely expensive (would you pay up to £500 for an internal door?), so we may just buy some cheaper plain doors (but with nothing cut off) for the new bedrooms. We don’t really need to make a fashion statement with our bedroom doors. Not being as practical as John, I was much taken with a copper weather vane in the shape of a cock, hand-crafted by a small local artisan (I refer to the size of his enterprise, rather than his stature). As usual no catalogue or price list to take away – but we can have a photocopy of a page, if we know what we want! But after a lot of discussion, an indication that were we to speak to M. Guillaume, after the exhibition, there might be a slight reduction on the exhibition model. Watch this space.

On the French cultural front all the winter cultural events seem to be starting up, now that the Geography Festival is over. I’m about to take a deep breath and see if the local history group can be penetrated by people with foreign accents, and also looking at the programme of the local branch of the UCP, the Université de la Culture Permanante, which has lectures on different topics on certain Monday afternoons, starting next week Having managed to penetrate the walking group and keep-fit group, it may be possible.

On the English cultural front, our attempts to obtain the Sunday Times continue. Since the end of August (and the departure of campers and other tourists), the paper has either not turned up at our newsagent’s in Fraize or been incomplete – usually with only Section Five onwards. However, we hoped we might have tracked down a new supplier (in our local Leclerc supermarket in St Dié). We were interested to learn that they already have a regular order for one copy (for someone who collects it on Friday!). So we were hoping they’d managed to order a second copy for us. The first week no second copy, but it was ordered for this week. So John went in hopefully at the beginning of the week. Two copies had indeed arrived – but both started at Section Three. Still at least this newsagent knew what the paper should look like and had already put them in her returns box marked incomplete, not acceptable (whereas the Fraize newsagent had got very petulant when we declined a copy that started at section 5, and had refused to try again, shouting “C’est trop compliqué”). Hopefully next week……

John had thought that Martin, who lives in Loches in the Loire, was in a better position, since he’d mentioned, in an e-mail on Tuesday, he’d seen information on a new Ryanair service in the Sunday Times. But it turned out he’d bought his paper at Venice airport when coming back from holiday! Back in the Loire valley all he was offered was the Saturday edition of the Sun or the Sunday Mail. As an afterthought, Martin also mentioned “It belatedly occurred to us in Venice that the easiest way of getting there (Venice) would have been Buzz from Tours to Stansted, then Go from Stansted to Venice.”

This discussion on transport had arisen because we’re always on the look-out for other cheap transport routes between the Vosges and the UK. Then Beatrice, wife of the patissier, heard on the radio about a new cheap air service from London to Strasbourg – bookings over the internet only and flights costing 20 euro – Beatrice thought it was from BA. We heard about this last Friday. After some internet searches, John finally tracked it down on Saturday as a new service by Ryanair from Stansted to Strasbourg starting 31 October with introductory fares of £29.99 each way including taxes for bookings made before midnight the following Monday. We e-mailed details out to a few people and Alistair (friend) and Leila (daughter) managed to make bookings at the opening offer rate. John wondered if Alistair would get a first flight glass of champagne (or whiskey?) as he booked for early morning on 31st October – which must be the first flight on the route! It should be well established by the time Leila comes out the first week in February. Incidentally she’s looking for someone to ski with – any offers? We’re well past experimenting with downhill skiing and only dodder along on cross-country tracks. Back on transport, rather than skiing, we’re still hoping bmiBaby start the service they were hinting at (when they started up in the spring) of flights from East Midlands to Basel – both more convenient airports as far as we are concerned (East Midlands because of proximity to Nottingham and Basel because it is slightly nearer than Strasbourg and less busy).

And to close this week’s news, another transport coup. Tractor, milk lorry and other vehicle access along our road has been greatly improved. Two SCREG vans (what an ugly name! I must find out what it stands for) parked outside our barn doors at 8am one morning and started digging up the roughly filled trench in which our electricity cables cross the road. They then proceeded to tarmac from the far end of the road (starting in fact up the dirt track to Farmer Duhaut’s new cowshed) towards our trench. Predictably there wasn’t quite enough tarmac at the end for our trench, which had to be finished later. Next morning Duhaut was to be seen driving his elderly mother along to inspect the new road, followed by other villagers. I shall miss the thump of vehicles as their wheels descended into the old unevenly filled trench! However there’s not much progress on the pink and yellow posts marking out the super highway into the village (though Farmer Vozelle’s imprecations increased in ferocity as his procession of cows lunged on two successive days from the road into other peoples fields (which are now unfenced).

And here ends this week’s news! A bientot!

Friday. Walking day. But walks have finished for the summer (at least, they have for the Societé des Promenades et Sentiers Forestiers de Saint-Dié-des-Vosges.) So a brief pause to remember the strange assortment of characters straggling through the forests.

The “real” members of the group (ie the paid up ones, who also do the longer Tuesday walks, and who help repair the footpaths and build the shelters) are easy to recognise by their fitness, the fact that they act as guides, their bandy legs (are they all ex-cyclists?) and their maleness. There are those who love explaining (and can be so busy pointing out distant peaks that they fail to notice the nearby panic attack of one of the party, or the fact that one person has skidded and fallen on top of and flattened another person, neither of whom, incidentally, were seen on subsequent walks). There are also those who hate talking (especially to foreigners, who are totally incomprehensible, by definition). Then there is the 84 year old, born at the end of the first world war, taken prisoner of war during the second world war whilst manning part of the Maginot line (with only eleven other defenders at that point). There is the slightly less ancient inhabitant who can name all the edible mushrooms (and helpfully knocks over any inedible ones along the pathways with his stick). There is the dear white haired man who brings along a different young girl each time (surely they can’t all be nieces). Our guide last week seemed to have needed a lot of alcohol to fortify him before the walk above Entre-deux-Eaux (sadly when an argument broke out as to the whereabouts or direction of the Col de Mandray, my local knowledge carried no weight, as how could a foreigner possibly know). However, the real identifying feature of “real” members is the turquoise T-shirt and the matching baseball cap which they all possess!

Those who haven’t achieved the T-shirt include: the bag lady (she has hair closely shaved, a radiant smile, hardly speaks, but has been walking with the group for ten years, and is inseparable from an enormous orange carrier bag – as she also carries a large water bottle and has her pullover and mac tied round her waist, the contents of the bag remain a mystery, even to the garrulous ex-hotelier (the first one to take me under her wing, as she was used to foreigners in the hotel trade – “Is Jonathon Dimbleby famous in England?” she asks – he stayed in her hotel once, as did the Tour de France  – or was it just the American team?). There’s the group flirt, in her scarlet shorts and red and white striped T-shirt, who always falls onto someone’s lap as the bus lurches whilst she’s collecting bus fares. There are the three teachers, who don’t work on Fridays and who have a different range of conversation than the others (racism in schools, literature for fourteen-year olds with small vocabularies). There’s the elegant blonde in immaculate white plimsolls (shame it was so muddy last week!), who carries no rucksack, just a dainty water bottle. There are the lovely, friendly ladies who chat about recipes and their cats. Also a supporting cast of another 30 to 40! How I shall miss them all during the winter months!

However, this weekend, the lust for culture which seems to mark the start of autumn in France just as in UK, was catered for in a big, big way by the 13th International Festival of Geography (FIG) held in St Dié. Now you may not have realised until now quite how important St Dié is in the world of geography. Did you know that the man who made the first map which showed the word America lived in St Dié? (But it still seems to need substantial train and plane reductions of up to 50% to lure people to the conference). “St Dié is full of academics”, the walkers had assured me, “it’s a great atmosphere, but the sessions are all free to everyone. It’s well worth going to.” Well the atmosphere on Friday, was very damp, and people seemed a bit subdued as they scuttled between tents and conference centres. However, once inside, there was indeed a real buzz. The theme of the conference was geography and religions, and being French, they’d somehow worked in food, mainly chocolate, whether as a religion or an everyday fact of geography was not entirely clear. There were loads of worthy sessions with professors from Paris expounding to intent throngs, but John went to the demonstration of tarte aux grands crus de chocolat and I went to a discussion on the appeal of Harry Potter. John was in a very fancy tent and didn’t think the tart tasted all that good since it was basically an almond pastry with a chocolate sponge filling covered in a layer of chocolate (and where else but France would you find attendees at a cookery demonstration bringing their dogs – who then barked loudly whenever there was any clapping?). I was in the grandly named Salon de Livres (no, not the library), which had huge publishers stands and book displays. There I ran into two of the walking group, one manning the Amnesty stand, and one wandering round because her lecture had been over-subscribed, so I instantly rushed off to get to mine early (which is an unusual feat for me!). Our professor (who’s published “Harry Potter, les raisons d’un success” as well as “Le Seigneur des Anneaux ou la tentation du mal” – she must have liked the films!) was very interesting, but some of the questions were  bit tedious, along the lines of “I’ve never read the books, but this is a geography conference, so what is the geography of Harry Potter – it all seems to me to be very Anglo-Saxon and nothing to do with the rest of the world?” I suppose I could have asked my burning geographical question as to why the French needed to translate Hogwarts into Poullards when all the other names remained unchanged.

As we drove back from our Friday cultural sortie, I noticed the trees had become more yellow, and realised I hadn’t stirred into the outside world for five days! This was not due to magic spells of immobilisation, but to making the most of fine weather to sand down and paint some more shutters (Bleu de France definitely grows on you after twenty shutters!). The new part of the building is beginning to merge with the old part – only twelve more to go. Whilst I have been slowly painting, John has been rapidly constructing a dividing wall in the attic to separate a future living area from a storage area and insulating the large airy attic space further. He’s seen a bit of the big world too as he’s been to buy the essential plasterboard and food.

The scenery outside has changed slightly this week, due to cow re-locations. On Monday at 8 a.m. we had cows in our western field, but by Thursday they’d shifted down to the southern field. These are burly Farmer Duhaut’s cows, which get taken back to their new palatial accommodation at 6.30 p.m. in the evenings for milking. You never hear farmer Duhaut say a word to his beasts, he just rounds them up by revving his ancient motorbike and herding them through the gap in the electric fence. Around mid-day there is a lot of shouting, which sounds most abusive, as Mme Vozelle drives the Vozelle tractor behind the Vozelle cows, and Farmer Vozelle hangs on with one hand and brandishes his stick whilst yelling imprecations at the cows who are desperate for some grass along the way. It’s always well after dark when we hear the chug of the Vozelle tractor on the return trip. There’s no shouting, though, so the cows must be keen to get back to their shed, as the temperatures have been dropping after sunset. In fact, this week’s night heavy frost on Monday has, sad to say, killed off the riot of orange and scarlet nasturtiums which are usually so spectacular at this time of year.

Other scenery changes include the appearance of yellow posts and pink tipped posts along the narrow, bending road from the cross-roads junction on the Saulcy-Mandray road leading to Entre-deux-Eaux, an indication of the future width of our improved super-highway (at a cost of some 425,000 euro). How those wedding processions will roar along on Saturday afternoons and evenings! And they’ll be able to overtake the late night tractors and herds of cows (unless the cows refuse to give way). Hopefully we won’t get an increase in huge transporter lorries, which have now been banned (by decision of the Entre-deux-Eaux Commune Council) from parking in the village shop car park although our builder, Jose de Freitas, seems to be letting them park up our road on the forecourt of his new (about 8 years old, but as yet unoccupied) house.

But don’t let me give you the impression that we have sunk so far into rural tranquillity that the only items of interest this week have been the appearance of the yellow and pink sticks and the movement of the cows. Last Sunday was flea market day but with literary touches. We started off in the neighbouring village of Ste Marguerite (where my keep fit group is) which was holding a old book and postcard fair. The book dealers brought all their local history titles, and we had fun looking through old railway guides from 1913 (special section on trips round Verdun), then John lit on a September 1943 guide to French pronunciation for the American troops. We shouldn’t really have bought it, as it was a restricted document, only to be given to people in the service of the United States and to “persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are co-operating in Government work”. But who could resist a phrase book which starts with:

Help!                o suh-KOOR                Au secours!
Help me            ay-day MWA                Aidez-moi
I am lost            juh muh swee payr-DEW        Je me suis perdu

A few lines later, just in case the bemused peasants haven’t already realised, comes “We are American soldiers” (noo SAWM day sawl-DAHZ ah-may-ree-KANG). They obviously expected to meet all kinds of interesting people, as there are options for Are you ……. Algerian, Annamese, Belgian, French, Greek, Italian, Madagascan, Moroccan, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Syrian, Turkish, followed (when faced by total incomprehension) by “Are you from this region?” (et voo duh la rayj-YAWNG). I think I need to go back to that Geography Conference, as I’m totally ignorant (as is the spell-check) about the Annamese.
However, section 8 really gets down to the useful stuff with “jay buh-zwang duh mew-nees yawng” (just in case you can’t follow the phonetics, that’s “I need ammunition”) and “Have the troops been building tank traps?” or “lay TROOP KRUZ-tel day P~YEZ ahn-tee TAHNK?” No wonder the French think we don’t speak their language! And, undoubtedly to keep up the morale of the soldiers, phrases such as “Where is there a restaurant” and “have you a better room”… are interspersed with “I am hungry” and “I want to sleep”.

If you’ve got this far, John also spotted an 1832 local yearbook or almanac, but I won’t list all the local mayors for you! (Yes, we bought it!). Interestingly, the list of local market days still all seem to be the same. By this stage Nicola had joined us and we set off for the flea market at Bertrichamps (we used to come through there on our way from Calais to Entre-deux-Eaux, before the new road, off the motorway, bypassing the small and congested towns and villages, was built). We enjoyed its range of stalls and also the sunshine, then took a small commune road through woods, past small ponds, fields of dried maize, and tiny villages with dogs asleep in the middle of the road to the pig or pork festival and flea market of a tiny dot on the map, Mignéville. There was a wonderful antiques stall at the bottom of the hill and fascinating stalls on the way up the main street, so by the time we got to the refreshment tent at the top of the hill at just before 3 p.m., all traces of pig had vanished from the spits – all that remained was a healthy looking pig in a trailer outside the school, whose weight we were invited to guess. In the end, Nicola didn’t buy a wedding present for American friends (“kess kuh suh-SEE?” you imagine them wondering, as they looked at the antique glass cross section of an apple). Then to humour me, I was allowed half an hour at the book village, Fontenoy-la-Joute, where the last of this year’s end-of-month Sunday specials was in full flow. All the bookshops were open, and there were stalls in the sunshine on the street. As the café was open we had considerably longer than half an hour as we watched the world stroll by and then doubled back to look at some beautifully illustrated books on Lorraine.

To finish last week’s medical tale, we eventually managed to take out complementary medical insurance (that is to say the insurance broker helped fill in the forms and took our cheque of about 90 euro for the first month – we’ve still to receive any documentary evidence that the application has been accepted). Hopefully we’ll get the promised 20% discount for the first and 10% for the second year. And it seems we should be able to set it against income tax……just need to jump into that mire! Our final social insurance registration and “smart” card are dependent on photocopies of our residence permits. The “smart” card seems to hold a lot of basic details – they must need to centralise information somewhere since you don’t have a specific doctor (don’t know what they do about doctors’ notes), you could go to several different doctors on the same day with the same complaint, etc.; and there are card readers in supermarkets, etc., so you must be able to check up on the progress of your refund. Undoubtedly we’ll find out more about what the card is really for sometime soon.

So Monday was the day to phone the sub-prefecture concerning our residence permits since we hadn’t heard anything for a few weeks on progress of our applications. “But you will receive them in the post” was the reply. And sure enough, on Wednesday we received stamped addressed envelopes (we’d forgotten about them!) containing not the permits themselves but a card to say we could collect our permits eight days after 30 September (John has his suspicions about French bureaucracy only jumping when pushed!). As we were in St Dié on Friday, we went into the sub-prefecture, and, a few minutes later were leaving with our plastic laminated cards (unfortunately about twice the size of a credit card). They are in the same style as the latest passport end page, but with a different document type code (and different country code!), so should do as passport replacements as well, should we need them in the EU. So now we’re valid for the next five years here!

The week has ended in style (a reward for all our hard work?). Saturday dawned misty (the cows looked ghostly in the field at 8 a.m.), with the sun struggling to leak through. Nicola arrived (late, after a shouting match with a builder who’d broken her gate lock attempting to get in without ringing the bell and nearly caused the hunting dog and the huge black Alsatian-like dog to make a dash for the mountain tops, wild boar and deer) and we set out over the mountains to Alsace. The vineyards were golden in the sun and little vans and trucks lined the verges as families picked their grapes. I’d expected to see a much larger operation! The small town of Barr was holding a flea market during the day and various wine festivities in the evening. The whole of the town centre was closed to traffic, with the regular Saturday morning vegetable and clothes stalls, and then streets and streets of antique and bric a brac stalls. John bought most this time, with three bags of ridiculously low priced metal brackets to hold the loft insulation and plasterboard support rails and a pair of army surplus waterproof gloves (what do you call mittens that have a thumb and a forefinger, with the rest as mitten for up to four fingers – John said it was so you could pull your gun trigger), and Nicola bought two more small bottles for her blackberry wine. We didn’t stay on for the wine festival events as John and I wanted to get back to the Geography Festival and Nicola is in the middle of a watercolour (struggling with snow on the roof, as she told a shocked American friend, who took her literally rather than artistically). But as we left, we spotted a gaudy float made from scarlet yellow and white button chrysanthemums, still being worked on.

Back in St Dié John headed for the gastronomy tent for a session we’d loosely translated as eel pie, but was more of a potato gateau with cabbage and cream and  topped with marinated eel. But unfortunately there wasn’t enough of the “here’s some I prepared earlier” for him to get a taste at the end. This session was of particular interest as it was given by the then second in command at the “Belle Vue” restaurant in Saulxures that we’d been to with my mother. (The chef himself had, sadly, died very recently, having been heavily involved with developing the gastronomy sessions of many of the conferences. So the tent is now re-named in his honour as the Espace Culinaire Denis Boulanger.) John’s second session was another chocolate one, but the chef had finished after half an hour (instead of his allocated one and a half hours). Meanwhile, I went to three of the local history sessions to hear about 1) the Jewish church near the Fountain des Molières, which upon archaeological investigation turned out to be neither a church or Jewish, but possibly some kind of Celtic site (no artefacts to date it by) 2) something whose subject (and mumbling speaker) remained totally unclear for 20 minutes, 3) the Egyptian symbols in the capitals of the cathedral. I also had time to look at the photographic exhibitions in the cloisters, which looked very dramatic as the only illuminated features in the twilight. (It was far too dark to see the Egyptian features at the top of the columns!) The festival finishes tomorrow, so we’ll probably ignore the flea markets and make the most of the culture on offer.

Late on the first Monday afternoon the builders’ merchant lorry delivered the three Velux windows which we’d ordered as soon as permission was finally granted to install them. (It turned out that our application had got attached to someone else’s – in fact we have someone else’s land map attached to our documentation, but I don’t think that invalidates the permission as the mayor gave the documentation his essential signature!). The lorry also brought twenty-six additional rolls of insulation, to insulate the roof space from the arduous Vosgian winters. So John spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday of that week, when the weather was sure to stay fine, opening up the roof and installing the windows on the northern side (to ensure the light is suitable for any artists!) in the second storey of the conversion.

As I sat one morning in the light and airy L-shaped sitting room that is emerging from the first floor of the old barns, I looked with pleasure at the pale cream walls, white ceiling, pale sand coloured floor tiles, and the minimal furniture we hadn’t found room for in our “store” while decorating – two chairs, one TV, and a branched, upright candle holder. But I also had a twinge of guilt, prompted by one of our correspondents who may have assumed that we were doing a loving restoration rather than transformation. But then could we live in a barn?

A flashback: (Skip this if you’ve read it before!). Twelve years ago. A hot, hot August. We see the farmhouse for the first time. A serendipity – merely the attraction of the cool-sounding words “Entre-deux-Eaux”. The ground floor of the barns is so cool. A worn wooden ladder leads up from the first barn which would once have housed the high haywain. It’s irresistible. As we emerge onto the wooden floored upper storey of the barn, all we can see in the shafts of sunlight seeping through the gaps between the roof tiles, are mounds and mounds of dusty hay. Our photograph album shows Toby leaping, arms and legs spread wide, from the highest to the lowest piles. A wooden hay cart lies drunkenly against another pile.

Conversion v. restoration: We have destroyed all that. The wooden floor has been replaced by a strong concrete floor, overlaid with the coils of underfloor heating piping, concrete, and floor tiles. It occurs to me for the first time that the colour of the floor tiles approximates to the colour of those bleached, worn, wood floor boards. A poor recompense, you might say. The honey-coloured stones of the old walls (which seemed to be held together in places by mud and sand) have been covered over by insulation and plasterboard.

But is it a justification to say that we no longer have the insulation provided by layers of dry hay upstairs or the traditional winter central heating provided by the warm bodies of the beasts in the stalls in the second barn? Would we ever have indulged in the escapist dream of self-sufficiency with our two cows, four sheep, one or two pigs, some hens, and twenty rabbits? I, the ex-vegetarian, was the only one of our squeamish family to watch Mme Laine’s pig being slaughtered by the mobile butcher on her front drive. John went strangely quiet on the subject after a few days removing surplus teats when on his agricultural college course – although, as he also pointed out, one can’t take off travelling to India or China if one has a barnful of animals. As to the lean-to wooden wash-house, who would choose to return to washing the household linen and clothes in a crumbling cement trough of ice-cold water. The trough must have been long superseded, given the array of decrepit washing machines lining the old man’s atelier, potting shed and garage (though as he was an electrician, some machines might not have come from this house). We turned the wash house into an outdoor covered eating area, then the beams began to sag, and it finally folded and collapsed under the weight of falling roof tiles in the great tempest of Boxing Day 1999.

One day a car stopped outside the barn door, and I found a young man examining the façade intently. “This was my grandfather’s house”, he explained, “and I used to spend my holidays here”. He looked philosophical as I showed him the changes – the cement staircase leading up over the animals’ drinking trough to the former hayloft, the massive boiler in front of the cattle stalls. (But the underground water storage tanks are still intact beneath the barns, should drought return.) Could he see the cellar under the old house? He’d never been allowed down there. His grandfather always used to frighten him by saying there was a dead German buried there. We assured him we hadn’t found any bones there, during our various drainage diggings. But John told him about the skulls in the roof space above the old man’s workshop. He laughed, and agreed with his cousin, the council employee’s, opinion that they were probably skulls his grandfather had picked up when the churchyard was been cleared for the next layer of burials.

Now: So what remains? Well there is still long ramp up which the hay cart would have been dragged to the first floor using the pulley system (which still partly exists in the third barn). But instead of the ramp leading into a wooden extension to the hay loft, it leads onto a flat area – our future balcony for sunset meals (this wooden extension had been damaged, not by the storm, but by rot). A second storey has been created under the roof beams. For a fleeting moment on Tuesday, the original atmosphere of the barns was recaptured, as John lifted roof tiles for the first Velux window. As the sun streamed through and picked out the pattern of the beams, you could almost see the old mounds of hay and the cart! But it was indeed fleeting, as work has since begun on insulating the second story. And most of the beams will soon be submerged under glass fibre and plasterboard. However, one reminder remains – the only approach to the second floor at present is up a step ladder (through not such a rickety one as the original wooden one with missing or rotted rungs).

As for me. I haven’t been sitting around all week musing on conversion v. restoration, despite the above reverie. I’ve been (slowly) starting to rub down and paint shutters. The year we moved in we and the Harts painted the old farmhouse shutters a cool, elegant white, and they have lasted well. But twelve summers of intense heat and twelve winters of frosts and snows have taken their toll, and by this summer they were peeling badly. After much consultation of colour charts, I picked the blue I’d envisaged all along. On the Dulux Valentine chart it is appropriately enough called Bleu de France. It looks a bit bright after white, but all the upstairs shutters had traces of blue paint under the white, so in fact it’s a bit of restoration rather than innovation!

All this activity followed a pleasant Sunday. We didn’t need to go far afield for our flea-marketing, as St Dié had a big street market, where all the shops on Rue Thiers and Rue d’Alsace (including Beatrice and Jean Robert’s patisserie) spilled out onto the streets to join all the visiting clothes stalls (including countless pullovers and panpipes from Ecuador), vegetable stalls (mounds of onions and garlic), sweet stalls (it was hard to taste the ginger in the samples of Vosgian ginger boiled sweets we tried), and ceramics stalls (wonderful dark blue heavy Alsace plates, casseroles and bowls with glazed white flowers and storks). In the market square and near the station there were lots of flea market stalls. We saw all kinds of interesting things, including wall lights, pictures, ancient wooden trays with carved pictures (done during the long winter evenings?), and lots of books. I bought a post-war book with interesting colour illustrations and a new (greatly reduced) book about Lorraine. By 3 o’clock it was getting very crowded on the streets and main bridge, and we were treading on small dogs and being rammed by large pushchairs. So we sat down for a coffee at one of the bars with tables outside. Refreshed, we went further and stopped to look at some wood burning stoves displayed on a lorry. This leads me on to a second diatribe, this time on how the French sell things.

French sales techniques: We have been wanting for some time to buy a wood burning stove for the new sitting room. Agreed, we already have the underfloor heating, but it would be so nice in a miserable and freezing weather to watch the flickering flames as well. And what would we have done without the old kitchen range during the week’s power failure following the great tempest of 1999? However it was very hard to ascertain prices of the elegant new models on the lorry, as the man by the lorry and then the girl inside the shop behind the lorry kept saying that they only had one price list from the manufacturer, so couldn’t give us a list of prices, and they couldn’t really quote us a fixed price as it would depend what we needed and they’d need to come out and see. This was exactly the response we got at the Nancy trade fair when we asked the price per metre of some shelving we fancied. John, who is used to taking his own measurements and making his own decision based on prices of components was so frustrated that he e-mailed the manufacturer when we got home; following a concerned phone call from the distributor early Monday, we got a visit on Wednesday from a director who was in the area. However the prices he was able to give us (“people don’t usually want a price list, they are happy for us to visit and assess their needs. It’s a very personal service”) were very high – although he did agree that perhaps a single sheet indicating whether stoves were 3000 euro or 10,000 euro could be a helpful complement to their glossy A3 catalogue! What a way to try to sell things, we fumed! But then I hadn’t yet read T.E. Carhart’s “The piano shop on the left bank”. It’s a delightful book. And I thoroughly believed the author’s account of how he was told for weeks by the elderly proprietor that he knew of no second hand pianos for sale until a young partner hinted that he first needed to gain an introduction from an existing client, after which he was allowed into the huge old showroom/workroom filled with second hand pianos (and did indeed have a very personal service in buying a beautiful second hand small grand piano).

This archaic sensation continued when I went out to pick raspberries in the evening, was aware of a sudden hissing, and watched a hot air balloon descending rapidly onto the field above the front door, avoiding the large bales of hay which Farmer Vozelle had been baled earlier that afternoon. The support vehicles came rushing up our narrow lane and parked outside our workshop. More balloon flights followed during the week in the evenings, targeting landing just the other side of the small stream at the bottom of our land, near enough to the Saulcy to Entre-deux-Eaux road for the support vehicles to retrieve and load the deflated balloon easily. It’s very picturesque to watch!

The other highlight of the week for me was a patchwork convention on Friday at Ste Marie aux Mines. I’d always thought it was a long way over the mountains (the road tunnel is closed at present for maintenance), and allowed plenty of time for the journey through heavy cloud. However, it was very quick, so I looked round one of the many exhibitions, this one in an old church, filled with Amish plain patchwork quilts (no garish patterned material!). it was fascinating. The streets were seething with patchworkers (a very recognizable species, it turned out), all attending lectures, courses and exhibitions. I’d hoped to do a crazy patchwork session, but it was over-subscribed, so I struggled with the unfamiliar art of quilting, but thoroughly enjoyed it – not least the companionship of the other quilters, all lending materials, exchanging techniques and picking up tips. At lunch time I looked at an exhibition in the theatre of textiles from India on the theme of “the good earth”. And at the end of the course I saw a spectacular Italian patchwork exhibition at another church. I particularly liked a dark blue and cream patchwork featuring Escher interlocking horses made out of silk tie pieces (guard your silk ties, John!).

The start of week 20. The official end of summer. And how accurate that dating is. The very evening that Autumn began, Monday September 23, the French weather forecasters were ruefully predicting snow in the Vosges and Alps between 1000 and 1400 metres. We didn’t set out for the high peaks the next day to test their accuracy, but we did wrap up extremely warmly as it was very cold, well 8ºC. John was indoors combating final UK tax forms and pension application and eventually lit the wood-burning kitchen range, which took the chill off the whole house.

Do we exist, medically speaking? The miserable weather, the aching bones (Helen’s poorly neck, John’s nascent kidney stone), and a calculation that it was over 3 months since we started trying to get documentation for our reciprocal rights as EU citizens to treatment under the French health system (as residents rather than visitors) led to a few impatient phone calls. Mme Poirier, the harassed only person in the Vosges who could process our documents had not yet done so, due to more important dossiers and a current change over of computer systems (how often do they unfairly take the blame? We’ve all been part of systems that have managed the changeover relatively efficiently). On Monday she said we wouldn’t get the number for another couple of weeks. “But you can still get treated, without a number, and I’ll process your bills”, Mme Poirier assured me. But, as the Social Security only reimburse up to 70% of a fixed standard rate (and one might get charged considerably more than the fixed rate by individual practitioners) one needs to consider taking out supplementary (complimentaire) health insurance, but for that have to first obtain the official state health number. But I can’t get my complimentaire, I grumbled. Oh yes you can, Mme Poirier said, loosing impatience and put the phone down once I’d extracted the name of her director.

So in the end I phoned our house and car insurer broker, where we are well known (thanks to an introduction from our former neighbour who works there, not to mention protracted dealings when our roof blew off in the great tempest!). Well, you’ll definitely need your health number, said M. Regnier, when I went in to see him. I decided to let him and Mme Poirier fight it out by phone. Trust me, said Mme Poirier, they will soon have a number, just go ahead. And, surprise, surprise, the provisional number arrived on Thursday. So we are currently wading through the literature trying to decide which degrees of protection we are most likely to need in future. Which reminds me, I’d better phone that nice M. Regnier, who is most helpful (could it be, perish the thought, that we look quite profitable – but we are talking of annual insurance costing around 1000 euro?), and make another appointment. Lets hope we’re soon covered before all the winter ailments kick in. Apparently if you don’t take out supplementary insurance before you are 60, French retirement age, the premiums rocket.

Tractor: When John sold our twelve-year old Passat to a dealer on our trip back in August he first swapped the two-year old battery for the original Passat battery we taken back to the UK from Entre-deux-Eaux. The “new” battery was to go in our 1954 750cc single cylinder diesel Deutz tractor which we found in the atelier when we bought the farmhouse. Around 1995 John had rewired the tractor and got it going again, much to the surprise of our neighbours, but we haven’t had need of it and it had been unused for five years. With a charged battery (and still with the original diesel in the tank from fifteen or more years ago) it started first time – once John had remembered the necessary procedures. Following our visit to the Hattstat tractor festival in August, the tractor will be subject to restoration sometime in the future when there is time

Another possible sign of approaching winter is the apparent return of our barn owl. John had only spotted it once before, a couple of years ago, in what is now the attic/second storey, but owls had left signs of visits, including many regurgitated pellets of fur and bone, for several years. In the last week John has seen it twice in the attic when he has gone up to start work. So, unfortunately, the small open arched window (above the old farmhouse door for those that know the building) will have to be blocked to stop further visits, but plans are in hand for a possible nest box just outside in the hope the owl doesn’t leave us completely.

Also the first autumn crocuses (colchicums) have started to bloom in our meadows but it will probably be a few weeks before some of the nearby meadows turn completely purple with their flowers.

A final slice of French life: It’s happened! There are now advertisements on French television at prime viewing time for cheese and ham sandwiches made with sliced bread and sold in triangular plastic packs which would easily get lost in a railway buffet bar.

A bientot!

Last Sunday was passed here in traditional fashion, at several flea markets. The first one was just off the main road from St Dié to Baccarat, at La Voivre – Hollande, where there was an apple festival as well as flea market. We joined forces with Nicola, which was just as well for her as she bought four more wooden dining room chairs (in need of stripping, polishing, re-springing, and re-seating – but what do you expect for 22 euro?), so we were able to help carry them, which was especially fortunate as the stall they came from was one of the last along the long single street of the village and any way round with the car would have been a minor tour in itself. We seem to buy less when we’re with her – we just seem to get pleasure from her purchases!

The next flea market was at a small hilltop village some way off one of the roads to Epinal, but none of us spotted anything of interest. The final market we visited was further towards Epinal and was quite large, with lots of variety. Nicola bought various small bottles to use for the blackberry wine she is making, to add as little Christmas presents, but again we didn’t find anything! As usual it was all great fun and the weather was sunny and pleasant.

John’s account of the rest of the week runs thus:
Painting week!! Forty-eight litres of paint used – about 500 sq. metres  of walls and ceilings (three coats) – is that equivalent to one coat over a football field?

You will gather from this that decorating has commenced in the “west wing”. We’d bought 20 litres of white plasterboard undercoat and sealant some time ago, and John used that on our bedroom, the sitting room and (future) stairwell area. Then we spotted some normally expensive white paint cheap in the current Cora promotions so bought five 6 litre tubs. John gave the ceilings 2 coats of white, then added a litre of beige paint to a tub to give a slightly warmer tint for the walls, most of which now have 2 coats. So it’s all beginning to look very elegant. On Monday we’re expecting a delivery from Gedimat of Velux windows (since we finally got permission last Friday to install them in the attic space) and more glass fibre insulation. So next week will probably be loft story week!

Whilst John’s been busy on that mammoth task, Helen’s done odd bits of painting, pulled out the most rampant of the bindweed (some had reached the top of a small tree whilst we were away!) and cut some of the grass to make more of a lawn effect below the terrace and beyond the new house. Helen joined a keep fit group in Ste Marguerite, which meets at 8.45 on Thursday mornings, and also participated in the usual Friday forest 10 km stroll with the walking group. It was a lovely walk up (and down) “les jumeaux”, twin peaks to the north west of St Dié. As the sun had come out after several overcast days it was very pleasant, despite the wind. When the group reached the second viewpoint, some of them burst into spontaneous song, which was entertaining. The convivial atmosphere was broken at the end when people got very tired of the 45 minute wait for the coach back to St Dié (the school runs must have taken priority now that term has started again –or else they just forgot us despite the map that the driver out had been given). So Helen ought to be getting a bit fitter, but the home grown produce and cooking is too good!

John’s also been busy as computer doctor, since Nicola’s computer got a virus which caused it to stop working and he has been sorting out for her (one of the I.worm.klez family – it required a complete rebuild of the operating system and reinstallation of all software), and he’s been helping Helen to create a database for her budding collection of children’s books. There’s also been a bit of fancy cooking, as we invited Nicola over to dinner on Tuesday evening (and to collect her computer!). We seemed to have been over to her more often than she’d been here, recently, so it was nice to return hospitality. It poured with rain that evening and the plants got well watered, but it was an enjoyable evening inside (alas, no dinner on the terrace!)

Monday had been a day of phone calls. The first was from a German friend, Margrit, who’s planning to come over at the end of September. It seems that it’s her 60th birthday on September 28th, and she’s told her family that she doesn’t want any birthday presents and that she will be away for two weeks. So we’re not quite sure what family saga we’re getting involved in here, but it will be nice to see her. Then Helen got a call (in English!) from the Tourist office in Ste Marie les Mines, who are organising a big four day patchwork convention next week. Now English phone calls in our part of France are extremely rare and she was impressed. Sadly the crazy log course she’d wanted to attend was full, so she chose “textures in patchwork” – homework is to find pictures of fossils, rock structures etc (which sounds like a trip to the library, as our books are still rather inaccessible). Later Helen rang the Sickness Benefit office in Epinal that we visited the day before we left for England. To our great annoyance, nothing had been done to process our documents, which we started trying to sort out in June! The only woman who could deal with it had been away for a month, and on her return had done nothing for three weeks despite having said we would get our temporary health insurance number by the end of August – and, wouldn’t you just believe it, the computer system will be changing next week. Refugees and immigrants probably face similar hurdles all the time in the UK too, but it is all so frustrating!

We’ve got a few more sunny days ahead, which will be pleasant. The evenings, however, get colder quite rapidly once the sun goes down if there is a clear sky, and we’re in warm pullovers in the evening, and not sitting out on the terrace! Tomorrow there is a big street market in the main roads and market square of St Dié; all the shopkeepers have stalls outside their shops and there is a flea market in the large market square and around.

We failed to advertise the farmhouse in Chez Nous for next year, not having advertised this year, as we didn’t know the closing date. So we will definitely have room for anyone who wants to visit. Just form an orderly queue and send in your preferred dates. First come first beds.

As a postscript, we’ve been asked many times where the two rivers of Entre-deux-Eaux are and haven’t been able to give any real answer. On the village walk last week Helen was told the village name might be a corruption of the Vosgian dialect version of Entre-deux-Hauts which will make it easier, except with so many hills around it is difficult to know which two they are!

When I first started the weekly bulletins, an ex-colleague said that I’d never keep it up. But my excuse for this 3 weeks worth of news is that we’ve been in England for 10 days of that 3 weeks, so that doesn’t count!

At the end of our last bulletin, we’d done a massive clear up in the farmhouse for the family from Birchington that we’d unintentionally let the house to (last September before our plans to move here had been finalised and we decided not to let the farmhouse this year), and we were camping in the unfinished barn conversion, prior to setting out ourselves for England. (In the meantime the visitors were setting out for long drives in the other direction. I have to admit that I’m finding it quite frustrating watching visitors set off for Switzerland, Germany and Alsace when I think that the countryside and villages within a 20 mile radius are so beautiful, – you can see everything on the local forest walks I take with the Friday walking group. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s THEIR holiday!)

As for our holiday, it was lovely to see Leila, Toby, my mother, John’s mother, John’s sister and her family and many of our Nottingham friends again. An additional treat was to spend a couple of nights in Broadstairs, where Jessica made us so welcome in her family house. We went to sleep with the lighthouse flashing on the cliff top, and woke to the sound of the geese rushing out onto the lawn. Needless to say, we also walked on the beach and paddled in the sea (we’d forgotten to take our swimming costumes).We strolled round to Holland House (my favourite childhood house), visited the Albion second-hand bookshop (and an even better one with a 50p bargain basement) and dined near the harbour – in a mixture of heavy rain and wonderful sunshine (the sunshine of childhood summers).

Our main aim was to do the final clearance of John’s mother’s bungalow (which his sister had already done a lot of work on), as it seems to be nearly sold. This is always a very dispiriting process. If your parents have already downsized, most of your childhood things have already gone, but there’s a lot of good quality furniture, pictures, etc. which don’t seem to have much market value. So in the end it was a clearance firm for most things, but with books and some other items given to Oxfam, some blankets and duvets to some of the homeless, and two carloads of stuff for France (one load stored with friends!). So the meals which we had with family and friends were just such a welcome diversion. We both have such happy memories of a barbecue on a balmy night with Alistair’s demonstrating his (then) latest version of his patent barbecue/garden heater/table/puffing Billy — which hasn’t yet set fire to the neighbouring properties (and thanks for a belated leaving present from John and Wendy S — when did he “steal” that Entre-deux-Eaux wood?), a balti in Birmingham with Toby, Hannah and Leila, a rather Fawlty Towers meal with my mother in Sherwood at a restaurant where we’d had an enjoyable meal in May (wrong wine, waiter asking how well I’d like my lamb done – when it was a confit, mixed up dinners, solicitous queries as to our enjoyment, chocolate “tort” which turned out to be sponge pud just like school made it, etc. – but all done with a very confident flourish), a Chinese meal down Mansfield road (no, not the one which St Ann’s Library –or, at least its staff – frequent) and a very enjoyable, relaxing meal with Ann and David and friends returning to Nottingham (plus demonstrations of David and Matthew’s latest model rocket technology which they had been launching over the Bank Holiday weekend, in Scotland). Then there was dinner in Billericay with John’s sister on the way up and lunch on the lawn on the way down. So thanks to everyone for looking after us so brilliantly and making the dreary task seem lighter.

We’d found Nottingham much dirtier, noisier, and scruffier than we’d remembered it, with road works, police sirens, litter, and boarded up properties that you just don’t notice when you live there (do we sound like Meldrews already?). So it was lovely to spend our last night before our return with Jessica in sunny Broadstairs. After coffee and toast at Broadstairs on the Friday morning we made a leisurely start and caught the 10.45 a.m. Pride of Calais, which gave us time for an easy drive back on our usual route through northern France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. We even turned off the motorway in Belgium to Redu (towards the Luxembourg border – also signposted for the European Space Centre exhibition centre) and spent an hour and a half in the book village there. Again it was lovely and sunny, and it was enjoyable wandering round. One of the shops had quite a good English stock, which was a pleasant surprise. We stopped a bit later for an evening meal in a restaurant at Cora, just before Metz, and were back at the farmhouse well before 11 p.m. We found the house beautifully neat and clean, which was good (the visitors had paid for cleaning). But we just left the car fully loaded and tumbled into our beds in the barn conversion. So we spent the Saturday moving things back into the farmhouse and also unpacking the car and finding homes for various items from the bungalow.

Week 17 has been spent mainly on getting straight in the house and garden and, for me, on walks. At the end of it, John and I took a short walk together to the Cascades of Molières. We’d earlier seen a footpath to it when driving with my mother to the north of St Dié. It was only a short, though very pretty, walk up along the stream to the cascade, which seemed to have been engineered at some point to run uphill and cascade spectacularly over an enormous boulder. There were little bridges and picnic tables and I could just imagine the charabancs at the turn of the century bringing weekend picnickers to pose by the cascade for their photographs (complete with long white lacy dresses and boaters). All I need to do now is to answer my mother’s question about what connection it has with Molière!

We returned from England just in time for the annual Entre-deux-Eaux walk, which I’ve done twice before, once along with John, Toby and other friends. You register and set off with a map whenever you want (so it’s more fun to be with a group) and pass 2 or 3 check points, where your map is stamped and where you can have a cold drink or a coffee. John decided that his legs/ knees/ ankles/ Achilles tendon weren’t up to it, although later that morning he joined Nicola, who’d dropped by, on a flea market expedition. So I set off solo after a late breakfast (for those who know the area, it started just along the road up Mme Laine’s lane and took in part of Saulcy, doubled back to cross the road past the schoolhouse in Rememont, did a big loop to Fourchifol then went up to the top of the track that leads down to the Entre-deux-Eaux church. It was 16km, and the people who’d booked lunch back at Entre-deux-Eaux had all finished by the time I got there! (However residents are allowed to book lunch without doing the walk! So maybe none of them had walked). I walked with various people at different times, including one family where one of the men won a bottle of champagne as the oldest participant and another said wonderingly that I wasn’t like his stereotype English person and didn’t seem like the traditional enemy. I left them at the first check point as they were going rather slowly and doing the shorter walk. Later I joined up with a female postman (or should I say postal delivery worker) from Schirmeck (it sounds quite difficult delivering letters to remote farms up there in winter).

During the week John’s been finishing off the plastering in the new bit and starting to sort out roof insulation. I’ve been weeding and clearing in the garden (there must have been quite a bit or rain whilst we were away, as everything has grown). John has made some more ginger and marrow jam and more tomato and marrow chutney (the marrow mountain continues to grow!), and we’ve frozen most of the green beans, which are delicious, and gathered our potatoes. Beetroots and carrots still abound, various varieties of lettuce are bolting, there’s a glut of basil, and the cabbages refuse to stop growing.

At the end of the week back here, I joined the Friday St Die walking group. The coach set off in the opposite direction to the place on the programme, so I think there must have been a change to the programme! The walk started from Saales and climbed up to a spectacular viewpoint. There was still logging going on and it was interesting watching the huge machine which could fell trees, strip off their branches and slice the trunks into required lengths. The weather was overcast, but the sun came out as we reached the summit, so the view was blue and hazy. There were autumn crocuses in the meadows as we descended, as indeed there are in our own meadow and orchard.

On the way back I stopped at the Mairie and collected our approved planning application to install three Velux windows in the attic (and to legalise the one already installed in the kitchen!). So work can commence on windows then roof insulation before winter comes.

It is peaceful being back here amid the cows and crocuses (and a hot-air balloon which landed last night among Farmer Vozelle’s bales of hay in the field across the road outside dining room and again tonight in the field just to the south of us – the balloon trip company come from Saulcy so perhaps they are targeting landings near to home for easy retrieval?). We don’t miss the noise and litter of town life, but we did enjoy seeing you all.

A la prochaine!

10pm (French time), Saturday 17 August. We’ve just been downstairs to welcome our paying guests to the farmhouse, after their long journey. Their one year old daughter has woken up from the car sleep, and is looking alert and ready to explore all night. We’ve retreated back to the barn conversion. It seemed quite an effort to clear everything out of the farmhouse, after being settled in there for three months!  However, the farmhouse looks even better after a massive clean up and clear up and the conversion looks pleasantly uncluttered and nearly habitable (apart from having no kitchen and needing decorating). It’s taken 2 or 3 days to get organised back in here, but by 4pm all was ready, and later John cooked salmon on the gas ring on the balcony and we dined in style.

The weather has continued to be very variable with a spell of overcast and rainy weather followed by brilliant sunshine. It does mean that all the weeds as well as all the vegetables have grown rapidly. So the early part of the week was spent harvesting, weeding and preserving. John has produced jars of tomato chutney, marrow and ginger preserve, and cooked and frozen all the damsons from the orchard’s defensive (sheltering) row of damsons.

The two days when the routines of cooking, gardening and cleaning were varied were last Sunday, which was still damp and drizzly, when we indulged in local flea markets. The first one was at La Houssiere, near Corcieux, and was held on a wet and muddy field (I realised that we’d been there another year, on an equally wet and muddy day and David Hart had seen the memorable cake plate with all its markings to help divide cake into portions. Alas the cake plate was no longer there!) However, we’d found a picturesque rutted road over the hills from St Leonard, which made the journey memorable. We went on to a second market, but that was quite small and we bought nothing (at either). Thursday was a public holiday to celebrate the assumption of the Virgin Mary, and so there were more flea markets and we went to one at Corcieux (where we camped when we first saw this house). This time it was sunny and as we took the same route in reverse back to St Leonard as we’d taken on Sunday, we found the most spectacular views, our road being intersected by a national footpath and by the Chemin des Ducs. The Corcieux market was large and interesting and John bought a couple of small DIY items cheaply, but no further finds.

Nicola, in the neighbouring village of Clefcy, has been having an even busier week than us, as she has her daughter Emma and two grandchildren over from the States, and her mother over from England. So there have been 4 generations in her house. Into this chaos she invited us to dinner on Thursday evening, together with the patisserie making friends. The American contingent speak no French and the cake-makers no English so it was a lively event involving much translation by Nicola’s mother (who was born and grew up in Belgium), Nicola and myself. The very articulate 4 year old was trying to persuade the patissier to build him a swing right now! We also saw the video Nicola made as she crossed the States by car (via tourist sites like Yellowstone Park) and worked on her and Emma’s newly acquired Coast house in Oregon.

I managed to get enough clearing up done by Friday afternoon to join the St Dié  walking group – this time on quite familiar territory! The walk started from St Leonard and went through the Mandray forests, steadily climbing up to the Col de Mandray, (via a little chapel by a spring where, according to tradition, you have to smear your eyes with water and your sight miraculously improves. I noticed a huge improvement as soon as I did that – but it was more due to washing away the sweat, I think!). As we started to drop down to Mandray Church we had lovely views across to the hill above Entre deux Eaux church which we can see from our house (though Entre deux Eaux itself was hidden behind the hill). Everyone was quite chatty – I was even invited to join the winter rambling group for older people – even though they politely added that they didn’t think that I was quite old enough to qualify! They also mentioned that there was a librarian called Helene walking just ahead of us, which was an interesting thought for an ex-librarian called Helen, though when I talked to her, she was a book binder (small firm of 2 people in Paris doing specialist poetry and art volumes) rather than librarian. Somebody else was talking about artefacts in the museum (ah! Cultural interests!) and one of the regular walkers broke into excellent English (heavily accented but very colloquial) – it turned out that he had hitch-hiked in Australia and the United States in the early seventies. So the group contains all kinds of surprises. I even got a farewell kiss from the guide!

10.30 am Monday 19 August. I thought I’d just had a postscript to last week’s news, as tomorrow we’re setting out for 10 days in the UK, during which you won’t get the updates! Yesterday we had a most profitable day at a couple of flea markets. The sun was shining brightly, all the stall holders were relaxed and joking (and consuming Sunday lunch, it seemed, any time we approached), and there weren’t too many dealers! The first market was at St Gorgon (who on earth was St Gorgon?), and it wasn’t till we got there that we remembered that we’d been there last year and enjoyed it (I’d bought my first French book there, a bit of early sixties nostalgia and adolescent angst from Francoise Sagan.) This time John spotted a beautiful hand thrown dark grey jug with black fish outlines (our most expensive buy apart from the earlier fruit press, but well worth the mere £4.50!) and also a heavy cast iron frying pan (65p) and some crème brulée dishes, and I spent some time going through a pile of illustrated books (looked like a sixties book club) and selecting a few. Flushed with success, we stopped at the refreshment room (no tent or marquee for St Gorgon, it was all done in maximum hygienic indoor conditions) for some sausage and chips. Then we drove on to the smaller, but quite delightful market at Jussarupt. Here the stalls were scattered throughout the small village, several in the cool interiors of the barns. There were old ploughs and dresses for seventy year olds for sale in one farmyard, children’s toys in others, a very noisy beer shack and a huge shady barn (alas, lots of interesting contents not for sale) in which I found some interesting novels published in the forties in a magazine format, with superb woodcuts by different artists (again for 65p each – one euro seems the basis for a lot of transactions!). As we hadn’t gone very far afield, there was time for me to go into the evening service at the cathedral, whilst John prepared pork wrapped in bacon, accompanied by the inevitable marrow (“diced courgette” probably sounds more inviting). This morning’s croissants were, of course, accompanied by delicious (home-made) marrow and ginger jam.

This morning one of our officials (this time in Social Security) returned from leave, so this afternoon we’re off to Epinal clutching birth certificates and the temporary cartes de sejour (whose acquisition we celebrated in the last newsletter) to see if we can transfer ourselves into the French sickness entitlements system (if successful, the next step will be top-up – or complementary! – private health insurance). Then back to pack our bags, check all is well for the next 10 days with the visitors next door, and tomorrow (Tuesday) we set off for England.

We’ll spend Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in Broadstairs (tel 01843 869 708), see John’s mother on Wednesday afternoon, and be in Nottingham by Wednesday night or Thursday morning. There we’re hoping to see plenty of Leila and my mother (and Toby, if possible) and are looking forward to dining with the Harts and Lea-Wilsons on Thursday and the following Tuesday and to seeing other friends at various times (Bank Holiday and permitting). You can contact us at John’s mother’s bungalow, 0115 9605186. We’ll probably set off down to Essex to see John’s mother on Thursday 22. Or even Wednesday 21.

Our news will be fairly short this week, as we’ve at long last started work on the house – and you won’t really want a blow by blow account of that!. Our final excuse for not starting work had vanished, with the departure of various visitors. (Whilst one set of visitors are safely back in Manchester, we’re wondering about the others, Jessica and Mark who set out over a week ago from here to walk and camp en route to the south-west of France. We’re just hoping they’ve been successful at dodging the rain and storms forecast at different times for the Massif Central then the Pyrenees!)

After their departure, we procrastinated for another day by “doing” the Sunday flea markets. Together with friend Nicola we strolled through nearby Fraize flea market and then the Orbey one over the Col de Bonhomme in Alsace. Nicola and Helen found Orbey quite interesting, but John found it very frustrating, as it was all dealers who set high prices (rather than villagers selling assorted junk from their barns and attics). Nicola didn’t find any cheap books with animal illustrations to adorn the bed she was making for her grandson, so gave up and went home to finish the bed from her imagination (she’d already drawn out some lovely elephants). And what did we do? We went on to an open air vintage tractor show!

Some of you will know that one of the treasures in our barns was a 1954 Deutz single cylinder 748cc diesel tractor which John has got back into basic working order by rewiring the electrics and putting in a new glow plug (Leila drove it round the field several years ago and my mother famously sketched Toby sitting on it, and something went wrong with the scale, so it ended up with a large Toby on a small tractor!). John eventually obtained a basic operating and parts manuals for both the engine and tractor (Deutz UK sent their only copies for free as they didn’t see any use for them any more!), but spare parts are a bit of a problem, so we were hoping to find out more. The show was in Hattstat, a village just south of our favourite wine village, Eguisheim. The event has been going for several years and is the largest in France. There were over 100 different tractors dating from the 1930s to 1960s, most of them working at some time or other during the time we were there. We saw a few Deutz tractors, including one of the same model as ours but a couple of years younger as it was built in 1956 (and was also not as good a condition or as authentic as ours!). We talked to a German who’d travelled 700 km to be there and who owned or had collected some 40 different Deutz tractors! He was very helpful (and like many Germans, fluent in English and French) about suppliers of parts, suggesting somewhere in Fribourg. Some of the tractors were taking part in a ploughing competition (the event took place in some recently cut wheat fields of a local farmer who was originally responsible for setting up the fair) and some were driving round in amongst the wandering visitors (hopefully the owners had insurance?). By late afternoon, as it got colder, the owners started to pack up and we saw some were starting to leave, including about a dozen from a Fribourg tractor club all setting out in procession along the road, rather than on trailers – they must be regular exhibitors at such fairs as some were even towing small one/two-bed trailers/caravans. So we left too, stopping off in Eguisheim to get some wine jam that we like from one of the small shops there.

On Monday morning, we delayed work on the house still further by going into St Dié as the first stage in obtaining our residents permits (cartes de sejour) had arrived (it’s called a “receipt”, but has a three-month validity with a photo, so looks very official). After we’d sorted that out, we decided to celebrate that (and our wedding anniversary) with a bar meal over the hills in Lapoutroie. It was unfortunate that the main course of the menu du jour was a moussaka made with lamb mince and marrow, as John had made something very similar a couple of days earlier – but his was tastier! I say unfortunate, because in our vegetable garden (or should I say “potager “? – it sounds much posher), the courgette/marrow mountain has arrived and John has been experimenting in preparation for writing 101 different ways of cooking meals including marrows (and soon he’ll have to deal with the beetroot mountain)!

However, after that our DIY excuses had run dry, and we set to and cleared up the new bit of the house and John has started work on plastering the remaining joins in the main bedroom and in the sitting room, and on making and installing window sills and window recess walls. Helen re-varnished the window frames in the old part of the house, which were in places flaking away to bare wood – it must have been longer than we thought since they were last varnished. Helen even missed the St Dié  ramble on Friday as she wanted to get the windows varnished, rather than leaving them in a rubbed down state, before the forecast weekend rain and storms; in the end she managed some second coats on Saturday, despite the rain, by using the shutters as protection! However it felt quite cold Saturday night after a day’s rain and all the windows open!

Unfortunately, having made a start on work, we shall have to give up in another 4 days time as we inadvertently (this is becoming a habit!) let the farmhouse for 2 weeks, so we will have to clear out all our clothes and valuables and camp out in the new bit (still, we’ll be able to admire the new window sills and plastering close up!). However, it will also provide a good opportunity (and funding!) to go back to Nottingham and see family and friends. We’ll be able to see John’s mother and sister in Essex on the way there and back, and may also break the journey in Broadstairs (I haven’t been back for years, since Toby was quite young when my mother moved up to Nottingham). We shall probably be in Nottingham by Wednesday 22 August (or Thursday at the latest), and spend about a week there. We’ll be staying at John’s mother’s bungalow (tel: 0115 9605186), which John and his sister need to finish clearing before it is sold. A sobering thought that we’ll have spent a quarter of a year in Entre deux Eaux! We’ll be back here a day or two before our happy (we hope) holidaymakers depart on 31 August, so keep the news coming in – we enjoy hearing from you.