To download a printable PDF version (no pictures) click on this link E2E2015no1.pdf (three A4 pages)

Click on the photographs for larger versions

Friends had fretted about our safety returning to France in mid-January (we’d been delayed by the flu we had contracted just after New Year) soon after the appalling Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris. But what struck us as we drove off the ferry and out of Calais was the number of fire service vans racing towards us; later we heard about the fire in the tunnel which was to cause long delays. We were fortunate not to be caught up in the chaos.

We were more aware of the state of alert when we went over to Strasbourg a couple of weeks later. Our ophthalmologist’s cabinet is a few doors down from the huge post-war synagogue on Rue de la Paix, a street name which seemed ironic when we saw the armed police guarding the synagogue. As we were early for my appointment, we went into a small Jewish bakery and café which does a good cup of coffee; we were to recall the scene ten days later when news broke of the shootings in the synagogue and café in Copenhagen. In Saint-Dié the small unlabelled mosque on our side of town, the modern but unused synagogue in the centre (there are no longer enough male Jews for a gathering to be quorate) and all the schools, have some flimsy barriers preventing parking immediately outside with red black and white triangular vigipirate signs. Normally there are no signs of armed police, though, as we passed the Turkish mosque on the other side of town last Friday around prayer time, there were flashing lights, police and a throng of young men on the pavement.

On a pleasanter note of welcome, the day after our return, four young deer stood on the field to the north of the house gazing at us, then moved slowly on, unworried. Several weeks of grey, clammy weather followed, quite uninviting for walks.

Quilt for Letchworth

So the Letchworth quilt got finished and there was plenty of time to enjoy the wonderful pile of Christmas present books. One of them was the very entertaining “1,000 years of annoying the French” (I’d enjoyed the author Stephen Clarke’s talk at the Geography Festival in October), especially informative on who started which wars. And on the First World War, there was more background on the contribution of Indian regiments in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1939 novel “Across the black waters”. In addition to those, there was the launch in Saint-Dié of the newly published World War One diary of a young woman from Lusse, one of the villages near here which was occupied throughout the war by the Germans. As she and her two sisters ran one of the bars, they saw plenty of the occupiers, between heavy bombardments by the French on the hill above. A keen genealogist from Entre-deux-Eaux also kindly e-mailed me details of some of the young men from E2E who were killed in that war. And on a more frivolous level there was a Philomatique (the local history society) lecture on the postcards issued with tins of biscuits by the German manufacturer Leibniz during the first world war.

Meanwhile, we were not without our own sugary items, thanks to the various festivities. We still had some of our Christmas cake to have with our morning coffee (it lasted until the end of February), and, although we returned well after New Year, our Scrabble group enjoyed sharing out a New Year galette des rois with cider at the end of a game. Then came Chandeleur (Candlemas) and magazines were filled with elaborate pancake recipes (we contented ourselves with Grand Marnier or Limoncello inside); that didn’t stop us from marking Shrove Tuesday a couple of weeks later in the English fashion with more pancakes with liqueurs rather than with the traditional French beignets (doughnuts). And at the February meeting of the Entre-deux-Eaux oldies, after a good walk over hill and field to Saulcy led by the ex-mayor, we returned to the customary champagne and cream cakes to celebrate all the February birthdays. Now the shops are filling up with chocolate lambs, hares and fish in readiness for Easter.

February clover

At last the had weather changed from wet and grey to white and invigorating. And the sun enticed us out for walks in the melting snow. We started off with shorter walks round the village and gradually moved further afield to old favourites round Fouchifol, the Col d’Anozel, the Col de Mandray and the hill above Roger and Dorinda’s former house in Anould.

We got some splendid, snowy views from all these, but our most panoramic must have been when we drove over to La Bresse, which is the largest ski station in N.E.France. We had in fact gone to try out a restaurant, La Table d’Angèle, which served us a good lunch of foie gras or smoked salmon, roast deer steak and desserts, which we then justified with an enjoyable walk from the Col de Grosse Pierre (between La Bresse and Gérardmer).

View above La Bresse

The snow was still quite thick up there, so children were having a great time tobogganing and adults were skiing or walking on the ungainly-looking raquettes.

A lot of you will remember meals at the Auberge Frankenbourg in La Vancelle, and won’t be surprised that we have had a couple of good lunches there. It already has its new 2015 Michelin plaque proudly displayed. On the day of our Strasbourg trip we tried out the unpronounceable-looking Zuem Ysehuet (the “Iron Hat” in Alsacian dialect), a recently renovated small restaurant fronting the canal. Apparently President Hollande had entertained Angela Merkel there the week before (presumably planning their Ukraine jaunt), but we all looked quite ordinary and undiplomatic, with no covert bodyguards.

And then the weather changed again. We would wake to white vistas, now heavy frosts, but the days were sunny and warm and lured us out to the garden and orchard. The 2014 potager crops are down to curly kale, Jerusalem artichokes and leeks, and there’s a limit to how many Jerusalem artichokes one can comfortably eat! One afternoon we picked most of the leeks and the freezer is now well stocked with soup (and it’s leek and mushroom omelette tonight). It’s the first year we’ve grown curly kale and, unlike sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, it has flourished here and makes a great Sunday lunch vegetable with added ginger, garlic and mushrooms.

Holes in the orchard

We have just replaced the raspberries in the fruit cage, as the old ones were dwindling in output and added another blackberry. We toyed with planting some cheap gladioli bulbs, but having seen all the new vole-runs in the orchard in addition to those in the flower garden, we decided not to give the wretched voles one of their favourite foods (they’ve appreciated our tulips too), but to take the bulbs to Letchworth.

Recycled divan springs

John solved the problem of what to do with the old divan springs, which were blocking the farmhouse corridor after we got a new mattress, by cutting them into three sections and attaching them to the ugly breeze-block wall below the ramp – once the clematis and the Virginia creeper spread it should look colourful. And today I’ve been scattering seeds from last year’s plants in the tubs in front of the house and on a grassy bank. There’s still masses to do this spring with rotavating the vegetable patch and sowing, but it will have to wait till we’re back from Letchworth and the garden there!

And finally some hopeful news on John’s thirty-year-old back problem. Over the years he’s worked his way through the local kinestherapeutes or physiotherapists and the dismissive rhumatologue in Saint-Dié (“It’s normal for your age. Just get on with your life and don’t come back unless you’re in pain at the moment.” What, normal for the bottom disc to collapse completely several times a year?) After a three month wait (even in France!) John had an appointment with a rheumatologist in Epinal who was recommended by a friend. We had a pleasant drive over to Epinal in the sunshine last Friday. We strolled along the river bank and had to wait for a whole school of teenagers in fancy dress to troop across the narrow footbridge, hooters blaring and whistles blowing before we could cross. Was it Carnival? (It was Red Nose day in UK, but surely not that). After all that excitement and the inevitable wait at the consultation rooms, the rheumatologist was very pleasant, listened carefully, looked at previous x-rays, had a good (ie painful) feel and then discussed options. As a result John has an appointment with a surgeon in Nancy on May 4^th to discuss the possibility of surgery (a more long-term solution than injections which would just reduce the ongoing pain). Afterwards we sat outside in the old square and had a coffee in the sunshine and felt that progress was being made at last, even if other plans have to be suspended for a few months.

To download a printable PDF version (no pictures) click on this link E2E2014no3.pdf (four A4 pages)
There are links in the text to the church restoration and to more patchwork photographs

If you were in charge, how would you choose to present the culture and geography of the British Isles to the French? What authors would you select? What music? What landscapes? What symbols?

This weekend the British Isles were the Guest of Honour at the FIG, the International Festival of Geography in St Dié des Vosges. So we eagerly awaited the programme of events (which is usually only available a couple of weeks beforehand). How disappointing to finally see the lecture titles of the mainly French contributors. The invited British Isles contributors were two jeunes auteurs irlandais Paul Lynch and Robert McLiam Wilson, Steven Clarke of merde fame, TV presenter and blogger Alex Taylor, the Highland Dragoons Pipe Band and just possibly (who knows?) Mister Franck & la Croche Pointée who were described as rock-blues anglo-saxon. British gastronomy was to be recreated entirely by French chefs (mainly local) in delicacies such as tuna smoked in Earl Grey tea, bergamot and red onion pickle. The only reference to Wales in the entire programme seemed to be a cookery demonstration involving Welsh lamb.

When, at the end of the Geography Festival in 2013, they announced the British Isles would be the Guest of Honour for the following year, did they realise that all the separate countries have different tourist boards from which they might get help and contributions (in most popular French newspapers and commentaries les anglais is still used as the collective term). At all the previous Geography Festivals we’ve attended there has been a country presence including a food tent providing lunchtime snacks from the country. This year that tent was occupied by Moroccan caterers. Just think, they could have recreated one of those glamorous old-fashioned tea rooms like Betty’s or Fortnum’s with waitresses in black dresses and starched white pinnies serving tea, scones, jam and tiers of cakes – a great missed opportunity.

However, other French-produced stereotypes abounded, with Union Jacks, a red telephone box, two men in busbies and red jackets, images of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and even an open-topped red bus (all the way from Belgium). There may even have been Big Ben in one venue. It felt horribly like Heathrow Airport Gift Shop.

The prestige lecture is usually held in the largest space, the cathedral. On Friday in the presence of the ex-mayor (who founded the FIG) and the young new mayor (who is busy exposing the financial mis-dealings of his predecessor), the president of the Conseil franco-britannique told his huge audience in echoing tones a few clichés about L’actualité des relations franco-britanniques:

1) Britain is less marked by the Marxist tradition than the liberal
2) Britain is less keen on fiscal integration
3) Britain looks more to the United States than Europe
4) no-one knows how the British will vote in the 2017 referendum

but the positives are:

1) shared defence projects
2) 20 years of the Tunnel
3) the Queen (not expanded upon!)
4) the Tour de France
… at which point I crept out of the cathedral and into the adjacent library in search of more stimulating insights.

Some of the library staff had entered into the spirit and chosen their outfits with care. One with striking black hair and scarlet lipstick was wearing a scarlet tartan long jacket with black straps with metal buckles (just like we all wear over there) and another had a more typical, perhaps, black T-shirt with a harp. The two jeunes auteurs irlandais (one from Belfast and one from Donegal) had to entertain a library of mainly students and could not escape questions about another stereotype – Irish poverty. While one (Lynch) looked romantic and soulful and replied only in English (with his translator frequently getting confused and translating his words into English), the other (McLiam Wilson) joked in French as he tried to explain a little of the historical situation.

On Saturday we could have gone into St Dié a bit earlier to the culinary demonstration ambitiously entitled Tartare aux deux saumons d’Ecosse, découpe Saumon fumé Ecossais. Haggis flambé au whisky, sauce menthe. Christmas pudding flambé. Cocktail a base de produits britanniques. I wonder how many of the audience lined up to taste the haggis with whisky and mint sauce. Instead, circumventing the food tent and the sheep grazing outside (were they Welsh ones left over from an earlier cookery demonstration?), I climbed up to the top of the Tour de Liberté where Steven Clarke gave an erudite and entertaining talk in fluent French on 1000 ans de mésentente cordiale, l’histoire anglo-francaise revu par un rosbif. He admitted that the title didn’t quite capture the original of 1000 years of annoying the French, and dealt with the burden we too feel of responsibility for the death of Joan of Arc and the imprisonment of Napoleon (but no mention of Fashoda). The audience loved the quietly affectionate tone and while I disliked one of his merde books, I shall buy this one. The Highland Dragoons could just be heard piping somewhere below.

Then it was back to the library for Anne Martinetti, the French author of a strip cartoon on the life of Agatha Christie. As the minutes ticked by, it could have been an Agatha Christie title – the mystery of the vanishing lecturer. Her suitcase, the anxious librarian assured us, was behind the counter, but she was not signing books in the Book Salon and they had no idea where she was. However, no corpse was discovered and a quarter of an hour late, a charming lady dashed in, apologised for having been detained by a radio interview involving the mayor (so it would have been rude to leave), said she had a train to catch in 55 minutes time, and rattled off at high speed but in a clear voice her interest in food in Agatha Christie’s novels (the subject of an earlier book) and also A C’s biographical details. Then she signed copies and dashed off to catch her train while we re-assembled in a different part of the library for a scholarly and delightful talk on the two languages, Le francais et l’anglais, une incroyable histoire d’amour, which the audience loved.

On Sunday we had had enough of the mésentente cordiale and incroyable histoire d’amour and headed off to a flea market in a village on the far side of St Dié, which was packed with locals oblivious to the charms of Geography. John added to his Photax bakelite camera collection for a mere 2 euros and I purchased a porcelain dish for a similar amount. But the lunchtime sausages and chips looked unhealthily undercooked, so we avoided our usual Sunday treat. In the afternoon it poured with rain. No doubt the FIG concluded among jokes about the weather of the British Isles.

All this has been a pleasant diversion from the to-ing and fro-ing between E2E and Strasbourg occasioned by my cataract operation. Our ophthalmologist is in Strasbourg and so is the clinic at which she operates, a large private, non-profit, faith-based, state-approved Jewish one (so no pork, rabbit, camel or shellfish on the post-op menu). That clinic, and two others in Strasbourg run by protestants and catholics, are jointly developing a new 100M€ clinic, due to open in 2017.

While walking the streets in search of his lunch in an area we hadn’t yet explored, while I was in the operating theatre (and ending up at the SE Asian fast food Streeat), John came across the Gothic church, église protestante Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune (not to be confused with the older Saint Peter churches in Strasbourg), with wonderful-looking frescoes. A ten-year restoration of the frescoes and the church started earlier this year. And, a week later, after an eye check-up we had lunch with Marie-Laure at a small restaurant John had discovered in Koenigshoffen on the outskirts of Strasbourg and Marie-Laure told us about the Roman remains of a workmen’s village that had been uncovered nearby. So a couple of interesting things to follow up on return visits. However, all this has meant that we shan’t be returning to Letchworth in October as we’d previously intended, and will probably delay our return till Christmas and stay for longer then.

So it was good that we managed to see so many people while we were over in August, including a large family gathering of Blackmores and Tulls on a lovely sunny day. Large quantities of food were involved and also games (mainly card ones for the adults and hide-and-seek and trains for the younger ones) and sitting around in the sunshine. The spare beds were well used by Jacob and Leila that week and by Ann and David the following weekend when they attended a wedding in a nearby village. We discovered some interesting walks, one with Jacob and another when we lost the footpath across the fields with Ann and David. But on the latter walk we also came across some Belgian war graves from the First World War in the village churchyard at Norton. There were also interesting local exhibitions, including Garden Cities (at the Letchworth Heritage Museum with Ann and David), Embroidery in War (at the Letchworth Arts Centre with Ellen and David) and Letchworth at War (in the Arcade). The last was an excellent informative exhibition at which John and I asked about the Belgian War Graves. Sadly we have received no answers yet as to why their official Belgian graves are in Norton, although there was an interesting section on the large number of Belgian refugees who lived and worked in the then very new town of Letchworth. We also walked round and through the stylish spacious Spirella factory which closed in the eighties after corsets went out of fashion (apparently it had a large ballroom for the workers). We were also pleased to welcome, at different times, Jennifer, Val, and Wendy and John, and enjoyed a trip down to London to see Jessica and Mark. While in London we all went to the Matisse exhibition, which was great, and we bought a couple of prints which are now in the Letchworth sitting-room clashing horribly with the floral wallpaper (one day it will go). On our way home we stopped at Ightham Mote where we had lunch with Dorinda and Roger (fraught from their kitchen and utility room make-overs), then looked round the old house (which John and I remembered from our childhoods, before it was handed to the National Trust). And our last port of call was at Susan’s in Dymchuch (we must go to that pub again). We loved catching up with you all!

There’s not much visual interest in the Geography and Anglo-French relations above, so we’ll take our leave with a few pictures from this year’s Patchwork Festival in and around Ste-Marie-aux-Mines in September.

“In the library at night” patchwork detail

Suede patchwork

Japanese patchwork detail

Among my favourite quilts this year were some suede ones by a French artist which were hung in one of the churches, one or two Japanese ones displayed in the mansion of a former tobacco merchant and a British competition winner on the theme “Imagine …” with her quilt “In the library at night” (and I assure you that it wasn’t just the magic word “library”).

A bientot.

To download a printable PDF version (no pictures) click on this link E2E2014no1.pdf (six A4 pages)

An enjoyable part of making a patchwork out of old clothes and fabrics is recalling their colourful heyday. It was a dull February day when I decided to rummage in trunks of old clothes in the Entre-deux-Eaux attics.

Over Christmas we had not only had all the pleasures of time with family and friends but had also embarked on a new phase of life by putting in an offer to buy a pied-à-terre back in the UK. We have had our house in France for nearly twenty four years. For the first twelve years it was our holiday house while we were living in Nottingham and working and the children were growing up. For the last twelve years (how quickly time passes!) it has been our full time home and we have loved developing the house and garden and welcoming family and friends. But it is a long way from you all, especially the newest member of the family, three-year old Jacob.

Over autumn we’d scanned Rightmove for the properties for sale in Letchworth Garden City where Toby, Stella, and Jacob are now well settled. The idea was to continue to live in Entre-deux-Eaux, but to spend more time in the UK, without continually imposing on long-suffering friends and family. We were initially attracted by an old lodge on the outskirts of Letchworth. Sensibly on one floor with an attractive looking garden and plenty of character, what could be more “us”? But when we looked round it just before Christmas it turned out to be miles from the shops, the country lane was very busy and noisy, the garden a pocket handkerchief and the interior dark and poky. So, continuing to bear in mind future mobility, we next looked at two conventional bungalows. The first John disliked, and the second, although Jacob liked the toys under a bed (and his judgement was also swayed by the Hogwarts metal train the owner gave him), I hated. The Garden City Heritage Foundation has imposed strict restrictions on altering the outside appearance of houses from the road, which has resulted in bungalows extended at the rear, leaving a room at the centre with no windows, just an overhead skylight, which feels very imprisoning. Quite by chance we saw in the window of a small estate agents a 1912 bungalow which had been permitted (in a laxer planning era) to extend upwards, and we liked the light airy feeling when we looked round it. Our offer was accepted.

Back home in the New Year there was that horrible uncertain period of waiting while the owners began the hunt for a house they wanted to move to. Paper searches were progressing and lists received of furniture and fittings being left, but it still felt as if nothing much was happening. We started thinking about furniture and curtains that we don’t use here or which would look better there. The recently re-vamped armchairs which John made for our first house were obvious candidates and we later added a small table of my mother’s. John decided to strip my mother’s oak bureau that has never found a space here but has been languishing in the workshop, and I altered our very first curtains (1970 Heals “Automation” design by Barbara Brown which is now, it seems, museum material, desirable and expensive retro-chic). Those first curtains had started off in the sitting room at Blenheim Drive, transferred to the sitting room at Brendon Road, been demoted to our bedroom at Second Avenue, then consigned to a box in the attic in Entre-deux-Eaux as we have shutters at all the windows. John was most apprehensive when I wielded the scissors to cut out the sun-faded sections at the edges. But it was this very act of vandalism which prompted the idea of the Letchworth Quilt and unleashed so many memories of our life together so far.

The curtain colours are purple, crimson, pink, grey, and cream. The downstairs Letchworth bedroom, which is the only room where they left no curtains or blinds, has two purple walls. Now, much of the décor is not to our taste, with its flowery walls and naff beading panels. But it has all been very carefully, lovingly and recently papered and painted and it may be some time before we impose our own taste throughout. So, on that grey February day, I rummaged in the trunks for fabric to match the fragments of purple, crimson, pink, grey and cream curtains that had been salvaged.

Imagine yourself back in the early seventies with long-haired bearded men in bright shirts, flared corduroy trousers and kipper ties, and wild-haired women in Laura Ashley smocks. Had I the heart to cut up that purple corduroy smock with the dark flower print? The bleach stain which defaced the front convinced me. What about the crimson check shirt of John’s (what ties did he wear with that)? And that plain mauve shirt would look good. Here is that long grey smock with white flowers (it must have been Laura Ashley too) that I loved drifting around in, and some cheap silver-thread Indian dresses from out travels. Oh yes, those all-in-one dungarees had been fashionable back then and the dark blue cord will tone in. And weddings –here’s the long puffy sleeved pink flowered dress I’d made when I was a bridesmaid and later cut down to a mini dress. Sadly for a quilt of memories, Toby and Leila wore out most of their clothes, but there are still some unused bits of Clothkits (did you too sew those pre-printed fabric kits? Some of us were addicted to them). And this one pair of Leila’s cord dungarees with smiley crimson cats on still has usable sections. How about a bit of colour contrast and a turquoise shirt of John’s – oh and that grey one with crimson stripes has just the right shades. And there’s some ribbed cream fabric left from making some blinds for the windows here (IKEA for a change) and some grey cord trousers that look hardly worn. And from the eighties a couple of richly printed crimson, dark blue and green swirling Monsoon dresses. I loved those, they always felt special. A table was cleared in the attic, fabrics washed and draped around, and cutting began.

Was anything else happening here? Winter is always a quiet time in the Vosges, with animals and people tucked up indoors behind their shutters, so there is never much news to relate. There had been the usual Mayor’s lunch for the over 65s on our return from the UK, complete with accordion and castanets; writer Hugo Boris talking about his latest book on Trois grands fauves, the powerful trio of Danton, Victor Hugo, and Winston Churchill; Roger and Dorinda’s farewell visit as the completed the sale of their Anould house (though, as it is being turned into a gîte they may well go back and stay there occasionally!), a tasty fish lunch at the Trois Poissons on the quay at Little Venice in Colmar (elegantly restored after a fire had gutted the upper storeys); and pleasant walks on sunny days. But it has to be said that the major local excitement as spring approached was the issue of new dustbins and the choice of a new mayor.

The old pace and style of life here has been shaken up by the local government re-organisation into unwieldy clumps of communes. The idea is to reduce the tiers of administration as Entre-deux-Eaux becomes linked with 18 other communes, including Provenchères-sur-Fave, the largest. The issue of dustbins is part of the new efficient inter-communal rubbish disposal; they are not just bog-standard council dustbins, but lockable ones, which will be weighed each Thursday before being emptied. You may remember that we had an aggressive local meeting before Christmas to “discuss” their introduction and the need to recycle more efficiently. While we were away over Christmas the new yellow plastic bags for paper, tins and plastic had been issued, and we were invited to proceed to the Salle on 26^th February to collect our new numbered and labelled dustbin. The distribution was presided over by the outgoing mayor, a council employee and two others (rather over-kill as there was no-one else there when we went in the late afternoon, and a huge number of yet-to-be collected bins). Buried in some of the newer documentation was mention of a ban on bonfires of “green” waste with the threat of a 400€ fine. So no more garden rubbish/wood fires; it is all meant to go to the tip. But for Entre-deux-Eaux inhabitants that is a 20km round trip, assuming you have a car/trailer. Garden fire smoke is still seen occasionally and I’m sure a lot more waste will be burnt on wood heating stoves to reduce the dustbin weight (and future charges) so, given the number of houses that are already burnt down each year, the number or insurance claims will surely rise.

Sadly we were to miss the local elections, in which we are entitled to vote, as the completion date on our Letchworth house was a couple of days before the first round of French voting. We had been led to think that a retired inspector of schools was likely to be the next mayor, and in due course we received from him a printed list of candidates headed Liste d’interet communal, which stated that none of the outgoing councillors or deputies wished to stand, announced their objectives for continuité and nouvelle dynamique, and included in its candidates our neighbour Claudine (now happily married to another of our neighbours, Gérard). The outgoing mayor was also happy to act in an advisory capacity to ensure stability. We were therefore rather surprised to receive a second piece of paper (this time green) the week before the elections headed Ensemble pour Entre-deux-Eaux for a rival team headed by retired farmer and former deputy mayor Dominique Duhaut (some of you may remember his cows ambling past our house to his milking parlour in the early days, with Farmer Duhaut plus stick on his motorbike behind them). It would be interesting to know what had gone on behind the scenes to produce this late flurry. As you vote for named candidates rather than parties, the result was the election of a mixed bag of the “communal interest” and “togetherness” groups, including Claudine but excluding the retired school inspector and the former mayor. That first council meeting must have been interesting. Alas for his dignity, I’m afraid that we shall be referring to Dominique as the Mary rather than mayor. On our return from our house purchasing, I had some tedious signing and stamping of anti-money-laundering ID documents with authorisation written in English, so on Friday took them down to the mairie for signature. The new incumbent was looking harassed with all the unfamiliar French paperwork to come to grips with (odd as he’d been deputy mayor for many years), so a request to also write in English was not popular and in his haste he miscopied my carefully written-out wording and transferred the Mary in my name to his occupation as well. Good old Mary Duhaut.

In Saint Dié too there will be big changes with a youthful UDF mayor replacing the socialist media-hogger and dominating our unfortunate neighbouring communes of Mandray, Saulcy-sur-Meurthe, Saint Leonard, Anould and others in their new inter-communal grouping.

But while all this was going on in and around Entre-deux-Eaux, we had removed all but the front two seats from Bluto and filled it with two armchairs, a canvas chair, a small table, boxes of crockery and cutlery, garden tools, DIY tools, sewing machine, linen, towels, curtains, pots, pans and a few clothes and set out to complete our house purchase. March 21^st was a difficult day for our vendors, with their initial removal van being too small and needing replacing, two slow apprentice removers, and Kevin somehow breaking a back tooth and waiting painfully during the morning for an emergency dental appointment in Letchworth. We lurked in Wilkos and David’s bookshop and coffee bar for as long as we could, having been told at 11am the house was officially ours but we shouldn’t expect the keys until 1pm, but retreated, defeated, to Toby and Stella’s. But by late afternoon we had the keys and were able to unload Bluto.

I don’t think we are noted for our impulsive purchasing, but during the next week we scoured the emporia of Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, Milton Keynes and even Coventry with the result that in addition to the three chairs and small table, our new house now has two double beds and mattresses, one sofa bed, pillows, duvets, eight dining chairs, a washing machine, a fridge/freezer, and a dish-washer; and two sofas are on order. Toby and Stella have lent us a small dining table until we get a bigger one and several of Stella’s striking abstract oil paintings which make the house look much more lived-in. It has to be said that Jacob was not initially impressed by our furnishings – where were the essential television, blanket, toys, carrots, biscuits and bananas? John’s sister Ann and Derek came up that first weekend, bearing gifts of simnel cake and ginger biscuits. Having carefully examined the ginger chunks in the biscuits, Jacob pronounced them most satisfactory, then discovered the simple outdoor pleasure of throwing daisies in the pond and fishing them out again (hours of closely supervised fun). The following weekend Leila came to join us at Toby and Stella’s and while our hosts did some driving practice for Stella and John laboured, Leila and I spent a glorious sunny Saturday morning playing in the park with Jacob. On Sunday amid huge bunches of Mother’s Day flowers and fragrant Sanctuary potions for our new bathroom, Stella cooked a huge roast and we opened a bottle of Crémant d’Alsace and celebrated Mothers and New Houses in style. That evening we slept in one of our new beds and the next morning had breakfast on our borrowed table, and felt chez nous. It was only a brief ten-day visit, but we felt we had achieved a lot.

Back in Entre-deux-Eaux it was the usual round of washing (the new Letchworth washing machine had required John to do some re-plumbing, as had the dish-washer) and a medical appointment, and we spent an interesting evening in the Salle hearing (mainly from the ex-school inspector) about events in 1914 in Entre-deux-Eaux. France is, like the UK but probably not Germany, reflecting extensively this year on the First World War. The inspector had prepared a slide show, which also had captions which were useful if one couldn’t hear everything he said. The mayor of Entre-deux-Eaux in 1914 had been deported by the Germans, suspected of spying and signalling to French troops, and his grandson was present and spoke movingly about the victims of war. At the start of the war, in August 1914, Entre-deux-Eaux was invaded by the Germans. However they did not succeed in penetrating further to attack Paris, but were beaten back to the top of the Vosges where they largely remained for the rest of the war as they became more pre-occupied with the north of France. However in that short time many of the buildings in the village were burnt or destroyed, and French and German soldiers were buried in makeshift graves in the fields around us. A former journalist read extracts from war journals of the fighting on the hills around. The young men of Entre-deux-Eaux were fighting elsewhere, and one of the contributors had prepared a map showing where the villagers listed on the war memorial had died. The mother of our new Mary said afterwards that her son found it all so boring that he fell asleep (but was he making a point about his rival?); however he roused himself to mumble a speech of thanks at the end.

After that excitement, we packed for a week in the south of France with Ann and Derek. As we had when we stayed previously in Antibes with Toby and Stella a couple of years before, we flew from Basel to Nice, but this time turned left rather than right along the coast and took the train to Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Ann and Derek had rented a stylish and well-equipped flat very close to the sea. After our busy ten days in Letchworth, it was pleasant to relax for a week (especially as John was nursing a nasty hacking cough following the cold he’d had before we went to Letchworth) and walk along the coastal paths, explore some mediaeval hill villages on the escarpment behind the coast and see some of Cocteau’s art. Around Antibes we had immersed ourselves in Picasso, his ceramics and his unappealing chapel decoration. Cocteau’s chapel in Villefranche-sur-Mer was much more attractive and thoughtful (incidents from St Peter’s life). And the Cocteau Museum in Menton had a fascinating special exhibition on Picasso, Cocteau and Matisse which we all enjoyed. We agreed that even if the Riviera was not our area of choice, it had provided us with a good break.

And now, back in Entre-deux-Eaux, we are trying to get the garden and vegetable plot sorted out before we return shortly to the UK for about four weeks in May and June. And hot off the press, this morning our new Mary’s first two communiques were delivered: the first concerns dustbins (what else?) and the second the drawing-up of the Entre-deux-Eaux Carte Communale which among other things will extend the areas of permitted construction. This could be interesting as we are currently in an area where new building is not allowed and also where, as John cynically observed, the new Mary owns or rents quite a bit of terrain which could be profitable if constructable. So another interesting and no doubt noisy public meeting before we leave for the UK.

Although Entre-deux-Eaux remains our main home, we are looking forward to spending more time back in the UK than we have done in recent years, and we do hope that you will come and see us in our more accessible home. We’ll continue to update you on our visits. So provided you can make allowances for differently-tasteful wallpaper, do ring up and make the detour to see us in Letchworth as well as continuing to make the longer journey to Entre-deux-Eaux, where you are equally welcome.

To download a printable PDF version (no pictures) click on this link
E2E2013no2.pdf (seven A4 pages)
There are a couple of embedded links in the text

I should have known better than to go out into our field on a dull October Saturday to gather branches of pink spindle to cheer up the gloom. Suddenly there was a very loud bang. I turned and saw men with guns, dark against cloud-shrouded woods, closing in silently on the stream that separated us.

But, for the first year, the local huntsmen were not an unwelcome sight. The very night after the hunting season opened, in the quiet of the night, and completely unheard by us, a party of scavenging boars had turned over a long strip of grass between the orchard and the “arboretum”, and had returned to complete the job on a subsequent night.

Boar diggings

Fond as I am of doing patchwork, it proved near-impossible to return the overturned clods to a reasonable position to make an even surface for the lawn mower (and its sea-sick driver) next year.

Earlier in the year we had heard an unfamiliar, harsh barking in the same field. No, not boars, though raucous enough for how one imagines them sounding, but deer. We watched, entranced, from the terrace as a baby deer was loudly encouraged by its mother, bound by bound, to make its way back from this unprotected field towards the shelter of the forest. What was it doing there? Had it got lost in the grass which had grown tall in all the rain and almost hid it from sight? Was its mother frantic with worry? It had to leap so high to follow its mother through the long grass to relative safety.

And, back in July, we’d seen an even rarer visitor. We’d spent the day in Strasbourg, where John had found a new (to us) restaurant in the picturesque Petite France area, close to the canals. We’d sat at a table outside on the narrow pedestrian street amid buckets of flowers and watched the world go by as we ate. My starter was a delicious fish terrine of North Sea fish and green vegetables with a lemon mousse sauce. The main courses were excellent too, so beautifully served, though the desserts seemed a bit ordinary in comparison.

Storks and tractor

We came back to find two tractors busy cutting the field below us and two storks foraging rapidly between the noisy machines, skipping and dipping their beaks for the uncovered lizards, crickets, voles and frogs. The very word “stork” sounds mediaeval and fairytale, and you think of their picturesque nests on turrets and steep roofs in Alsace villages. They used to be more common on this side of the Vosges (indeed, Rene Fonck, the First World War ace from the next village, used a stork as his emblem on his flying machine). Perhaps, while we were eating out in Alsace, these two had flown over to Lorraine for a day trip of gourmet harvest food. Will the young farmer be blessed next year with babies brought by the grateful storks?

Our next surprise – a resident, it would seem, rather than visitor – was less pretty. Back in autumn the men installing the photovoltaic panels had dumped the removed tiles there. In France the norm is to install photovoltaic panels directly onto the roof as a replacement for (rather than as well as) the existing covering – less weight?

Bufo bufo

Eventually we got round to selling the tiles to a man with a trailer. When John shifted a pallet on which a pile of roof tiles had been stacked, a very large toad, with a scaly grey face like a miniature dinosaur, sat motionless and staring in the hope that he wouldn’t be seen. So we don’t know when the toad had taken up residence or where he disappeared to when we weren’t looking.

Visitors here using the little back road, are used to their passage being blocked by Vozelle’s ducks, geese, guinea fowl and chickens, but rarely notice those of our neighbour Madame Laine, which were, more safely and discreetly, in a large, wire enclosure and wooden house behind her potato patch. The sad news is that, having stopped keeping a pig and other livestock, she has been killing off all her birds this autumn. As her legs have got more painful (and her husband’s heels have long been dodgy), the daily feed, especially in bad weather, has become more of a burden. So, end of birds and of the side-line in egg sales. Only the rabbits remain. A chair-seat has been installed on their back stairs. “It’s no fun, getting old”, she says morosely.

The monthly afternoon gatherings of the anciens of E2E continue with cake, champagne, cards and chatter. In May, to celebrate my 70th, John kindly baked a typical English, rich fruit cake for me to take to the gathering. I’d thought, long and hard, about whether to stick to what they were used to (éclairs would have been fine), or to introduce a bit of cross-culture. Alas, the organisers had to eat a slice each and insist it was really nice before any of the hardened traditionalists would risk it.

Much more festive was the gathering of our family and friends the following week. Sadly the weather was nothing like as good as it always is for John’s birthday at the end of October.

Wet and misty climb to The Donon

In mid-May we had rain, hail and snow. So no sipping champagne on the terrace. But, despite the weather and various coughs and colds, we managed a couple of good, though wet, walks, a couple of restaurants, a Colmar quiz and museums (out of the rain), and John’s back recovered sufficiently for all his cooking to go as planned. The star guest (for us, at least) was grandson Jacob who took delight in all the small wet rural pleasures like floating buttercups in puddles and running like mad for shelter. A typical memory of the gung-ho “make the best of it” spirit, was of the Italian café in the covered market in Nancy, where we took shelter from the lashing rain and cold, and created mayhem, while Toby and Stella walked through snow in the E2E hills! Guests were forced to accept a copy of Footprints, the novel I’d been writing over recent years, and fortunately managed to look more politely grateful than the villagers with their fruitcake. Its production was also the result of John’s labours, as he’d got it proof-read, printed and published, using an Amazon-related company, and although I’d always disapproved of vanity publishing, it was a thrill to see it in print for my birthday.

As you can imagine, despite the quantities of sausages in the freezer, we didn’t manage any barbecues that week. But shortly afterwards, the young couple at the chalet beyond us (the Munsch house) held a roofing party, with eleven or twelve friends up on the roof removing the old tiles, laying external insulated boarding and laying new tiles, and with protracted lunch-time and evening feasting down below in the garden. It all looked very bucolic. Maybe it was a bit too bucolic as the morning after the first overnight rain they returned to put plastic sheeting between the chimneys, which has remained there over the summer months.

The next barbecue involved the anciens of E2E trying out another new (to them) idea: the Sainte Marguerite farm museum’s annual lunch. We had been to the lunch a couple of years ago. This year’s invitation to the anciens presumably came about because the museum is run by two sisters, one of whom has become our mayor’s companion (now we know why he was running the bar there a couple of years ago). The E2E contingent were given two long trestle tables in the centre. Between courses, the main course being barbecued lamb, the other sister and some young people played old musical instruments (possibly from the museum collection), and a man told entertaining anecdotes whose punch-line John and I consistently failed to understand.

The most recent barbecue also involved the anciens, and also an odd experience. Our vivacious ex-fireman’s wife had offered to celebrate her September birthday with a barbecue lunch for the oldies to which everyone would take salads, and those who also had birthdays would take cakes. Of course, the weather that morning was 5°C with rain threatening, so everyone sat indoors in the community hall at beautifully decorated tables, while the ex-fireman and one of our neighbours set up the barbecue under the overhanging roof by the front door. It was very well done, with tasty starters followed by ample quantities of meat and colourful salads; but before the cake desserts, I was invited to join the group of three “walkers”. You won’t believe where we went. As we left the meal, one asked me lugubriously, “where will you go when you’re dead?” and looked shocked when I said I didn’t know. But it’s obviously important here, for we shuffled off to the cemetery, all of two minutes away, where I was introduced to the predecessors of everyone still in the village that I might or might not know. I heard who didn’t get on with whom, who drank themselves to death, who killed someone, who had a relative who came to the funeral in scarlet, who died last year, the children of whose mistress had placed an engraved tribute, who died young of leukaemia … until I pleaded that I was cold on the hill and we returned to very welcome desserts and warming coffee. I hadn’t realised what an endless source of gossip a churchyard could be, and we only did the top three rows!

But it’s not just been wet barbecues. We have, of course, continued to enjoy our restaurant excursions. One of these was the Sunday after my birthday celebrations, we drove across the Rhine to the small German village near Europa-Park where the former chef at the Blanche Neige now has a hotel and restaurant. As if we hadn’t eaten enough the week before, we indulged in his five course surprise menu, and then drove on to see the wonderful Chagall exhibition in a nearby village, in what was part of an old brewery, now all white walls and big spaces. We drove back via a third village, through pretty hills and vines and sunshine, to find the producer of the delicious Muskat that we had drunk with our lunch, only to find that it had closed a few minutes earlier. Heading home, the Rhine and the canal locks looked dangerously high, with water splashing up onto the bridge and tourists stopping to watch. Fortunately the Rhine level had dropped quite a bit when we returned a week later to buy the Muskat from Weingut Abril.

Another of our occupations, the vide-greniers, or flea markets have been a bit disappointing this year, partly because of poor weather, but also because most people have already sold off their interesting items in previous years. However, at nearby Saulcy, I was much taken with a large framed print of a Gauguin painting for only 1 euro. It now adorns the wall above the wine rack in the revamped second barn/ entrance lobby. And at Ban de Laveline we picked up some useful shelf brackets and a little brass tortoise (originally an ashtray) which is nosing its way along the garden path (without getting very far unless accidentally kicked). We didn’t spot much on the stalls at the Fraize flea market, but went up some front steps into a narrow house after John noticed, through the invitingly open door, the unusual blue and white tiled walls. It turned out to be an old butcher’s shop; the butcher’s grandchildren explained that the shop had been turned into a sitting room when the couple retired about twenty-five years ago, and now that grandmother had died and grandfather had moved in with them, they were selling the furniture and contents. So we bought some of their wine glasses as a small house-warming present for Toby and Stella. After all, not every English family drinks from a French butcher’s wine glasses.

You will gather from the above that Toby and Stella have, after all the delays, moved from their London basement. Months ago they put in an offer on a house they liked in Letchworth Garden City but contracts on that and their flat were not completed until August.

Jacob and John building bricks at the new house

While I was enjoying a long-planned train-gang re-union in York, John helped them with the move and then (with brother-in-law Derek’s help) demolished much of a partition wall between their new kitchen and dining-room. The house is lovely and spacious and they are slowly decorating it to their taste. Jacob really relished the freedom of the new garden on the sunny days that followed. Toby then faced the delights of the daily commute to an office in Victoria (We took Jacob to the station with us in the car one evening to pick up Toby, who then failed to appear, having fallen asleep on the train. He did wake in time for the next station, but for a long time, whenever trains or stations were mentioned a little voice piped up, “Daddy asleep on train”).

Meanwhile, back in E2E, we had been forced into several considerably more expensive purchases than our flea market ones. When our small car, Snowy, aged 13, was taken into the garage because the brake pedal was suddenly very bad and he needed a service, it was discovered that all the underneath had rusted and corroded very badly (possibly after all the winter salt on the roads). As it would have cost well over £2,000 to repair, we started to think about a replacement. Snowy was named after Tintin’s little white dog, called Snowy in the English translation, as he was white and felt like a short-legged little dog scuttling along through fog and snow as I drove him back through France and Belgium to England after we collected him from the dealer in Epinal in December 1999. John was driving our bigger car just behind, shepherding Snowy along! It was very sad abandoning the faithful Snowy in the Toyota compound in Saint Dié. After some thought about whether we still need 2 cars, we chose a slightly larger Toyota Verso S from the showroom, which also happens to be white. We tried out various names for the new car including Milou (the original French name for Tintin’s little dog), but somehow none felt right, and we reverted to calling our small car Snowy.

Heating oil and boiler maintenance and repair are a regular expense. I wish I had a photo of John’s anxious face and twitching hands as he watched the lad who was sent out to repair our boiler when it refused to start after being turned off for an oil delivery back in July. The lad, who looked no older than a work experience third former (and hardly any older than the boiler itself), had clearly not encountered this model before, so John kept showing him the pages in the manual. Eventually, we tactfully suggested that perhaps his patron was more familiar with such an old model, and he withdrew, relieved. The patron, his arm in a sling, duly came with the lad the next day, but seemed no wiser. But eventually they ordered and installed to correct part. For some reason, we haven’t yet had the bill.

John has long been muttering about getting a new computer, and has finally done so. Transferring data and programs was always going to be a pain, but at least the timing was such that, having also immobilised his right leg with a hefty blow from his shovel while mixing cement, he had plenty to keep him occupied indoors. An X-ray showed nothing broken or chipped, just very bad bruising and he was prescribed crutches (a tasteful shade of blue, with reflectors for the dark nights). His leg is meanwhile recovering slowly, and after four weeks he can again put on real shoes, rather than slippers or crocs, – and tie the laces.

Another large (in size, this time) purchase has been of wood. The Vosges area is littered with wood yards and the sound of sawing. But most of the timber is pine or similar. John has been planning on replacing our old barn doors (the ones that are large enough to allow a fully-loaded haywain to enter).

A typical old Sunburst doorway

A charming, typical regional barn door style is the “sunburst” in which the panels in the upper semi-circle radiate out from the centre. We haven’t seen any replacement doors made in the old style, so this has been a challenge. One of the local wood yards had larch which John had seen recommended on the internet for garage doors. But the larch was only exterior cladding quality and not ideal for carpentry. The alternative was to work in oak. After many calculations and detailed consultations on possible designs with John S (including during the birthday celebrations), he put in an order for oak at the Lusse village wood yard at the end of July. Of course, you never expect anything to happen in August in France, but we were surprised to hear nothing throughout September. While his cheque remaining un-cashed, we began to wonder if the enterprise had gone bust or burned to the ground (or both). So, after a walk above Lusse, I wandered into the wood yard, where a man and a woman were loading some wood into the back of their van and I finally found a man on a tractor. Ah, still in business!

Knife block

And, following my visit, John has finally heard that some of the wood they’d cut had not been of satisfactory quality but that the new wood should be available next Monday.By now it is, of course, getting too cold to work in the atelier where all his machinery is. His previous wood project had been a knife block for his Sabatier knives. So this is on a somewhat larger scale.

The walk above Lusse village was with the Sainte Marguerite group. As it was a lovely sunny day and also the start of the mushrooming season, there was a large turn-out. We parked just by the mouth of the long tolled road (originally rail) tunnel under the hill to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. I had hoped we might be going up to the chaume, the grazing pastures on the ridge, where we’d first seen the traces of the lordonbahn, the German supply railway in the First World War. But in fact we took a lower route. But I was pleased when we passed the countess’s château I’d been reading about (which the Germans occupied) and could now visualise some of the outlying hamlets mentioned in a village woman’s journal of the 14-18 war. The further we walked, the more and more strung-out the group became as people lingered to pick fungi – they each seemed to have their favourite species for cooking and swapped quite amicably. At one point the path had become obscured by brambles since the leader had last walked it two years ago and I thought we’d lost several stragglers (the leader didn’t seem to do much counting of his herd). However, when the front reached a hamlet and paused to chat to inhabitants, the rear of the group with their bulging bags slowly trickled down and it was pronounced a good walk!

Being ignorant of the good and the bad in the fungal world, we have not been experimenting. But our shelves in the barn have been restocked with rhubarb and ginger jam and a spicy plum jam reminiscent of mulled wine. More plums are in the freezer till we acquire more jars; so only one batch of plum chutney so far. This year the autumn raspberries, blueberries, green beans, peas, courgettes, beetroot, carrots, onions, leeks, chard and squash have all been good, despite a late start. But the blackberries, blackcurrants and walnuts have been almost non-existent and the broccoli have bolted. A strange year.

And perhaps we should conclude with a bit of Culture, as there hasn’t been much so far. Saint Dié, as you are constantly reminded, is the capital (self-appointed) of World Geography. At the beginning of October street signs and shop signs there started to appear on banners of beautiful calligraphy; for the guest of honour was to be China. There were plenty of worthy lectures on economic geography which we could have attended, but of greater appeal were the talks on contemporary Chinese novels, and on problems of literary translation. And which characters peopled the last lecture I attended? Tintin and Snowy, of course, in a very entertaining discussion of the Chinese calligraphy, political allusions and background architecture in the Blue Lotus.

And finally, if you are feeling cheerful and devoid of guilt at this point, I should say, “Fashoda!” with a knowing sneer. We have grown accustomed to being made to feel guilty, on behalf of the perfidious English, for the burning of Joan of Arc and the theft of the Rosetta Stone. But Fashoda? It was at a lecture on France, China and the Boxer rebellion that the F word was mentioned and dirty looks cast, and we acquired another burden to bear.

So, F … arewell and Au revoir!

We have two roofs with 21 and 19 150W panels giving a total of 6000W. The two groups of panels are connected to two converters which log the actual output. It is possible to connect to the converters using Bluetooth to retrieve and then process the data. For the days when we are here (and my computer is running) the results are uploaded every five minutes to our web site.

We have 21 and 19 panels rather than two sets of 20 panels because of the position of a chimney stack on one roof. It is possible to drill down into all the data on the web site to see day-by-day output (and the sunny days!). The chimneys are also the reason why the set of 19 panels is more efficient; the set of 21 panels has more partial shade from one stack in the early part of the morning.

In France it is more usual to sell all the output to EDF rather than using some and just selling the surplus generated. There is only payment for the electricity actually sold (unlike the UK). We get paid at about three times the amount per unit we can buy at.

To download a printable PDF version (no pictures) click on this link
E2E2012no4.pdf (five A4 pages)

December 1st and the fields and trees outside are crisp and white with frost in the morning sunshine. Yesterday we had a light sprinkling of overnight snow (not the first end of the year, as there had also been flurries at the end of October). Cheered by the sunshine at the end of a grey week, we decided to go to Nancy. The hilly scenery soon opened out into flat fields of pasture, winter wheat or bare ploughed furrows, and a more distant horizon. A bird of prey hunched on the overhead cables, huge balls of mistletoe festooned the copses of bare trees, reed plumes and teazles along rivers, ponds and ditches glistened regally in the sunlight, and there were flashes of scarlet hips and lemon yellow birch leaves.

Nancy’s Place Stanislas was tarted up for its 250th anniversary seven years ago and still presents scrubbed white façades and flashy gold on the ornamental wrought ironwork. Having bought photo quality printing paper (for some of our Christmas cards), we parked near Place Stanislas and headed for a scruffy looking but well-recommended, tiny, unimposing on the outside, restaurant, Le Cosmopolitain, behind the covered market. Inside it was small but elegant and packed, mostly with young business people. It’s not often, these days, that you find a good two-course meal with coffee for 10.90€, which added to the pleasure.

Patchwork 2012

After setting out in different directions to explore the shops, we later met up unexpectedly in the covered market and had another coffee. Outside the market, wooden cabins were being erected and Christmas trees planted ready for the Christmas market and tomorrow the main streets will be closed for the Saint Nicolas procession. We were glad to enjoy Nancy and its shops on a “normal” day and equally happy to see the distant whiteness of the mountains as we drove home. The last two and a half months feel as if they’ve been dominated by maintenance work — house, body and car. But there have been the usual autumn highlights like the patchwork festival and the geography festival and the pleasure of sharing some of them with visitors.

Part of a Japanese patchwork

The patchwork festival brings to life the surprising number of old churches (also a former bank, the theatre and a mansion) in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and neighbouring villages in the Val d’Argent, trailing and draping colour from the organ lofts, pulpits, stage and counter as well as walls and windows. John came, rather reluctantly, for the first time (as we had visiting friends of his), and outside the first large church of the Madeleine spotted a stall with Moroccan leather slippers (no trace of patchwork!); the perfect birthday present to replace his old ones, which he’d bought in Marrakesh in 2004, through which a toe had bored a hole.

Sculpture in Villa Burrus garden

You always see things differently through the eyes of friends, with Julia’s focus on techniques, Graham’s scientific / mathematical approach and John’s photographic approach. The colours, as ever, were stunning. The former tobacco industrialist’s Villa Burrus in Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines displayed delicate Japanese quilts indoors and patchwork flowerbeds with eye-catching sculpted heads outside. From there we drove down the wine-route, with the vine leaves golden in the evening sun, to the mediaeval walled village of Riquewihr. Near the upper gateway we had an enjoyable dinner at one of our current favourite restaurants, Au Trotthus.

We had an equally good lunch there the following month when Leila, Stella and Jacob were with us. This time it was grey and drizzly outside, but we did sneak a quick walk round the cobbled streets and tiny shops. The food was as good as before, but we were very conscious of the Maitre d’s disapproval at our lowering the tone of his establishment with a CHILD. Jacob, at 18 months, had no such inhibitions and, when not eating the food we’d brought, relished dipping into Leila’s creamy mushroom amuse bouche, and munching pieces of chicken wakame, shrimps, mussels, toast and terrine, and apple tart, though considered the service rather slow, so got down and played by the table, which of course incommoded the bustling Maitre d’. However, chef kindly came several times and gave him great bear hugs.

We had brilliant sunshine for the Saint Dié braderie while Graham and Julia were with us. We headed through the food, clothes, linen, leather, balloon and boiled sweet stalls to the flea market at the centre and browsed among old books, furniture and knick-knacks, emerging after a couple of hours with the Little House on the Prairie series of books (in French) and some new tea towels. On the other hand, the weather was grey and miserable for the Ban-de-Laveline flea-market while Leila, Stella and Jacob were with us. Our car Bluto was reluctant to start, Jacob wasn’t feeling happy (probably still tired from their journey out the previous day), and everything seemed pricey, so it was not such a successful event!

It’s interesting how different even Entre-deux-Eaux looks through visitors’ eyes. Walking round with Shelagh, Melvyn and the excitable small Prinz (I’m not good on dogs, but think Prinz has Cavalier King Charles Spaniel pedigree), we encountered all the village dogs and cats. The Alsatian-cross, chained outside the “drug dealer’s” shack, struggled, as ever, to break his bonds and gobble up this small intruder. Ex-farmer Duhaut’s large aged golden dog lumbered up affably, telling us about his poorly leg. Behind him was the new pavilion (bungalow) Duhaut is having built, and behind that the new two rental apartments above old farm buildings (were they pig, cattle or machinery housing before?). Jacob was, of course equally interested in all these dogs, and specially liked the six that rushed out of the next farm, Vozelle’s, and licked him enthusiastically and accompanied us till we had left “their” section of the road. But we had to stop to look at the hens by their stream and the geese, who were fortunately involved in a loud and bitter dispute of their own. But the highlight, for Jacob, was being ushered into Madame Laine’s poultry enclosure and running around among her birds, then having some of the fat rabbits lifted out of their hutches and held firmly by the ears to be stroked. The little tricycle we’d bought for a euro in a flea market was great for these expeditions. Jacob was more cautious, however, about the ride-on tractor and contented himself with pushing Teddy round on it.

Jacob and Al(bear) on 29 October 2012

At first he insisted on being carried by Mummy in the field to see the cows, but he was soon following John, clutching the faithful Teddy, through the long grass on masculine tours of inspection of the orchard, drains and “arboretum”. The arboretum has suffered from deer chewing the bark and rodents chewing through the base of the slender trunks. So the new trees which his sister Ann and Derek gave John for his birthday have more substantial protection, including wire fencing and bright orange plastic tubing. (And with this years bulb plantings we’re trying net onion bags and cardboard egg boxes as anti-rodent protection!) But so much for small dogs and boys to look at (and sniff out) locally.

It was the night before Leila, Stella and Jacob’s flight out that we had our first snow, and it was still falling as we crossed le Bonhomme. The gritters, however had prepared well. Stella and I thought it would be good to take a walk through the snow and drove up one day towards le Hohneck. I was being cautious, as our smaller car, Snowy, does not have winter tyres. I was glad I stopped at the point I did as we later saw a car stuck on the road up to the café at the summit. “No winter tyres!” exclaimed a man in camouflage who had helped push them. But it was worth the leisurely walk up through the trees to the ridge and spectacular views. The sun was out, the snow glistering and scrunchy beneath our boots, and the orange lollipop poles marked the track out in the snow. The hot chocolate at the top was good too. Jacob had to content himself with pressing his nose to the living room window and watching the snowflakes on the balcony and the birds coming to feed. Long after they had left, I kept hearing little cries of “Birdy!” whenever a bird landed on the food.

Saint Dié’s International Geography Festival (known affectionately by locals as le FIG) had a cover-all theme this year : Les facettes du paysage, nature, culture, economie. Few of the geographical lectures appealed to me, apart from one on landscape in Tolkien. I don’t think the organisers realised quite what a large cult following Tokien has. They did move the talk to a larger area of the library than the advertised one, but by the time I discovered the change, the old reference library was crowded out and it was impossible to hear from outside. However, the invited country was Turkey, and the literary talks about Turkish authors were interesting. The first I went to was in a huge hall with an audience of eight (now why didn’t they use that for the Tolkien talk?), but so interesting that I ended up buying a novel by Sait Faik Abasiyanik and an autobiographical volume by his translator into French. There was another interesting talk on Pierre Loti and Turkey, and the opportunity to see the haunting film “Once upon a time in Anatolia”, (a film with a 15 certificate in the UK which had no classification in the programme and a teacher had brought a junior school class to see, the teacher finally ushered the children out a few minutes before the end when a graphic autopsy took place). John only went to one of the cookery demonstrations (alas, not Turkish food), as the others had little out of the ordinary. The Turkish food tent was busy though, and there was a lively Turkish street band with dancer.

Photovoltaic panels being installed

In between these activities and visits, house improvements continued with the installation of photovoltaic panels on the south-facing roof. Fortunately there were no serious mishaps in the process. The man who measured up arrived on a wet day and scrambled around on the slippery roof with no safety helmet or other protection – and looked considerably paler-faced by the time he descended. The van bringing ladders and safety netting on the first day decided to turn on the field and got stuck in the mud; fortunately the milk tanker was just returning from the cattle shed at the end of the road and kindly pulled it out. The lorry delivering the panels and electrical boxes was more prudent and turned at the end of the road before unloading. While it was blocking our narrow road the impatient farmers in a car attempted a turn in the other field and also got stuck (it has been rather a wet autumn). But after that things proceeded smoothly, and we now await connection to the grid by EDF and possible inspection by the mysterious sounding Consuel. Their approval (they only physically visit about one-in-five installations of electricians they generally trust) and certificate is necessary before EDF will return and put the final fuse in. But when we went to change our house insurance, we learned of an unforeseen French hazard for solar panels: huntsmen firing at them when hunting (was the man joking?) Perhaps we shouldn’t risk cheering as the deer cunningly zig-zag up the side of the orchard away from the shots (we’ve seen that twice already this autumn). Autumn maintenance included a boiler check, a once-in-twelve years oil tank sludge clean-out and fresh oil delivery for the winter ahead. John is currently making enquiries about geothermal heating, and we are finally arranging to have the now muddy area at the front and side of the house tarmaced.

As for body maintenance: John had day surgery (in Saint Dié’s new hospital block) on his out-turning eyelid which had been causing scratching of the eye, redness and irritation. He was allocated his own room with bed, ensuite shower and loo. English patients must be a rarity (or else I was a very bad patient) as one of the nurses remembered me from five years ago. Work was still being done in parts of the new hospital block and some of the accommodation was temporary, so there were no signs up at that stage, just one very busy lady directing bewildered patients to different sections along multi-coloured but otherwise bare corridors. Arriving in the right place felt quite a triumph. There is a shortage currently of ophthalmologists and dentists in France, so perhaps it was fortunate that John was critical enough to be seen within a week at the hospital and operated on a fortnight later. I had to travel over an hour to Strasbourg to get a routine eye test. Then, clutching my new prescription, I toured the opticians in Sainte Marguerite and Saint Dié (no shortage of retail outlets) obtaining widely varying quotes for supplying lenses to my existing glasses. Ophthalmologists (eleven years of medical training and many now charging a lot more than the state will reimburse for an examination) and dispensing opticians are mostly separate businesses in France. More recently, opticians have been allowed to do simple eye tests just to check for minor variations from prescriptions up to three-years old, presumably to try to alleviate the shortage? Jacob seemed entranced by all the long mirrors in the optician I chose (the cheapest quote), and ran round looking in all the mirrors as I tried on my new glasses. As for my dentist, he was looking well-tanned when I got an appointment after his month away (more shortages and long waits). And his surgery has a lot of new paintings up (all his own work, presumably over his long break). However, he has had time to do some temporary work (so I can stop chewing the cloves), and proposes expensive work after Christmas.

Our main car, Bluto, however is in a less fortunate state. We were getting increasingly worried about problems starting and had booked a service and check in Epinal where there is a larger Toyota workshop. But the day before the service, Bluto refused point-blank to start. Unfortunately he was in the garage, and his insurance only covers break-downs over 25 km from home (no AA/RAC in France but most car insurance policies include it as an extra). Even the break-down driver was unable to elicit any signs of life and Bluto was towed out of the garage and taken ignominiously away to the Toyota garage in Saint Dié. Unfortunately there is only one mechanic/lad working there (who, incidentally, looks remarkably like Tintin) and they could give us no idea when Tintin could look at Bluto, who currently is now languishing forlornly in the car park. Our pleas that we wish to drive to England shortly fell on deaf ears. Since I started writing, snow has been falling. Will snow-covered Bluto recover in time for Christmas? Will Snowy have to be pressed back into long-distance service? Will we see you?

Next week the postman will call with his calendars, Saint Nicolas will visit the children in Entre-deux-Eaux and the neighbouring villages will turn on their Christmas lights. We hope you have all escaped the autumn floods and landslides and enjoy your December preparations. We hope to catch up with as many as possible of you over Christmas and New Year.