My Countdown To An Event app – which is now functioning as a Countup – tells me that, as of 2 p.m. European Summer Time on September 27th, I have been retired for exactly one year. Not that I’d forgotten. It’s interesting to compare my daily timetable now with what it looked like twelve months…
‘C’est la realite de la France profonde.’ So said Serge, who was standing next to me in a group of about half a dozen blokes who, as men do, had gathered round to gawp reverently at the cochon farci which had just, to great applause, been carried into the marquee from the barbecue pit. Last…
“A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare” – W H Davies: ‘Leisure’ Last week’s ‘Friday Faves’ on WordPress set me thinking, as it highlighted three blog posts on the broad theme of the guilt that is all too often associated with not being ‘busy’ (or at least…
‘Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.’ –Winston Churchill There are several large domestic cats that roam freely around here. There’s a tabby, a Persian and a ginger that share two common – and no doubt related – characteristics: a sleek, healthy appearance and an utter lack of compunction in stealing anything…
It would be grossly unfair to single out France as a world champion of nasty nutrition. Far from it: sheeps’ eyeballs in Arabia, deep-fried crickets in south-east Asia, even guinea pigs in South America, could all knock France into a cocked hat when it comes to sources of food I would run a mile from.…
Is that it? On the second Sunday in December for the past twenty one years, the small town of Blond – about twenty miles from Tranquility Base – is given over to all things capon. For the uninitiated, a capon is a castrated rooster, a fact which explains their more relaxed mien when compared to…
In rural France, where mains gas is just a pipe dream (so to speak) and electricity comes through overhead cables and so is more than usually vulnerable to disruption, whether from a coup de foudre or a particularly oafish tractor driver, the use of wood for cooking and heating is pretty much de rigeur. The practical downside…
New readers (and at this point you all are) start here. Still lured by the twin devils of the ego and the aesthetic (see ‘Why this blog?’) I remain hell-bent on sharing – or making available, at any rate – my ruminations on such matters as happen to grab my fancy. However, as a first…
the only deadhead in the hameau 