Monday 29 February 2016

An extra day


It would have been nice to be doing something that I have never done before...

Sunday 28 February 2016

The flurry did not stay

About a week ago, with colder temperatures turning rain into a colder form, there was the first flurry of snow in my garden. I couldn't capture the fact that the large snowflakes were like giant white v shaped wasps coming into land or miniature white geese landing.  My imagination saw that as I stared into the white blur! This part of my rose and lavender had only a day or two before been weeded of grass growing in the wrong place!

Saturday 27 February 2016

Cakes and ill health but now I am betterererer

The recent E-coli UT infection, which I believe I have had for six months, trying to cure naturally, prevented me from going to the CCC.  Damn it!

My first cake baked in my newly second hand oven was not the "Love is in the air" themed planned recipe. HOWEVER I will make it for the next guest!  That'll be a laugh!!!!!!!! (in-joke!)

My first cake baked in my splendid gifted but paid for oven was a Lemon Drizzle cake without icing to share with my friend who likes low sugar products and hardly eats cakes.  I wanted and needed to bake once that course of antibiotics had given me more energy by hopefully wiping out the infection. I am being monitored!

So... cake it was ... butter, sugar, 4 eggs, ground almonds and hazelnuts, maize flour, (the recipe said cornmeal and I got that wrong thankfully!!!) drenched in lemon zest and juice.. nice with  freshly sliced pear...improving with age whilst kept wrapped in the refrigerator!   I AM VERY HAPPY WITH MY OVEN!!!!!
Since then I have baked a baby chicken, roasted stuffed red peppers with fennel, roasted veg including a new one for me roasted broccoli and made jacket potatoes...I need English potatoes please!!!

Friday 26 February 2016

Book Review: The Promise of Happiness

by Justin Cartwright - Bloomsbury Books - 2004

I would like to read other books by this author. This book was borrowed. I started it on December 27th 2015.It took a few reads to get into.  Then, having given up on at least three occasions, I became addicted.

Absolutely a great weaving of threads. Each family character is revealed as the story unfolds around daughter Juliet, with the sense of justice or injustice that she endured.  Her passion and interest in glass bring her and members of her family to deal with, or not, the various interplay of emotions that goes on between people,  to encounter and face emotional injury, present and past lovers, addiction, compassion, secrets, truths, lies about who they each are and what keeps FAMILY together.  It provokes thoughts on core values - on morality.  It is a story that incorporates at the very least, fear, responsibility for one's own life, betrayal, guilt, freedom, redemption, forgiveness, compromise and understanding. What is love? filial, romantic, enduring....
Out of despair brings hope seemed to be the underlying theme in the pursuit of the reality that Happiness comes and goes, and is dependent and not dependent!
Set partially in America. However, the epicentre of the story was set in a little part of Cornwall I had the good fortune to be near a few Autumns ago. I still wish to walk that coast and the coastline of England! 
The story is about the quirkiness of FAMILY happiness : the woven threads of a dream if one is fortunate!!!!!!!!!  Ah... promises that little babes in arms bear...

Friday 12 February 2016

groanmoan

This must be the worst French "bienvenue" I have ever attended.. it WAS wine... mixed with pamplemousse or something sweet and sickly!  Why can't we have a decent boxed wine!?  Other people manage it and it isn't so expensive! 
Yes please some apple juice as not everyone drinks orange juice. At one event there was cidre and I couldn't find the wine. So home I went!
If the village is so strapped for cash why don't they put the NEW YEAR event at a time when families with children may attend ... not just us old codgers ... and why did it appear that there were few complete "étrangers" there...apart from les Parisiens. etc. At least I learned a few things when I'd also taken my friend, a new owner of a maison secondaire!
As I pointed out at one meeting it is difficult to find out from anyone what is happening in the village.
Why don't they ask us to bring food "à partager" - then sit for an evening meal once the formalities have been endured.   Why do we have to stand???
The Office du Tourisme -'la même' although at least they provided paperwork to support their performance over the year at their AGM... but likewise no decent wine  and the most appalling canapés. Am I such a snob with my French roots?   NO!   What happened to French standards!!!!!!????    I just think we should all give and take ... not just take! 
Admittedly people were friendly... more friendly at the OT event.
WE need to support our village to stop it crumbling under the weight of the financial needs of the crumbling chateau and the weight of more than 15,000 visitors in the summer which transform this village from a morgue into a place of delight... (ah the restaurants - let's not mention those!!!) and the weight of the part time residents who possibly as in Southwold UK are not paying their share of local taxes... I do not know... and draining the resources... although with Southwold it is like Little London!!!!!!and the Londoners and Northerners pile in in droves... It is a family home of mine!!!!!
Why can't we aim to be like a Little Paris... we have the roots of lingerie embroidery here!!!!!!!!!! and of course the English invaded many a year ago... it's my village as much as theirs!
I will try to mention about chateau funding in another post if I find the energy.


Thursday 11 February 2016

a real oven

Imagine my fortune when three days ago I was offered the opportunity to purchase a freestanding cooking oven and hob!
How more-than-lucky am I!!!!!!!!!!

It arrived yesterday... such lovely, lovely people brought it over and installed all the meticulously clean pieces and made sure it was working!
This, just in time to practice cake baking skills for the next CCC.
I have to admit I am very nervous as I have not baked a cake since August.
Well, I did try to make one in the micro-combi oven but it did was more of a pud than a cake!

Shopping list: eggs!!!!!!!

ADDED NOTE: Have not had an OVEN since August 2015! A micro-combi inherited as a gift in September, a slow cooker and a steamer have been helpful but they are not the same!

Wednesday 10 February 2016

Wtfiiaa?

This particular blog started as a way of recording the renovation of a property... much as many others have used a blog format as a journal.

However, it also became unintentionally, a vehicle for an emotional journey, after the break-up of what I thought was a relationship made-in-heaven.  No such thing exists, I have discerned.  My vulnerable dream was shattered by my own negative energies and those of another.  My dream of having a relationship that incorporated all that I dreamt of in terms of 'happy family' sharing when my parents never did, came to fruition fleetingly and then was quickly dissolved by irritability. scorn, criticism and blame and maybe other stuff.  Let's not go down that road for now!

This blog has seen a few up and down episodes of my personal life since 2010 or whenever I started to blog, in retrospect to that time that I bought my property.  This blog has also commented on places and events.  It has witnessed my observations of, and in, my village and surroundings.  I try to avoid personal and family pics.  I try to be cautious with global internet exposure but sometimes fail!

On occasions I tried the challenge of blogging every day of a month by writing articles ahead of time when the facility to do that became a possibility,  or I discovered it!  It takes time to get photos prepped and an article written.  I have posted deliberately and unconsciously as a form of creativity, as well as avoidance of doing other tasks - let's call that procrastination!

Sometimes I write ahead, then edit and re-edit before publishing.  Most often I write and publish.  To the discerning few who bother to read this ego-centred self-published material, they may have identified that sometimes I edit after publishing.  Sometimes I feel I've been too public with the emotional outpouring.  Or a poem needs to be improved or altered to make it, in my mind, better!  Or my form of dyslexia has come to be too garbled in its word-salad, so I have to rewrite the nonsense sentences into ones that can be understood and not misinterpreted!

Sometimes there have been major gaps between postings, where I've become silent, unmotivated, dispirited, when words or creativity are blocked.  The gaps might signify I have been occupied or that I have nothing worthy of publication. The gaps may signify that I have been in a dark hole of depression or contemplation of the thought:  "W--- t--  f---  i-  i-  a--  a----?"
This posting is in itself an admission of that.  Excuse me for any sensitivities of the use of an expletive. Isn't it amazing how few letters are required for one to be able to read a sentence? My children at school loved that they could read, if I covered the ascenders or descenders of letters!

It is also an admission that I do NOT produce this for others... I produce it for me. Very ego-centred!  I am aware and what is wrong with that form of artistry?  I do not seek compliments but if you wish to make them then I feel honoured.  If you feel you want to refute me or disagree then you can do that too!  My blog is a kind of diary.  I am proud of it.  I am proud  of the progress I have made in writing skills when at the end of my career I was writing absolute goobledy-gook for important documents: no one told me!!!  - no one even understood - least of all did I realise that dyslexia manifests itself under stress. I feel it is remarkable what I have achieved given that at the age of 17 I had not much idea about literacy! From an early age I read the dictionary at bedtime to learn vocabulary and spelling because I'd read the main reading material - the family print company's selection of Charles Dickens novels.

I have made progress coping with and in the particular challenges I've experienced of living in France.  All the downs and all the ups.  It is called LIFE and possibly would not be any different wherever I lived.  I am who I am!  However, I think the very fact that one lives in a different culture where the primary language is my secondary language, does make an enormous difference to sanity, as also does the fact that the country is huge.  To go to a supermarket or anywhere to experience culture is a often a long journey necessitating the ownership of a vehicle!

My former blog tried very hard to gloss over the hidden REALITY that was not exposed to others in the lifestyle that my former partner and I were living,  although there were some who knew and who were helpless to help, because as for all of us, there is only one who can make a difference, and that person inside us needs a certain amount of  knowledge, skills and talents that perhaps doesn't quite exist when it is required.  Some friends and members of my family said they would not read either of my blogs because the first was not REAL!  It was my real!  It was often the better parts of life as it stood then in a chocolate box cottage surrounded by sheep and a pony where I learned to write poetry.  We had some wonderful positive experiences and I really should find the time and expertise to transform these blogs into book format.  For me. for my grand child.  For posterity or they can burn it at a later date!

People make things. I have done so. I made music.  I fed children's curiosity. I have in the past sewn,  crocheted, knitted etc. I like to write.  My poetry is quite substantial now and this too I would like to get published alongside my photography such as it is!

Meanwhile the spectre of a kitchen room haunts me...
It seems so obscene,  the price it will cost to have the kitchen room electrics rewired for first and second fix!  The flooring seems reasonable but I am undecided on wood or ceramic that looks like wood but I think real wood will win the day!  Then the furniture  and appliance costs seem so obscene.  Yet what I love is expensive. I have expensive tastes as a pauper!  My mother aged 89, said to my daughter when giving her a Christmas gift and not one for me, that I have everything I need!!!!!!!  Maybe she is correct. I have relatively exceptional health for someone my age and I am stil young even if old but I hold no bars to my daughter...who gasps at some things I say... and yet it is tame, very tame, compared to some tigers! All my life my mother has always said that I have ideas above my station! And indeed I have... and wtfiiaa in this isolated west facing property  on the outskirts of a beautiful ( so they say) village!!!!  They don't live here!  Let's not go down that road.