LE VIN, LES CONSERVES ET LES ANGLAIS

We all know we are different and we all hope to be unique and yet we all do the same things.

Here we are in France busy growing grapes, conserving our garden produce, 'a la retraite' like a large proportion of the British we met and yet we all like to think that we are the 'pathfinders', the special people doing it for the first time - finding our own way . . .

So though we have so much in common - sometimes we are not too friendly to each other. I guess I have seen these hierarchies and cliques in other expat communities - I guess we have them in our towns and villages back in the UK.

We need the friendship and help of other British people.

Most days for retired folk do not give them easy and constant contact with working French people!

Any how John's grapes are tasty and my shelf of conserves - mostly from overgrown courgettes is increasing! Hopefully they will help to conserve us over the winter.

We are still rather lonely here - missing friends and missing family - and hoping that our circle of acquaintances and friends - French and English-speaking- will grow and enrich us.

STONED ON KORCULA ISLAND

STONED ON KORCULA ISLAND AT CAMP MINDEL

It was September and over 35 in the shade.
All we could do was sit under the olive tree and get stoned – by dry olives falling from above. Every meal we were bombarded by huge wasps but the Korchula kittens tumbled and climbed to amuse us.
Camp Mindel is on a ridge between several beautiful almost deserted bathing coves. Mr Gorana had his own wine and olive oil to sell and we languished very comfortably in the heat. His mother-in-law makes the most delicious tomato sauce for pasta that I have ever eaten and the figs are soft purple honey!
The island is amazing – the hillsides have been terraced over millennia probably to clear small patches of earth that grow figs, olives, and almonds. Peasants used to live in tiny stone-roofed, stone huts without windows among these metre thick, metre high stone walls. It is impossible to conceive of a harsher existence – even the Greenlanders seem to have had more comfort!
Even now there appears to be a drought and the trees seemed to be dying. Rain is truly a blessing.