APOLOGIES

Apologies and then some more!
We have been without convenient internet connections and I have been without my computer and so unable to do any work on photos for you.
We have loads of pictures to show you and loads of stories to tell.
At present we are both in Cyber-base a free internet site that is part of the local library in Maubourguet, the small town close to the village where our future home is to be.
Cyber-base is a fantastic resource but we hope soon to hava a landline and internet connections of our own.
House buying has been a huge saga just as you would all expect or have experienced. We hope to complete the purchase next week - this was delayed by a week due to the unsurprising problems of moving money around when all financial nerws is so bad.
As soon as I can I will post pictures of the smallish house that we are buying.

Meanwhile the mouse in the van still is on board and nest building! he/she ate her way into the top of a carton of tomato juice. John still wanted to have it for breakfast but I explained that mice dip their tails into cartons of juice so that they can suck the moisture off the tip and no I wasnt even going to drink it with vodka!
We had an excellent three weeks in England and saw friends and family and had such a good time that it is hard to know why we would live anywhere else but there - except of course for the weather.
It is spring here and deliciously warm however - perhaps you will all come and visit?

CRASH!

Ruth's computer has crashed, so here is a nearly-finished post she wrote:-

MICE, MOVES AND LA MAISON DE JOHN AND RUTH

It has been a long gap since our last blog.
We have spent three weeks in England and a week driving back to Tarbes.

The weather has been terrible everywhere in Europe. We left Tarbes Lourdes airport in a rainstorm and arrived in a Cambridge thick with snow and freezing.

Back at our campsite a family of mice were in charge of the wheely cabin. We are not sure when they joined us. Possibly somewhere in Eastern Europe – maybe they are Romanian mice – or they could have joined us in Sicily straight off the raft from North Africa. It is most likely they are French country mice as this is where we have been stationary for the longest period.
I woke one night to the sound of tiny feet scratching their way round the van. The next night an owl hooted and we heard its claws scrape on the top of the wheely cabin. A search revealed a nibbled cardboard box of biscuits and not much else. Before we left for England I spent some time storing food as carefully as possible and blocking up some of the gaps around the hot air ducts under the cupboards.

In Cambridge I bought humane mouse traps at that wonderful ironmongers, Mackays. We hoped that the mice would have perished in the below zero temperatures in the van while we were away or met their death at the claws of the owl or in the flood that threatened to overtake the wheely cabin from snowmelt and rain, but as you have guessed, they had made themselves more comfortable while we were away. They used the sheepskin for nests, explored the rolled bedding and investigated the cutlery tray. last heard behind the electircal box that works everything in the van.
You can't see them or catch them or persuade them to leave.
First thing at the new home will be une Chatte or cat or both!
We have been struck by financial blow after blow or crash!
Perhaps we will just have to continue our lives as trailer trash with the economic migrant mice!

A Counterblast to "A Lonesome Road"

Ruth promised you a poem from me. This is it

Journeys Ending

You need a travelling companion?
It might as well be me.
I’m just as good as Valium,
but better than that, I’m free.
I long ago stopped trying
To win the human race.
And now I think I’m dying,
Just keeping up the pace.

Now down at heel, behind the wheel
Around the World we travel,
Until we feel, that very soon we’ll
Start slowly to unravel.
Yet still we talk, it’s hard to walk,
Our arches begin to sag.
With plastic mac and haversack
I go with my old bag.

WORKING FOR THAT PHD AND THAT EXHIBITION

We wait for notaires and conveyancers to do their work and we do ours.
This is our actualitié in winter in the wheely cabin.
Wheely cabin fever setting in!

CHICKEN STEW ON THE LONESOME ROAD

I invited this rooster in for a stew but John doesnt eat poultry.

He has a poem to add to mine.

LONESOME ROAD

I’m travelling down a lonesome road
Won’t you come along with me?
I need somebody by my side
But anyone won’t do –
It must be you! It must be you!

I started travelling long ago
My mother held my hand
My father took his rifle
As he walked across his land
I told them I was fine alone
I was ready to leave home

I’m travelling down a lonesome road
Won’t you come along with me?
I need somebody by my side
But anyone won’t do –
It must be you! It must be you!

I was no longer lonesome
With my lover by my side
Travelling was sweet and easy
The road was smooth and wide
But men can be forgetful
Though babies come to stay.

I’m travelling down a lonesome road
Won’t you come along with me?
I need somebody by my side
But anyone won’t do –
It must be you! It must be you!

I walked beside my children
And I held them by the hand
but children must be free and
as soon they could stand
they saw the open road
and they ran away from me.

I’m travelling down a lonesome road
Won’t you come along with me?
I need somebody by my side
But anyone won’t do –
It must be you! It must be you!

So you’re travelling down a lonesome road
Could you come along with me?
If you need a new companion
Some traveller by your side
It may as well be me.
Frankly I am getting tired
And anyone will do – and anyone will do

The road is always lonesome
But it won’t be always long
We can go along together
We can sing this lonesome song.
I need somebody by my side
And anyone will do – and anyone will do

I’m travelling down a lonesome road
Won’t you come along with me?
I need somebody by my side
So why not you? – so why not you?.

Syndrome (de) Mémoire Fausse

While we have been travelling around Europe we have largely been out of range of good English language radio (or any other language, as far as I could tell) – the World Service of the BBC having substantially disappeared from the terrestrial World to the Online, which is fine if you have internet access but not otherwise *. As a result we have had recourse to local stations. With a few exceptions - Turkey being among them, where we could listen to a channel playing Turkish music - there was no local traditional music, only the same fodder, mostly post-pubescent nymphets squealing in pseudo-American accents about “ivry tam Aa see yaw fez”. The nymphets generally went on to tell about how the object of their affections made them “feel saddisfaad, deep down insaad”. Anyway, that’s when we plunged the CD’s into the player.

Now that we are in France we have a choice between Radio’s “Culture”, “Musique (Classique)”, “Info’s”, “NRJ” (Energy –geddit?) “F U N” and, what is currently playing in the background, “Nostalgie”. This last plays hits from the 70s and 80s, rather as Radio Two used to. Given the world-wide dominance of American and British pop music, most of what is on Nostalgie might as equally be aired on an equivalent UK station but occasionally a piece comes on in French or a familiar song is played in a version which was not successful in Britain. When that happens it’s a shock. It’s as though The Grim Reaper has abruptly appeared at your dinner table or you spot a helicopter in a depiction of the Crucifixion and nobody else seems to notice or find it odd. I’m suddenly hit by the idea that memories that I thought I had of thirty years ago which I believed were common to everyone of my age were not shared as much as I thought. Perhaps that’s true even of close friends?

A lot of the music of twenty to thirty years ago is still played frequently on the radio and so to an extent is still current, but in the mid-70s I lived in Belgium and had a brief exposure to French pop music. Quite a lot of that I hadn’t heard since, but now, here on Nostalgie are Maxime le Forestier, Sheila, Michel Sardou, Gérard Lenorman, etc. sounding just as they did then and wiping out the intervening years. It’s weird, man! (On the other hand, I have seen photos of them as they are today – French singers going on forever, like Cliff Richard – and they look older than I do. Well, they must do, I don’t look as old as they do, do I?)
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*I suppose the advent of mobile phones has made those public service announcements which used to be broadcast on Radio Four on the lines of “could Miss Jacqueline Armstrong from County Durham, believed to be travelling in Devon and Cornwall in a Ford Anglia, registration number 531 PTN, please contact Newcastle General Hospital in connection with her sister” obsolete. I wonder when they stopped? Did anyone notice?

WHY TARBES AND THE HAUTE-PYRENEES?

Why this part of France ?
We started looking at Languedoc-Rousillon and the areas of France that John knows and likes. Montpellier is too expensive so we looked in a rough triangle between Beziers, Narbonne and Perpignan and went as far west as Carcassonne. This is wine country in recession and tourist country so, sadly, it’s dead in winter. We hit two main problems. Affordable houses were in dying hamlets and no houses at our price had gardens. The houses are stone and attractive – part of once semi-fortified villages on rocky hills and outcrops but all required very hard and major renovation work.

Nothing seemed right. In desperation we moved our search north and west to the Charente where we hit a week of arctic weather, van trouble and snow and ice. The property here was much more what we were looking for but the area though beautiful, didn’t feel right for us. This may sound strange, but it was too provincial and too French especially by comparison with the South of France which has a mixed community into which we felt we might assimilate better.

Absolutely by chance we had stopped in Tarbes, a place that meant nothing to us, to see friends on our way to the Charente. They sang the praises of the Tarbes climate and the local house prices but as it was dark when we arrived in Tarbes we had no idea at all about the appearance of the town or the region until we drove out the next day imagining that we would not be back.

We had, however, established contact with an estate agent in Tarbes and were sent some properties to look at that seemed promising. Our Charente shortlist still hadn’t given us ‘le coup de Coeur nécessaire’. We were cold and the van was b***d so we went back to Tarbes, looked at some properties and are still here enduring ‘les tempêtes’ and waiting to see if the place we like may become ours at some happy future moment.