The slightly peculiar theft, the disinfected-trouser disaster and the early start

 

It’s all change at number 14. Yesterday, James and Lesley arrived from the UK, and this morning I gave Kate, Adrian and the kids a lift to the TGV station at Aix-en-Provence, which meant an early start. Getting up at 6.15 isn’t pleasant and I now know how bloody cold it is here in the small hours. I think the Wareing-Sells enjoyed their stay. Christmas was fun; the kids didn’t wake us too early and were either pleased with everything they were given, or too polite to make a fuss.

We took the children out to one of the squares here to try out their new ‘outdoor chalk’ – special chalk that you can use to grafitti walls and pavements, but which washes away in the rain. It worked really well, and kept the kids occupied for ages. Whether it washes off or not remains to be seen because it doesn’t rain much here…

Anyhow, during that time, Becky’s handbag was lifted from the park bench and we didn’t notice until we were called the following morning by the man who’d found it on the side of the road. Becky went to pick it up. Inside, it was almost untouched. The purse was missing some money, though most of it was still there; the keyring still had all of Becky’s keys except her car key; Becky’s out-of-credit out-of-batteries mobile phone was taken; and so was a tacky covering for a 2006 diary. It’s almost as though the thief didn’t want to cause too much trouble. The car key poses the biggest problem. We’ve had to empty the car of all CDs and valuables, and use the steering-wheel lock in case the thief happens by. There aren’t too many Toyotas in Manosque.

Luckily, it didn’t put too much of a damper on the rest of Boxing Day. Luca wasn’t feeling well, so I looked after him while everyone else went to Sisteron and had fun playing football in the summertime swimming pool. Adrian managed to get himself locked into one of the self-cleansing toilet cubicles and had to breath through a hole in the roof with a biro until the waters subsided. At least, that’s what he told me later. And then the satnav tried to murder them all on the way home by telling them to drive off the edge of a cliff.

Provence – better than Alton Towers, huh?

14 Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau

Guest blogger - Adrian: We were curious about what this house is like before we arrived. This is what we’ve found. (We may also get round to posting about people, experiences etc. on another occasion!)

The house is nestled in one of the many wriggling back roads in Manosque that are – by continental standards at least –wide enough to allow cars. While billed as a five storey house it is more of an alternate floor layout with half floors to front and back. The front opens onto a crowded street and as you ascend can allow views out across the rooftops and down onto the street below. The back is nestled into other buildings, too chaotically to justify a term such as ‘back to back terrace’, but squeezed into whatever space was available at the time. Coming in through the front door (there is no back or side entrance) you pass the small garage. I have spent much time nudging backwards and forwards to manoeuvre the hire car into the space – causing only slight scratching to the car in the process – but hey, that is what collision waver damage is for! Walking into the entrance hall you are above the spacious cellar which includes a very large, although rather dilapidated old wine barrel. The cellar dates back several hundred years and the combination of no light source, a damp soil  floor and low stonework ceiling gives rise to feelings of claustrophobia in many.

Beyond the entrance hall at the back of the house is a utility room that bears the marks of kids painting and other creative (read messy) activities. Going up the stairs, which circle all the way up the house round a central stem, brings you to the kitchen, the heart of the house and where we have spent much of our time, feeding the kids, playing with them and on occasion being screamed at by ours as the odd french food didn’t meet with their approval! Out the back of the kitchen is the terrace as featured in Jasper’s pensées. One idiosyncratic feature on this floor is the horse who is pasted on to the back of the toilet door. He (I am guessing here) is either looking over your shoulder or staring you in the face, a slightly unnerving situation which ever way you approach the task at hand.

Carrying on up the stairs you come to the main room, currently commandeered as our bedroom. It has a shuttered window that opens out above the front door and offers an opportunity to watch life pass by on the street below. The cupboard behind our bed houses items of Eva’s too breakable to be allowed space, although the sounds emanating from it in the early hours suggest a healthy underground club scene is flourishing behind its door. Having walked round the block we remain confused as to the source of this night-time music.

Onwards and upwards to the main bathroom area, more trompe l’oeil on the back of the toilet door – a Chinese scene this time. Carrying on without pause past a room at the front (Eva’s study area I am led to believe) and up to what is currently Theo and Cara’s room, although it would normally be Luca’s. Whichever way it is used it leads on to Jasper and Becky’s bedroom. Continuing the ascent brings you to the final habitable room, currently being used by Joe and Ilona – with the exception of when they get freaked by the strange and unusual house and end up decamping downstairs to sleep with Mummy and Daddy. Turning back towards the stairs and into the shower-room you can appreciate the height of the house through an atrium like space that sits alongside the stairs and drops all the way back to the entrance hall. Two posters advertising jazz concerts in Manosque sit alongside pipework and windows before you land back on the tiled floor of the entrance hall.

For completeness. Further stairs take you up to a door, a few more to another door taking you up into the pigeon-infested eaves. The steps, sixty-nine in total (auditors beware – so multitudinous are the branches of the stairs that a dispute will arise if you ever try to verify that figure) are uneven and vary by depth, height and angle. It is a characterful house that would feel full of life even without the number of people residing in it. From the damp, dusty ground at the foot of the cellar to the pigeons nesting in the eaves it grows and emerges from the soil up into the light of the busy Manosque skyline where ariels compete with a local church tower for attention. We are happy to make it our home for Christmas and grateful to our hosts for having made such a brave and interesting move.

And then there were nine

Adrian, Kate, Ilona and Joe are here for Christmas, so we’ve been excitedly showing them some of our various local attractions and specialities: the Christmas market with its vin chaud and chestnuts, Father Christmas taking kids for free horse and cart rides up and down the street; the amazing fishmongers they have in all the hypermarkets. We’ve already demolished a ton of smelly cheeses, gallons of wine, miles of bread and a dozen oysters.

 

Yesterday, Becky and Kate looked after all the kids during the afternoon while Adrian and I went for a long cycle ride along a marked cycle route. I gave Adrian the crap bike, hoping that I’d be able to keep up with him, but he was still quicker than me. We spent an enjoyable, if knackering few hours cycling up steep hills in the sun (hot and sweaty) and down steep hills in the shade (cold and frosty). The low light added its colours to the pallete so that our sunset approach into Manosque was a watercolour wash of purples and lilacs, layers of hills stretching out below us and the town floating on a cloud of mist.

From Becky: … and today, being new men, Adrian and Jasper took the five kids to the family centre while Kate and I went for a walk over the Luberon hills. Bliss! We crunched through hard frost as we climbed (Kate well-prepared in her heeled boots) and then broke out into bright, warm sunshine and a glorious view. Driving back through the little villages, we looked out for a restaurant to serve us some homely fare. By the time we’d rejected a seafood restaurant (too expensive and time-consuming), the village of La-Bastide-les-Jourdans (not a ‘perched village’ with a decent view) and the pizza-place in Pierrevert (too closed), it was really time to get home and relieve the boys, so we arrived happy but hungry. Luckily three of the kids were asleep and there were still four different kinds of smelly cheese and some baguette on the table. Ilona was quick to let on that Adrian had opened my special Christmas-day nougat, but since he’d sealed it up again so that you could hardly tell, even that didn’t spoil my mood.

A Green Glass of Worms

 

Becky decided to brighten up our terrace the other day, and planted some pansies. In French, pansies are ‘pensées’ – thoughts. Here are a handful of unrelated thoughts that I’ve had since we’ve been here, but which don’t warrant their own posting.

Unrelated thought #1: The Christmas market opened last night in François Mitterand Square. There were speeches, Provencale Morris dancing, and fireworks over the Mont D’Or. The market has local crafts, cheeses, meats and delicacies. It feels very olde worlde, except for the stalls selling tacky Father Christmases, and the displays showing polar bears snuggling up to penguins. (Yes, I know.) Becky pointed out that there were loads of stalls selling food for preparation at home, but there is nothing to sell you a hot-dog or burger to munch on while walking around. Food is just too important to be treated that way.

Unrelated thought #2: The French don’t have a word for ’sober’. Their equivalent translates as ‘no longer drunk’. I like that.

Unrelated thought #3: Father Christmas obviously doesn’t bother coming down the chimney in France; he uses a ladder. And what’s more, there don’t seem to be any reindeer knocking about either.
 

Unrelated thought #4: On the long drive down from the UK, it occured to me that the French would have difficulty understanding what you meant if you said something like ‘Vern threw the green glass of worms towards Versailles’: ‘Vern a jeté le verre vert de vers vers Versailles’. I told this to Becky, who thought about it and then said ‘why would anyone want to say that?’. I suppose she has a point.

Joyeux Noël!

Happy Christmas everybody! We wish you fun, rest, sunshine and a little bit of snow.

From Becky, Jasper, Cara, Theo and Luca (all missing Sam-the-dog, who is having a lovely holiday in Alton)

 

Tacky Father Christmases

We took Linda for a walk up the Mont D’Or in the morning before she left. We found olives (well, duh!), almonds, wild thyme and marjoram… and, horror of horrors – evidence of frost! The weather has been much colder since the heavy rains the other day, and it now feels as though it must be getting down towards freezing point even during the day. I’ve even been forced to start wearing a jumper. The sun is still always shining, but is very low on the horizon, which makes it difficult to look anywhere approaching south. From the top of the Mont D’Or, south includes loads of water flowing through the valley, making it doubly difficult to see. It’s good that there’s been so much snow falling on the slopes to the north, as they are looking really enticing now; like a huge slab of vanilla cheesecake in the distance, defined only by sun and shadows.

In fact, what with the cold and the delicious smell of woodsmoke everywhere it’s beginning to feel like Christmas might be just round the corner. The French seem to love Father Christmas dolls, and there are lots appearing in shop windows and on the sides of people’s houses. Some are just like the rash of hanged Santas you see in Oxford around this time, but others range from the child sized singing and dancing kind to the animatronic stepladder-climbing kind. There are three at a time sharing a rope in one shop. French tacky at its most festive.

A Visitor

We’re currently entertaining our first visitor to Manosque. On the day that London had a mini-tornado, Grandma Linda flew in on Ryan Air (1p each way) for a long weekend. And she brought the weather with her. The morning haar over the Mont D’Or finally broke and we were treated to a proper tropical downpour. We hid in a bar and played babyfoot, which Cara and especially Theo loved.

It’s been trying to rain here properly for a few days, and it was actually quite welcome. I’ve been waiting for the weather to turn for a few reasons. I love the rain and I’ve been missing it; there’s a whole load of pidgeon poo that needs to be washed off the car, and because at the moment it’s too warm for snow on the pistes. It’s too warm even for the snow cannons to be effective. Can you guess what I’ve been given for my birthday?

There’s a skiing resort about 1½ hour’s drive away; I’m being taken for a day on the slopes, probably after new year. I even read in our local rag today that there’s been 15-30cms of snow overnight, so I was all smiles.

Meanwhile, for Linda’s last evening here we’re having artichokes, crevettes and cuttlefish, with some of the fine wine we’ve been degusting today. Lucky for Adrian, we bought far too much to drink it all before they arrive

Feu d’artifice

We’ve been in France for one calendar month today.

The last time I was in France for a month (about 15 years ago) I started dreaming in French, which I thought very chic. A couple of days ago I had a dream in French again, which was great, except that I didn’t understand a word of it. I woke up feeling very confused.

But I think it marks a turning point in my linguistic understanding. Today we visited our host’s friend Hilda and I spent a happy hour chatting about otters and gorillas, sharon fruits (‘kaka’) and how Luca looks just like me because of the shape of his eyebrows. A couple of weeks ago I’d have finished the conversation after about ten seconds by declaring ‘je ne comprends pas – je suis Ecossais’, as though that’s an excuse.

Anyhow – the kids had a great day. After a morning of shopping and a nap, the visit to Hilda’s might have been a little dull for them but for the chocolate biscuits. Hilda asked if it was ok to give them chocolate and we said that one was fine. I reckon they had five or ten each.

So, pissed on chocolate, we dragged the kids to see the fireworks that mark the beginning of Advent and the switching on of the Christmas lights in Manosque. We sat with probably a thousand Manosquins in the amphitheatre at the Parc de Drouille and watched 15 minutes of flashes, crackles and bangs. Theo (who is scared of that sort of thing) covered his ears for the duration, while Cara, still pissed, giggled all the way through. At the end, she clapped with everyone else, and then, after a pause, said:

“I want to see some more”

We settled for the free Vin Chaud – my first of this season