Willy's post for June

There are people who are kind enough to tell me that I speak good French - this is very kind, but almost certainly untrue - I speak passable shopping French, but I very quickly get lost when the French switch into High Box. Like, for instance the other day when the Countess had taken us out to lunch with a crowd of smart natives who were all talking their native tongue at max revs, whilst I had long since gone into neutral. Then came a pause in talk and I realised that the Marquise (oh yes, I do have smart friends) had been addressing me. It seemed that she had been asking me if we had much "Sida" in England ? “Oh yes”, I said, “we have cider - the most excellent, but normally, in the far west, in Devon and Cornwall. But you also have good cider, I have tried it in Normandy - it is of excellent quality”. There then followed the sort of deep silence, which tells you that you have shot a conversational cat. It was then that I got a sound kick from Madame Poole:
" You bloody fool" she said, “they're talking about AIDS”.... well, how was I to know? I mean they had all been talking foreign and talking very fast too. How did they expect a chap like me to keep up with them, especially when they had started talking ' mucky'? Ah well all part of life's rich pattern, I suppose, but there we are. Mind you, speaking foreign can be a problem.
Our telephone rang at lunchtime and Madam answered it –
" yes”, she spoke English,(the caller), then gave a stream of rapid foreign. She was very sorry but could Madame speak more gently? Madame was obviously incensed by this and dropped into rapid and even more difficult French. We have found that there is one sure way of stopping one of these tirades. This is to state the truth that we have sold the house and are moving to Normandy. This works because no one in the Vienne knows where Normandy is or might be and they certainly do not believe that anyone from the Vienne would be so stupid as to go and live there. It stops them dead. It shut this woman up immediately.
"What on earth did she want?"
" I don't know -she couldn't speak English"

So, when do we move house? Well, I wish I knew - the problem is that the hauliers will not tell us - this is France you understand. As well as I can tell you it will be at the end of July or early August. One of the things about Normandy that I am looking forward to, is being by the sea again. I was brought up by the sea in Cornwall and have missed it ever since. We have been going through boxes of old photographs, most of which I shall offer to the boy and then burn, as they will be of no interest to him, but they have smartened up my memories. I was bred and buttered on the beautiful Fowey estuary - a place much loved by many people. Hilaire Belloc described it neatly in a bit of doggerel:

‘Oh the harbour of Fowey is a wonderful spot
and it's there I enjoy to sail on a yot
To sail in a yot round a mark or a buoy
Oh a wonderful place is the harbour of Fowey.’

How I loved Fowey Harbour. Golant which was the family home was a mile or two up-stream, but we had a base in Fowey. The 'boat house' just down-stream from the Bodinnic ferry; it had a hard landing, two fixed moorings, a two story boat house, and a three story cottage. The whole thing was owned and shared by various parts of our family and I well remember my horror when it was decided to sell it when the house up the river was up for sale after my much loved grandmother died. Bless her it nearly broke my heart - that was my home and I loved it. This all happened back in the early 1950s, I got an early lesson in taxation. I don't know how many of you remember death duties. The system then was if the deceased bequeathed his or her possessions and then held on to life for 7 years he/she escaped the payment of duty. Granny had little time for the Labour government of the time and hung onto life, but it was no good, the poor old lady handed in her cards just 6 weeks within the seven years. This was a disaster for the family as apart from losing Granny, her death came at a time of a fiscal slump and all the family assets had to be sold off at fires sale prices. I remember the Boat House, as it was much discussed at the time. I remember the sale price as being some £10,000. As a water front property in a prime position, it would have been worth a very moderate fortune today, with several extra zeros on the end, but such, I suppose, is life. That was part of the sad story of my family and its many disastrous financial dealings and of course, with the 'boat house' went the boats and a piece of my father's heart. That is why I shall keep some of those old photographs - memories of another world

How are you on éoliennes (French for wind farms)? If you had travelled from my Northumbrian home to Edinburgh, you would have gone through a great plantation of the things on top of Sutra Hill. Well now they have plonked another great copse of them on a neighbouring farm near here. I cannot say that I am best suited but they do not worry me over much. The thing is what can be the use of the things? Nothing at all says my friend the Professor of Engineering. He says that the cost of building and erecting these things can never be paid for out of the income they might produce. In other words they are a complete waste of money, which is pretty much what all the locals have been saying.
In our local town, where Madame does the shopping, there are lots of pedestrian crossings and I have to say that the French are pretty good about stopping to let a pedestrian cross, especially lame old buggers hobbling along on sticks. As I set forth to cross the road by the bakery the other day, I could sense a car approaching the crossing from the other side. As I set out across the crossing I could feel the car creeping up to me. I kept going and then I felt the car coming along and then I could feel the tire creeping along the side of my foot. That was enough - I shouted -
"That's my foot you stupid old Bitch!" Anyway that stirred up the market place - the man who had been painting the wood work on the baker's window vaulted down from his cradle and began a high volume row with the car driver, whom I now saw for the first time. It was not a woman at all. It was a tiny man who was too small to see over his steering wheel, he had to look through the wheel and quite obviously could not see the foot he was running over. I began to feel sorry for the poor wee feller, especially as he now had half the market people shouting at him - well no one likes their foot being squashed even by very small people in very small vans. No one thinks that it is a good idea and sorry as I now felt for the poor little bugger, neither do I.

Just had a visit from two people who wanted to look at Basil, he is called Basil because he was made in Basle. He is my four wheeled cycle and a jolly good egg I think. I plod all round the local lanes on him and as he has 'assistance electronique' he trolls along very happily as long I remember to charge his battery up regularly. The Monsieur was very lame and as I understood it he needed a caliper to make his leg do what he wanted it to do, rather than the other way about. Well I thoroughly understand about the annoyance of bits of you not co-operating with you, so I wish him well, but not to the point of letting him have Basil.