Our big news this week… we have our car back! After being without for nearly two months and having our adventure bubble burst, or at least deflated, plus being reliant on our lovely neighbours for lifts to here and there we are finally free again to explore at leisure. We can continue our discovery of our nearby towns, villages, lakes and countryside, and we can continue to find treasures for our Etsy shop. With a complete new front end needed we waited, then waited some more but in the end Monsieur Boulesteix at our local Peugeot garage came up trumps. A job very well done. Most things take longer in France, but so far we’d say most things are done better and this was no exception. Today we filled our car very nicely full with all manner of rusty gold.
When back in Edinburgh one of our most popular TV choices was American Pickers, a US daytime series where two lovers of all things vintage tour all manner of barns, trailers and dusty outhouses in search of ‘rusty gold’. After doing the dance with sealing the best deal, the finds are then sold through their store, Antique Archaeology. It’s hardly highbrow TV but it’s given us a catchphrase that reminds us of Edinburgh. I was going to write reminds us of home, but well… home is where the heart is and our hearts are very much here now. To be honest we don’t really look for rusty gold. Patinated gold maybe, but often when out on our daily walks we’ll see an old, very dead Citroen or retired, ancient farm machinery left out to graze in a field and out comes our catchphrase. It makes us smile.
As well as being reunited with our car we have also just had the same experience with our summer clothes. Not being able to return to Edinburgh and not really wanting to unnecessarily buy a new summer wardrobe, our very much missed and loved ones posted out a king sized box of shorts, t-shirts, sandals and summer dresses, not to mention fabulous birthday and Mother’s Day surprises. Just in time too, as today our temperature reached 20 degrees with this weekend promising even more. Spring feels like the sort of summer we’re used to. Nature and its rainbow of colours are blooming, and previously unseen life has emerged from hibernation. Our animal friends are constantly being relocated from one field to another one nearby, and one such animal family more than matches our own gaze.
We’re always being stared at by cows. Pretty brown ones with pale noses and rings around their eyes. We are both animal lovers, probably more than most, and through our daily explores we’re now very happy to be on first name terms with goats, ponies, llama, sheep, donkeys, horses, deer, coypu, all manner of birds, poultry and fields of grazing, or more frequently, gazing cows. Pepper’s favourite are the poultry and coypu, but that’s just her stomach talking. We have to keep her on a tight leash when either is in sight. We also had our first sighting of a herd of wild boar last week and Pepper’s lead was on before we could take a breath.
Our next update will almost certainly include links to booking pages for our new gite, La Terrasse de Citron (above). Either that or updates from our garden which has taken a back seat for a few weeks. With our car back on the road we can now take our hoard of garden debris to the tip and clear the way for stage two of Le Garden Rescue. With so much to do there’s barely enough time to fit in a round of golf. Actually that’s a lie. My golf game is on par with my French, and with Heather on a 43-day Duolingo streak we will both soon be past what could be classed as ‘beginners’. We’ve even been back to school and learned how to say the alphabet in French. G and J are a pain, G is pronounced jhay and J is pronounced jhee. We’ve got it now and yeah… we’re probably still beginners.
m'sieu-dame 
Leave a Reply