Homeward bound

It is now over a year since we left you all and flew back to London from Chicago.  My mum is doing great – cooking her own breakfast and pruning the roses in her dressing gown before her “carers” arrive to help her wash and dress and make her bed.  Not that she would ever say so, but John and I are definitely surplus to requirement.  Just as well, as it looks as though we may have sold our London house.  (Third time lucky?  Two previous offers have fallen through … Crossed fingers and prayers to St. Jude please.)

In preparation  for our house move, we are bringing the bikes back home to France.  It is the first long ride we have had since last summer.  Tonight I am writing from Limoges (if you stuck a pin in the middle of a map of France, you wouldn’t be far off).  John is snoring beside me.

We had intended to make it back to Montréjeau tonight, but the itinerary was fecked before we started.  We stayed last night with John’s mum, Betty, as it was easier to get to Dover from Coulsdon than from the Isle of Wight, for a cheap ferry crossing to Calais.  We were booked on an 8.15am ferry, which we could have made easily by leaving at 6.30am.  Unfortunately, Betty’s snoring woke us at 4am.  Having tossed and turned a bit, I got up and made a cup of tea for us both.  By the time we had drunk it, it was 4.30am and John had a brilliant idea, “Let’s leave now!”  It is a ten and a half hour drive from Calais to Montréjeau and, if we had caught an early ferry, we could have made it to our local auberge at about 9pm, in time for a pizza.  But there was no “early” ferry, so we just sat nursing a large coffee and a bacon roll until it was time to embark.

If we had ridden on, we could probably have made Montréjeau by midnight, but the auberge would have been closed.  As it was, after 400 miles, we started to flag at Orléans and decided to have a decent meal and call it a day at Limoges. We booked into a B&B Motel (€45 per night + breakfast) and had a nice bit of rump steak at the Courtepaille restaurant next door.  Slightly worryingly, it took a second bottle of vin de pays for John to notice that we could have paid €37 for the room, if we could have found a third person to share it with us …

The mind boggles. 

Good night.

Some more Irish humor

The Irish Millionaire
 
Mick, from Dublin, appeared on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’
and towards the end of the program had already won 500,000 euros.
 “You’ve done very well so far”, said Chris Tarrant, the show’s presenter.
“Now for a million euros, and you’ve only got one life-line left and that
is ‘Phone a Friend’.  Everything is riding on this question………..
will you go for it?”
 “Sure,” said Mick. “I’ll have a go!”
 
“Which of the following birds does NOT build its own nest?
 a) Sparrow
 b) Thrush,
 c) Magpie,
 d) Cuckoo?”
 
“I haven’t got a clue” said Mick, “so I’ll use my last lifeline and phone my friend Willie back home in Dublin.”
 
Mick called up his mate, told him the circumstances and repeated the question to him.
 
“Feckin’ hell, Mick!” cried Willie. “Dat’s simple……It’s a cuckoo.”
 
“Are you sure?”
 
“I’m feckin’ sure.”
 
Mick hung up the phone and told Chris, “I’ll go wit Cuckoo as me answer.”
 
“Is that your final answer?” asked Chris.
 
“Dat it is, Sir.”
 
There was a long – long pause, and then the presenter screamed, “Cuckoo is
 the correct answer!  Mick, you’ve won 1 million euros!”
 
The next night, Mick invited Willie to their local pub to buy him a drink.
“Tell me, Willie?  How in Heaven’s name did you know it was da Cuckoo that doesn’t build its own nest?”
 
“Because he lives in a feckin’ clock!”

June 1st – The appliance of science …

May 31st, for those of us who lack the confidence to complete their Déclaration d’Impôt on-line, is D-day for French tax returns. Since our (French-registered) car and bike insurance are also due for renewal around now, a trip home was in order. Mum is, to all intents and purposes, fully mobile again so, having not spent a single night alone for nearly a year, this would be a fine chance for her to prove her independence. The lovely girls from the home care agency visit every morning and Mum’s beloved daily agreed to come out of retirement to do a few hours of housework while we were away, so she wouldn’t be entirely abandoned.

The only real issue was how Mum was going to feed herself during our absence. Despite her protests to the contrary, a week’s diet of soup, sandwiches and ginger biscuits, is hardly ideal for one who is meant to be gaining weight. Pre-prepared meals might be an answer but there was always the question of reheating them … or not, as the case may be. Since her illness, Mum gets ravinously hungry and needs to eat … now! As in immediately – not in 20 minutes’ time, when the oven has reached temperature. Left to her own devices, she would happily spread fish pie on bread and eat it as a sandwich rather than heat it up. Even so, having once or twice nearly melted a plastic freezer container in the oven, John and I decided she needed a microwave.

We found a neat little combination microwave with, needless to say, a dozen functions that Mum will never use, and I cleared a convenient corner of the kitchen worksurface of the ‘coral reef’: an accumulation of lovingly-collected tins and boxes, old menus, a dozen bottles of vitamin pills, “useful” plastic bags, kitchen scales (2 sets, with weights), paper napkins and a couple of hot water bottles … Of course, I couldn’t throw any of this away but, by the time I had found most of it a new home, I must say that the new microwave looked very handsome in its new oasis of quiet organisation.

And Mum seemed approving. She even put on her reading specs to examine the new apparatus. I gave her a brief demonstration with a cup of water, and stuck three flourescent yellow stickers next to the most essential buttons, marking them steps #1, #2 and #3. Nothing could be simpler.

Or so I thought. In fact, when I dared to suggest, an hour later, that Mum might like to heat up her dinner in the new oven, her face was a picture. The look of horror was such that I might as well have suggested grilling a live rattlesnake with a flame-thrower. No! Really!”, she said with genuine panic in her voice, “I’ll make an omelette”.

How guilty did I feel when John and I came home from our evening out, to find that she hadn’t located the eggs …?!

Ooooooh Feck!!!

Here’s a little technical quiz for you.  John’s rear brake suddenly failed on the way up to London on Sunday.  Can you spot what might have caused it?!

Ooooh feck!

Luckily John didn’t have to stop too fast.  Still, one can’t help but wonder what happened to the missing section of brake line. He had ridden over 50 miles from Portsmouth without incident.  Then, suddenly ….!

Home is where the heart is …

John and I finally made it home to France.  Sadly, we’re only here till Friday, but it is good to be surrounded by one’s own stuff for a few days.  We’ve been talking a lot about last year’s trip.  It will be exactly one year tomorrow that I was last here, and walking in on Sunday evening was a bit like entering some sort of time warp.  There were all sorts of bits and pieces that related to the planning of our US trip, that we had left out when we packed the car.  It was a very odd feeling.

Anyway, seeing as so many of you will be at Del Rhea’s, do send everyone our best.

B x

Still Out There

Hi Everyone,

Been awhile since I’ve communicated, but since Brigid made the website change, I simply haven’t been able to log in. First wouldn’t recognize my password, tried unsuccessfully to change it on multipe occasions, but not until several more attempts today did I succeed. Beginning to wonder if the internet gods have been trying to thwart me. In any event, things have been somewhat uneventful in the midwest (except for the arrival of my 5th grandchild 3 weeks back – and Leah looks like the last). However, it finally looks like summer has arrived. Been putting in breakin miles on my new Electric Glide Ultra Limited (yep still a Harley man). The old one just wasn’t the same after the Alaska trip- at least that was the excuse I gave my wife.
Looking forward to hitting the road again, but it has to be scheduled around my annual fishing trip to Canada and several family vacations. This retirement thing is sure a bitch!! Hope everything is well with all members of the group and I look forward to being able once again to communicate with you all on this site.

Bill

RIP Elizabeth de Stroumillo

Who?

Elizabeth de Stroumillo, “Minky”, was a pioneering travel journalist and the mother of my best friend at school. She died in March, aged 83, as a result of being knocked off her scooter!  She and her sculptor husband, Phil Turner, took me in shortly after my father died, when I first moved to London.  They taught me the ways of the world and treated me as one of their own.  For this alone, I would be forever in their debt.

However, I can also tell you that without them, you, my friends, would never have met me and John. Minky and Phil were both keen scooter riders and it was they, to my own parents’ joint horror, who suggested that I should buy my first 50cc moped …  From these modest beginnings, a biker was born. RIP Minky.