I have had an interesting few days one way or another, with the weather and a very petulant daughter who is over excited about Christmas, and full of cold. The snow in the UK on Friday threatened to stop me getting home, however in the end I was only delayed by an hour and a half. I took the car to Gatwick 1st thing Friday morning ready for a return to Nottingham on Monday, and to avoid any problems on the roads, and caught the train back to London to work.The trains were all over the place timing wise, but there was still a good if slow service running, and so when I got back to London Bridge station to go to the airport I caught a train that was running over an hour late, but it actually meant I arrived at Gatwick earlier than normal. This being the last weekend before Christmas the tourists were out in force, having left their brains at home as usual, so security took an absolute age, especially as Gatwick security is amongst the slowest in the UK, they would say for slow read thorough, so combine the two and you spend a good 45 minutes looking through the metal detector arches before you finally take your turn.
Once we took off we were looking down on a winter wonderland all the way from the UK to Angouleme when suddenly the snow disappeared and we landed in a green Bordeaux, and bizzarely I saw no snow on the drive home from Bordeaux until I reached Jarnac, you could say the river Charente was the snow line so Sigogne was a winter wonderland, but our neighbours south of river were surrounded by the more usual winter green.Our daughter is, for the first time, suffering from over excitment in the run up to Christmas which has resulted in some huge mood swings and some not so pleasant fits of temper, which we have never really seen before, when she does not get her own way. Now I can see why parents can sometimes say I'll be glad when Christmas is over. All this is not helped by the fact that she has a streaming cold at the moment so has been inside for 5 days, I hope she calms down whilst I am away otherwise I shall be returning on Thursday to an exhausted and exasperated wife and mother in law.
So its Monday morning and I am heading back to the UK for a short week of work, I'm only working about 3 days though I already have too much to do both in both my work and private life, but that is how it is a Christmas, then, when I get back home on Thursday afternoon I will have 10 days of staying on the same place with my family which I am really looking forward to. Weather permitting I am heading to Nottingham, Harrogate, Mansfield, Ashbourne, Bourne and Southend to name but a few before I head back to France in the car on Thursday morning.
Its been an interesting run up to Christmas, with all the weather disruptions in the UK, the threat of strikes (by British Airways) and the Euro Tunnel shinanigans, so I was amazed that apart from loosing one day to the snow I escaped somewhat unscathed, and arrived home on Christmas Eve via the Euro Tunnel bang on time.
The family at Christmas, Christmas Table, Fleur & Oma singing Carols, and of course the one and only Franca happy now she has a bottle of AmarettoThe run up to Christmas is as always a great big panic, even though every year I try to get organised, this year the weather threw a big spanner in the works with the snow and ice meaning I was always playing catch up, especially as I was visiting lots of people in remote parts of Derbyshire during the bad weather, well at least trying to. One nice visit in Derbyshire, not work related, was to catch up with my oldest friend Alice whom I am ashamed to say, I have not seen for 17 years!, she has not really changed so why have I got all the grey hairs then! Christmas in Sigogne this year was celebrated in a fairly low key way, unless you were my 7 year old daughter, its the first time she has got really exicted over Christmas so of course we were woken up at 5:00am, 6:00am and she finally got up at 7:00am. Franca's mum was also with us which is always good fun, and since she had been here since the middle of December she headed back to Rotterdam on 27th. I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and have a Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year
Made a bit of a boob this weekend, or rather I made it back in October when I made all my flight/travel bookings for the rest of the year. I managed to miss out this weekend for some strange reason lost in the mists of time. Hence I am now sitting on the Eurostar heading from Paris to London on my most expensive weekend return of the year. To get the trains I want I had to book the full 1st class return, but it was still £200.00 cheaper than British Airways wanted for a last minute return to Bordeaux.In all it was a bit of a lazy weekend just pottering around doing little jobs. However this will have to stop as we need to get on and do things, if we are to be ready for the next season. To show willing and convince myself we had restarted work I knocked down a wall, not a very big one but it meant that things were starting to move forward again. We are coming into the Christmas season and this will slow things down a little as we are suddenly getting guests again so there will be no major work this side of the New Year.I have a list of small jobs that all need to be tackled before the next major onslaught of guests, hopefully around Easter next year, the biggest of which is to fix the walkin shower which seems to continuously get blocked which means ripping up the shower floor and part of the bathroom floor to re-lay the waste pipe. Pipe work will take about an hour to do , ensuing tiling and flooring will take 2 or 3 weekends. So its busy busy time again, however we have some nice things to do again, it is Franca's mother's 75th birthday and we are celebrating it in Paris. As part of the trip Fleur is being taken to Disneyland, and she is already saving up all her Euros ready for the big day.
The weather has really decided to take turn over the last couple of weeks in our little corner of France. After July the sun shone and almost not a drop of rain fell, now in November the sky has thrown nothing but rain at us. From ground where you would need a kango to make an impression and where carrots refused to grow down into the baked soil, we now have ground that does not know if it should be liquid or solid.I know we have fared much better than lots of people in both the UK and France in that we have not had any flooding, and it is highly unlikely to happen to us as we live the top of incline that runs down to the River Charente some 7km away, if we are under water the entire Cognac industry would be devastated, not to mention 10s of 1000s of people loosing homes & livelihoods, so we should count ourselves fortunate, though it does not stop us moaning about the weather.One remarkable thing about our recent weather is that it is not cold, they are not reaching the heights of 30 degrees that we saw in October, we are still regularly reaching between 15 an 18 degrees, though when we left to drive to Angouleme this morning the car was showing an outside temp of 1 degree, so maybe that is a sign of winter arriving, but atleast that will hopefully mean the sun will make a welcome reappearance.Being a bit of a snow-a-holic I have been monitoring the mountain ranges in France for the start of the snow fall for the winter season, and the Alps are doing well, the first snows of the winter have fallen in the Massif Central and it looks like the Pyrenees are get in on the act as well with a good covering. I am hoping to do atleast one weekend in the snow this season so Fleur can have a go a sledging and maybe skiing too, we will have to see what the winter snows bring..
