The Deed Is Done

We knew it was going to happen, but it still came as a sad surprise on Thursday when we were travelling in the car to the post office (an unenviable task at the best of times) and we were greeted in Chazelle by men with screwdrivers putting a road name on the wall of a house. They told us that they were on their way and would be at La Tuilerie any minute.

Cees walked home despondently and I went on to the post office with a heavy heart as I knew I would have no time to say goodbye to our beautiful plain concrete gate post.

The men turned up and proceeded to measure and drill and screw and now it is official, we have been “Numbered”.

By the way, please note it took four men to put the number 10 on our gatepost: one to hold, one to drill, one to watch and one to take photos.

Despite my reservations though, they have done a nice job and it does look quite smart I suppose.

Click here for 10 Route de Chazeux Website. Doesn’t have the same ring about it as La Tuilerie, does it ?

Again : a call for help

This is a copy of Cees' blog, if any of you feel like helping please let us know, a big thank you in advance!

Just like last year we received a number of bingo (or loto) cards from the Amicale de Cormatin, which we were asked to sell. The proceeds of these cards are used to finance the yearly dinner for the aged of Cormatin (April) and for Christmas presents for all kids in Cormatin between 0 and 10 years old.

At the beginning of 2011 I placed a call for help in my blog, begging my readers to donate something to this fund raising event. I got quite a few positive reactions, and we managed to sell our 40 cards quickly to some expats and friends around here, to some guests who stayed previously on the campsite or in the gites and to friends and family abroad (the second prize fell on one of our cards!)

Because over time we have gathered some more friends and acquaintances among the French population of Cormatin, we made the rounds in Cormatin and environs, and we managed to sell all our 40 cards in no time. No call for help on my blog or on Facebook required, or so it seemed...

Until Sue spoke to some less pro-active Amicale members; they had been “unable to sell any cards at all”, and on top of that they possessed a box with more than 60 unsold cards! She will be on the road this afternoon, to try to persuade the shopkeepers in Cormatin to flog off some more cards. At the same time I will try to interest some of my readers in again buying some cards off us through my blog and through Facebook. Who says that social networks are useless?

I ask those who are willing to invest some of their hard earned money for this good cause, to send an e-mail to this address cees.sue@latuileriechazelle.com, specifying the number of cards requested à € 2 (or £ 1.70) a card.

The potential benefactor will receive our bank details; continentals my (Dutch) BIC and IBAN numbers, islanders who want to pay in sterling will receive Sue’s account number and sort code.

On Saturday 28 January half the population of Cormatin will play bingo on your behalf for 3 prizes well worth the money:

1. a Techwood 32 “ flatscreen TV-set (PAL & SECAM)

2. a Life’s Good home cinema

3. a ham

None of these goods will go off shortly!

I hope this call for help will have the same effect as last year; all contributors receive a well meant “thank you very much” in advance.

Do a Good Deed Every Day

On the way back from shopping on a Tuesday, we normally stop at a friend’s weekend home and put their dustbin in their garden to stop it blowing away or filling up with rain, nothing special, it is not exactly a “good deed” as they look after Fifi very often when we are away and I wouldn’t ordinarily mention it, other than this simple act triggered off a rather unfortunate event. Had we not stopped at their house, then we would not have been stopped by a car with two gentlemen of North African extraction in it as we were pulling away from that house, and then we would never have been asked for directions.

The gentlemen in question explained that they were dreadfully lost, and did we know where “Parlayplay..” was? Ummm, not really. To be honest, thinking back on what happened, it is not a good idea for two foreigners with heavy foreign accents to ask two other foreigners with heavy foreign accents, for directions to anywhere, but that is of course said with hindsight. At that particular moment, I thought I knew what they had said. "Paray-le-Monial?" I asked with my perfect English accent, “Oui” they replied in chorus - phew got that one sorted.

Paray-le-Monial is 60 km from here, it is a lovely place with a superb Basilica and if you can ever get to a concert in there, it is well worth it as the acoustics are magnificent, even just a wander around the town is worth the effort, and for pilgrims it is a “must visit” destination, but I suspect that these chaps had a more mundane appointment than that, so another 60 km was not exactly what they were looking for. Breaking the news to them allowed me to use one of my favourite and very evocative expressions: “Oo la la” I said.

I just love this phrase, it says so much. A plumber arrives and sees a leak, “Oo la la”; an electrician arrives and sees some burned out wiring “Oo la la”; a builder arrives and sees a crack “Oo la la”; it says it all - “disaster!” The gentlemen in the car fully understood the severity of the situation and their faces dropped. We explained how far it was and then we told them how to get there and despite the extra distance, they left with smiles, a wave and a big “merci”.

Driving home, I suggested to Cees that these guys must be really, really lost to end up on our little road en-route from département 42 to Paray-le-Monial - where is département 42 by the way? After unloading the shopping, I checked a map of France. Our département (71, Saône-et-Loire) borders three départements on the south side, 01 (Ain) and 69 (Rhône) near us which I knew, then it borders 42 (Loire) further to the west, which I obviously didn’t know. Interestingly, the closest large town over the border from 42 when travelling into 71 is actually Paray-le-Monial, so these chappies would have already driven through the town once that day to get to Chazelle. I then had a little doubt in my mind, maybe they weren’t looking for Paray-le-Monial after all. Maybe they were looking for Prayes (5km down our little road) or Bray (3km down our little road)?

Whoops ! There goes my good deed for the day.

Ah well, my heart was in the right place, but next time I’ll just stick to dustbins or maybe give up being a Brownie altogether - the uniform doesn’t fit me anymore anyway.


La Tuilerie Website

The World Continues to Change !

Things are looking different around here. The Christmas decorations (all except the pretty lights) have been removed from Cormatin, the three kings have been and gone, which we celebrated with the traditional Galette des Rois Friday evening. But it is more than that, much, much more than that.

There have been some curious goings on in Cormatin and Chazelle this last week. Things that had never been seen here before have been appearing, unwelcome, insidious things, gnawing away at the very essence of French rural communities. Then, finally on Thursday we saw the men who were behind this act of vandalism. Monsieur G, Monsieur M and Monsieur V. armed with drills, cordless electric screwdrivers, a long stick and a step ladder, were defacing the centuries old properties of Cormatin.

With a jolly “Bonjour, Bonne Année et surtout Bon Santé” and two kisses each, we were proudly told they had done 60 houses already that day and that our house too would be defaced fairly shortly, they are heading our way !

Back in March this year I explained the joys of French addresses, but now that Spitting Image puppet, apology for a president, has finally got his way, the axe has finally fallen and we are all being reduced to numbers. No more need for the complex descriptions to make sure people find your house, just give the road name and number and you’ll get there – very sad indeed.

Having said that, I am not sure that calling us 10 Route de Chazeux will help anyone find us. We are one kilometre from the village where you will find numbers 1 – 9, 11, 13 and 15 and then 200 metres down a tiny farm track off the road itself. Do we really think this is progress ? I think we’ll stick with La Tuilerie, at least everyone knows where that is - even GPS systems.

The World Has Changed !

Yes, it is 2012 and the world as we know it in South Burgundy has changed.

OK I’ll grant you, the first change we noticed just before the new year but it was just an omen for great things to come. We found PARSNIPS in the Intermarché, not one or two, not manky looking apologies for a vegetable (which have been available every so often in the past) but nice juicy-looking, just-the-right-size parsnips.

I can see you are all very under-whelmed by my news, but today, today the 3rd of January, for the FIRST TIME EVER ANYWHERE WE HAVE EVER BEEN IN FRANCE, we have found red chillies !! Yeh !

Hold on, hold on, don’t get too excited we thought, these could just be sneaky wimpy little chilli-like things that just lead to dreadful disappointment, which has happened before. So we put just one, ever so carefully, in a plastic bag took and it to the checkout. Hoping that this would indeed be a fiery little soul. Before we reached the car Cees was so excited he couldn’t wait any longer and so he ate it. It is a real chilli and a pretty hot one at that. Hooray !

Buoyed up with excitement we went to see how the Nativity scene in Taizé is getting on. The wise men are still on their way, but one of them must have heard about the chillies in the Intermarché, because his umbrella has exploded and he has half fallen off his camel in surprise.



All we need now is for Barclaycard to get my credit card working again and I will truly be able to say “the world has changed”.

Happy New Year to everyone !

Merry Christmas !

For my Christmas Day blog what else could I write about other than Christmas cribs. I did the constantly changing Taizé Nativity Scene pretty much to death last year, so I thought I would give that one a miss this year.

Where I used to live in The Netherlands, in the Protestant north, Nativity scenes are not at all popular, but where we stayed at the beginning of December, in the Catholic south, they are Big Business. At the beginning of December, we stumbled across this amazing shop, completely dedicated to Nativity scenes. Now isn’t that worthy of a photo?

But the biggest and best was not to be seen by us this year, we were a week too early. The Saint Jan church in Den Bosch has reputedly the biggest Nativity scene in The Netherlands. My photo shows a tantalising glimpse of a star above the stable, but the other two (stolen from the internet) show it in all its full glory.

I must say though that I fail to understand why there is need for a lioness and a Chinese lady, but I am obviously missing the greater meaning behind it all.

That’s it for today it just rests for me to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and enjoy your turkey, I’ll certainly be tucking into mine pretty soon.

La Tuilerie Website

Run-Up to Christmas

Always a busy time of year, but this year seems to be more hectic than most. I don’t understand it, I have bought all my pressies and sent all my cards, so why, oh why is there so much to do?

Well the truth is that I didn’t realise that being the treasurer of the village committee was going to generate so much work, especially at this time of year. Whilst the village events usually last a day or part of a day, my work before and after each event comprises of ordering, buying and collecting items from local and some not so local suppliers, chasing up invoices, paying invoices, finding stock (where has the president put those 500 plastic cups I gave him for the last event?), counting stock (did we really drink that much wine??) and generally pulling my hair out (why won’t the figures balance?) and that all adds up to several days per event.

December is a heavy month for our little club, there was the Téléthon on 3rd December, the Christmas drinks and dinner for the volunteers on the 16th and the kids Christmas party on the 17th and I now have to get all the bingo cards distributed to the sales people before Tuesday. Making it almost a full-time occupation these last few weeks – good job we don’t have the gîtes up and running at this time of year.

All that doesn’t include the AGM of the Rendez-vous de Cormatin, the AGM for Guitares en Cormatinois and an insy-winsy bit of socialising that we have managed to fit in these last few days - where incidently I met up with someone who follows my blog which was a big wow for me, so here is a special hello to Ann(e) - sorry don't know your spelling.

Anyway, no wonder it feels so hectic !

Fortunately, most people will disappear out of sight by mid-next week, off to their little Christmassy nest to spend time at home with their families and I will sit back with my turkey and enjoy the peace and quiet !


La Tuilerie Website

The Light of Bethlehem

We heard last week that on Sunday afternoon the “Light of Bethlehem” would be arriving in Taizé. On further investigation it appeared that the Scouts and Guides of France, in cooperation with the Austrian Scouting movement, were bringing a flame from Bethlehem to France. This is the first time the flame has been brought to Taizé and the first time the flame has been in Saône-et-Loire. The flame was flown from Bethlehem to Vienna where it was distributed amongst various Scout and Guide movements in Europe. The French flame then went on to Paris and travelled by TGV to Le Creusot on Sunday afternoon and on by car to Taizé.

It was a chilly afternoon, but at least it didn’t rain while we waited, outside the church, for about an hour for the flame to arrive. While we were waiting we were able to look at the Nativity scene which has appeared again this year. It is a little less “flat” than last year and the wise men have moved out into the area in front of the church with their own little bit of desert,

just next to the live donkeys. Even the shepherds have their own space, appropriately near the live sheep pen.

Quite a crowd had turned up from all over the Département including as far afield as Autun and Paray le Monial, there were also some scouts from Nevers, but the scouts who had come all the way from Lebanon definitely had the longest journey. Before the flame finally arrived there was a little ceremony outside the church, then we followed the brothers in silence into the church itself to await the flame. A small group of young scouts came into the church with the flame and lit a lamp and two large candles at the front.

The little service that followed was a bit chaotic and lacked the slick organisation of the brothers, who I felt were left a little confused as to what was going on at times, but the scouts were very enthusiastic, which made up for it.

The young scouts with the flame then proceeded through the church lighting candles and lamps of the onlookers. Normally when candles are lit in the church, the congregation are given special Taizé self- extinguishing candles, but this time the vast majority of the candles were brought from home and quite frankly they were a bit dangerous to say the least. Can anyone explain to me why someone would get their baby, who can’t even sit up on its own yet, to hold a lit candle? Not to mention the father who had to hit the side of his toddler’s hair when the toddler set light to it with the candle he was wafting about? And why would you put a lit tea-light on the carpet in the church then walk away, leaving your crawling baby within inches of it? Good job someone else was on the ball to take the tea light away as the baby grabbed the side of the container. Do people lose their common sense on this type of occasion?

That aside, it was a nice idea, a sweet little ceremony and it was a different sort of afternoon out, but I don’t think I’ll risk it next time.

La Tuilerie Website

A New Career?

There is so much to tell about our week in The Netherlands I don’t know where to begin, so I will stick to the highlights. We stayed with Cees’ daughter on her ship in one of the old harbours in Den Bosch, we saw friends and family and we finally visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, something I have been meaning to do for years but never got around to and I must say it was well worth the visit; we did shopping to stock up on essential items impossible to find round here (chillies, sambal, brown beans) and we ate foods we crave when in France (kroketten, Surinaamse broodjes just to name two things); we tried to visit the Nativity Scene in the Saint Jan Church and failed but the highlight, the absolute highlight was something we had not planned at all.

Back in the summer Cluny had an exhibition of pottery in honour of Frère Daniel of Taizé who is 90 this year and those who read my blog will remember the afternoon we made a bowl. Well Cees’ daughter read the blog and she, being a very accomplished, amateur potter herself, decided that we should be shown how to really make a bowl. Saturday morning we were bundled into her car complete with overalls and a huge box of amazing looking tools and off we went through the rain to the pottery studio she goes to, where she had managed to convince them that we should be allowed to use their equipment, even though we were a pair of clay nincompoops.

First of all squeeze all the air out of your lump of clay, ummmm, not so easy as you would think and we haven’t got anywhere near the wheel yet.. I kept kneading it a bit like bread which seemed to be pumping more air in than out. Cees managed quite well but I was a lost cause, so Cees’ daughter did it for me, after all if she had had to wait for me, we would still be there.

Then on to the wheel. Throw your lovely ball of clay into the centre, splat! Wow, mine hit the centre, which anyone who has ever seen me try to throw anything will be amazed at. Then switch the thing on, fortunately it was an electric wheel so no confusion with the feet as well. Try and poke your thumb in the middle, NO, NOT THE SIDE - THE MIDDLE. OK I’ m doing my best, but it keeps wobbling all over the place, it's like trying to get a wiggling cat to swallow a tablet, it kept moving at random and it spat bits out of the side.

Finally I got the hang of it and I must say I am rather proud of my effort (pictured left). Not everyone’s creation was as successful though (someone else's attempt pictured right). I don’t think we will be trying to do this for a living so the local potters can rest easy, but we both had a great time, I can really recommend having a go.

Thanks Ljalja!

La Tuilerie Website

Keep the Home-fires Burning

Chimneys and wood-burning stoves have been the bane of our lives since we first arrived here in France. Our first chimney needed to be lined prior to use, so we were told - I am not so convinced about that now, but that's a separate issue. Anyway we had it lined and that nearly caused our house to be burned down. The builders at the time who were doing the renovations in the stables laughed and said “Well if you must employ cowboys…” OK so it was done by a friend that was not a builder and didn’t know any better and neither did we, but of course the builders knew how it should be done didn't they.

So when it came to installing chimneys for the stoves we were going to buy for the gîtes and the stove we had bought for our new living room, we asked the builders to install proper chimneys and we would have no worries. The stove installers arrived with the stove and they refused to connect it up. They condemned the whole installation. Not only

was it not conform to standards but incorrect materials (designed for low temperature gas flues not wood burning stoves) had been used, insufficient distances between the chimneys and the woodwork in the roof, lack of or insufficient insulation in the chimneys, horizontal chimney sections that could block and well - it was just pain dangerous. Who’s the cowboy now?

The incorrect materials were exchanged and installed at the builder’s expense, but we have had endless leaks in the roof where the flashing was never quite right around those chimneys and even after that we had a chimney fire which made me always very cautious of using the stove in the living room not helped by the fact that the stove made the room and chimney wall so hot we had to open the windows even in the coldest months.

Last year we got someone to remove the two gite chimney tops on the roof – leaks solved and this year we have bitten the bullet and bought a smaller, less powerful stove and had the remaining problems with the chimney sorted out. We are now nice and snug and safe. So a big thank you to our lovely stove installer and his friend, pictured carrying our old stove out of the house for ever.

Moral of this story although a chimney looks like a simple thing, you have to know what you are doing, as they say: “if you play with fire….”

Farewell to a Daughter of Cluny.

Today Cluny, along with hundreds of representatives from around the Socialist world, paid tribute to one of her greatest daughters. Danielle Mitterrand was laid to rest in Cluny cemetery this afternoon. Danielle spent her formative years in Cluny where she actively fought in the Résistance, alongside her parents and it was at her parental home that she met the young François Mitterrand, marrying him a couple of years later.

When we heard that the funeral was going to be in Cluny and that it was amazingly open to the public, we just had to go. Large chunks of town were blocked off to traffic from 6 o’clock last night and so we parked at the Intermarché at the top of town and walked down into the town centre past Mrs Mitterrand’s family home.

The funeral itself was held in the open air in the grounds of the ENSAM with the students forming a guard of honour along the long path from the entry to the back of the cloister. I was surprised at how few politicians came to pay their respects, I had expected Sarko or at the very least his wife to turn up, but Mitterrand was the wrong colour politics I suppose. There was talk that several ex-First Ladies would be there, but sadly not one was to be seen. Martine Aubry and François Holland turned up which was to expected and we managed to get a couple of snaps of them, not the best photos in the world, but when Hollande gets elected president next year I can at least say I have seen him in the flesh.

The service concentrated on Mrs Mitterrand’s achievements with France Libertés an organisation she set up 25 years ago. Her support the Kurds seems to have been her biggest achievements which explained the very large Kurdish presence and the singing of a beautiful Kurdish song written especially for the occasion.

After the coffin was carried back down the long path to the gates of the ENSAM, the hearse took over and made its way up the hill to the cemetery with everyone following on foot. At the cemetery only the invited were allowed in for the short service. Halfway up the hill I stopped and took a photo forwards and backwards of the crowds, I am sure the news will tell us how many walked behind the coffin, I have no idea how many were there, but it was a sea of people as far as the eye could see.

A great send-off for a great lady.

New Red Chairs

We are big fans of Cluny Cinema, they show some really good films. They tend to show the sort of films you can’t see in run of the mill cinemas, films in original language with French sub-titles, which we find much more preferable to films dubbed into French and some old films that no one shows any more.

This summer the cinema came up for a face-lift and lovely new red chairs were installed, so this week when we went to see the 1950s film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, we took along a camera to make some photos and aren’t they really special and worthy of a blog? We arrived especially early to take this photo (5 mins before the film started), so you can see just how popular the film was. Eventually the audience totalled 8 paying viewers and 3 staff, which was a pity as it was rather good !

All regular Cluny cinema goers will know that there was a difference in the chairs in the two sections. The bottom section chairs used to be bigger and a lot more comfortable than the top section chairs. On one occasion when we actually went to a sell-out film (Le Grand Meaulnes) we had to sit in the top section and I can tell you the chairs were horrible. Ever since then we have arrived well in time, just in case. Having said that, our taste in films doesn’t seem to coincide with the rest of the population around here and it has never been necessary since. But following the renovations you don’t have to worry about the top section chairs any more because they are the same as the bottom section, lovely and big, seemingly comfortable and of course red !

We were rather surprised to see the top section cordoned off since the new chairs had been installed, but in never crossed our minds to even question why. But then we received email from Cluny cinema a couple of weeks ago explaining that there was a little (or big?) problem with these chairs and that they would be replaced soon.

So on our visit this week I decided to try and sit on one of the top chairs, to check them out before they disappeared. The seat was lovely and soft and big enough for my bottom, but I agree, the lack of leg room was a little disconcerting. Let’s hope they manage to find a happy medium with the next lot !



La Tuilerie Website

How to Make Your Own Booze

No this is not a DIY blog about building your own still and making puchine at home, I can get my friend Richard to tell you to do that if you like, he had a cracking business going when we were at university, but I digress. No, this blog is about how to make your own booze legally.

First, get your fruit and put it in a plastic barrel and seal it allowing the fruit to ferment for several weeks or months. About this time of year your fruit should be well fermented and ready to turn it into alcohol. But doing that yourself is of course illegal so what do you do, well you call your local travelling still owner of course (have you no imagination?) He will tell you where and when he will be in a village near you and you turn up with your fruit and hey presto you leave with a few gallons of eau de vie.

This tradition stems from the fact that viticulturists have to pay their taxes in alcohol, yes alcohol. They used to have to go down to the local tax office with several gallons of booze and their taxes were paid. Now it is a little simpler, they just give the nearest distillery the required number of tonnes of grapes and he sorts things out with the tax office. But of course this is France and so the travelling distillery still comes to town tax man or no tax man. Up until 1960 everyone who owned a vineyard could get the distiller to make up to 1000 degrees of alcohol free of any excise duty, nowadays there are few people left with this privilege, but the distiller still comes and will distil your fruit and you just have to pay him for the effort and pay the tax on the booze he produces.

This is something we have been trying to see for a long time and finally this year we got wind that our local travelling distiller was in a village near us and so off we went. You could smell the fermenting fruit and eau de vie from more than 100 meters away, so we knew were in the right place even before we saw rather inauspicious the sign. Not quite as glamorous as I had imagined, a ramshackle concoction of vessels and pipework cobbled together on the back of a trailer, parked in a muddy farmyard surrounded by old codgers testing the produce, but it was enormous fun to watch.

At the end of each session in a village, the distiller uses his still to boil up vegetables (cabbage, whole potatoes in their skins, carrots, turnips you name it) along with huge chunks of bacon and various other pig parts to make what is called an “Assiette Alambic” this meal is then enjoyed by the villagers on the last evening of the still’s presence in their village. We ate Bray’s version at Le Grange Finot the other day for lunch with enough meat (on my plate alone) to feed an army, along with soup to start, cheese or dessert, ¼ litre wine and coffee all for the princely sum of 12.50 Euros, now that’s what I call a meal Burgundy style.

Saint Martin – Who was he?

The annual Saint Martin fayre took place today in Cluny. The whole town and half the population of Burgundy seems to turn out for this event judging by the crowds. Of course any Saturday in Cluny starts with the game of finding a parking space and as you can imagine it was even more of a nightmare than usual this morning, to add to the chaos the ENSAM had decided to have an open day as well, so it was difficult to find a square inch free let alone room for our car. But being the good girl I have become (since the parking ticket incident this summer) we decided to pay for a parking space. After waiting a while for a paid space to come free we parked and then went to pay. I put my 20 cent coin in the machine and the machine ate it and refused to give me a ticket. Being an engineer and being very au-fait with this type of delicate electronic equipment, I thumped the side of the machine and it gave me a 10 cent coin in return….. Back to the car and we put our pre-printed “the ticket machine is not working” sticker in the window of the car and went to join the fun anyway.

At the top of town there is an old animal market place which is used once in the year to display and trade in horses and some cattle. There were some beautiful carthorses on display when we got there and we enjoyed ourselves wandering around looking at the animals and sampling the local farmers’ produce on display everywhere. The whole main street is turned into one huge market, that combined with the weekly market in the market square and a “vide grenier” (car boot sale) at the other end of town, meant that Cluny was heaving with people.

Anyway, it got me to wondering who Saint Martin was. These things are usually not too difficult to find out, but it does appear that Martin is quite a popular name amongst the saintly community particularly in the month of November. I ruled out all non-November Saint Martins and I was left with, saint Martins for 3rd, 10th, 11th, 12th, 15th, 18th and 27th November. The most popular of these (ie the ones with Wikipedia articles) were for:

Saint St Martin de Porres 3rd November, patron saint of barbers, mixed-race people and all those seeking interracial harmony (pictured on the left) and


St Martin of Tours 11th patron saint of soldiers (pictured on the right).


So you pays your money and you takes your choice, I haven’t a clue who’s day we were celebrating !

In Memory of Lost Friends

We were invited to a little remembrance service just the other day, when the ashes of a friend, who died a year ago, were to be scattered in Taizé. Our friend Chris passed away last year on 27th October and his wife Linda has made a journey over the last week visiting places they loved, making sure she was in Taizé for the anniversary of his death. After his ashes were scattered (with the brothers’ permission I might add) we had a little ceremony at one of the small shrines. Whilst Linda had said it should be a joyous not a sad occasion, I had my doubts, but it was a very joyous occasion, we were able to remember Chris and think about what he had brought to our lives and then, as I am sure he would have approved of, we went out for a superb lunch accompanied by local wine. Thank you Linda for inviting us and letting us say our last farewell. (BTW the photo has been blatantly stolen from her blog).

Coincidentally this week sees the Jour des Morts – All Souls’ Day (2nd November) which is the day the French remember their family and friends who have passed away, conveniently the day after Toussaint - All Saints Day which is a holiday in France, so that everyone can have the day off to get their chrysanthemums to their family graves in time. It is a lovely tradition as once a year everyone visits the graves of their family and friends giving themselves the time to think about those who have gone before. Graves all over France are decorated with chrysanthemums and other flowers which makes the graveyards a stunning site, not dissimilar to a garden show, at this time of year. Interestingly the tradition of honouring the dead started by St Odilio the abbot of Cluny in 998 and this spread to the rest of the western world yet another demonstration of the influence that the Cluny Abbey had in those days.

La Tuilerie Website

Maintenance

It has been a beautiful autumn, which has allowed us to get some much needed maintenance done around the place. Well I say “us” quite loosely , let’s just say it has allowed some maintenance to be done. The front shutters were taken down more than a year ago by friends who can cope with ladders and have been waiting to be painted and returned to their rightful position and as has previously been blogged, we have had a TV aerial in our kitchen for a year waiting for someone to attach it to the wall or roof outside. That is not to mention the kitchen window shutters which were desperately in need of a lick of paint and a washing line that needed to be put up on the campsite. So how does on get all this done when you are a couple of weak wimps who can’t go further up a ladder than the second rung?

Well this is where children come in very handy. Not having any myself, it was down to Cees to supply the person-power. Cees’ daughter had said she was coming for a week one of the gites at the beginning of October with her partner who is not afraid of heights ! Now what better opportunity was there?

The last weeks in September were busy with painting shutters and organising a scaffold tower and we were all set for the work. And boy did they work. The shutters were up in a flash and then the TV aerial. Zip off to remove the kitchen shutters, felt the need to paint the window frame too while they were up there, shutters painted and replaced.

What more could one ask? Well…… maybe dig a couple of holes on the campsite for a washing line? Great here we go. The clay on the campsite was so hard and dry they had to use a drill to loosen the soil then dig it out using a trowel. Holiday over, no time to mix the concrete and put up the posts, oh well I suppose we ought to do something ourselves !

So a super big thank you to you two and I am glad you managed a couple of days of cycling, walking and sightseeing while you were here as well, next time……..


La Tuilerie Website

Cormatin Randonnée

Records have been broken at the Cormatin Randonnée (organised walk) last Sunday. Not records we wanted to be broken, but broken they were none the less.

I’ll just go back a couple of steps first, to explain what this is all about. The annual walks are organised by the Amicale de Cormatin of which we are both active members and this year it was decided that all the walks would be changed. Now that is one heck of a lot of work and we have been walking the highways and byways around here all of August, different groups of us, to sort out and agree on the four new walks, 7 km, 13 km, 20 km and 30 km. We spent all day Friday and Saturday marking the walks on the road with paint arrows (the way to go) and paint crosses (the way not to go) and we have been hammering in posts of coloured indicators and “watch out there are walkers about” signs at junctions, we have done shopping for food and wine to refresh our walkers and we have set up the feeding posts in suitable locations.

In an average year, the walks usually attract about 300 walkers, but we have been known to have more and it is one of the two big events that swell the coffers to pay for the annual pensioners’ lunch.

Sunday dawned and it was raining, well not raining actually, it was pouring down. Not a good start to a walking day after the hottest and most beautiful few weeks we have ever had in September. Off we set to do the final arrangements and then go to our feeding post at La Moutonnier. At eight o’clock on the dot the first walker arrived to sign up for the walk, he was actually going to run the 30 km and as we were feeding the 20 and 30km walkers, we headed off shortly after him to make sure we got there first. It was a bit of a slow cold start to the day, but at 10 o’clock our first mountain-bikers arrived, then our runner and then we waited. A little later two more mountain-bikers. We were expecting 50 people for the 30 km and 100 for the 20 km and had sandwiches and wine for them all, along with dried fruit, chocolate and cake. We waited and waited and it rained and rained and we got colder and colder. To cut a long story short, before we shut up shop, only 16 people had passed our post. It was a good job the farm cat

came to join us or we would have had nothing to do at all. We returned to base camp, a little despondent, to hear how the other walks had gone. The 13 km was as usual the most popular walk, in a normal year this walk would attract 150 walkers but this year only 23 hardy souls made it and the 5 km (very popular with after-lunch walkers) had the grand total of 0 people.

So this is a record year for the fewest walkers ever in the 33 year history of the club and our coffers have not only not been swollen, then have significantly shrunk. Not a good day in the life of our little club, looks like it will be leftover sandwiches for the pensioners' lunch this year...


La Tuilerie Website

Belonging

One way for us to integrate into our new community has been for us to volunteer to help out at the various events going on around here. This has not been as easy as we thought it would be, to say the least. There are different groups of volunteers involved in each event, each has their own clique and whilst they do need extra help from time to time, they are not screaming out for new regular people to join “their club”. Our attempts at volunteering have been hampered to some extent by our poor French (us misunderstanding what is being said and/or us failing to get our message across) by cultural differences in how things are done and organised in rural France compared to our previous manic Dutch world, but also by a natural suspicion within some in the organisations themselves. For instance when volunteering for one group we were told that we had to be paid-up members for at least a year before we could volunteer, the logic of that escaped me at the time, but the then president said “C’est normal”, well it may be normal in France but it comes across as pretty weird and unfriendly to two foreigners just trying to help. Not living inside the village of Chazelle itself and having no neighbours to