We are going tomorrow, and I have occupied the last two days in flapping about the house in a state of complete tizziness.
I have packed and re-packed, unpacked and packed again.
Fortunately there is no weight limit on the ferry, and so I have packed practically every single item of clothing that we own, apart from obvious things like ball gowns and dinner jackets. This has led me to the irritating discovery that I ought really to purchase new underwear.
This always seems like a shocking waste of money, because nobody will ever see it except for Mark and the Accident and Emergency nurses if ever I get run over, and the latter will just cut it all off with the scissors anyway.
The former would not be in the smallest bit tempted to try his luck at cutting it off, not least because he has paid for it.
Underwear is very jolly expensive, I can tell you.
Today I am wearing my Emergency Underwear, which is quite surprisingly comfortable, because all of the rest of it has been folded up neatly around clean handkerchiefs and pairs of socks, and lovingly packed away in the case.
The packing was almost a disaster, actually.
I had sorted our clothes out into piles, a full set for both of us for every day, and laid them out tidily on our bed, each, in an inspired moment, neatly laid out on top of its own laundry bag.
I got distracted then, and buzzed off to do something else, returning ten minutes later with Mark in tow only to discover that Guffy had jumped on the bed to investigate, and had promptly had the most revolting squirty accident.
It was not a happy discovery.
Fortunately Mark was around to help with the clearing up, and even more fortunately, most of our clothes had escaped.
There was some hasty laundry.
Poor Guffy. I am sorry to say that her Little Problem has reasserted itself lately, possibly because, in her misfortunate state of gravidity she has developed a desperate craving for yoghurt.
I have been indulging this, possibly recklessly, and it has resulted in misadventure.
She is not getting any more, no matter how hopefully she mews when I am having my porridge.
Poor Guffy. She is enormous now. It will not be very long before we have a very lot of cats.
I hope she can wait until we get home.
We have been planning the trip with frowning thoughtfulness, carefully piecing together travelling times to fit with estate agent appointments, it turns out that French estate agents are no more helpful than anybody else in France, which has been quietly satisfactory, nothing seems to have changed very much. Still, I had quite thought that everything was all organised and arranged, and then this afternoon we threw a spanner in our own smoothly-functioning cogs by finding another house that we would like to look at as well.
Mark suddenly had the inspired idea that instead of selling our own house we could just buy something really cheap, and then we could spend the next five years rebuilding it before we retired.
Our preference is always for doing things ourselves, and in fact I have spent the last few days grumbling that we are going to be paying thousands of Euros just to pull out somebody else’s ideas of renovation, after which probably we will start all over again.
Obviously the only houses that are really cheap are ones that nobody wants. There is almost always a very good reason for this, usually that they are rubbish.
They are falling down, and far too neglected and unloved to be of any use to anybody. They are, in short, White Elephants.
We looked on the mighty Internet to see what might be there, and of course we found one.
Actually we found several. Crumbling ruins are not in short supply in France. We have bought one before.
All the same, there was one, very special-looking one.
We have become very excited about this one.
It looks as though the French Resistance had been hiding out there, digging up all of the floors and shooting through the windows, before leaving in a hurry just before it exploded.
We do not mind this. It has four acres of land, some woods and a lake. It is not very far from an airport and from the cross-channel ferries.
We are going to see if we can go to see it whilst we are there.
We might just come home with a wonderfully snowy-white elephant.
