More house-contemplation.
The weather in the North Sea is still rubbish and Mark has had time on his hands, so we have occupied it in contemplation of the house-moving project.
It has been very handy, actually, because he has been able to peruse the offerings provided by French immobiliers on the mighty Internet, place them on maps, and discuss them at length, without needing to concern himself with a single other thing. His food and laundry are still all nobly provided for him by our mighty oil and gas overlords, even though he is doing nothing whatsoever, and he has had not a concern in the world other than to scowl thoughtfully and ponder our house-related ambitions.
I have got lots of other concerns, although mostly I have been able to stick the telephone in the top pocket of my dungarees and carry on talking whilst I got on with them. The modern world is truly a wonderful place. It does not seem so long since the telephone was an object placed in the hall of a home, and you sat there next to the front door and shivered whilst you talked on it, occasionally interrupted by roars of complaint from one’s parents about the cost of the activity.
We shared our telephone line with next door. If you picked up the phone, sometimes you could hear them talking on it.
It was not considered polite to interrupt. No matter how urgent your business, it was courteous to put the phone down quietly and wait until they had finished. This was sometimes quite a while, our neighbour was a garrulous old lady.
As well as endlessly talking, we have occupied ourselves with our usual daily activities. We went to the farm yesterday, and Oliver split up some logs whilst I filled the boot of the car. He has not done much log-splitting, being only twenty. I have done a very, very great deal of it in my lifetime, and I was dying to interfere, pointing out the best place to make the next cut, and so on, but of course it would have been terrifically irritating, so I refrained, at least mostly. Nothing is more annoying than being extraordinarily helpful and then being given a stream of tiresome instructions by some old boot who can hardly lift the axe any more, especially when one is faced with a particularly recalcitrant, knotty log.
I only almost kept quiet, I am afraid.
After that I had to clean my taxi out. A boot filled with sawdusty wet logs meant that the muddy dogs had to ride in the front with Oliver and we dumped the axe on the back seat. The resulting mess was not somewhere you might have wanted to sit down in your very best Saturday night party frock.
Obviously when all was suitably unloaded and stacked, I rushed straight back to the computer to share in Mark’s discoveries. We have got a shortlist of seven houses so far. I am sorry to say that we have reluctantly abandoned the idea of the beautiful one, the one whose enormously desirable picture I shared on these pages last week, because it is simply too far south.
I love the idea of living in the south of France, where the sun is warm and benevolent, and where practically every house has got a swimming pool, but it is too far for the children to visit easily. There are perfectly functional airports close by, but when air travel malfunctions, it does so fairly spectacularly, usually leaving hundreds of very miserable people camping on the floor of Heathrow airport and wondering if they are desperate enough to eat their own luggage yet.
We are going to look at the chosen seven next week, sailing from Hull next Monday – not tomorrow, obviously, since Mark isn’t home yet – and I will keep you updated, along with illustrations, about our progress. In the meantime I have got a whole week in which I will have to try and think about something else, because it is driving me slowly potty.
I keep waking up and finding myself wondering frantically about piscines and greniers and étangs.
I wish it would hurry up.
