June 2008 First Week

Well it's that time of the year again and we are back in our little area of paradise. We spent 6 days socialising in the UK with our friends, other than the continuous gluttony we had a great time. Of course I hit Marks and Spencers and to my delight I only had to double the pound instead of tripling it thanks to the strong Australian dollar, needless to say I had to make a couple of visits!!!

We arrived at Capet via a supermarket and garden centre (explain later in blog), the garden was looking 100% improved to our arrival last year, except for some reason every flower bed sported metre high purple poppies (today I explained to the gardener that even though he thought they were very pretty they are in fact weeds). I have removed them swiftly before they started to seed and take over, the grass had been cut in a fashion but due to the incessant rain over the last few weeks it has been difficult to cut.

The other little problem is that the electric gates are not working, we had visions of climbing over the gate with our suit cases but luckily one side would open. I tried to ring the company that fitted them, all in my best abbreviated French and the man at the end of the telephone was not at all forthcoming and kept prattling on about electrique, I said I know they are electric but not working, in absolute desperation we rang our English friend who then rang them and apparently I had rang the wrong number and had been speaking the man who fitted our television!!!!! Bugger. Thanks to Julie the electric gate people are coming out on Monday, apparently due to the number of electric storms in the this part of France there are a large number of people with gates that do not open.

We have got our first visitors the day after we arrived, Dei and Rick are our goods friends from Australia who are travelling from Portugal through to Amsterdam and dropped in to spend four or five days with us. Today we went to our local Auberge for the plats de jour 11.50 euro 5 course lunch (including house wine and coffee!!) and when we went through the door, all our friends were there so we felt like royalty going from table to table chatting, its great to be back. (I hasten to add that they were all English so the chatting was easy).

We have been busy in the garden planting out our veggies, tomatoes, courgettes (zucchinis for the Brits) and lettuces, we figure that due to the fact we are here for four months we should reap the benefits of the home grown produce and of course we love pottering around in the garden. I am sure everyone is sitting on tenderhooks wanting to know how the moles are fairing, well in fact there seems to be only about dozen moles holes, but enough to keep Terry occupied with planning his attack with the explosives. He was hoping to have a competition with a local friend but Richard seems to have eradicated his mole problem at the moment.

Well this is the first instalment and hoping first of many now we have got our internet on at the house and if anyone wants to call the phone number is: 0011335040557012 from Australia and from the UK it is 00338442323945 as from tomorrow Saturday 14^th June.