I don't know what it is about top floor flats, but they only ever seem to attract the most marginal of tenants. OK, they're invariably the smallest, least well-maintained and often bizarrely cut, but it really shouldn't mean that whoever lives up there needs to express his/her individuality by being criminally anti-social. Our new neighbours who live in the studio above our bedrooms have about as much civic conscience as drugged woodlice and this evening it's the turn of the bloke who lives in the one above our sitting room. I'll be fair: we've heard neither sight nor sound of him for weeks, but tonight he seems to be celebrating something and the 300-year-old floorboards are creaking under the weight of the merrymaking. He's normally incredibly discreet but he seems to be spending his capital right now...
The odd ones out in the house are us. We're more or less the only owner-occupiers and are surrounded by single students, Syrian somethings, Brazilian dancers (I kid you not) and an Irish chef. We're also the only ones who ever worry about having a bit of peace and quiet after 8pm. The Brazilian girls have a couple of children but don't appear to be concerned about how much sleep their offspring get. In a normal world we'd be living out in the country in a four-bedroom house, spending money on a time-share on the ring road, but we decided to do things differently. I'm still not sure we made the right choice, regardless of how good the schools are, how expensive the neighbourhood is or how close to my work it's situated. There will always be a downside, and neighbourly noise is the one grabbing all the headlines in our little world at the moment.
The birthday party season has started. Fingernail 1 was invited this afternoon and her little diary is filling up fast. Her birthday is just around the corner, too, so somehow we've got to squeeze a few mini friends into our bijou shoe box for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon before next month. Fingernail 2 feels a bit put out by all of Big Sis's activities but takes it all pretty stoically. Until she starts screaming with jealousy, that is.
Time for bed. Sunday morning in France is one of life's joys: all the important shops are open (wine merchants, newsagents, cafés) and I invariably bump into a coffee-worthy acquaintance at the market. It's a welcome semi-colon in the weekend, especially for those who haven't been able to get out of the city. The Fingernails enjoy their glass of mint syrup, too, so everyone's taken care of.
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Monday, 8 September 2008
And hell, what a barbeque it was! Gorgeous house, set in 2.5 hectares of manicured garden, spotless swimming pool, sunny weather and more good food than you could throw a Mr. Creosote at. Wine, beer and good company on tap. Now that's more like it. The Fingernails spent the whole afternoon in the pool and zonked out as soon as their little heads hit the pillow. Which was just as well as the Syrians in the badly-insulated flat upstairs are now five in number, which gives them 5 square metres each. Did I mention there's a ten-month-old baby there, too? If we didn't see any elephants in the Safari Park we can picture a herd of them upstairs: them simply walking around above our bedroom makes the walls shake. I don't know if there's any legal recourse to getting the landlady to at least provide them with a carpet, but we really have to do something before we go crazy by sleep deprivation. Mrs. Fingers realises that she's only going to make herself ill if she carries on fretting about it so we're viewing this situation as a Magic Flute-like series of tests. Whether we fare as well as Tamino and Pamina is still open, though.
Spending time in the country, surrounded by so much space cemented our mid-term decision to move out of the centre. Our delightful little flat will at least remain stable due to its location and virtually all the areas we're looking at are gently falling in price. The ideal time should come in about a couple of years, when we should be able to grab a five-bedroom villa with a pool, seven acres of garden, a live-in nanny and a courtesy helicopter for 45p.
We can dream, can't we? Providing we can get to sleep in the first place, that is.
Spending time in the country, surrounded by so much space cemented our mid-term decision to move out of the centre. Our delightful little flat will at least remain stable due to its location and virtually all the areas we're looking at are gently falling in price. The ideal time should come in about a couple of years, when we should be able to grab a five-bedroom villa with a pool, seven acres of garden, a live-in nanny and a courtesy helicopter for 45p.
We can dream, can't we? Providing we can get to sleep in the first place, that is.
Saturday, 6 September 2008
Now I don't want to get all alarmist on you (on me?), but something's afoot with the quality of the food we're eating. I was born and brought up on English school dinners in the sixties and seventies which basically means I could eat a rancid shoe with melted telephone sauce on top and not feel remotely queasy. In all my now forty-six years of existence I've never had a problem with anything I've eaten, until now. I mentioned a bout of food poisoning from an otherwise charming restaurant in Carcassonne a few months ago and yesterday night, having eaten an innocuous-looking industrial chocolate pudding I was back on the big white telephone to remind God he was still important to me.
OK, two pukes in five months isn't so bad, you might think. It is. When you have no previous history in way over half your natural life expectancy, two food chunders before autumn is harrowing. I don't have facts and figures at my disposal of how poor farmers are being forced to feed dead mice to their chickens or how cows are now ordering Agent Orange aperitifs at the bar, but somewhere we're all being taken for fools. Corn crops are now being channelled towards the production of the Emperor's New Bio Fuels and we're being made to pay through the nose for the sordid muck which is left over. It all makes you want to believe Alan Partridge's famous rant about farmers making pigs smoke.
Other than that, today was a great success. Mrs. Fingers and I set off with the Fingernails a bit later than anticipated to visit a local safari park. It was teeming with rain, but when you've hired a car expressly for this purpose you're not going to let a bit of precipitation put you off. Our Berlingo sat alone in the car park, most of the animals had barricaded themselves into their shelters and the only one who showed a bit of initiative was a zebra who licked our car. The lion was having none of it, though, as were the monkeys, the hippo, the panthers, the jaguars or the kangaroos. The sealion show was cancelled. A couple of Siberian tigers squared up to one another out of sheer boredom but soon gave it up as a bad job. The café was closed and the Fingernails were starving. By the time we got out, all the restaurants in the surrounding towns had finished serving, thus torpedoing our little dream of - gasp! - a lunch out, so we ended up driving home and having a plate of rice to calm our still delicate tummies. Top that if you can.
Tomorrow we're invited to a barbeque...
OK, two pukes in five months isn't so bad, you might think. It is. When you have no previous history in way over half your natural life expectancy, two food chunders before autumn is harrowing. I don't have facts and figures at my disposal of how poor farmers are being forced to feed dead mice to their chickens or how cows are now ordering Agent Orange aperitifs at the bar, but somewhere we're all being taken for fools. Corn crops are now being channelled towards the production of the Emperor's New Bio Fuels and we're being made to pay through the nose for the sordid muck which is left over. It all makes you want to believe Alan Partridge's famous rant about farmers making pigs smoke.
Other than that, today was a great success. Mrs. Fingers and I set off with the Fingernails a bit later than anticipated to visit a local safari park. It was teeming with rain, but when you've hired a car expressly for this purpose you're not going to let a bit of precipitation put you off. Our Berlingo sat alone in the car park, most of the animals had barricaded themselves into their shelters and the only one who showed a bit of initiative was a zebra who licked our car. The lion was having none of it, though, as were the monkeys, the hippo, the panthers, the jaguars or the kangaroos. The sealion show was cancelled. A couple of Siberian tigers squared up to one another out of sheer boredom but soon gave it up as a bad job. The café was closed and the Fingernails were starving. By the time we got out, all the restaurants in the surrounding towns had finished serving, thus torpedoing our little dream of - gasp! - a lunch out, so we ended up driving home and having a plate of rice to calm our still delicate tummies. Top that if you can.
Tomorrow we're invited to a barbeque...
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Three months is a long time to go without submitting a post on a blog, but I've decided to space my thoughts out rather than post daily with such observations as "I've noticed I've peed on my shoe". The fact that I just have is neither here nor there.
We all spent ten weeks in Germany and Austria, me working at an international music festival most of the time and the four of us hiving off down to Austria from time to time to stay with friends who own a luxury hotel in the Alps. I gave a recital there with a baritone from the Vienna State Opera and, in a flash, a new concert series was born: future editions will feature high-quality singers from the festival with an evening in July and one in August. Dates will depend on our availability. Come along!
The cleanliness and ease of life in those two countries hits you when you return to urban France. We live in a beautiful city, but how difficult can it be to just keep it a little cleaner? Evidently impossible. Our bin has been stolen, meaning the other residents merely pile up their rubbish bags by the front door and hope the dustman - sorry, 'refuse officer' - will take them. Mrs. Fingers has to go to the police tomorrow morning to ask for another one. No doubt she'll have to spend about an hour with a highly motivated guardian of the peace to get through the associated paperwork, a wonderful use of police time.,
Without wanting to go into all the reasons why basic, day-to-day existence is more manageable in German-speaking countries I have to say that one's mindset over there, having realised one is not going to receive a single bill or a single call from marketing companies during the entire stay, is totally different. Add the fact that we were living one minute from both the forest and my workplace and had a wonderfully large garden and you'll understand the peace which descends on you as soon as you set foot in the place. If we were there permanently, life would be different (I spent 11 years in Germany yet still never considered it home) but for an extended summer stay it's absolutely divine. It's not high on many people's list of preferred holiday destinations, but more fool them: you come back relaxed, rested and at peace with more than just your own existence.
A couple of days after hitting the mediterranean tarmac I was off to play a private concert at the house of some wealthy retired Brits and immediately rediscovered the peace and tranquility we'd got so used to in Bavaria. It really is possible, here; you just have to move out of town and pitch your tent next to a field of sunflowers or some such. It would be lovely to be able to do that, but commuting six days a week would take the gloss off the view, providing it was ever light enough to see it at the end of a working day. Wouldn't see the Fingernails as much, either, and that pretty much swings it.
Night all. Back to work.
We all spent ten weeks in Germany and Austria, me working at an international music festival most of the time and the four of us hiving off down to Austria from time to time to stay with friends who own a luxury hotel in the Alps. I gave a recital there with a baritone from the Vienna State Opera and, in a flash, a new concert series was born: future editions will feature high-quality singers from the festival with an evening in July and one in August. Dates will depend on our availability. Come along!
The cleanliness and ease of life in those two countries hits you when you return to urban France. We live in a beautiful city, but how difficult can it be to just keep it a little cleaner? Evidently impossible. Our bin has been stolen, meaning the other residents merely pile up their rubbish bags by the front door and hope the dustman - sorry, 'refuse officer' - will take them. Mrs. Fingers has to go to the police tomorrow morning to ask for another one. No doubt she'll have to spend about an hour with a highly motivated guardian of the peace to get through the associated paperwork, a wonderful use of police time.,
Without wanting to go into all the reasons why basic, day-to-day existence is more manageable in German-speaking countries I have to say that one's mindset over there, having realised one is not going to receive a single bill or a single call from marketing companies during the entire stay, is totally different. Add the fact that we were living one minute from both the forest and my workplace and had a wonderfully large garden and you'll understand the peace which descends on you as soon as you set foot in the place. If we were there permanently, life would be different (I spent 11 years in Germany yet still never considered it home) but for an extended summer stay it's absolutely divine. It's not high on many people's list of preferred holiday destinations, but more fool them: you come back relaxed, rested and at peace with more than just your own existence.
A couple of days after hitting the mediterranean tarmac I was off to play a private concert at the house of some wealthy retired Brits and immediately rediscovered the peace and tranquility we'd got so used to in Bavaria. It really is possible, here; you just have to move out of town and pitch your tent next to a field of sunflowers or some such. It would be lovely to be able to do that, but commuting six days a week would take the gloss off the view, providing it was ever light enough to see it at the end of a working day. Wouldn't see the Fingernails as much, either, and that pretty much swings it.
Night all. Back to work.
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