Welcome to the Blog part of the website. This is my attempt to make sense of Kate and I living in France, the lifestyle,the french, my home and animals and anything else that seems amusing to me. Sorry I have a strange sense of humour!! 

The blog is written on a monthly basis with regular  news of my adventures and those of my animals at La Godefrere.  You can now look us up on our new facebook page - La Godefrere.

This website can no longer host my blog so I have changed to using wordpress. This can be accessed through the following link:

Link to my blog

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Browsing Archive: October, 2017

End of the season; New neighbours arrive; the cats have time on their hands; the hens too; we approach Toussaints and hear of a wine shortage!!.

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, October 29, 2017,

For us, this is the end of the gite season as we close up the gite for the winter. Our last booking left on Friday and with the advent of colder weather we won’t take any more bookings. While the gite is very cosy it has no central heating and it can get quite nippy at this time of year. We only have electric convector heaters and these are OK, but to a point and of course it adds to the cost. 

We are happy to let the gite from February to the beginning of November and this year we have had ...

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The cats settle in for a quiet week; we have a double repas weekend; the adventures of Tintin and the student of French

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, October 22, 2017,
It has been a bit of a quiet week with intermittent weather, which has gone from cold and rainy to warm and sunny, with blustery conditions as we catch the end of storm Brian. It is difficult to take seriously a storm called Brian. Monty Python might say: “It’s not a storm, it is just a naughty wind!” It is clearly a very British storm and therefore we continentals can safely ignore it and by the time it reaches us, it will in the spirit of Brexit have faded away.

The cats, however, take...

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The dance of the maize harvest; Woody wakes the starlings; potager poules and pumpkin pie and we are ready for winter!

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, October 15, 2017,
This week we had a respite from the autumn with the tail of hurricane Ophelia bringing bright sunny days and plenty of warmth. Yesterday Mrs. Parish reverted to her shorts and we were able to sit out in the garden until quite late. A glass of wine tastes so much better sat in a sunny garden and of course we also get a beautiful sunset.

This week, our farmer neighbour, Xavier came to cut his maize field which is at the bottom of our lane and we have a view from behind the gite of the field. He ...

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Backgammon from the brink; the delights of rural France; strange things in Super U car park; bizarre shopping and we ignore strays and buy a big bird!

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, October 8, 2017,
I left last week’s blog on a gloomy note with me facing an ignominious defeat in the backgammon tournament with friends from the UK, Alan and Debi. In a three-day round robin tournament, I was ending last Sunday at the bottom of the table, or so it seemed but in a late-night drama I clawed back points with a sensational victory against Alan. His luck seemed to have deserted him. I put this down to a planned visit to the pilgrimage site at nearby Pontmain and a tour round the basilica. This ...

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October arrives and we have a full cave; visitors arrive for the Michelin experience; the hunt arrives in force and we have a biker cat!

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, October 1, 2017,
We have visitors and are therefore busy eating and drinking, so it will be a fairly brief blog this week.

It is the first of October and autumn marches on. The last of the swallows have now departed and flown South along with their following hobbies. They will be back in late March next year. Earlier in the week we had lots of sun but it has now turned to a rainy weekend. 

Here at La Godefrere we are getting ready for the colder weather and the winter. Our wood store is full of wood and we have...

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About Me


Graham Parish Graham Parish is a former UNISON Trade Union official who retired to France with Kate (a previous self employed gardener and now resident gardener here) to start a new life of wine, cheese, french bread and a vegetable garden on a large rural french farm with holiday gite, and associated animals.

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