A ferry trip at each end of the week with a funeral in between has been the story of my week in which I have been back in Britain for my father in law’s funeral which has also given me a chance to catch up with old friends. What I thought would be a quiet and sombre week has proved to be exciting and interesting.

It all started on Monday morning at 5am when my sleep was interrupted by the shrill alarm from the clock radio. Fortunately I had set the alarm as I was deeply asleep and was shocke...

Well it has been an exciting and action packed week which has ended with sadness as I have just heard that my father in law died this morning. I considered whether I should cancel this week’s blog as a mark of respect but actually he would not have wanted that. He had a great sense of humour and so I shall dedicate this week’s blog to Gordon Edwards, always known as granddad and a man who was deeply loved by all his family and the one’s like me associated by marriage. He was the perfect...

I look out the window and its blowing a gale and raining. It seems to have been raining all week although we bizarrely had a sunny day yesterday when we sat out on our patio drinking a cup of tea and enjoying the afternoon sun. Apart from that it has been raining almost all week and Mrs. Parish and I and the cats are all going a bit stir crazy.

To start the week the cats were glad to get their house back after the visit of Tommo. They insisted that they also get back their proper place in th...

So we moved from the weirdness of a French New Year’s Eve to the craziness that is Tommo the three-legged Keeshond, who came to stay for a week and caused great disruption to the Parish household. Tommo is the dog of my son Ian and his fiancée Emma. He is a Keeshond which is a sort of Spitz like dog which originates from Holland. (Apparently they were used as guard dogs on barges). Tommo has only three legs having lost one due to an accident with a bicycle. Not one he was riding but which ...

I finished last week’s blog with the prospect of New Year’s Eve approaching and its promise of good food and weird television. Well, we were not disappointed. We visited our local butcher, Monsieur Rebuffe in Ambrieres, our local town. The nice thing about French butchers is that often you can get pre prepared meals just ready for you to cook or reheat at home. However for special nights you do need to order in advance. Judging by the number of packages waiting for collection lots of peop...

Christmas week has been and gone. We ate too much and drank too much (well at least I did). A time which should have meant peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind turned out to be a bit more incident packed than we would have wanted. Mind you that could be the case most weeks at La Godefrere. My retirement retreat to the quiet and solitude of rural France has not quite lived up to expectations.

This last week started badly with a cake crisis (une crise de gateau). Sounds even more dramatic ...

A brief blog update this week as Christmas festivities descend upon La Godefrere. Hopefully will be back to the full report next week.

So it is now 22^ndDecember and officially winter started yesterday. Coincidentally the cold weather has disappeared and we now have rain, lots of it. So the cruel frost of last week has gone and I have managed to complete my poor man gathering winter fuel routine. All the wood is safely gathered in and stored away either in the wood shed or around the grounds, n...

Brightly shone the moon that night,
though the frost was cruel,
when a poor man came in sight,
gathering winter fuel.

As we move closer to Christmas we of course have to get out our CD of cheesy Christmas music including lots of Carols. Mrs. Parish has set up her version of Santa’s workshop in her sewing garret and is disappearing for hours at a time “making Christmas”. Actually most of her work has been on designing and making Christmas cards and wrapping presents. A book has just arrived ...

'Fear not, till Birnam wood

Do come to Dunsinane:' and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane.

It has been a bit like a scene from Macbeth this week as I seem to have spent hours in the garden moving brush wood down to our big field for it to be burnt. The brush wood is all the small branches and leaves that came off the trees cut down or pruned. This meant that all around the garden there were great piles of brushwood. Mrs. Parish likes a good bonfire so decided that we should burn the brushwood i...

It is cider making time and as you might assume this is of great importance to the French. Emile and Yvette came round last week for the final lot of our cider apples. We had some late fruiting trees and so collected them up. Mrs. Parish also went round to help Emile pick up his apples and spent a happy afternoon on her knees! I was unable to help as I was allocated to important Assistant Tree Surgeon duties. More of which later.

Once the apples had been collected we were invited round to watc...

After discussing the ever changing world of computers last week we return to the quiet certainty of French rural life and consider a subject that changes very little – wood. They say that wood warms you three times. Once when cutting it from a tree, once when moving it and finally when it is burned on your log fire. This is a gross under estimate based upon my experience, reinforced this week as our tree surgeon arrived to carry out various tree works in the orchard.

Paul, the tree man, is ...

It has been a busy week and started off last Monday with a bank holiday in France. The French very wisely have lots of bank holidays. Last Monday was the 11^th November (Armistice Day) and rightly commemorated in France with a public holiday. Bank holidays in France are a bit different from England where public holidays are either a reason for a party or to go shopping. In France all the shops are closed and there don’t seem many parties around here so instead everyone goes visiting. Usually...

The beginning of the week was one of mixed feelings. On the one hand I was basking in the great backgammon victory but on the other sad to see my friends return to Britain after a great weekend. Alan has asked me to point out for the sake of accuracy and his self esteem that he did win on both the pool table and darts board. But as these were not official ranking tournaments we can safely move on without making too much of a fuss. Needless to say the official Backgammon tournament trophy is s...

Well, lots to report this week which ended spectacularly on Sunday night with the final leg of the Anglo-French Backgammon championship here at La Godefrere. As regular readers will know my good friend Anglo Al and I regularly compete at Backgammon each time Alan comes over. On the last visit I won a great victory and as a result the trophy rests proudly on a shelf in the kitchen. I have tried to insert a picture into the blog of the trophy. And failed! The trophy is a small pottery figure of...

The internet is a wonderful thing and a source of much useful and useless information. Following Mrs. Parish’s great success in the Mole Wars I have been looking at alternatives to the minefield approach. Over the past week our mole patrols have reported no further incursions into the La Godefrere exclusion zone. There are some rather large mole hills at the bottom of our big field and it may be a matter of time before we have a red alert situation.

So I typed “removal of moles” into Goo...

Mrs. Parish has returned to Blighty for her well earned R&R and victory tour. Medals have been mentioned for gallantry. The moles are in full retreat and the daily mole patrol has reported no sightings of moles in the past week. Admittedly, our orchard looks a bit like the Somme at the moment with lots of craters where Mrs.Parish has dug up turf to lay out the minefields. Still our strategy of fortress La Godefrere and strict enforcement of the mole exclusion zone has paid dividends. Mrs. Par...

It has been a busy week here at La Godefrere and the weather has stayed fine for October but it has got a bit colder. Time for the winter duvet, Mrs. Parish decides. The apples and pears continue to fall off the trees at a remarkable rate and a daily task for me is to go around and pick them up. A mind bogglingly boring and tedious task as well as backbreaking as of course they have fallen to the ground and have to be picked up. Not for much longer as plans are afoot to deal with this.

Mrs. Pa...

I am sitting out in the garden overlooking the orchard on a beautiful evening with the sun still shining and after a lovely day it is still warm at 6-45 (7-45 English time). I am sat here with a glass of kir and some snacks and my trusty computer writing up the week’s events reflecting on an interesting week at La Godefrere.

You will want an update from the Front I suspect. Well after last week’s success, we have continued to hit the moles hard. In a brilliant flanking manoeuvre Mrs. Paris...

Great excitement here at La Godefrere as we bag our first mole in the great fight back. We have noticed all week an increasing number of mole hills around the orchard and it soon became clear that strategy number 1 was failing. Strategy number 1 is of course my major offensive armed with tractor and songbook. Despite much revving of engines and some truly awful singing we found that the moles must have improved their defence mechanisms and now be wearing ear defenders or maybe they had just g...

In fact the past 2 weeks have been very wet and gloomy. In typical fashion Mrs. Parish was complaining we did not have enough rain and the garden was dying. Now of course we have had too much rain and Mrs. Parish has been cooped up inside which is not good. A great deal of pacing up and down like a caged tiger and grumbling. Fortunately there has been sewing to complete so Mrs. Parish has taken herself off to the sewing garret to make some cushions for Ian and Emma.

The bad weather has led to...

After last week’s somewhat esoteric blog, we are back to normal (or what passes for normal here). Moggie has excelled himself this week by catching a mole. He did have one a couple of weeks ago but we were suspicious, that he may have just found it. This week no doubts as he proudly brought back the mole from the allotment and proceeded to play with it. I am told that moles taste revolting and therefore cats won’t eat them. I’m not sure who tries out mole tasting to find this out. Moggi...

As you might tell from this week’s heading I have had too much time to think. This is dangerous and leads to all sorts of strange ideas. There I was on Wednesday sat in the garden looking at the orchard when an apple fell to the ground. For me this led to a bout of swearing and cursing the fruit trees that create fallen apples and pears that I then have to go around and pick up, causing extreme back ache and regular battles to fight off the wasps. Sir Isaac Newton in the same situation, 300...

As reported last week my daughter Jo and her partner Nicky were here for a week and they were keen to take Mrs. Parish and me on in La Godefrere games. After last week’s blog we were honours even and this week we managed to cement our class on the pool table, continued to be absolute rubbish at darts and then tragedy struck on the Petanque terrain. I say terrain with some exaggeration as we have to play Petanque on the grass in the orchard. This has several disadvantages. As we have no rece...

Sorry the blog is a couple of days late this week but we have visitors who need lots of feeding and entertaining. My daughter Jo and her partner Nicky have come over for a week to chill out, even though it’s very hot. They have already had a week walking the Cornish coastal path so need a bit of rest. This however includes challenging the La Godefrere team to games of Petanque, darts and pool. So far La Godefrere (myself and Mrs. Parish) have maintained our 100% home record at Petanque. I t...

I am sat outside on the patio in glorious evening sun, sipping a rather large glass of Emile’s calvados. I am in a somewhat reflective mood gazing out over our orchard which is full of apples and pears. I am contemplating a bit of a philosophical contradiction that would have given Marx a testing time for his dialectic approach. The contradiction that I am considering is how can it be that something as delicious as a glass of Calvados requires such a tortuous process to produce it.

Starting ...

Just when I think that things have finally achieved some degree of normality, the obscure and bizarre seem to occur. Last night Mrs. Parish persuaded me that it would be a good idea to lie out on our garden chairs in the pitch dark at midnight and stare at the sky. Apparently if we do this we might see some percies flying across the night sky. Mrs. Parish explains slowly once again that the thing we are trying to see is a perseid meteor shower which appears as shooting stars in the sky and th...

Here I am sat in our marvellous and large garden, enjoying the afternoon sun. On my lap curled up, is a small grey cat and so quite naturally my thoughts turn to world domination. I stroke the cat and begin to narrow the eyes and mutter in a strange but probably German accent, “so Mr. Bond”. I am awoken from my reverie by Mrs. Parish (in practical mode once again) who reminds me that Blofeld had an evil looking all white cat and our Minou hardly comes into that category, and never mind do...

Over the past two weeks it has been immensely hot, to the extent that in the middle of the day it has been too hot to be outdoors. This has resulted in a number of thunder storms and heavy rain. The heat wave has been called La Grande Chaleur in the French media, meaning the great heat and warnings have been issued about the dangers of excessive temperatures. On Monday evening the skies darkened as storm clouds gathered and we heard the rumble of thunder coming our way. One of the things we h...

For all you followers of French culture, you will recognise the line in the title as being from the song Sur la pont D’Avignon and it can be translated as “we all dance there in a ring”. This is rather an obscure way of introducing this week’s blog as we have not been to Avignon but we have been dancing, almost in a ring. We have discovered so far that the French are great people to live amongst and in rural France at least, the most friendly and generous people. Yesterday evening Mrs...

Bon fete, today, the 14^th July is Bastille Day in France. A national holiday to celebrate the storming of the Bastille in Paris during the French revolution. Mrs. Parish and I joined the French in celebrating by going to a local town for a mass car boot sale. The French seem to like nothing more than a boot sale although in France it is called a ”vide grenier” which literally means empty attic. Judging by the amazing array of stuff for sale, there are a lot of empty attics locally. Mrs. P...

Lots to catch up with after 2 weeks and a trip back to England. Sadly I have to report the sad demise of Henny Penny our aged chicken. We inherited her when we bought the house as she was the last of the chickens owned by Dave and Julie. As regular readers of the blog will know Henny was certainly a character. She was clearly top of the pecking order, keeping the cats at bay with strategic pecks. She also had the ability to train her sights on any piece of cake or sandwich that came within he...

What a week it has been. There we were expecting another quiet week in rural France when a van load of Aussies descend upon us. Strewth! Actually they were 4 adults and a 14 year old who had booked into the gite for 4 nights and we didn’t know until they phoned to let us know their arrival time that they were from Australia. It turns out that they were on a 5 week tour of France and arrived with us from Paris. We were half expecting tinnies everywhere and constant barbies. Enough stereotype...

A quiet but interesting week in which we were very surprised at the sudden return, to Loic’s field next to the gite, of 21 cows seemingly returned from the dead. You will recall that the cows went off to the abattoir a couple of months ago and the field was left for the grass to grow for hay. Or so we thought. Now as far as we can tell the bullocks are the same ones that were here before. They look the same and have the same numbers. Either they have returned from the dead as zombie cows or...

After a quiet week the chaos that seems to surround our lives in France has returned with a vengeance. The sun arrived at long last and we have had a gorgeously sunny week. Now that May has passed I could safely don my shorts again. There was of course a risk that the reflection might cause temporary blindness to the surrounding populace, but it was a risk I was prepared to take.

One thing I have discovered in France is that the French discuss and moan about the weather just as much as in Brit...

It was always going to be a quiet week after the departure of the red ramblers on Tuesday. After our epic weekend Mrs. Parish and I returned to the more mundane everyday tasks of living in France. But first we had to get rid of the vast volume of waste and recycling after the weekend revels. The waste was not too much of a problem. Her in rural France we don’t have collections of waste, so we have to take our rubbish to communal bins at the end of some of the lanes around us. It does mean...

The blog is late this week and it is entirely due to the visit of our good friends from the red ramblers. We have spent the weekend walking and eating and stayed up late chatting and drinking Armagnac, whisky and Emile’s calvados. So I have had no time to write up the blog until after they left this morning. The red ramblers are a walking group set up from friends in the Labour party in Weymouth. When we lived in England we went walking around beautiful Dorset once a month and always had a ...

I have decided that it is time to start my missionary work and try to teach the French how to play cricket. It has clearly been one of Britain’s greatest triumphs to take cricket around the world and to create teams that end up beating us! Although I see today that we beat New Zealand in the first test match. I explained last week that Mrs. Parish had been tasked to return from her visit to England with a cricket set so we could start playing cricket and encourage the French that cricket is...

A quieter week and no bad thing. I managed to survive until Mrs. Parish returned from her visit to England for a school reunion. By all accounts she had a great time with 40 years worth of catching up with her old friends. Apparently after 40 years they all look exactly the same!! Mrs. Parish arrived back at midnight on Tuesday via the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen. It is then a 2 hour drive to our house. That of course had the advantage that I had all day on Tuesday to clean up the house and...

It’s hard to know where to start this week as there has been much excitement here at La Godefrere. What more? I hear you say, surely more excitement cannot be possible in one small place. Well this is magical France where there is excitement and wonder every day. (That may be a slight exaggeration). To start I must make you just a little jealous. I am sat in our garden on a gorgeous sunny afternoon. I have a glass of white wine (a rather nice Macon) and I have been watching from my chair th...

I am sorry to say that the Blog is 24 hours late this week. I have to blame an older boy who is a bad influence. We had guests staying with us this week and my old friend Sandy Clark does bring out the worst (or it could be best) as far as drinking is concerned. So on Sunday we were out to lunch with a very nice Saumur Champigny and after aperitifs we had with our dinner in the evening a couple of bottles of Cahors followed of course with several glasses of Emile’s calvados. So a late night...

As I reported last week my good friend Alan and his son Dan duly arrived for the weekend and as well as intense battles on the backgammon board there has been rather a lot of drinking and talking. One result is that the blog has had to be delayed until Monday morning. This has the advantage of coming at it with a clear head and being able to give a full report as the Anglo French rivalry reaches fever pitch. So far in the first two legs of the Backgammon Trophy games honours are even. The fir...

It’s been an exciting and interesting week. Our first paying guests duly arrived on Monday to be greeted with a cold and wet day and a power cut which meant we had no heating! Not good and the weather did not really get any better until today when we finally could announce the arrival of Spring with a full on sunny day. The temperature reached 20 this afternoon and we could finally decant some of the several layers of clothes we have been wearing. We even sat out until 9pm in the sun drinki...

We have had a week of poorly cats and at times La Godefrere has resembled Animal Hospital and hence our expectation that at any time Rolf Harris could have come bouncing in. I have of course been doing my bit with some excellent Rolf impressions and the occasional rendition of “Tie me kangaroo down” interspersed with “Two little boys”. Until Mrs Parish threatened divorce proceedings, she can put up with Inspector Clouseau but draws the line at Rolf Harris, I can see her point!

I mentio...

At last it seems that spring has arrived at La Godefrere. The sun has been shining although it is still cold. This morning Mrs. Parish was in her sewing garret. It has all the features necessary for a garret. It is at the top of the house, it is used as a work room and it is has no heating (albeit Mrs Parish cheats a bit by using a hot air fan. She was in the garret sewing dresses for the lovely Matilda, who is the daughter of a friend back in England. She is 3 (and a half) or probably nearly...

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more.”                

The visitor turned out to be Henny Penny, our chicken tapping on the patio door with her beak. As I have mentioned in the past Henny has the run...

It’s been a bit of a strange week here at La Godefrere. All started well with the birthday on Monday and I had a very nice day with lots of cards and presents. The most unusual was the card from Mrs Parish which illustrates very well what an odd bunch the French are. The card had French birthday greetings but also had pictures of a game of Boules (also known as petanque). The game is sort of like bowls in England except the French throw them on to gravel pitch rather that genteelly rolling ...

Mrs. Parish’s time at the front has been a success. Although she did not capture any moles it seems that her vigorous counter thrust has stopped the moles in their tracks and there has been little sign of mole activity this week. This could of course be down to our major ally Peter who seems to have rediscovered his mole catching skills and this week caught a mole. The first of the current campaigning season but his fifth overall. An impressive record. Mind you it could equally be the effec...

I thought as I sat down to write up the blog that it had been a quiet week with not much happening but surprisingly when I look back it has been another interesting and exciting week.

I started out by deciding it was time to get the tractor mower out as the grass had grown quite long. Since Christmas we have had nothing but rain and it would have been impossible to cut the grass. As we had a dry spell it was time to get the tractor out from its winter quarters at the back of the lean to shed n...

We have now been in France for 6 months and bits of it are beginning to make some sort of sense. I am getting to grips with the language thanks to the weekly classes with Jacqui our French teacher (an English woman who teaches French for the avoidance of doubt). When we came to France I could manage a few essential French words, enough to buy a baguette or order a meal and bottle of wine. However if then asked a question, panic would set in. Constructing a sentence was a real challenge. At ou...

In last week’s blog I introduced Monsieur Propre, the French cleaning fluid which cleans everything. I mentioned the picture of Mr. P on the bottle and his skinhead appearance but with an earring. Was he hard or gay or both! Well I can now reveal in an exclusive report the latest. We discovered an advert in our local weekly publicity magazines for Monsieur Propre which also gave his Spanish name which is Don Limpio!! Well with a name like that he is obviously not hard! In Italy he is Maestr...

The last week has all been about the rain and how much more can possibly come down. Today has been truly miserable and it rained all day. In fact it has been much like this all week. The cats and Mrs. Parish are going stir crazy and driving me to drink, which is no bad thing I suppose.

The kittens have invented a new sport of dangerous domestic duties. Because of the rain they have not been out much which means they have excess energy and race around the house at the same time when the fr...

After the esoteric nature of last week’s blog, I promise no more quantum physics. Life returned to the more mundane with occasional bursts of excitement.

This week I have spent most of my time in the stable with a paint brush or roller in hand. There is over 50 square metres of ceiling and more wall space to cover so I decided to start by painting the new toilet, created in the corner of the stable. Things did not start too well as I was busy painting and of course had removed the door h...

I suggested in the last blog that this looked a quieter week and as I was stuck inside the house with a blizzard blowing outside my thoughts turned to Quantum Mechanics as I am sure yours did also.

I once listened to a programme on BBC 4 in which a scientist spent half an hour explaining all about quantum mechanics. It was absolutely enthralling although I barely understood a word of it! Anyway this week in an idle moment I was thinking of the programme and how quantum mechanics has affected ...

This week winter arrived at La Godefrere, along with my son Ian, his fiancée Emma and two friends Sarah and Dave. They came and stayed in the gite along with Tommo, the three legged bundle of furry dog. They arrived on Monday and this time my son managed to get into France without bother from the customs. The last time they were convinced he was a drug smuggler! We had all the heaters we have on full blast to warm up the gite and to keep them warm while they were here.

We gave them our li...

This week has been quite quiet as we recover from Noel and the fin d’annee. The weather has been fairly typical of this area in January, constant rain or drizzle and low cloud. It’s still dark when we get up and doesn’t seem to get much lighter all day. So this means that there is not much we can do outside and we are waiting for the builders to finish the work on the stable so we can get going on finishing and decorating. It now looks really good and there is just some plastering to co...

Firstly, the latest on the hunt for Trigger. He was seen before Christmas the otherside of the village and we have now had other sightings from around the same time. We have been to the area and looked around but sadly no sign of Trigger. We have leafleted houses but no luck so far. We will keep searching.

On a lighter note I reported in the last blog that Mrs Parish and I were intending to spend a quiet New Year’s Eve with a nice meal. We did indeed have a splendid meal. Mrs Parish prod...

New year at La Godefrere was given a significant boost yesterday. We had a phone call from a nice lady called Kat who reckoned she had seen our lost cat Trigger. She lives on the other side of Couesmes Vauce about a mile across fields and a road from us. She had seen a tabby cat hunting in the field next to her house and from time to time sleeping in an outhouse behind where she lives. It was not until she went into our local bar “Le Chat Noir” and saw one of the wanted posters we had put...

If you are reading the blog you will have realised that the end of the world did not happen last week. The French take these things very seriously and last Tuesday when all our “publicite” arrived from all the local supermarkets and other shops we had with it a leaflet from the local undertaker offering his services. I’m not quite sure how he would have coped had the world ended as predicted but he clearly hoped to have a few orders with cash up front.

My favourite “Tat” shop Gifi ...

TS Eliot says each cat should have three names. We are having enough trouble finding one name each for the kittens. We have decided on Minou for the little female cat because she is so small and makes a definite minou noise. The male cat is currently being called Moggie but I’m not sure it is quite right. No doubt we shall be inspired but if not our two daughters are coming to stay at Christmas and I suspect they will be able to come up with the right name.

The kittens are settling in an...

Just when we thought that we were settling into some sort of routine and normality, madness has descended upon us. We were just sitting around and thinking about poor old Trigger who still has not returned and whether we should find another cat as a friend for Archie. How this idea for finding a cat was transformed into let’s get these two kittens who have just been rescued and the family who found them are desperate to rehome them. Those who know Mrs Parish will be aware that she is quite ...

One man and his Tractor heading into the setting sun. An iconic image, bringing to mind images of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. At least in my  mind on a Sunday afternoon in Mayenne. Maybe it was the fact that the sun was setting and as I rode out to meet the advancing tide of grass, there was something of the wild west about it. Just me, my tractor and the vast wilderness that is my garden and fields. Maybe it was the fact that as soon as i started up the tractor, the cattle in the ...