"Travel notes"

Our local newspaper reported one morning last week that an English plane full of passengers heading for Portugal made an emergency landing at our airport, which is about 5 minutes drive from here. Smoke was detected aboard and they think that it may have been an overheated laptop. MIL told me the other day that Christian would be going to Portugal around now. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence? I can imagine him pointing out his parents house to his friends as they landed.

Dom’s train was delayed by an hour and a half last Thursday as someone had been hit and killed by a train They were only about ten minutes away from the station, but nothing could move. The already too small car park was absolute havoc as the delayed trains all arrived at the same time. It was good to have her safely home.

Which laptop?

Olivier is trying to choose a laptop. He can afford one after working all summer, but he’s agonising over which one. Most of his friends aren’t too helpful because their parents have paid for theirs, so they don’t see the problem from the same perspective. He doesn’t want one that is too big as he will be travelling with it and taking it to lectures, etc. He doesn’t want a really small one either. He wants to have a coupe of games on it just in case. After sales is important to him after taking his ipod back three times before they gave him a new one.

What kind of laptop did you choose? Why? Are you satisfied with it?

Twenty-five years ago

Something I haven’t done in a long, long time is delve into my old diaries. So today I’ve gone back in my time machine 25 years and arrived at Tuesday 14th August. I was still living in England then. Nothing much really happened, work and Indian meal with friend. I had chicken korma. At the bottom of the page it says “Started to eat meat again”. That was the end of my year long vegetarian experiment. Funnily enough, Dom did something similar a couple of years ago.

Dark and gloomy and a glimmer of hope.

As the roads of France are blocked with cars either coming or going on holiday it is a very dark and dull Sunday morning. Dom went to the mountains with her boyfriend mid-week. They went on the night train which reminded me one of my favourite Alfred Hitchcock films; North by Northwest. I wonder if she managed to sleep?

Talking of sleep, or lack of it, none of us slept very well last night. Rob got up at five to start work on the postcards. He sent off an email for confirmation of an auction we’re interested in and our ‘expert’ replied almost straight away (someone else who had difficulty sleeping perhaps?) Olivier got in at 5 too and when I got up myself just before 7 I could hear his TV so I went in to turn it off and he was awake and watching the news. He’s got to get up at 10.30 to got to work – I can see we’re in for a struggle this morning.

On Friday evening I got a message from Google every time I tried to visit a blogspot blog using Firefox. It told me that my computer was sending out multiple requests. When I tried using AOL (or whatever it is called nowadays) I had no problems. Yesterday morning I managed to pick up three Trojan horses – there seem to be a lot of problems around at the moment.

Finally on a feel good note, I’m linking to a YouTube video as I don’t like to put up screens in every post. A dog rescuing another dog. You might have seen it already. Am I loony for saying it restores your faith in human nature when you see something nice like this happening.?

For Nancyrowina and Tennyson’s bicentenary

This is a little thank you for Nancyrowina who lives on the Isle of Wight and, if I remember rightly, has a video of my cousin playing the saw. Nancy has been helping approving blogs on BlogExplosion and is really involved. If you’re reading this because of BlogExplosion, Nancy is one of the reasons why.

Paul Armfield is my Cousin; I last saw him when he was about 14 and a punk. It was a long time ago, but we keep in touch. He’s set the poem “Sweet and Low” to music, it’s lovely.
Jo! I’ve written to him this evening asking if he knows your cousin Emily (who also sings). If he does it means that we’re sort of related!



SWEET and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep

The Great Gatsby across the miles

It’s a little while since Dom told me this one so the details might not be exact:

Before Christmas Dom borrowed a copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ in English from the library at Poitiers. As she was busy she had to hand it back unfinished, so she left a bookmark in at the page where she had read to and returned the book. When she went back to re-borrow the book it was out, which she thought a bit of a coincidence considering the book was in English. She kept a look out for the book and surprise, surprise, she found it again with her bookmark still in place and a little note. The note was from an American student who could not resist trying to find out who would be reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ in a French town. They corresponded for a little while – probably about books and went their separate ways.

For everyone that had a father

You must go and see Henry's tribute to his dad. As always he writes and illustrates his ideas beautifully.

Comings and Goings

The last month has flown by and we’re still waiting for some real summer. We took Dom to the station this afternoon. The platform was very crowded. The train to Poitiers is also the Paris train so lots of holiday makers were going home.

The Russian wedding in Avignon wasn’t as good as expected, just the French civil ceremony. There were Muscovites and Parisians. Everyone in France knows that there are the French and then there are the Parisians, who are not to be mistaken as French. The same probably goes for people from Moscow. They slept in a tent and it was very, very cold. Dom did get to see the famous bridge, you have to pay to go on it.

I’ve done all of my blood tests and collected pee for 24 hours. The results are good except for my thyroid which is out of normal range. I’ll go and see the Doctor next week. We raised the thyroid medicine when my eyebrows dropped out, but I think that it was due to stress. They are growing back, but It will probably take a decade for them to come back completely.

I’m slowly starting to prepare for Olivier’s moving at the beginning of September. I think that he probably thinks he can get by with a bottle opener/corkscrew, though he did say he would come shopping with me – to choose the correct bottle opener/corkscrew no doubt.