All aboard the Transbordeur

Last Friday Rob and I went for a day out and spent some of the time visiting the transbordeur de Martrou (Transporter Bridge) near Rochefort sur Mer. The bridge was built in 1900 by Ferdinand Arnodin, who built several in his time. The bridge at Rochefort is the only one left working in France, The rest were destroyed in WW2. Passengers and vehicles were pulled across on a platform, driven by steam. I was amazed at how quiet and smooth the trip was, although no longer powered in the same way.




Since I’ve been selling vintage postcards I’ve learnt to appreciate bridges. Look at the beautiful patterns of the girders. Mr Arnodin, who didn’t learn to read and write until he was nine because he used to play truant, loved solving problems.

The bridge was in use until 1967 and also appeared in the film 'The young Girls of Rochefort' (new link) released the same year (If you watch till the end you'll see how the bridge works). Now after being restored and made safe since the 1990s, tourists can cross back and forth, visit a very interesting exhibition about the bridge and explore the surrounding countryside.

We didn't see them go by!

Around Christmas 2009, Rob and I were having a cup of coffee...



...when Google Earth passed by

Impromptu music

Dom and J-M came to stay last weekend. We had good weather – yes, there was about one weekend’s worth. On Saturday evening we sat outside and had a barbeque. A little while before we were to start a neighbour knocked on the door and informed me that they were having some friends from Quebec. He explained that it might be a little noisy later on. I thanked him and told him that we could tolerate a little noise as he had been so polite.

We were just having a little drink while the barbeque was warming up, when I heard someone paying a banjo. A bass guitar joined in next, followed by an acoustic guitar and later some drums. While we were eating we were treated to a jam session and some blues! It was brilliant. They can make noise like that as often as they like. Once the music had stopped there was very little noise. We heard cars leaving a little after midnight. What nice neighbours we have!

I phoned Dom earlier, she was just finishing the writing of her first paper. By now she’s on holiday for two weeks. They are moving. They’ve found a new flat/apartment at the top of the road where Olivier has just moved out of. It sounds really lovely, they‘ll have an extra room that will act as an office. I hope that we’ll be able to visit them soon.

Am I the only one that thinks that time seems to have speeded up recently?

Phnd md qtuhgick!

The ‘good’ start to last week continued: On Tuesday, the Renault 5 needed to go to the garage for a service. I don’t know the way there so Rob said ‘Follow me’. It worked really well until I had to wait for 10 cars to go by before changing roads. We hadn’t discussed where I should head for if he went too far ahead. No signposts to the part of town where the garage is. I pulled in it call Rob, but it didn’t help me much as I didn’t know where I was. He advised me to head into town and go to the garage from there (I know that route).

So I was in the middle of town in heavy traffic slowing down and the car stalled. I kept calm, turned everything off, put on the hazard lights and checked that the car was out of gear ready to start up again. The car refused to start. With a lot of impatient drivers whizzing round I started to panic. A nice young man offered to push me onto the kerb, which just happened to be an empty parking space. I was so grateful. He then ran off to help a young woman who had fallen over (‘Tomorrow’s News’ or a Guardian Angel ?). With shaking hands I sent Rob a text message, the title of this post is what I wrote. He realized something was wrong and phoned me back straight away from the garage. The garage manager has been looking after us for 25 years now, so he listened over the phone while I tried to start the car again.

They both came to rescue me and our garage man replaced the spark plugs and took the car off to service. When we collected it the following day he presented us with the bill – no charge for coming out to fetch the car.

It does pay to build a good relationship with your local garage, even if you don’t know where it is. Unfortunately he’ll be retiring at the end of the year.

Aïe !

…Is what French people exclaim when they hurt themselves. It’s pronounced ‘eye!’. Yesterday when I was cleaning the shower, I splashed my eye with cleaning product. Fortunately I was in the right place to be able to wash it out quickly. It didn’t hurt for long but it was really red. During the evening it started to hurt a little as I was watching TV and not moving my eyes around much.

Before I went to bed I had to open a new bottle of the eye drops which I use every day because of allergies. Being the good person that I am I decided to reread the leaflet that comes with them in case there was mention of not using the drops if you got something in your eye like cleaning products. Hydrochloric acid is noted as one of the ingredients!

This morning my eye is fine thanks – just a touch of conjunctivitis in the other eye…

Did you know that if you take medicines for long periods you should check the leaflet enclosed from time to time as they are updated every now and then?

Out of Africa and Out of Africa revisited

I was watching a news report on TV about the droughts in some parts of Africa this year. An elderly lady was being interviewed and she was saying that she had never seen such bad conditions all her life. They asked her how old she was. She was the same age as ME! It’s easy for us to appear youthful physically; we have such easy lives…

Out Of Africa was on TV last night. When it first came out I dragged Rob to the cinema to see it. He fell asleep and my French wasn’t good enough to understand the subtleties of the plot. Although, I did enjoy the shots of the magnificent scenery. At last I understand why she wanted the land. I don’t think we see enough of Meryl Streep these days

Fireworks

Part of last night's display. See yesterday's post

Fireworks

Follow your star

Years ago Rob gave English lessons to a young man. I don’t remember his name. The young man was passionate about pyrotechnics. Rob remembers the young man's grandmother telling him to take his studies more seriously and forget about fireworks, get a real job and so on…

To celebrate July 14th in France, he provided the main firework display for Paris, by the Eiffel Tower and two weeks ago, the fireworks to celebrate the marriage of Prince Albert of Monaco to Princess Charlene.

You don’t always have to listen to your grandmother

In which I sit and talk

I finally got round to making a video of myself. I’m sorry about the quality of the image and the sound. Any tips on how to improve it will be gratefully accepted.