Head Rambles

Grandad September 25th, 2008

We decided to go for a drive, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

There is a place called Carlux which intrigued me, partly because of its location [in a valley] and partly because it sounded like a car wash.  We decided to head there.

It is a lovely little village, and in an area where most of the villages are lovely, that is something.

I stopped the car to take a couple of photographs and herself started muttering about coffee.  She had spied a place just up from where the car was parked.

I was dispatched to see if it was, in fact the kind of place that sold coffee, and it wasn’t.  That didn’t make a squat of difference to herself, and she decided to explore for herself.

We walked up to it and found it was a barn that had been converted into a shop selling local produce, from cakes and wine to carved stone and paintings.  I pottered, she bought.

At the back of the barn was a small restaurant and Herself demanded lunch.  I wasn’t in the least bit hungry, but I wasn’t going to start a fight that early in the day.

One thing I have to explain about the Peregord region of France – if you don’t like omelettes or duck, you are fucked.  If you are a duck then you are thrice fucked, as they don’t seem to eat anything else.

We looked at the menu and Herself decided on omelette and I decided on duck [confit de canard.  What else?].  We sat ourselves out on a little terrace which literally overhung the valley.  We ordered and waited.

When the meals arrived, I can honestly say I was at a loss for words.  I am not a ‘wow’ person, but this was a ‘wow’ moment.

I have never seen such a colourful or appetising plate in my life.

The menu had blandly stated “Confit de canard avec crepes et pomme de terre Sarladaise“.  This was a bit like describing Constable’s Haywain as “a bit of a painting”.

Along with the duck, which was beautifully cooked and very tender, I got the promised mushrooms and Sarlat potatoes which are potatoes thinly sliced, deep fat fried and then sprinkled with crushed garlic.  I also got a load of salad which was beautifully dressed along with a lot of fruit, like melon, grapes and raspberries which were garnished in a delicious syrup.  The whole thing was topped off by a flower!

It was possibly the nicest meal I have ever had, bar none.  I ate every scrap, but Herself stopped me eating the duck bones and the flower.

It was truly an experience.  Even the building itself was fantastic.

Of course, the more mercenary amongst you will be muttering about the cost.

€12.

Beat that!

• Holidays
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Grandad September 24th, 2008

I have nothing against insects and creepy crawlies.

Except of course when they bug me.

For some reason, I was plagued with flies for the first few days in France.  It was nothing to do with personal hygiene because I had had a shower the previous month.

I armed myself with a can of weapons-grade flyspray and sat here creating havoc in the fly population.

I didn’t give a shit if their mammys and daddys love them.

I didn’t give a shit if they had a family of five hundred little darlings waiting for them to come home from a day’s work.

If they came near me, they got a blast of biological and chemical warfare.

They made my job easy, because they are so fucking stupid.

When you swat a wasp, it buggers off somewhere else.  When you kick a dog, it sulks off and won’t talk to you again.  When you swat at a fly, it immediately returns to the scene of the crime.  This is what I hate the most about them.  If one tickles your arm, you swat at it and it immediately returns to the same spot.

In the theatre of war, however, this is an advantage.  I spray ‘em, and they piss off.  But they come straight back to where the cloud of gas still lingers.

Their only weapon of defence was reproduction.  The little fuckers [and I use the adjective deliberately]  were treating my knees as some kind of bordello and insisted on copulating there.  This was one of my main areas of attack.  My spray can was an artificial form of coitus interruptus.

They sent an small group of twenty.  They were waving white flags and pleading for amnesty.

I sprayed the bastards.

Fuck the Geneva Convention.

Then of course there were the spiders.

I have nothing against spiders, but unfortunately Herself has.  The house was inundated with those spindly ones – the ones that look like a small pea standing on eight bent hairs.

I could have gone around killing them, but that would have been cruel.  Or I could have put them outside one by one, but they appeared faster than I could put them out.  So – and I am using the Nuremberg Defence here – I sucked them up with a vacuum cleaner.  I told myself that they had a fighting chance as it was one of those new-fangled Dyson lookalikes.

As I went around sucking them off the walls and ceilings, I wondered what kind of conversation was going on in the dust bag? …………

‘JEEEZUS!!  FUCK!!!  WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED THERE!!!!’

‘Howya Bill.  I dunno what happened, but it just happened to me too.’

‘Oh! Hi, Fred.  I was having a quiet morning doze on the ceiling when this huge noisy wind thing came at me, and the next thing I know – I’m in here.’

‘Most of the gang are in here.  Poor old Jason over there hasn’t a leg to stand on.  They all got sucked off in the wind.  LOOK OUT!  Here comes the Murphy family.  Hi John!  Hi Mavis!’

‘What is this place?  It’s kinda dusty in here?’

‘I noticed that.  It’s kind of crowded too.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘I don’t know.  I’m going back to sleep.’

Two or three days later, I decided to empty the vacuum cleaner.  I took the dust container off and had a look inside.

Do you remember the film ‘Alien’?

Do you remember John Hurt lying there with his chest heaving with live things inside?

It was like that.

The container had a good fill of dust, and it was pulsating.  It was quite hypnotic to watch.  To be on the safe side, I brought it down the garden and stuck my hand into the dust.

Underneath the top layer, all my little victims were having a party.  Dozens of them.

I let them go and they all scurried away.

At least they will have a good story for the grandchildren.

• Holidays
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Grandad September 23rd, 2008

For the third time in my life, I’m trying to get used to a new mobile phone.

Yes.  I have a new one, thanks to the Blog Post of the Month Award.

No.  I didn’t win it.  Our K8 did.

Herself has been using my original and very first mobile phone.  It is still in perfect working order apart from the battery being worn out, so it needs recharging all the time.  Not that that makes any difference, because she never answers the damn thing anyway.

She has had her eye on my phone for a while.  Mine is also quite old, but it has a colour screen and hers was only monochrome.  You know what women are like about colour.

Then, our K8 won the award, and part of her prize was a new phone.  With only the minimum or persuasion [that involved nitric acid and an ants’ nest] she agreed to give me her old one, as she didn’t need it any more.

It’s a Nokia 5310 that does all sorts of weird and wonderful things like play music, games, take photographs and browse the Interweb.  Hidden amongst all the gizmos is a telephone, which is what I wanted.  It is very thin, which is another thing I wanted.

It comes with all sorts of cables and things, so I connected it to my PC.  It asked if I wanted to upgrade my software, as my old one was out of date.  Foolishly, I gave it the nod.  It updated all right, but it wiped all my phone numbers.  So if you don’t hear from me, you now know why.

One thing about it that really pisses me off though – somehow [and I have no idea how it happened], it seems to have filled up with business people.  Since I started using it, they won’t stop ringing me, and asking me to do boring things, like work.

I wish they’d get out of it.  Why can’t they live in their own phones?  Why can’t they leave me alone?

I like the new phone.

It would be a shame to have to dump it.

• Rambles , work
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Grandad September 22nd, 2008

Our second day in France was just about as uneventful as our first.

After a breakfast of paracetemol we hit the road south.  It was a cloudless day, and the heat was shimmering.  Herself was a red as a beetroot and complaining non stop about the heat.  I stuck her on the roof of the car for a while, and that cooled her down.

We decided to stop of for coffee in a rather attractive little town.  I don’t remember its name but it was probably St. Germaine-sur-Somethingorother.  Every town in France seems to be called St. Germaine-sur-Somethingorother.

Most of the shops were shut, as it was the height of a Saturday afternoon, but we managed to find a wee coffee shop.  Actually it was more of a snack bar than a coffee shop but it had two things going for it – it had nice tables set out in front, and it was open.

They gave us lovely coffees.  That is one thing I’ll say for the French – they know about coffee.

The owner was a bit brusque so I casually dropped the fact that I was Irish into the conversation.  I regretted that.  Apparently he hates the British but thinks the sun shines out of an Irishman’s arse.  After much handshaking, hugs and kisses [on the cheek, I hasten to add], he told us how much he loved the Irish.  All of this was in French, but I actually understood him very well, and he actually understood me.

He told us how he insists on buying only Irish beef, because the English stuff is shite, and full of foot and mouth, and blue tongue and BSE.  For some reason, Herself got the wrong end of the stick here.  She thought he was saying that he had married an Irish wife.  I didn’t bother correcting her as it would just have led to confusion.

He raved on about Irish beef and Herself made comments about how nice Irish wives are.  The two of them struck up great conversation about the merits of Irish beef/wives.  Until, that is, he decided to bring Herself into the kitchen.  He had one of those great cylinders of beef on a skewer for cutting kebabs off.  “My Irish beef,” he announced proudly.  Herself screamed and passed out cold.

The poor Frenchman was a bit taken aback.  I resorted to International Sign Language and the good old standby – point a finder at the temple and slowly rotate it.  That satisfied him, so we revived Herself, had more hugs and handshakes and kisses and went on our way.

I wish Herself would learn French.

• Holidays
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Grandad September 21st, 2008

When I was away, all I heard from home was complaints about the weather.

While I was basking in thirty degree sunshine, you lot were bitching about the cold and the rain.

I expected to arrive back in Ireland and to be diverted all over the place because of flooding.  I was concerned that I mightn’t be able to get home.  I was worried that there mightn’t be a home to get to.

And what do I find?

Dry roads.

No floods in sight.

Blue skies.

Sunshine.

Yiz are all a pack of moaners, whingers and begrudgers,

and liars.

• Rambles
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