For an extra tenner you can book a priority thing for the car.

When we arrived in Rosslare, we were given a wee card to hang off the mirror, and then were stuck into a special queue before boarding.  When they started loading the cars, our lane was first on so I was well into my first pint while they were still loading cars.

When we arrived in Roscoff, once again, we were amongst the first cars off.  Brilliant.

The fun happened on the return journey though.

We drove up to the reception kiosk in Cherbourg and Yer Wan gave us the card to hand from the mirror and told me to switch on the hazard lights [I had to search for the switch.  I don’t think I have ever used them before].  We then drove onto the quay and were put into a short lane beside the normal huge lines of cars.  The bugger in front of us had spotted the hazard lights trick, and he too was put into our lane.  I noticed though that he had no card on his mirror.  A chancer?  Heh!

When they started the loading, once again we were first on, but not Chancer in front!  The bastard was pulled to one side and then sent back to the tail end of the longest queue.  Prat!

The one place where there is always a huge holdup is in Rosslare where the customs are a pain in the hole.  The last time we came through there, it took over an hour.  This time was different.  We were the third car off the ferry and so had the pick of the customs slots.  I drove and wound down the window.  “Where are ye from?” asks the customs bloke.  “Wickla” says I.  He laughed.  Only a Wicklow man will call it Wickla.  “Go on outa that” says he.

Thirty seconds through customs.

Sweet.

And they never even checked the luggage.

Just as well…….

Holiday over.

No thanks to that fucker Roger though.

If you look at a map of France and try to plot a route from Anger to Caen, there are two obvious routes.  The East route is via the motorway which is very fast and very bloody boring.  To the West there is an alternate route using the Route Nationales, which are really motorways in all but name.  Now which route do you think Roger chose?

Wrong.

He chose neither.

For some reason which I cannot fathom he decided to compromise and bring us on a route between the two.

I presume this was his warped sense of humour but in fact it backfired on him as we had a very pleasant trip meandering along back roads and passing through very beautiful villages.  We stopped off in one of the towns for a very nice cuppa coffee [or three], and eventually arrived in Caen.

I thought that would be the end of it.

I was wrong.

Without thinking I let Roger do the navigation after we arrived in Ireland.  Fucking hell, but he did it again.   I have no idea what got into him, but before long we were driving down roads that had grass growing down the middle.  Other roads obviously hadn’t been repaired in the last fifty years. I constantly had visions of us arriving at a farm gate with no further progress.  He did eventually bring us back to the N11 somewhere around Gorey, after showing us some parts of Ireland I never knew existed.

We arrived in the end, but I’m still not quite sure how. 

I’m going to have to have severe words with Roger before the next trip.

If there is a next trip.

Apparently the hotel here does have Interweb.

Can’t use my mail though as the whole fucking hotel chain has been blacklisted.

Too bollixed to write anything…

Talk amongst yourselves.

Packing day.

Today we pack and try to clean the house. The latter is always a problem, and I always have trouble getting Herself to do it properly.

Tomorrow [the worst day] we load the car and hit the road. We have an overnight stop in Caen, and while I know they have the Interweb there, I have a problem with adapters – I don’t have any. So you probably won’t hear from me then.

Sunday we mooch around Cherbourg and then board the ferry. The ferry has Interweb but you have to pay through the nose for it. You definitely won’t hear from me then. We should be home sometime around Monday afternoon, God and bribable custom’s officers willing. I’ll probably be too knackered to use the Interweb so you may not hear from me then.

There are a few things I am looking forward to about going home.

The main thing is greeting Sandy.

Then there is my armchair with its personalised arse shaped indent which makes afternoon naps so cozy.

Playing tennis with Sandy.

I’m also looking forward to just being in my own place where I don’t have to worry about nagging Herself to keep it tidy.

I suppose I have to include the family?

Playing chess with Sandy.

An Interweb connection that doesn’t suffer from PMT.

Having a bit of craic down the pub.

Decent tea bags.

Did I mention Sandy?

What will I miss?

The warmth. It’s building up to midday here and the sun is cracking the rocks. Beautiful. It’s going to be a real scorcher. Again.

Driving. I’ll miss the excellent road system and the almost complete lack of traffic. We were in a fairly big town yesterday and didn’t get stuck in traffic at all, simply because there wasn’t any.

The water pressure. I swear I could fill an Olympic swimming pool in five minutes flat from the pressure here.

The boulangeries. Fuck but this lot know how to bake bread and delicious wee savories.

To be honest, the only reason we are starting back tomorrow is because I have the ferry booked and paid for.

I suppose there is always next year?

JFK? World Trade Centre? Man on the Moon? I can live with them.

But there are times when I really wonder if there is a grain of truth.

Take for example my Interweb connection. For a long time it was abysmally slow. Then the fucking wireless thingy disappeared [I'm still not sure how]. Having gotten that back yesterday, I discovered today that there is no power. OK, it’s back now, but that’s probably a mistake. Add those factors together and you realise that someone is going to one hell of a lot of trouble to keep me quiet.

I would blame the CIA, but frankly they couldn’t wipe their arses without a roadmap. Could it be MI5? Nah! They have no reason.

There is only one organisation that I can think of that hates negative press, that has the power to bully any country and that is stupid enough to come up with the idea.

The EU is trying to silence me again.

*sigh*

I suppose that’s news to you lot as you never noticed I was gone in the first place.

*sigh*

It’s a long story, but basically our host and landlord decided to move house. Of course he went and took the Interweb with him.

The bugger!

I had to track him down and kidnap his missus.

Big mistake.

He said that he was happy to keep the Interweb, and wished me luck with the missus.

Bugger!

In fairness to him, he took pity on me and moved back to his old house.

Fucking Interweb still doesn’t work properly. I have to sit outside the front door or it keeps breaking.

Life’s a bugger sometimes.

The reason I am mentioning it again is that dozens [OK, a couple] of you have written to me via email, rather than via the site.  I haven’t replied for the simple reason that I can’t.  Well, I can but it’s a bit of a nightmare.

The connection here is a bit of a joke.  I can connect but only if I am sitting within a couple of feet of the front door.  Anywhere else and the connection breaks.  If I try to put any stress on the connection, such as trying to watch a video the fucking thing disconnects.  On top of that it doesn’t treat all sites as equals.  Some sites I can get into quite quickly but others cause problems.  This site for instance takes an age to load.  If I try to add a comment, it can take up to five minutes.  Google occasionally ceases to exist and I get a message asking me if I have correctly typed ‘google.com’!

Mail, for some strange reason just doesn’t work.  I can receive mail all right but sending is just not on.  No fucking way.  It just whines that it can’t find the server, so I haven’t been able to reply to the dozens [OK, couple] of emails that I have received.  Sorry about that.

Even if I do manage to keep the connection alive [basically by not using it] it is fucking SLOW.  And I really mean SLOW.  I tried measuring it and I swear the results are wrong.  They couldn’t be that fast?

It took me fifteen minutes just to get that image inserted!

So if any of you are waiting for a reply from me, I’m afraid it just ain’t gonna happen.

At least you now know why.

Unfortunately Herself has an inbuilt mis-guidence system that always aims her to the wrong part of the shop.  If she goes in to buy food, she ends up buying clothes.  If she gos in to buy a pair of knickers, she’ll come out with a leg of lamb.  She also has the uncanny knack of becoming invisible in a supermarket.  To this day, I have never worked out how she does that.  I have been known to walk the entire length of a supermarket ten times, knowing she is in there somewhere yet still failing to find her.  Weird.

There is a supermarket in a town not far from here.  As French supermarkets go, it isn’t that big but you could still probably every single supermarket in Ireland into it, and there would still be spare floor space.  We have had to go there a couple of times now, and each time I have had to accompany Herself into the dreaded Halls of Consumerism.

Not only is Herself’s mis-navigation a problem but she is a divil for the impulse buy too.  This is another valid reason to accompany her as she might otherwise buy one of the many cars on display in the main hall. Or a new roof for the house.  Or a holiday in the Seychelles.  Irish supermarkets sometimes have “sweet-free” checkouts.  The French should have “car-free” counterparts.

There were a couple of things that I noticed about this supermarket.

For a start, the car park is so fucking big, it actually features on my SatNav.  Yup.  Roger gives me directions on how to navigate it, which is probably as well, as I’d never find my way out otherwise.  Even Google Earth marks its lanes as roads, though it stops short at naming them.

In Irish supermarkets you occasionally see kids pushing a broom around the place trying to keep the floor clean.  Here in France there is a slight difference.  Not for them the lowly foot soldier of the cleaning brigade.  Oh no.  They drive around the place in mini-fucking-lorries.  A couple of times I was nearly run down by one of these machines as the bloke drove it up and down the aisles.

One afternoons shopping there and I feel like I have just run a fucking marathon.  You need hiking boots, the place is so big.  It’s not a bad idea to bring a tent too, in case you find yourself too far from the entrance and have to spend a night there.

There are a couple of things I am looking forward to back in Ireland.

I miss Sandy.

I miss my comfy armchair with its personalised arse shaped dent in the cushion.

And I really miss Interweb shopping.

There is nothing better than sitting outside the cafe in the warm sun and watching the world go by. The best ones are the ones in the cities as there is usually a lot going on, and I can just sit, relax and watch the young girls people going about their business in that peculiar unhurried way they have. Come to think of it, I don’t think I have ever seen a French person run.

Cafes and bars are everywhere. You’ll pass them in villages and most streets in the towns have them.

So can someone please explain something?

How come I seem to have picked the one spot in France where the nearest outdoor cafe is about ten miles away?

That is fucking annoying.

As the fates would have it, I was in a writing mood, and when I’m in a real writing mood I don’t waste my time here.  Oh no.  Yesterday I made a ferocious dent in The Buke.  Remember The Buke?  The one I have been writing for years and never getting anywhere?  I made a bold decision yesterday and deleted the fucking thing.  Started again from scratch, I did and it is trotting along very happily.

Until today arrived.

Today was one of those days I dream about during the long Winter.  An azure sky withe ne’er a cloud to be seen.  A light breeze just to prevent it getting too hot.  Not a day for playing with The Buke.  We went for a bit of a drive after the sun had burned us to a crisp.  We found a lovely waterside restaurant that actually has my favorite item on the menu – Confit de Canard.

The place wasn’t open, but we’ll be heading back at the appropriate time [whenever that is].

Already I have seen my main course just beside the restaurant.

Raw Confit de Canard