The Polish Cavalry has returned from Cracow armed with skirting boards, alcohol distillery equipment, hand-made light-oak kitchen furniture, and hooch. So the twelve-hour marathons of banging, drilling, sanding and painting will begin again in earnest next Wednesday. But their brief arrival to say hello came as something of a surprise to canine houseguest Ozzie, who generally wagged his tail….somewhat tentatively.
His temporary keeper, you see, garbles in a whoozagooboooyee, yuuragoodlad sort of way. So Oz seems a little suspicious of this newly arrived garble that is more jinski, brova, slavska, vondrodi, and barrooshta in nature. He’s not sure about them. He’s reserving judgement. There don’t seem to be any words like walk, breakfast, water, drop, pine cone, or bed in there. It’s all rather unsettling.
As part of my new determination to be ecumenically atheist, I’ve decided to treat Saturdays as my Sabbath. I took this decision earlier today, a few minutes after finally being sure that today is Saturday. My week ahead looks like this: Sunday, slaughtering Royalist Catholics. Monday, overturning the tables of the moneylenders in the Temple. Tuesday, milk monitor at the stoning of under-age Rotherham girls. Wednesday, live Zen Archery from another plane, not owned by Malaysian Airlines. Thursday, burning of the widows foolish enough to turn up to the pyre. Friday, plotting to blow up the Proddy Parliament. I always look forward to Fridays.
Anyway, today was Rest Day. I went into the village and gossiped with locals about the hasty departure of Le proprieteur du Presse. He legged it last Sunday, meaning that my local ville has lost its butcher, chemist and newsagent tabac in the last three years. The plan now, it seems, is for Murielle and hubby (the bakers who took over the grocery store) to re-open the old boulangerie premises across the road, and add papers and fags to their grocery epicerie. If things carry on like this, by 2020 they’ll be the area’s leading Car-repair pharmacy-bricolage and smoked bread petrol-station news portal. Quite when they’ll sleep is a conundrum yet to be solved.
It was a good day to be idle. The slightly washed-out watercolour blue skies and lowering sun meant one could meander about in the mid-afternoon without burning to a dehydrated crisp. Oz and I walked around the fields. At one point, he saw a hare looping away at great speed, stiffened his posture, and then thought, “Naw, f**k it” and went back to sniffing at the maize stumps. Later, I introduced him to the quince as fetch-missile – an alternative to the pine cones whose unpredictable bounces keep him fascinated for hours. He wasn’t converted to the idea. I can get behind his Weltanschauung on that one: crunching a cone is a lot more fun than breaking your dentures on a quince. If you’re a dog. If you’re a Brit, Simon Cowell will do just as well.
My local one-horse no-pharmacy town is en fête at the moment. Last night there was a moules-frites thing, tonight there is a steak-frites spectacle. After that perhaps there will be a festival du rire frites, then probably a marché du soir vide grenier bodega-frites evennement. Normally I like all this stuff, but at the moment I’m too knackered to stay the course. Oz and I collapsed under the three big cone-providers this afternoon, and shared a siesta. Tonight I’m having goat’s cheese and onion with spinach on crusty bread and I bet you’re not hahahahahaha nerrnerrnaneernerr.
Tonight’s genuinely sad news is that my former Mayor Maurice is dead, after a long battle with cancer. He was quite a character, having served as a French NCO in both IndoChina and North Africa. After a few too many sherberts during various salle des fétes drink-ups, he’d often become very keen to show people his war wound located in the groin area. For me, this tendency was always the high-point of the evening.
He was, variously, a bigot, bombast, terrier, tinker, wheeler-dealer and determined fund-raiser: in short, a Mayor.
He died on 14th August in Agen hospital, having been our Mayor for a staggering 36 years. I’m told this made him the 3rd longest-serving French Mayor in history, but I can’t be sure. He is survived by his wife Carmen, an invaluable help to me in that she acted as my interpreter of Maurice’s heavily-accented argot-ridden French. For the life of me, I rarely understood a bloody word he said.
The Slog 