09/04/00 Spring's Sprung

Spring is officially here - since the 21st or something, the French reckon the seasons based on the equinox or whatever the thing is. Sometime around the ides of March, anyway. And last weekend we slipped into summer time (or daylight saving, to be more accurate) without really noticing - whatever your clocks were set to, we were late up.

While the garden is still in an untamed state now is probably its best time of year - the grass is green but not too long and the clumps of different varieties of daffodils are in flower, along with the primroses, the violets and, just lately, the bluebells. Be a shame to mow it all, but you can't stop progress. Or a maniac with a lawnmower, come to that.

Really have to replace the bridge across the stream, though. The creaky plank that went in over a year ago as a temporary measure is not really adequate. Discussed the matter with the neighbours from up the road, who share the access with us, and decided that we really need a decent bridge, not too heavy, on a solid concrete base each side of the stream. We have the wood, they have the concrete mixer and cement. (The Americans have the technology, but we'll muddle through without.) Almost laid the foundations there and then, actually, but Eric reckoned that it looked as though it might rain and that is apparently not good (how would I know?) so I went off and flew a kite with Jeremy instead.

And as it happens it DID rain, and in fact it snowed - again - not this low down, but not that far above us either. Most annoying because it's got all cold again, and I do not like that. And it's wet. And grey. And basically miserable. A typical European spring, really.

It may or may not have come to your attention that our esteemed PM, Lionel Jospin, has reshuffled the cabinet. Dominique Voynet, the Green minister for the environment (who was guilty either of doing a very bad job or of having a very bad spin doctor) is out, as are Sautter, DSK's successor in finance, and Allègre, in education. Sautter sinned in trying to reform the Finance Ministry without having either the political guile of DSK or Jospin's support at 100%: Allègre - unfortunately for him - told the truth once too often about the teachers' unions. At any other time they'd probably both have been kept on - everyone knows that the (rather modest) reforms they proposed are necessary - but the presidential elections are looming up and nothing must compromise Jospin's chances.

So Laurent Fabius (an ex PM under Mitterand, perhaps best-known in NZ as being PM at the time of Rainbow Warrior but got definitely sullied as far as the French are concerned when implicated - up to his neck - in the business of AIDS-contaminated blood transfusions) takes on finance and Jack Lang, a media-savvy intellectual featherweight, gets education (a match made in heaven). Given that Fabius is an old enemy of Jospin's, and that Lang is unpredictable and extremely ambitious, and that both are potential rivals, it's probably rather a clever move. Neither of the pair will actually do much harm - Fabius might actually do some good - and as Truman (I think) once said of Hoover, "better inside the tent pissing out than outside ..."

And Martine Aubry, daughter of Jacques Delor and architect of the 35-hour working-week in France, is standing for mayor of Lille. (Which is a rather grimy and exceedingly depressing industrial city in the north of France, been controlled by the Socialists for years and is consequently rather a black hole in whatever standard of quality of life you choose to apply.) Much to my surprise, she has declared that if elected, she will resign from her government post (reasonable, but unusual). If at all possible, I'd move to Lille and vote for her. It might be bad for Lille, but could only be good for France.

All of which reminds me of Renaud's disgust last Friday when he tried to ring a supplier on an urgent matter - possible replacement of a touch-screen - to be greeted by a charming taped message along the lines of "Due to current French legislation on the 35-hour working week, we now close at mid-day on Fridays. Thank you for calling, please try again Monday. We value your custom." Had to laugh, personally, but he didn't see the funny side of it. Sourpuss.

It's now Saturday, April 1, and Margo's closed up the shop. Last day yesterday, and a quick swoop in this morning to pick up various bits and tidy up some loose ends, but the key is now under the mat. Well, not quite, they still have to appear before the Tribunal de Commerce on Monday to make it official, but that's more or less a formality. Tomorrow I head off at some ungodly hour in the morning to pick up Neil Potter from Satolas airport before shoving him on a train to Montpellier - I am NOT looking forward to that, as I do like my weekly lie-in.

Sunday 9/4

That wasn't a very long addition, was it? Try to do better this time. Got Potter safely picked up on Sunday - almost didn't, mind you, as he'd neglected to send over his flight number and according to the arrivals board no flights were scheduled to come in at the time he'd specified. I spent a while wandering around Satolas before phoning Gill and getting the flight number from her, when I found that the flight had arrived, but not at 8:45, and that it dumped its cargo into one of the two downstairs arrival zones, when I was hunting around upstairs. On top of that they managed to lose his suitcase. Which was - give them credit where it's due - delivered to our doorstep that afternoon.

A bit too late, unfortunately, for him to take it with him to Montpellier. Luckily he was turning up back here on Tuesday (and duly did, late again - problem with the train this time) and so didn't have to re-kit himself.

The liquidation went according to plan and the court-appointed liquidator wants to speed up the disposal of assets as much as possible. Given that said assets are currently sitting in an uninsured shop with no alarm system in what the French euphemistically call a "quartier populaire", this is probably a good idea. On the other hand, we got registered letters yesterday from the bank: as we personally guaranteed the loans that the company took out, the bank now wants its money back. With any luck the insurance company will advance them that much - in any case it's all in the hands of the lawyer now, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over the matter.

Been income tax time again - probably why the sods went on strike. Ostensibly it was over Sautter's proposed reform of finally bundling the tax assessors in with the tax collectors: the current Byzantine system, whereby the Finance Ministry decides who owes what and the various local Public Treasuries are responsible for collecting it, dates back to Napoleonic days and was originally intended, I think, to combat corruption. This no longer being the problem it was, it seems logical to combine the two functions, but the civil servants swear blue that the public actually LIKE having to deal with two different services, in different buildings at opposite ends of the town. Anyway. Most people were probably cheering the strikers on, happy in the knowledge that it'd put off the evil day when they have to pay, but as I'm owed money I'd rather that my return got looked at ASAP. I suppose I really ought to sit down and calculate just how much they should be paying me, but at the moment I can't be bothered.

Yesterday was lovely and fine, so I finally gritted my teeth as firmly as possible and hauled the lawnmower out from its lurking-place in cellar n° 3. The grass was very lush and must have been up to 20 cm in places, so the poor little mower was labouring a bit and I had to go over twice, but it's now looking a bit more civilised down there. One of those faithful weekend chores has just come out of retirement, and for the next five or six months the buzz of the lawnmower will be loud in the land every Saturday. (And Sunday, in St Pierre. Everyone else mows their lawns on a Saturday, but I do it on Sunday morning 'cos that's when I have time and it's not too hot. It's probably against some municipal bylaw or other.) The leaves are out on the old apple tree, the plum trees have burst into flower and the lime tree has its first buds showing: there's just the acacias to get some leaves on them now.

Come to that, the wood strawberries have their first flowers out, which means that sometime in June I should be able to flop my head over the bank and fill my face with the little darlings.

All this foliage means that next weekend we should be able to napalm the brambles and the ex-vegetable garden with systemic herbicide, which will hopefully bio-degrade in time for us to look at planting in Autumn.

Anyway - I threw Neil out of the car onto the footpath at Satolas this morning, from whence he flies north to Amsterdam and thence south to Madrid. On a return ticket, of which he's using only only one leg. Why? Because it's significantly cheaper than a one-way ticket from Toulouse to Madrid. And why is that? Buggered if I know.

Anne-Laure (remember her? We brought her to NZ with us last time we came over) popped around this evening to give Jeremy a cuddle and talk over career choices with us. She's decided that teaching is perhaps not her real vocation and wants to switch to computer science, specialising in website design. What she'd like to do is a course in Pariswhich specialises in 3-D imaging - she hopes to get an interview in the next few weeks. While her parents are off on holiday in the Middle East. She just thought it'd be a good idea to run the idea by us once before letting Claude & Maryse in on it - preferably at the fait accompli stage. Feels funny, being considered old enough to be acceptable parent substitutes.

I still have work to do and the birds are going to start singing at some ungodly hour tomorrow, so I'll get this off now. Goodnight, all!

06/03/00 Mr. Brain has long since departed ...

As Blackadder remarked to Percy on one occasion, and I know just how he felt.

Just spent the last two days in Switzerland getting things ready for the new supermarket game, which starts on Monday, ie getting the machines back in their housings, checking that printers and modems work, boring little details like that. The game itself is a tired warmover of last year's version which I'd personally have thought would be guaranteed to discourage everyone save complete lackwits (preferably terminally depressed ones) but noone seems to mind and as it's more or less money for jam I'm not going to start worrying about it either.

But I could have done without the trip, especially today as it was the opening of the Geneva car show, which meant traffic jams all around Geneva this morning, and the weather went rapidly downhill so that instead of yesterday's 20° or so I had rain/snow slurry persisting down on the way back home.

Now Sunday 5/3, and I'm trying to catch up a bit before watching Star Trek and then hibernating.

We gather that NZ is still the proud custodian of a rather ugly silver-plated spittoon. Congratulations. After the rugby - and the cricket - it's about time! But I am a bit surprised to find that the event was celebrated with what the Herald-Tribune called "typical Kiwi over-indulgence". I'd always thought we were rather an austere lot, on the whole - apparently not. I must admit that I didn't actually watch any of the races (couldn't avoid 30 seconds on the evening news one night, but that hardly counts) - as a spectator sport yachting comes in with down-hill skiing, marathon running and solo tooth extraction in the excitement department.

Those of you who care will notice that relations between Chirac and Jospin are a little strained at the moment. Small history lesson - unlike any civilised country, France has a President and a Prime Minister, both with executive power. This arrangement was dreamed up by the framers of the constitution to please Charles de Gaulle (don't know why they thought it would make him happy, but apparently they did) and as no-one seems to have noticed that he's been dead for some time it's gone on unquestioned.

Now one of the little unquestioned details was that foreign policy belonged to the President - his own private hunting-ground. As time goes on it's about all that's left to him, really. So it was particularly unappreciated when Jospin, on a visit to Lebanon, called Hesbollah a terrorist organisation. Not only is the remark Chirac's to make (as Pres) but also, historically, France has always claimed an "honest broker" position in the Middle East whilst also claiming to have a unique understanding of the Arab mentality (a claim which, were I Arab, I might well take as a personal insult). It's always come as a disappointment to them that the only outside country with any real influence is the US.

Basically Jospin has chucked that pretence out of the window, and also had the bad taste to remark that he wished that la France would stop dreaming that it was more important than, in fact, it is. Didn't go down very well. And then there was the humourous episode when, on Jospin's arriving back in France on Sunday night he was telephoned by Chirac requesting his presence at the Elysée IMMEDIATELY, to which Jospin cheerily replied that they'd see one another at the usual Wednesday Cabinet meeting.

Been another beautiful day today, so we went down and did some more work in the garden. Margo attacked trees and ivy withh the slasher, and I tried to get some of the rust off the garden gate before repainting it (in pond-scum green). Jeremy went off and played at finding cow-pats to sit in in the paddock behind, and Tess followed to keep him company in case he really did find a cow-pat, and needed help with it. As far as we know he didn't (or if he did the stains came out remarkably easily), but the search kept him busy for hours.

Jeremy, incidentally, has started to miss his sister. Not sure why, but it's the case. It'll probably last all of 30 minutes, when she does actually arrive back (in late June, according to the latest plans). What we do have to do is seriously attack his bedroom - or rather, turn what was Margo's sewing & junk room into his bedroom. This involves shifting out the wood-burning stove and the sink (preferably AFTER cutting off the water), removing tiles from the walls so that it's a bit less like the public baths, then rewiring and repapering.

Rewiring will be fun. The idea is to reuse, as far as possible, the existing wiring ducts so as not to have to use the equivalent of a router on the walls and ceilings. At least I now know how and where the three-phase arrives upstairs, and the monophase does the rounds downstairs before heading off upstairs itself. The trick now is to use this knowledge to rewire room by room without plunging the rest of the house into darkness (or, more pertinently, cutting off power to the PC). This is where I shall have to

• do a little more electrical archaeology and
• call in our friend Bruno Fontanel to tell me what to do.

The other plans for this summer are, more or less in order:

• getting the staircase down from the balcony to the courtyard
• replacing three exterior doors
• finishing work on the living room
• napalming the garden
• bringing peace to the world, ending hunger and converting Saddam Hussein to Judaism.

An ambitious programme, at the end of the year we hope to be able to show some progress on at least the first four items.

Tuesday there's a big meeting at Margo's shop: the court-appointed assessor has ordered everyone to be present so that he can learn exactly what the hell is going on. As the different insurance companies involved are obliged to be present Margo hopes to get a better idea of exactly what they're willing to pay up. And, if the offer's acceptable, to take it straight away. However that works out, the shop should be closed up in the next three months or so.

Paragraphs below this line are intended strictly for a mature programming audience and are designed to induce terminal boredom in normal human beans.

I've found a new hate object for the month and surprisingly enough it's not a Microsoft product, nor is it in any way related to the fairies of Redmond. This month's Bimler Award for the Most Gratuitously Frustrating Useful Software Product (with Special Mention for misuse of Capital Letters) goes to Seagate Software for Crystal Reports V7.x. This is a marvellous product which is probably only appreciated as it deserves by those of us who, some 20 years ago, had to learn about RPG.

Integrated into your software it allows the users to design and run their own reports, thereby reducing your workload and blood pressure, the installation procedure is, once worked out, quite straightforward (provided you don't let Visual Basic's cyber-bloody Install Wizard do it for you and screw it up as usual) and it's royalty-free. It's also, unfortunately, full of bugs. Not major, life-threatening ones, but small, naggy, annoying ones that waste half an hour of your time here, then another half-hour the next day ... the online support is rapid (I sent off a query and got an answer back the next day) if not always the best (the answer was useless) but - another annoying point - the documentation is appalling. Along the lines of (and I am not joking very much)

prototype is function ButterYourToast(toast, butter)

This function causes the specified number of copies of your toast to be buttered. The optional jam parameter, if non-zero, specifies the marmelade to be used. System toast is used by default, unless or even if the Bread.MakeToast() constructor has previously been called to specify wholemeal. NOTE that MakeToast will replace the system toast for the life of your application. You may want to consider making the Bread object of global scope to avoid conflicts. Don't forget to restore system toast to the default value (currently hard-coded in NT 4.0 as white, thick-sliced, although this is subject to change) on exiting.

Next month is time for the Why do I Insist on Beating My Head Against the Wall award for recidivist users of any Microsoft product. The focus will be on ActiveX objects (or whatever they call it these days) and would-be nominees are invited to submit a white paper explaining why the developers of any given Microsoft "technology" should not be put up against a wall and forced to listen to Boy George for three months before being made to develop a useful, portable and useable application using their own tools.

20/02/00 A fête worse than death ...

No, neither a spelling mistake nor some sort of Freudian slip, just that last night was the school dine and dance here at Saint Pierre, and we weren't able to get out of it. Locked into a smoky salle des fêtes for at least four hours, surrounded by demented French-things drinking with abandon and smoking - as far as anyone can tell - silage. Attila the Hun and his mobile disco provide the musical ambiance, which is pretty dire.

Actually it wasn't as bad as all that. It was pretty bad, because our table was right up at the head of the room about 3m from the "orchestra", which rather curtailed conversation. On the other hand it wasn't too smoky, which was a pleasant surprise, and we managed to slope off early - about mid-night. Luckily Jeremy had decided earlier in the day that he wasn't going to enjoy himself and so spent his time sulking, which most people interpreted as tiredness and recommended we take him home.

Reminds me that at some time I really must fill him in on the sordid details of exactly what it is I do for a living. At the moment he seems to have it in mind that I make computers and then give them to people, which isn't exactly right.

The weather at the moment is traditional French for the month, aggravated by the usual influx of Parisians and other simple carbon-based life-forms for the winter holidays. Practically speaking this means a couple of days where you start to think about putting away the winter woollies, followed by a week wondering why on earth we chose to live so close to the North Pole when there are so many warmer places around, like Siberia. And the autoroutes are jammed. And I do not even wish to speak about going to Carrefour to do a simple bit of shopping.

On the other hand the birds have been at it - noisily - for weeks up in the eaves and some of their enthusiasm seems to have communicated itself to the vegetable world, as the primroses are in flower and the daffodils and snowdrops are out, looking for a less boring means of reproduction than just splitting their rhizomes. Which means that soon we'll have to look at spreading grass seed on the balder patches of paddock, look at planting out trees if we're going to get that done this year and perhaps even napalming and then rotary-hoeing the patch where the vegetable garden once was.

Tuesday night now, and I'm trying to recover after a day's diarrhoea - not mine, I hasten to add, Jeremy's. Took the morning off to look after him but had to drop him off with Margo in the afternoon as I had the accountant coming up to the office to play "Let's hunt a hundred thousand!" or however much it is we want to pay out to ourselves this year. Starting to be a pain in the proverbial rude parts now that we have a bit of production going on, which means that we have to keep track (vaguely) of stock in hand at the end of the financial year so that it appears in the credit side of the accounts (as stock) as well as the debit side (something we actually, through gritted teeth, paid for). Because otherwise you look at the balance sheet and see 300KF spent buying components and 310KF coming in from the sale of what we made from those components, and you start to worry seriously where your margin is,until you realise that the 100KF you spent in December and billed at 200KF in January appears on the books for '99 only as an expense. This business of trying to manage a small company isn't all it was made out to be at the beginning. No-one warned me that it might start to get complicated!

On the news front - the European Commission has already threatened France with a slap on the wrist for continuing to ban British beef after the relevant European agencies have found it to be safe - or at least edible - and are seriously considering doing the same with Germany. I must admit that the French have played it very nicely: having just created, by some incredible coincidence, an "independent" organisation somewhat along the lines of the FDA, which duly found reason to doubt that Britain's herds were totally free of BSE, they now claim that there is no way they can override the expression of the peoples' will and let mad cow meat into France. An attitude which goes down well not only in France, because most right-thinking people hold the Brussels bureaucrats in the same esteem as cockroaches.

But one of these days the French will have to accept that they're just a second-rate nation (have been for at least 120 years, but never mind that) and can no longer get away with bullying the Germans from a position of weakness. Back in the 60s both the French and the Germans wanted to lock Germany into a peaceful Europe, with the Germans as the economic motor and the French as the political visionaries. The unwritten agreement was that the French led and the Germans backed them up with their economic clout. Now conditions are, if not reversed, at least a bit more equal, and this lot of Germans sees no need to feel guilty and would rather like to have their own place on the world stage. Which leaves the French wondering exactly where their place is. Unfortunately, unlike the English, France has no experience of voluntarily giving up an empire, and so has no idea of how to decline gracefully. (Off the top of my head, I can think of no other country that feels a need to bribe small, corrupt African states to continue using French as the official language.)

Perhaps, as de Gaulle's myth of the heroic French resistance fades, and Mitterand's generation of techno/bureaucrat collaborators dies out, France will become a normal nation that doesn't have to pretend that it was raped by the Nazis in 1939 but somehow remained pure in spirit. It has started, with the trials of several home-grown war criminals and the reconsideration of the war in Algeria.

Things can only get worse (well, more interesting) as the EU expands to take in the next lot of applicants (six of them, if memory serves, including Cyprus, which is politically delicate) and starts considering the next lot whilst thinking about what to do about Turkey. (Been thinking about Turkey for years. Got nowhere. Blame it on the Greeks.)

Does all that sound a bit dyspeptic? Must be in a bad mood. Probably listened to one ignorant Frog too many, decrying the evils of an "Anglo-Saxon" economy of which he knows sod-all, and moaning about how he doesn't get enough subsidies.

I really am feeling sour. On the bright side, we finally got together all the necessary paperwork and our naturalisation dossier has been sent off to the Préfecture. So in another couple of years we may well become authentic French-persons. While waiting, we have to renew our cartes de résident this year, and as they expire in August I suppose we'd better get a move on, especially as the Préfecture is basically closed for three months starting in June. That gives us three months, which should be enough. Just.

Anyway. For now, it's enought that the Parisians have all gone home (usual traffic jams on the autoroute all day) and the temperature is rising, which can only mean that Spring is coming. Another few months and we can dust off the barbecue!

08/02/00 The brave new dawn of the 3rd millenium?

More like the hung-over awakening of the 2nd millenium's left-overs, but never mind.

Well, three weeks into Y2K we're still here. I'm starting to feel that maybe we can relax a little and venture out of the bunker for an hour a week or so. Although that might be a bit premature, at least until Feb. 30th goes by without a hitch (according to purists it's a double leap-year).

Anyway, time goes by and the primroses are starting to get ready in the garden, and I suppose that in a month or so the daffodils will be poking their heads out as well. Which will be A Sign that the lawnmower needs an oil change if it is to cut grass rather than bludgeon it, and that we'll have to go around spraying fruit trees against mealy-grub, white spot, black spot, greasy patches and mad cow disease (this is France).

But all that's on hold for the moment as it snowed again quite heavily on Saturday and then again last night: 25cm of the stuff this low down at this time of the year isn't bad. Friends came around on Sunday and we all went sledging in the paddock, which the kids loved. Shame the snow was sticky: great for making snowmen, but you wouldn't have wanted to ski on it. Wouldn't have got more than a few metres before bogging down and falling over. Seems that it was good up in the stations - nice snow, if a bit chilly at -15°

26-1-00

The snow is still deep and crisp (soggy, actually, but never mind the details) and even except in those parts where it's been beaten down by the passage of tiny feet, and I've spent all day as one of the great unwashed 'cos there was no hot water this morning. (Central heating was still working, fortunately.) Spent a happy afternoon up in the attic with the hairdryer, thawing out the one pipe that I hadn't bothered to insulate, thinking that there was no point as it wouldn't freeze up there, to wit the cold water pipe into the hot water cylinder. I admit it, I was wrong, on exceedingly cold nights it can in fact freeze up there and it does. Have now insulated absolutely EVERYTHING.

4-2-00

Time does fly, doesn't it? Can't think why, it's not as though anything has actually happened but there you are, it just whips past, some swine hands you the bill and you're left wondering vaguely what the hell you're paying for and rather hoping it was worth it.

But it does feel like the end of winter. Don't know why, there've been no conspicuous signs or even little notices stuffed in the letterbox, just the once-a-year feeling that the worst is over and spring is on its way. The daylight hours are stretching out so it's no longer dark at 16:30, little old ladies come out of hibernation, and the youth of the village commit whistling in public places.

Which reminds me that frightened bats make a noise like someone sucking their teeth. At least, the one I woke up from its hibernating in the woodpile made a noise like that. Of course, it may not have appreciated being tossed into the wood basket and having another couple of logs thrown in on top - luckily it didn't seem to be hurt and scuttled off happily enough into a dark crack when I picked it up.

And of course the winter sales started (almost finished now) and I succumbed to the temptation of a new scanner and bubble-jet printer for only 800F the pair. (Well, I succumbed and Upstart paid, seemed justifiable to me at the time.) I also have no real excuse not to buy the kids a decent computer as I can pick up the necessary bits for about 1500F (that's motherboard with everything integrated, 500MHz Celeron and a bit of RAM) so at some point this year I must get around to doing that.

But before doing that we have to get Jeremy's bedroom ready for him, now that Margo has removed all her sewing junk from there into the playroom. Which is suddenly about a quarter of the size it used to be. There's the old sink to be taken out, tiles to be removed from the walls (we're assuming he doesn't want to sleep in the Municipal Baths) and the electricity to be redone, after which it can be quickly bodged up and wallpapered.

Just at the moment I'm trying to work out just how the electricity gets around in this house. Yes, I know the theory - electrons (about the size of a small pea, but faster) move in wires and when they come to the end of a wire they fall out and, thanks to gravity, make the little paddle-things in electric motors turn around thus generating rotational motion which can be converted to a linear ie useful movement by a gearbox. Which does not completely explain the transistor radio.

But what I am actually trying to do is work out just where in the house the wires go. The old heating system is fairly easy to pick out, being relatively recent, and I think I've found the lighting circuit. But I'm damned if I can work out where the 3-phase goes. I'll find it, there aren't that many places it can hide.

Anyway, I rather think I won't do any more work tonight so before shutting down the machine I'll send this off. Have a happy (late) New Year

05/01/00 New Year's Dribble

I really must start keeping a diary on the Palm V: it does sterling service for the shopping list and business notes, I don't see why it shouldn't serve for me to keep track of what I've been doing as well.

Christmas went well, if quietly - probably just as well, we're all tired (especially Jeremy) and were quite happy just to sit around and eat and enjoy being warm. Tess has other problems on her mind (such as it is) - there's a mouse in the house and she can smell it but can't get at it. The little sod (or family thereof) seems to have a thing for rice - two packets of Basmati I've had to throw out so far after finding the plastic packets chewed open and little black not-rice grains in there. (Could always collect them and try to pass them off as wild rice to ecologically-minded acquaintances - NOT friends, please note ... haven't dared up to now)

Invited Joc & Hervé around on Sunday night as I was feeling luxurious and decided to make a filet de boeuf Rossini, as it turned out only Joc turned up as Hervé managed to put his back out and spent three or four days immobilised on the bed. Anyway, Jeremy decided that he wanted to sleep at their house with his friend Caroline and we'll pick him up tomorrow or in 16 years time, depending.

Turned out well really as today we had to go off to a funeral - Jacques' wife Anne-Marie died on Christmas Day after five years of degenerative nerve disease and then cancer. Nothing like a good funeral to get all the family together and bitching about one another but personally I always get extremely depressed and have absolutely no idea of what sort of consoling thing one should say on such occasions, and to top it off it's been snowing on and off all day, the church was unheated, and the vicar evidently had thermal underwear on and was in no particular hurry.

I've always wondered how they organise the seating arrangements, actually. Obviously the bereaved family sit up at the top, but do all the rest get shunted onto one side or another depending on whether they're "defunct" or "survivor"? Whatever.

Quite odd really as there were all these grown-up people there - Jacques' children - that we first met twelve years ago and have seen grow up. Saw Claire grow from a gawky, awkward, spotty 8-year old to a rather pretty and reasonably self-assured woman of 20. Vincent is no longer a pimply adolescent but a much head-hunted waiter at 5-star hotels in Geneva. Went to Catherine's wedding, come to that, and would've gone to Xavier's last year (except that it was in Spain, and we didn't have the time). Tim R. Mortiss is definitely catching up with me.

Today being Thursday we all hopped in the big car and headed off to Lyon. First stop M&S to pick up emergency supplies of chocolate-chip biscuits and gingernuts, and to get some cheese to take along for tomorrow night. Got Stilton, red Leicester and three varieties of Cheddar - should be enough to frighten the Frogs. Then we did our usual "escape Lyon by going round and round and round until you get to escape velocity" trick and actually got onto the right road, so went into Ikea to get ideas for doing up the kitchen. Came out with quite a few - one of them being that it's going to take a lot of time and money to get it transformed into something reasonable but then we were expecting that.

Had a slight delay getting to Lyon, of course - we started off later than hoped as we all of us wanted to sleep in, and then going through the tunnel at Chambery the car ahead of us - about 200m ahead, luckily - did a fairly spectacular pinball act bouncing off the right wall, left wall, then the right wall again. Must have hit a patch of ice on the road, I suppose. No-one as hurt though, and we just had to hang around until the firemen came and took the driver off our hands before going on.

The mice have definitely got to go. They may not actually be living IN the toaster, but they're certainly living off the crumbs in it. Tess is about as much use as a limp rag - you say "Tess! Kill!" and she looks around a bit in an  interested manner before sidling up to her food bowl to see what's on the menu. Apparently not self-service mouse.

Those of you who've seen the footage of houses blown over and whatever can rest easy, we haven't so much as a slate out of place on the roof (not more than usual, anyway). By the time the storms got down here they'd more or less blown over and so we had a couple of extremely windy nights (I was worried about the old apple tree in the garden, but it seems to have weathered it) but nothing like the damage further north. And the electricity only cut off twice, for about a minute each time, and each time I'd just backed up what I was working on. Stroke of luck there.

On the other hand, it has snowed again. Woke up yesterday morning at some ungodly hour to the sound of the snowplough rumbling its way up the street, so thought rude words until I got back to sleep. Only 10 cm or so down this low anyway, and with all the rain we've had the earth is quite warm (relatively speaking) and so the roads are clear.

Now Jan 1st, and the world has not - apparently - stopped turning, and the electricity didn't even shut off for a second. We headed off to Renaud & Sophie's after a fairly frenetic hour getting rid of mice - nabbed one in the toaster, and another under the grill of the bread-board. Tess got the first one, but only by a miracle - it actually ran under her bum before she knew what was happening, and I don't know whether she suffocated it or what, but she wanted to come inside five minutes later but as she had mouse-tail dribbling out one side of her mouth we declined to let her in.

Anyway, we had quite a restrained New Year's Eve. In theory there were to have been four couples and we were taking dessert, but there was a minor cock-up on the communication front so there were just six of us and we brought the cheese (hence the fore-mentioned trip to Lyon and we got rid of:

• three bottles of champagne for the aperitif
• two halves of Sauternes with the foie gras and truffles
• one bottle of white with the smoked salmon
• two bottles of Burgundy with the venison
• a quarter of port with the cheese
• two more bottles of (good) champagne with dessert
  

Quite proud of ourselves for not over-indulging.

At about 3am R & S and Bruno & Patty decided to go off night-clubbing but we were rather knackered and headed off to bed, where we stayed until 10:30. Renaud and Sophie surfaced about midday (with eyes, as the French say, 'en trou de pine', which, for those of you who don't have a Frog slang dictionary close to hand, is a vulgar but accurate way of saying 'small, bloodshot and watery'), so we had a leisurely breakfast before heading homewards to let Tess in. After which we have not, I regret to say, done a great deal. How was it with you? I gather that the fireworks in Auckland were worth watching - at least from what was shown on TV here.

Good luck against Dennis Conner, by the way.

25/12/99 Warm & Happy Xmas

Those of you who don't watch the international news roundup on TV, or read major investigative papers like the Taihape District Herald, may still be unaware of the fact that we've had our central heating in and running for the past week. Still a few minor problems - a joint in the fuel circuit which wasn't properly tightened, meaning diesel was pissing everywhere in the cellar, air bubbles everywhere in the radiators which means that when the thing starts up at 5 am it sounds as though there's a small waterfall in the room with you, stuff like that - but the place is WARM! And we don't have sheet ice forming down the bathroom walls either.

And a Merry Christmas to all of you, even if it is a bit late (for you. It's still Christmas day here, although not for long). Malyon rang this morning to let us know (amongst other things) that the weather was traditionally grotty: well, it was the same here too. Cold and wet, maybe some snow tomorrow. Better that than the oil slick currently washing up on the Britanny coast.

Traditionally in France the big feast is in fact on Christmas Eve (followed by another garguantuan one on Christmas day, but that's another matter) and so when Anne-Laure turned up last night to check something up on the Net with her mother Maryse in tow, I thought I'd better check on what they were having. Just a snack, really - salade composée with smoked salmon, snails, venison, vegetables and the bûche de Noël. Our leg of lamb crawled off into the kitchen and hid itself in shame.

Never mind, we'll make up for it on New Year's Eve, when we go around for a small party at Renaud & Sophie's (they have their central heating in and working too!). Just four couples, everyone brings a plate, and just to give you an idea, we have four desserts to bring - pavlova, brandysnaps, cassata and I can't remember what else. I think we might sleep over the night.

Anyway, Merry Christmas again, and think of us laggards when you're washing down the year 2000 with whatever it is you drink on occasions like that, andwe're still sitting around the remains of lunch waiting for 1999 to go away.

14/12/99 Frozen Frogs On Sticks

No, not a new type of iced dairy dessert, just a moan about the fact that it's snowed again today. Forget about the sticks, that's just in the subject to add a bit of local colour. They're not very nice on sticks anyway - trust me. Green, and crunchy (too many teeny-weeny bones. Like vertebrate shrimp).

Well, as far as we're concerned the big news is that the central heating system has finally been installed. Boris Yeltsin may have said unmentionable things about Clinton's willy (can't remember which way it twists, personally), Tony Blair and Lionel Jospin may no longer be friends, for all I care the world may have ended three hours ago, but the thing is done. Now all that remains is to start it up. The fuel gets delivered on Monday and on theory the technician should be around sometime in the week to push the button - only six months after I started organising things, a clear condemnation either of the French way of life or of my personal organisational skills, personally I prefer the first option.

Anyway, we woke up this morning to find it snowing again. A right royal pain. I had to follow a snowplough into Chambery to go to the market, a long slow trip. And of course I forgot to take the umbrella, so I got soaked. Then this afternon we all went down to Grenoble to get our Christmas shopping up to date and pick up a few necessities like Golden Syrup, good thing that the roads were clear as the BMW is a right cow on snow. Even with 80 kg of bricks in the boot.

Work is going well, perhaps a bit too well - just manage to almost get one job finished and another pops its head up. Renaud has almost finished the Nestlé breast-feeding site, and now there's an entire intranet-based document-control and publication system to set up for an insurance company: I may have to start learning about some of the technology behind all this if I'm not careful. Never mind, a couple of days reading and I can pass for an expert - bullshit baffles brains, as usual. And I'm still polishing the rough edges on my inventory-control system: reports to be created, usual problems with Microsoft products that don't respect their own guidelines on internationalisation, general teething problems ... the usual.

Tuesday night now, and I'm completely knackered as usual. Spent all day trying to track down a bug in my stock-control system only to find that it wasn't a bug in my program at all, but a bug in the Microsoft ADO library. I don't know why I'm surprised at this. Happily, the guy who's paying for the system is a developer's dream who notes everything he does, so I was able to reproduce it on my system and track it down - turned out to be the contents of a read-only recordset being modified by updates to another recordset on the same SQL connection. This completely irrational behaviour is doubtless by design.

The snow's stopped - for the moment - and the rain has set in, so the stream is running high just now. Good thing too, with a bit of luck all the crud that the peasants have chucked in (straw from rabbit cages, half-digested pumpkins, rotten tomatoes and stuff like that) will get washed down to the Isère and it won't look quite so much like a sewage station for a while. More snow forecast for tomorrow though, and the temperature has indeed dropped noticeably - at least the technician comes to push the button on the central heating on Friday!

We have a vertically-challenged Christmas tree in the hall - a real live one, with roots and all, so if we look after it it'll do for next year too - and Jeremy has spent all evening decorating it. It's very pretty, but perhaps a bit lopsided, with decorations only at the front, at Jeremy-height. He enjoyed himself. Perhaps Margo will be able to tactfully rearrange it a bit tomorrow.

Spent Sunday evening cleaning out the pantry cupboard - now that winter's well and truly in a family of mice have aparently decided to look for easy pickings, and they'd worked thir way through a packet of pistachio nuts, the stock of Basmati rice, some spaceman pasta and half a packet of egg noodles. I got suspicious when the rice (which I'd planned on cooking) turned out to have some black grains in it, which is a bit out of the ordinary. Tess obviously needs to sharpen up her act.

I can see that if we decide to treat ourselves out to dinner this year it'll be a good one - Renaud's eyes lit up when one of our friends from a company just downstairs described their little do at Bocuse the other night. The menu starts at 750 FF (for eight of them) and the first bottle of wine, an 87 Cheval Blanc, set them back 1500F. It's tempting, but I must admit the the thought of the 300 km round trip is a bit discouraging. Suppose we could always stay over the night - godnose what breakfast costs though.

Anyway, that's enough for now, and in case I don't get time to write again soon, Happy Christmas to the lot of you.