06/02/06 The random babblings of a disturbed mind ...

Truth to tell, I just couldn't come up with an apposite title (not that I've ever been able to do so). First of all, hope you all had a good Christmas standing around cooking prawns on yer bleeding BBQs and laughing over the plight of the poor sods in the freezing dark up North, and a happy New Financial Year to all.

Some of you know, and no doubt many will have guessed, that as usual, we went off to Pesselière for Christmas. Enough food for an army but these days I just can't hack it - the very idea of sitting down to foie gras, smoked salmon, oysters, snails, stuffed capon with puréeed chestnuts, both traditional and ice-cream bûches, and Christmas pudding makes my liver tremble. There's also the logistics involved in getting 12 people, half of them demonstrably French and one third of 'em under 18, up to the table when the meal is ready rather than half an hour later, when all the possible options have been discussed and the absence of soup pointedly noted.

Summer is definitely a better time of year for Christmas: you can have a simple barbecue thus avoiding both organisational problems and the prospect of massive renal failure, it's warm and sunny, and the options for filling in the afternoon void extend beyond a 5-mile hike through muddy beetroot fields or the 7-hour director's cut DVD of a stand-up comic (and having given up smoking, I can't even go out and do my bit for air pollution with a Corona). Lolling in a hammock in the sun would be a favourite.

Anyway, January/February are typically the coldest months of the year and this year is - surprise - no exception. Everyone's moaning because it's so cold,or it's been so cold for so long ... whatever, it's definitely chilly. Be more pleasant if we got some of the brilliant blue-skied freezing days that make winter - if not comfortable - at least bearable, but with a few rare exceptions it's been grey and dismal. And foggy. Bah.

Whatever. Done a bit of reorganising around here - getting into training for summer, when we've promised ourselves to restart work on redecorating. Not that it'll help, 'cos what I've been reorganising is the computer situation, and that's not going to help much when it comes to wallpapering and such. Still, it keeps me busy.

First of all I started to run out of space on the system disk (all that downloaded music ...) so had to go get another hard disk to stick alongside it, then the antivirus went silly (problem in the virus signature database, I suspect, which got fixed literally overnight) and started telling me that some of my Windows files were infected and when I told it to fix the problem I could only boot in safe mode. So I went off and got another hard disk and did a clean install onto it, sucked all the useful data and personal files and such off the old disk and spent a happy weekend reinstalling all the software.

Then I got annoyed at the huge screens cluttering up the place and went off and got a couple of 17" LCD screens for the kids (one apiece) and a USB sound system for Malyon's old Gespac industrial computer (sound cards for that sort of thing being rather rare). Then my big 19" CRT died two weeks ago, so I went off and ordered a 20" LCD screen to replace that, and being unwilling to stop there I took the plunge and ordered a new laptop from Dell, to replace the old HP that I originally bought to accompany me to Cameroun five years ago.

Of course the laptop came with Windows XP pre-installed. I'd always planned on getting rid of it and putting W2K in its place, but I knew that I was absolutely going to have to do that when the thing suggested that "we spend a few minutes quality time together to finish the installation of Windows XP". I had to pull the battery to get it to stop. So I did all that, which was reasonably painless, and now Margo has the old HP which is fine so long as you're no more than 5 minutes from a power point.

Malyon's busy busy busy - doing the dummy runs for the bac (baccalaureat - the Frog equvalent of what UE was in my day, I suppose) at the moment and on top of that she's involved in the English-section school play again, production this year. She comes home on Fridays, logs on to MSN to catch up on her far-flung friends and acquaintances, does her homework (I assume), and occasionally emerges, alone and palely loitering, just so that it's quite clear that we have absolutely no idea about how hard it all is. Although recently she hasn't come home on Fridays 'cos the play's on in a week (yes, we get to go - couldn't get out of that one) so Saturday evenings, after rehearsal and other social activities are over, seems more reasonable.

We're not too worried about the academic side of things for her - I went down to Grenoble for the parent-teacher meeting a few weeks back and the general consensus was that she'd have no problem. They doubtless say that to all the parents, for the simple reason that they can - they get to pick their students. I think their pass-rate for the bac is not far off 100%.

On the other hand, I must have looked a bit out-of-place - plastic bags hanging from every available appendage and a faint whiff of curry. I'd parked the car at Grand'Place to the south, taken the tram and changed lines at St Bruno - the only problem is that when you get off the tram at St Bruno there, in front of you, is "Carrefour d'Asie" or something like that, a big Asian grocers. I got five different types of sugar, I topped up on satay spice mix, I got some Chinese sausages, a few more gallons of sweet chili sauce, more char siu marinade ... need to go back with a backpack.

Jeremy seems to be doing OK - he's not exerting himself but managing to get a 12/20 average. For the time being we're not going to force him too much. And he heads off skiing every Wednesday afternoon with school, and after the February school holidays he's got the whole week up at Valloire, paid for by the regional government, le Conseil Général. Seems that not enough Savoyards go skiing (fair enough, they can't afford to, for one thing) and they're trying to rectify the situation. Jeremy enjoys it, anyway. Which is good.

Anyway, that'll do for now.

Look after yourselves

Trevor & Margo

18/12/05 Merry Christmas 'an all

Hello everyone, a bit early I know but I thought I'd get in before the rush starts.

Well, we had a lovely Indian summer up until a couple of weeks ago - exceptional, really - and today, right on schedule, it snowed. We woke up to about 20cm of the stuff, nice and powdery on cold ground, to boot. As it's been about four years since I last put chains on the car I walked Jeremy up to collège with the snow still swirling around us, then came back home and got Margo to help me. (Not too proud to ask for help.) It's true that the quick-fit chains go on in less than a minute - so long as you can remember eaxctly how you're supposed to do it. Otherwise you can spend half an hour. I must admit that they're convenient - the ones I got are even auto-tensioning, so you don't even have to stop after 5 minutes to adjust them.

Anyway, made it safely down to the nationale thinking "right, I'll just carry straight across to the autoroute and take the chains off there, where it's nice and clear" only to find that the autoroute access was blocked - a lorry had gone sideways across it - so I did the 10km to Montmelian like a complete prat, at the magnificent speed of 50kph. There I finally got onto the autoroute only to find, a couple of km further on, that the circulation of heavy lorries had been banned and that they were consequently all parked in the two right-hand lanes, leaving us with a one-lane autoroute. Great. Back to three lanes after the péage, but then at Chambery the tunnel was down to one lane and then, as the autoroute to Lyon was cut, there were more lorries on the side of the road.

Finally got up the hill and negociated the tricky last 300m to the office - being a relatively little-used road it's low on the list of priorities, so the snow-plough goes by in the afternoon (when it's not needed anymore). The anti-skid thingy light was flashing on and off like a tacky disco globe and I was wallowing across the road like a bloated cow but I finally got there - only an hour and a quarter after leaving home.

It's not supposed to snow tomorrow, but it'll freeze tonight, which'll make it even more fun going in to the market tomorrow morning. Still, on the bright side, we do have the latest series of Dr Who! In Frog, unfortunately, but I can live with that.

04/12/05

Wel, a week has gone past since those last lines and apparently nothing of great interest has happened, or I'd surely have noted it. Wouldn't I? At least it hasn't snowed again - not down here anyway, although that might change this week as snow is forecast down around the 500m level.

One thing we did get around to doing before the snow arrived was going down to the Foire Internationale at Grenoble. Our long-suffering kids got dragged along, and it did make me wonder why we bother trying to do things as a family given that when we do we all wind up foul-tempered and bloody-minded. Personally I quite enjoyed going around, even though there's absolutely no way I'm going to buy a €6000 wood-fired stove for the kitchen even if it does come with a personal letter of recommendation from Paul Bocuse, and you can forget about the 20m swimming pool. I was happy to come across a specialist stand in the food & drink section and pick up some more decent curry powder, although I did think that their chocolate-scented tea was a bit of a failure. To say the least.

18/12/05

Yet another lapse, I see - it's not that nothing actually happens, just that the things that do get around to occurring are usually far too ordinary to warrant mentioning. We made it down to Grenoble again yesterday to do the last bits of Christmas shopping and to deliver clean clothes to Malyon before she went off to Valence for the weekend with a friend from lycée. Being a large city, Grenoble has a not-too-bad public transport network and in any case, like many French cities, the centre is relatively compact, so it actually turned out to be a rather good idea to take the ring road around to the enormous (free) carpark at the Grand'Place mall on the southern side, park there and take the tram into the centre. The family tram ticket cost €4, less than two hours parking in the centre, so it really ought to be pretty much a no-brainer.

The Chinese shop I usually go to had moved from its usual place behind the Halles to somewhere up Cours Berriat, which was emphatically not on our plans that day, so I'm still short of satay spices. On the other hand, the flash grocers next door were still there, so I managed to pick up some stollen cake and some pain d'épice and some posh tea and some more curry, all of which'll doubtless turn up as stocking-fillers at Pesselière. And the Laiterie Bayard (est. godnose when) deigned to open its doors at 14:30 and sold me sherry and vintage rum, and pressed a small sample bottle of extremely old Chartreuse into Margo's hand as we left. ("Laiterie" is perhaps inadequate for the establishment, although it does sell cheese, which is actually present on the premises and may be inspected. Not a Monty Python cheese shop. In fact, I'd say it dates back to somewhere around 1910, going by the tiles walls and antiquated notions of hygiene - still sprinkle sawdust on the floor. They also have as large a selection of fine wines as I've seen anywhere, ditto whiskies and rums. A nice shop.)

During this time Jeremy had been lured into a comics shop- and that's a pitiful word 'cos we're talking about the coffee-table art-book style rather than the latest Donald Duck album. We dragged him reluctantly out and headed off in search of Arab pastries for the girls. Luckily it's the right area, so we didn't have to go far. Found an Arab grocer ... what I really like are the bins full of raw spices - cumin and caraway and curry and paprika and chili and turmeric and godnose what else - and mysterious packets proclaiming themselves to be authentic Turkish coffee or tamarind paste, or bulging fresh dates ... it really is so easy to please me.

Anyway, we're heading off to Pesselière on Friday, if all goes well, then coming back on the Tuesday, admittedly to much wailing from the kids. Life is tragic.A very merry Christmas and happy New Year to all of you, and we'll catch up with you soon.

Trevor

14/09/05 Life's too short ...

25/8/05

Hello to all of you, and as you may have noticed we passed briefly across the radar screen in August. To all of you that we managed to see - thanks for putting up with us. To those that we missed - sorry, we'll try to do better next time. You can always come over here, you know. It's not as bad as it's painted, and we do have the room now.

The return trip was relatively simple. Left Hamilton at 17:00, flew out at 22:00 and arrived at Incheon (Korea) after 12 hours, spent 3 hours waiting before boarding an Air France flight for another 12 hour flight to Roissy where we hung around for 3 hours until our TGV arrived to take us down to Chambery 3 hours later. I admit it was a bit tiring. I also have to admit that I preferred Air France to Korean Air. The service was fine on both, it's just that - let's face it - kimchi (the Korean national dish, spicy pickled cabbage) does nothing for me. It's an acquired taste, and I've not acquired it. And even if I had acquired it, I'm not sure that I'd appreciate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner - especially breakfast, where it's served with a sort of rice porridge. My advice is to give it a miss.

On top of it, Jacques fell into conversation with the crew (as is his wont - godnose how he does it) and discovered that one of the stewardesses was the neighbour of one of his nephews (also an Air France steward) in Chamonix. From which point on we got a couple of bottles of champagne (nicked from 1st class, I assume) tucked into our hand baggage, and were royally served in wine and whisky.

All things considered, the plane was the easy part. At least, once you've checked in (the Korean Air guy was very kind, and weighed us in at exactly 120 kg - rather generous, I think, and of course completely ignored the 40kg or so of "carry-on" baggage) your suitcases follow you around without your having to concern yourself with them (except in a statistically insignificant number of cases, where they eventually turn up on Easter Island). Trains aren't like that - at least not any more. We had the TGV from Roissy to Lyon, then the slow train from Lyon to Chambery, with ten minutes to connect at Lyon. With our 160 kg of baggage. The TGV was full, as were the baggage racks, so we piled our suitcases on the floor by one of the doors and sat down, to watch all the latecomers arrive and pile their suitcases atop ours. Not good - or at least, not too helpful in the "speedy change of train" department. Then we got to Lyon to find that the door now hidden behind the Pile of baggage was the one opening onto the platform. A few very busy minutes followed - clambered over the Pile to open the door, pulled all the baggage onto the platform, grabbed ours and legged it. We made it - just.

The next day - Monday - I drove Jeremy down to La Grande Motte, on the Mediterranean near Montpellier, where he was supposed to be spending the week with Sophie and her two, Lucas and Rémi. The I drove back - a nice little 8-hour round trip. It's Friday as I write this, and everyone seems to be more or less back to normal.

14/9/05

Time has passed, hasn't it? As far as I can make out we're still all alive and kicking - albeit feebly - and we seem to have survived the annual ceremony of the "rentrée scolaire". The only real glitch we had was with Malyon, whose request to be put up at the boarding establishment at Grenoble somehow didn't make it into the system. Which we discovered about two days before she was supposed to turn up there. She only had a couple of days commuting until - as always happens in the first week or so - someone either dropped out or never even turned up, so she's now comfortably ensconced. She does have school on a Saturday morning this year, which is a bit of a sod, as she really needs to sleep over in Grenoble the Friday night and she can't do that at the boarding school - luckily we've found someone who'll put her up.

Jeremy's gone into 6eme at collège - the equivalent of Form 1, or whatever it is now - and has discovered the delights of having homework. It does not impress him. I can understand that. Doesn't help that he really misses Malyon - rather more than we thought he would. I really don't know what we can do about that. He's asked to see the school shrink again, to talk about things - I suppose that's a good sign.

Anyway, the grape harvest has kicked off and so for the next month the departmentales will be clogged by tractors with enormous trailers either laden with grapes on their way to the winery, or empty and banging their way across the road at the slightest hint of a bump as they head back to get filled up with grapes again. I'm back on the nationales and autoroutes until further notice.

In the weather department it's fine enough, still up in the twenties during the day but in the mornings you can tell it's autumn. Apparently it wasn't that much better when we were with you. Let's just hope it stays fine for the next month or so - keep the fuel bills down.

Love to you all
Trevor & Margo

16/05/04 French Connection, n°3 -a quick note

Hello again.

Just a quickie, to let you know that we're still alive and have not yet been condemned by Rumsfeld to whatever pit of Hell it is that has jurisdiction over cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

We've finally made it through the winter and are feeling comfortable enough to have turned off the central heating - just as well given what's happened to the price of fuel oil recently. It's almost warm enough for Margo: it's 27° in our bedroom right now, which is certainly warm enough for me.

And of course the garden is growing - mostly weeds, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to go down there soon with a low-yield atomic bomb (buy one from Pakistan over Internet) in an attempt to get rid of the dandelions and thistles, then I'll have to reseed a vast patch of lawn that was doing very well for itself until the heatwave last summer but which has, since then, turned into a sort of thistle nursery. Having a flock of cows invade in January didn't help matters, as they crapped everywhere (of course), left great holes from their hooves and ate back one of the feijoas to the ground: happily it seems made of hardy stuff and has started to grow back.

One of those months when everyone disappears: Toerag went off for a week to Barcelona, then Jeremy disappeared for 10 days (school trip to the Ile d'Oleron, off Britanny) and now Margo is headed off in a couple of days for two weeks in England with her class. I'm the only one who's not going anywhere.

We're also trying to get Toerag into the International College at Grenoble. Which means that tomorrow morning I have to get her down there for the oral exam: the written part was last week. Should she be accepted (and it's not a walkover, given the number of English-speaking students who apply [Grenoble's a hi-tech centre with an awful lot of expat Americans and English {remember, too many embedded brackets are a sign of a sick mind}]) she'll do her brevet international, and the closest simile I can come up with for that is a multi-lingual bursary exam. It involves lots of work - the standard Frog exam plus 10 hours per week minimum of instruction in English - good.

Whatever, it'll get her out of the house. Not that she's a pain, just that she's a thoughtless, egocentric self-absorbed verging on hormonally-overdosed child of 14 going 15 who is discovering boys and hours spent in the bathroom with Yves Rocher (thank god we now have a sufficiency of bathrooms, although it's a bit unfair on Jeremy who has to share with Malyon). Yes, I know this is normal adolescent behaviour, yes I know that you've all gone through it or soon will, that doesn't really help. She can still be a right pain.

Jeremy has been going off to see a "pyschomotricienne" for the past six months now, and it seems to have helped him a lot. Well, we think so anyway, and as we're the ones paying for it, that's probably what counts. The general consensus is that he was sufficiently uncomfortable with his body to push him into mild depression, so the therapist has him doing happy-clappy things (I exaggerate a bit) and the results are enough that I don't regret the fees. He's a happy lad. Fortunately, it hasn't stopped his ability to have (when he wishes) an intelligent adult conversation, which is always a good party trick.

The animals are fine: Kelly is still spaced out on her epilepsy medication but she's still the enormous bad-breathed loving hulk she's always been, just a bit calmer. The guinea-pigs have made us rather doubt Jean's sexing ability - they were supposed to be two females, but Punk has bits and a tendency to hump stones - or Blueberry, when she doesn't have a headache. No baby guinea-pigs as yet, so perhaps we're reading too much into this. Could be just animal high spirits.

Our plans for the summer involve doing as little as possible, and getting away to Palavas (yes, the Mecca of the Français moyen) for ten days in July: any suggestions concerning reasonable excuses for not doing things around the house that I know really ought to be done but have no great wish to do will be gratefully accepted.

Love
Trevor, Margo, Brats, Animals

(Oh, we let the bird go. Margo took it down to the vet - she had to take Kelly down anyway - and he said she's fine, let her go. Then the stupid thing flew off, perched on a halogen and burnt her tailfeathers off - end result, we had to keep her for another month. Until they grew back. Cretin. She finally flew off, and my office floor is no longer covered in bird-seed and straw. Happy ending.)

23/12/03 Seasonal Greeting

The subject says it all. Hairy Gristlemouse, everyone, and a very Furry New Bear.

Being in Old Europe, where such things happen, it's snowed here - at last. Unfortunately the kids aren't here to enjoy it: Margo took them off to Pesselière on Monday, where it seems that they're still anxiously awaiting snow. They may be disappointed. I head off tomorrow, which is why I'm now in a mad rush trying to get things organised: clothes, finding forgotten packages and leaving them out conspicuously so that they don't get forgotten again, get files on the portable up to date and get it packed away ...

The house alterations have been legally declared finished, so we must believe this to be the case. As it happens it's true, if you don't count a myriad little details, and right now I don't feel like counting.

Anyway, it's another year down the drain. Nothing particularly notable happened - not a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned - and if I've any luck at all, and have lived a good and moral life, as I believe I have, 2004 will be much the same.

To finish, a short excerpt from The Economist: "... without its hyphen, extra-marital sex would be in a completely different moral sphere ...". And try to remember that the ratio of an igloo's diameter to its circumference is Eskimo pi.

Merry Christmas
Trevor

15/11/03 So far, so good ... this is not an advertisement for Viagra

Although I'm sure, with the special offers that keep pouring in, I could get you some cheap if need be.


Anyway, we made it back from Croatia - of which more later - to find Jeremy's bedroom destroyed (it had, as planned, turned into the landing) and our putative bedrooms upstairs accessible via a ladder. We quickly arranged a hotel room for Jean & Leigh that night, and then for the rest of their stay we managed to park them at Sue's place, she and the kids having gone off on holiday. We squatted on mattresses on the floor for a month until, coming back from Pesselière, we found the stairs had been put in, so quickly painted and moved upstairs before Jean and Jean-Michel (the builders) could have second thoughts.


Right now it's almost over, and we even had the builders round for dinner last Saturday to celebrate. I got the kids' bathroom finished last weekend, after heroically wrestling with lino that didn't really want to fit in such a small space, and now there's just our ensuite to get finished: painted, silicone all around the shower box and the lino to go down. I hope to get the painting done tomorrow, and I am not looking forward to the lino.


Still, we're living up there, we're very pleased with it - lovely and luminous with all the windows - and at last we have a bit of room. And when - in a couple of weeks - our bathroom gets finished, guests will have their own bathroom on the first floor which doesn't have to be shared with Malyon wanting to wash her hair for three hours.


My office - what used to be Malyon's bedroom - needs repainting and shelving putting up so that I can move fifteen years oif BYTE magazines and a cubic metre of junk off the floor, but that can wait. Who knows, I might even find time to get it done over the winter. There's a staircase to be varnished and a couple of windows to be done as well, which is probably higher priority.


Margo's been busy: put crépi up in what was our bedroom and turned it into her sewing/junk room, which has allowed us to empty out the library and the living room downstairs. She's also plastered and then waxed the walls in the first-floor living room, and at long last the TV has moved up there. The walls are a warm terra-cotta, and we're planning on painting the skirting-boards in a sort of raspberry-crush: we like it, even if the kids don't. We'll sell the place before they can inherit, so their opinion doesn't really count.


There are still about five zillion things that need doing: the skirting boards upstairs, light fittings to be bought and installed, pictures to be hung and half the first floor to be redecorated (finally get rid of the incredibly kitsch "Venetian Festival" wallpaper!) but I think we'll slow down a bit for the next few months. Done enough. Shagged out. Bored witless.


There have been no fatal accidents during the renovations so we're all alive and kicking. Work's going nicely - although I may have to head off to some godforsaken hole up North, near Metz, on Tuesday to look at some problems for the SNCF - and Margo's working fewer hours, which seems to please everyone. Malyon is a teenager starting to suffer from the "oppressive parents" syndrome - mind you, we managed to send her off to England for ten days a couple of weeks ago, for a walking trip in the Lake District with cousin Mandy, and very nice it was too (for us, mainly) - and Jeremy is still Jeremy. He asked to see the school psychologist a month or so ago, and the upshot of their interviews is that he's a bright kid, not particularly at ease in his body, and afraid of failure to the point where he has two primary and five backup reasons as to why it wasn't really his fault. Runs in the family, I suppose. Still, Margo turned out OK in the end, so there's no reason he shouldn't.


France is - slowly - modernising and with luck ADSL will arrive at St Pierre sometime next year (according to the Mairie, "very soon. Like, December 2004". We must have different ideas about the meaning of "soon"). When it does I shall jump upon it and get the place outfitted with a router and radio network, and waste a weekend getting it all set up Whilst waiting I've done something I've been thinking about for a while and ordered a webcam, the idea being that I can then waste another weekend installing it and the necessary software for doing video over internet. Then, assuming that Jean & Leigh pay someone to install things at their end, the kids will be able to chat with their grandparents.


The grape harvest is done and the wine is bottled, we're enjoying a beautiful Autumn and I'm going to bed. After a bit of cut'n'paste, to give you the few follwoing paragraphs -


As for Croatia - which we loved, to the point of seriously considering heading back next summer - what follows are my admittedly terse notes made at the time (you try writing a novel on a Palm):

Well, here we are - Margo and I, the kids, Jeannie & Leigh and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, comfortably ensconced in a villa in Trogir, Croatia. We left rather later than planned - as usual - on Friday morning, leaving the house in the hands of the builders after extracting a promise that it'd still be standing on our return: they were going to attack the electrical renovation of the first floor during our absence and if we've any luck the staircase up into the new part will be there too when we get back. The dog is staying with friends - hopefully she won't walk straight into their swimming pool without noticing it, as she did last time - and a neighbour is looking after the kitten.


Did the trip down in two legs, probably just as well as it took fifteen hours rather than the twelve that Michelin rather optimistically planned. Not really Michelin's fault, just that the last 400 km we did at an average speed of 45km/h, rather less than I'd expected. Everything went swimmingly down to Trieste (apart from losing our way around Turin and taking the southern bypass rather than the northern, but that only cost us 30 km and it seems that everyone gets it wrong) and then we went through Slovenia and into Croatia and found a zimmer for the night with a shade under 400 km left to go, but the next day we attacked the coast road between Rijeka and Split. As did, apparently, 90% of the planet's population, with the majority being Dutch people with caravans. A very scenic - dare I say it beautiful, if a bit desolate - road, but what in France we'd call a departementale, and poorly maintained at that. I am so glad that air-conditioning is standard on modern cars.

Anyway, we made it to Trogir - not as early as I'd hoped - and got shown to the villa, settled in and took the kids down to the Adriatic, about 50m from the doorstep. Where they plan on going at least twice a day, or until they get sick of it. Tomorrow we might make it into the old town - if we can find a park - and wander around so that I can play with my brand-new digital camera, an Olympus C5050 that the company thoughtfully bought for me just before we left.


As far as I can see, the economy of Croatia seems to be based on renting out one's house to tourists over the summer. Oh, there's doubtless other things, but that does seem to be the principal activity. Godnose where the actual people go - into the cellar for the duration, perhaps. Or perhaps, like the house we're in, they build 'em specially with an extra floor, to be rented when possible and used as extra living space when not. Maybe they decide to spend summer with the grandparents - maybe they go somewhere even poorer - Albania, say - for their holidays. I really don't know.


Whatever, in France you'd be paying probably twice as much in rent and general living expenses, to find youself on a dirty beach with twice as many people around, so personally I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.


Trogïr is a walled mediaeval city on an island just 30m from the coast, classed world heritage by UNESCO and effectively extremely charming, quaint and touristic. Also no doubt expensive by Croatian standards but dirt-cheap by Frog ones. It boasts a small port, a drydock and a marina where you can find lots of small craft, ranging from 20m schooners to small Italian motor yachts - small meaning 30m long minimum, three floors above deck, a couple of radomes that'd put NASA to shame, two or three gorillas bulging out of their suits and registered in the City of London. I suspect we're talking serious money here. Split, about 20km south, is also a world heritage site, as is Dubrovnik, about 200km south. The country seems to be festering with them. We made it to Split -via public transport - but didn't really want to try taking either cars or the bus to Dubrovnik - especially as the thermometer didn't get below 40° during our stay.


Oddly enough, Margo arranged everything over the internet - that's not odd in itself, I know, what's odd is that it all turned out so well. The villa was all it was represented as being, if not more; the guy (Mario?) that ran the tourist agency was charming, honest and looked after us above and beyond the call of duty; one or other of the grandmothers (couldn't tell which one, I think they're interchangeable) of the lessors inundated us with tomatoes and cucumbers ... which is odd really because in Croatia the vegetable seems to be a protected species. When you order your meal it will be copious (as are the beers: the small glass is 50 cl) and will generally consist of a half-kilo of meat, some chips, and a lettuce leaf. Unless you've ordered salad on the side, in which case you'll get a trough of tomatoes. Think to order vegetables, which will get you (in our experience) a half-dozen wisps of barbecued aubergine.

Mario also arranged us cut-price tickets on a boat trip (his boat) to one of the islands about 10km offshore, and that's where I'd like to go back, if not next summer then the year after (whenever we have some cash). We stopped in at one end, at a bay which had fairly recently but quite tastefully been set up as a vacation center - small 2-storey villas hidden amongst the trees in a ravine leading back from the bay - and then, at the northern end, at a small port. Which had a big auberge, a few shops, and that was about it. Apart from the deserted bays, in one of which I nicked Malyon's schnorkel and mask and had more sheer pleasure than I've had on holiday for a long time, just diving around in crystal-clear water annoying the fish. I think I could happily spend a couple of weeks there, perfecting the art of doing nothing.


The trip back home was relatively uneventful, apart from managing to lose one another - godnose how we managed it, but we wound up with Margo a hundred km ahead of me. Of course her cellphone didn't work in Croatia, and Malyon's phone chose that moment to run out of credit for voice calls and would only do SMS - unfortunately Margo had Malyon's phone and Malyon was in my car and Margo couldn't work out how to write SMS on Malyon's phone (it uses T9 and is set up for Frog). But we managed to catch up with one another and stayed at the same zimmer we'd stopped at on the way down. The owner was quite chuffed (it was, incidentally, very nice - large rooms opening out onto a huge private balcony) and pressed a couple of bottles of Croatian grappa onto us as we left. (And extremely nice it is too.)


Then of course we made yet another wrong turning around Turin (which, as already noted, everyone does: a lack of clear signposting does NOT help) and arrived home under the first rain for months (literally) to find that the entire first floor had been rewired, the staircase was not yet in, and Jeremy's bedroom had turned into a landing. So we put Jeannie & Leigh into a motel for the night and camped on the floor.


Trevor & Margo

03/07/03 The rain in Spain

The rain may, in fact, be in Spain but as it happens I don't care, the problem is that the rain is not here. Nor has it been within spitting distance for a month or so. Consequently the garden is dry as a bone - actually reduced to watering the lawn to avoid desertification - and on top of it it's stinking hot, been floating around the 30's mark for the past three weeks. All rather exceptional for June.


As usual, now that it's summer and all right-minded people are contemplating their month's vacation on the beach, the orders come in. So far I have a Windows CE platform to get up and running, a keyboard device driver for some rather special hardware under W2K, a few radio terminal/barcode reader and EDI interfaces to do for the stock-control system and a weather station to hook up to the surveillance system in Cameroon. Business as usual. A quiet summer would've been nice, but I can see that it's not on the cards. Oh, I also had to head off to Geneva again to take a look at an embedded system (under Windows 3.11) where there's a slightly litigious conflict between Gespac (the supplier, and my client) and Alsthom - had to dust off my 10-year old CDs and drag out the old DOS toolbox.


Reminds me that when at Gespac we started chatting about retirement, as you tend to do (and it's also a rather hot topic in France at the moment), and one thing led to another and Vincent, my client, asked Sandrine, one of their programmers, what year she was. The answer was 1978, and I sadly reflected that she was busy being born while I was undergoing my last full-time year at Massey. This makes me feel no younger.


A quick word for Ken Ashman - I finally got to go on the TGV trip I'd been promised by the AEF. Made for a long day: Chambéry-Paris, then on to the test TGV for a quick trip up to Brussels (riding in the driver's cabin), then off to Calais, then Lille, back to Paris and home again to Chambéry. When you're sitting in the front, watching through the windscreen as posts flash by at 320 km/h, it feels FAST. Now what I need to arrange is to go on one of the speed trials.


I know I mentioned the saga of our naturalisation proceedings: for the moment it's on hold. I did in fact write a rather shirty reply to their last request, and eventually received a form letter to the effect that if we couldn't supply all the documents required the dossier would be closed - leaving us until December to decide. The mairie and the Préfecture were very sympathetic, but said that the matter was out of their hands: personally I'm tempted to let the whole thing drop. It's not as though I need to be a Frog-person.


The work on the house is going ahead full-tit: the builders have been at it for the last six weeks or more, and two weeks ago I actually got the building permit! So now the windows have gone in up in the attic, and we can actually see what's been done. Which is, in fact, quite a lot: the floor's down, all the interior partitions are up, this week the showers and toilets go in and Jeremy's bedroom disappears (well, metamorphoses into a landing) ... we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and are pretty sure it's not a train coming in the opposite direction. I do still have to get the permit allowing us to be connected to the sewers - odd, giving that we're no longer allowed to be on a septic tank - but that should be relatively painless (although I'll still have to pay, of course).


I spent some (a lot) of time a while back upgrading various machines, thanks to getting a new Dell a the office. So as usual the old office machine came home, the home computer got downgraded to Margo's machine and Margo's old machine went to a worthy cause ... except this time I didn't just swap machines around ('cos the old office machine was very noisy, having an industrial-grade fan in it) but decided to swap motherboards. Which I did, expecting the worst. And much to my surprise, it didn't happen! Each and every machine booted up, said something along the lines of "Windows has discovered new hardware and is now installing the necessary shit" and carried on! Almost as simple as in the old days. I still find it rather difficult to believe.


It's also been new car time. The lease on the 146 ran out mid-June so I arranged for my new car: a bright red Alfa (what else?) 156 station wagon. What the French call a "break de chasse" because it looks like a station wagon but you can't actually fit more in the boot than in the standard version - I don't care, she looks beautiful and I love her very much. Only problem is the leather upholstery, which is a bit sticky when it's 35° and you're wearing shorts. Shame they don't do a convertible version of the 166 for the next time I change up. The BMW has also gone, replaced by a little Suzuki Sport Wagon (also bright red). What Margo wanted, what we needed as a second car, and hideously cheap. They actually gave us 1000 euros as a trade-in for the BMW (about 5 times what it was worth) and then they didn't actually want the thing: rather than go through the hassle of trying to get rid of it ourselves we made them pay us the symbolic 1 euro for it and they filled the tank up on the new car. More than I'd expected, actually.


Other than that life just goes on, more or less as usual. Jeremy has headed off down to the Mediterranean with Sophie, Lucas and Rémi for a week's holiday on the beach, and Jeannie & Leigh should turn up here on the 11th (or thereabouts) before we all head down to Croatia for a week. Raewyn, our bridesmaid, is turning up on Friday (that's tomorrow) for a weekend in France - that's about it, really.


Love
Trevor, Margo, sprogs and animals