When I stepped off the plane in Tours on Saturday afternoon, dressed in the same basic dress-leggings-cardigan combo I'd been rocking solidly throughout Norway and the UK, I confusedly thought that the jet engines of the plane were pumping out a lot of heat. While I'm sure they were moving the air around, it soon transpired that it was just that hot. Saturday was (I assume) the hottest day of the year, with temperatures reaching 38.1°C in Tours and more than 40° elsewhere in France.
Temperature map at 5.48 pm Saturday. Tours is in Indre-et-Loire, the département with a 37 in it (also, coincidentally, the number of the département) which is sort of divided into two between the black and dark purple, north-west of the one right in the middle that says 40
You can imagine what it was like coming back to my little apartment under the eaves... I was super glad to be back for Bob though. I've never seen a cat panting before. I didn't even know a cat could pant! I wrapped him up in a damp towel and we had some cuddles by the fan. He still insisted on welcome-back cuddles on my lap despite the heat and the wet towel. Silly Bob!
I tried to get one with the towel over his head so I could call him Little Virgin Bobby, but he kept moving. Goddammit, Bob!
You can wrap me up like a mummy, but you'll never take my tail's FREEDOM!
Anyway, let's go back in time and recap the rest of my holiday in the UK. As promised, I made my famous wine jelly for M&D. The wine (South African) was horrible, but thankfully I managed to simmer/sugar the horrible out of it and the jelly was well-received! We couldn't get it into the fridge at first, but I was assured that it would set overnight on the bench. I knew that wouldn't work - how many jelly recipes have you seen saying "leave it to set overnight on a bench"? - and sure enough, it was still liquid in the morning, at which point Mum managed to manhandle a shelf out of my granddad's tiny fridge.
Mum, Dad, and my disembodied arm
I'm not sure whether Mum wanted to eat the camera or she was just too eager to start on the jelly
Going back even further in time, I think it rained every day we were there, starting off punctually when we landed in Liverpool on Wednesday.
Driving in Norway
Driving on the M6. Spot the difference.
However, it did brighten up on Thursday afternoon for a trip to Haworth, the famous home of the Brontë sisters. We visited Haworth en famille in early 2007, but the parsonage where the Brontës lived was closed in winter (in fact, this is my first time visiting Lancashire in summer since I was a kid. And I know Haworth is Yorkshire, but we are a Lancs family. Screw you, Yorkshire). This time, everything was open and the morning rain seemed to scare off some of the tourist trade, since it wasn't toooo busy. The museum itself is quite small and photos are not allowed, so I don't have any. It was really interesting though. I knew quite a lot about the Brontës and their works, but I did learn new things, such as that Jane Eyre was first published as an autobiography "edited" by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë's pseudonym), and Charlotte even pretended to be acting "on behalf of" Currer Bell with her own publishers (I had assumed they would be in on the secret, at least after the first books were published). It was also fascinating seeing the "little books" that the children wrote. They really are tiny, and the words are hard to read even with a magnifying glass
I also didn't know that the sisters were accomplished artists. I thought their sketches and paintings were far better than their brother Branwell's horrible oil paintings, but of course, being a boy, he was the one encouraged to pursue a career as a professional painter (although I suppose we should all be grateful that the girls weren't stopped from writing. Or not, depending on whether you had to suffer through them at school.)
His famous painting of his sisters. His other portraits were equally crude and unattractive, I don't know how he managed to get people to pay for them. Maybe because they didn't feature someone getting Raptured out of them.
The main street in Haworth
On th' moors. Either Lancashire or Yorkshire, on top of the Pennines
A green and pleasant land, and all that
Pretending to be the ghost of Cathy searching for Heathcliff. Or something equally foolish.
One thing about the moors is true - they certainly are windswept!
Oh, and by the way, without ever (in France) having turned a wheel in anger, as they would say in Formula One (i.e. "driven a car"), I now have waited out the three years of probation on my French licence. That means I can now rent a car, I have the full amount of points on my licence (points are taken off rather than added for infractions), I wouldn't have to carry an "A" (for "apprenti" - "apprentice") on my car window, and I wouldn't be charged a premium on my insurance. I have no plans to drive in the near future, but still, huzzah! Especially since (difficulties with driving on the right and in a manual car notwithstanding), I've actually been driving off and on since I was 19, so about bloody time!
So last weekend we had a pretty chilled-out time with my sister Jess, her friend Liz, and our mutual friend Marion (who lives in Tours, but knows Liz from uni in New Zealand. Oh and we discovered also that Marion used to work with my cousin, who is an actress back home - god, New Zealand is a small place at times). Some of the highlights were the hour-long dégustation of rosé wine - a bit awkward having to translate for the girls at times, hope I did okay. I learnt quite a lot about how rosé is made (there are two main methods, one which basically follows the method for white wine, and the other for red wine), but not sure how much of that information I passed on! We also got to hang out at the guinguette, the "famous" open air café/dance hall/concert venue on the banks of the Loire. It rained a bit while the girls were here, but it was still mild enough on the Friday to sit outside and have wine by the Loire. The opening of the guinguette is always a very welcome sign that summer has finally arrived in Tours. (Talking of which, it has been baking hot for the last couple of days, although thunderstorms are predicted next week.) We also had dinner at La Souris Gourmande, a cheese-themed restaurant which j'adore (their tartiflette is amazing, if you're ever in Tours), drank lots of wine (but didn't actually have any big nights out) and generally just hung out and relaxed.
I swore I was taking a break from alcohol, but that lasted until Wednesday, when it was so hot that not cracking open a bottle of rosé would have probably resulted in a criminal indictment. Then on Thursday, my friend Liz had just arrived back from Japan and I went round to help her deliver flyers for her business around our neighbourhood. I think we did about three blocks and then decided it was wine-o'clock. We seem incapable of just having a quiet glass and this was not helped by heading to a bar (same one I went to with my sister and friends across from the Souris Gourmande, if you're reading this Jess) where they are super friendly and nice and you can just sit at the bar and chat with all the regulars and your glass just keeps getting magically filled (and these glasses are about the size of a bucket to begin with!). We spent a lot of the evening chatting to a guy who had spent 12 years being tortured in a Vietnamese prison camp before breaking out, fleeing on a boat and getting picked up by a French navy vessel. Getting to meet people with stories like that is definitely a highlight about travelling! He was much better than the young French guy I got talking to later, who said things like "I have a complicity with my girlfriend" (meaning that they have an "understanding" that they can cheat on each other) and then when I said you can't say that in English, he looked up the word on his iphone and showed me that it existed (obviously having a completely different meaning in this context makes no difference) and said (quote) "you're not English so you don't know how to speak properly like an English person does". He also tried to convince me that "snob" is an adjective (as in "She's very snob", because in French they have just borrowed the word snob and thus say things like "Elle est tellement snob"), and then when I said it wasn't, he asked Liz, the "real English person" and damn Liz was like, "yeah, snobby" and the guy was all like IN YOUR FACE and just wouldn't listen when I said "NO! SHE SAID SNOBBY! NOT SNOB!". Plus he said New Zealand and Australian accents were the same and if he couldn't hear the difference it meant it didn't exist. Anyway, I might still be a little bit ragey about this stereotypical arrogant French guy, so we'll move on. (Although, one last thing, I was talking to arrogant Frenchman's friend later and he said that he didn't have a "complicity" with his girlfriend, she just cheated on him all the time and he was sad about it and trying to act like the big man about town to make up for it. It's not very elegant to crow, but I've got to say HA! He deserves it!)
On Friday, the attestation d'emploi I needed from my assistant job turned up, so I had to drag myself out of bed and across town to take it to the pôle emploi. I didn't want to wait since Monday is a holiday and obviously the sooner I get all the paperwork together, the sooner they might start paying me. It took like two and a half hours' round trip to just give them this piece of paper, since they were being rubbish at the reception and I had to wait to see someone else who took all of about 30 seconds to sort it out. Good news though, they still had my file (apparently if they decide it's incomplete, they just reject it and send it back to you, because of course that makes way more sense than just sending you an email saying "hey, we need one more piece of paper from you, can you bring it down?") so fingers crossed now everything will be in order and they'll make a decision on it soon.
Right, that's all of interest (supposing it was, in fact, interesting). I'm going to go catch some rays (21 degrees, my idea of perfection) before watching quali for the Monaco GP in a couple of hours. Hope it's sunny where you are too! Here's some photos from Greg's and my sister's visits to Tours.
I don't know if you can read this, but it says "Bastard is waiting for you at stand E8 at the Tours Fair". I was intrigued!
The west windows in the cathedral glowing in the afternoon sun
A shot of the cathedral from behind
Not a great photo (hello fake smile...), but the only snap we got together, courtesy of the covoiturage guy who was giving Greg a ride to Paris
Ducklings!!
An old church (or something) hidden behind the cathedral
Greg and St. Martin's at night
An old building I liked
Me and the ghost of Fritz, the famous elephant, as featured in the Super Best Tour of Tours Ever. I look strangely like my arms aren't attached to my torso, but I assure you they are.
My sister Jess and her friend Ratty got into the swing of things with Fritz as well
Me and Jess at the cheese restaurant. Mmmm, cheese
Liz, and Marion at the restaurant
There has long been a goat-about-town in Tours, which some guy takes around on a leash (you can see a glimpse of him hanging in a kebab shop here, on my first visit to Tours), but now there is a RIVAL GOAT, who rides around in a little cart pulled behind a bike! I've seen him twice in the last couple of days. Is this town big enough for two goats, that is the question??
And here's a video of my cat, Bob. Bob is normally frightened of everything (he was severely traumatised for about a week after Greg's visit, due to Greg running around the apartment gratuitously making dinosaur noises and so on, followed by me running the vacuum cleaner and not having enough time to give Bob make-up cuddles before the girls showed up from London), but I have recently discovered that he loves smoked chicken so much he's even willing to meerkat about in order to get it. If you don't know Bob, this will seem like less of a ground-breaking revelation, but honestly it's a big step! I have tried buying him toys and things, but if you roll a ball at him or whatever he gets scared and runs away and hides, so it is awesome to see him playing a little bit!
And here's an awesome video of my brother swimming in his own private waterfall in Hawaii. Frickin jealous!
Someone recently told me Bob looks like Salem. I got the reference straight away, of course, but that didn't stop me making fun of them for bringing it up heh heh. It's so true as well, same uber-round head and everything! How did I fail to see this before?!? So who's who?
And, finally, a couple of clips of Salem in action for your viewing pleasure
And in case anyone's wondering, I'm totally owning the fact that I'm sitting at home on a Friday night, drinking wine, playing with my cat and watching clips of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Sounds way cooler than whatever you're up to :p
