Full complement again at La Basse Cour

« Ta femme, elle est arrivé hier ? » I was asked by Christophe, our gardien (goalkeeper) as I arrived for hockey on Sunday.

“Yes, she’s reading the paper in the car and she’ll be along to watch the start of the game”

“Does she speak French?”

“Yes, a bit, not quite to my level but she says she can understand everything I say in French”

“That’ll be good - because we can’t!”

Barbara’s flight, scheduled at 09:40, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at 09:41 on Saturday morning. One minute late after over twenty four hours travelling – pretty good going! I’d left home at 4:15 to drive to Paris via Nantes, Angers, Le Mans and the manic Paris Boulevard Peripherique at 8:30 on a Saturday morning as half of Paris was leaving at the start of the Easter school holidays. Driving a French plated car makes me feel less conspicuous on the road but also, on the evidence of the first week, means other drivers now treat me like a native driver rather than with the wary caution accorded to a Brit driving on the wrong side of the road. The sun came up huge and brilliantly red in a clear sky as I drove past Le Mans and the drive was straightforward and easy until Paris as almost all long-distance road trips seem to be in France as long as you avoid a) Paris and b) the start and end of major holiday periods. We came back via a cross-country scenic detour from Laval that was a bit more scenic and cross-country than planned but showed Bretagne off to its absolute spring best and the recent warm weather (we had four days with temperatures above 25C last week) has had the farmers rushing out to cut the first grass of the year for silage.

Hockey on Sunday was a six-pointer against Carquefou, after surviving Christophe's joke, a shot that hit the post and a couple of desperate goalline clearances we went behind to a breakaway goal – the usual sort of bumpy breakaway goal that playing hockey on a grass rugby pitch tends to produce. Chris – our other rosbif player - equalised right on half-time with shot that was going wide until the goalkeeper deflected it in. It was clearly going to be our day after that and a dribbly scrambled goal fifteen minutes into the second half put us ahead. This was enough to win the three points but the defence ended patched-up as I got a big blow to the right knee from a stick (painful !) and Jean-Christophe took a hard ball on his right knee. That puts us clear in second place with one game to play.

We spent Sunday afternoon working in the sun in the potager and planted French beans, broad beans, peas, potatoes and set out the strawberries brought from Victoria Road together with a dozen new French stock I’d bought the previous week.

April already !

Gosh – a quarter of the way through the year, how did that happen ? And a busy week last week that achieved a lot but left me realising how much I still have to do here.

I had a visit from two women doing a survey for the commune on waste collection (did I use the yellow sacks - yes, did I know which day the collection was - yes, how much rubbish – about 25 lites a week etc.), They said at the end that, from next year, we’d get a new micro-chipped bin and residents would be charged by weight for their waste collection. Which I’m quite in favour of as we re-cycle or re-use as much as possible although I’m surprised that an issue that causes so much light and heat in the UK seems to be coming to such a rural area as Noyal Muzillac.

On Tuesday our car had it’s contrôle technique test (French version of the MoT). I’d warned when I booked that it was a véhicule étrangère but it took ages as they (we) tried to work out which piece of information had to go where in the admin database, they looked up the settings for an English car on another database for the diagnostic machine, searched for an adaptor as the diagnostic plug on the car is different to a standard French one (no idea why as all the cars are made in Swindon) and they worked out why the speedometer output was wrong on the diagnostic (of course it was outputting in mph not kph). But, they were very friendly about it all throughout (I think it was something a bit exotic in their lives!)  and there were just two advisories – uneven tyre wear at the front and a split blade on the rear wiper (not part of the test but they checked it anyway). Otherwise, he said, it was “impeccable”. So I have the certificate, the sticky badge in the front window (for the gendarmes) and we don’t need to do that again until 2013.

Then off to Vannes to the prefecture to register the car in France. I reached the office at 10:45 to find it was shut with a group of cross people outside and a sign stuck to the shutters saying that, due to too many people (52) being in the queue at 10:37 they had shut the office for the rest of the morning to deal with the backlog. Unbelievable !!! What planet are these people on!! And it’s not open in the afternoon. That will be simply so there’s no danger of them going one minute into their two hour lunch break or risk going one minute over their 35 hours this week. I’ve avoided getting righteous or xenophobic on the blog about French bureaucracy so far but there is a limit!

So, early start again next day and it was chaos in the prefecture. It was 8:45 when I got in and I was number 40, they were up to 97 when I’d finished so I’m sure they closed the doors again after I left! I had all the documents necessary and the certificate of conformity from Honda was worth its weight in gold again. It was free from Honda UK but every other document I’ve read said that you have to pay the manufacturer around £100 for one. I have a receipt slip and the registration document will follow in the post and then I can get the new plates made, change the insurance and the car will be in its French plumage.

The Permis de Construire for the barn has come through approved with three provisions; usual ones about getting the fosse certified and any new services (electricity/ water) having to be connected at the boundary in accordance with the suppliers regulations plus one saying that we have to plant trees that are “haut tige” – I think that means high standard shaped trees (but not sure what “high” means, 3m or 6m??) – at a density of one per 150m2. For our terrain this means about 20 but of course we have planted 16 already if arbres frutiers can be considered as haut tige, maybe we can claim they are arbres floraisons. We’ve got another four already in pots as well. Actually I think this provision is to delineate our terrain with the house from the surrounding agricultural land and I feel that’s quite a good way to do it. I took the accusé de réception (receipt) into the Mairie on Saturday and briefly met and shook hands the mayor who was on his way to perform a marriage ceremony.

The postie came round to talk to me this week and said our grounds looked good, that it must be a lot of maintenance work and would I like to buy his ride-on lawnmower that he’s selling. I thanked him but said we had already ordered one ;o) I’m looking forward to it being delivered as the grass cutting is fast becoming an epic event, the last cut took six and a half hours and two re-fuels. The field has a very vigorous growth of dandelions and I counted the number of dandelion heads I cut on one strip (478) and there are about eighty strips so that’s 37,500 dandelions on our grass. And I cut the same number down last week and I’m sure it will be the same number next week – that’s 100,000 dandelion flowers on our field in three weeks!

Sunday hockey was off down the autoroute to Angers in our bilingual car – Chris and I talking in English in the front and Adrien, Max and Denis in the back speaking French with little front-back interchanges in French. One or two problems with directions coming from the back in French but we got to the University pitch without drama and won 5-0. The team didn’t play so well but the defence is playing OK as a unit and getting used to me passing to them at the back (rather than thrashing the ball forward all the time) and so Christophe our gardien only had two kicks all game. That puts us second on goal difference but a long way behind the runaway winners Laval.

And the highlights from March:

Maximum Temperature:  23C

Minimum Temperature:   -2C

Frost days:                   8

Rain days:                    3

First flowering dates:

Nectared Nectarine        10^th

Peach                           15^th

Nectared Nectarine        18^th

M27 Crab Apple            19^th

Polonais Apricot           24^th

Field plum (Quetsche?)  25^th

Sunset Apple                26^th

Golden Hornet Crab       31^st

Victoria Plum                31^st

First swallows               16^th

First cuckoo                  3^rd April