« 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.
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