The past month has been busy, with two family groups overlapping so we had 9 to eat one Friday. A great pleasure to see Katherine & Ian en route back from a Mediterranean cruise, and the Cassidy family visiting from England for cousin Chris's 300th birthday treat. Time flies, and we feel increasingly fortunate to be relatively well and healthy despite the advancing age which so often restricts people including many of our dearest friends.
After the hi-jinks of last months' birthday season we are now into an autumn of French conversation and other regular activities. I thought it would be interesting to sketch a typical week in our lives. Monday (when as Flanders & Swann remind us the gasman came to call) is Mary's busy day for cello in termtime. I have a catch-up day at home and make lunch for us when she pops back beetween lessaons and group sessions. Tuesday mornings are conversation times almost every week, either here or at someone's house - often somewhere in the Vaunage valley north-west of Nîmes. The network now called SEVE (never mind what the acronym stands for) which used to be called the Réseau d'Echanges Réciproques des Savoirs or RERS has a membership mainly in the western Gard, on the other side of the river Vidourle. That river, which is notorious for floods from water rushing down from the Cevennes hills to the north, forms a kind of boundary between the Gard département and ours, the Hérault which stretches way further west beyond Béziers.
Our Tuesday language group has run weekly more or less continuously since we arrived here in 2006, and used to focus on anglophones learning French, but more recenly there has been a steady corner of French people wanting to improve their English. Now we also have a smaller group working on our French, meeting on Friday mornings. Both usually run from 10-12 followed by a shared lunch, to which people bring delicious food and wine. Various ways of working on language have been tried over the years, but nowadays for French we tend to have a book which we take turns to read, then translate out loud.
Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually blank days, and the weekends vary a lot. Gardening and housework happen of course regularly - in the garden Mary is a bit more flexible than me ans so does most weeding, and I mow and prune when needed although we now rely on our splendid factotum M. Beaumann for much of the heavier pruning as well as major repairs around hte house and on the roof! My floor cleaning days are Mondays or Fridays, at times when Mary is out.
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| The murier platane just given its winter trim |
On the whole we have a quiet life, and no longer do B&B as we did often in our first years here, but visitors sometimes come in clumps and this month we have welcomed 7 people - my niece and her husband on their way back from their holiday, and my cousin Mary with her family, so we sat down 9 people for one meal last week
We also welcomed son Sam for a few days - a really nice visit, with a couple of meals out including one at the new Lunel restaurant Maison Soubeiran, a family concern aith a woman chef/proprietor, full of interest and quite classy. Meanwhile we have enjoyed visting winemakers (large and smaller-scale) and tasting with another group which has met regularly since soon after our arrival here.
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