Decembre, janvier. Bonne année! Et je perds le plot.

We had a hectic but fun trip to Manchester for New Year, meeting family and friends. We stayed with our daughter near Platt Fields Museum and the Whitworth gallery so managed to see the Mary Quant

and Andy Warhol exhibitions as well as work by Deanna Petherbridge and Idris Khan. I’d been missing parkrun so persuaded my friend to walk it with me so we finished the old year on a good note.

 

We travelled over by car and ferry but hit traffic on the M25 on the outward journey so it took us thirteen hours. We set off in plenty of time for the return on New Year’s Day and had a clear run, caught the ferry two hours earlier than planned and were back in the flat at 1am.  We woke on January 2^nd to a light dusting of snow: a new view from above.

I have a target of walking one thousand miles this year. The town centre is small and I’m starting to know it quite well so headed out of town for a mile and a half to the Chapel du Carmel. It’s a modern building and I’ll be back to get a better look at the windows when the sun’s shining.

The sales started on Wednesday 12th. It was busy but there was none of the mad rush that we experience straight after Christmas in the UK. After working in retail for ten years and knowing the extra work for sale prep that somes a the busiest time of the year, I'd love this to happen back home. Much more civilised.

We are members at the Maison de Quartier, the local community centre. It cost all of 8 euros for both of us to join and we got a reduced price (12 euros each) for a Mediaeval banquet on 9^th. As we waited for the starter, there was a commotion outside and two knights appeared fighting with swords. One escaped into the hall, they appeared to call a truce and sat down to eat.

The food was as authentic as possible: a sort of herby flan, beef stew with a puree of leeks and other veg (no potatoes), bread, and a dessert of blanc-manger, which bore little resemblance to the blanc-mange which had been a staple (pink and often in the shape of a rabbit) at parties when I was little. There was, of course, wine, one as it came and one sweetened. Coffee followed though I’m not sure how authentic that was. A bargain for 12 euros.

I’m now doing two mornings a week on the mail distribution at the Croix Rouge. At the beginning of the year one of the men on our list had been found dead in the lorry in which he had been living. We have another client who is sleeping in his car. I don’t know his full story but he divorced and things went worse. In the very cold weather he’s been in a gym which is being used as a shelter.  A lovely guy, polite and friendly, looking for work.

My Nordic walking session includes a lot of technique exercises. This week the coach put out markers on the grass at the side of the athletics track, floodlit in the evenings. One of the markers "plots" was green and difficult to see. My cry of "J'ai perdu le plot!" translated (incorrectly) into English would likely have been "I've lost the plot!" No need for comment, thanks.

We've continued out exploration of various foods. The fishmonger on the market is wonderful. We haven't been great fish-eaters in the UK and identification has been easily done by looking at the packet but here it's another matter. These are just fish, no packaging and a label with the French name. As we never remember to take the huge dictionary (weighs about 2kg) with us it's frequently guess-work but has usually turned out well. This week we saw sandre and vive, neither of which we'd seen before.

We bought a vive, googled it (and how sad is it that the French don't use the word googler!) and found that it's weever fish, whose spines can be toxic. It came with a warning to wear leather gloves when preparing it to avoid getting speared by the spines on its back. Fortunately, these had ben ripped out by the fishmonger, though we did wonder why she'd washed her hands afterwards. The temperature was about -5. I keep meaning to ask her what hand cream she uses. It turned out to be a lovely fish - very firm flesh and quite meaty. We'll be buying it again. We like living dangerously.

The weather has been cold since the beginning of the month. For the last week the temperature has been mostly in minus numbers but we’ve had no rain so the roads and pavements have been good. After several days of grey skies, I made the most of the sunshine with a walk across town to the lake, almost completely frozen. 

We’d not been expecting much in terms of sky views during the winter but there have been some stunners. It can make washing up quite a slow business. 

Novembre et decembre: Noël approche

We didn’t get an early warning in September that Christmas was on its way. Things only started happening at the end of November when the Christmas lights went on around town: tiny lights festooned through the trees, mostly white but with accents of colour in various squares around the town. I was happy that our little square had bright blue lights and suddenly acquired Christmas trees at shop doorways and by lamp-posts

One of the shopping streets. Not quite Oxford Street but still pretty.

I’ve become a volunteer at the Croix Rouge française (French Red Cross). Apart from the better-known first aid side of things, we provide a service of domicilation: offering a postal address for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to receive mail. Of those whose backgrounds I know, there are immigrants from many countries, those just waiting for somewhere permanent, travellers, asylum-seekers and one man sleeping in his car. We log the mail as it arrives, put in the appropriate file and then the people sign it out when they collect. I went on a “Welcome to the Red Cross” training day in Lille in early December. We were told about the history, ethos and current activities of the Red Cross. Being in France, the lunch was rather good.

I was particularly impressed with the tiny bottle of salad dressing.

We continued the investigation into the restaurants of Valenciennes with a visit to an estaminet, whose had advertised in our butcher’s, so we reckoned it would be worth a visit. We walked a mile or so across town, along a road next to the dual carriageway and through a small industrial estate, across a dark car park and into Le Bonne Franquette: a bar crammed with bottles, red checked cloths on the tables, a Yorkshire terrier sitting on the first one…………..  It’s a different way of life and we seem to be getting used to it. We opted for going straight for the main course, pork steak or carbonnade flamande (beef stew) with chips, then some salad. It was huge, delicious and we ate it all, washed down with a bottle of red.

The pudding was some sort of ice-cream thing. I think eating the main course made anything else pale into insignificance. At least the walk back across the car park (crunch, crunch), through the industrial estate (ssh, ssh) and by the road (roar, roar) wore off a few calories.

For several years I’ve been meeting my “original” running friends on or very near the Solstice to see the sunrise. We’ve had many grey days when the sky just gets lighter, once with snow and one glorious day when the sky was deep blue and orange as we looked out form Clifton Suspension Bridge up the river Avon. Unable to meet this year, we opted for doing our own thing so I set off and headed along the Avenue de Verdun which was my best bet to see the sun between buildings. The very best view of the sky would, in fact, have been from the flat but that seemed to be missing the point. The sun rises about half an hour later here than in Bristol (8.44 instead of 8.15) as we’re towards the west of European Time so I had a very pleasant walk through the square and out of town.

At the appointed hour I was on a straight stretch of road with no real distinguishing features so I settled on a banner as my turnaround point and a way of reminding people to do something important. 

I’m unable to give blood while I’m in France as they won’t accept UK blood because of a perceived CJD risk. Back home for breakfast. It was lovely but not quite our usual Solstice bacon butty.

 A beautiful sunrise in early December, looking towards the museum.