MEETING THE MAYOR

The mayor of our village called at the house with a letter for us, from the water company, asking if we could pay by direct debit.  We had decided to pay the bills as they cropped up and perhaps pay by direct debit when we were in residence. 

The mayor was not at all as I imagined.  He called as Andy was sitting on a chair in the front garden with a can of beer and smoking his pipe, whilst I was dressed in cut-off jeans, hair pinned up, scraping paper and covered in paint and with bits of wallpaper stuck on everywhere. 

Andy managed to get his ‘heureux de faire’ bit in but I was totally tongue-tied!  Andy had been practicing his ‘party piece’ of greeting the mayor for weeks.  The French phrase books usually give the pronunciation of the full greeting for the mayor.  We did not really say much to him, although we had wanted to ask many questions including, “Help! The windows are rotten, do we need permission to replace them?” or, “We have two collections of things which may be of interest to tourists to the village, would you like them to be available for visitors to the village?”  We would leave that for a future visit.

On a wander around the village, we discovered that it is a ‘tourist walking village’, with several routes marked out on the notice board outside the Mairie (the Mayor’s office).   There are a few attractions in the village, like gardens full of concrete animals and figures called ‘Jardin Extrodinaire’.  There are no shops or cafes in the village so most of the ‘tourists’ are those who like walking around the countryside.

At the bottom of the lane behind the house is a man-made lake to take the rainwater from the new drainage system.  It was being landscaped and is lovely now it has been completed.  Fishing is also allowed in the lake.

I cleared out the porches, which were full of junk and also several boxes of medicines.  Looking at the medicines I realized that the previous occupants had not lived there for some time, as the bottles and boxes were all for small children, or baby, use.  The children of the previous owners were quite grown up.  I did not think the house had been lived in for some years – not just a year as we had been told.

Under all the piles of junk in one of the porches was a letter addressed to us – this was over 6 months old and was from the removal company asking us to confirm everything and also thanking us for using their company.  We thought the removal men may have left it there. 

I noticed that every time I had swept up, Andy found something to saw or chop, thus leaving yet more debris for me to clear!

FRENCH PLUMBING

As we had still been unable to utilize the hot water, I had a chilly strip wash and Andy braved a cold shower!  I had the feeling that no-one had lived in the house since the bad storms of about 4 years previous, which, we had been told, had taken the roof off.  We also thought the previous occupants were planning to put a wash-basin in the roof rooms and never actually completed the task.  It eventually turned out that the tank we had found in the roof space was a header tank for the central heating, not plumbing for a basin.

As we got so dirty, we decided to check in to a motel for our last night, so that we could get cleaned up, as we still had no hot water.  This was the same motel we had used previously with no problems.  We had previously stayed three nights and paid at the end of our visit.  The Receptionist took one look at our appearance and asked for the money up front!