It's been a year since we traded crazy London for the not-so-sleepy Poitou. Progress has been slow but are now seeing our dream house emerging from the chaos of the renovation. The heat-pump stands proudly in the front garden, the partition walls are up, plugs and switches are sprouting on them, a little bit more everyday, in tune with spring. Next the ceilings will be fitted, and all the electrics will be plugged in the - very expensive - fuse box, followed by the laying of our underfloor heating. Another layer of cement, and voilà! A ready-to-decorate house will finally be ours. But cautiously, relying in my newly acquired experience of French tradesmen, I do not expect to sleep in the house before at least September. Once bitten, twice shy.
Having the inside walls up is giving us a sense of the volume of the rooms. We were worried about the bathroom, the walk-in closet (that became a walk-through closet as one access the bathroom through it) and the library. But now that we can walk in each of them and have a feel of the space, we are relieved to see we made the right choices. I often walk in there while drinking my morning coffee, before going to work. I appreciate the light coming through the huge windows as the sun is coming up, and I imagine how the garden will look like once the tarmac will have been removed.
It has been a trying year for both of us albeit a very positive one. Fox had to undergo a third operation and will have to go back to hospital soon for corrective surgery. Seeing double and having a poor sense of depth is driving him up the wall but we are all too aware that he could have lost his sight and his eye, so we're trying to put things back into perspective. Being cooped up at home is no fun though, and Fox is impatient to drive again to go to one of his favourite places around here: the déchetterie. The local tip. Indeed.
As for me I've been told off by the cardiologist. I was in the right place mind you for I nearly had a heart attack when I climbed onto the scales: 94 kg (a bit over 14 st). Overweight (after seeing my face he knew the shock-tactic of telling me I was obese was unnecessary), smoking 40 a day, a stressful job and an artery already clogged up by cholesterol at 30%, I needed to change my ways. And my diet, of course. The one and only cheese and bread diet. It felt like being kicked in the bollocks, really. And this wonderful news came just one week before my birthday. I would have slapped him if he hadn't be really nice and friendly.
The big house opposite us, that was once a hotel and a restaurant, has been sold. It won't come as a surprise that the new owners are English. He came to the Galopin to introduce himself few weeks ago. We had a drink and got talking about the village and I just could not resist to make use of a little piece of information Alain had given me a little while ago once he mentioned that it was once one of the seven hotels in the village, by asking him if he knew that it had been a knocking-shop too. It was a bit cheeky but his face was a treat: shocked but trying not to be by laughing it off. Naughty me. They seem to be lovely people though, and we're happy that more people are coming to our village. That makes two more children as well, which is lovely for little Gaby, he'll have playmate during the summer.
One year on I'm still not used to the road kill. My heart still breaks every time I see one, or kill one myself. Well, I don't so much kill them as being an instrument in their suicide. It's birds mainly. They're like Kamikazes. You'd be driving to work or to the shop minding your own business when they suddenly dart from one hedgerow to the other one across the road and all of a sudden you hear a bang! and see a cloud of feathers. I'm on my fifth. I'm deadly, me.
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