all we have to do now, is wait……

 Enjoying the garden,  we call park

The lambs in the next field remind us that we are on the good side of Winter at last...

Every single day I walk at least three times around my park. HOSS barks at the air, I chicky chick to my hens on the way past the barn to circumnavigate the whole park and in three and a half years and am still not bored. I encourage Mike to come with me for the day time walks as he is not up for it first thing in the morning whilst cuddling his first cuppa of the day and by the time the last walk comes round he is snuggled down on the sofa so I do a lot of  this walking on my own and I absolutely treasure the time.

The mobile homes have been emptied and refilled,  I took all the crocks and cutlery out and have updated with equipment I already had from our previous venture.  We have made decisions as to what stays and what goes, what we can afford to replace and what we need to tart up and make good. We are doing this now because we are in the waiting zone, waiting for the electric people to get “sparked” up and send us the form to get their process started, waiting for the JCB driver to look at the  “hole “ job, waiting for the water people to get off their “butts”  and put in the new meter and at the same time waiting for our favourite men at point P to organize a quote for a cement lorry to come and unload seven cubic meters of concrete. So we wait and we wait and we wait. Today we also had to wait for the chappy from Car Glass, we had a stone hit the windscreen on the camper and I called their instant as a flash hotline service to organise a man, who can, and replace the glass. Five days later and after many calls it was decided that our file had been lost and could we start again, and after all that we would  need to get the camper  to St Lo for a morning next week. I was very disappointed because all the adverts talk about the home visit that takes all the inconvenience out of replacing a windscreen and I smartly explained my feelings to customer services gentleman who was most glorious in his response and said that I should not be concerned and he would organise an engineer to come to us here at Bucaille at nine o’clock  Thursday, seven days after the first call.  I said “Bravo young man” there is hope for the French customer services business after all and he should be proud of himself, and he was. He called this morning to say the engineer was on his way . With high hopes of a perfectly executed process the engineer took one look at the van and admitted he had been given a screen for a much younger model. He looked at our Carte Gris, breathed out and said.  You’ve re-registered this vehicle haven’t you ?  I wanted to tell him about the year long agonising and expensive process to put an English camper on French plates, but I didn’t pursue that line of chat as I already knew by the look on his perfectly calm and rational face that the process from hell was about to bite my bum again and we were not going to get a new windscreen today. The order is in for a windscreen and we now have to wait. and wait…

I am not sure if I have mentioned my little hobby that is becoming an obsession in the form of book keeping. I collect receipts like confetti and I then log all the details onto an excel spread sheet and I have to admit I find the whole process food to my control mechanisms. I can at any time tell Mike how much we have spent on group 6, that’s food,  1 is petrol, 19 is land and garden and so on. Today Mike declared that he needed to replace the drive belt to the lawn mower and  asked me what size did we buy last time, I just went to the excel spread sheet found the entry then found the receipt and Mike was furnished with the reference number for the belt. We went over to our local mower supplier and as is the norm I did not know what to call a drive belt in French and  had to walk to the wall and point and jump about a bit but I jolly well had the reference number and the manager, who knows us well,  stood there in shock that we may now have a little  knowledge and that is very dangerous for him. He promised to order referenced belt and it arrives Saturday, we hope, so all we have to  do now is wait……