les Davey de France

  We just spent three weeks in the UK. The first week was spent at our mission, UFM's, Summer Conference. We've always enjoyed these times - the conference centres are always clean and comfortable and you get catered for - our children used to think they were hotels. In addition you get some preaching and teaching - this time from an old acquaintance from Northern Ireland - and reports from people who serve in amazing places. We always feel like weaklings alongside the folk who paddle their way up the Amazon, or who work in remote parts of Central Asia. We had to do a seminar on preparing for retirement, which was well-received. Ella took us quietly and smoothly up to Caen for the ferry and we stayed overnight near the terminal before taking the early morning crossing. To get to the conference centre we had to use the M25, and it lived up to its promise. The second week was spent with my sisters and a nephew in a holiday cottage in Tenby. This was a straightforward trip down t...

The RER from Paris Charles de Gaulle takes you through Drancy, where those deported during the Second World War were collected from all over France to be transferred to the camps in Poland. I always shudder as I pass through and wonder what it is like to live somewhere with such a dreadful past. I changed at the chaotic and frantic Gare du Nord for the metro to Montparnasse and found a fold-down seat in the crowded carriage. An (even more) elderly man came and folded down the seat next to me and we began to chat. I don't think I asked his age, but I did ask him if he was from Paris.  "Oh, my story is a bit complicated." It turned out that he was born in the early forties to a couple of resistants. His father was captured and shot. His mother was deported. (This means she was sent to the camps, and almost nobody ever came back.) He grew up placed in a family. I talked about how different the UK experience of the war was, and how although my father served overseas, there is...

Back in perhaps 2007 or thereabouts we saw a table at Ikea. It wasn't part of their catalogue and had no strange name. It was just a big, heavy table in very solid pine, measuring 180 cm by 100 cm, or almost 6 feet by 3 feet. We fell in love with it and bought it and it became the centre of our life for almost 20 years.  It was where the children did their homework. It was where sewing projects were done. It welcomed family meals. It held Bible studies. It was where people ate, prayed, read and talked. It was the field where endless games were played. You could easily seat 10 people around it, and we regularly did. And more. It moved with us from our house to our small flat, where it dominated the living room. It then became the centre piece of our bigger flat and we put a makeshift bench at one end increasing its seating capacity. You could squeeze stools in, too. But now we've moved once more to a smaller flat and the table is just too big. I offered it to family and church f...

Who knows! However current thinking is that maybe we will not leave UFM completely, but will stay as long as we have some kind of useful service somewhere, somehow.  We'll keep you informed!

The DWP first acknowledged my request to be paid my UK State Pension from April. Then they sent me back my birth and marriage certificates. Then they told me by SMS that they had studied my case and written me a letter. We might be all systems go for the next phase of retirement. 

 1 cup sultanas 1 cup strong tea 1 tsp ground mixed spice 1 egg 1 cup self-raising flour Soak the sultanas overnight in the tea with the spice Next day mix in the egg, then the flour Bake at 180°C till a skewer comes out clean (30 to 40 minutes) Cool, slice, butter if required. Note well, if eaten unbuttered this tea-loaf has no fat and no added sugar.

The International Church in Marseille is one of our sister churches, and does a lot of event evangelism. Recently they held a Thanksgiving Feast, with an interview with Governor Bradford, and 111 people present. They buy imported American turkeys, make pumpkin pies and green bean casserole, and hire a chef for the day to get everything ready. Then each year they hold a Carol Service in the Basilique du Sacré Coeur, which is on one of the Boulevards of Marseille near the Protestant church where the international church used to meet. Although the Marseille church usually has fewer than 30 people attending, there are some wonderful networkers there and so they get a great turnout for their special events. They've invited me to go and be their speaker at Christmas a couple of times over the years, but Marseille is a long way to travel, and the talk lasts about 7 minutes, so I felt I could never accept. Anyway, who would preach at Bordeaux while I was away? But this year a couple of thi...

The Bordeaux Town Hall has put up posters in the city carrying this message. The words come from Gisele Pelicot, the woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and many other men. She came forward to denounce him, testified in court and explained why she's taken her courageous stand. She's not changing her name. She says that she wants her children and grandchildren to grow up having a reason to be proud of the name Pelicot. She said that it's not for her to feel shame. Victims should not bear shame. It's the perpetrators who should feel ashamed. "La honte doit changer de camp" - shame must switch sides. She's become quite a figure in France, where domestic violence and sexual aggression is too common. The town hall posters advocate for no tolerance of domestic violence.

Well last Saturday we met our granddaughter for the first time. She is the finest looking baby I have ever seen, with the exception of her uncle and her mother, of course. She has fine features, a decent amount of hair and is unusually alert. She loves having her head massaged or being gently tickled, and has taken to feeding as if milk is going out of fashion, which, of course, it soon will. She's generally calm but is subject to violent nocturnal attacks of unremovable wind. The life of a grandparent is as wonderful as they said it would be. In other news, after a week of procrastination I have submitted my application for French citizenship. I hit two snags on the website application : 1) they asked me to upload a United Kingdom DBS. However their list of documents didn't have that, and it would need to be officially translated, and I have lived in France for 19 years. If I need to do that then I guess I'll have to. 2) What category does pastor fit into? Am I employed? S...

The news arrived the other day of the sudden death of one of my cousins. People from South Wales usually have lots of cousins, and so did I, though the number is falling fast. Weddings and funerals are important occasions to get together and acknowledge the place that family plays in our lives. We usually can't get home for them, and I doubt if this one will be any different. Meanwhile a senior colleague is leaving Bordeaux. He's a wonderful man who knows the area really well. He's retiring up to the Dordogne - I teased him about going to live in the English region - and he'll be a big loss to the Bordeaux scene. I wouldn't want to retire up there - maybe to the coast - but he says he needs to give his successor some scope, and that everyone can understand. This week in Bordeaux they've been filming a period drama about the life of Chopin in Paris. Bordeaux was remodelled around the same time as Paris, so people often call it "the little Paris" - same ...

In one of the university buildings in Bordeaux is a hidden chapel, generally disused but kept in good repair. We went there once for a lunchtime concert, and it was a very fine experience. Recently I saw that the chapel was to be open for a show of son et lumière. This is a combination of projected images, typically on the walls and ceiling of the building but sometimes also on the floor, combined with music, either recorded or live. We have a permanent show at the old Nazi submarine base, and a wonderful show was recently put on at the Cathedral with a live orchestra. I can't remember why we didn't go - timing, perhaps - but we heard good reports of it. So I pre-registered to be able to buy tickets for this new show in the chapel. Then came the day to book, and the title was announced. Genesis - origins. I was torn. Doubtless the show would be impressive - I imagined the darkness, the stars, the coalition of the cosmic dust, the primeval soup, the lights, the music. But what w...

I ordered my parents' marriage certificate and was really pleased when it came, as well as their birth certificates. Then I looked again at the list of documents necessary to ask for French citizenship and I also need - their death certificates.  Oh well... almost there.

Those who once were regular readers may have noticed that regularity is harder to achieve. The blog is running down. This is due to various factors : 1) we are so used to living in France now that little is remarkable any more 2) I am so astonished by our political situation that I dare not comment 3) our service with the mission is slowly drawing to a close. So the blog has a use-by date. When we finally pull the plug on our active service with the mission I have vowed to withdraw from social media, and this includes the blog. Meanwhile I guess we'll be documenting our progress towards Christmas 2025 and our definitive retirement. We're awaiting our first payment from my old IT pension. I did get identical two emails the same day, saying that computer system problems were delaying our first payment. We'll keep you posted!

Whether or not things can only get better, I do not know. However it is good to see that the UK has not joined the drift to the extreme right, and there are a few people whose absence from the news bulletins will spark deep joy.

15 minutes of light work, including turning it upside down to tighten the bolts. To break up the cardboard boxes to go for recycling - 30 minutes of hard labour! But I got them all in the recycling bins!

The magnolias are flowering, the weather is mild, the rain is gentle and fine and I'm going to a garden centre! I'm after troughs to put on the balcony, compost, seeds for lettuce and tomatoes and also perhaps some trailing petunias and African marigolds (if I can remember the French name for them!)  

When I was a child this was the happiest day in the school calendar, except, of course, for the end of term... We prepared for weeks beforehand.  The school was divided into four houses - Dyfed, Gwent, Gwynedd (my house) and Powys. The houses were named after the old kingdoms of Wales. Dyfed's colour was red, Gwent's was blue, Gwynedd's was green and Powys' was yellow.  Some time before in February the competitions were announced. Each subject would set a competition, and there were additional competitions for music and for choral recitation. Each competition could win points to your house's score for first, second or third place, and there would be bonus points for especially good additional entries. I remember the following :  For Maths : Make an icosahedron. Make a dodecahedron. We had to find out what it was and construct one. For Religious Education : Make a model of a first century Palestinian house. For History and Geography it might be essays. For English yo...

 We're in a period of "grand froid" - when temperatures plummet and emergency accommodation is organised for the folks who live on the street. It won't last. Next Wednesday we expect 18°C.  Meanwhile today it snowed. Pretty much all day.

French politics is quite confusing for British people. Brits are used to static parties that don't change their names and which occupy a certain space in political thought - be it left, centre or right. Those positions drift, and there are spectra within the parties, so you can talk of the Tory left, the right wing of the Labour Party, etc... But it's always Labour, Conservative and whatever the other one is called. In France it's different. For a start there's more parties. Also they change their name  so it's hard to keep track of them. At the moment Emmanuel Macron's "En Marche" (EM, get it?) is the centre-right party and he has a minority government just now, sometimes backed by the centre-right party, currently called "Les Republicains". The centre-left is still represented, I think, by the Parti Socialiste. France also has a Parti Communiste. Then there's the far-right party currently called "Le Rassemblement National", he...

The tram system in Bordeaux is 20 years old this weekend! Hurrah for the trams! To mark the occasion two trams collided one the C/D line right in the middle of Bordeaux at 8pm on Saturday evening. A points failure is suspected. The weather was mild, no icing up is possible.  Anyway, whatever the cause, the first effect was the collision of the two trams, resurgent in one being squarely derailed. Nobody was hurt in the accident. The trams we moving at low speed. This meant that on Sunday afternoon, when we hied us from our cosy nest to go wassailing with the singers, there were no trams. We contemplated waiting for a bus de substitution, but there were no signs of life whatever at the stop. So began a somewhat crazy and frustrating journey to church, which involved much waiting at stops and perhaps too much crowding into Bus 9, which does the circle fo the boulevards - this Sunday very slowly indeed... We joined the merry band of wassailers about an hour late. Happy Birthday Trams !...