les Davey de France

So I got our property-owners' tax bill through today. 1608€, please, by mid October for the property which we no longer own . I wondered whether I perhaps still owed for last year, but no, it clearly said it was for this year. I wondered if there was some kind of mistake in my mind, but no, the notaire had clearly said that we would no longer have to pay after December 2015. I wondered if perhaps I had not notified them, but I have. I wrote the day we sold the house, enclosing the notaires' attestation of sale. AND they contacted me in August asking if we still owned the house, and I replied, enclosing my letter of 22 December and the notaires' attestation of sale, again. I phoned them up. After some minutes on hold I got through to a helpful lady who made encouragingly shocked noises to her colleague. "Oh la la. Mais quoi? Et aloes... Zut!" and other words I shall not repeat. "Allô? Monsieur? Yes, because the change of ownership was only noted ...

I'm off to Paris in October to a training day on association law run by the Conseil National des Evangéliques de France. It'll mean an overnight stay but I've found somewhere reasonable, a reasonably priced rail ticket and it's all feasible.

Today Mrs Davey and I took advantage of the relative calm to go and explore an exhibition of street art that has been set up in the old premises of the Virgin Megastore, and that is open from Wednesday to Sunday each week. OK. So, having a little time on our hands, we decided to check out some new coffee chops. First we poked our noses into Starbucks because a friend has just started working there. He wasn't there. We retreated swiftly. Then we visited the BIG post office looking for pre-stamped envelopes for sending letters overseas, for example to England. They didn't have any. Then we decided to check out a new coffee shop that comes with strong recommendations, and that will prepare your coffee by chemex, aeropress, or sundry other methods. It looked great, but Mrs Davey was not convinced. So we went to the Jean Moulin French Resistance Museum where there is an exhibition of propaganda from WWII. It was chilling, especially a film about the liberation of the deat...

So today has been interesting. Catrin left at 9:00 to go to the airport with some friends on a trip to Barcelona. We, meanwhile, were off to Clinique Tivoli for an appointment with the anaesthetists who will numb Patricia's eye with drops ready for the surgeon to do her cataracts. At about 10 the phone rang. "Dad, one of the girls has a problem with her card, but there's a couple who had the same problem, so we're going with them by car to Barcelona." The "problem with the card" was a French identity card that was out of date by a month. The girl in question will come back by coach, where they don't worry so much about valid identity. So off they set for Barcelona. Catrin promised to text us from time to time. Meanwhile we set off for the clinic. Patricia needed a BIG THICK dossier of papers, including a complete print of the contract of our health insurance and loads of other stuff, together with her passport. We walked through the stre...

We have had two different deliveries this week from UPS. One came on Wednesday and one on Thursday. At least in theory. I had been tracking the deliveries and I knew that Wednesday's parcel was scheduled to arrive, so we made sure someone was always in to watch for it. I was not encouraged, therefore, to receive a message saying that the package could not be delivered because we were " indisponible " - unavailable. How much more available can you be than watching the gate of the front yard of the flats? We knew no UPS van had come. Anyway our flat has a bell, a loud bell, a loud bell which had been silent all day. Subsequent messages said that the package had been delivered to a relay point about 5 minutes walk away, then that the relay point was closed so "a new attempt to deliver the package would be made on Thursday". The problem - apart from complete fabrication such as "unavailable" - is that because the flats are less than a year old t...

We needed some provisions, so Patricia and I ventured out quite early on the 42 bus towards Mérignac. I knew one stop to get off to go to the huge Carrefour at Mérignac Soleil, but I saw, too, that you could alight at the stop before and take a shorter route, so we tried it. A little gated road with a footpath and cycle path led past a staff carpark for Carrefour - promising - and past a yard full of Carrefour rental vehicles. To the right was the after-sales service area. A gentleman with a small girl was walking in front of us. I noticed that his legs were strangely shaped - a cyclist, I think. We followed him. He entered through a doorway. When we approached the doorway we saw that it said "Private, No entry, Security". A lady stood just to one side, smoking. "Hallo," I said, "how does one access the shopping centre?" "Through there", she said, "then across and through a door on the left". Thus encouraged we entered the pri...

The inscription process is really well organised. You start at the bottom of the reception building with someone who checks that you have all the documents you need. Catrin had not received her official list of marks for her course last year, so she'd downloaded them from the course website. Also we were unsure whether the little grant she received makes her a boursière or not, so we'd said she wasn't. The woman who checked Catrin's dossier went off to check and came back with her official report from last year AND the news that she is indeed a boursière, and therefore we didn't have to pay any fees for her course. Last year we had about 200€ to pay. Then you go to part 2 , which is the actual inscription desk. Here all your information is loaded into the computer and you get back various certificates to say that you're a student, as well as your wifi password, etc. After that it's part 3 , which is where you get your student card and you walk awa...