les Davey de France

We needed shopping. We got it from our local Carrefour. To get there we trundle a shopping trolley like old ladies have through the park. On the way we are rewarded by this :

http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/twocities/had-sex-dumped-jesus/ "James S. Spiegel quotes Søren Kierkegaard saying it’s wrong to assume objections to Christianity stem from doubt. They instead “spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience. . . .” Willful immorality, in other words, undermines our faith. We, as Paul says, suppress the truth in unrighteousness."

The letter came yesterday. I don't need a doctor any more, I can get the vaccine from the pharmacist and get injected by a nurse. But not today. Today the pharmacists are on strike.

with a full day at Maison de la Bible on Saturday (which was when I met our Tamil friends from the Tamil church) and then a full and lively Sunday, which meant French church at 10:30, followed by lunch with French Church, followed by our first time to stay for Bible Class with French Church, then off we hoofed to Dan to open up for the service. Friend James was preaching, but he wanted me to interpret for him and this time I gave in. It was kind of fun trying to retain what he said, then retransmit it in French. And he was very kind about my mangling of his well-thought out discourse. So today was quiet. Just English-time this afternoon with our neighbour.

that there is Tamil church in Bordeaux?

It's been a long, hard, tiring week. Today after burying the one guinea-pig that we found, covering the tiny body with (used) coffee-grounds and pepper to try to prevent any digging-up, we hied us away to the book group. This month's book was "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar, and NOBODY had got on with it. It's a modular novel dating from the 1960s which has two alternative orders in which to read the chapters. Not that I bothered. After that I needed to stay in town to catch a bus to my next appointment, so Mrs Davey and I refuelled at a pasta bar in town, cheap, hot and totally carbs. Then off to catch the No. 15 to Villenave for the Conseil d'Administration of the Maison de la Bible, chez my good friend, Marc. We talked happily and freely about the bookshop and left just before 4. After a somewhat convoluted journey I got home just before 5 to find my grieving girls. Pizza for tea. With salad, though. And fruit afterwards. We have bananas to finish up.

I had a day in Montauban. We had to arrive for 10, which meant catching the 5:55 train from Pessac Alouette. Montauban is a handsome town. My train back to Bordeaux was delayed by almost an hour.

to the four assembled gentlemen, "Vous sachez toutes que je ne maitrisons pas la conjugaison de la France." and only one person laughed. Sometimes I don't know why I bother

We awoke this morning to scenes of violence and carnage in the Davey front yard. Some predator capable of burrowing has left one guinea pig dead and taken the other. I suspect a fox. It dug a very neat burrow into Daisy's cage. How Tom was taken from his cage I am not entirely sure. We, of course, heard nothing.

Lifehacker to the rescue! Read it here .

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Isn't that a LOVELY picture of Christian character. It's the fruit that the Spirit of God produces in the life of the Christian, pictured for us by Paul in Galatians 5:19. Stanley Gale has taken this picture of the fruit of the Spirit and grafted it onto two chapters about abiding in Christ, the true vine, based on John 15. Afterwards there follows one chapter each for each characteristic of the fruit of the Spirit. Then two more chapters are grafted on, about humility and grace. I think it's important to survey and understand the table of contents before launching into the book, because it is not at all an exposition of John 15, and I thought it was. I was puzzled, disappointed and confused until I realised how the book was structured and where it was taking me. Once you get that the book is a useful, practical, helpful discussion of the fruit of the Spirit, with discussion q...

Do pray for the Christianity Explored team. They're busy working to adapt the course for the French language and context. Language is one thing. Context is another. They need your prayers.

I just watched Michael Portillo's "Great Continental Railway Journeys - Series 2: 6. Bordeaux to Bilbao" on iPlayer. Super programme.

This building is an art deco gem, and it's on the route of Bus 4 in an area a little off the beaten track, just up from la Victoire and across from the Hôpital Saint André. La Bourse du Travail has been in a lamentable state for years, with the rendering cracking and coming off and netting round it to protect the bonces of the passing burghers of Bordeaux. But now it is in the process of being restored. I hope some sensible use will be found for the building! Read about it and see photos here .

They say we're having an Indian Summer , and that we never used to have them and that these Indian Summers are evidence of global warming, but I remember the term Indian Summer from my childhood when we apparently never used to have them, so why did we have a word for things that didn't exist?

Wow, it's hot. No, I mean like REALLY hot! And I was signed up to go and see a demonstration where three webmasters build a website from scratch using three competing website building tools; Wordpress, Joomla and Duplo. Well, OK, it wasn't Duplo, but I can't remember the real name of the last one. I had a bottle of water with me, the demonstration started at 2 in what for me has to be one of the coolest places in Bordeaux that I had been dying to see, The Node, a kind of open-plan office where webmasters and others can work, just round the corner from the restaurant where we meet. So I drank my water. After the demonstration, which was very fun because the three webmasters were really genial people, enthusiastic about their preferred CMS, and about teasing each other, and because the Node is even cooler than I thought, I had a couple of hours to kill before my meet up with the two Chinese boys, so I found a place with free wifi and installed myself to deal with some ...

My son's called Gwilym and my daughter's called Catrin. Oh, cool. And do they have English names? (thinks : Yes, Algernon and Gertrude.) Uh. No. We don't do that.

They've opened two new enterprises in the Bordeaux area, and I am dying to go to one of them. In Eysines there is a new ski centre. You ski on a wide conveyor belt that moves and tilts to enable you to slide and then to get the impression of going downhill at great speed, all the while not moving an inch. Apparently these centres are a great success. Then in Mérignac, we saw from an advertisement on the side of a bus, they've opened a new Pirate themed restaurant. Aah harr oh yes they have me hearties. Intriguing. There used to be a jungle-themed restaurant in Pessac which broadcast jungle animal noises from huge loudspeakers all around. Till it closed down and got turned into a Hippopotamus grill. I'm not making this up. I couldn't.

They'd forecast storms and a rainy end to the week. It started at about 4:30. Thunder. Lightning. Torrential downpours. I had to go out at 5:30, but thankfully by then the rain had stopped, the water had all but cleared off the paths and driveways, and all that was left were menacing rumbles and the occasional distant flash,. These rumbles and flashes continued for hours. Meanwhile in the Aveyron, the Hérault and the Gard there were flash floods and some people were killed. For me it meant that bus 35 was 20 minutes late on the way and 20 minutes late coming back. I will quickly grow to dislike bus 35 very intensely, I think.

Best Sellers : Number Two slot, the Bible. And this in France.

Normally this blog gets about 300 views each day. That's amazing! But on September 14 it got 9,337 page views. What!? Whatever did I blog about that day? I looked.. Oh dear! I hope we don't get any unusual visitors any day soon.

What fun! James, the new GBM guy, needed a mobile phone, so since the Maison de la Bible did not require my services this morning, and since the FNAC is one of my favourite places in the whole wide world, I offered to take James there, we met at 10 by the cathedral and we hied us off to the FNAC. Hurrah! James had a particular phone in mind, in black, and we had already ascertained that it was in stock at the FNAC, so all we had to do was wait and wait and wait until a sales-assistant became available, contract the deal and swagger off with his loot. There remained the question of connecting the thing. He had hoped to connect to Free, but they require you to pay by bank card and James' bank card is not yet fully functional. He does, however, have a RIB, so after some checking again on the internet, off to the Bouygues shop we went to get a B&You sim card. Card obtained, installed in the phone, we then set ourselves up on the top floor of the shopping centre to connect t...

I confess that long journeys on motorways are hopelessly soporific for me. It's a nightmare. More than once I have suddenly realised that the lorry on front is suddenly nearer than it was, and that because I have been somewhat too absent. I worked with a chap who lost his whole family in a car crash because he fell asleep at the wheel, so these things are to be taken very seriously. What to do ? Stop at the first services and drink a nice strong cup of coffee. Then take a short nap. In the car is OK, or in a quiet corner of the café. Then use the loo and resume your journey. This advice, which I heard some years ago, may have saved my life. Who knows. Read an article about it here .

Yesterday evening was beautiful.

How do we sing at Dan, without a piano? Well we did have Gwilym with his guitar. But now he's left... Yes, we still have our secret weapon - Christian Hymns DVD of MP3 accompaniment files. Pastor Robert Maclean of Rhuddlan showed me how they use them there. Admittedly he's an advanced user, putting the fies through Audacity to change the pitch and speed to suit the congregation. I have not done anything like that. I have, however, loaded them all onto my little iPad mini so that with a bluetooth speaker strategically positioned (near a plug) we can sing anything in the hymn book at will! Together these things constitute the Magic Music Machine. Pretty good, eh?

Our new neighbour came round to work on his English. Poor lad. "You don't pronounce the 'r' on the end of stranger! Keep your tongue down! It's straenj-uh." He can't help it. He's had a diet of American films since his earliest childhood. But he says he wants British pronunciation so there we are. After a couple of hours of torturing the poor thing I let him hobble off down the drive and scuttled off to enrol Catrin for her singing lessons. First the maestro. He was alone, so we chatted about Catrin, her aspirations and what she ought to do. Then the office. That means writing cheques. Then off to - the Opera! A small baroque choir were performing "Rameau's" "Les Eléments Réunis" in the Femina Theatre in Bordeaux. 5€ a place and a small group of us were going from the International Club of Bordeaux. Well the plot was somewhat unintelligible, but the choir was jolly good, the soloists were not bad either and once t...

As a recently enlisted Macintosh user I was interested to see what the iPhone 6 would be like when it was announced on Tuesday. I use my phone for reading and for various other purposes, so I like a big screen, so I have a large Samsung Android phone. However the attraction of easy linking between my laptop and my phone is considerable, and Apple's meticulous design and tight control of their devices mean that everything generally just works. Not only that but the iPhone is so beautifully made. In a meeting the other day I was playing with someone's iPhone 5. It was so nice, it reminds me of a well-made flute or a good fountain pen. However my current phone already has all the functions that the iPhone 6 plus offers, with a larger screen, but at a greatly reduced price. It's the old Apple thing: their products are great but the price is very high. I had an iPhone years ago, a 3GS that I got when Orange France did some crazy offer just before Christmas where effect...

Yesterday I agreed to meet a friend for lunch. Basically it's a guy who lives alone, who has pretty serious health issues and who likes to invite people out to lunch. He's VERY THIN and I believe him when he says he just doesn't eat at home, so he's convinced me that by letting him buy me lunch I'm doing him a favour. Not only that, but then he gets to choose the place, and it's places I just would never go! Anyway yesterday it was a social centre at Bègles, run by the town hall, they do a lunch there three times a week to get people together and create a bit of social adhesion. They do the same menu on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and put that with the extremely hot weather and you understand why we were the only people there. Lunch was gazpacho - salty and loaded with garlic - then meatballs in pepper and tomate sauce with its puréed vegetables followed by a basket of fruit for dessert. The lady brought up this enormous basket with two good size bunche...

Read the article here.

So I took Gwilym's zoom digital recorder that he got for doing work experience in the music store in Bordeaux that closed down just after he left, and ... WOW! the message is THAT LONG? Ok, there's interaction in the form of a little discussion and some verse reading on the part of others. That adds some time. Then there's the whole fact that it's bilingual, so that adds probably another 1/4 or 1/3 to the time... This needs some reflexion...

I feel like I've been reading "A Soldier of the Great War" for ever, and I'm only 1/4 of the way through. It's quite a saga, but very, very engaging.

Someone brought this podcast to my attention recently. http://www.francaisauthentique.com It's just normal, conversational French.

There have been a few books that I have REALLY enjoyed, for a variety of reasons: 1. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. It's just a wonderful, encyclopaedic novel. I've read other Eco books and enjoyed them, but not to the same extent. 2. A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel. Again a wonderful, crazy book. 3. A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin. This is an American novel, but to me it reads like a novel in translation.

we passed through this tunnel of trees near the Hotel de Ville tramstop and heard the deafening sound of sparrows quarrelling in the branches. We arrived home to find our garden in uproar, with birds swooping and crying. It seemed that a bird of prey was in pursuit of some small flying snack. As we walked down the driveway they all scarpered!

1. Make a list 2. Check it twice 3. Pack into my rucksack : a. bluetooth speaker b. sermon notes book c. A4 church notice to stick on Dan's noticeboard d. service sheets (with songs, readings, etc... on e. offerings box f. church flyers and cards Meanwhile, Pat is packing into her shopping trolley all we need for the after-service picnic It was very hot yesterday, so the stone interior of DAN was pleasantly cool. I manipulated the alarm system with no difficulties thanks to Romain's excellent training and explanations. However the magic music machine refused to cooperate, playing the accompaniment in fits and starts. Some frantic random button pressing yielded a result and in the end the machine worked very well. One person sat in a corner thought Catrin was playing somehow. The service was quite a happy time, though people generally don't know each other yet, so the after-service picnic was especially important.

is today in the centre of Pessac. We need to go along to try to find a choir for Catrin.

the houses in our street have 2 metre high walls or fences. They always did. It's nothing to do with us. But it means that some of the neighbours we have never seen, and others we see only from time to time. Well our next-door neighbour is owner of the fence between our garden and his and he decided to come and get rid of the ivies and general growth that turns it from a fence to a hedgerow. We were a little sad because it gives us the idea that we're living in the country, but hey... While we were talking I said "and that nest in the tree last year?" "Yes, it was asian hornets (frelons asiatiques). We did nothing about it and eventually they left the nest and it fell out of the tree." I wasn't sure this was the best course of action, but the nest was VERY HIGH UP in a VERY TALL TREE so I'm not sure what else could have been done. We never saw a hornet, anyway.

has banned all hats to protect laïcité. I offered to knit her a phrygian cap with a red, white and blue rosette, as worn during the revolution, but no. All hats. Boys' and girls'. Banned... Here's her timetable : Here's a banned phrygian cap:

Poor François Hollande. What a rentrée he's having! His finance minister rebels against the austerity plans and forces a government reshuffle. He gets caught referring to homeless people as the sans-dents (the toothless), perhaps from a proverb, "A man without money is like a dog without teeth". The woman he lived with while entertaining his famous scooter affair with an actress publishes a book called "Thanks for the moment", in which she chronicles their break-up and his attempts to get her back. Another government minister is forced to resign over tax-dodging, as is the chairman of the committee that was convened to look into it. Some are asking if Hollande is on the slippery slope. I don't think so. We're quite used to having a president who says funny things and whose life is like a comedy script. Witness M. Sarkozy and his foul-mouthed retorts. I don't think for a moment he'll get re-elected. We'll probably have M Juppé fo...

for Alan means designing and printing flyers and posters, then distributing them round Bordeaux, as well as starting new preaching series on Sundays in the international church and on Saturdays for the Chinese. Why flyers and posters? Well really to try to achieve some kind of visibility! People only come if friends bring them. People get in contact through other people. But flyers and posters can help break the ice.

means that Pat has resumed her duties in the Maison de la Bible, but I was not needed this week. (Means I can get on with preparation here instead of doing it at Maison de la Bible!)

So yesterday Catrin started back at school for her last year - the rather ominously named terminale . This year she no longer does any science, maths she bid adieu to long ago, but she takes philosophy this year, as well as Chinese, Spanish, French literature, American literature, history, geography and sundry other minor subjects. She scuttled off at 7am to catch her bus, hoping for a gentle timetable. In fact she starts at 8 every day and finishes at 6 most days. OK. But she does get some free periods as well as some l-o-n-g lunch breaks. Bon courage!

Click here .

For some time I have been thinking that it would be good to record the messages. Various things have stopped me : 1) the nature of our service. We're a small group and so when I speak I speak in a conversational tone and not very loudly. (Just the kind of level that works for radio, however. Radio doesn't adapt to people declaiming.) 2) bilingual. We do English/French. While this is OK when people can see you, would it work for listening? 3) Where to store the recordings? Online storage can cost a lot and we don't pay for our website or anything like that. 4) What about all the hassle involved in loading up the files etc? Wouldn't we need a (shudder) webmaster? Well I think Dropbox may have just answered questions 3 and 4. I currently have a free Dropbox account which, by a combination of factors, gives me 55.4GB of space. I find it very useful for storing anything I might need to access from anywhere, especially now my pc has a very small hard dis...

These summer Sundays we have enjoyed having the service at our home. We can cook. We can be a bit more relaxed about timing. And yesterday we had grills after the service : courgettes/zucchinis, (bell-)peppers, sardines and merguez. It was very convivial. But next week we return to Dan, and to cold cuts. It'll be great. Meanwhile something is brewing in my little bonce.....