les Davey de France

We decided to go on a free walking tour of Bordeaux from 11 till 1 on Saturday. Run by a group that advertises on Facebook, it promised the story of how Bordeaux became three times the capital of France. The rendez-vous point was at the base of the cathedral bell tower, and we arrived there about 25 minutes too early. Just the right amount of time for a quick 1€ espresso at the café Cheverus. The tour was conducted by a charming guide called Hubert who alternated between French and English as we were five tour members, two French, two Brits and a Canadian. The tour included: The monument to the defeated of the Franco-Prussian war - GLORIA VICTIS The Hotel de la Préfecture where the government was housed during the First World War. The Grand Théâtre, seat of government during the first few days of the Second World War. The Girondin Monument, sold to the German occupying forces to be melted down for munitions during the closing stages of the Second World War, but which ne...

We have a little lawn. Well, what passes for a lawn in Bordeaux. In winter it's water-logged, in summer it's dry as a cracker. But it does have classy weeds. The other day when I was cutting the grass I got a distinct whiff of mint. Strange. When the château's tractor was cutting the grass in the ditch next to our residence, that smelt of mint, too. I hunted a bit and, sure enough, we have little clumps of wild mint. This is good news, because I have never been able to grow mint deliberately. It just never works. Other people are inundated with it. I can't get it to survive. Well until now. So in our lawn now there are little unmown clumps where the mint is. But that's not all. We also have various flowers. Amongst the usual clover, daisies and dandelions we have a couple of plants of this charming little centaury.

but still I manage to lose things and find them again by accident. Like this hat, which I found when looking for a small backpack. (I didn't find the small backpack)

We have these wristband gizmos that do all kinds of things. If you're indoors and can swivel your arm at the right speed or poke a receptor successfully it'll tell you the time. Not only that, but coupled with an application on your phone it will tell you how many steps you've taken, how far you've walked or run, your average stride, the distance travelled, your maximum heart rate while exercising and your heart rate at any given moment. It's wonderful. If you wear the thing overnight it'll even detect when you fall asleep and when you wake up and tell you how long you spent in deep sleep. Every now and agin they update the software on the phone and on he wrist band. Lats time I went to the UK, because I'd be spending all day sat in a conference and travelling lots by underworld railway and bus and stuff I left the thing at home. When I cam back I charged it up, updated the software and since then it's gone nuts. Apparently I don't do deep ...

I'm not saying a lot about it. For one thing there's so much one could say: about Brexit, Trump, May, Macron, the whole kit and caboodle. For another thing there's so much rancour and aggression: about Brexit, Trump, May, the whole kit and caboodle. So I'm keeping my trap shut.

and we are thankful. We have no plans to use it until October, but we can now book those flights to Munich for the International Churches' Pastors' Conference - with Glen Scrivener.

Well that was funny. I could see that it was raining a little before I even put my shoes on, but by the time I got to the corner of the vineyard it was clear that the rain was too heavy and that it was increasing. So I turned round, went home and ate my porage.

If you're a bit confused about cafés, bistrots, brasseries, restaurants, this won't help at all. There is a version of this film in English, too, below the French version. and in English:

Today the new "Excuse my French Café" was advertising a brunch at 8,50€, so I suggested an adventure to Mrs Davey and at about 12:30 we set off. Tram B is now repaired and all is well, so we hopped on the tram to take us to the Musée d'Aquitaine where we'd walk down Cours Victor Hugo to the street where the café is situated.  At Peixotto we were told that the tram in front had broken down. The helpful public transport app on my phone said that to get were we wanted to go we could either take tram B or walk for an hour. So we started to walk. Two stops later along came the tram, so on we hopped - or rather on we squeezed. We were many, and packed in tight. We didn't fall down but at every stop as the doors opened we popped out and had to press ourselves back in. It was good to arrive at Cours Victor Hugo. Well the café was charming, run by an Anglo-French couple, brunch consisted of scrambled eggs with feta cheese and red peppers, porage with nuts a...

are everywhere. There's one perched right at the edge of the roof of the town hall building way up high above the city. A friend posed his children for a fake family foto with one, but you do have to position the kids carefully if you do that. Meanwhile:

So it's the Grande Braderie, the long weekend at the end of the sales where there are stalls in the street, some selling end of line bargains from the shops behind, some selling varied ranges of clothes, toys, gadgets of varied quality at attractive prices. Best avoided, frankly, but this is not the general opinion because the streets are flooded with torrents of people. Meanwhile yesterday I had a solid and weighty parcel to take to the Post Office. I dread it, then rise to the challenge, vigilantly looking for the little gaps you can slide through to get where you need to be through the slowly moving crowd. But I still took the long way back, avoiding the shopping street, weaving through the back lanes. Meanwhile in theory today Tram B is back in action. At the same time there are major roadworks in Pessac that have resulted in most bus routes being diverted. Much confusion. Also Place de la Victoire has been closed to traffic so it's completely inaccessible to buses and ...

Last week poor tram B broke down NUMEROUS times. So this week they're working on the rails from Musée d'Aquitaine to Peixotto - a distance of some 5 km, it must be. This means that no buses or trams can pass through la Place de la Victoire, one of the hubs of Bordeaux. One poor elderly man was trying to get from Palais de Justice to Victoire today, and there was no way he could do it, except by walking. Then there's the impact on the buses - bus 4 has been STUFFED with people. Absolutely stuffed. I switched to bus 24 and came home that way. Pat managed to get on a bus 4 later.

Some time ago I got these new chinos, very racy (for me) a kind of terracotta colour. To me they were a daringly reddish colour. To anyone else in the whole world they're brown. Anyway, I have loved these trousers, but now the sun has faded them to a kind of comfortable colour of wet sand. I still love them, but they are not a uniform colour and they look... old and loved. So for some time I have known I must get some new trews. Not only that but running has taken a few centimetres off here and there, so my trousers now often remind of old curtains that never had the tapes adjusted - they kind of hang from my belt in irregular, scruffy swags. If I want to avoid this I can slide the excess round, gather it and have a kind of pleated area at the back. I can't imagine what this looks like but until my neck is a whole lot more flexible I will never be confronted with it so hey... Alternatively I can just let the belt go with the trousers and have a kind of low-slung look, a b...

set fire to a house in Saint-Médard and needed 30 calls to the emergency services to deal with fallen branches etc.

1)  ‘The degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking’: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. in the Guardian 2) Blog posts that begin - the first words : "I have...", "I am...", "I am...", "I was...", "I'm going to...", from the front page of a popular Christian blog. 3) Contemporary Christian Culture with its big conferences where guys are up talking about big stuff. 4) I read recently that sanctification consists largely in thinking of oneself  less.   5) C S Lewis famously said that humility is not thinking less of yourself so much as thinking of yourself less. 6) B J Thompson (who's he?) recently said "the most obvious sign of pride isn't boasting, it's lack  of prayer." 7) Jason Meyer :  The Bible’s answer to our fallen self-obsession is a great work of grace in the gospel that creates a worshipful obsession with God. Pride is defeated decisively at conversion, progressively in sanctificati...

They forecast 38°C for today, and as I wended my weary way homeward from the Maison de la Bible this afternoon, sometimes it felt like much, much more. The thing I noticed was that if you kept in the shade then you were well hot, but there was a cooling breeze.  However, if you strayed into direct sunlight, then not only was the atmosphere hot, you also got the direct heating effect of the strong sunshine AND even the breeze seemed to be hot as a hairdryer. Anyway, they forecast storms for 7pm, followed by cooler temperatures.  As I type, at 8:15pm, the sun is still blazing down and there is no sign whatsoever of a storm, of a weaker sun or of lower temperatures. These forecasters, they know nothing. 

When we moved we got rid of the Griffin Memorial Barbecue - a massive structure resembling half an oil drum that the Griffins had bequeathed to us when they left Bordeaux; To be honest we seldom used it - it was so huge it took the best part of a sack of charcoal just to cover the bottom and once you got the thing lit it would take days to go out. So we found an electric barbecue, very posh, wooden handles and a grill in cast iron. It weighed a ton, but it worked pretty well. We used that when cooking for small numbers of people and the Griffin Black Hole of Fire when feeding the forty thousand, as my mother would say. As I said, when we moved to the flat we got rid of the Griffin Memorial Barbecue - I remember the satisfying CLASH as it plummeted into the scrap metal skip at the dump - but what happened to the electric barbecue nobody knows. We must have sold it. But why? Why? Anyway last Friday we needed to make good this error because we told folk that the service at our fla...

Tram B had a bad week last week. In fact, I think it's had a bad month. It's been breaking down a lot. Someone said on Sunday, "Tram A is the most reliable, then tram C, but tram B is atrocious". This is important because the trams run smoothly and are air-conditioned so when it is hotter than a roast chicken's ... interior the tram is by far the nicest way to come home. But all this week there's no tram B while they try and fix the recurring problems. And it's hot as Nebuchadnezzar's burning fiery furnace heated seven times just now. Never mind. Onto Bus 4 we must all cram our sweaty selves and ooze our way back to Pessac together.

It's a long time since I went off on one (gave in to the temptation to rant) so here goes: The pastor as shaman I think I did write about this before, a woman who was thrilled after asking me to pray for her, and me happily doing so, to find that I am a pastor. Did I also write about the time I was in a church service where people could come to the front for prayer at the end of the service and I was invited to go down and pray for people, too. "You're a pastor, come and pray for people." Now don't get me wrong, I hope I'll never vote against prayer - unless it becomes a substitute for action - and I'm very happy to pray for people habitually and specifically. But the pastor's prayer is not worth more than anyone else's. The pastor is not some kind of shaman, invested with more spiritual power than other people. The pastor as conjuror That was a tricky one, and I can hear the word "but..." arising in my own heart as well as i...

Here's a turn-up for the books. At present in France the amount we are paid is below the threshold where a four-person family pays income tax. When we lived in our own house in Passaic Alouette we were liable for two other taxes. Taxe Foncière is paid by people who own property and is based on the value of your home. Taxe d'Habitation is paid by people who occupy property. Since we no longer own our own home we are no longer liable for Taxe Foncière, so we just pay Taxe d'Habitation. Now one of M. Macron's election pledges was that he would abolish axe d'habitation for 80% of French people. He plans to do this by introducing a threshold below which you do not pay it. We fall below that threshold. This means that if M. Macron's plan goes ahead, from 2018 (probably from 2019, because you usually pax this year the tax on last year) we won't pay any direct tax in France, only indirect taxes like VAT, etc. Further details turned up at lunchtime - t...

So much of what I do is not really bloggable. For example this morning I have to catch up on reading and also search for suitable photos for our new website that someone is working on and which we hope to release in September.

After the great chick pea juice discovery I stumbled upon this: Chocolat chantilly. This is, apparently, a genuine French recipe developed by a genuine French chef, I forget who, around I think the 1940s. I hope that is vague enough. Anyway, if you search for it you will find it described as chocolate mousse or chocolat chantilly. The recipes I have seen all vary. Some use equal weight of chocolate and water. Some use less water than chocolate. Some use hot tea instead of water. I wonder what a nice, light, jasmine china tea would bring to the mix. Another recipe uses half water, half orange juice. Anyway, this was my recipe for yesterday: 350g of dark chocolate broken into small pieces. The recipes all say to use the best 70% chocolate. I used supermarket own brand 50%. 270ml of hot water. Then whisk until the chocolate is dissolved into the water. Once you have a runny liquid with no lumps put your whisking bowl over an ice bath and continue to whisk until the mixture becom...

one of the things we miss about our old place at Pessac Alouette is the plum tree in the park, so on Monday we hopped on bus 4 and hopped off just by the park. Sadly we were too late. The plum tree was surrounded by rotting plums trodden into the soft mould, and what few plums remained were up high, way out of reach. However, there is a plum tree just on our running route, so on the way back we made a slight detour and, accompanied by one of our neighbours, gathered a goodly portion which Pat then made into a rather tart but wholesome conserve. We just went out again, in the raging afternoon heat, and garnered another goodly portion from the topmost branches, which Patricia hopes to turn into crumbles. When she gets some more sugar. Having used up all our sugar on Monday. (see above)

Well they did it! They built the new LGV  Ligne à Grande Vitesse so that the TGV Train à Grande Vitesse could travel very fast à Grande Vitesse  all the way from Paris to Bordeaux. Previously the train slowed down suddenly after Tours,  à petite vitesse . They announced the inauguration of the line for 1 July 2017 and the commencement of the service from 2 July, and they hit the date. We are now just two hours from Paris. The advantages of this: We can get to Paris and back for the day, or for a day conference, or for a weekend conference without it feeling like we spent all day getting there and back. The disadvantages: Rail travel is still expensive in France. The Parisians all plan to move to Bordeaux, inflating house prices, making the town centre very crowded and forcing us all to walk very quickly with our heads down, hissing and sighing.

Read in French les perles du bac here

While I was in London at EMA, Pat was cleaning the flat from top to bottom, and not finding her passport. She contacted the UK consulate in Bordeaux. It is possible to get emergency travel documents at a cost of 140€, with proof of address, proof of travel (airline tickets) etc. Of course, in addition, we need a replacement passport, too. We talked about it and decided to change our summer plans. We had planned: 1 Second week of July, visit to Gwilym's future outlaws. 2 Third week of July, Keswick convention 3 Fourth week of July, UFM Family conference 4 Wedding in reading before flying home. The fact of being away in July meant we would have to cancel Bordeaux Church services for the last three Sundays in July. Instead we will continue church services through July and take holiday when Gwilym visits in August. Obviously, unless Pat's replacement passport comes in time, we'll have to stay in France, but current thinking is to find an AirBnB somewhere we've...