les Davey de France

Today marks the end of four weeks of sleeping on the sofa. The sofa is OK and we sleep as well on it as in our bed, but it makes getting up awkward. I sneak into the kitchen and prepare my forage in the half-light of the window and the light from the cooker hood. Today we take Gwilym to the airport. It may be the last long holiday he takes with us. Next summer he'll be preparing to marry. It's been a very happy time together, with adventures in Toulouse and in an open top Mini. Tomorrow morning I'll be able to get up and put the lights on, change and go running, come back and get on with my day like normal. It'll be sweet. Bittersweet.

It's such a long time since I frequented any of Bordeaux' coffee emporia. Not only that, but certain of them closed for the whole month of August. So on Thursday morning I high-tailed it into Bordeaux to visit Café Piha. Family members declined my invitation to come protesting the extreme heat (we are well into the thirties just now). I arrived to find the place buzzing and got my nice Americano. Then the second man, whose name I forgot, appeared and invited me to join a group coffee-tasting session. The idea is that when a batch of coffee beans comes in you have to work out how long to roast it for. Coffee is a natural product. Every batch of beans differs. Each batch reacts differently to the heat. The roasting has to be fine-tuned to achieve the optimum conversion of sugars for the optimum release of flavours. Friday morning found me charging into town once more as a new Anticafé has opened right by the cathedral! The Anticafé is a place where you can go and work an...

Gwilym's fiancée, Beth, returned to the UK on Saturday and on Monday and Tuesday we reserved a Citiz car, a Mini convertible. It is stationed at Gambetta in the centre of Bordeaux so on Monday morning I scuttled in on the N° 4 bus to get the car. What fun! The new Minis are very plush, but really quite small. Just room for two small people in the back, a tiny boot and not very practical, but for swanning around in the sunshine it was wonderful. We went off to Bazas. It is a small town with a cathedral well known for it's façade, and we took the small roads to get there. Driving in a convertible in blazing sunshine and 34°C down French roads lined both sides with poplars is just wonderful. We did get rather more brown than one should, except Catrin who could sit in an oven at 250° and still not brown, but sunscreen helped a little. On Tuesday it was even hotter so we swanned around on local roads instead, going for the shopping, then visiting a local air-conditioned shopp...

We looked for somewhere easily accessible from Bordeaux, somewhere to explore, somewhere we didn't know too well. The buses to Pau and to Bayonne from Pessac are not running at the moment, but there were really good fares from Bordeaux to Toulouse, and we found a nice flat for 5 on AirBnB available when we needed it. The bus was as OK as any of these kinds of things are. Long train journeys, flights, bus trips, they're all a bit awful, but if you have music and something to read then they're OK. The flat was super. Very stylish. Two bedrooms, so Pat and I had one and the two girls the other. Gwilym slept on a sofa bed in the living room. There were windows onto the street (see below) and a nice balcony over a private little courtyard with a big-leaved catalpa and a nice, black cat. The flat was very near the Palais de Justice and not far from the river. There were supermarkets, bakers and cafés all around. The one drawback with the flat was the way the front windows...

So the man came to fix the patio door. It turns out that with a dirty great heat gun you can soften the uPVC of the window frame and it will return to its previous shape all by itself. For those areas where some uPVC has been broken off there is a resin based filler that you mix up and mould to the shape required and after some minutes it is hard and set. A couple hours work and the window is pretty well good as new.

Our holidays are beginning with the visit of an elderly friend from our home church in North Wales. On Sunday Patricia spotted one of our next-door neighbours, the lads whose door is opposite ours, putting something in the big bins. She scuttled over for a chat. We're looking after their cat at the end of August and we talked about doing another apero or something to invite all the residents of the apartments. They suggested that if we do it at their place we could have a barbecue, so it's arranged for the latter part of August. Today we scuttled down on the tram to the quays and took our ease, eating extortionately priced ice-cream on the terrace overlooking the river, and running the gauntlet of innumerable cyclists, skateboarders, uniwheelers, roller-skaters and other sundry light rolling-stock. As we staggered back to our flat we bumped into another near neighbour, a teacher from the language school who is also a travel writer and poet. We'd bumped into her before o...

An older lady (like 80?) is visiting us at the moment from our church in North Wales. She has brought a wheelchair, but is able to walk short distances, and she came by train from up in the Vendée.  We were to meet her at the central railway station in Bordeaux. So yesterday I went in to recce the situation. The station has a special desk for these things. I asked the charming lady what she would advise, to drive in from Pessac and, if so, where we could park, or to travel out to Pessac by train. "You can stop in the pick-up area for a couple minutes." "And if the train is delayed?" She made the pursed lips sign that says you have made a valid point that has no easy solution. We decided not to travel in by car. The train was delayed. An hour. I took my life in my hands and drank an iced frapperooni from MacDonalds while Pat drank a big coffee. We shared a cronut. I won't eat one of those again. The train arrived and a friendly man from SNCF helped us ...

The refurbishment of our place of worship has been held back by a delay in delivery of a staircase, so now it's scheduled to be finished for the end of August.

Yesterday I gazed out of the window at the blazing heat and longed for rain. Yesterday I looked at our dry, crisp but patchy lawn and vowed to mow the small area under the windows which is not only not dry and crisp, but also has broad-leaved weeds like plantains. I thought, "I will mow that section tomorrow morning before the sun is high and melts us all." Tomorrow has come and it is raining.

Slowly the strong currents of the Garonne erode the foundations of the Pont de Pierre, so from time to time work is needed to reinforce them. In the city's tradition of making a virtue of a necessity, this has led to the Pont de Pierre becoming a great big cycle-path right in the heart of the city for the months of August and September. Trams and buses can use it, as well as pedestrians, but no cars, vans or lorries. A group called Vélo-cité held a quick party in the middle of the bridge to mark the beginning of the two months. The Mayor of Bordeaux says that if traffic is paralysed then the bridge can be reopened, but I should think that for August all should be well. It's holiday month anyway, and the bridge only allows single-file traffic in each direction. In effect cars, vans and lorries are diverted upstream to the Pont Saint-Jean or downstream to the new lifting bridge, the Pont Chaban Delmas. Maybe we could foresee a day when cars are diverted away from the rivers...