les Davey de France

 So the summer holidays are drawing to a close. This week the teachers and children are returning eagerly to their classrooms. New people are contacting us about studying in Bordeaux. And the church's year is beginning, too. Alongside our "Café Contact Centre", A Coeur Ouvert / Espace Gallien, is almost ready to open. We have tables and chairs, a counter made fetchingly from old wine crates, our swanky coffee machine, enough stocks to start with and we're all set to go on Wednesday 6 September for our grand opening. There's still quite a lot to do, though, especially in terms of publicity. We need flyers, posters for the windows, a sign above the window, maybe a Facebook page and/or Instagram account. In the past I would have cobbled these things together but that was then and this is now. Others have better graphic skills than I do, and accurate colour-vision, and so I leave those jobs to other. 

 I just got back from my forced march to Lidl. I like to scuttle off to Lidl or to Carrefour early, get a rucksack full of food, and scuttle back perhaps a little more slowly. This morning when I got up I opened all the windows and got the air changed in the flat. As the sun rose I shut the windows and shutters. At that time it was 28°C in the flat. Oh dear! My dash to Lidl was quite pleasant in the shade of the tall buildings. I aim to walk quickly. My mental image is of an elderly man afraid of missing his train. Of course, once I arrived I started to perspire. The walk back was warmer but I took it slower to compensate - and because of the bag of peaches, cucumbers, peppers, courgettes, avocados, bananas, milk, cheese and butter on my back. As I write the flat is at 29°C and I am gradually cooling off! We had a storm last night with plenty of light and noise but only a little rain.

 We flew to Manchester Airport on August 3rd with Ryanair, an easy and uneventful flight, and caught our train to Shotton. Everything was on time and convenient. The train was clean and comfortable and we enjoyed seeing the landscape slowly change from the city of Manchester to rural Cheshire and then to Wales. We had been asked to "organise" the Missions Hall at the Annual Conference of the Evangelical Movement of Wales in Aberystwyth. Flights in August are predictably expensive but our mission travel fund is there for that. We baulked, however, at paying a thousand pounds for a hire car so it meant travelling by rail. Aberystwyth is accessible by rail, but to go there from Manchester Airport would take a very long time so we took the opportunity to break the journey with a visit to our "home" or "sending" or "previous" church in Shotton, North Wales. This was a joy, of course, and we got to visit our old next-door neighbour and to see various o...

 One of the little challenges that awaits us with this new flat is the need to fit a kitchen.  When we moved into our current flat there was just a sink unit. A new, but poor quality sink unit. But it's a rented flat and we knew that we probably couldn't stay here once we start living on our pension. So we didn't fit a kitchen. Instead we cobbled together shelves, drawers and a kitchen island on castors from Ikea Kallax units. Instead of paying thousands we spent a couple of hundred and it's all be very functional. But the new place is our forever home, and it doesn't even come with a sink, so we have to do something. Not much - there isn't a huge amount of room, and we don't want to change our cooker, dishwasher and fridge, but we have to do something. So here's the challenge. I am reasonably good at putting things together - I've built wardrobes, desks, beds, tables galore - so I think I could fairly easily construct a kitchen from flat pack. Not o...