les Davey de France

We just spent two weeks, three weekends in the UK visiting our supporting churches, Alan attended the Bala Ministers' Conference, we both were there for our old church's 50th anniversary and some other festive occasions. Here's some reflections : The overnight ferry Portsmouth to Caen was great! We slept OK in our couchettes plus - a sort of dormitory of bunk beds - we were alone in a cellule of four beds and many of the cellules were empty. From Caen to Portsmouth we caught the early morning boat and stayed in a cheap hotel at Ouistreham. Checking in and out of the ferry ports was easy.  UK roads are really bad. The surfaces of town roads and streets are worn, pot-holed and very rough indeed. UK motorways are very crowded, but this means everyone drives slower. this resulted in us getting over 70 mpg in Ella, our Honda Jazz! French motorways are much smoother and less crowded but we pay tolls and you can get bullied by heavy lorries, as you can in the UK. It was wonderful ...

We've bought a car. It's taken me over two weeks to tell anyone. Why? Because cars are now SO EXPENSIVE! Anyway, we've bought something very sensible, a Honda Jazz. It's black. It's hybrid. It's called Ella. And soon Ella will take us to the UK and convey us all over Wales and in the midlands of England. It's the first car we've had since the Great Citroen Berlingo Clutch Catastrophe, so I'm understandably a bit yippy, as we have learned to say.  But I'm not sure Ella has a clutch, or not one I can stick my foot on, anyway! It'll be fine!

Thea is now 6 months old and she has real character. On Sunday evening at church she was so excited, flapping her arms and occasionally singing. As yet she doesn't know the tune or the words, but she has a good, powerful voice that carries well. Her close friends, the Coquerel twins, are always glad to see her and she loves them too. They're just about 3 months older than her and together we hope they will enchant, delight and terrorise the good folk of Bordeaux.

I'm so very thankful for all the wonderful things God has given me over the years, and now he's given me the opportunity to serve him in a different way. Twenty years ago there was a conversation where we shared to whom we were responsible. My list was very long. I was accountable to the church and the people I worked for and with. I was responsible to denominational structures in France. I was also accountable to my home church which had sent me to France. There was also the mission who were there to support and take care of us. Then to the many people who were contributing generously to our support. It's good to have accountability and I rarely found any of this to be a problem. From now on, however, we'll be paid increasingly exclusively from our own resources, to which we have contributed over the years. Voices that once were determinative will now become consultative. We'll appreciate people's advice and counsel, but we will have much more freedom in what w...

My dear ophthalmologist is very thorough, so when he discovered an "anomaly" in my optic nerves he decided to send me for various tests : MRI scans of my head x 2 Doppler imaging of my carotid arteries and those which feed my eyes. A night at the sleep clinic to explore the possibility of sleep apnea. My own doctor was somewhat sceptical. Do you nap? How long for? Every day? Who is this Dr.? Anyway, the sleep clinic is run by a psychiatrist, and you have to fill in all sorts of questionnaires about your sleeping habits. I filled them in honestly, I promise, and my score was very low, but she said, "you have a long head and I'd like you to do the overnight sleep test and for us to have a good poke around in your sinuses". I came out feeling worse than when I went in. A year passed without me hearing anything, so I wondered if she'd decided not to bother, but then on my next visit to the ophthalmologist he told me to contact them. Some message had gone into sp...

 We sold the table on a Saturday. On the Sunday evening after church we hied us away to the Ibis Budget Hotel near the airport to stay overnight before our early flight to London. The Ibis Budget Hotel was fine. The lift wasn't working, but we were on the first floor, so what did we care. Next morning at 5am we trotted the 10 minutes to the airport and ran from terminal to terminal (not very far!) to find our flight. We were in London in time for breakfast. Breakfast was in a nice Turkish café on the way to our London hotel. Bacon, eggs, tomatoes, etc., and a big mug of tea. Bliss. We were staying in the Easyhotel in Shoreditch. It was fine. You get a bed, a bathroom and two coat hooks. Once I fixed the shower all was good. Our week included : A visit to The British Museum, this time armed with my little book. The Museum was crowded, so we curtailed our visit a little, but not before visiting Alexander the Great and Socrates, as well as Ur of the Chaldees and Assyria. Oh, and the P...

Back in perhaps 2007 or thereabouts we saw a table at Ikea. It wasn't part of their catalogue and had no strange name. It was just a big, heavy table in very solid pine, measuring 180 cm by 100 cm, or almost 6 feet by 3 feet. We fell in love with it and bought it and it became the centre of our life for almost 20 years.  It was where the children did their homework. It was where sewing projects were done. It welcomed family meals. It held Bible studies. It was where people ate, prayed, read and talked. It was the field where endless games were played. You could easily seat 10 people around it, and we regularly did. And more. It moved with us from our house to our small flat, where it dominated the living room. It then became the centre piece of our bigger flat and we put a makeshift bench at one end increasing its seating capacity. You could squeeze stools in, too. But now we've moved once more to a smaller flat and the table is just too big. I offered it to family and church f...

 The DW letter arrived yesterday telling me that I am, as I thought, and as the government website informed me, entitled to a full UK state pension from 18 April 2025. It will be paid into our bank account every four weeks, etc. Once we've received the first payment we can reduce further our support from UFM. We're getting there slowly, step by step.

There were no direct flights to Bordeaux from a convenient English Airport, so we rented an apartment in the Paris region from Monday to Saturday. Catrin, Froim and Dorothea stayed overnight on Sunday evening and on Monday morning we sneaked off to get the 840 train to Montparnasse. Then we had a metro and a train journey to get to the apartment. Well, travelling by metro and train in Paris with a pram is all kinds of dreadful. Lifts that don't work, or will only go to the floor you don't need. Trains that you have to climb into or jump down from. Hordes of people everywhere. Long queues of able bodied people who could have taken the escalators but instead are waiting for the small lift that anyway takes you to the wrong floor. Tickets that will randomly refuse to work. (a railway worker told me that they demagnetise. I told her that I wait for someone else to go through then run behind them and she laughed.) But the apartment was great. We managed to eat nice meals in Paris fo...

So have we had a week! Our daughter, Catrin, has been pregnant for some time, expecting a little girl in mid-October. Once your estimated due date arrives  you go to the maternity unit every two days to be assessed. If all is well they send you home to continue the long wait. If necessary they will intervene to bring the pregnancy to a happy conclusion. Thus it was that every two days we have been on tenterhooks for some little while. On Thursday they decided enough was enough, and that Catrin would stay in hospital until the baby was delivered. This was followed by gentle induction of labour ( déclenchement in French), then less gentle induction, then finally a caesarian section yesterday afternoon. And so Dorothea Anwen has entered the world. We're very proud of everyone - Catrin, Théa and Froim dealt with the whole process with enviable sang-froid, coping admirably with every medical decision and every change of plan. I was amazed - and I don't amaze easily. I regularly tak...

 Some friends came to serve in Bordeaux Church in August by preaching each Sunday. They stayed in our sweet little retirement flat. Meanwhile they suggested to us that we go spend some time in their manse in Northern Ireland, and that we use their car while we were there. Well we had a wonderful time visiting the Giant's Causeway, Derry and some of the important sights and sites of Belfast. The car was a hybrid and very easy to drive once you managed to convince yourself that the automatic handbrake worked and would continue to work while you were away. The railway service is cute and scenic. The people are immensely friendly, kind and courteous. In short we loved the place and its people. While there we worshipped in two baptist churches, one where our friend is the incumbent and the other in Belfast where an erstwhile intern in Bordeaux is now Associate Pastor. We'd love to go back to Northern Ireland one day, but in the summer.

 Following the Great Keswick Debacle, when our volunteering at the Keswick café was sabotaged by our assorted indispositions, we had airline tickets to use up. Yes, we had not taken travel insurance, so we paid even more money to change our tickets to fly for a short visit to North Wales. This time we were able to go. We passed extremely slowly through a very crowded Bordeaux airport but in good time to get our plane. All seats in the terminal were taken so we leaned against whatever we could find while waiting to board. Hey, bags need seats, too! though sometimes pointing out to Pat, "No, that's a bag seat", makes the bag find a new refuge on the lap of the person sitting next to it... Once on the plane we quickly found our allocated seats - right at the back on the left hand side - stowed our bags and the flight was smooth and uneventful.  We had 30 minutes in Manchester to disembark, get through immigration , hustle off to the station and board our train for Shotton. I...

The Hobbit has been translated into Welsh and published as "Yr Hobyd - Yno ac yn ôl". I rushed to order a copy, of course. Meanwhile we've had visitors. Our son and daughter-in-law have been to stay, and then their friend Phil from Yeovil arrived. They are going to watch a couple of Olympic football matches, one here and two in Marseille, where they drove today. Our flat is smaller than our old one, and poor Phil had to sleep on the floor in the living room. A borrowed airbed proved useless because we didn't have the special pump. Cushions pushed together were abandoned. A duvet on the floor proved pointless. The last night involved cushions secured together by the duvet, and this held throughout the night. Nevertheless Phil's Fitbit announced that he had slept well whatever the conditions. We begin a month of inactivity soon. Well, we are planned to visit our sending church, then to spend two weeks in Northern Ireland. We will chill diligently ready for our big r...

Saturday 13/7 I finally felt more like myself again, though it seemed unwise to wander far from a good toilet. That makes 10 days of gastro-enteritis! Sunday I was able to preach.  Monday I was pretty washed out and good for nothing. Meanwhile Pat's back was responding well to painkillers, rest and gentle exercise. Tuesday we went into the café, travelling by bus'd'sub on the way there and bus 9 coming back (never again!). Our tram that takes us to church and to the café is currently having some major engineering works, so it's out of commission until next week. The city lays on relay buses (bus'd'sub, for bus de substitution), which are slow, hot and crowded. They follow, more or less, the route the train would take. We decided to take bus 9 along the boulevard to come back, but it's slow, long and crowded, too. Worse than the bus'd'sub. Wednesday, yesterday, we got to the café on time by taking an earlier bus'd'sub, then decided to make the...

We have some medication from the pharmacy. It seems to be good stuff and has reduced the problem greatly.  Meanwhile Pat's old back problem has flared up.

The retirement age in France is 62, so in theory I'm in extra time. You have to balance this against the fact that I arrived in France fewer than 20 years ago, and that we are in one of the less advantageous pension schemes - the official scheme for people who work in religion is, understandably, tailored mostly for priests, monks, nuns, and others who have a certain course of life and so on. No dependants. In theory. Anyway, I looked at our retirement scheme information and it said that retirement takes about six months to process, and you have to ask to retire online. This all looked very simple. 5 easy steps, said the website. I started them. They always ask you if you have things you've never heard of and can't understand. "Are you in receipt of anti-ancillary-refundable-post-traumatic scholarships, or whatever". I suppose if I don't know what it is I can safely say no. Anyway at present we're not receiving anything we don't know about, so ... And ...

Today is the Fête du Travail, when we celebrate work by not doing a stroke all day. The buses are not running. The trams are not running. The supermarkets are closed. The Pharmacies are closed. The cafés and restaurants are closed.  Sorry for this odd style, I've been listening to stories in Italian for beginners. And it's cloudy and cold.  Yesterday there were absolute scenes in our little neighbourhood supermarket as people queued up and down the aisles to buy enough food to get them through till Thursday. More pasta? Yes, much more pasta. We had planned to go for a nice walk to the Parc des Angéliques to see the Wisteria Arch. We still might, but if we do we'll need to wrap up warm. Alternatively it might be the perfect opportunity for a duvet day!

We've never really been present at the heart of the life of our wider family. When we married I was already in pastoral ministry (= no weekends) and living a long way from our folk, so when we came to France the situation didn't change all that much. Now we feel fine about leaving things at the weekend and we have more freedom than I think we've ever had, so it was a special joy to spend time with my folks in South Wales. The occasions were firstly the appointment of my nephew, David, as bishop designate for the see of Bardsey in the diocese of Bangor in North Wales, and my 65th birthday.  We flew to Manchester because flights to Bristol either left too early or arrived too late to be practical. The journeys were eventful - flights were delayed and trains cancelled, but we got where we needed to be and all was well eventually. David made history by being the youngest ever bishop in the history of the Church in Wales. I'm never sure whether the history of the Church in W...

Our apartment block has a roof-garden, laid mostly to lawn by surrounded by fruiting shrubs, a couple of hazel trees and with four raised beds. This is overseen by a company which put shared vegetable gardens in various office buildings and apartment blocks. We'd wondered whether we could actually use the raised beds or whether the produce would be taken and distributed to the poor of the parish. It transpires that we plant and look after the beds, with plants supplied by the company, grown in their nursery in nearby Bègles. We are also supposed to cut the grass. So yesterday two chaps from the company came and supervised our planting of herbs in two of the raised beds, including mint, thyme, rosemary, chives, hyssop, sariette , lavender and strawberries.  In May we'll be planting up tomatoes, courgettes etc... Meanwhile on ou balcony we've sown some cut and come again lettuce (laitue à couper), some tomatoes ("it's a bit early!" said the chaps) African marigo...

For over thirty years I have worked weekends, so quick visits to family or simply getting away happened Monday to Friday. Then the café opened, and we are generally needed in Bordeaux from Wednesday to Friday. Now I'm handing over pastoral responsibility to Sylvain, so weekends are back in our life again. This is why we went on a quick visit to see Gwilym and Beth in Norwich. We flew on Saturday evening and returned on Tuesday. It was great to see them, to meet their excellent and allergenic cat, Beryl, and to explore the city a little again.  Travel was uneventful and timely.