Arrivederci Stella bella

Wednesday and the last day for Jack and Stella in Marsilly

Les Deux Tours de le vieux port de La Rochelle 

Sheila reports…..

Wednesday saw an early rise from everyone; well OK only Peter, though to be fair Jack and Stella were actually seen downstairs before 11.00am. There was lots of coffee and map reading before the packing started. Peter headed out to source the pastries for breakfast, as sustenance for the task in hand was clearly needed, and to relocate our car to the Place to allow for Jack to park (the biggest Jag in the world) outside the house.

So down the suitcases came, I am not saying that Jack and Stella brought a lot with them but, if they've not warned Tim and Kristy that they've brought so much on holiday, they just might think the house in Witley has been burgled.

As Jack was loading the car he was corned by not just one of our neighbours, but two! Clearly some sort of smoke signal had gone up to say that there one of les anglais has been seen outside No 8 and the rumour has it that he speaks French, let’s get over there. (note from ed - we know he's Scottish) First up is our neighbour across the road with whom he had a lovely conversation about life and the weather and this was closely followed by our neighbour to the left.

I need to set the scene for this conversation because Peter had already been cornered by this neighbour on a return journey from the shops last week. To cut a long story short, Peter had no idea what he was saying but with hand gestures we thought he was referring to the weeds outside our house. We set about removing every last vestige and dousing the path in weed killer.This thought lasted all of 48 hours until we saw that the bath & shower were leaking out of the drain and into the road and thought "aha" that’s what he was trying to tell us (Countless hours were spent on a trip to the DIY store and efforts trying to fix this.)

So a week on and notre voisin sees another person outside the house and says to Jack “Do you speak French?” in French mind you - because he speaks not one word of English. After some time, it seemed like 15 minutes, and many more hand gestures, we establish that he is just trying to say that when we are not around, he sprays the pathway at the front of the house to kill the weeds, maybe about 3 times a year. That’s all he was trying to get over, being a friendly neighbour that he is. He must have gone back into his house and thought feck me what do I have to say to these foreigners just say I am a nice neighbour. Jack on the other hand never thought he’d be having a conversation about weeds when he got on the ferry for his French holiday.

Jacks linguistic contribution was not yet over. No sooner had we sat down to a scrambled eggs brunch, toast having been burnt during the above conversation, as Peter was needed from time to time, just to wave his hands really. Well blow us down! We’d all only just sat down when the doorbell rang. In fact it rings so rarely rings we actually didn't know what it was it for a moment or two.  Our two fluent French speakers hopped up and ran to the door to be greeted by, well greeted by a door to door sales man. 

At the door was M. Jolie who was offering his services to clean our roof. Peter immediately said “non” whilst Jack was eyeing up his cherry picker and thinking that maybe the house next door (the walls that face us) could be painted by him. Jack was brilliant. He tried to persuade M. Jolie to paint the house next door and when M. Jolie was not interested in doing that Jack convinced him that we didn't want the roof cleaning. So “non” won the day and the chap headed off and we returned to our brunch. In fairness Stella was pretty much ready to hit the road, however le chauffeur still had a few tasks to attend to, a situation we felt was not happening for the first time in their thirty odd years of marriage.

It was now 1.30 and Jack and Stella got into their car, which was now calling on its great reserves of its  suspension system, and headed off up to La Motte for another lovely few days, though hopefully without the need to engage with door-to-door salesman, neighbours concerned about weeds, 67 year old widows and late nights in music bars.

It’s been a fantastic few days, brilliant laughs and extremely enjoyable all round. Hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.