Blog in France

We’ve been making the most of our bonus day, 29th February, as well as the wonderful weather. We were down to teeshirts today. It seems incredible that only a week ago Chris and I were bundled up against the vicious cold, dragging wood across the firmly frozen lakes. They’re all...

He’s 60 this year, he’s stripey, he’s cute – but what exactly is he? Marsupilami is a bande désinée (comic book) character invented by Franquin and was first published in 1952 in Spirou. In 1987 he got his own series of BDs, which our Ruadhri loves. There’s now a further...

Caesar from the Asterix books As I’m sure you know, this year is a leap year. In French that’s année bissextile. A what? Well, bissextile comes from the Latin bis sextilis which means ‘twice sixth’. None the wiser? OK, leap years were introduced under the Julian calendar, after Caesar’s Egyptian...

It’s long puzzled me why sliced brown bread here in France comes in ‘normal’ packets of 14 slices (550g) and family size ones of 21 slices (825g). Those seem to be strange numbers of slices, especially the 21 size. You can’t make an even number of sandwiches with that. Sandwiches...

I’ve been sitting gazing blankly at the computer screen for a while. Not writer’s block – I’ve got plenty of blog posts planned out – but farmer’s exhaustion! It’s been quite a week. Now that we’re finally thawing out, we’re catching up with outside jobs. But there was still thick...