The aforementioned folder ...

 ... (see previous post) is too small.

Have I mentioned already? Probably not.  We are attempting to buy a small terraced house in Chichester.  

We've spent much of the last eighteen months pondering our future (nothing like a couple of major ops to force one to face one's mortality).

Much as we love France and especially the bit where we live, we have come to recognise whoever of us is left will up sticks and return to the UK.  We have no family to take on the role of executor and it would be cruel to ask anyone else to sort out our affairs in France.  So, we are planning for it now and hopefully making things easier for the last of us. Part of the plan is to have a property in the UK already that either of us would be happy to move into whilst things are tidied up in France.

We've found somewhere and are going through the agony of trying to purchase it.  We realised the last time we bought a property in the UK was 28 years ago. It is now another world, not helped by the fact that we are treated as money launderers, everything is now done on smart phones and the paperwork arriving from the solicitors by email is so voluminous that, this morning, I have had to buy a larger folder (see above), an additional ream of paper and a new set of inks. 

We grit our teeth and hang on in there because we love the house we've found and are enchanted by Chichester.

We talk about it becoming our "maison secondaire" for a time and popping across to stay for a week or two, while our base continues (for the time being) to be France.  We are too embedded in the French system and all its healthcare benefits to want to lose that quite yet.

The house is bright, modern, feels spacious within its smallness, with a small garden. Chichester has a John Lewis and I look forward to shopping for modern, Scandi-style furniture. It could not be more different from where we live in France.

This will be a new adventure.

 

A One Hedgehog Evening

 Rona has been "done". And to my surprise she is returned to me with no cone or bandage round her belly to stop her licking herself. And to our even greater surprise, she takes little or no notice of her operation scar. I do dig out the fancy Elizabethan collar she wore after her elbows were operated on, just in case. The vet today checked her over and proclaimed her "nickel" but did warn she might lick more as the scar scabs over - so for the moment the cone remains on the side.

We have instructions to keep her exercising subdued and controlled, until next week.  So she remains on the lead. Tod does the early morning walk - down to the stream, along, up and round, usually across Monsieur F's clover field which is still planted and flowering and makes for an easy route back home (not too wet or muddy).

Armed with a head torch, I do evenings after supper, before the latest Netflix series. She and I head off round our field and garden, saying good evening to the hedgehogs as we go. She is good with them - just a sniff and a nuzzle - and then off.  They barely react and certainly don't feel the need to roll into a ball. Unlike the days of Clara, who used to run round the garden with a rolled up hedgehog in her mouth and then drip blood on the kitchen floor as I extracted the spines from her lips.

I think we have at least four, though we've never seen more than three in any given evening - they seem to keep to their own patch: the cottage lawn, the field, the house lawn and the bank alongside the track.

We only saw one tonight, as I "encouraged" Rona into the house. We're staying in the cottage while work is done on our utility room in the house.  I got tired of the mouse-ridden, colombage-dusty open shelves. What seemed enchanting when we moved in, these days is just grubby.  So the walls are now white, plasterboarded and rendered, the ceiling insulated, and the floor about to be tiled. (The "terre cuite" squares we bought for the kitchen18 years ago are totally passé - everything now is grey and beige giant rectangles.)  I find a series of multi-coloured tiles with an echo of the russet in the kitchen and hope that they blend in.  Tomorrow a trip to Bordeaux for a final check up of Tod's second cataract op (all progressing well) affords an opportunity to head to Ikea for suitable (narrow) kitchen shelving, and a Swedish meatballs lunch.

Rona and I thread our way through the kitchen, filled to the gunnels with the contents of the utility room, including a fridge, washing machine and tumble dryer. Not sure how our builders managed to squeeze the appliances through the utility room doorway and past the kitchen dresser.

My objective is to find a folder and a hole punch in my study and take them back down to the cottage. I need to do some filing before the accumulated paperwork disappears into the Bermuda triangle between the cottage and the house.  How do people who split their time between the UK and France manage?  We can't even keep things in order across two lawns!

The lights in the cottage throw out a warm, welcoming glow. As we head back down, I briefly turn out the torch and look up at the myriad stars in the clear black sky - it's going to be a cold night - two degrees by eight tomorrow morning. I hope our hedgehogs find shelter.