Our washing machine had been on the blink for a long time. Sometimes it would spin normally although noisily, sometimes it struggled and rattled like hell, and sometimes it just refused to spin at all. It was a good quality Bosch machine but eleven years old and had been great until the last year. So the question was, whether to try to get someone out to look at it and see if it could be repaired or whether to not risk spending good money on an old machine and buy a new one. Plus the risk that one day it would simply conk out when full of wet washing, which has happened to other people I know and which complicates the problem no end.
The decision was made when I spotted a bargain in a local branch of SuperU. 700€ is a lot of money but 300€ off made it affordable. We decided to go for it. The old machine now resides forlornly at the corner of the déchetterie alongside other discarded machines. Curiously, the man that mans the déchetterie seemed remarkably thrilled to take it, and didn't swipe our users card (twenty goes a year), for which there must be an explanation but I can't imagine what.
I am very, very pleased with the new machine. It hardly seems to use any water and washes things beautifully, spinning them much better than the old one. RIP.
We recently discovered a number of previously unfamiliar cheeses at the cheese stall on the market. We were having visitors and lashed out a ridiculous amount of money on an eclectic mix of hard and soft goat and cow's cheeses. I took photos of them knowing I would never remember what they were otherwise
This one was my favourite.
They all went down well with our visitors who also were not familiar with any of them.
We couldn't resist this one, called Belper Knolle, because Belper is the name of a small town in Derbyshire close to where I grew up and a knowle is another word for a village or hamlet. It was jolly expensive.
I wondered how on earth cheese made in a Derbyshire town could end up on the market in the middle of France and was disappointed when the cheese lady told us it was Swiss. However, it was worth buying as it's delicious. The idea is to serve it grated like you would a parmesan, on salads, pasta dishes and in soups, and in fact it tastes much like parmesan only better. I sprinkled it on the soup I served for dinner and it was much appreciated.
We now covet the wooden cheese grating device that the cheese lady used to give us a taste.
We have a visiting cat. We had seen the cat in the field behind the house (once the farmer had cut down the triffid like weeds) occasionally over the last few months. I wondered how long it would be before it ventured to our house and sure enough, I smelled the tell-tale odour of tomcat in the little barn.
Shortly after that Yvonne appeared one day without her collar and with a scratch on her face. We found her collar (it's a quick release type) in a flower bed amongst a clump of flattened dahlias so we suppose that's where an encounter took place. A few times she growled and hissed when looking out of the glass door and once she hurtled into the house via the cat flap and hid under the stairs, eyes like saucers, hissing and spitting. Then we spotted the cat on the drive and found it on the beams in the little barn. It's a handsome cat with a fluffy tail and looks nice and clean.
It is nothing like the vicious cat we had visiting before. That one found its way into the house and terrorised Daisy, attacked both of us and would not go away, returning every night to take food. This one seems much more friendly, is obviously well used to humans as it came towards us, purring and rolling over on the beams. So far it has not attempted to get into the house and we therefore presume it's well fed and lives in one of the neighbouring farms, just doing the normal tomcat thing of wandering a fair distance from home every so often. We haven't seen it for a few days now that the weather has turned and hope that it is in fact well cared for and has somewhere warm and cosy to spend the nights.
