SOAP a re-post from the "old blog"

These are some of my favourite English and French soaps.

My OH recently explained why he prefers a bar of soap to liquid soap.  Having been together for over thirty years I previously never knew the reason.  I assumed it was because he thought it was more manly!  He said he couldn’t get on with liquid soap because as soon as you run the tap the soap gets washed off.  

"Does it?" I thought.  

In our French house we have four sinks, or handwashing stations.  One each in the kitchen, utility room, ensuite shower room and the family bathroom.  Each sink has a bottle of liquid soap next to it and three of them also have a bar of soap. Two of them have two bars of soap, his and hers.

So why this obsession with soap and what about the thorny topic of soap dishes? 

I feel compelled to expand and explain.

Personally I'm a fan of liquid soap.  No more slimy bars of soap sitting in nasty puddles of gloop on the side of the sink, the stuff of nightmares from my childhood.  The worst you might have to deal with is a grubby thumb print on the plunger!

Don’t even mention the wall mounted soap on a stick I first encountered in French restaurant toilets.  Thankfully I haven’t seen one for a long while although it seems you can still buy them.  I used to shudder at the sight of one that was three quarters used, full of deep ugly cracks, and where you really had to wash the soap first before you could wash your hands. Ugh.

These are some of my favourite English and French liquid soaps.  

Now for the enormous variety of soap dishes available.  It has taken me years to find one that actually works; that keeps your soap dry and out of a puddle of slimy gloop. Consequently I have quite a collection of them.

This is the least effective kind.  The little bobbles in the bottom barely lift the soap above the water that runs off it and it soon goes soggy.  Yuk.  They do however make good trinket trays for your earrings!

I found the one on the right in a local French DIY shop several years ago.  It’s brilliant at keeping the soap dry but you obviously have to wipe up the drips on the surface underneath it and give it a wash occasionally.  It's made from plastic coated metal with rubber tips on the feet that stop it from skidding around.   It’s by the sink in the utility room where Nick prefers his own knobbly soap bar.  

The knobbly soap is an artisan kind of soap, very hard, full of bits of seeds to tackle hardworking gardener's hands and I have only found it on market stalls.  

Next to the gardening soap I keep a bar of girly soap on a different kind of soap dish.  The slots in the tray keep your soap more or less dry and the drips collect in the dish underneath, out of  sight.  The top separates from the bottom easily for cleaning of the dish.

This one was a much recommended internet purchase but I soon abandoned it to the box of spare soap dishes under the kitchen sink.  It works well enough, just about, in keeping your soap dry and out of the puddle, doesn't skid around, but soon produces a slimy residue on the side of the sink.

The same goes for these two, found in French supermarkets.  They keep the soap dryish and don't skid about on the side of the sink but a glurp of slime soon builds up in the dish and underneath.  They're very cheap so as a budget solution not too bad.

Remember these?  Yes, you can still buy them, mostly in old fashioned ironmongers or cut price homeware shops. The only good thing about them is that they are good for sticking your bar of soap to a sloping surface, but the soap is kept barely dry and the holder becomes disgusting rapidly.  Yuk.

These are my current favourites.  The rack is nice and deep and keeps the soap well out of the puddle and perfectly dry.  The puddle can be poured out of the dish until you're ready to clean it.  The rack clicks in and out so you can give it all a good scrub and the base has little rubber feet to keep it from skidding around.  They are made by a company called Joseph Joseph and I got mine in Sainsbury's.

Last but not least, I finally succumbed and invested in two glass refillable liquid soap dispensers.  Some of these can be very decorative (and pricey) but fiddly to use.  Mine came from Ikea, are very functional and not expensive but wouldn’t work on anything other than a very flat worktop surface.  They hold about twice as much liquid soap as a regular plastic bottle and are ideal for use with the cheaper bags of soap refills.

Now back to the original question.  If the liquid soaps run straight off under the tap how do I find them so easy to use?  I had to think about it and analyse how I perform a task that I do many times a day automatically.  I put a good dollop of soap on one hand, turn on the tap to wet the other hand then rub my hands together to lather up before putting them both under the tap.  Works every time.  Simple!

MISTY MORNINGS, SUNNY DAYS.

 The mornings are mostly cold and misty, a little frost here and there.

It’s nice to feel the sun on our faces later in the day.

It’s heading in the right direction.

STILL SCARF WEATHER

Over the winter I have knitted myself a warm scarf. There were just enough balls of wool in the shop but when I got them home one was a different dye lot and a slightly different shade.  So I used it to lengthen the scarf by adding a fringe.  You can barely notice the difference.

Spring may well be just around the corner but the scarf is still in regular use.

WHITE RABBITS, SUNSETS AND SNOWDROPS

My parents always used to say "white rabbits" first thing on 1st March.

I don't know why.

I'm glad to see the back of February.

1st March always feels that at last Spring is on its way.

It feels like it's been a long winter but we have had some spectacular sunsets.

In our art class we painted some snowdrops.

The teacher had a good method for keeping a few stems upright in a vase.

Moss.

It made me realise that we have no snowdrops in our French garden.

We will do something about that.

I enjoyed painting them and must aim to finish this one.

SECOND THOUGHTS

 

I have missed blogging more than I expected so am starting again, although in a different way.

I might republish some old posts but for now, just the one about Daisy.

Let's see what happens!

DAISY'S STORY

In 2014 we downsized in the UK so that we could upsize in France and spend more time there.  Once we had decided to buy the house in the middle of a large field friends said "you will need a cat".  Will we, I thought?  Their ginger cat, Marmalade, was about to have kittens.

There were two kittens, a male ginger cat and a female calico or three coloured cat.  Our friends' daughters had decided they would like to keep the female and let us have the male but when the time came for us to have the cat they had changed their minds.  They kept the male, who they had called Pumpkin, and we were to have the female, who they had called Splodge.  Splodge didn't seem the right name for such a pretty cat so we called her Daisy.

The friends said we should keep Daisy outdoors.  She had never been allowed into their house and they always had outdoor cats, providing food and shelter in their barns.  We were not completely convinced but could see the logic so we decided to go along with it. 

We moved into our crumbling farmhouse in the middle of a field in the September and Daisy arrived four days later.  She was eleven weeks old.  Two weeks later she had disappeared.

We spent the first few days of her disappearance frantically calling for her, searching our outbuildings, also the roadside and ditches in case she had succumbed to a passing car.  There was no sign of her and she had vanished completely.

After ten days it occurred to us that she might have made her way to the neighbour's house although we thought this unlikely.  She was so tiny and to get there she would have had to navigate enormous ruts and deep puddles in the field in between, or made her way to the grassy track that led to his house.  He also had a dog.  

We had a dog, our then standard poodle Lulu.  After a tricky start they had learned to live happily together but the neighbour's dog was untrained and uncontrolled.  

After ten anxious days and sleepless nights we decided to speak to the neighbour’s carer.  She visited him every day so we watched for her car leaving his house and waited for her at the end of the lane.  When we asked whether she had seen a kitten anywhere she said "she’s on his bed".

It transpired that the neighbour had noticed the cat and decided he would like her for himself.  He was in the habit of walking to and fro across the front of our property to watch what we were doing, several times a day.  On that day we had to go out and leave the gate open as the electrician was coming in and out.  When we left the house Daisy was playing at chasing leaves in the garden.  By the time we returned, only twenty minutes later, she was gone.  The neighbour had been into the garden and taken her.

He kept her imprisoned in his bedroom so that she couldn't escape or come back home and where she no doubt had to endure goodness only knows what torment from him and the dog.  He had told the carer that he found her abandoned by the road, picked her up and took her home.  The carer’s opinion was that kittens were easily come by, that we should let him keep her and get ourselves another one.  We protested and said that if she didn’t bring Daisy back to us we would go and get her.

Daisy was returned to us the next day.  She was ill, bloated and riddled with worms and fleas. From that moment she became an indoor cat with outside options.  We got her treated for the parasites, fed her quality food, had her vaccinated and microchipped and installed a cat flap, keeping a close eye on her if she went out, in case the neighbour tried to steal her again.

Inevitably we had to take Daisy with us when we went back to the UK.  She had her own passport so the formalities were straightforward but she was not a good traveller.  We had to put up with hour after hour of operatic meowing and eventually we worked out that what she didn’t like was the noise.  Road noise, traffic noise, roadworks, sirens, music, radio, the tomtom and even conversation would cause her to wail inconsolably.  Gradually over the years we learned how to manage the twelve hour journey, travelling in complete silence while Daisy sat quietly in her cage.

She was not keen on cheap hotels either.  Overnight stays in places like an Ibis or Campanile would result in none of us getting any sleep as she scratched frantically at the door or window all night trying to escape.  In much posher hotels, with plush chairs, a big bed and a large bathroom where we could deposit her litter tray and feeding bowls she was happy.  She would settle down in a comfy spot and we all got a proper night's sleep.

Our overnighters in posh hotels were not without incident.  On one occasion Daisy launched herself at one of the very stylish standard lamps causing it to crash onto the tiled floor and shatter into a zillion pieces.  Nick was out walking the dog and I was in the shower.  I heard the crash and dashed into the bedroom in my birthday suit to find a sea of broken glass on the floor and Daisy on a comfy chair wearing her "nothing to do with me" look.

It turned out that we definitely did need a cat.  Over her short life Daisy caught hundreds of mice, along with other things.  Her repertoire included a mole, a stoat, luckily very few birds although a hapless moorhen, and a few bats who all lived to tell the tale.  Frogs, toads and lizards had to run for cover and the young snake she brought into the bedroom one morning was very cross.  

She was also a very mischievous little thing.  Cats will be cats and true to type she loved hiding in bags and boxes, climbing up high and pushing things off the edge.  One morning we sat up in bed with our mugs of tea and watched as a large holdall on top of the wardrobe gradually inched towards the front and finally dropped off.  Daisy looked down at it with huge satisfaction.  

One of her favourite games was to go out in the rain, come in and demand to be dried off then go straight out and do it all again.  She just loved getting a rub down with a fluffy towel.

She helped with household chores by getting in the way and was generally always around us.  Her favourite time of day was "apéro time" when we all sat together, preferably outdoors, for a drink and some treats.  Her treat of choice was Dreamies.

After Lulu died we got our standard poodle Hugo.  They got on famously from the very start and were best friends.  In reality he adored her and she teased him mercilessly.  Her favourite taunts were to run between his legs at speed from the other end of the garden, to sneak up on him when he was eating and biff his tail, to demand that he licked her ears (which, being the perfect gentleman, he was happy to do), and swipe at him when he stopped.

We didn’t settle in the UK house we had downsized to.  After only three years we were on the move again and one of the main reasons was undoubtedly Daisy.  The house was on a busy road, which didn’t seem to matter until we ended up spending more time there than we expected to.  We were terrified that Daisy would either get run over or run away so we decided to keep her in.  It was hard work so we moved to a quieter area where there was a wood at the back of the house.  We were much happier and Daisy enjoyed being allowed outdoors again.  She was thriving, having a great life in both countries.  In France she had fields, barns and roofs to explore.  In the UK gardens, ponds and the wood.  She would run along the top of the fence chasing squirrels, jump across the roofs of sheds and garages, climb up and demand to be let in through the bedroom window.  Then she would go out through the cat flap and do it all over again.

When she had just turned seven years old we noticed the appearance of a small berry like red lump in front of her left ear.  The UK vet suggested it was probably not serious but offered to do a biopsy if we wanted one.  I remember thinking that this could cause Daisy and us a lot of pain and cost a lot of money and how right I was.  The lump did not change for six months but once back in France the following spring we thought it might be getting bigger.  A biopsy revealed that it was a sarcoma.  

In 2022 she had two operations to remove the tumour, one in France in June and the second in the UK in December after it made a reappearance.  That second operation was a big job and afterwards she was unable to close her eye properly.  After a few months she ended up with a corneal ulcer requiring more treatment by the French vet.  There it was discovered that the tumour was back and was growing fast.  Another operation would have required the removal of the ear and eye and even then with no certainty that all the cancerous cells had been removed.  For us it was out of the question.

The eye was treated successfully but we were just waiting for the inevitable.  We gave her the best life we could for the last few months but finally she, and we, lost the battle on 12th October.  She was only nine years old and we are immensely sad that she didn't get the chance to live to a ripe old age.  She was unique, a joy to have around and we miss her enormously.  There will never be another Daisy.

Since I started writing this post we heard of a mature cat in need of a home, called Yvonne.  She now lives with us, is very different from Daisy and is settling in.