A TABLE EXTENSION

Two tables end to end to seat ten people.

When we bought our first house in France it was a tiny place but perfect as a second home or "holiday home".  We struggled to find furniture for it in France and soon realised that we could end up spending much of our actual holidays trying to furnish it. 

Over our first winter of owning the little house we collected furniture for it in the UK, sofas from Ikea, flatpack bedroom furniture and a lovely oak dining set in the January sales including a four seat table that would extend to six.  We hired a van and transported the lot across the channel at Easter 2008, picking up extra beds for the second bedroom and cramming them into the van on the way through France.

After a few years we downsized in the UK in order to upsize in France. The new UK house was much smaller and very little of our existing furniture would physically fit into it so we brought it all to France.  This included our dining table, sideboard and four chairs, meaning that we now have two dining sets in France.  

"Casual dining" in the kitchen.

The old UK table works well in the kitchen where Nick refers to it as "casual dining" and the oak set from the little house lives in the dining end of our living room where it serves as "formal dining" and comfortably seats six.  It’s a solution that has worked well for years and we really like it.  

As our circle of friends has grown we have been entertained by people who have the ability to throw large dinner parties or lunches where they could seat eight, ten or even more people.  We're not talking posh château dining, but people who have the room to fit in a big old table, or multiple small tables, and a random collection of chairs.  

After a while I began to wonder if we could do larger gatherings ourselves.  Our dining table seats six comfortably and we found that by putting the kitchen table at the end of it we could seat ten.  The only problem was that to get the kitchen table into the dining room we had to heave it out of the house through the kitchen door and back in through the middle door as it would not physically fit through the door between the two rooms!

It was heavy work, adding a lot of time to the hosting of any dinner party and in fact we missed having the kitchen table into the kitchen for food prep so we had to come up with another solution.  

One extension to seat an extra two people.

When we bought this house the large bedroom was also being used as an office.  There was a desk made from a couple of lengths of fairly sturdy kitchen worktop which we saved when we dismantled the office.  Having a huge barn enables us to save a mountain of stuff that might come in handy later!

Two extensions to seat an extra four people.

Nick created two extensions, one for each end of our oak table, using sections of the old office worktop, each supported by three tubular legs from Ikea.  They fit onto the table using clamps which can't be seen when the extensions are not in use.  With one extension the table seats eight with ample elbow room.  With two extensions we can seat ten.  If only the room itself was bigger we could add a third and seat another two!  

The worktop is not pretty and obviously I need a long tablecloth to hide all the joins but it works really well.  Luckily we already had enough chairs!  

Sets of matching or at least reasonably similar dinnerware are often on sale at local brocantes or vide greniers and we have accumulated a fair stash of it over the years.  The original set of six plates we bought from Ikea in 2008 has been boosted by acquiring extras from brocantes and fortunately we also have plenty of room in the barn to store it all!  We rarely pay more than two or three euros for a set of plates, bowls or whatever, the bonus being that we now have enough to afford to break a few!  Luckily mismatched crockery and glassware are still very much "in vogue".

The table in the foreground (there is a step down into the "dining room") is a side table that normally lives at the far end of the room and we bring it forward when we have a big dinner party.  It's perfect for serving dishes and plates.  It was a UK charity shop purchase a few years ago (pre Brexit when it we could bring such things freely).  I remember thinking it would probably come in handy at some point and with a coat of paint and a lick of varnish it's just the job!

SEVENTY FIVE NEXT !!

Another birthday has passed and in my birthday week we ate at some of our favourite restaurants.  The troglodyte pizzeria in Loches had had another makeover for Christmas.

On my actual birthday we went to the déchèterie!  What a treat!

We had to go because we had a lot of gardening and other rubbish to dispose of and opportunities were limited.  However, I did find a nice birthday gift on the "help yourself" table - four lovely dessert bowls, perfect for trifle or ice cream.

In the evening we had a delicious meal in the hotel in the village.  Its restaurant is called "L'Auberge".

The village looked very festive as we walked back to the car.

Later in the week we sampled the Christmas menu at Brody's.

The smoked sausage was very good.

I made a pumpkin and mincemeat cake in my forest Bundt tin for my birthday.

It was delicious!

 On a beautiful sunny day we went to the Christmas market at Bossée-sur-Claise which was great fun.

One of the food stalls was serving tartiflette so we had another good lunch!

In our art class we painted Christmas robins.

After we had deposited Yvonne in the cattery on the eve of our return to the UK for Christmas, there was a gorgeous sunset.  Such things make leaving France hard to do.   Hugo comes with us as he travels really well.  Yvonne does not travel well at all.

Soon after we arrived we continued the eating out and met up with friends who spend the summers in our part France for a get together and Christmas lunch.  It was great to catch up.

We went somewhere we had never been before, even having spent most of my life living in Derbyshire.

The Church Inn at Chelmorton.  Highly recommended.

After that, things went rather downhill.

The weather turned very damp and grey and we both succumbed to nasty colds.

All other festivities have been cancelled and we simply hope to be well enough to travel back to France on the 27th.  I am keen to fetch Yvonne from the cattery as soon as we can.

This was not the Christmas we had planned or hoped for.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, I have just turned seventy four.  It was my dad who would have said "I'll be seventy five next".  After every birthday he would add a year on, saying what he would be next, not what he was now.  It was his kind of joke.  Until the day he met his lady friend and then he started to say "we don't talk about our age" with a cheeky grin.  

It turned out that he had not been entirely honest with her and had knocked a few years off!  

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS 

AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL !!

NOTES ON CHRISTMAS IN RURAL FRANCE and three goes for photos

Christmas in rural France is not the same as in the UK.  It doesn't really get going until much later and there always seems to me to be less emphasis on the hard sell.  

Our favourite troglodyte pizzeria has made an effort at Christmas decorations.

 However, the supermarkets by now have mountains of chocolate and other seasonal foods.  

The French clearly take chocolate seriously at Christmas.

The weather has finally turned quite cold and we have had some spectacular sunsets.

One of the restaurants in town has announced their Christmas menu.

Not a brussels sprout to be seen and still very reasonably priced.

The hotel restaurant in the village hasn't quite got its Christmas decorations sorted yet.

It always looks fairly festive anyway.

We've been experimenting with new local wines and this is now a favourite red.

We are lucky to have three good eating places in the village although that may soon change.  There was an Irish night at Brody's with our local band Celtiqua performing.  It was an excellent night.

Winter is not as dull as some might think in rural France.

Unfortunately, Brody's is for sale and the owners of the third restaurant and the bar are all approaching retirement age.  This time next year we could have only one place to eat in the village.  We are patronising it as often as we can.  Use it or lose it.

Finally, we have resumed our class in watercolour painting.

This is the second of an exercise in perspective, which is much more tricky than I expected.

One of the good things about learning to paint is that you see everything around you with "new eyes".  We drive around saying "that view would make a nice painting" or "look at the perspective in that!".

Finally, finally, I have finally cracked how to upload photos to my blog using pictures taken on my phone which appear automatically in my photo library in my iPad.  Using the iPad:

Step 1:  Click on "insert image".  Select photos and click to upload.  Up comes the message "unable to upload photos to your blog".

Step 2:  Don't give up.

Step 3: Click on "insert image" again.  A quick flash of something on the screen then nothing happens.

Step 4:  Don't give up.

Step 5:  Click on "insert image" again.  Select photos and click to upload again.  As if by magic they appear in the post.  Third time lucky you get a result.  It's all a complete mystery to me but it seems to work!

MORE OLD STUFF AND A NEW SCARF

Back in October we went to a local brocante/vide grenier for a nosey.  It's a popular thing to do on a Sunday and the weather was pleasant.

It was not a great brocante, mostly old children's clothes and toys and lots of stuff that had clearly been kicking around in people's barns for years, brought out every year to put on a table and see if anyone will buy it.

Empty handed, we were heading back to the car when Nick spotted a box of stuff under a table containing, amongst a load of other junk, this candelabra.  It was pretty dirty and some of the ivy leaves were a bit bent but for only 1€ it seemed worth a gamble.  It cleaned up very well, the bent leaves were easy to straighten out and with a fresh coat of paint looks perfect for Christmas.  Bargain.

Last winter I knitted myself a scarf in green.  Half way through I found this multicolour yarn in Centrakor and thought it might be fun to make another one.  I'm looking forward to finding out how the colours work out.

OLD STUFF

The other weekend we fancied a run out and ended up at a town called Montrésor.  The weather was reasonable, the last of the decent weather before the recent cold snap.  Our last visit was probably over a year ago and there had been a few changes including the appearance of some new shops.

One of the shops was a "brocante" shop.  It sells second hand or old stuff, a cross between a junk shop and antique shop.  I can’t resist a nosey round such places and was amazed to find that the prices were very reasonable, more like street market prices than what you would expect in a tourist château town.

The little jug was 2€ and the decanter 9€.  The jug pours beautifully and is perfect for serving warm milk with my little cafetière of morning coffee.  The decanter also pours well and looks lovely filled with red wine on the dinner table.  The stopper is as usual not the original but that doesn't really matter.  

Bargains.

The tureen came from the brocante at Abilly, "fète de la confiture", earlier this year, already planted with a succulent plant, which didn't survive very long.  It was meant to be an outdoor plant but the pot had no drainage and the wet spring weather followed by repeated heatwaves made it difficult to look after.  We brought it indoors but it gave up the ghost and ended up as compost so I put one of our own indoor plants in it.

Finally, the artwork is made of old metal.  A friend of ours creates interesting pieces of sculpture  from metal and other items that he finds.  We have admired many of them but this one just makes me smile.  It's called "gold tooth" and was a recent exhibit in his own art gallery, a former garage, called Espace Onze.

A NEW WASHER, CHEESE, AND A VISITING CAT

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.  

BUSY, BUSY.

I have been really busy since my last post and much of it, one way or another has involved baking.

My friend Rachel asked me if I could make a birthday cake for her granddaughter's fourth birthday.  I remembered that somewhere amongst all my cook books was one which included several designs for children's birthday cakes so I sent her some pictures and she chose this one.  The family live in France so a fairy tale French château seemed perfect.

The only problem is that I have never ever made anything like it before!

I did a little mock-up of the design using cake tins I already had and ice cream cones for the turret roofs.

 On the internet I found several pages of similar designs to what I was aiming for.

Luckily Nick was back in the UK for a week and was able to bring back cake decorations and other stuff which I had no idea if I could buy here in France.

I baked the sponges for the cake and between Rachel, myself and Nick (and a few glasses of wine) we decorated it.  It took two whole hours.

The birthday girl was thrilled with it.