Blog #2 2019

Written Sunday 23^rd June

Remember the wind gusts forecast on the 7^th June? Well, around 8pm we were eating dinner and Sue looked across at the English-owned barge - Redquest – moored along the bank from us and saw the ladder on their wheelhouse roof lifted into the air. They had gone back to England the day before and the ladder was supposed to hold down the tarp covering the solar panels.

Next thing we see our French neighbour, Bernard, on the Redquest fighting with a solar panel that had blown off the roof. It was dangling over the water on its electric cable.

I dashed round to join him together with another ‘batelier’ to lift it back up into place.

We secured it with one of our spare mooring ropes.

The next morning I went into the port office and Vincent rewound the security film and we watched the moment when first the ladder blew off, followed by the tarp, followed by one of the solar panels!   "Mon Dieu"   "Ooh la la"

When the poor owner (from Sunderland) had arrived a couple of days earlier, from the South of France in his camper van, we watched as he tried to repair the air conditioning unit on the roof of the van. This had been virtually torn off when he went under a too low bridge. He’s said to be touring the Lake District now!

Saint Florentin is dominated by a huge church on top of the hill in the town centre. 

You can see it from miles around. 

An Englishman who spends his summer moving hire boats around, told me that the stained glass windows were spectacular so, as I was in town on Friday afternoon, I went into the Bureau de Tourisme to ask for the key to the church.

I approached a young lady seated behind a computer terminal and made my request.

• -       I need your ‘Carte d’Identité’ monsieur, s’il vous plaît
• -       We don’t have identity cards in England

She looked totally bemused.

• -       But the computer needs your identity number
• -       I don’t have one. We don’t have them in England – but I do have my driving licence in my wallet with my photograph on it

I produced it and she turned it over in her hands looking at it suspiciously – obviously disturbed by this unheard-of anomaly

She called to an older woman for help in satisfying the demands of the computer programme.

After a thorough search of the licence card, front and back, horizontally and vertically, she found two letters followed by an 8 digit code in miniscule print on the bottom right hand corner of the reverse side.

This satisfied the computer and the young lady finally handed me a huge, wrought-iron, key, but only after she insisted on handing me a map and a guide book, even though the church was, literally, just across the road.

• -       Go through the big red doors and lock them behind you when you’re inside (rather worrying) and lock them behind you again when you leave.

The quantity and quality of the stories illustrated in the glass panels was amazing and I spent more time there than I expected.

The lock rattled as a party of 3 French came in, and I duly locked them in behind me when I left.

• -       Where have you been (asked Sue on my return)
• -       To the opticians to get my glass fixed but I nipped into the church to have a look.

I don’t think she was impressed with my extra-curricular activities.

Latest weather forecast :

          Tomorrow    Monday       34ºC

                               Tuesday       35ºC

                               Wednesday  40ºC  (104F)

                               Thursday      39ºC

                               Friday          39ºC

There’s absolutely no way we are travelling in these temperatures but we are happy to stay in St.Flo with French friends and some old Australian friends just arrived in port. So we’re drinking chilled wine and catching up and, of course, we have a nice cool car to travel round in if it gets too unbearable.

Back on the ID subject, I took great delight in telling the French locals who come to the port every day to sit under the trees that, when we went to vote in the recent elections, we needed to produce no documents whatsoever and that we had a pencil on a piece of string to mark our X in the box and that was it.

Horrified expressions all round.

I manged to restrain myself from saying that, unlike France, we were not brought up in a police state where we can be randomly stopped by the police and asked for “papiers, s’il vous plaît”.

Sometimes it is good to be reminded of our relative freedoms in the UK.

 SCENES FROM 'DOWNTOWN' ST.FLO

LEADEN SUN - ANNOUNCING THE HEATWAVE (canicule)