Bastille Day

This week my parents have been visiting. We stayed in a holiday park for a lot of time and enjoyed a pool and being walking distant from the sea, but we came back to our house on one evening to join in with the Bastille day celebrations in our village. Bastille day is bonfire night for the French, but they have it in the summer which has pros and cons:

Pros - the weather is nice and people can sit outside in shorts and t-shirts.

Cons - you have to wait until at least 10pm to do fireworks which is a bit late for the kids.

More cons: what else is there to do in November?

Maybe the Americans have got it right with fireworks on 4th July and then fake Christmas on a random Thursday in November.

I bet neither Guy Fawkes or the French revolutionists gave the time of year enough thought when they were planning their shenanigans. Just like my parents 9 months before they had my sister Jo, the day before New Years Eve.

But enough about my parents sex life, back to the French Revolution. All I know about it is learned from the musical Les Mis and a brief look at Wikipedia right now, but it seemed some people got angry with the monarchy and stormed a prison in a place called Bastille in 1789, and that got rid of king Louis 16th, who was likely to be a bit of a meff.

And because of this me and Dan the boys and my visiting parents all got free food and wine. Compare this to the jubilee which was two days off. No free food and isn't every year. If you compare and contrast I'd say the only logical solution is let's get rid of the Queen. Shall we do it in September? It gets dark around 8 or 9 then and that's good for fireworks. There's not many other festivals in September, it can be a depressing month, especially if you're a teacher, but the weather might still be ok for a street party. Imagine if my blog got taken down for this, or imagine if the Queen died in suspicious circumstances in September, I'd be in big trouble.

We arrived at the Get Rid of the Kingaversry around 7:30, already past our kid's bedtime (they're starting to cotton on that French kids go to bed a lot later). It was just behind the school, the band were practising, and Percy got straight onto dancing in his own unique style. It's like break dancing mixed with skipping.  A load of chairs were set out and people were slowly arriving. It's so nice to do a village thing, I grew up in a village and we did village things, but never anything where literally the whole village would turn up. We had the village hall harvest festival and the scarecrow making competition and the primary school beetle drive. That's where you roll a dice and slowly draw a beetle with different strangers while drinking wine from a paper cup. This night in France also involved drinking wine from a paper cup but it felt a lot cooler. Me and my Dad (the extraverts of the group) went off to get wine and chat to random people, while the only one who can actually speak French was much more reserved. Me and Dad found out that the guy pouring the wine was actually the Mayor, who has previously shaken my hand when we went to the Marie (town hall) to fill in our forms. He seems like a super nice normal guy, and he didn't feel the need to wear any blingy necklaces to prove he was the mayor, like the needy British mayors do. Shall we get rid of them too when we off the Queen in September?

We had no idea what the food would be, or when it would arrive, we had just filled in an invite form that came through our letterbox with the amount of people. We could see in the hall baguettes and peaches and Dan said, "they can't cook everyone hot food can they?" because there was maybe 200 people there. Then, slowly, people began going up to collect their food, table by table like at a wedding. We were given a big cardboard tray for all the food and then served with a kind of noodle paella, with a massive prawn on top. Plus a chunk of baguette and bit of Camembert. There was no veggie option, there was just this but bigger.

The band played quite a random selection of mainly English songs, such as Avril Lavigne's "Complicated". Maybe the revolutionists sang some of these lyrics to the king when they were angry at him...

"Your watching your back

 like you can't relax,

you try to be cool 

you look like a fool to me"

The boys danced around with some kids from school, we were trying to hold out for the fireworks but at 10:30 they still hadn't done them (we saw them a bit later as we were driving back to the holiday park).

Since then we've had a bit more time with my parents and we went to this cool place in the wild swimming France book. It was a bit of a pain to get there. I'm practising driving, so trying to drive everywhere, but this was a lot of windy mountain roads and then when we arrived it had a no swimming sign, but everyone there had turned up for swimming. It was a gorge with rocks to jump off and rock climbers climbing with a rope too, probably the best place I ever swam at. I hate to swim in a blue rectangle, it's the least imaginative of all the colours and shapes you could swim in. I've always thought art galleries and swimming pools should combine because both can be a little dull, but swimming in natures art gallery is the best.

I've heard a lot about the UK heat wave, I hope you're all surviving. We have one air con unit downstairs, so I often sleep on the sofa, but my parents were there so we resorted to putting our duvet covers in the freezer, making ice cold hot water bottles, a cold shower before bed and Dan also just slept on the tiled floor with only a pillow for comfort. In England when it get to September I always feel not ready for autumn because I haven't had enough sun to get me through the winter, but I think here I'll be happy to welcome in the colder months.