96 Friends

I’m nearing the final week of my 6 week tour, and my people count is up to 96 people that I have intentionally seen. (This does include the children of friends, some of which I had little interaction with.)

Dan just arrived in the UK and we will now be spending the final week in Preston to see his family. Unfortunately I’ve already seen them all, so they won’t count as extra people and I’m unlikely to make it to 100 people which would have been cool. One of his sisters is pregnant so maybe I can count her as 2 people? If she gave birth a few weeks early and it’s surprise quads I could reach my goal. But a surprise quad premature birth is probably not what you want at a family BBQ to be honest.

Since I last blogged I’ve been to a fake Centre Parcs near Blackpool called Ribby Hall, with my extended family. They had a little zoo and a crazy golf and a swimming pool and boating lake on site. The highlight of the zoo was the anteater, such a mad creature that poked its long nose through the bars while we and another family just laughed at it. 

The weekend after that we went to my cousin Lauren’s wedding. The boys didn’t come, I dropped them off at Dan’s parents. Weddings are kind of boring for kids and kids have been known to ruin weddings. Hopefully it was nice for my parents in law to have some time with the boys. The wedding was very beautiful, very fancy compared to my own wedding which accidentally resembled a school fete. But very emotional and personal as well. I didn’t really know much about my cousin’s partner and how they got together, but it was a lovely story. They were friends at uni and then housemates for years before they got together. Just a beautiful day in a lovely venue with very nice food, and some fun dancing at the end. It was nice to catch up with family. 

It was easy to see the Marshall descendants because we all had the same curly hair. It’s like they didn’t even need to ask, “bride or groom?” the hair gave it away.

Curly hair boomers

Curly hair millennials

 It was really nice catching up with other family there too, particularly two other cousins who were there, and are just both really interesting people. One of them, Marie, I’m trying to persuade to get into stand up. Whenever she tells stories they’re really good, and some stuff in her life is not going well right now, which is the perfect time to get into stand up. No one wants to hear stories when your life is all going great. 

I got to see my old housemate from my uni days Josh, with his fairly newly adopted boys who were a similar age to mine and got on well. It was super nice to see him as a Dad. I’ve always seen him around kids (working with, them not just lurking in playgrounds) so it was lovely and very natural to see him smashing being a Dad. He had been at a festival in the south and drove up in a big van full of crazy props and circus stuff, to where he lives near the Lake District, and stopped off on the way to visit me for a BBQ at my parents house.

After that I did a trip to the North East. I saw my sister in Leeds and my friend Lydia who got the train down from Gateshead to York with her two kids, aged 5 and 3. We went to the railway museum where you could see some big old trains from the olden days and there was one you could go inside, the Japanese bullet train. 

Eric was unfortunately feeling unwell, even though he was fine when we left that morning. He had a temperature, said he was very sleepy and wanted to go home, which would have been a massive shame given that my friend had made the effort to come all the way to York for this day. Obviously we didn’t have calpol on us but Lydia did have paracetamol. Which we crushed up and put in a ham sandwich. After a lot of bribery Eric ate a bit of the disgusting ham sandwich and he did improve a bit. We didn’t see a lot of York, but we did find a canal boat that was selling ice creams, which is fun but not as fun as if an ice cream was selling canal boats.

It was nice to hang out with my sister Jo in Leeds, but I can’t say it was relaxing. They have a two year old and a four year old and are in the middle of house renovations. The boys really loved their collection of board games though and wanted to play some very complex ones, which was not easy in a house of tiny people and renovations. One highlight was getting to make pancakes dressed as a shark. I didn’t have a dressing gown and the shark was the perfect over pyjama outfit. 

I’ve been enjoying seeing people in their own homes and seeing how different people parent and asking couples what they do for fun, and what they do on weekends in their family. The boys have also noticed that not everyone does things the same as us. Especially that lots of kids are allowed to get up earlier than them.

On the way back from Leeds we went to Dan’s sister’s baby shower. It was really nice and different to other baby showers I’ve been to. She had it in a community hall and she had a big table where you could make something out of clay and another table of flowers where you could make a bouquet of flowers to take with you, and some very delicious cakes. I tried to make a clay pot that was a cylinder but the hole in the middle was star shaped. It accidentally ended up being the perfect size and shape for an ash tray.

My next little road trip was to Staffordshire to see Abi and Jon and their girls who are the same age as my boys. We hung out a lot when they were little and we both were in Liverpool, and for a while we had a childcare arrangement. Both the older kids were in school and so I looked after their youngest with Eric a day a week, and then they had Eric a day a week so we could both have some child free time in the week. I highly recommend getting a deal like that if you’re in the toddler stage. It’s not twice the work to have an extra kid for a few hours, it actually kind of makes you put a bit more effort into doing some nice activities with them and your kid gets to bond with another kid and then you get time off, to do things like sit in a silent house.

Unfortunately my boys can now hardly remember their girls. Eric does have a great memory for what toys other families have though and asked me are they the family with the lego train, which they were. When we first arrived Abi said the neighbours were having a party next door and we were invited. So this was the second stranger’s birthday party we would be crashing since arriving in England (see my previous blog for the story of the first one). This was a BBQ with a bucking bronco and the family were so lovey and welcoming, getting us burgers and trying to speak to us in French, because initially they thought we were French. Bad French in a Birmingham accent is my absolute favourite kind of French, because it really makes me feel better about my own level of French.

Since moving to the midlands Abi and Jon have got a big fluffy dog called Dolly who we took for a mad long late night walk through the forest that was really fun. If it was just me and the kids they would have got bored and moaned straight away, but with kids their own age they loved it. 

I noticed all the families I’ve visited with kids the same age as ours are calling their parents “Mum” and “Dad” now not “Mummy” and “Daddy” and they just said it happened naturally. But I think it’s not happening naturally with my kids because they don’t see other English kids, so I’m intentionally trying to phase out Mummy and Daddy now. If you get to an adult and you still say Mummy and Daddy then you’re posh. I don’t know why this is true but it is. Why don’t we all call everyone by their actual names that is a lot more logical. It makes absolutely no sense when you’re in a park and someone shouts, “Mum” and everyone looks round.

I was really pleased to get a visit from Helen and Esther while I was at my parents. They are both good friends that had visited me in France and they’re both paddle board kind of people. Helen sometimes even does yoga on a paddle board and they both swim in ridiculously cold water for fun. When I started planning this trip I was happy that I would be able to see 5 of my 6 bridesmaids. Helen was the one I wasn’t going to get to see because she lives all the way down south and it is far, but it was really lovely of her to make the trek up north. Next time it’s definitely my turn to go south.

Helen and Esther

Me and Helen

I picked Dan up from Liverpool airport on Saturday afternoon, squeezing in seeing one more Liverpool family (the Ravens) that morning. They have 3 boys who are giant compared to my midget sons. Their youngest is 5 and was only a tiny bit smaller than Eric, who is 8, and their oldest, who is 11, was loads taller than me.

I’d been apart from Dan for 5 weeks, the longest I’d been apart since we’ve been married. To be honest I didn’t really miss him on week one, I was seeing all the other people that I miss all the time. But I did really miss him by the end. No one gets me like he does, and things just feel a bit weird like I’m not quite a full person.

We’re now in Preston. You never really expect to be holidaying in Preston, but it’s sort of the unexpected side effect of loving a Mediterranean holiday destination so much that you move there. Prepare to take your holidays in weird places forever.

Today we ate a full english and went to charity shops, that’s really the top things you can do while holidaying in Preston. Tomorrow we’ll take a day trip to the lake district because that’s the other good thing you can do in Preston: Go somewhere else.

Next week we’ll be doing more of living in random other people’s houses, but in France.

I love Liverpool

Week 2 of my 6 weeks of touring the Uk was in Liverpool. I will always have a special place in my heart for this city. When I’m in France and people ask me where I’m from I always say Liverpool and then if they’re British I have to follow it up with “I went to uni there and I lived there for 16 years but I’m not originally from there,” to explain the accent. I guess adopted children who are a different race to their adopted parents have to do the same thing. “Yeah she’s not my biological mum but this is the mum that raised me” that’s how I feel about Liverpool, it’s not really where I’m from but it’s the city that I choose that made me who I am. And I don’t really have many ties with my birth city Coventry anymore.

Someone recently asked me about why I didn’t want to sell my house in the Uk. They said “do you think you’re still emotionally attached to it” and the answer is yes I am, and I don’t really mind admitting that. There were years of stress and homelessness that went on before we got that house? Our previous house was in a really bad area someone was murdered right outside. I spent so long decorating every room of that house that we still own. So yep I’m emotionally attached, and also I think it makes financial sense not to see it.

I was really greatful that a friend who was going on holiday let me borrow her house. It was a beautiful house as well, she had so many plants and some many artefacts from around the world, and it was in a lovely area called aigbirth. (If you’re not familier its pronounced “egg-birth” other cool sounding Liverpool, places are “old swan” and “the dingle” ) this week was the only week we had a house to ourselves and it would have been pretty relaxing, had I not scheduled in seeing as many people as is humanly possible.

We arrived on a sunny Monday eve and after stocking up on food, driving through made me so happy and also a bit sad that I wasn’t still there, its got everything you could want from a city really. Apart from the stuff we moved for I guess: sun, mountains, and a sea you can actually swim in. We drove along the river past the docks to a climbing place called awesome some walls. 

My kids hardly remember Liverpool and I kept pointing out places I had lived or worked or done comedy which is a lot of places and by the end of the week they were sick of that. Climbing was really fun, and a perfect way to start the week. On Tuesday the romantic bubble surrounding Liverpool burst when Liverpool was grey and I had to go to the Argos in St John shopping center which, since they built Liverpool One (shopping district) is just a weird dystopian mix of terrible shops old people and despair. 

I got to see a lot of people, current people count of people I’ve intentionally seen including their children is 59, I think. In Liverpool I had Grace over for a meal, she has been on a similar journey to me, she moved from Liverpool to Cornwall (or Devon) please just assume any time I say Cornwall I mean somewhere in the south that isn’t London. Anyway she bought a house with her partner Laura and then it didn’t really work out and they are now in the Wirral, after having many of the same stressful moving situations and finding new friend dilemmas as me. I met Danni my old housemate from 2009-10 who now has a very cute one year old, and it’s so lovely seeing her being a mum after years of her thinking it might  never happen. I met up with Katie in the inflatable park that we got pretty much to ourselves because the Uk kids were in school. I saw my Godson Ben and he’s just turning 13 and is taller than me! In fact my boys and Ben and his sister Elodie played a fairly complex board game and me and Steph the mum didn’t have to supervise at all we just got to have a nice chat. I realised how far we’ve come from the day that Percy and Elodie were babies and we could never say a whole sentence at once.

2015 and 2025

I wanted to see my friends Zac and Jude who have boys a similar age, but since it was still term time they weren’t very free to hang out. So Jude suggested that on the Friday, which was her kids last day of term and they finished early, we could go to a trampoline park together. Her kids were actually invited there for a party, but we assumed the whole class would be there and no one would notice my kids being there as well. We were wrong, the party was the birthday boy, Jude’s boys and one other family, so we very much were noticed. The mum of the birthday boy was so welcoming though, she offered the boys party food and when I declined she insisted. My kids did not pick up on the weirdness and were happily posing for photos. The poor birthday kid is going to look back at these photos in years to come and wonder who these gatecrashers are. 

 I went to my old church Saint Stephens and saw a lot of people I used to know, unfortunately the boys hardly remember these people. I also went to see my old man old neighbour Geoff. He told me had had Cancer but he only whispered it because he didn’t want the kids to hear. Unfortunately I said “what?! You’ve got a hamster?” I wish I made that up for comedy but it’s true.

On the Saturday I organised a big picnic in Sefton park, but being England it was raining. It’s frustrating that all the good weather is in France and all the people I want to meet up with are in the land of rain. But we did it anyway we sheltered under some trees and we were near the cafe for if things got really bad. So many people came that I hadn’t seen for ages and you know they are your real friends if they come to a rainy picnic. The weather did cheer up and we had a great time, I just feel bad that I didn’t get to talk to everyone for that long. 

I saw keshia, who was a good friend when Percy was young, her daughter was 2 weeks younger than Percy and we hung out a lot, she even had Percy a day a week when I was working. When we became mums I was 28 and she was just 19 and single. She was a super good mum then, she read a lot more about parenting than me and she knew a lot more facts about breastfeeding and stuff. People assumed I knew stuff that I didn’t know, and they probably assumed she didn’t know as much as she did know. It must been really hard for her in many ways, it was hard enough for me aged 28 with a supportive partner. Now she’s almost 30 and has had another baby with partner Jamie and doing so well, I just feel really happy for her that things worked out for her, she’s actually in the process of buying a house round the corner from my old house that I still own, and I’m slightly gutted we won’t get to be neighbours.

Me Steph and Rachel went on a big night out, the relive our student days.  It was raining of course and I didn’t have an umbrella so I chose to tuck my hair into a sun hat the preserve the curls. And of corse it looked super cool. 

We had a few cocktails on 2 different places on blood street. The toilets in Albert Schloss were the highlight of the whole night.  We attemped to go out to our old spot “Hebbie jebbies” but unfortunately it wasn’t open. So we went to this place called “Teddy’s” instead which was fun but not quite enough party atmosphere for a big Dance. It was a rainy Sunday night outside of term time to be fair.

I finished my week in Liverpool with a Brunch on Lark Lane, I love lark lane, so many quirky shops, we went to Milo lounge one of the places I’ve done comedy before and the boys were made up to have a stack of pancakes Eric had it with blueberries and Percy had it with bacon.

 They were also chuffed with how long it took me to pack and tidy the house I was in because they had a very long time playing the switch. So long that we got to our holiday home near Blackpool about 4 hours later than I intended to get there but it was all fine.

This week just gone we’ve been in the holiday house with my extended family and then to my cousins wedding in Shropshire but I’ll write about that next time. 

My Uk tour begins

 I’m currently on tour, I’ve even made myself a tour t-shirt. It’s like I’ve given being homeless a rebrand but before I talk about that I need to talk about the last week of school which for us was the first few days of July.

It’s Percy’s last year of primary school, and it was a weird feeling getting to this point for many reasons. In the UK he would have another year at primary school which is a weird mind trick that’s kind of making me not accept that he’s leaving. Like this is just some kind of alternate reality, that doesn’t count. In the real world he’s still in primary school. There’s no prom like they have in Uk schools and no leavers assembly, they went on a school trip on a sailing boat all day, and then they had a graduation, where their teacher who is lovely and has been their teacher for two years, did a personal speech to every child. And a lot of the kids were really emotional. I was emotional too, we had promised Percy he could finish school here and we wouldn’t move and at times when we had no house and no job it seemed like it might be a real challenge to stick to that.

 I was also really sad when he left his school in England, it was a shame to think he wouldn’t be with those friends all the way through school, and he was doing so well in school there, we weren’t sure if we were going to mess everything up by moving him. But the teachers in France were saying how they just feel so lucky to have him which is super nice to hear, especially when you sometimes see UK headlines saying how immigrants our ruining our schools. I know if half the class don’t speak english as a first language, in a deprived area it’s not the same as one foreign kid joining a village school, but it’s still nice to hear that it’s been a positive for the teachers.

But he’s done so well with the language, he’s completely caught up with the reading and writing levels of the other kids. He’s super good at maths too, he told me he has a “black belt” in maths. And I laughed in his face, but then he explained how they did this kind of test and the highest anyone else got was purple belt which is two levels below black. I hope he never brings up his black belt in maths in a fight though.

On the last day all the kids in school form a kind of tunnel and the school leavers walk out through it and all high 5 the other kids. It’s so cute. As an end of term treat we went straight to the inflatables on the lake for a hour of mucking about jumping in water, going down slides and attempting to run over wobbly floating stepping stones.

The next day was a boring day of packing. I had spent the week moving all our stuff into storage in the loft of our air bnb for our return in late August. Dan took us to Carcassone airport for our flight to Manchester. On the way we drove past a pretty serious wild fire and Dan had to drive back a different way which took almost twice as long. 

The flight was annoying , it was delayed and then when we finally got on we had to wait for the plane to get fuel and then in Manchester we had to wait absolutely ages for our bags. We were next to another family in baggage who’s kids were losing it, it was around 9:30 or 10 at night UK time, even later french time, and we managed to engage this kid in a game of travel connect 4 to kill the time which was nice. Not as nice as if our bags were there and we could leave but it is nice to make the wait less boring if it’s possible.

The first week I was with my parents but I kept doing trips to see other friends, in that first week I went to Sheffield to see Ruth and Birmingham to see Bex, Ruth and Bex are my only 2 childhood friends that I’m still in touch with properly and it’s lovely to see them both with their own kids now between the 3 of us we have 7 boys and no girls. Here’s some funny quote from their kids:

Me: what kind of things do you like to play with?

Ruth’s 3 year old: I like to play with wheat.

Bex’s 10 year old: we listen to a podcast when we go to sleep, but if we’re naughty we just have to listen to the sound of rain.

That kid Zech got on particular well with my boys he was very encouraging, he taught them how to make stuff on Minecraft and then said to Percy “that’s so good for your first time bro” 

Me and Bex grew up as next door neighbours and sometimes I wish our boys could grow up next door neighbours too. 

The weather was great in that first week and I got to go out on my parents river a lot. As a birthday present from my mum to my Dad, Dad had half an hour on a jet ski, and he thought it would be a bit boring on his own so lucky me got to also go on a jet ski and the boys rode on the back. It was a lot of fun and even 20 miles an hour feels really fast.

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping as well, shops are just not that good in my bit of France so I much prefer to buy clothes here, and I still get the majority of my underwear from M&S. I’m also making the most of english food that is hard to get in France. So far I’ve been enjoying Mini Chedders, cherry Bakewells, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, and pick and mix - a healthy diet.

This week I’ve been staying in a very lovely house of a friend who is away on holiday but lives in Liverpool.  And yesterday I invited everybody I know to a picnic (if you didn’t get an invite sorry it wasn’t intentional) But I’ll write about that next time.

The tour t-shirt that I spent ages making but I’m a bit embarrassed to wear.

Choosing a village

 How did you end up living where you’re living? I feel like very few people truly choose where they live, I think most people either live where they were born even if they went away for a bit, or people move to be with a partner, or they move for a job, or they move for uni and then stay. All of those do involve some choice, maybe you want to be near the grandparents or be in a city for a good job, or in an area with affordable housing, but I think not that many people look at a map and think “where do I want to live?”

I lived near Coventry for my first 19 years because my mum went to Warwick uni and then met my Dad who moved to Coventry for a job, he and only intended to stay a few years but they go sucked in for 30ish years. Then I went to Liverpool for uni because my ex-boyfriend went to chester and so I only applied to places near there. We were together at the time, otherwise that would be slightly unhinged behaviour. In my second year of uni we broke up but I stayed another 15 years in Liverpool.

Then we had the privilege of actually decided where we wanted to live thanks to Dan being an EU citizen and a pandemic making remote working a thing. So we looked at a map of France, for the hottest and most affordable bit of France by the sea. And maybe we went a bit too hot, currently only the ground floor of our 3 story house is really habitable for sleeping. Last night Percy couldn’t sleep, he first tried cuddling up to an ice block wrapped in a bag, and then went to sleep on the sofa down stairs when he was asleep Dan carried him upstairs so that the sofa was free for me to sleep on. I bet halfway down France on the Atlantic coast is lovely right now. But anyway my point is we did choose this region based on location we didn’t have any personal connections, but the village we live in is pretty random.

View from our current bedroom window

The village is just a village that had a good house free on the random weekend Dan came to look for a house one month before we moved here. And now that the 3 years is up on that house, and we are in temporary housing, and Percy is about to start secondary school and we know all the areas well, it seems a good time to actually choose a location. I’ve written about this a bit before, we went to see a few places and decided on Thuir being a good place, that’s got a good amount of amenities but still a villagey feel. 

It’s not easy to find houses though, and Dan’s trial period isn’t over until mid august, so in term of getting a house the official normal way that’s a bit late. We started researching Thuir to see if we could get some house views and negotiate something. At the same time a house came up in our village that was very similar to our old house except a bit worse and for 300 euros more a month. That’s how much rents have risen in the last few years. This house also didn’t have an oven, a dishwasher, a fridge or a washing machine. Which is quite standard in France. The walls were perfectly white which most people would love but after not getting our deposit back for our walls not being perfectly white after 3 years, I never want to rent a white house again. This was the only house up for rent in our village and nothing was coming up in Thuir either.

My work is fizzling out at the moment, my school work is only November to May because the school can’t afford a whole year, and everyone keeps cancelling their private lessons for various reasons. I’m trying to just make the most of being here, and chill a bit before I having to look after the boys on my own for 2 months. So I was at the beach having a swim and a roller skate along the promenade, just living my best life and then came home and was in the shower when there was a loud knock at the door. I opened it in my towel and it was the mum of one of Percy’s school friends who told me there was no school this afternoon,  and that while I was frolicking in the sea I should have been parenting. She also asked for Dan’s number because she didn’t trust me to understand stuff, which is fair. (She didn’t say that but it was obviously the reason.)

So Percy had no school because his teacher had a meeting with the secondary school, and what they always do when a teacher is off, instead of getting in a supply teacher, is share out the kids between the other classes if you’re parents are working or ask the parents to get them if they happen to be just sea frolicking and roller skating. Later on that night she came round to talk to the responsable french speaking parent about the thing which I wouldn’t understand.

Recent sea frolics

She wanted to fill in a form so that her daughter and Percy could be in the same class, but you have to do this together and sign a form to say you both agree they are friends. She also told us some useful information about getting the school bus and the day you have to go in to register for school. At first we said “well we’re still considering trying to move to Thuir.” But over the next week we just kind of thought that moving somewhere else and then trying to get into that school is going to be too complicated and too expensive and there was a growing pressure to get on with the Millas school application stuff that he was already sign up to, he had to choose an extra curriculum sport, (he’s considering outdoor cycling, climbing or acrobatics on a Wednesday afternoon and table tennis as a lunch club)  and he had to  decide if he wanted to study Catalan and decide what level of freedom he could have about whether he could make his own way home, its on a traffic light system from do what you like and leave school whenever you have a free period to only be picked up or get the school bus.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to move to Thuir, I’m sure they let kids in last minute, it could all work out, but I didn’t want it to all be last minute, I wanted him to be able to tell his friends where he was going, and I wanted to give a difinitive answer to the mum of this girl. So we decided let’s just stay in this house and let Percy go to the school he wants to go to, and give this mum an answer. Once he starts that school we ideally don’t want to move him so we might end up living in this village for the rest of our lives just because this mum pressured us to fill in a form! 

We still have to move out over the summer though because the house will be an air bnb to holiday makers so were busy moving all our stuff in to storage again, half of it is already there, the furniture and winter stuff like skis we moved to storage the last time we moved house in April, but we have to move everything were currently living with which does include some 3 chest-of draws, 3 bikes and 2 big desks up to the loft stage in the house and put everything back to how it looked 3 months ago. It’s hard work in the ridiculous heat.

I also went to take down my exhibition last Friday, and it was so hot that my phone was overheating and didn’t want to use the sat nav. The air con works ok in normalish heat but above about 34 degrees it’s just pumping out warm air. My friend Hawa who is Spanish/ Sénégalaise came with me to see the exhibition and help me take it down, she offered to put her sat nav on which was Spanish so then she was translating the Spanish into French (we can only communicate in bad french) we were both sweating buckets we gave up on the air con and had the windows down, the car said 43 degrees, it was not a relaxing way to travel but I did learn the Spanish word for roundabout.

I’m so happy that I sold some of the paintings a couple to friends and a couple to strangers. I also did a workshop which was so fun, art workshops was my main job in England and I miss it a lot, and this was a lot easier than when I’ve done schools workshops because everyone had chosen to be there and everyone had enough space and good quality materials and no one threw a chair at me (that once happened when I worked in a pupil referral unit.) 

If anyone in England (or anywhere) wants some of the left over very post-able art let me know and I can bring it to England when I come next week. Here’s a few examples they’re all A4 20 quid including postage. You can see the full options on my Instagram (@artisthannahjones)

I’m coming to England on Saturday, and I’m pretty excited about seeing lots of people and being a normal temperature. Dan is a little less excited to be staying to work. He’s hoping to do a few fun things at weekends, the first 3 weeks he’ll be right in the south and he’s going to see if he can hire a mountain bike and cycle to Spain, its really just the other side of the mountain. Imagine that is your normal life, and then for the one week he’s got a holiday in August he’ll be spending it in Preston. 

My Exhibition

Hello, my last blog was one of the least read blogs I’ve ever written with 49 views. No one cares that I went on holiday, and fair enough. I remember having to watch videos my granny made on her camrecorder and copied them onto VHS of her cruises round the world and they were dull, I get it. Mainly we did just have a nice time which is boring. Compare that to a blog I wrote this time last year called “double bad news” that had 374 views. 

374 minus 49 = 325 people that are only interested in bad things happening to me. If you’re one of them sorry but you will be disappointed by this blog. Other than getting told off by a librarian and getting a massive bruise mainly everything was fine. So quit now if you like.

But for the nice people still reading I’ll tell you the story of my first solo exhibition. We got back from holiday on a Tuesday afternoon and we had a ton of things to do. The next day I was putting up my exhibition, but because it’s a Wednesday (so no school in France) I teach a little group of kids English in my house. We are currently making a video of the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears. 

After my English teaching I rushed off to the gallery and got there just before they closed for a 2 hour lunch. The French love their long lunches, but it’s super annoying when you can’t even use your long lunch break to get some useful shopping done because loads of shops close for lunch. Once when I had French lessons the person in charge apologised that we only had a “very short lunch” of one hour. Anyway I got to the library 5 minutes before lunch which meant I could stay locked in working on the exhibition over lunch time. The paintings all clipped onto invisible strings, so the small ones were fairly easy to sort. I needed help doing the massive one. It’s really hard to put up a painting together when there’s a language barrier. When I got home I asked Dan what the French word for diagonal was. He told me it was “diagonale” and I was fuming. As well as the big paintings I had these little A4 lino prints and gelli prints. And then I had some of my print making things to display to show the process.

The private view (which I think is badly named because it means the opening night that anyone can normally come to) was on the Friday. The library lady told me on the Wednesday that she had all the food, and drink for it. Which was kind of annoying because a few weeks earlier Dan had gone to Spain to get a load of cheap wine and snacks for it, and paper plates and everything. I just assumed I had to provide that, and it was lovely that I didn’t have to, but it would have been better if we hadn’t made a whole trip to another country to stock up. We served all their much nicer wine so I still have a lot of cheap wine to drink. I also made a lemon cake and cookies because the French don’t really think of that kind of thing, they just had a lot of charcuterie stuff. 

Gelli prints

People started arriving half an hour before opening, just random local old people who must come every time for the food. It was weird seeing them looking at my art and taking photos, someone was even writing notes. Some of my friends started arriving after a while and I went to poor one of them a drink and got told off by the librarian! Apparently the bar is not open until I have made a speech in front of the mayor. I had to sneak my friend a water because she was so thirsty! It’s not the first time I’ve been told off by a librarian of course. Librarians are kind of the opposite of dyslexic art students and if you are going to give dyslexic art students a photo copy budget of 100 quid then you should expect to find them sprinkling glitter and bits of string into the photo copier. We’re certainly not going to waste that budget photocopying books, because we all hate reading. 

Anyway I made a little speech about my work which Dan translated into French and then we could finally drink something. Quite a few people wanted to talk to me, which resulted in me getting none of my own cake and cookies that I’d spent the whole day making. But other than that it was a lovely night. I sold one of the mountain canvases and my painting on 3 stones, to a woman who’s kid once painted a stone that she loved but then it went missing. Something like that, but she was very emotionally attached to this stone paintings. I felt like a fraud selling the stones, I don’t even really own them, I stole them from a beach and then painted them. I also sold 3 lino prints.

Painting the rocks

The next day we went to the water park. Since coming back from Corsica Eric has been desperate to swim because he missed out on the holiday, so we went on the opening day of Frenzy water park. It was warm, like 25 degrees, but a bit grey which meant there were only 20-30 people there for the first couple of hours. Last summer we went to a different water park where you had to queue up to an hour for each of the big slides, here the most we waited for one slide was 5 minutes. They had loads of big slides but unfortunately the boys were too small for many of them. They could go on the inflatable obstacle course, the body board slide where you go on your front and when you hit the water you skim it for ages, the slide that throws you up in the air and 3 of the water chutes. 

My favourite slide 

The bruise maker

I went on one slide with Dan where it’s a normal water chute at first you, do a bit of a spiral in a tunnel and then you go very fast nearly vertically into a big half pipe. I’ve never seen someone so scared yet so repressed as Dan, he said “crikey” a lot. We also both had a go on the one that throws you into the air, there were different levels between 1 and 8, I found I had no control of what happened or how I would land so one time smashed the water so hard I got a big bruise on my leg.

 But all in all it was fun, the boys actually just loved watching people do the big throw you in the air slides. I wish you could join a water park like people join gyms and just go on your lunch break or whatever. Talking weird lunch breaks, even the water park closed for lunch! Not all of it, but all the big slides were closed for an hour for Lunch. That’s weird right?

Recently I’ve been trying to make a bit more effort with French. I’ve signed up to some new online classes and I’m trying to do more jobs that previously I would have let Dan do, because he’s better at French. Partly because I have to because he’s out at work all day now and partly because it will help with French. My Spanish friend (who speaks to me in French) challenged me on this recently. She came round for lunch and it was the first time she’d come without translator Dan being there. She speaks very good French enough to have a French job in a clothes shop, and she just learned by talking. She said when she moved here she had to do all the admin and go to all the meetings you have to go to when you’re trying to find a job and a house and a school for your kids. She was saying how I should have been the one to go to the hospital with Eric when he needed stitches. But it always seems like it makes more sense for Dan to go if possible.

This week I’ve done a lot though. At the exhibition I spoke to a lot of people in French then I went out roller skating at the beach and then for a meal with my roller skate club, where I’m the only English person. I have previously avoided socials because I just think they’ll be awkward. I then went to an estate agents to ask about houses to rent, and I was really proud of myself that I had a good conversation with that guy. I also took the boys to get a hair cut, that was fairly awkward, because I tried to subtley say to the hair dresser that she knows how to cut hair better than an 8 year old so please don’t listen too much to his instructions, but I couldn’t quite say that well and would you believe my 8 year old would not translate that sentence for me.

And then this is less fun but I had to go to the dentist for a filling. I don’t enjoy the combination of doing something horrible and adding in my embarrassing French, I don’t know dentist specific words like “filling” either. She spoke to me a bit in bad English she said she would put me to sleep and I was pretty surprised and then she said “not you, I will put your teeth to sleep” which is a cuter way of saying I’ll numb the area. Then she got really confused between the words tooth and teeth and I explained it for her. Anyway my teeth had a nice sleep and woke up all better.

Next week I’ll have more chance to practise French at a meeting at Percy’s new secondary school, but I’ll write more about the whole weird French school system and how we dropped the ball on school admin, resulting in a parent knocking on our door next time.

Corsica

For a long time I’ve been interested to go to Corsica, we even considered going for our honeymoon. It’s a beautiful island of beaches and mountains owned by France or part of France or something like that, they speak French but apparently they don’t like to be called French, like the welsh. They hate it when you call them french. 

Anyway for our honeymoon we ended up just seeing what flights go from Manchester on the afternoon after our wedding and we ended up going to Crete. It was the only time we ever did a normal hotel with a pool kind of holiday. But a few months ago when it seemed like we were going to be moving back to England we decided we should take our chance to go to Corsica. It’s pretty annoying to get to from the north of the UK. Flights are only from the south and only on a Sunday last time I researched, but going from where we live in France we could just drive 3 hours 30 and drive onto a ferry.

I’m a big convert to ferrys. They are magical. They literally ferry you about to the place you want to go, while you sleep! It’s so relaxing compared to flying (especially when someone else is driving.) You can pack whatever you like as long as it fits in your car. We even saw someone bring a dining table on top of their car! You don’t have to worry about liquids, and if you want to bring a razor on board to shave your legs you can. Has there ever been a ferry based hijacking? Let me just google… Oh yes once. 1974 in Singapore, 5 hostages, no one died. We’re well overdue another one in my opinion. 

Security was lax, on the way they asked if we had any paint, we said no, but I did actually have some posca paint pens, they should be more specific because I bet you can take watercolour paint. On the way back they did look in the car boot but they didn’t open any bags. I feel like when I fly now it’s just the boring thing you have to do in order to get to your destination, whereas the ferry did feel like part of the holiday. We did have a cabin though, maybe if you were sleeping on the floor it wouldn’t feel so holiday like. People brought sleeping bags and slept together in little friendship groups and it looked pretty fun, I would like to see if you could get away with bringing a tent. And a camping stove to use on deck, that would be so cool.

The holiday would have been perfect if it wasn’t for Eric’s stitches which he couldn’t get wet. Any other time it would be no problem to not swim for 10 days, but this was such a water based holiday. We stayed in an Airbnb that had a pool and was a 5 minute walk from the beach. 

The first morning we got in at 8am in Propriano in the south west and drove down the most southern point Bonifacio. It was a beautiful city with a load of millionaire super yachts to look at. My Dad spent his 21st birthday there helping his millionaire uncle to sail his boat there, and for his birthday he bought my Dad a bowl of 21 scoops of ice cream.

My Dad on his trip round the med in 1978

From there we went to the most beautiful beach, the water was that perfect turquoise that I associate with the Carribbean. Me and Percy got straight in. The doctor who stitched up Eric’s knee said he can’t go in the pool because of the risk of the wound getting infected but that the sea was even worse. I put this special splash proof plaster on Eric’s knee, it was basically sticky back plastic. But because it was his knee not a flat bit of him it did’t stick well. I said he could stand in the sea and play ball, it was really hot so he wanted to cool down. I forget 8 year olds aren’t like adults though, once you say he can play he gave very little thought to his leg and it was stressful to watch. Then he fell over in the sea and while the splash protector did help it didn’t completely protect him. He said, “don’t worry I feel fine.” He didn’t understand that there are no immediate consequences to the leg getting wet, but days down the line there could be. 

We had planed to go canyoning, which looked so fun, but obviously not something Eric could do. I had this book called Wild Swimming France and the absolute best looking places in the book were in Corsica, so on the second day we headed out in search of them. We had bought Eric a gift of a “Perplexus” (a big complex maze ball) so that he had something fun to do while we were playing in the water. He was very excited for this. We drove inland from where we were staying into the mountains and it was so beautiful but in a different way to the mountains where we live, the rocks were red and the trees were all pine trees. We came across a beautiful bit of river and we should have just stopped there and swam and had our picnic but we didn’t because I wanted to find this specific place from the wild swimming book. 

We eventually found this bridge, packed up and continued our journey on foot up the riverbed like the book was suggesting. The book said this was a 20 minute easy walk. They didn’t have instructions for how long it would take with a kid who A) can’t get their knee wet and B) refuses to bend their knee. Percy happily scrambled off ahead hopping from rock to rock but it was slow for Eric. We had to be next to him to make sure he didn’t trip and when it got to a bit where you needed to step a bit in the water we gave him a piggy back. He was trying hard and I know it would have been annoying for him, he would have loved to run off like a free mountain goat but that’s how he got this injury in the first place.

After over an hour we needed a break and we all sat on a big flat rock to eat our picnic. I ventured a bit further and found it opened out to a beautiful bit that you could actually swim in that was pretty deep. It wasn’t the place photographed in the book. I’ve no idea where that was meant to be, but this was a lovely bit of river that we could have completely to ourselves, so why not go a bit further. We found Eric a spot he could sit and dip his feet in and then we all swam.

 I enjoyed it a lot, apart from when I heard the sound of a wild animal, something cat like, but not just a cat. It was pretty creepy sound but we never saw anything. They do have wild bob cats in Corsica so maybe it was that. There was a cool deep bit that I could jump into and I took some photos on this disposable underwater camera I have. We didn’t stay too long because Eric got bored and it was a long trek back.

After beginning to wade back through the river with Percy while Dan was carrying Eric, Dan spotted a path! The journey that had taken over an hour of scrambling, carry Eric and being really careful not to let Eric’s leg get wet was just a 5 minute walk on this path! We couldn’t believe it! The next morning we went to our local beach, our Airbnb host had apologised to us that this beach was not as beautiful as Saint Guilia the very turquoise one. Just look at this hideous beach we had to endure. 

We had it pretty much all to ourselves because no one else would want to come to such a disgusting beach.  We also went for a lovely little walk round a peninsula and played some crazy golf. I was very bad at it.On the last day we went back to the beautiful beach and hired a pedalo with a slide, unfortunately Eric still couldn’t go in the sea but he had fun on the boat. 

And then we went to get the ferry back. The crossing on the way back was longer because we left from the east coast, we also had no idea it would be stopping at Sardinia. It was about 9pm and we were just getting ourselves to bed, because when we share a room we just all go to bed at an average of our bedtimes. But then I got to go out and have a little glimpse of Italy at sunset which was a bonus. 

In the morning we arrived at Toulon around 9:30am but before that we saw a dog having a wee on the carpet outside of the lift and then a woman stepped in it, and a big crowd were watching and the dog just kept on weeing everywhere. We also saw a woman wandering around with a cat in a special cat backpack. You just don’t get this kind of fun on Ryanair. I wonder if you are allowed to take any pet on a ferry? Can you take a snake? Can you take a horse? Could you take a hamster?  

We had so much to do when we arrived back. Eric had his doctors appointment to take the stitches out, I had to do a food shop and then do my lesson planning and last minute preparations for my exhibition that I was putting up the next day. Plus the normal unpacking and washing stuff, so not a relaxed end, but I’m very grateful we got to see such a beautiful place.

Next time I’ll write about my exhibition and going to the water park. A bientôt.