What a weird life we are living these days, I keep putting off the blog thinking any day now there’ll be some news or some decision that I can share that people will want to know, but there’s nothing like that yet, were moving into an air bnb in less than 2 weeks and staying for 3 months and that is the end of our plans. To further complicate things we had an unfurnished house and now are moving into a finished house so a lot of our stuff will be going into storage. We do keep talking about mad plans though, the euro millions was up to 200 million or something, and it is fun to think about what you would do with it. I said buy a lighthouse and make 2 helter skelters round it for getting down one would be a water shoot and one just a regular bog standard dry slide round a lighthouse. Dan was talking about living in the country side and at one point said “I fancy a goat” and then I repeated it back like it was an awful confession, that would ultimately lead to divorce. I don’t know if the two slightly different meanings of “fancy” come across well in writing.
I really didn’t expect to move this many times in my 30’s I moved 6 times between a the ages of 20 and 25 but then we bought a house, and I knew it wasn’t our forever home but when I had a baby at 28 I thought maybe I’ll move one more time into more of a family home in slightly less of a drugs den. (If you’re lucky enough to buy a house as a 25 year old artist it will most likely be a northern drugs den) but so far in my 30’s I’m on my 4th house and I’ll be up to 6 by the end of the year. In between the big stuff, life keeps going with the funny or weird or lovely everyday moments in between packing up boxes applying for jobs and stressing out about not knowing what’s going on.
My most exciting news is that I’m going to be doing a solo art exhibition in June. I’ve made a lot of art since moving here and I’m trying to get a few more prices done before the exhibition. I went to the art shop the other week to buy a “normal sized canvas” and then I just saw this massive one, kind of the size of a door and I thought “why not this, will be fun” and to be fair it has been a lot of fun. I’m painting the beautiful Collioure which is actually quite hard because it’s already very beautiful in itself so its really hard to do it justice. I follow this guy on social media who selling a book called “nice paintings of shit places” and it really is a great niche. Maybe I should call my exhibition nice paintings of nice places. Or Dan suggested that he starts painting shit paintings of nice places. Could that work?
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| This and many other pieces of my art are going to be in an exhibition. 6-27 June, Saint-Nazaire Médiathèque. |
Me and Dan tried to have a bit of a date while we were in Collioure, I can’t even remember the last time we went out for a meal and we can’t really go out in the evenings without getting a baby sitter so it does make sense to go out when the kids are in school. Unfortunately we made the same mistake that we made in 2013. Steak tartare is raw mince with a raw egg on top, Dan ordered it once at a lovely french restaurant on our big trip to the Middle East, and we thought we had learnt our lesson, but due to the fact the menu was hand written and french handwriting is mad, we made the mistake again. Which resulted in Dan asking if they could cook my totally uncooked mince. Which they half did, the middle was still cold and pink. But then we did a good deed for the day when Dan overheard another couple ordering the Steak tartare, he went over and told then “this is uncooked mince” and they were very grateful and changed their order. They need a sign in english saying don’t order this if you’re english.
We got an ice cream after Dan chose a flavour labelled “cookies dough” and we spent a long time discussing why is cookies (plural) is not correct? It’s not until you start teaching english and you might have to explain to someone why cookie dough is right and cookies dough is wrong that you realise how stupid english is.
Life in France has been surprisingly rainy recently, something like 250% more rain than normal for the month. But it’s good for the earth our very dried up reservoir is nearly full again. And a hour towards the mountains there is a load of snow. The ski resorts are very happy. And we had a great day sledging and building a giant snow blob.
They have a spring time carnaval in France where kids wear fancy dress or sometimes ski gear. One day I turned up at the school I work at and saw all the kids were in ski gear. I assumed it was a ski trip and they had forgotten to cancel my english lessons, so I asked the head teacher but she said it’s just the carnaval. So kids were sweating away in my class because they were wearing ski cloths as fancy dress gear. Our roller skating club had a carnaval too, and I was doing face paints. My favourite part of that day is when my slightly drunk fellow face painter came up to Dan and said “oh you’re english! Can you help me?” And then played him a video of her robot hoover saying in english “I need a new battery” - she had no idea what it was saying!
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| Ready fo the roller skating carnaval |
Thanks for reading.
