Last blog I wrote about my big birthday party and then arriving back in this random village in France that I accidentally moved to because people tell you to follow your dreams and take every opportunity. But they don’t follow it up with specific advice about what to do if you subsequently find yourself in a very cold and broken house, trying to teach English grammar as a dyslexic.
Last time I said how we worked out that our reversible air con was on snowflake setting and if we changed it to sunshine setting it would heat the room. So we do have one room that we can heat. But we are doing all our living in this one room, I’ve hardly slept in my own bedroom this month. And I’m like a chain smoker but with hot water bottles, I have my early evening one, then I sometimes make a fresh one for bedtime and then one night we were both sleeping down here on the sofa bed, but around 2am I decided to go to our room to be further away from Dan’s snoring but I had to re-make a new hot water bottle because I knew the current one was only lukewarm and I did not want to go to bed with a Luke. I want something piping hot in bed with me.
Apart from the cold, January has had some lovely moments. On my real birthday I had to work in the morning at a school and in the evening I was also teaching, but in the afternoon I had two friends over for chocolate orange cake and art.
During this little craft time I had a kind of brief phone interview with a teacher from a sixth from college. It was in French and I put it on speaker phone and my two friends who are both not French but very good speakers of French were whispering things and writing things down that I should say which was very cute. (I didn’t get the job though.)
I also, just days before that, had an interview for an online job which was probably the worst interview I’ve ever had. The first half was in French and I can only talk like a 5 year old in french. The second half was in English and I thought, “great this will be easy now.” But then he asked me “what is the difference between the present perfect tense and the simple past tense?” I wanted to just say “ok I haven’t got the job bye” He tried to help me by saying it’s the difference between saying “I ate” and “I have eaten”. This is not the correct answer, but I would say there’s no difference. They both mean you’re not hungry right now. Anyway he said I can still do online teaching if I want but only to a basic level. My actual teaching where I get to make it fun is going fairly well at the moment so I’m not sure if I will do that job.
Two days after my birthday I was able to take a day off and Dan did too and we went skiing for 4 hours while the kids were in school. The timing just works to drop them off, drive up the mountain, get the discounted 4 hour pass and be back in time for pick up. We had a great time, the last time we skied before that was last winter, when Dan didn’t have a job and it looked very likely we’d be going back to the UK. I remember thinking then, “we might never come back here”. So it was really lovely to be back in the snowy mountains again.
That night we also went out with another couple Sam and Emma. Sam was celebrating his 30th so we made it a joint 70th.
Last weekend Dan was away in Morocco doing a half marathon with two friends, because men can’t just phone each other up and talk about their feelings, they have to go to another continent and put themselves through some kind of endurance before they can say how they’re feeling about life.
Meanwhile I didn’t do a great job of surviving without him. It was a bad weekend for feminism. On the Sunday instead of going to the French church that we sometimes go to, I thought we’ll go to the English one because it will be easier for me. I was wrong. The English church had just moved locations to a random village quite far away that I’d never been to before. I was running a bit late anyway, but as we were leaving I couldn’t lock to the door, it’s always been a pain that door, but with recent heavy rain it swelled up and after trying for a while I gave up and messaged my landlord to say could he have a go at locking it if he was around.
Then I was following the Satnav to this random village very near Spain going down the auto route and I was confused as to whether I was at the right junction to turn off at or not. Then way too late I realised I was about to go through the barriers for continuing to Spain. No one was directly behind me so I did a really long reverse back to the turn off while people stared at me. We eventually found the new location for the church which is a mad old round house thing, some of which would make an excellent roller disco venue. Unfortunately the bit I had to park in was very muddy due to all the rain and my car got stuck! My wheels were spinning round and round and an 82 year old man had to drive it out for me.
We got back to find my landlord had been round to sand down the door to make it easier to lock but he sanded too much off so there’s now a big chunk missing from the bottom of the door. And then this week the glass broke and Dan patched it up with cardboard, but so much cold is getting in.
Next time I will write about going on the church ski trip this weekend, I’m sure you can’t wait!
