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Malcolm’s had a rotten week.  Shingles.  It sounds such a jolly complaint, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  It began last Saturday with a sore area at the back of his neck.  A couple of hours later, he retired to bed, his whole head a boiled orange-red and covered in flattish blisters.  The caricature Englishman who fell asleep on the beach for several hours at Costa del Something never looked this bad. He ate nothing – not a morsel – for two whole days, and was prey to dismal and depressing thoughts and feelings whenever he wasn’t asleep.

On Monday I called the doctor.  But as the news of his illness got out, the emails and phone calls started to tumble in. ’He must see a healer’, our French friends insisted.  When ill themselves, some of these friends choose the kind of alternative therapies that make homeopathy seem mainstream, while other scurry down to the surgery demanding packs of pills at the first hint of a sneeze.  Whatever their usual preference, they were united in believing that only a healer could help.  And the doctor had admitted he could do little for Malcolm.

One friend came up with a specific suggestion.  The mother of her childhood friend is a healer of shingles sufferers, and so successful that doctors often send their patients to her.  Malcolm had nothing to lose, so he got in touch.  Every evening for 3 days he’s been at her house at 6.00 for a short session.  She’s rubbed hard at his troubled skin with one hand, while making sweeping movements with her other.  Sessions last 10 minutes or less, but even after the first time, the improvement was noticeable and swift.  Now, after the third, his skin is almost normal and he feels fine,  but she’s expecting him to treat himself for a few days with poultices of olive oil, or olive oil, egg yolk and lemon juice.

Healers turn out to be very common indeed here.  They have the gift of treating a single complaint, and they receive this gift of healing from another practitioner. They often work in very different ways .  The mother of a friend worked in a way Malcolm wouldn’t have recognised. At sundown, she would briefly carry the sufferer on her back, back-to-back, whilst saying prayers in her Béarnaise dialect.  She had received her gift when she herself was suffering from shingles, and having treated her, the healer passed on his skills.

What unites all these people – men, women, young, old, garage hands, housewives, teachers, highly educated or largely untaught –  is their sincerity, and their real ability to effect change for the better in the sufferer.  A true healer will not ask for payment, but most grateful sufferers offer a gift, which could well be money. It’s not necessary for the sufferer to have faith that the treatment will work, merely a willingness to be open-minded and give it a go.

We’ve both been astonished by the huge fan-base for healing in a country where patients routinely expect doctors to prescribe medication for any complaint, however trivial.  At choir last night, discussing Malcolm’s experience with everyone there, they all nodded sagely and encouragingly.   ‘Il n’y a rien que ça’.  And it’s true.  Doctors seem to have little joy treating shingles, which seems to persist for weeks in the unfortunate sufferer’s body despite antibiotics and other potions.  Healers seem to deliver on their promise to have the thing sorted in under a week

Just over 5 years ago, I first started writing a blog.  I was going on the trip of a lifetime, to India, and I wanted to record it.  For my family, who’d made it possible.  For my friends, who wanted  the story.  And most of all, for me, as a record of a special month.  It wasn’t this blog, but one hosted by The Travel Blog.

I found I enjoyed writing, recording, sharing my new experiences, so I continued when I got back to France.  All the same, France was my new home, so a travel blog didn’t seem quite right.  After a few false starts ( I’m really no kind of geek), I made the move to WordPress, and here I still am.

My interest always was, and still is, in keeping in touch with friends, and as a sort of diary for me.  I never expected anyone else to read it.  But gradually, other regular readers came along: people I’ve never met, and in most cases probably never shall.  From Germany, from America, from France and of course from the UK.  They comment, they encourage.  In many cases they write blogs too, and I enjoy glimpses into very different lives from mine.

Compared with many of the other blogs I read, mine has a small readership.  But it still astonishes me that something I started so I could keep in touch with maybe 30 people has resulted in several cyber-friendships, and regular or occasional readers in every continent.

I find it interesting that no one blogger’s ‘reading list’ in any way resembles anybody else’s. There are thousands, I suppose millions of blogs on offer these days, covering every possible area of life.  I read those that touch my life in some way, and comment too, just as many readers comment on my posts.  I enjoy this interaction  and so I guess that for the time being, I’ll keep writing.  The day I run out of things to write about, or it becomes a chore, I’ll stop.

Meanwhile, I’m showing you my Annual Report not because I expect you to show the remotest interest in the detail, but because you might be astonished, as I am,  at all the information that WordPress has been able to collect.  They know who you are……

‘The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.  (You might like to know that the people on their Help Desk are called ‘Happiness Engineers’)

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 14,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 3 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.‘

Surprise!  Today I opened my in-box to discover I’ve been nominated, with several others, for The One Lovely Blog Award.  This is as flattering as it is interesting, because we’re 7 nominees in total, and we’re a mixed bag, including a female soldier serving in Afghanistan, several photographers, a woman sharing her grandmother’s fascinating diary entries from 100 years ago, a couple running  a Bed & Breakfast in the States, and a dog lover.

And this is surely what makes the world of blogging such an interesting one?  We who read a variety of blogs get views and insights into other worlds, other lives, other ways of thinking,  and forge cyber-relationships with people we’d never otherwise come into contact with.

The blogger who nominated me, who writes Thoughts from an American Woman, is very different indeed from me.  She calls herself as ‘an American housewife and Army mom’, and writes about her experience of being the mother of a serving soldier, and shares with her readers her curiosity, her busy life, her love of dogs, her poetry and her Christian faith.  Despite her active days, she finds time to follow very many blogs.  Thank you, Patty, for nominating me and for sending me frequent words of encouragement.

Now, apparently I need to share 7 things about myself:

• I’m fine with spiders, and snakes, and mice, and bats, and birds, and creepy-crawlies.  But I don’t much care for the scrabbling and rustling noises that are beginning to emerge from behind our kitchen cupboards.
• I sometimes fear my life is defined by my total inability to get a good night’s sleep.
• I think I’ve got quite a mixed blood-line.  On my mother’s side, Suffolk and Yorkshire blood, with great grandparents called ‘Pickard’.  Originally from Picardy in France surely?  My father, long dead, took any stories of his Polish family to his grave.
• For years I’ve been banging on about doing a long stretch of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella.  I even have half-baked plans half-talked about with several different friends.  Perhaps going public here will force me to do something about it at last.
• I can’t begin the day without my fix of coffee. Please don’t expect me to.
• I can’t end the day without reading myself to sleep.  I normally get an hour or more in during the night as well.  A good way to be fairly well-read.
• The best stress-buster is to get in the kitchen and cook.  Then relax over the results with easy company and a glass of wine.

And then I need to tell you which blogs I would like to nominate.  Here they are, in alphabetical order.

As a Linguist:  An American teacher comments perceptively and engagingly on language in its many forms.

El Bueno El Malo Y El Feo: Exciting, atmospheric, often gritty photos, mainly taken whilst travelling round Spain.

Mama Clark’s Kitchen and Back Porch Emporium: Leann was our friend and neighbour when we all lived in Harrogate.  Once back in the States she began this blog.  Beautifully and atmospherically written

My Spanish Steps: One of my daughter’s blogs, highlighting things that interest her during her early months teaching in Spain.

Slow Living in the French Pyrenees: Kalba moved to France at much the same time as we did, and we met very early on, so I enjoy her take on France and the French.

The Nelson House Diaries: A bit incestuous this! Sharon is a Francophile and found Kalba’s and my blog – so we found hers.  Hers is the story, among other things, of the challenge of renovating her home to an exacting – and exciting – standard.

The View from the Potting Shed: Gilly gardens with great knowledge and enthusiasm here in the Ariege.  She’s not posted recently, so I hope this may encourage her to resume her useful and inspirational blog.

Welcome Visitor: Another incestuous one.  This American expat, living in Germany, discovered my blog – so I discovered his.  It is, as he says, about his life in Germany – and life in general.

So…. Just eight among thousands and thousands of blogs you could spend 200 hours a day reading.  And to Patty, and all the bloggers who give me such pleasure: thank you.

 The rules for One Lovely Blog are:

1. Thank the person who nominated you and link back to them.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Nominate  other bloggers for this award.

Every time we come back to England, I realise how much it is, quite simply, ‘home’.  Our house  is rented out, we have few personal effects here, but still I routinely and unconsciously speak of it as ‘home’, and Laroque as ‘back in France’.  So you don’t have to be a genius to work out where my heart really is. My daughters, grown-up, mature, independent, make no secret of the fact that they’d prefer us to be around more.  It’s difficult not to agree.

England itself works its way under my skin every time I return.   We’re staying in a friend’s house on the Valley Gardens in Harrogate.  Daily walks in the park, easy access to the Stray, and the busy neighbourhood shops of Cold Bath Road have put a much more positive spin on the town than when we lived in our house in the suburbs.  Yesterday we spent walking near Grassington, along the River Wharfe, where baby ducklings and a heron held our delighted attention.  But the landscape of windswept green hills, drystone walls, sheep with their lambs, and late in the afternoon, the bluebell woods, captivated us as only ‘God’s Own County’ can.

 

I’m happy in Laroque, very happy:  and I don’t want to leave.  Not yet.

Three minutes after publishing my last posting, a message popped into my in-box.  It was Kalba.  Had I thought of looking on Le Bon Coin, the site where everybody looks for anything from a second-hand T shirt to a pre-loved car?  Well, no, I hadn’t, but we were soon ploughing through and responding to all the wood-for-burning adverts we could find.

By the next morning, there were a dozen suggestions in my email account, and as comments on the blog.  Even Bloggerboy, all the way from Germany, was on the case.

So how could we peasants have done without our computer? Quite well, as it turned out.

A phone call from a friend led to our calling his brother, who passed us on to somebody else who…..has wood.  Lots of it.  Well weathered chestnut, oak, beech.  We ordered some. It’s coming on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, another friend called HER friend who rang us with another lead.  This lead was the mayor of a tiny commune near here, and, intrigued by our plight, he came straight round.  He hasn’t really got any more wood to spare, but he promised to go home and scout round, and bring us something, anything, to ‘put us on’.

Just after we’d concluded that all the calls and emails made to people we’d heard of courtesy of the computer had come to zero, this evening we had a message.  A farmer near Ventenac who’d advertised on Le Bon Coin has stacks of well-weathered oak, and he wants to come round tomorrow lunchtime to see whether he can get his tractor and trailer down our street.

Yeah, yeah, I know we’ve already ordered some for Wednesday, but we peasants, you see, have to have something put by for when times are hard.  Play our cards right, and we won’t need any more wood for another four years

Slightly iffy weather on Saturday made us decide to take the car out (petrol’s back!) to explore with our guests the Montagne Noir area, north of Carcassonne.  We’d decided to visit Villelongue, a Cistercian abbey there.

Back in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, the Cistercians spread wide over Europe.  Following the simple life of hard work and austerity promoted by the Rule of Saint Benedict, their architecture was also simple and distinctive, avoiding superfluous ornamentation.  We’ve got two Cistercian abbeys in Yorkshire, Fountains and Rievaulx, and what they have in common with Villelongue is their ruined condition. But the Yorkshire abbeys are National Treasures, and beautifully managed.  Villelongue’s in private ownership, and more quirkily run.  It has, for instance, an important collection of pumpkins, though we’d missed their big day of celebration last month.  After enjoying the peaceful cloisters, the remnants of the abbey, we spent our time inspecting the slightly zany management of the monastic gardens, all ancient bicycles, parakeets, and blue chairs with pumpkins perched on them.

Then we went to Montolieu.  That’s France’s answer to Hay-on-Wye.  Both towns are in their own versions of the Black Mountains, and both have made their mark by appealing to book lovers.  Books old and new, collections of magazines and dog-eared collectable posters appear in traditional shop fronts, down narrow side streets where bookshops have been made from tiny front rooms, and ancient staircases lead you to low-beamed attics stuffed with more books and papers.  We had fun poking around, but didn’t buy.

We’ll be back to explore again, but half the party was nursing the first colds of the season, and anyway, there are only so many pumpkins and second-hand books you can take in one day.

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Or – It  Ain’t Over Till The Fat Lady Sings

I was worried in my last blog that because of the continuing French days of action and strikes, Tom, Sarah, Brian and Sue wouldn’t make it over here.  I was right to worry, but they HAVE made it.  Here’s how.

In the days before their arrival, we all check Easyjet’s site, compulsively.  By the night before, it’s saying that their flight, alone of Easyjet flights to Toulouse, will depart.

BUT Ryanair cancels almost all French flights for the Thursday, which doesn’t lead to peace of mind.

Thursday:

Tom & Co. get up at 3.00 a.m. and go to airport for a 6.30 flight.  Thomas texts me,

5.59 BST: Still looking promising. Flight still on time.  They checked our bags in.  Fingers crossed.

In Laroque we listen to the French news and learn that this day of action is intended to disrupt mainly transport, and two thirds of all flights will not take place

At Gatwick, they all board as planned. They taxi off.  Over in France, we read on the website that they’ve taxied off, and so we depart for Toulouse.

Half way to Toulouse, this series of texts from Thomas:

7.59 BST: Still being held on plane at Gatwick.

8.09 BST: Just been told we expect to take off in 45 minutes

8.39 BST: We’re off.  Probably.

And so they are.  By 11.35 French time, they’re with us.  We are out of the auberge, and this particular lady, though not fat, is quite prepared to sing.

As I read this back, I see that this frazzled journey was only delayed by some two hours.  But the nail biting, the anxiety in the preceding days (To cancel?  To postpone? To bash on and risk its all not happening) has been….stressful.

On the day before, Wednesday, I was talking to an extremely militant French friend who goes on every available demo, waving placards and generally making his presence felt. ‘Nous ne voulons pas emmerder les gens’, he explained. ‘On veut seulement ravager l’économie’ (‘We don’t want to b***** people about, we just want to destroy the economy’).  He seems not to have succeeded in his first objective, but to be doing fairly well on the second