7th October 2012

One of the first things I did when we arrived in France was to buy a giant English:French dictionary. It's not just the words I needed to know, but the phrases.  But for Him indoors, all he needs is the free catalogue from Brico Depot.  Armed with this and the phrase 'avez-vous quelque-chose comme ca?', he's happy.  One of the reasons he liked this house in the first place was its proximity to this store. Our railings and gate were rusty and badly in need of freshening up  so last week we set off to buy some blue paint. Now, you'd think that because so many houses in the Midi-Pyrenees region have blue shutters, this colour would be easy to find.  Wrong.  Even Brico didn't have any, but what they did have was this amazing, computerised mixing machine.  I'd never seen one before, but it seems they take a tin with some sort of colourless liquid inside, put it into a kind of kiln, type onto a keyboard a magic reference code, and voila - out comes a tin with blue paint.  Back home at chez-nous, the job was going well until Him indoors tried to fix the tin to a hook on his ladder....you guessed it, the tin fell, and a pool of bright blue paint went all over the concrete in front of the garage!
Neither he nor I needed a dictionary or the Brico catalogue - the language was already blue!  Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'the job needed doing badly'......