2nd January 2011

Any point in new resolutions? Well, yes. Ever since Janus - he of the 2 heads - started looking both back and forwards in the year 153 BCE, it's been a good time to reflect on your life. Here are a few of my own, made from personal experience here in France:
1. Take a tip from the French and never sing Auld Lang Syne on new year's eve. No-one knows all the words anyway, even the Scots.
2. Improve your language skills. Here's Happy New Year in various languages: French: Bonne Annee; Hebrew: Leshonah Tovah Tikatevu; German: Prosit neujahr; Hindi: niya saa mubaraak; Chinese: Shu ten shan; Arabic: Kulaam u antum salimoun. But, I quite like the Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz anno Novo - enjoy many good parties. I'm all in favour of that.
3. Get more exercise. At a recent occitan dance I was amazed at how even 80 year olds had so much stamina - they were still dancing when I left exhausted at 2 a.m.
4. Learn from listening rather than looking things up in the dictionary. You can easily come a cropper without realising it - and you don't have to be English to do that. Below is how a perfectly knowledgeable French gite owner fell into the trap:

'Warning! Do not put hot bottoms on the worktops.'

No answer to that. A very happy and healthy new year to you all!

26th July 2009

It was our anniversary on Thursday, so how to mark it? We enjoyed a leisurely lunch at Le Moulin restaurant, on the banks of the Aveyron, a short stroll from our house. And Bruno, the dog came too. He likes to lie under the table, especially fretwork ones with holes in, so that he can benefit from any manna from heaven coming his way.
Tourist season in French villages means there are local fetes everywhere. As there was an Occitan-dance listed in nearby Negrepelisse, we and two visiting friends decided to go. Occitan is a dialect linking Spain with France. In fact, the Languedoc region is named after it (Lange means language, so 'Language of Oc'), and some car reg. plates display the letters OC. We arrived to find the usual French lack of commercialism. We parked where we liked. No yellow lines, nor car parking attendant. No admission charge, and no ice-cream stalls or similar. The music was a cross between English, Scottish and Irish, and the dancing merged the old country dancing we all did at school with barn dancing and lots of stamping of feet. Great fun, even though in the dance which started with a circle, with partners moving around, Him indoors found himself partner-less halfway through, with another single individual on the other side of the circle! Good excuse for a drink.