The perils of creative mending and rather too appropriately named slipper socks

With thanks for all the good wishes and concern extended to Tom regarding the eye surgery; he is seeing better than for many a long year and drove the car the other day. He has in fact detailed his experience at his place here, with a few sometimes eye-watering photos taken, at his request, by me, of which I shall only feature this one,

~

to illustrate how seriously the medical services take the matter of healthy eating. In fact quick and simple sucrose and fructose and plenty of caffeine are really just what you want after hours of fasting and minutes of minor anaesthetic, but I munched on my oatcakes and apple and felt virtuous.

Unfortunately the new lease of life afforded him by his new vision rather came a cropper and ended in tears, or at least groans of agony, and this was in part my fault, owing to my particular current preoccupation with creative mending. 

This has led me of late to the embellishment of an old blue lambswool sweater gone into holes (perhaps moth, but then it was 30% nylon so I doubt it, probably just a cheap sweater in the first place) with small flowers,

which remind me a little of tattoos, but without the commitment, and also, would you believe, to this rather kitsch patching which has rendered new tea towels for old:

Yes, I know, you're asking what kind of bored do you have to be to patch tea-towels? It's not like I don't have any new ones, I frequently come across and buy very tasteful ones in discount stores for next to nothing, grey ones with red embroidery, ochre coloured waffle ones, black gingham ones... trouble is they're all so pretty I can't quite bring myself to wipe up with them but instead use them as alternatives to wrapping paper at Christmas or just leave them in the cupboard. But I actually like these old towelling ones, they are efficient, and yes, I know my hygienically evolved transatlantic friends and anyone else with a dishwasher, ( ie mostly everyone) shudder at the thought of wiping up at all, but I'm very particular about rinsing and draining and changing the towels, and glasses are so much better wiped immediately very hot with a clean cloth.... and it's so annoying when your fingers go through them, and anyway I felt like doing something idle and whimsical one Sunday. I was somewhat inspired by Tom of Holland's visible mending programme, and the double thickness parts are actually rather good for purpose.

So, anyway, when the house socks which I made Tom for his last birthday from thick old short staple vintage wool

got sloppier and sloppier, and he asked me if I could perhaps shrink them a bit in the machine, and I did so rather too zealously so they turned into stiff little felt bootees which I can barely get on and he certainly can't,

I sought to make it up to him by converting the his Irish wool hiking socks which had already been darned more than once, and, New Testament style, gone into holes around the darns, into slipper socks, by sewing on soles cut from an old felted sweater, my go-to material for many creative projects. He liked them very much.

Thus slickly shod, full of enthusiastic, newly re-visioned zest for life, and taking it at a run, he misjudged something crucial and slithered down the last several stairs, whacking his foot on a wooden post so that a middle toe stuck out bizarrely and was clearly broken. 

Now Tom breaks toes about as often as I smash up cars, it's less expensive but more painful (maybe, though psychologically perhaps not...), we know what it looks like by now. No hope of medical attention on a Saturday evening and not much to be done anyway, so I slathered bruise gel everywhere possible, strapped the wonky toe to its neighbours, dosed him with tea, sugar, aspirin and whiskey, and there he is, still fairly cheerful but stopped in his newly refurbished tracks. I'm looking into bathroom silicone as a means of making non-slip soles.

Meddling with medlars,'and al was for an appil...'

The two medlar trees by a rather sombre, fairly modern house on a route I take every week are dropping so much fruit all about that no one seems to be collecting I was determined to try by fair means or foul to get hold of a reasonable quantity of it. So this week I stopped on my way home and somewhat trepidatiously took the steps up to the door at the side of the building which seemed to be the main entrance and rang the bell.  There were windows a-plenty open, and I was sure I heard movements and voices inside, but no one came, so I went back down and gathered an armload of dropped ones.  As I was doing so, a cheery group of bin men  stopped at the house.  A young black guy saw my haul and grinned, 

'What are they?' he asked

'Medlars (des nèfles)' his mates replied in chorus, and before I knew it they were all jumping down, picking up the fruit, chucking them about and engaging in an excited exchange about them with which I was eager to join in but I was a little afraid that all the brouhaha would draw the house's inhabitants out.  I repeated a couple of times that I had gone to the door to ask first...

'No, they aren't ripe, you can't eat them like that, you have to wait for them to rot...'

'Can you make jam with them then?' 

'What country are you from then?'

Etc etc.  Only in France, I'm inclined to think, would you end up in a discussion with a group of bin men on the gastronomic properties and virtues of medlars.  I scooped up another armful and tossed them into my basket in the car, and we went on our way, the bin men giving me a merry bip and a wave as I passed them.

The foraging bit between my teeth, I decided to stop at the sawmill and fill the boot with offcuts for firewood.  If you stop on the opposite side of the road from the mill itself, and only take from the piles of oddments, not the tied together bundles, it's free.  It's well seasoned and sometimes there are some very nice chunks. It's a bit grubby but my car's used to it.

That done, I walked Mol down the avenue of poplars and turkey oaks approaching the château of Bogard, then rang Tom to put the kettle on.  Just as I was approaching Beau Soleil, I thought the final cherry on the cake, as it were, would be to pick up one of the delicious-looking rosy apples that had been dropping on the verge there all this autumn to munch on the last leg of the journey home.  I pulled over, left the engine running, shut the door behind me, ran across the road, picked up three apples, ran back... and couldn't open the car door.

I had shut the buckle of the seat belt in it.  This happens quite frequently, perhaps because of the two-door Saxo's design, perhaps because I have to have my seat a long way forward, or perhaps, as was pointed out subsequently by our friendly, treasured, but sometimes annoyingly  know-it-all garage man M Turbin, because there is a rather clumsy velcro-attached thing on the belt to pad it against your shoulder, put there by the somewhat large people who had the car before me and which I've never taken off, which stops the belt from rolling back properly and makes it hang awkwardly. Hwever, it has never before resulted in jamming the mechanism of the door handle.

Everything, except for me and the apples, was in the car: keys, bag, mobile, Molly... the engine was running and the passenger door was locked.  The woman whose apples I had scrumped at this point leaned out of her window and looked curiously at me.

'I have a problem.'  I told her.

It was my greed (gourmandise, not quite greed as we scarcely reconstructed protestant Anglos know it, but I'll save the comparative semantics for now)  that has caused this, I confessed, I was stealing your apples.  This didn't seem to worry her, fortunately.  

'Hold on a minute and I'll get a wire.' she said, and came down with an unravelled coat hanger.  This didn't work.  Her arm was thinner than mine and she was nearly able to reach the button of the passenger door but not quite.  Molly barked a bit but happily didn't attempt to savage her, and let her stroke her nose through the opening.  Then she she said

'What about the boot*?' 

Why hadn't I thought of that?  Of course.  I opened the boot to reveal my haul of scruffy firewood.  Poor Englishwoman, she must have thought, reduced by the dismal exchange rate and the dwindling value of their savings to gathering old bits of wood and nicking apples.

'Would you like me to climb in?' my saviour asked kindly.  I assured her I could do it, scrambled in ungainly fashion over the wood and the back seat and asked her please to close the boot behind me.  The door proved to open perfectly well from the inside, the engine smelled a bit warm, Molly was pleased to see me and the tea was well brewed when I got in.  I confessed my sorry tale to Tom, who said 'Serves you right for scrumping', which Adam might well have said to Eve, I suppose.

Unfortunately, the door handle is broken, and M Turbin can't fix it till Tuesday, as he and all his suppliers are  'making the bridge' - taking a long weekend around a public holiday, so I am having to open the passenger door and lean across every time I want to get into the car, which is slightly less undignified that clambering in the boot.  All my frugality will be set at nought against the cost of the repair, I dare say, though our gallant garagist will always try to get a cheap salvaged part for us, which probably means I'll have a pillar box red door handle on my bottle green car, further to remind me of my folly (actually he said he's spray it for me if that happened, and perhaps it wouldn't be necessary if he could just rehook the mechanism, so fingers crossed).

~

Anyway, here are the medlars.

After research into the bletting process, I have arranged them on straw in an old winebox under cover in the woodstore, so I'll keep you posted as to their progress.

~

* trunk, if you're American.  This post seems to be one that almost requires a glossary.

In which we are not afraid to make a scene.

We've a fairly busy day today, I mean for us, whose default mode of living ( I don't really like the word 'lifestyle') is quiet, remember.  We have friends coming over who wanted to go camping up on the coast above Erquy.  Their boat gets in at St Malo this evening, and the municipal campsite they were interested in doesn't take bookings, you just have to turn up and see if there's room.  So, to ensure that they had somewhere, we went up this morning to reserve a pitch by putting a something on the spot - a borrowed 'throw-up' tent ( OK, that doesn't sound good but 'instant erection' would have sounded worse...).  Then this eveniing we'll drive over to St Malo to meet them so they can follow us back to the site. We could have had them to stay and taken them up there tomorrow, but there was a not unreasonable level of anxiety about coming over without the certainty of a place, which we sought to allay by promising that we would have somewhere  sorted out by the time they arrived.

Anyway, that accomplished, we set off home again, only feeling a little anxious about whether they'll like it, whether the throw-up tent will get stolen or thrown up on or whatever, and anything else our minds could scout around to get anxious about given a slightly unusual situation and responsibility.

As we'd be travelling this evening, we decided perhaps we could justify eating out at lunchtime and just taking some sandwiches with us this evening, so we thought we'd stop in Erquy, but then we took a wrong turn and got a bit more fraught, but finally we stopped in Val André, found a place we'd eaten at before which was OK, and ordered. Molly was brought a bowl of water, I found a loo and felt much better, and so far so good.

We asked to share a starter, which came after a bit, rather a small plate of grilled shellfish and a small and rather rock-like bread roll)  but then the service got slower and slower.  The patronne, a brusque but quite pleasant woman, it seemed, took our order, but she wrote nothing down, rather having the air of someone who believes themselves to be far too much in control of things to bother with such details, and various other younger women served and cleared.   We sat over our empty starter plates too long, which is always a downer, they were taken away but then nothing happened and nothing happened,  After about 45 minutes we began to think about the little time that we'd have to come home, take a break, sort out extension leads etc for our friends, then set off for St Malo.

I went into the restaurant and asked if it was coming as we were a little pressés, that we could otherwise pay for our starter and drinks and leave.  Young woman #3 disappeared into the kitchen, some muttering of the kind which gave away that we had been forgotten.  I waited, waited, put my head around the kitchen door and repeated that we could pay now...  No, it was coming , there had been a mistake, but it was coming now... 


I sat down, after 10 minutes got up again, but brusque patronne said brusquely 'It's coming out now!'.  ( No, you're right, I am quite familiar with the several ways one can say sorry in French and did not actually hear any of them...),  So I sat for another 5 minutes then cracked.  I ordered Tom to take Molly out, I'd sort out paying for what we had had and we'd go.


In the ensuing fracas (italicised or not? Is it a fully adopted English word, what do you think?) the following arguments were put forward.


'If you were in a hurry, you shouldn't have ordered a starter.'


That from the young man behind the bar who was the first line of defence.  I said that I didn't know it was going to take so long.  Now, I said, we had lost our appetites, which was true.


'You should have said if you were in a hurry.'


I should have said if I didn't want to be still waiting after an hour?  I replied, adding that in fact I did say, about 20 minutes ago.


The patronne is coming, he announced, and retired from the field. 


She said that I had not said 20 minutes ago that we needed to hurry now; she had taken our order and I had not told her ergo I had not said it. 


She said that the magret de canard took a lot of preparation, that's why it took so long.  I said I had been told there had been a mistake and that was why.  Ha!


At this point the food arrived at last, and she said that if we left the food would all be thrown in the bin, was that what I wanted?  


At this point I did begin to weaken somewhat as I do hate waste.  Could it not be eaten here?  I asked.  


By whom? She parried.  No, it would all go to waste!


Fortunately Tom then swung in with reinforcements.  Too bad, he said, no we would not stay and eat the food,  Indeed, to have slunk back to our seats, stuffed it down and paid up would have been ignominious and unacceptable.


Brusque patronne then offered a compromise.  And if she were to pack the food as take-away so we could eat it at home later?


I conceded and said we would pay the price of take-away, which I guess we did, because the bill was smaller than it would have been, and food and face were more or less saved on both sides.


Brusque patronne offered Tom an 'au revoir' as we left, to which he replied, 'Ah non!', so I guess we had the last word.  We drove home feeling considerably better than if we'd just put up with it, despite the rather uncomfortable heat of a pizza and a plastic ice cream box of magret de canard and its garniture on my lap.


However, I don't really fancy eating it now. 

Pizza anyone?