Sorry, but it has been a while since the last update. We've been quite busy, and have had a lot of visitors, which doesn't always give much time for blogging.
In the last month or so, we have had Tina's Mum, my Mum and Dad, Tina's sister Helen and my brother Terry, which is a lot of people for country folk like us.
We took Tina's mum to La Rochelle for the day, which was even nicer than we remembered it. We hadn't been to La Rochelle since the World Cup ( the proper one, not the egg chasing) and they seem to have developed the harbour area , with even more bars and restaurants.
We found a nice Spanish restaurant on the harbour side, makes a change from all that French stuff, and had some good tapas and fish dishes. It was also great value, considering what a tourist trap La Rochelle can be.
Mum and Dad were happy just to potter around, so we got a lot of work done in the garden, and got a bit done in the barn as well.
We took Helen to Limoges for her birthday lunch, and we also took her to Oradour-sur-Glane, the World War 2 martyrs village. It's not the cheeriest of places, but it is an important monument. The whole village was wiped out by the SS as a random revenge for a resistance attack and it has all been preserved ever since. You can still see the tram lines that used to run all the way to Limoges.
My brother Terry popped over for the a busy weekend during the international football break ( no Saints fixture). We started of with a round of golf at St Junien, where my handicap refuses to come down below 80. I did manage a couple of bogie's, and one 200 yard drive, but there were a lot of horrors as well. Yet again, neither of us could get across the lake at the 14th. There's always next time.
Check the course out yourselves .
On the Saturday, we watched the England Estonia game, which was so dull in the second half that we turned over to watch the Jocks instead. James McFadden seems to be the Scottish Matt Le Tissier. Luckily for Scotland, he isn't being kept out of the team by a Scottish Teddy Sherringham.
That night, it was the village football club Moules et Frites night, which clashed with the England France Rugby. They put some TVs in the salles de fete, so people could watch, and fortunately for us the French are much better at coping with defeat than people in the UK ( cue lots of Jim Davidson jokes about French war heroes, etc). There was no trouble, apart from one drunken Frenchman banging the table so hard that our friend Peter's glass of wine flew off the table, onto Peter's shirt. Other than that, there was a bit of Gallic handbags outside, between two footballers who didn't get on, but there was no ceremonial wrecking of any cars with GB stickers, as there is in England whenever we lose a big game.
The food was very good, as last year, and the service was a bit faster, so we managed to be home and in bed before 4 am.
Terry and I were invited to watch the team play a home game the next day, by the club president, so we took in some air, to shrug in the excesses of the next day.
We caught the end of the reserve game, which Suris lost. It was a fairly gentle game, with lots of space which Terry said that he thought I could play in comfortably, a shocking statement from him as he would normally leave me as the last kid picked for a playground match.
We asked the president and the mayor what they thought the first teams changes where, but they weren't sure, due to the beer consumption the night before.
The first team where quite good. The centre forward was very much in the James Beattie mode, with an ego to match ( he was the one that tried to pick a fight with me at last years do). He won and missed a penalty, scored a good goal, missed some sitters and walked off in a strop after getting booked for diving.
They seem to have a strange rule in France that you can have rolling substitutes, so as a manager, you can take of your centre forward and if the sub doesn't work out, you can bring the centre forward back on again.
The opposition keeper got injured early on in the game, making a save at his near post. We couldn't work out what happened, but he couldn't get up, so there was a half hour delay in the game while we waited for the pompiers to come and get him. The pompiers only came from 5 kms away, but it seems that sporting injuries are low priority in the France as well as the UK.
After that, every time someone went down injured, one of the local wags shouted 'pompiers'.
Suris won 3 nil in the end, with two goals from the no 11, who was more in the Anelka style. They also had a very good midfield player, who looked and played like Alan Giresse.
They even had a bar up there, and unlike St Mary', you can drink while you watch. It was very entertaining, although €3 entree fee is a bit steep perhaps, as it's only €15 to watch Bordeaux.
We were quizzed by the club president about what we thought of the whole set up, and we told him that it was much better than our old pitch in England, where you had to clear up the dog shit before you could kick-off!
