It’s Sunday afternoon here in Perth and as we’ve been out for a very good lunch everyone else is snoring away. I’m still all over the place and fell asleep last night at six this morning, if you see what I mean.
It’s spring here – the equivalent of the first week in June for us in France. So I was a bit taken aback to see waves on the swimming pool yesterday morning and again today. It’s warm and humid during the day and pretty perishing at night. We have sheets, blankets and duvets – yikes.
Yesterday we went into Kalamunda to a once monthly craft market. MMmm, lots of household objects caught bored people’s eyes during the winter and just cried out to be decorated. So the result was around fifty stalls, the vast majority selling delightful objets d’art such as saws, both hand and circular, painted with snowy scenes of huskies or cottage gardens, papier mache mushrooms painted neon colours and sold in families of five for 30 dollars – to serve what function I could not guess. In amongst the doll peg bags and doggy door stops were many stalls selling jams, pickles, imported spices and things based on olive oil. The difference in attractiveness seemed always to come down to the packaging, some simple and elegant, others basic and off-putting. My favourite stall sold blue, I’m not kidding, blue langoustines and things called marrons which looked like crayfish. We bought three in spite of their 35 dollar per kilo price tag. They’re in the freezer having an extended sleep and will be hurled cruelly into boiling water tomorrow for supper. Apparently they’re cooked in water flavoured with both salt and sugar. Can’t wait to try them.
Got onto the internet for the first time today to check e-mails and upload the first episode of this trip on the blog. The first e-mail from home tells me that I have two goldfish doing the swimming upside down thing. Now, why am I not surprised? It’s just a relief to know it isn’t the way I look at them that does it.
Last night T&T made us a barbecue despite the howling gale and lashing rain. Yumm. And today we went out to lunch and ate far too much luscious seafood. I guess this trip is all going to be about meals. Our poor hosts.
Finally got the mobile phone working. Only had it five months & never managed to make a call as it always seems to be in a no signal area. Now, here in the most remote city in the world, I have a signal – clear as you like.
Lovely e-mail arrived from my niece, Poppy, enquiring whether we’ve got through a hundred books yet. If we continue not sleeping like this we should hit the hundred by Friday.
About Me
- Le Couvent - www.roujan.com
- Take me somewhere warm and friendly where I can stop - stop and stay for a while in a big, pumpkin-coloured room, a chambre d'hote where I don't have to wake up until noon. Does it exist? Come on, of course they do, hotels, houses to rent, chambres d'hotes in the south of France where I can check in for bed and breakfast and stay a few days and it's alright and I can get up at noon and smell the lavender and walk through the vineyards and dip my toes in the Mediterranean and, and I could lie on the beach and read. I could read French books, I know my French is rubbish but even I could read Agatha Christie in French, Something old-fashioned. Sort of Deauville or Provence. The tube jerks off. Outside the windows are dark curved walls with thickly-coated horizontal tube maps of wires moving by. Passing by slowly, I give you that, but definitely moving. "Thank God, not today then. Yes. No. Oh God. We've stopped again. Why don't they tell us what's happening. They do quite a lot now about all sorts of things. Not really important things of course. If they don't say anything it means it's bad. Or they're too busy I suppose. How busy? How bad? Okay, don't go there. Go back.
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