Today we wrote a leaflet announcing our arrival to the local community and forewarning them about our plans. It is of course in French, but I’m sure you can get the gist.
This fancy leaflet encourages people to come to the brocante on Sunday. We popped one through everyone’s door in the village this evening, the old school version of mailchimp if you will.
A brocante is a kind of French car boot sale, without the car or the boot. We are having a table there, that apparently we have to set up at 6am! Bugger – the bells don’t go mental til 7am! We will have to set actual alarms and look at watches. Good grief.
We have collated a mass of English themed tat to wow the villagers of Sacy-le-Petit, that will be displayed amongst St George’s flag bunting no less. We have the taken the doll out of its box and brought it into the house, as if it isn’t spooky enough.
We’ve been thinking a lot about our difficulty transitioning from city life to the countryside. We are living out our own version of City Slickers. Today in the gardens of the Chateau we were instructed to make a large thingamygig structure out of giant stick things for the beans to grow up and spent ages tying it all together with miniscule pieces of twine. PLEASE LET IT STILL BE THERE IN THE MORNING. We pulled up a ton of weeds. PLEASE LET THEM HAVE BEEN WEEDS. We both have nettle stings on our bums from crouching down without looking behind us first. We planted 10 green cabbages and 10 purple cabbages. PLEASE LET THEM STILL BE THERE IN THE MORNING. We are having to google every plant before we eat it. We cooked up rhubarb from the garden for pudding. Do we eat the leaves? DEFINITELY NOT. We boiled up the stems with some water. When Hermine found out we hadn’t soaked them overnight first she declared this sacrilege and a crime against rhubarb.
We are eating nettles, and dock leaves, and sorrel, and sage, and we love it. There is something good about getting your hands dirty. We are so removed from where our food comes from living in the city. We plucked rhubarb from the ground and cooked it and ate it, and despite it not being done completely correctly, we are proud. Don’t ask about the microwaved beans on toast we had beforehand. (Yes, toast in a microwave).
Rain stopped play today. We were holed up in the Chateau most of the day, listening to the rain and the thunder. So we decided to record some audio. We were of course still hearing the bells. After a few failed attempts we managed to record the 200 bell tolls that happen morning, noon and night. A kind of old fashioned clocking in machine for the workforce on the surrounding farms. Click the link below to hear them and share our pain:
DONG!
Just imagine that 200 times over. Dong, dong, bloody DONG!
We also found the old Chateau. And it WAS just across the road, masquerading as a sugar beet storage facility. How disappointing. We had envisaged crumbling ruins overgrown with weeds. Instead we got an industrial warehouse with bricked up windows. However, Hermine has mentioned some ruins in the woods that we are going to hunt out tomorrow. If it ever stops raining.
We went up into the attic of the Chateau today and, once Hermine had managed to change the light bulb, we were treated to a treasure trove of delights: old political posters, huge ornate frames, endless vases and jars, and a LOT of cobwebs. Hermine found the wild boar’s head and kindly thrust it into our hands. Initially we thought he was a bit revolting. Now you have to bear in mind that we are both rather squeamish, so removing his half hanging out tongue with some tweezers and turning him upside down and shaking god knows what out of his gob was rather traumatic. But after that, we began to warm to him. We excitedly traipsed around the chateau looking for a place to hang him for some photos. But then thought, lets have a cuppa first, and managed to fuse the electrics for the whole chateau making a coffee. Whoops-a-daisy. We were not top of the pops. So after a quick trip to the hypermarket to buy a camping stove to replace the defunct cooker, we got back to photographing the wild boar, who we had now christened Sebastian. This turned into a full on photo shoot with studio lighting and portrait lenses for the close ups. Good fun.
Sebastian seemed to look best hung on the wall of the bedroom designated for the new woofer. In fact he looked magnificent there. Unfortunately we forgot to take him down, so there was a bit of panicked rushing around to get him off the wall and under covers when we heard her arriving (from Casablanca no less!). We are considering if we can make Sebastian’s ears wiggle at all using some electronics, bring some life back into the old fella. He has a happy face.
We also got shown the space where the exhibition will be held, a large loft room in one of the outbuildings. It’s a truly amazing space. There is a white screen nicely set up if we want to show a film. It’s all beginning to feel real. Better make some work soon!!!!!
This evening we went for a stroll around the village in the drizzle, looking for the ruins of the old chateau, which Hermine had said, with a vague wave of the arm, was ‘Just over there.’ Equipped with a hand-drawn map from the 1700s (which it turns out is not so useful nowadays), we searched in vain for an hour before giving up. Hopefully, we will find the elusive ruins tomorrow.
Today we went to Paris to check out a taxidermy emporium called Deyrolle. Taxidermy is de-rigueur in these parts and we wanted to investigate it. When we eventually managed to exit Les Halles station (no lie, we were walking round in circles for at least half an hour), we found the Rue du Bac and a rather unassuming shop front. This belies the huge upstairs floor of stuffed animals of every description. The buffalo, zebra, bear and rhino were particularly impressive. There was a strict no photos rule so we snuck around surreptitiously snapping on our phones, not looking at all suspicious.
Hermine has told us she has a stuffed wild boar head in the attic that we can have, and that somewhere she has some clawed animals paws that her father used to hang his gun on the wall. Exciting!
Back at the Chateau, we are gradually getting to grips with the schedule. Here is what we have picked up about local village life so far:
Charcuterie in Sacy le Petit 9 am Tuesdays.
Farm shop for vegetables 11.30am to 2pm from Wed to Sat
Farm shop for milk and eggs, 7pm daily, and very early in the morning too we think.
Watercress sold next to the bakers in St Martin on Tuesdays at 4pm
Bar in Grandfresnoy (the next village) does food on a Sat night.
Put out recycling on Wed nights.
Clothes washing is on Mondays.
Aidez-nous!
We did manage to make the 7pm milk pick up (just) which is useful as they don’t actually sell milk in the shops. And we can confirm it came directly from the cow into our reused 2 litre water bottle. Fucking fresh.
The cows who had just been milked were out in the field and looked very chilled. We might go back there to film them later in the week.
We are off to bed shortly. To bed but not necessarily to sleep. We both lie in our beds with our eyes wide staring at the ceiling, concerned the place may be haunted. Julie is consulting her ghost-buster brother in case we need to do any DIY exorcism. Or indeed try to capture any of the blighters on film. The bells are still haunting us too as they ring on every hour and half hour, all night. I expect we’ll miss them when we’re gone.
Night night, sleep tight.
In order to further ingratiate ourselves with the locals, we signed up for a short forestry course today. If anyone can tell us what our guide Alain was on about, do let us know, cheers. It might have been prudent to sign up for a short French course first.
