The Chateau Diaries

Wow what a day! The Pertonk was a MASSIVE success and we were loved, loved, loved! Thanks Brucey for stepping into the breach! There will be a big blog post to follow in a few days as we are having to pack all our things up. The adventure is over – for now.

(PS We must also tell you about Hermine’s hilarious farewell dinner in her kitchen, Julie nearly combusted trying not to laugh. HERMINE WE LOVE YOU!)

Au revoir France, until July!

We didn’t quite realise the importance of the task when we took it upon ourselves to organise the village Petanque. The stress levels have been gradually rising and reached fever pitch today when Hermine discovered we hadn’t yet made the score chart and had a bit of an episode. Julie was visibly shaken afterwards. We escaped across to the village hall to set up, only to set off the alarm which was extraordinarily loud and alerted the whole village to our whereabouts. Mind you, they seem to know where we are at all times anyway. We have stuffed the 3 large fridges with the booze (surely they can’t drink all that white wine, its insane!) and put up our posters everywhere. Just one more trip to LeClerc (corkscrew, Hermine couldn’t possibly let hers out of the house in case it gets mislaid and then what would she do?) and we are ready for the big day tomorrow!

Here are the trophies, what beauties. We are slightly less confident about our wooden spoon prize now that we know a journalist is coming from a local magazine. Not sure they will get it and we don’t have the language skills to explain that our painting is intentionally in a naive style. Honest.

We picked up the larger than life Brucey from the station, in his straw hat and flip flops. When we got back Hermine had started the bonfire which was threatening to take the whole place down. Seems a tad on the large size for a few bangers.

The evening was a hoot. Hermine ran around the table swapping napkins making sure we had the grubby ones and the guests of honour had new ones. The drinks consisted of: sparkling Rose Pamplemousse to start, followed by homemade Sangria brought by Didier (Hermine’s elusive builder), then vin rouge with the sausages and a special Rose wine to have with the dessert (strawberries with ‘fresh cream’ which is creme fraiche with icing sugar). Conversation at dinner turned to what Brucey did for a living. “But you’re a newsagent!” Hermine exclaimed horrified. “Oh, I’ve never met one of those before!” After the meat and huge barbequed onions, Hermine and Didier kept throwing wood and foliage onto the fire, then running about getting whatever they could lay their hands on to feed the flames, by now 30ft high and lapping at the barn. Our exhibition venue was looking increasingly in jeopardy. Hermine then appeared with a pot of sage tea and announced no more wine as there was work to do tomorrow, much to Bruce’s dismay. She reluctantly brought out a bottle of vin rouge and the party continued. (Side note: we taught Julie how to say vin as in the ‘van’ a builder drives, and the Frenchies were in hysterics “Not quite so aggressive Joo-lee!”

We have left the party in full swing, hopefully someone is keeping one eye on the bonfire.

So sorry we failed to blog yesterday. We did lots of stuff, we were just so tired from our exploits in Paris the day before, we didn’t have the energy to tell you about it!

So here is a quick recap. Yesterday we visited Senlis, which is a medieval walled city with a mahoosive cathedral. We had a very posh lunch at a restaurant called Scaramouche (will you do the fandango!) and then set off into the woods surrounding the city. The forest is called La Halatte and stretches for miles. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, apart from the several motorways that cut through it and that you seem to be able to hear wherever you are. We filmed some lovely pine trees waving in the breeze until the heavens opened and we headed for home. Back at the Chateau we filmed more stuff in the garden in the drizzle, including some comedy attempts to film an owl and a bead of water on a leaf. Until the heavens opened and we headed inside. You get the idea.

Today has mostly been about booze. We got a rather hefty delivery from the wine merchant. He kept going back to his van with a trolley to get more, it was almost embarrassing. The delivery included 10 cases of bottled beer and 6 cases of vin blanc. But it seems this was not enough, so we ventured out to LeClerc for more. There we got 3 boxes of Rose Pamplemousse, which we have developed a penchant for, a bottle of Ricard, several bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape and a nice Chablis. But it seems this was not enough, so we returned to LeClerc in the afternoon to get 2 bottles of sparkling Rose Pamplemousse (what a discovery!) and 2 bottles of Bordeaux. Christ. Now, let us explain, this is not all for us. We are setting up a bar for the good people of Sacy-le-Petit at the Petanque on Saturday and it appears they like a few.

Yes, it all eyes on the Petanque from now on. We were in charge of making the ‘wooden spoon’ prize for the team with the fewest points. We have taken this very seriously and so far have painted sad faces on 5 wooden spoons and aren’t really happy with any of them. Is it racist to paint them in a beret with a stripey jumper and a tache?

We have enlisted the help of Bruce from the London Petanque Club to help us with our Petanque. He arrives by Eurostar tomorrow evening and Hermine is terribly excited and busily mowing the lawns and preparing a giant bonfire which apparently is going to be a barbeque. She has ordered the local speciality sausage from the boucher and invited the neighbours. We emailed Brucey some tips on Chateau living, such as don’t forget your slippers, and he replied: “The only necessity I have is a hat, albeit a straw one! For slippers I will bring a clean pair of flip flops. Do not worry. I am pretty hardy!”

You just wait, Brucey, you just wait….

Today we had to make a quick trip to the centre of Paris for some emergency camera repairs. If you ever need a sensor clean in Paris, we highly recommend the relaxed (2 hour lunch break), friendly (gave us blueberries) team at Mat Photo. And the area around the shop – République – is a good spot to hangout while you wait. It is just how we hoped Paris would be, little streets with cafes, art galleries, fromageries and fancy tea places, with ladies on bikes riding passed with baguettes. We don’t have many photos of this, of course, as we were one camera down. But we did get this lady sunning herself on the République statue.

In the afternoon, we visited The Tours Aillaud, a housing estate in Nanterre. Also known as Tours Pablo Picasso or Tours Nuages (clouds), the towers are located just outside La Défense, which is the Parisian equivalent of Canary Wharf. The main architect was Emile Aillaud and they were built in 1977. WE LOVE THEM.

We parked under the Grande Arche de la Défense so it would be easy to find the car later (under the ginormous arch) and walked, quite a long way as it turned out, to the estate. We first had to cross a busy road with a rather scary looking multi-storey car park on the other side. Ah, we thought, the view must be good from the roof of that car park! So up we went. The roof was deserted and completely overgrown with trees and discarded sofas, a perfect spot for some filming and a picnic. Big shout out to our guide Judith who it turns out is 18, not 19. She got us out of quite a few sticky situations and didn’t mind scaling a graffiti covered concrete monstrosity that reeked of piss for that all important angle. Merci beaucoup. It was a bit overcast today and when the sun did come out it was rather inconveniently pointing in the wrong direction, so we are planning to go back one morning to stake it out again.

We took our lives into our hands driving home on the Boulevard Périphérique (you should hear the satnav trying to say that one, bless her), a rather hair-raising experience. Nutjob Parisian drivers, sci-fi tunnels and deeply confusing signposts. Not aided by the schizophrenic satnav asking us to keep right and then immediately deciding we should keep left, which is not easy on 8 lanes of traffic. We were relieved to make it back to the Chateau for a well-deserved lager.

We are eagerly looking through our footage now and tomorrow we will try out a few edits with the audio of the bells to see what works.

All in all, a good day, apart from forgetting to get Hermine the 2kg of apples she requested. No Tarte Tatin for us tonight! Bugger!

We would like you to meet the seven new family members soon to be taking up residence in the Chateau gardens:

Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful and Sneezy.

It was strange because we had discussed only the day before the ‘disneyfication’ of modern times and how that masks the underlying lack of meaning in our lives. (Philosophical or what?) And then who do we discover at the brocante but these beauties. How could we resist? Plus we do love a garden gnome (see Blooming Britain) and think they will look just lovely in Hermine’s organic wild garden. (She feigned mock horror, but we don’t believe her, we are sure she’ll grow to love them).

We had a bit of a rest day today after yesterday’s antics so we lay about drinking tea and writing a list of essential items to improve Chateau living:

More hot water bottles
Bed socks
Tupperware
Long bread bag (the bread is REALLY long)
Milk frother (turns out they don’t do cappucinos in France)
Thermals
Fingerless gloves
Bed hats

This evening we ventured out to warm up a bit, returning to a field of wheat we had seen undulating beautifully in the wind the other day. But there was no wind at all today, not a bloody ripple, it was as still as millpond. So the video footage was a bit, how can we put this, stationary. We did manage to get a nice clean recording of all 200 bell tolls, due to the lack of said wind, so I suppose we can’t have it both ways. We then filmed the sunset, got bored and set off home just before the sky turned the most glorious shade of red. Bollocks.

Hoping for better luck tomorrow in the rough estates of the Paris suburbs. We are taking a French guide with us. Not a native Parisian but a 19 year old girl from the countryside in Normandy who is as quiet as a church mouse. Hi ho, hi ho, its off to work we go….