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).
