Tanks, Dangerous Scooters and Castles

Timeline: just before Christmas: The arrival of the bride into Nantes airport four days before Christmas was a joyous occasion, as work at Le Clos de la Rose had been going well and since I had not had a day off for two months, I was secretly looking forward to a rest. The trouble was that my mind and body was now wired to working long days and since we had a party of wild animals coming, oops, sorry, a group of wild party animals arriving to celebrate the New Year, I was reluctant to let my mind or my body slow down quite yet.

The Maison du Vigneron had been completed for months now, so needed just a thorough clean, a splash of Christmas decorations and a few odd jobs to make ready, while the Maison d’Amis was not quite finished, still requiring cleaning, furnishing and painting and I hadn’t completely decided on the colour pallete.

There was however an issue. Not a problem, all such entities having long been eradicated in favour of the easier to contemplate challenge and we’ve faced plenty of those. No, not even a challenge this time, but an issue and one relating to not having walls anywhere near straight or perpendicular. You’d have thought the many challenges facing builders two hundred years ago, would not have included building straight and vertical, but well, there you have it. As we needed a reasonable wall surface for the new kitchen, this necessitated the liberal application of rather thick plaster in places and that meant long drying times, even more so due to the fact we were using lime plaster, in keeping with our sympathetic restoration ethic. Yes, it takes an age to dry out, so there’ll be no painting this year.

Fortunately, lime plaster has a wonderful texture and when dry, a clean white colour. While drying however, it has a patchy, smelly, grey colour, so the heating was whacked up, rugs, curtains, pictures and some Christmas decs added and we then had a tidy, cosy retreat.

Needs paint!

Really comfy IKEA sofa

The colour pallete incidentally, unless the bride informs me otherwise, is very pale yellow walls, white skirtings and ceilings and pale green beams. The beams have been pale green for some 50 years or more, so why upset them now?

We were both hard at work right up to and including Christmas Eve, when we downed tools and took Christmas Day off. For a small village of 1300 people, we are blessed with a 12th century collegiate (teaching) church the size of a cathedral and we wanted to spend a part of Christmas within it, surrounded by its living beauty, spiritual tranquillity and to experience the power and solemnity of a living village rejoicing at the heart of its community.

The couple of hundred or so people who turned out were dwarfed by the scale of the interior, but we realised with surprise that we recognised many of them and we all sung our hearts out and felt even more privileged than usual to be able to live in such a special place as we walked home afterwards.

The morning of the 28^th saw us eager for our guests to arrive . . . so we could stop working and take a break and so it was with shovel in hand, moving a last bit of spoil left over from a recently filled in drain trench, that I heard two cars stop outside the gates. Hmm, what will they think? Will they like it? I’ll just copy and paste part of our guest and lovely new friend, Julie’s review:

''We arrived after a leisurely drive of just under 3 hours from St Malo and swept through the gate posts of lovely honey coloured stone into the courtyard and several days of bliss…. ''

It was indeed bliss and my mind or body never thought of resisting the need to party. My liver did cough a few times, demanding quantities of mineral water to make his work a little easier, but we all had a ball and I even got my hair cut, courtesy of my visiting hairdresser, my sister, who had brought the assorted revellers along.

The days were remarkably mild and sunny and Martin and Julie were keen to visit the tank museum in Saumur, while the others wanted to enrich themselves with more traditional French culture. I rode shotgun to the tanks and being someone who likes museums of all things mechanical, I was mightily impressed with the largest collection of tanks and associated artefacts from around the world, as were both Julie and Martin. My favourite was a combination of Vespa motor scooter and cannon, the latter being longer than the former. Absolutely bonkers! The famous instructions, ‘light blue touch paper and run away’ sprung to mind.

Several hours passed quickly and so engrossed were we in the exhibits, that we forgot about one of mankind’s basic needs, food, so after a quick walk around the beautiful chateau and a visit to one of the medieval timber framed houses in the centre of Saumur now converted into a creperie, we stocked up on some more wine before returning home for more merriment.

The New Year celebrations were fabulous, with seven of us gathered around the farmhouse kitchen table for a very slow meal, fast paced discussion and board games with some dubious moves, which we all got away with.

I must give a big thank you to Maggie for cutting my hair and making me look and feel human again, to Roger for despite coming down with serious man flu, still managing to fit all the new spotlights to our nearly completed Atelier suite, to Martin for breathing life into my old and trusty notepad pc and also putting some real security into our wi-fi set-up, to Julie for liking tanks so much and for such a lovely guest review, to Sally for a brilliant rendition of 'Hey Big Spender' and reminding me how much friends not seen for far too many years remain important to you and to the bride for being the love of my life. 

I’ll let Julie finish off this post, but not before saying that they have booked to return later this year and also for the retro Grand Prix in 2014. How cool is that ;~) 

''Bill and Letsie promise on their web site to ‘offer you respite from your busy lives in a pleasant environment, overlooking vineyards as far as the eye can see.’ Mission accomplished for us! Our visit left us relaxed and charmed by the whole experience and we will return!  Julie & Martin''

Leaving the village bar, a sad, yet regular event

A bientôt,

LC