It’s Friday again and I have a pretty light day today. Thank heavens, it’s been a pretty heavy week with work.

In today’s news: curfew in France is now going to be pushed to 6pm across the country. [It was previously 8pm in most places, with some large cities already at 6pm.]

In order to make the most of my ‘time off’ I have packed my diary back to back for the day. Morning work meeting with the PS and a Neurological, gene, imaging company. Pretty interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I then give Vicky’s ‘old man’ a call. She’s been calling him regularly as part of the NHS support stuff and figured I could help, I do love listening to stories!! He wasn’t in the best of moods and didn’t really want to talk to me. Probably not such a bad thing, after 40 mins we managed to get off the phone. Hopefully he was glad of the call and, whether he enjoyed it or not, I definitely won the prize for most distant caller during lockdown.

Once I’m done Matt and I head down to the garage to see if there is an update on the car. Good news, the car is at least being looked at – we could see it in the shop behind us. Not such great news, he told me exactly what I knew already about the clutch not working properly… Well done genius, I explained that when I bought it in! [Ok, that’s probably a little rough as my explanation was probably pretty poor.] Apparently they’ll give me a call in the afternoon to give me an update – no idea which afternoon though, this is France.

Intermarche. Quite excitingly we did manage to find a small bottle of Worcester Sauce, I didn’t even realise Heinz made it – clearly they need introducing to Lea & Perrins! I also saw these crazy tacos – what on earth is a French Taco when it’s at home?!

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Manage to drag a 25kg bottle of fuel back home along with a ‘couple’ of bottles of wine and other shopping just in time for Matt’s next meeting. [I think he’s looking forward to when we finally get the car back.] While he’s doing that I head up to the Marignac post office to send some documents to the bank to open our individual bank accounts so we can finally pay ourselves. [French banking is rather complicated and all the more so when we are also fumbling our way round the corporate side of things for my company and Matt’s employer – rest assured we do have a French accountant too but it’s never that simple here.] While I’m there I pick up a couple of extra stamps so that next time there is no excuse for Matt not to do the post.

Back at the house and things have warmed up a bit today. So much so that it seems our snowlady has taken her last bow.

Much of the snow has started to melt although there is a good few inches of ice across the porch. It’s rather damp with some rain this afternoon, predicted to turn to snow later on, so I took the chance to clear the porch.

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It will probably just be a thin layer of ice tomorrow instead but you do what you can right.

Time to start preparing dinner as we’ve been planning a curry for a few days now but been too busy.

Matt is still on calls but I’m due to have a catch up with Peter. He’s always late so I just carry on with dinner prep till he finally wraps up. Nice to speak to him again, I miss our weekly Friday afternoon catch ups!

Meanwhile, Matt has finished his calls and he’s taken over on dinner duty. He’s not the curry connoisseur that I am so I take back control. Curry takes time. It’s finally ready though and we settle down for a good feed and relax for the evening along with a nice chat to the kids.

[15 January 2021]