The Big Night

It was cold outside so I declined the kind offer to accompany the girls to the markets to top up our dwindling supplies of sheep cheese and honey cake, deciding to while away the morning nostalgically playing architect. Before the mound of steaming mushrooms, pork and baguette landed on the table for lunch, the extensions for the new house were as advanced as plans to continue the national general strike indefinitely, with big rallies planned for Paris on Saturday.

With no, or few trains running, getting to Paris becomes problematic, and with getting to Paris problematic, getting to London um… challenging. With disappointment verging on sadness it seems we will be forced to cut our visit short to be certain that we can make our Eurostar connection, but then a day in Paris is always a good thing in the cheer-up stakes.

I'm not sure if it was the uncertainty regarding the travel logistics, or whether I really was nervous about the function, but as the afternoon rolled on I found myself pacing back and forth. It felt like the countdown before one of the girls' weddings.

When we arrived, Olivier guffawed and looked at his watch.

We were two hours early.

That was our plan, and we managed to fill the time quite happily adjusting lights, polishing sculpture and going over speeches in our heads until the first invited guest arrived exactly on time. Suddenly we were in Barclay's Premier Club. A cloud of deja vu descended. I was back in a familiar environment full of suits and rugby hugs and girls in power dresses. This was just another opening, but there was something very unfamiliar about it all, I was on the wrong side of the fence!

The plan was always to prepare a collection that would compliment Dume's sculpture, and it must be said to the credit of the dynamic duo the plan worked! Of course no one was going to sidle up to me on the night and say "I hate your stuff", but it was with some relief that the exhibition seemed to draw a good deal of positive response. Olivier, as he turfed out the last guest at two tomorrow morning thanked us, and declared the exhibition to be an extraordinary success and has asked if we could leave our work in place till April!

From our perspective, as we dined at three we weren't really up to too much analysis, but we all agreed when the red dot appeared on Mr Three, perhaps the most personal and therefore the least likely we thought, to attract a purchaser, we all felt a quiet sense of achievement. We collectively need a few more sales to cover costs, but there are enough people in love with the other pieces to make us confident that we will probably not go broke.

Of necessity, I am writing this the morning after. It's early afternoon in reality, and we are all staring at each other quietly confident. About what we are not sure, but there is enough afoot to ensure that we may not find boredom in the coming year.

I was asked this morning why I was polishing my old shoes. A hastily mumbled something about not wanting to damage the new ones before the big night seemed to placate things for a time, besides if I wore the new clobber to the bank this morning they'd think I didn't own anything else, which admittedly would be fairly close to the mark.

It is fair to say that the drive in to town this morning was a strangely nervous time, mixed with a tinge of excitement, all the while with an eye out for poor Waiting riding in the trailer behind.

But we made it, and from the moment we reached the foyer of the office even I could see that the feedback we had been getting was not just a sap to boost my confidence.  Now placed throughout the premises, my paintings have indeed taken on the life that I had hoped for them but was never confident  despite the kind murmurings of others, of having achieved.

I had regularly used the word "impostor" in discussions about myself as an exhibiting artist, certain that nothing I had done would stand up to scrutiny, that my lack of experience would be as obvious to others as it was to me and as I lived with these things night and day for those months earlier in the year my confidence continued to falter. I could only do my best and hope that those around me who were attempting to underpin my insecurity were right.

Perhaps because I lived too closely with them as a project, perhaps because each time I visited another gallery and saw the technical skill of "proper" artists I came away more despondent about my own feeble scratchings, my doubts lingered, but today for a fleeting moment seeing them hanging in an extraordinarily foreign environment, I even felt proud of them.   Grateful as I am to all of those who have provided so much support and encouragement along the way I can now say that I am comfortable and even satisfied with this year's output.  Thank-you, you know who you are.

I think that after tomorrow, I'll wear the title "peintre" without a cringe.

Now that I'm an artist, I reckon I'll get away with wearing homely old shoes.

Farewell

Farewell old friends

One of us needed a new pair of shoes apparently, so it was up to Celine to show us the rounds of the likely spots. Sadly for me the shop sold shoes for blokes as well, and it seems that suddenly two of us needed a new pair of shoes. I was told in no uncertain terms that my dear old Rockports were no longer suitable. Suitable for what exactly wasn't explained by either of my antagonists, but from the beginning arguments to resolve our divergent philosophies on that point were only going to have one outcome. To make the situation more grave, apparently new shoes demand new trousers and a belt to match.

After more than a decade, the old shoes were just about getting comfortable, and my jeans have only been worn night and day for a couple of years, but apparently in their absence I'll look my best at the Bank on Thursday evening.

I thought I'd give this looking my best thing a go tonight at the local theatre, taking it slowly at first, by wearing the new shoes, and I do have to admit that they provide a certain warmth, that some of the thin spots on the old ones lacked.

Theatre? Well yes actually, and bless them, it was a silent production, so we only had to translate the French mime routine, which as luck would have it seemed to have been written in English as we understood the whole thing.

The lead performer, if that's what the "man" in a one man show is called, wore a pair of pumps which bore a startling resemblance to my own nifty new footwear, a sure sign that I'm dressed "suitably" now I would have thought.

Perhaps I'll moonwalk home.

Back to Work

It's one thing staying with friends and talking till the wee small hours, but it's another thing altogether to have them start cracking the whip and getting one working almost as soon as one is out of one's night attire, even if that happens to be closer to lunch time than one could respectably call 'breakfast time", but to be fair there was a repair to be made and a deadline to make it by.

I think it was fear of catastrophic failure that made me reluctant to want to start, but "Waiting" has been patiently waiting on the living room wall with a tear in his side and his stretcher removed for three months, pending our return. We had planned for the worst, a major reconstruction and surgery on the tear, a repaint and four days of hoping it would all dry. It would be a painful patient process, but after two cups of coffee I was ready to start.

Dume had kindly arranged for the stretcher to be repaired in our absence, and I could stall no more. I reached deep into my picture framer's bag of tricks learned all those decades ago in my first proper job, and my apprentice and I, within a few short hours were gazing somewhat in awe of our own ability, at a completed job with no discernible damage. Amazingly, by my quick calculation, that should have left us four days completely free until the opening of the exhibition grande.

But of course I had not considered that our hosts may have had other plans for us. After some detailed instruction about what we were actually looking for, and what might actually kill us if we got it wrong, they had the gall to send us out into the forest until late in the afternoon foraging for mushrooms and chestnuts.   A forest!  Foraging!   What if we were snorted at by a wild boar, or tripped by a mole?  

As if the foraging wasn't bad enough this evening they made us sit in front of an open fire roasting chestnuts and eating all those wondrous varieties of fungi gently sauteed in butter and garlic with a loaf of fresh bread to hand.

We thought life on the boat was tough!

And so to bed

It's already a long way into tomorrow in a day that went faster than our TGV Express to Paris.

We slept unsoundly on our last night on the boat, the church bells woke us as usual at six and we went back to sleep as usual till eight, missing as usual the seven o'clock call to start work. By eight of course we had five hours left till the taxi arrived and six hours worth of stuff to do, so we thought we'd work out how to go about it over a leisurely breakfast.

Helen and Chris popped by for a quick goodbye, and Rudolph and Karin didn't want to hold us up as they were going through the same process, but we really hadn't made too much of a dent in anything by smoko.  Perhaps we thought we could change in our methodology to something which didn't involve entertaining visitors.

We'd almost come up with a plan when Maggie and Jacques arrived having just picked up the keys to their soon to be new but for the moment very crumbling ancient barn and house and wondering if we'd be interested in a quick squizz, which we thought given our now desperate situation was an absolutely splendid idea. By the time we got back it was time for coffee and for reasons which we couldn't explain, the amount of work left to do seemed to be about the same as it was last night yet the amount of time left to do it in was contracting at a nearly alarming rate.

So we had lunch.

To heck with it, it's our last day cruising for the year!

We did leave on time, our boat tidy, our friends farewelled, our town quietly going about it's lack of business, our neighbourhood deathly Sunday silent, and ourselves with a strange sense of leaving our home, rather than setting off back to it.

Once over the hill we were time travelling again, a well-worn path to a welcome back in Orleans, back in "our" room as though we'd never left. When we arrived we had five hours till midnight and six hours worth of stuff to catch up on, or make that seven.

And so to bed. There will be no church bells to wake us in the morning, and work to do, and after all we have till Thursday to get it done.

It's a wrap!

It's bedtime, and all we've achieved today is moving every item we have on the boat from its rightful position to one that's as far removed from where it should be as we can get it without actually leaving the boat.

The stuff from the aft cabin had to move to the forward cabin because there's work to be done there over winter, and the stuff from the forward cabin had to move to the main cabin because there's work to be done there over winter, and the stuff from the two bathrooms (ok heads if you want to be picky) has to be removed because the blokes need access to all the pumps and things, and the stuff from the main cabin had to move somewhere as well because we need to keep all the access to the bilge areas free and open.

We did work out that we can get two bikes upside down and without their wheels on, on the bench straddling the stove, so that's a start, and by crawling along the bilge I got to a space under the helm where there was enough room to store the wheels out of the way of the fibreglass work to be done.

The wrapping job looks neat though, it's such a pity that it will probably all have to come off so the blokes can move the boat, and sure as eggs they won't remember how to put it back, but at least it will keep some of the melting snow out of the bedding we hope.

And Mr P? Well it's the water pump I'm afraid, and while we are arranging a substantial increase in our investment in the boat, with new electrics, upholstery and a bit more remedial work on the hull, it's a bit of a rude stunt to pull if I do say so myself, and Old Smokey isn't going to get out of chugging us along just yet!

But not to worry for now, tomorrow we have a train to catch and a new adventure awaits.

Two more sunsets over the implausibly named Cappuccineau are all that we have, which is probably not too bad because we are starting to feel as though we are taking part in a remake of Groundhog Day.

More cleaning, more coffee with our German friends, more offers of Swiss beer from the returning hirers opposite, more items on the list of things to do than can possibly be done in the time remaining.

For a little variety, Mr Perkins has decided that even though we thought he had breathed his last for the year, he'd construct a coolant leak to add to our list of things to fix. Just how the inanimate Mr P can create a substantial leak of his own volition no fewer than two days after his last activity, is a complete mystery and one that I'm rather afraid to solve lest he should have other ways of throwing tantrums because we are leaving him alone in the ice.

I do now know however that the disposable nappies we've been using to catch the odd oil drip in the engine bay completely disintegrate when full of an oil and antifreeze mix, and that disintegrated nappies are not at all fun to deal with. I suspect that's just one reason people don't feed their babies on oil and antifreeze.