V-E-T-S

Yesterday it was time for the annual vaccinations for Millie & Bib. These two are the most vocal when in the car, and Millie will race away as soon as she sees the carrier come out of its place. We usually get them out a couple of days before the trip, so she becomes a bit more accustomed to them.

She will come and beg whenever we are preparing food, so I thought I would just make “preparing food ” noises and she would arrive….But somehow she sensed this was different. Even when I threw tempting bits of chicken on the floor, she would rush in, grab it, and rush out again before I could grab her. She’s become less trusting since we used to grab her and force medicine down her throat. Other times she’s as soft and floppy and come hitherish as can be, but when she thinks something is afoot then that’s it!

I managed to grab her scruff and “feed” her into the upturned carrier – this seems to be the most effective way of getting her in. Bib was a piece of cake after that, but then the cat chorus began. All the way, (only a 15 minute drive) Bib kept up her affronted “MEE-OW!” uttered at top volume, while Millie gave sad little meeps from time to time. Arriving at the vets, about 10 minutes early for our appointment, I saw there were three other cars in the car park – with COVID precautions everyone was waiting in their car. This vet is a replacement for our usual, and while she is lovely, she does like to chat. So the cats and I sat in the car with the door open for about 45 minutes. Bib wanted me to stroke her, but Millie just wanted to be left alone.

When we got into the surgery Millie behaved beautifully – she cuddled up to me when the vet left her alone, and she sat patiently while being poked and prodded. She went gratefully back into her carrier at the end. Bib blotted her copybook by starting off all cuddly and then going into delinquent-with-a-flick-knife mode. She scratched and bit the vet, and hissed and swore. I suspect she was fed up with the wait. (So was I!)

Anyway, Millie is underweight and needs feeding up; Bib isn’t and doesn’t. Of course, the problem is that we can’t leave food out à volonté (help yourself) as Jasper and Bib would tuck in. The vet suggested a cat feeder that only opens for a cat with the appropriate computer chip. Like this:

At over 100€ I think not. We’ll just have to give her a feed at lunch time too.

Bib sang on the way home, but Millie sat silent in the carrier. Both were glad to be home. Bib forgave us quickly and was snuggling up to us as usual by the evening. Millie is under the weather today; she is keeping a low profile, but I’m sure she’ll be fine tomorrow. However, she did give me a long drawn out love-fest last night (once I was safely in bed and obviously not going to grab her!) so I think I’m forgiven!

Run for your life…

I’m not a sports fan, so this summer hasn’t been great for me on the TV viewing stakes at least. First the Euros, then the Tour de France, then some weird cricketing thing called The Hundred, and now the Olympics. Mr FD, however, is in seventh heaven, flicking from BBC1 to BBC 2 to the red button, to BBC1 again trying to watch the sports competitions he’s interested in. He was up at about 6.30 this morning to watch the men’s road race (cycling) and is now enjoying the men’s hockey and the women’s football.

I’m happy if the UK win medals; but equally I like to support the underdogs. This year, as in the 2016 Olympics, there’s a team I’m rooting for: it’s the IOC Refugee Olympic Team. I’ve discovered that not many people are aware of this team – even those involved in work with refugees. So I thought I’d mention it

In 2015, 65 million people had been displaced from their homes as a result of conflict or natural disaster. In that year, more than one million refugees entered Europe after fleeing wars in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

That summer, the International Olympic Committee established a Refugee Emergency Fund and $1.9 million was donated to help international aid agencies integrate refugees in sport. In the same year, the IOC announced it would be inviting refugee athletes to compete in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The creation of the refugee team sent a message of hope and inclusion to millions of refugees around the world. The 10 athletes who competed in Rio de Janeiro came from Syria, South Sudan, the DRC and Ethiopia.They didn’t win any medals, but they raised awareness of the issues around the refugee crisis – and reminded people that refugees aren’t just an amorphous mass of scroungers, but real people with real feelings, and histories.

Following the success of the 2016 team, the IOC decided to enter an IOC refugee team in the 2020 Tokyo games.

The 29 athletes come from Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Eritrea, Many of these countries are in the midst of conflict or civil wars, making it too dangerous for the Olympians to return. The sportsmen and women will be competing in 12 sports including athletics, badminton, boxing, canoeing, cycling, judo, karate, taekwondo, sport of shooting, swimming, weightlifting, and wrestling.

Their stories are inspiring, like that of Cyrille Tchatchet II. He is from Cameroon, and claimed asylum in the UK Since arriving in Britain, he has trained as a mental health nurse, and has been supporting patients through the pandemic. “I will be honored to represent not only refugees but all the estimated 80 million displaced people around the world,” he said.

Or Yusra Mardini, originally from Syria, who used her swimming skills to save lives, as she and her sister kept themselves afloat for three hours while pushing their foundering boat—which carried other refugees trying to reach Europe—to the safety of a Greek beach. 

You can read more here, or watch the video

Run for your life…or swim for your life…flee for your life…exactly what every one of these Olympians did.

Memories of September 2018

Mr FD produced this powerpoint presentation to share with family & friends of our trip to Lake Orta and its environs after my treatment for breast cancer. This trip was financed by a dear friend who, having received an inheritance from her father (“more than I’d imagined, or need”) offered to pay for a holiday for us both. I was so grateful for her generosity…

We had a wonderful time, staying in a bed and breakfast place, above Lake Orta. I felt stronger each day, and although I needed plenty of rest-stops (to eat ice cream, drink beer and admire the views) I did a lot of walking, considering I’d finished my 30 days of radiotherapy only a week or two before we left.

Mr FD is an altogether better photographer than I, so his photos are lovely! If you want to read more bout the holiday you can go here and read the following posts. Otherwise just click your way through Mr FD’s lovely photos.

Lake Orta^J Italy.pptx

Buen Camino!?

You may have seen this post before!! It somehow got retro-published but I thought that all my readers (because there’s so many of you!!) might like to read it…

I am enjoying the 1000 kilometre challenge, and feel it has improved my fitness a little. I am not going out every day, whatever the weather, and I am not doing so many “Leslies” now (online walking with Leslie Sansome) but I’m still on target to complete my kilometres by the end of the year.

Next year, I’m going to try for the 1000 miles. So I need to think of ways to motivate myself to do more walking, as 1 mile = 1.6 kilometres – quite a big difference!

We have decided that next year our challenge will be to walk a part of the Via Franca – the French route of the Camino de Compostela. On this map you can see the way that the different routes from Germany, and Italy and the Netherlands go through France to meet in one of two places to traverse Spain to Santiago de Compostela

Our plan is to walk the part that goes from Cluny to Le Puy en Velay

It’s not shown on the main map, but I think it’s a “short cut” from Chalon sur Saone to Le Puy, without going via Lyon, or possibly from Vezelay, taking in Le Puy. I’m not quite sure. Whatever we’re doing, we’ve now got the book to help us with our planning

More than 30 days of walking, it says…That should keep us going!!

Anyway, we’re not going to do it all in one go. Cluny is a couple of hours drive from here, so we have considered taking a weekend to walk part of it; other parts are only 30 minutes drive away, so we can cover parts in a day quite easily. I like the idea of planning something for next year. My only slight worry is that I’m finding bits of me are hurting more frequently – especially knees, but hips and ankles/feet too. I hope my body is not getting so old and crock-like that it won’t work!

So with that in mind I need to keep walking. Last week I did a miserable 5.8 km – what with dismal weather and work, I felt disinclined. This week (starting on Friday) I’ve already done 11.6 km of walking, or, in the case of yesterday, bad disco dancing (5,000 steps!) to the strains of Bronski Beat and the Communards….Ah! Back to my (relative) youth…

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

I am not a political beast, although I would imagine that most people who read my blog (I say that as though there are hundreds! I imagine it’s more like a handful, but never mind…) can make a fairly well informed guess at my general politics, and my opinion of the present government in Britain. Especially their management (or otherwise) of the Covid-19 pandemic.

If I was in Britain now, I think I would be feeling very nervous about the so-called “Freedom Day”, and if I didn’t already know that my 92 year old mother is being sensible, and staying in the house most of the time, avoiding crowds where she can, and meeting friends and family outside, I would be very worried for her. I know she is still vulnerable, but I am less concerned than perhaps I might be.

Johnson and Sunak are glibly saying they won’t self isolate after being “pinged” by test and trace, because they’ve been in contact with Javid, who has tested positive – while telling everyone else to be “reasonable”, “sensible” and to use “common sense”.** Numbers are rising in the UK because of the super spreader Euros finals, and yet double vaccinated people from France can’t enter the UK without costly tests and quarantine, because of the Beta variant (of which there are fewer cases in France than in Britain…) and people from South Africa, where the variant originated , can still, I believe, enter the UK. Hey ho.

(**ETA After criticism from across the board – backbenchers, opposition politicians, & the public, all of whom have been doing the right thing – these two have now announced that they ARE going to self isolate after all; probably maintaining that this was what they were going to do all along, and we idiots just misunderstood them)

But this wasn’t meant to be a rant. It was meant to be a post abut the heart breaking Memorial Wall that has been created in London. Johnson has promised (and I am sure he keeps all his promises) that there will be a national memorial when all this is over, but this has become a “living memorial”

This wall was conceived and created by a group “Led by Donkeys” – they were responsible for anti-Brexit campaign, where Leave politicians historical tweets and comments,supporting the EU, were publicised – and also the newly formed Covid-19 Bereaved Families group. It has become a focal point for those mourning the loss of loved ones. As this interesting and moving article from the Guardian says:

On the Albert Embankment, there is a wall, about a third of a mile long and shaded by plane trees, which runs alongside St Thomas’ hospital and looks out over the Thames at the palace of Westminster. Before 29 March this year, it was just a wall; now it is decorated with more than 150,000 red hearts, each one representing a life lost to Covid-19.

Every day people come to add their own hearts, or write in those already drawn by volunteers, to commemorate and remember loved ones lost to this pandemic. I am lucky, that so far, I have lost nobody; in fact I only knew one person who has died, and we don’t know for sure that it was indeed Covid that took him. My work has hardly been affected at all, and while I’ve found confinements and curfews and restrictions mildly annoying, they have not impacted my life greatly. I’m in self isolation now, because I was recently “pinged” by the T&T in France, but being double vaxxed, and having tested negative, I’m not too concerned by that.

But there are millions in the UK, and billions around the world whose lives have been devastated by this, through bereavement, through job losses, through poverty, through mental illness, through stress…. And this wall recalls “just” 150,000 who have died, in the UK alone.

In this link, you can “walk” along the wall, and hear the stories of some of those who have written on it

Everyone who painted the memorial wall, or has inscribed a name on it, belongs to a community united by a determination to remember. To walk along it is to be reminded not only of the devastation of loss but also of the extraordinary magnitude of love. “They say grief is love with nowhere to go,” says Jo Goodman, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group. “The wall is where it goes.”

First Day Back!!

I am rather late posting this, but it’s a little bit of a celebration, nonetheless: on 30th May we went back to church, in Real Life for the first time in quite some time.

All through the pandemic, like so many churches, we have been finding out how to use Zoom, how to manage breakout groups and so on. In October 2020 the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe held its convention fully online. It was very successful, but of course, the social side of the event was lost,as we were unable to share meals and coffee time together. We hope that 2021 will be face to face.

Our church, Christ Church, even went through the process of advertising, interviewing, choosing, and supporting through the move from the US a new Priest in Charge! So it was a double cause for celebration when Susan Carter was able to celebrate the Eucharist, for the first time, in the church building!

I was surprised how emotional I became after taking the bread (no wine yet, because of hygiene restrictions) of the Eucharist service. I really hadn’t realised how much I had missed this part of church life. I know that for some denominations, the “Lord’s Supper” or Communion, is not considered to be a central part of the service – Methodists, for example, focus much more on preaching, and (in my mum’s church at least) only celebrate Communion once a month, tacked on the end of the service. Some people would skip out just before that part, because they “had to put the dinner on”. In the Episcopal church, as for others, the Eucharist is the focus of the service, with everything leading up to it; the liturgy, the spoken words, point us towards the very heart of the service: Christ died for us; we remember this.

So getting back to church and being able to physically taste the bread – if not the wine! – was really, surprisingly, important.

How did you feel on your first day back somewhere important to you?

A Walk in Nature…

A bit of creativity for a quiet Sunday morning.

Skool

I’ve been lucky enough to be working in a school one day a week this academic year – I am employed by a company called Cap English, who provide qualified English teachers for private schools and for after school clubs. We can’t work in public schools because we are not accepted by the Department for Education, except in special cases. For example, about 10 years ago I was approached by the school in the village because they couldn’t find an English teacher to cover Maternity leave. I taught the Troisième class – the last year before Lycée. It was a horrible experience, and I ended up crying after every lesson, I was so terrible at it.

This is an altogether different experience, because I am working with primary aged children – which I was trained to do – instead of stroppy know-it-all teenagers. I had a good time; there was one group who were difficult, but mostly because of livliness and inability to concentrate, rather than through maliciousness. I will be teaching them again next year, so I will have to look at my strategies for dealing with them. But generally, it was an extremely positive (if exhausting!) time.

At the end of the year, one group (my favourite, if I’m honest!) made a little party for me: four of the students made “English” pancakes (I’d guess they were slightly more American, but I didn’t tell them that) and another made cup cakes

I also received lots of cards from the different classes.

I certainly don’t think I could do this every day now – fulltime teaching is beyond me! – but it has filled a gap left when I stopped teaching at summer school, after my illness. Working with young, enthusiastic children is fun! I’m looking forward to going back in September!

Walking Progress

I don’t quite know where I am with telling you about my walking progress on the blog. I think I have said that I have decided to aim for 1,000 kilometres this year, and maybe 1,000 miles next. I think that the thousand kilometres is a little bit more achievable, and less off putting. It’s just halfway throuh the year and I’m almost at 550 kilometres, so I feel able to complete.

It’s going well, in general; I do about 7 or 8 km on a long walk, and 3/4 on a shorter one, and I get out about three times a week. The weather here has been mostly damp and not very appealing, although I’d rather walk in these conditions that the 40°+ they have had in Canada and the Pacific North West of America.

My biggest problems are caused by dodgy feet, ankles and knees. The knees are arthritic, and generally hurt constantly (not debilitatingly, but unpleasantly); the ankles are weak and unreliable, likely to turn suddenly, especially when I’m tired; the feet are not right either, with a tendency to hurt after about 7 km. Basically, I’m a bit of an old crock!! But, you know, I don’t mind too much, because I am still enjoying my walks!

On Sunday, I went out for a “shortish” walk (that’s what I told myself) but I actually ended up doing over 7 km.

Here’s the view after about 2 km – I had to walk on the mainish road out of the village, but this was from the track that I took. I didn’t really know where it went, but I had a vague sense of where the village was, so I knew that if I followed the track (which became quite muddy as it was being used by logging machinery) I wouldn’t get lost.

Sure enough, I was treated to a view of the village, just where I expected it to be, and I emerged from the woods where I guessed I might. That entailed another 2 km of road walking, but as I was tired, it wasn’t a problem to be walking on firm ground!

Other walks have been taken with Friend Cathy and Marvin the dog

with Mr FD

Don’t worry, this wasn’t recently! The weather hasn’t been good, but it’s not snowed.

and by myself – some with Marvin! (who is Friend Alison’s dog)

and some, just by myself…

As I have (finally!) learned how to download pictures from my phone onto the computer, I may be able to show you more of what I have been doing!

Holiday – last day.

Both of us felt remarkably perky after yesterday’s efforts – my back was aching, (but that could have been the bed, which, while not terrible, wasn’t as comfortable as our own! By now, I was looking forward to getting back to my own bed!) but a paracetemol helped with that.

We drove to Tournemire, which was close by: this village is designated among les plus belles en France – the most lovely in France – it was pretty, but nothing to write home about!

Anywhere looks better with geraniums!!

We hadn’t eaten out for the whole holiday, so we thought we would go to the Auberge at the Col de Légal, and see what the weather was doing. From the Auberge we could see that Puy Marie was still covered in cloud, so there wouldn’t be much of a view from there.

Still, lunch time (and beer time!) beckoned…

We had a rib-sticking lunch of country ham, truffade and salad, followed by a burriol, the Cantal version of a crepe.

Le bourriol (from Occitan bourriól) is a pancake made from flour, buckwheat flour, baker’s yeast, water and milk.

Originally from Haute-Auvergne (Cantal) and Rouergue (Aveyron), this wheat pancake formed the basis of the lunch basket for the farmer or worker. It is also called “pump” in the north of Cantal (Riom-ès-Montagnes, Condat-en-Féniers), not to be confused with apple pumps, or apple croustades, made in the same region. Softer than the classic pancake, it keeps well and can be filled with a savory or sweet filling. Its taste, finer, lets more express itself the slightly sour flavor of buckwheat.
For a very long time, bourriol was consumed in Auvergne instead of bread. Today it is considered more of a pancake and is eaten regularly.

I had confiture de myrtille in mine – bilberry jam – and I think Mr FD had Nutella!

The Auberge terrace – we were the only ones there, apart from a cyclist who called in for a beer. He and Mr FD compared notes about “mountains around here that I have cycled up”. The cyclist won.

In the afternoon, we went to a traditional Burron to buy cheese to take home, and called in at the Brasserie for some beer to take home. We then headed back to the gite to read and relax a little. A snacky tea, as we’d eaten so well at lunch time, and then another early night.

We were back at home by lunchtime the following day!

My walking totals were:

Day 1: 8 km; Day 2: 5.6; Day 3: 7.2; Day 4: 16.4; Day 5: 3 = 40.2 km!!!!