… night that was!

I went to bed early and fell asleep after just about 10 minutes of a film that I’ve tried to watch on several occasions. But it didn’t do me much good because I was awake again at about 01:30, really uncomfortably, and I couldn’t go back to sleep again.

Not only that, there was some kind of incident early in the morning. I thought at first that the cat had caught a seagull or something, but apparently the landlady’s dog had had a fit – and I bet that it was a tight one too.

Mind you, I must have gone to sleep at some time or other during the night because I had been on my travels. I was with Roxanne and Laurence, trying to negotiate Roxanne’s entry into a different school. But the negotiations were extremely complex and I discovered that you had to pay for the lessons – including the basic ones like English (which surprised me – by the way, it was English as a first language too). In the end I turned to Laurence and suggested that Roxanne stay at home and Laurence teach her – after all, Laurence is a qualified teacher (which she wasn’t, but never mind).
We ended up being on a coach going down a steep hill – I wasn’t driving but the man who was driving it was having a few difficulties. trying to negotiate his way between a couple of parked lorries he ripped the right-hand side mirror out of its housing. No amount of fiddling about could get it to go back into position.

After breakfast I had a shower and a good clean-up, tidied up my room, packed up everything and then spent an hour or so catching up with some stuff on the internet. Once I’d finished organising myself I got my motor running and headed out on the highway.

There’s no electricity in my new place until Friday morning and so Liz and Terry had told me that if I didn’t mind sleeping in the middle of a building site, I could stay at their new place for a few nights. Of course, it’s not where you are and what you are doing, it’s who you are with that counts and so I headed off through the rainstorm (the first real rain that we have had since I’ve been up here) to Roncey.

Liz had cooked a gorgeous soup for lunch, and then I had a little surprise. Liz and Terry had bought two really nice sofas for the living room at their house in the Auvergne but there wasn’t room for both of them in the living room in the place that they have just bought. And so in thanks for a service that I had rendered to them a few months ago, we heaved the redundant sofa into the back of Caliburn and drove off to Granville.

Once we had dropped off the sofa, we went for a walk around the area where my new place is. It’s an old town full of beautiful stone buildings, narrow alleyways and city walls. And we found a café that looked like something out of the 19th Century, with live music too.

Back through the rainstorm and the roadworks for another one of Liz’s special meals followed by home-made vegan cake and a nice wood fire. Here I can sit and watch the rain falling outside while I am in the warmth.

And I have some furniture now. I’ve slept on that sofa before and I’ll be sleeping on it again until I can organise myself a bed. It’s only a sofa, but it’s a start.

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