Noël

Christmas
So our first ex-pat French Christmas was largely an exercise in attempting to recreate a proper English Christmas, so I guess that means we are homesick and 'miss everyone' - bah! We have a proper Christmas tree (our second as the first dropped all of its needles in three days) and everyone rebelled at my highly artistic idea of a replacement of 'painting a stick white'. :D Presents were opened on Christmas Eve, as per French tradition, and we went next door for Christmas dinner (cooked by Bev) of proper English fayre. Jim & Monique very kindly invited elderley neighbour Paulette for dinner too but I failed to understand more than one word in four of what she was rattling on about, but she seemed quite happy nonetheless.
I made mince pies, a la Jamie Oliver, tres bon and got to do an emergency mission to the English Shop at Saintes for mincemeat and sherry. As it was nice I got to go by motorbike, pretty good for Christmas Eve.

Births & deaths
Boubou, the Jack Russell, gave birth to puppies on the 14th. Harry was witness to the first birth and came back shrieking and waving his arms about, so we were lucky to be on the scene for all seven births. Unfortunately two of the weedy looking ones have since died, one of them holding out for nealy two weeks. So that's sad, yet lovely and educational if you want to look at it that way. The remaining puppies are very healthy, four boys and a girl - the owner of the stud dog gets first dibs on the pick of the puppies and Jim hopes to keep one, so that's three that will be sold I s'pose. Over the weekend also saw the demise of Frofrou, the silky bantam, to a fox we think and Dotty, the pintade (guinea fowl), throat torn out by a weasel (!). Bonne chance mes amis. All go down on the farm! We are now avian-less - maybe I should go to market and buy myself a duck? I counted the horses and donkey this morning, just in case ....

Househunting
We viewed the most fab house today at La Brousse; fantastic position for us as it's less than ten Ks from where the boys are at school and close to decent roads for trips up to La Rochelle and over to where the folks are at La Tremblade. Also it's habitable and has plenty of scope for improvement & enlargement into the numerous outbuildings. Fingers crossed that the pound/euro rate doesn't drop any further then or it'll start to drop out of our price range. Pictures below, though they don't really do the place justice.

Website
Just in case any of you fancy popping over to see us when it gets warmer, here's a link to a website I put together to advertise Jim & Monique's business so you can get an idea of what this place is like.

Football
The boys haven't played competitive football for a good month now but they had their footy squad photo taken. Harry 1st boy on the left, back row; Alfie 2nd boy from right, front row.