Dear Diary

Dear Diary

I feel I need to make a new posting on the blog but there is not a lot that has happened over the past three weeks. The bees that buzz around in my bonnet from time to time have stayed quiet and most aspects of my life here have experienced little change.

Perhaps the most significant event was that my PC went down with an untraceable bug. The local fixer '(and he's good) couldn't identify it and ended up stripping the machine of software and rebuilding it from scratch. Unfortunately he's a man of these parts and so doesn't answer his phone or respond to messages left so it took me a week to track him down. He has just acquired an office and is presumably expanding his business, or hoping to, but the lack of communication doesn't augur well for him. The bug deprived me of Internet access for nearly two weeks and made me realise how much of a drug it has become in my life; I didn't get the shakes or hot flushes but I was definitely twitchy.

I mentioned in a recent posting that the village entertainments' committee was in a mess. It has subsequently been found that, while doing very little in terms of organising entertainment, they managed to spend some money for which they can't account. The result has been a clear out of the whole committee; a new one is being assembled.

Daniel came round to eat one evening and I decided, without any great expectation, to see if he could give me any guidance on the use of prepositions in French. The use of prepositions seems to be almost arbitrary in all languages I am familiar with. For instance, the French say “il est difficile de faire quelque chose” but “quelque chose est difficile à faire”; they also “décident de faire quelque chose” but “se décident à faire quelque chose”. I challenged Daniel to explain this and also pointed out that my French teacher at school had claimed that the French language was a masterpiece of logic. Daniel disclaimed this latter point and could offer no explanation for the former, except to suggest that the answer probably lay somewhere in the upper branches of some Chomsky grammatical trees. I don't think I shall be going there to look.

With luck the winter is now over. We've had two days of snow, about a fortnight apart, with the snow staying around for about a week afterwards, accompanied by some really cold days but interspersed with very warm ones. We're now back with the warm ones and, if the weather runs true to form, that's the winter done and dusted. The earlier warm days stirred me to do some gardening: clearing up, pruning the vines and spreading some general fertiliser. The ground has remained too hard however to do much more. A week of warm days should do the trick and then I should be able to do the rest of the work needed.

I had been doing some search engine optimisation work on my website, which will continue. However, the official village website is now up and running and seems to be almost purely administrative, which gives me a clearer idea of how I can develop mine. I shall exclude administrative material and probably add a section on writing (the Académie Mollanaise?) and put more effort into the accommodation section. I want it to appeal to villagers as well as future visitors.

Apology
In my last post I aid that Jim Sluszny was Polish but Jim has corrected me.  His parents were Polish but he was born in Belgium before going to England and is thus Belgian.  Sorry about that mistake