Sacré Bleu – it’s off to work we go

But first…..

Thank you to so many friends from all over the world who left such wonderful messages regarding the last post. It is humbling and touching. I still don’t quite know why we are doing this blog, perhaps more so to document if our experiment of “doing it differently” can work but such a flurry of support and encouragement really touched us, especially when we are all feeling a little “out of touch”.

Perhaps it was with this freshly instilled confidence and enthusiasm that we tackled the St Antonin market last weekend then. Markets are permissible during French lockdown and St Antonin is too pretty to turn down the chance to spend an hour or so out of the house.

A little giddy with excitement and freedom, we wandered up the back streets towards the market for the first time, to be met by a chap selling nougat on the first stall we came to. There was a buzz of trade that I’d not seen for while, of people allowed to go about working, selling their produce, catching up with people in the town centre and getting fresh vegetables. We were quickly offered a piece of nougat to try, and naturally, were quizzed about why we had not been seen around before. Explaining in French, confidently telling the story of having recently moved here from Hong Kong but that I was well and truly “French, bien sur” and that Nicola, “ma femme, Ecossaise” and I were living not too far away and huge fans of nougat! Feeling obliged to buy some to keep his business going and the whole global economy afloat, I asked him for some to take home. He waved the price tag in my direction and I nodded, in French of course, that he was fine to cut me a slice about the size of a normal bit of cheese…….

Committed, still enjoying the small talk, wallet open in my hand and a smile that said “we’re fresh off the boat’, he threw the slab on the scales and landed me with a 48 Euro bill. 48 Euros. 500 HKD. 44GBP……2000 Thai Baht (this conversion hurts the most as it would get you the most incredible ocean view room for the night on a beach in Thailand). For nougat. For half of the filling of a Double Decker Bar. For 50% of a Topic without the chocolate!! (NB – photo of the market is from pre-covid!)

I felt Nicola’s eyes burning a hole in my cheek, but I couldn’t make contact. I was far too British to ask the salesman if he was taking the p*ss?, just as any proud Frenchman would have done after such robbery and far too proud to admit to Nicola that my math skills had not converted the price of the gram quickly enough into my slice. After all, who on Earth has ever spent 50 Euros on nougat?! Well, for the record….me. 

Not wanting to show any loss of face as I’d learnt from my time in Hong Kong, we buoyantly continued round the market to explore, whilst I tried unsuccessfully to convince Nicola that I hadn’t just been conned in my own country and that any nougat connoisseur would have paid just that for such a delight.

The next part, however, is where I compounded my stupidity to epic proportions. Nicola spotted a Cantonese food stall in the corner and in my head, I mic dropped “I’ve got this” quicker than you could say fai di la to a HK taxi driver. Standing in the queue, overly excited at being out of the cabin, in a market and high on fresh air, I tried to save my first foray into French market stalls by ordering in Cantonese to remind me, and also the Toulousain loose-head serving me, of what “home” was like.

“Jo San ‘ah. Leung go xian bing m’goi”  –

It was at that very moment that I figured out what I should have said to the nougat salesman. In fact, it probably didn’t really even need saying. The look spoke 1000 words.

My back-peddling and embarrassed mumbling got him to reveal that he had actually spent time in Shenzhen and if I were to have had a shout of any local lingo, Putonghua would have been my best shot.

Sheepishly, I let Nicola take over the talking from there and decided that I still had a lot to learn.

Anyway. It’s off to work we go…….

Our working week has taken the most brilliant turn this week after Nick and Pippa kindly let us have access to another of their gites on le Mas Coutillard (www.lecoutillard.com) for us to use as an office.

After le confinement of 4 weeks and days typically spent in the cabin where we work, eat, sleep and play, it has done us a huge amount of good to start a routine where we have to “leave” for work again. I haven’t done it for over 12 months and the feeling of leaving the cabin at 8am to be at my desk for 8.15am (if I’ve gone the long way round) has been so refreshing, especially as I have now mastered the commute. I turn left at the rock that looks like a wild boar at night, hop over the twigs by the ancient stones and mind that I don’t slip on the innocuous pile of wet leaves by the big oak tree, just after The Great Wall. There have been times where we’ve worked together but what it has allowed us to do is have two very different spaces. Head space as much as physical space where we can look forward to engaging each other as a couple again in the evenings with a very clear cut off from what is work-time and us-time.

Even more exiting is that I’m really looking forward to the weekend, not because I’m not loving the work that I’m doing for YourBoard (www.yourboard.co) but because it now has a very different feel to it and our routines have started to take a shape more akin to our pre-Covid lives. I’m also looking forward to spending 2 days at home with Nicola and watching France v England in the rugby. So I suppose with the establishment of routines, and the excitement of planning a week around work, meals, loved ones and sport, we begin to start feeling like things are as they should be, as they were. And that creates a strange feeling…….a familiar one. A different one given our environment, but one that feels very much like it’s starting to feel a lot like home!! And that’s a great feeling……..

Anyone fancy a piece of nougat?