Au Revoir. The Final Chapter.

Madamoiselle d'Armentieres (Parlez vous?)

Readers who have been with me for EVER may recall that I am (was) part owner of an ancient (1960s) Citroën 2CV from the 425 cc era, once a twinning gift from the French town of La Chapelle d'Armentieres, to the North Kent town of Birchington. This twinning happened in 1989 with Birchington giving a red phone-box to La Chapelle while La Chapelle gave 'us' a non-runner 2CV OK for photo-shoots but not much else.

David Austen rose (sorry, we can not recall the name)

This blog took up the story after our 2CV club (The Kentish Hoppers) got involved in a 4-man restoration (during 2007/8) of this car to get it road worthy so that it could be used in the 20th Anniversary (of the twinning) Carnival to be held at La Chapelle in 2009. This we did and we had a great weekend which included us being spoiled like celebrities and driving our car (and 2 other 2CVs) at the front of the carnival parade. Happy days. We four lads owned a quarter of the car each. It would have been worth about £3100.

Sometimes it is not mice and shrews the cats bring in. This is
a dragon fly (Brown Hawker).

With the big weekend over, 2 of the lads wanted out of the project, so Andy B and I bought out their quarters and now owned half the car each. I saw very little of the car but kept my 'end' up by paying half of any garaging, maintenance, MOTs, tax etc). When I moved to Ireland in 2011 I decided to pull out too, but as Andy did not have the spare cash at that stage, we decided I would slowly withdraw by not paying my share of the costs, and Andy would calculate how much this had eaten into my half. 6 years later I am down to about £600's worth of the car owned. In a blog post at the time, I called it the "Long Goodbye".

European lime.

This week, I got a text from Andy and one of the other original four (Ian C) asking if Ian might buy back in by reimbursing me for my cut. Although I will be sad to 'lose' my only remaining bit of 'real' 2CV (I have a gazillion models, toys and dead/used 'souvenir' parts) this seems like a sensible move and will help to keep Madamoiselle where all old 2CVs should really be - in use, on the road, getting regularly driven, not stashed in a dusty lock-up under a bed sheet. So, there you have it. I will receive a cheque shortly and will then join the ranks of 'former 2CV owners'. Good luck Ian and Andy. Cherish and enjoy that Lady as much as I did. Au revoir, Madamoiselle d'Armentieres. Bon chance. [wipes away a tear]

Storm Hector barges through. 

Meanwhile, back in Roscommon we were enjoying, as you know, that lovely warm spell and a bit unimpressed by the rattly but dry thunderstorms which were letting us know that things were about to change. Nobody was quite ready for the announcement by Met Éireann of a winter-style "named" storm charging up the Atlantic. This was, we found out, Storm Hector and he came with the usual Status-Orange weather warnings for winds gusting to 110 kph. Put all those lumps of rock back on the beehives, lads, and anything that might go airborne. Close the poly-tunnel. Batten down the hatches.

The 'Chinaman's Hat' part of a jackdaw pot. Not worth
putting that bit back up, then?

That evening I had to collect The Woman of the House from the train station, back from her stint of house-sitting for Steak Lady, so she was here to enjoy it all too. We spent that night as scared as normal listening to the wind raging round the house in the dark (I can never sleep properly through one of these) and worrying that trees would be blown down and chicken house roofs would go airborne leaving the poultry open to the weather.

A few branches blown down from that
gate-side larch was the worst damage.

In the event we got off lightly. The worst damage was a big branch blown down from that larch that suffered in the last blow (Storm Eleanor?). There were myriad smaller bits of tree strewn everywhere. The metal cone 'Chinaman's Hat' bit of our range-chimney jackdaw pot was sent flying but when I found it, it was so rusty and broken that it is not worth putting back. We'll just go with the 'cage' bit and the fire heat to deter the jackdaws. It is quite new, so I was a bit surprised by the appalling state of the thing. They are presumably not designed for in-use chimneys, which seems a bit lame.

Making the best of foxgloves broken off by
the storm winds

Oh, and we had no power. I had to phone the fault in (they were not 'yet' aware of it) and they managed to get us back on at about half past 2, just in time for Elizabeth getting home from an exam as part of her Horticulture training course. No problem there either - we have the gas hobs on which to boil saucepans of water for tea/coffee and on which to cook if power is still off at supper time.

Dublin Bay rose flowers knocked off by 'naughty' Hector.

The only other damage was the knocking down of some tall flowers (mainly fox gloves and aquilegia) and the knocking off of a lot of the open flowers on our lovely red, 'Dublin Bay' rose. That was as if Hector was just a naughty boy with a stick bashing all the flowers off out of spite. Never mind. The rose will flower again. The foxgloves may not.

The broken branches get tossed in to the sheep for browse. 

It is all over now, of course. The wind has dropped to a light breeze, the clouds have cleared (we did not get much rain off this one, either) and the sun has come out. Tomorrow promises a nice day so we can get out in the garden again and clear up all the debris.

Very little else going on here, so I will finish up at this point. Good luck to niece J-M who is currently sweating through her 'Leaving Cert' school exams (think 'A' levels for the Brits). Knock 'em dead J-M!

Of Projects Past

Sausage pies - sausage meat from our pigs and suet crust
from our lamb suet. 

A bit of our Kent life came back to greet us today when friends Mark and Cathy dropped by on a whistle stop tour of the Republic seeking out cousins and old family roots in Bray, Ballinagare and Tallow (Co.Waterford - so far south you can only go further south by hopping into Co. Cork). These guys are real friends from my 'Cambria' days, the time spent as an active volunteer on the famous Thames Sailing Barge while she was being restored in Faversham.

More baking for the visit. We like to lay out a good 'spread'.

My recent life seems to have been cobbled together as a series of long projects and readers who have been with me for 'ever' will recall the rebuild on the 1961 Citroën 2CV car which had been a twin-towns gift from the French town of La Chapelle d'Armentieres to the Kent town of Birchington (see posts around May 19th 2009). This was followed by my involvement in the Cambria project (posts such as 21 June 2008 and Oct 31 2007). This was all followed, of course, by the biggest project of all, our move here, restoration of the house (Dec 2011 to May 2012) and then creation of the small holding.

Tea Brack. Moist and delicious

Back in the 2CV days I knew little of Thames barges except that there was an old boat yard in my town (Faversham), through which I walked my dogs and where they seemed to be always doing up these "big old boats" - the yard was always strewn with equipment, ropes, folded red-ochre sails and an old crane, and echoed with banging and hammering, the scream of power-planes and drills and the bangs of 'maul' hammers. Then my aul' Mum came to visit and came round with me on the walk. She stopped dead as we turned the corner onto Standard Quay and whooped with delight "Thames BARGES!" Growing up in Bromley by Bow (London) in the 30s and 40s she had seen these lovely craft moving up and down the London River in trade (they were still trading up to the 60's as they could move 170+ tonnes of cargo about with a crew of just 2 men which kept them economic until well into the age of steam, though they stopped making new ones in the 30s).

There will be 'tay' - Mark and Cathy getting ready to tuck in.

My Mum's enthusiasm piqued my own interest in them and I started reading and researching the type. By coincidence the group looking after the decrepit rotting hulk of Cambria had just secured a £900,000 Lottery grant to completely rebuild her in Faversham led by project manager Will Collard and Master Shipwright Tim Goldsack but seeking volunteers to help with unskilled stuff and showing the public round. I had read about it in the local paper and decided to volunteer my services but did not know how, so I kept walking the dogs and knew that eventually I would see someone.

Bearing gifts including these US Deep-South food packets and
rigging parts - see main story.

Step forward, then, Mark, who visited us today. He was the first man I saw, tiptoe-ing through the boatyard junk in a big yellow hi-viz coat. He'd been involved in Cambria for 15 years already by then, when they had no money and used to try to keep out the weather of the beloved wreck using bits of old plank, chains, tarp and concrete. "Excuse Me!" (I might have said) "Are you to do with this barge and how can I get involved?" The rest is history, covered fairly well in this blog - I was put to work in a gang of superb volunteers (including Cathy), a very happy and productive, enthusiastic group working regularly right through to launch day and beyond. I even kept running the website and the Cambria blog on moving to Ireland, right up to this year.

All good things must end, though, and the distance and lack of real contact meant it became harder and harder to keep the website fresh and to keep track of new stories and the website has realistically been superceded by the involvement of the still hands-on, closer members of the team who mainly use Facebook to publish stories and pics of their adventures. Good luck to them, then and I have parked up the old blog that was so much part of the actual restoration process (visit http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/ and hover cursor over the 'News' word in the black bar, then click on either 'blog' or 'blog archive'. The restoration took 3 years or so between 2007 and 2010)

So, Mark and Cathy came and enjoyed a bit of a cold buffet. We like to put on a good spread - Liz says she likes the table to say words like 'plenty' and 'ample', though not actually 'groaning'! They also had the farm tour. They are readers of the blog and they both said they were delighted to see the place for real that they had only ever seen in pics. Mark's camera hit over-drive at one stage shooting pics of Towser at a top window, then geese on the lawn and Rambo the ram coming up to the field gate to say 'Hello'. They came bearing gifts too - they had offered as they were coming over from Kent, to bring anything we might need so, among the generous bounty were some Zatarain's (US Deep South) food mixes which we used to enjoy buying from the excellent world-food/deli in Faversham, 'Macknades' (but can't buy over here). Also some yacht-rigging gear which I need to haul the bee swarm lure box into my tree next year; living by the Kent coast they have much better access to yachting chandlers type shops than we do in Roscommon! Thanks very much for all this 'stuff' Mark and Cathy. Safe journey back to your hotel tonight and then on back to the UK tomorrow. We have high pressure weather just now and not a breath of wind, so you should at least get calm seas for your crossing.

Au Revoir, Mademoiselle?

The shell back on the chassis. Andy B on left, me seated.

Readers who have been with me for donkeys years may recall that back in the winter of 2007/8, I was one of 4 members of our 'local group' of the Citroën Club of GB who got involved in the complete nut and bolt rebuild* of an ancient, non-running 1961 2CV car. The car was found by the club on one of our camping convoy events which took in Dover Transport Museum and turned out to have been a twinning gift from the newly twinned town of La Chapelle d'Armentieres in Northern France, to their new twin, Birchington in Kent in 1989. It was all sign-written with heraldic crests from each town and the regions. Birchington gave them a red phone box, being suitably British and 'iconic' which has stood ever since, outside the town hall (Mairie).

'Rolling Chassis' in need of lots of work.

The car, in 1989, had been roughly assembled to look the part for photo shoots but below the surface the engine was dead, brakes not connected up and so on, so the car sat on a local garage forecourt for a few years but was then gifted to the museum to look after. Dover Transport Museum, though, is more interested in commercial stuff - old lorries, vans, trains etc, so as they filled up with stuff the car was relegated to a slot out on the grass in the rain, which is where we found it and took pity, so we made them an offer.

We called her Mademoiselle from Armentieres (like the WW1 song) just because the "Parlez Vous" song is the only thing most school boys know about La Chapelle d'Armentieres! We stripped that car down completely over the winter of 2007/8 and rebuilt it. I was writing this blog by then but was writing then as if from the viewpoint of Deefer (then a small pup) so some posts about the car appeared such as

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2008/02/madamoiselle.html

I wrote up the car rebuild with the usual millions of pictures on the National 2CV Club website and was quite proud of the work, but unfortunately the club fell out with their internet service provider and various crashes of the site made them move onto a completely new site, abandoning the old forum archives and blogs and I lost the lot. I tried any number of the former 'webmeisters' but could get no joy, so that good record of our mechanicking is gone, not even on the internet anywhere, because the server was shut down and cleaned up ready for the next customer. Hey ho. This blog is on blogger.com which seems to be made of sterner stuff.

Well we completed the car and all the time had been in contact with the town of La Chapelle who were coming up to the 20th Anniversary of the twinning and were going to do a massive celebration and carnival to mark the event (a 'do' that French towns seem to love more so than either UK towns or the Irish). They insisted that we bring the car; we did and got treated like celebrities for the weekend with the car on show by the Mairie and then one of 3 2CVs leading the Big Parade. It was a real treat. The car has been back several times on the anniversaries since, once with us but since then with our good friend Andy B, who was really the 'project manager' on the build.

Soon after the 2009 trip, 2 of the gang-of-four expressed a wish to pull out and use their money on other 2CV projects, so, with the car then worth about £2400, Andy and I chopped in £600 to each of them and from then on we have owned the car between the two of us (and it is now worth about £3100, we think). Well, now having moved to Ireland, I do not get a chance to drive the car or even see it and sit in the seats, so I have been wondering whether Andy might feel like 'buying' me out too - we are both still splitting the cost of housing it in the dry lock-up, insurance, MOT and repairs (it is exempt from tax). It is only actually about £100 a year total each. We have now done a deal where I stop paying my share and just slowly fade from view over how ever long it takes a rough ton a year to burn up my half of the value. It could be the longest 'au revoir' in history. I will enjoy, meantime, knowing "that there's a corner of a foreign 2CV that is for (almost) ever (mine)" (apologies to Rupert Brooke)

Meanwhile, we bloggers, like any other internet users are host to the usual motley crew of scammers and hackers, spammers and the like. Many of these arrive as fake attempts to 'comment' on your blog posts and most of us have the comment function set to make sure we get to see the comments before they go up onto the site. Blogger.com is very good at protecting you and parks them if various conditions are met and, in particular in my case, if they come from that famous spammer, (Mr) Anonymous. I have been amused recently by a pattern forming among these as if they may have all read the same guide on how to pull the wool over the eyes of the blogger - compliment him or her on the blog but be very general and non specific about content (do not mention the subject matter of the post!) and then suggest that he/she come and look at yours which is on this link here, guv. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately two other factors they have in common are very bad English (generally looking like badly translated English) and then bizarre names on the links - sites selling medical gear, sites offering to improve your sales on Amazon.com and even sites selling labrador puppies!

I give you the following examples (but with the links, obviously, severed as I do not want you getting into inadvertent spam-hell)

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and finally

"Advanced level course, you get to study joining emergency treatment, fitting utilization of Automated External Defibrillator (AED) when heart failure strikes at the ictimized individual and considerably more.But you can’t be so sure that there will be no such incident happen in your life. The AED pads that are applied to the victim's chest, while CPR is in progress, can also assess and determine the victim's heart (cardiac) rhythm"

* Not strictly true - we swapped in a complete spare engine and gearbox rather than strip that right down. 425 cc of silky smooth oozing power!

"Gribbly Bits"

Chinese belly pork (Johnny Diamond)

Gribbly Bits. That is our in-family jokey name for any non-standard bits of the pig, cheap cuts, offal, ears, tails, trotters and trimmings. That all started with a chum of ours named Andy while we were on a 2CV convoy across Northern France, off to show off our 1961 reg, fully restored car at La Chapelle d'Armentieres. There is almost certainly a post on this if you go back far enough

(try http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2011/05/three-2cvs-in-big-parade.html)

Andy had brought along his Hungarian then-fiancée who's spoken English, I should add, was probably better than ours. We'd stopped in a restaurant along the way and she (who went under the superb name of Zsa zsa) is one of those people who take huge amounts of time choosing off a menu; to the point where waiters give up and promise to come back later having 'given you a bit more time to choose'. Liz and I have no such problems and had spotted and quickly ordered a chicken gizzard salad. This is a firm favourite here but would definitely be in most peoples' list of 'gribbly bits'. We had a good laugh 'teaching' Zsa zsa that 'gribbly bits' was a genuine English expression and was widely accepted by French waiters as 'les pièces gribloises'. No, don't worry, we weren't being mean, we were kidding enough that she was definitely unsure and we let her off the hook before she could embarrass herself!

Trick or Treaters. Liz has bobbed down to
kiddy-height to offer the sweets so we can only see the
top of her head., 

You can use every part of the pig, so they say, except its squeal. We have been playing around with some of the gribbly bits. You'll know I made the 'head cheese' (brawn) a week or so back, and the dogs got the ears roasted. We have the hearts and livers, of course. We did not get the tails or trotters back this time but that was because we have trotters still in the freezer from last year, when we bought half a carcass of Gloucester Old Spots cross. Liz had boiled up the trotters, following a recipe in our Phil Vickery and Simon Boddy book ('Pork') but had not followed up with the oven-roast/glaze half. The trotters had been portioned up and frozen. Well, now all inspired by our own pigs, Liz completed the job and  rescued them from the 'archive'; glooping them up well with a whizzed up mix of mango chutney (ours), tomato purée, cider vinegar, red chilli, garlic and olive oil and then roasting, uncovered, for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven.

Under this 'abuse' the trotters pretty much fall apart and flex into impossible shapes as the tendons contract, so it is compulsory to pick them up in your sticky fingers and get all Medieval on their glutinous, sticky, sweet, delicious gribbliness. If you, the reader, are finding this a bit too gribbly, then remember that this is just the skin, tiny muscles and cartilege of the lower calf, wrist or heel joint and the feet, cooked to melt-in-the-mouth tenderness. The actual bones and the hoof 'toe-nails' are left for the delighted dogs to deal with. The mango chutney glaze is definitely a success; we will be claiming our trotters back from now on. We have some more half-done in the freezer to be going on with. No pics of the finished product, I'm afraid, not for any reason. I just didn't take any.

We've also been exploring some Chinese style recipes for the pork bellies. Here, Liz followed a recipe from our other excellent pork book, Johnny Mountain's "Cooking with a Passion for Pig", which involves, like the trotters, 2 cooking stages, a 6 hour gentle boil in stock, followed by a fry-then-roast. We make one adaptation from the Mountain recipe, in that we use a family favourite stock known as "Blackspring's Nan's pork hock stock". Blackspring was the pen name of one of Liz's internet buddies, and his Chinese Nan used to do the hocks this way; the stock was the perfect choice for the belly-boil. It's on

http://gapyearforeating.blogspot.ie/2009/10/blacksprings-nans-pork-hock.html

...should you want to follow that one up, but it's basically a goodly mix of ginger, chili bean sauce, brown sugar, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, star anise and spring onions plus, if you fancy, rice wine and 5-spice powder. After the boil you cool the meat, ideally overnight (you will have spotted that this dish can therefore be pretty much pre-prepared the day before), then carefully cut into portion 'blocks', which if you're as posh as Mr Diamond you can present rather nattily on a bed of rice etc (as per the photo at the top of this post). Very yummy and more-ish. Neither of us stopped at just the one 'portion block'.

Nice meaty bellies wait for their curing mix.

Other than that, in the pork dept, Liz has started some dry-curing, bellies for bacon rashers and a couple of boned-out leg joints to have a go at air dried hams. We are looking to rig up a cold smoker too, so at least one of these may get smoked. There are some exciting recipes for this kind of thing in both books and there is a thriving group on Facebook called "Sausage Debauchery" where dozens of curers all around the world are creating ham, salami and no end of types of cured sausages. We will be in good company, but I won't go into any detail here; Liz is covering all that on her blog.

By tonight, then, we were feeling a bit like we might have had enough forms of pork for the moment, so we re-visited the old faithful supply of Hubbard chicken parts which is still going strong in the freezer. Just breast meat (skin on), roasted nice and simply and served with broad beans and cous-cous. Guaranteed no "pièces gribloises".

Sump Oil and Waffles

2 more silly stories from the Hoppers 2011 camp. When Mum and Dad last deserted us to head for La Chapelle d'Armentieres one of the missions they go on is to a deli on the road to Belgium called Wez Macquart (or something sim'lar). This is an olde deli which goes in for horse brasses, stuffer wildboar heads on the wall, agricultural impliments hanging up and , in one corner, an old fashioned waffle iron which intrigued the shoppers.

Comprising of 2 irons with stippled faces which squash together in the heat of a fire, squishing the waffle mixture out into a circular, stipple-surfaced biscuit. The deli was selling these by the packet, but we were guessing that they were now made by some new, pristine, stainless steel industrial process in a big biscuit factory, rather than by some buxom farm wench squishing them individually in her tongs. Sorry. Dad made me put that bit in.

Later in the weekend, Andy (co-owner of the Mademoiselle car) found such a device in a huge flea market at only 3 Euros, so just had to have them. Our hostess, Anne was very amused at the thought of Dad and Andy trying to coax an edible biscuit out of this rusty relic. Not to be outdone, Andy brought them back to his workshop and wire-brushed them to within an inch of their lives and googled Belgian waffle mix recipes (under their English and their Walloon names).

At the camp communal barbeque, after everyone had done their meat and main courses, we gave them a try, the irons hot on their supporting ring dropped onto the coals, the dough squished out flat between the irons, the butter bubbling out and melting and evapourating from the backs of the irons. The biscuits were delicious, like a dense version of ice cream wafers, all sweet from the cane sugar and slightly cinnamon-ish.

And then there was me showing my usual keen-ness to dive under 2CVs to get out of the sun and coming out with a slick of sump oil all down my back. 2CVs are just the right height and I can't resist. Improvement on horse poo, I guess.

Deefs

Lost in France

Yesterday we saw the small convoy of 3 cars reach Calais passport control following an incident free run north through the French countryside and you, the reader, maybe wondering what was the drama which I have so far avoided describing. Well, tonight I will let you all off the hook and tell all. The Judge has overturned the Super Injunction.

Dad was at the front of the queue coming into the port, with Mum passing the 2 2CVs as the guys stopped to retrieve passports and tickets from car boots and jacket pockets, but then dropping back to take up her position bringing up the rear. The three drivers each chose a different queue at passport control and pretty much trundled through abreast, with Dad's central queue possibly moving slightly faster. Relieved to have come back up through France in such old cars successfully, the boys are focussed on getting home, returning the Mmle car to its dry-store lock up.

Passports checked (twice) Dad trundles his car the few yards to check-in, noticing both Andy and then Mum following him across the gap a few moments later. Here Dad's middle queue is definitely moving faster and he notes both Mum and Andy swapping out of their lanes behind him to choose faster moving queues. Andy is 2 cars in front of Mum. Dad gets his boarding card - a small hooked piece of paper to hang over the rear view mirror reading X31, relaxes and heads off to find the lane number mentally ticking the lower-number lanes off as he drives forward.

He is expecting to happen exactly what always happens both outbound and inbound; all three cars end up in the lanes waiting 2 hours for the ferry to start boarding; all the humans get out, wander about, chat, find a coffee etc. Instead he sees that lane 31 is empty and the only vehicle in any lane is a white van in about 36. Ah well, he thinks - it is 2 hours till the ferry leaves. But no! Man-in-hi-viz-jacket waves an arm and says in heavily French-accented English "Straight on board - up the steep ramp to the upper deck, s'il vous plait"

Dad complies, happy to have passed one more milestone - "safely aboard ferry", he gets out of the car on the vehicle deck and is immediately approached by 2 well dressed French speaking business-men (Algerian?) who admire the 2CV, start talking about how much they love them and telling him about a Mehari (plastic bodied desert/beach variant of the 2CV) one of them owns. Dad tells them to wait a few minutes and an even older 2CV will come down the ramp, namely Mmle. Andy duly arrives a few minutes later smiling triumphantly and hugging Dad in a "we made it!" gesture.

Then the phone rings. Dad's (work) phone has not worked all the time they've been in France for calling out or sending texts but can receive both. "Where are you?" says a confused Mum. "On the ferry", say the boys. It seems that the vital 2 car difference between Mum and Andy on the check-in queue had been the point at which the kiosks stopped checking in cars for the earlier 18:40 ferry, and switched to the real booked 20:30 boat. Mum had got a boarding card saying T61 and was way over to the left of Dad's lane, first car sitting waiting the 2 hours while the queues built up and Dad and Andy's boat cast off and steamed away over the horizon.

Mum was understandably a bit dis-chuffed about this and about being 'abandoned', lost in France and there was, what I believe is called a 'frank and open discussion in which some robust views were aired'. Ahem. Up on deck, watching Calais become ever smaller behind the ferry, Dad borrowed Andy's phone to send another apologetic text and got one back about "the small figure raising a finger in the air is me!"

Long story short, the boys got home via depositing Mmle back in the lock up, about 20:30 UK time, by which time Mum would have been sailing an hour, and she returned safely about 22:00 with a few more choice words about driving like the Virgin Mary. Dad has had to eat plenty of humble pie and has had to buy fizz, chocolates, flowers and an apologetic card in order to restore things to normality. I suspect he may never drive through a passport control or a check-in in front of Mum ever again.

Ooops

Deefs

Three 2CVs in the Big Parade

The third and final day in the gang's madcap adventure in Northern France in which the main event is the Carnival Parade up the main street of La Chapelle d'Armentieres. Prior to that though are many and various festivities around the arrival of a busload of visitors from the twin-town of Birchington.

There is a flower market all around the Mairie (Town Hall), a brass band plays and marches about, pigeons are released from wicker cages and the town's Carnival Queens and court (Les Damoiselles) and Mayor do presentations and handing over of ceremonial keys to the town from last year's court to this years. Dad, Andy and another 2CV-ist (Geoff) show their cars again on the pavement opposite the Mairie and at one stage receive a parking contravention ticket put under the windscreen by a joking Mayor, Bernard Coisne who assures us in heavily accented English "They are not real". Just as well - the fines marked are up to 2500 Euros!

Everyone adjourns to the Sports Centre for a lunch and aperitifs reception to meet the Birchington lot (who the gang know anyway from 2 years ago's 'home' and 'away' visits.

Then the cars must be fired up and driven down to the top end of the high street to meet the assembling carnival parade, which the 2CV's are to lead. Dad's car and the old 1961 girl collect various female locals, their Hostess for the weekend and other 'dignitaries' and family to fill the back and passenger seats - everyone is charmed by the iconic car and wants a ride in the Carnival. All the usual carnival lunacy ensues - noise, marching, line-dancing, baton twirling, horns blaring, music, people dressed as bananas and gorillas etc.

The cars lead the parade back down to the 'Restaurant Scolaire' where at the Mayor and others up on a covered, bunting-bedecked podium review stand. The Mayor says lots of nice things about 'nos amis Anglais et les deux-cheveaux' including joking about how many young ladies you can get in the back. At that stage the gang's work is done. They park up in the central reservation allowing the parade to stream by either side (once reviewed by the Mayor club by club, school by school, association by association.... it will go on for hours)

'Les Anglais' are invited up onto the review stand for a sit down and a watch of part of the parade, but soon they are looking at their watches, anxious to head North and not miss their 20:30 ferry booking. They hit the road, convoying back up through Hazebrouke, St Omer and Ardres till they pull into the Port of Calais and its passport control queues. All grand so far.

So what of this mis-adventure of which I have spoken? This cause of anger and angst in some parties?........ Oooh - Dad's calling me away for a walk and a sweetie, so more on that tomorrow....

Deefs (Whoosh!)

Adventure Day 2

Day 2 of the French adventure sees the gang installed in La Chapelle d'Armentieres and asked to show the 2CVs off to the local public, outside a building called the Restaurant Scolaire, the school canteen (serving 3 schools) which is also being used for an art exhibition, an exhibition of trad African art and carving, a philatelic exhibition based around the Jules Verne stories and a bizarre exhibition of papier mache farm animals which includes some very bright pink piglets.

200 yards down the high street a massive car boot sale is going on all along a disused railway line which crosses the main high street at 90 degrees. Called "Braderies" these sales are hugely popular in France and this one rather eclipses the car and art show, so the gang aren't exactly buried in the rush.

They do, though, get approached by an old octogenarian named Josef Costeleyn who tells them that he worked in the 50's for a firm called Mottez who had diversified out of supplying rope and textile products mainly for the ports and for lorry transport (tarpaulins, tilts, sails etc) into accessories for the then new 2CV's coming out of the Citroen factories. They would develop good options, like a 'hatch-back version' or different seat covers which reduced the tendency for back seat passengers trousers or hosiery to snag on the tube and wire seat frames.

These options were first supported by Citroen who would send customers round to Mottez for their improvements to be done, and then usually adopted and taken in house. The boys are fascinated by this guy and talk for ages. He later comes back having been home to collect some photocopies of adverts and magazine articles from the time, which he is happy for Andy and Dad to copy.

The gang nip out to neighbouring village of Wez Macquart almost on the Belgian border to a favourite deli for local beers, food for lunch and a gift hamper for their hosts.

In the evening they are invited to a big dinner/show; a massive buffet followed by performances by a 'transformiste' (an amazing lady singer who can sing in a huge variety of styles and accents and whips a hurried costume change through between each song - she does Edith Piaf, Abba, Josephine Baker, Carla Bruni, a whole run of funnily bad talent-show contestants and a crazy huge butterfly shaped head-dress costume with fairy lights on for the encore) and by a troop of Brazilian dancers.

There - and I still am not allowed to tell you about Dad's massive transgression for which there was nearly murders and divorces....

Deefer

La Chapelle d'Armentieres 2

There we go, abandoned again. This time it's both Mum and Dad off for a return visit to nrthern French town La Chapelle d'Armentieres. twinned with Birchington in N. Kent, and the original source of the old 2CV restored by 4 blokes from Dad's 2CV Club and widely now known as Mademoiselle from Armentieres after the WW1 song (It's the only thing UK school boys know about Armentieres!).

The old girl, built originally in November 1961, is in her 50th year now so they decided to do a revisit to the town's Carnival weekend, retracing the steps from their triumphant visit in 2009, the 20th Anniversary of the original twinning.

I am being told by Dad to describe this adventure in real time plus 3 days, so I have to take the three days to tell it, so here's day 1. The guys decide to take 3 cars over - the old Mmle car, Dad's 1986 2CV and Mum's modern car as support in case anything untoward happened. The were booked on the 11:30 Sea France, so it was a fairly leisurely get up and breakfast. We were left in the capable hands of the Angel B, so we were OK, though A-B did grass me up for being off my food and missing my Dad.

They met up at the dry storage where Mmle spends her days, and convoyed down to the docks, the only hiccup being Mmle having a stall while not really warmed up. At the docks, in the marshalling lanes, Mmle attracts many admirers and much comment. On the ferry the gang buy maps and plot a good route down - Ardres, St Omer, Hazebrouke, La C.d'A. Again an incident free run to arrive at the house of thier friends, an English lady married to a French guy. It's all fairly gentle as the old car, with its 435cc engine can manage only 48 mph (75 kph) on the flat, so they all toddle along.

The main entertainment that night is being welcomed by the town and the Mayor, invited to see the local schools' "Spectacle en Anglais" - a series of sketches in English by the local children of 6-7 years old, with the 7 local schools taking a sketch each following the story of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days". From there to a free rock concert by a French band. Difficult to hear most of the words in the rubbish accoustics, but good renditions of, for example Cocaine Blues.

And so to Bed, but because this is semi-real time Dad says I can't yet tell you about his howling faux-pas which left Mum swearing about having to drive like Virgin Mary and now has him buying apologetic fizz. You'll have to wait for that.

Sworn to Secrecy

Deefs

Home Leg

Dad and the 2CV boys are today on the 4th part of the Mademoiselle 2CV restoration adventure, the "home leg" when La Chapelle d'Armentieres came to Birchington. This was a last chapter, if you like, and a final "mission accomplished" stamp.

The car now sorted, went on it's baby adventure to Birchington, then did the London to Brighton, then the big adventure to La Chapelle in May and now, finally, heads for Birchington, there to meet the La Chapelle contingent off their tour coach at Quex Park, and then to convoy into town and park up, on Show, in front of the library while the two towns met for a meal, wine, speeches, Morris Dancing, tree planting and even a Blessing by a local preacher-man.

There was even a fly-past by the Battle of Britain flight, buzzing low over the Birchington seaside, but that might have been something to do with a big Air-Show happening just down the coast at Margate. Very nice, all the same!

My pics are of the cars attracting a lot of attention outside the town library, and one of Bernard, the Mayor of La Chapelle sitting in the car while he recounted anecdotes of owning a 2CV whilst a student around Lille.

It's a tiring day, and we are a quiet subdued lot in the evening, sitting out on the terrace wondering if the gathering clouds portend rain at last?

Deefski

Food Miles

I am wondering if food miles count when you buy "local" produce a long way from home and then bring it home when you were coming anyway.

Remember the "Sangliers" post a few posts back, which mentioned a local-produce farm shop near La Chapelle d'Armentieres. There Mum and Dad bought, along with local cheeses and dried salami-type meats and some rillette, some bottles of local apple juice.

Even fewer food-miles has me celebrating the end of Dad's "hungry gap" up at the allotment, bringing home the first of the Autumn-sown broad bean crop. Plenty more where that came from. Big fresh pods and lovely tender beans. Megan and I are sitting at Dad's feet through the podding process - Meggie has always liked fresh raw broad beans even from a pup, and I'm learning. Haggis? No way. He doesn't "do" plants. Ahh beans in the warm sunshine..... Afternoon Delight?

On the Rec a fun fair has been thumping away every night since Friday, and tonight that's joined by a music mini-festival up by the Rugby Club. Sounds of rock music of varying quality drifting across the trees of the old railway line.

Diamond and John (and Rags we guess) over for a bit of lunch on the terrace this afternoon, D+J just fresh back from Poros (Greece).

Concours de Petanque

We are told that one of the sights of this Twinning Celebration worth seeing was a massive Petanque tournament, called a "Concours de Petanque". Petanque (Boules) is hugely popular in France, with many houses having courts in the back yard, many children starting to play from a very young age and most older people (mainly men, but plenty of ladies also) spend a lot of their leisure time playing.

Dad saw a kiddie who can't have been more than 6 or 7 casually lobbing boules about (and then much less casually when he noticed Mum, Dad and their fellow " foreign visitors" watching him) but in such a way that the first casual lob went 15 feet with feirce back-spin and landed "thock" flat with no bounce, and the second casual lob would hit it with unerring accuracy every time.

The "concours" was something else. This one was part of the Twinning (Jumelage) weekend but apparently they go on most weekends anyway. You can see from the pic it takes up the whole of a double soccer hard-pitch and there are dozens and dozens of matches going on all the time. the bar is open and the lads are in and out of there on a regular basis. As it gets dark the flood lights come on and the drinking, playing (and by then singing and tomfoolery) and larks carry on way past midnight and into the small hours.

Sometimes this is still going on at 4, 5 or 6 in the morning, by which time the average player is completely tanked, can barely stand, never mind see the boules or throw accurately, and nobody knows who's winning, or even cares.

My only experience of petanque was on a 2CV camp, where Dad was playing friends Cliff and Shelley, and where either I, or C+S's collies Ben and Nellie spent most of the time trying to nab the jack-ball and run off with it.

A tout a l'heure

Le Deefer

And the Winner is....

We mentionned that following "our" leading of the Carnival parade through the main street of La Chapelle d'Armentieres, "we" were presented with a small trophy by the Mayor as a momento. Here, indeed is the same, proudly displayed on the bonnet of the car while she was on show. It even has a little plaque naming the event. Cute, huh?

Deefer

SANGLIERS!!!!!!!!!!

OK.... who's a fan of the Asterix books? We all are here, and especially Mum, who's good at French anyway, so she has a collection of Asterix books in French.

If you are, you'll know of the big guy, Obelix, and his love of hunting and eating "Sanglier" (Wild boar), so you'll be as impressed as Mum and Dad were at spotting this trophy head on the wall of the local farm-shop; the same place they bought the cheeses.

Actually, they tell me, the walls of the place were a veritable menagerie of stuffed animals - badgers, geese, ducks, deer; anything the average French countryman loves to annihilate in the hunting season.

Duck!

Deefer (running for cover as not very well camouflaged)

Home Alone

Our cruel and heartless parents abandoned us at the weekend, leaving us to the tender care of the Angel B and Jim. Where's that RSPCA number?

They were off to France for an over-nighter, to give Dad his birthday meal (they went a bit mad and had it in a very nice restaurant in St Omer, called le Cygne

http://www.restaurantlecygne.fr/

... not cheap, but very very good - more of that later, when I've finished discerning the 7 courses from the smells on Mum and Dad when they came back)

From there they were off to La Chapelle d'Armentieres, the town near Lille which gave Dad's project 2CV to Birchington in North Kent as part of the twinning celebrations 20 years ago. The town wants Dad and his cronies to bring the 2CV back for a carnival to celebrate the 20th anniversary, so they were over to meet the main contact lady and sort out the details.

So... we were left all alone from midday Saturday round to about 3pm on Sunday, but we coped, and we are now extracting maximum sympathy (raw pork ribs and multiple fussings) due to guilt on their part.

All's back to normal here-abouts though - they're back at work, so we're into the 4.30 dog-club routine out on the Rec. Everybody's out there. We meet Misha, and Finzi, Ben and a new choc lab belonging to an Ozzie lady. The dog's called "Ciccio" (Italian for "chubby-cheeks" allegedly) and we meet again that 4 year old Shar-Pei called Monty we've mentioned before.

More soon

Deefski