Nobody likes to be a pain in the …….. neck. But Brother Ralph, as you see below, is being turned into one, willingly or otherwise, by the witch, Esme Gat-Tooth. Maybe he shouldn’t be too surprised to be turned into something if he decides to get into dealings with a sorceress!
I imagine you’re getting to know the characters in Merrie England by now. We’re still in the early stages and there are plenty more personalities for you to meet as time goes by. But for now, as usual, the first three strips set the current story and the last is the latest.
If you find these little stories amusing, perhaps you could be a real friend - nay! a philanthropist - and help the cast of Merrie England become better-known by sharing their doings with your friends and family? If you do that, Brother Ralph, Esme, Father Abbot and the rest can brighten up the email Inboxes of everyone in your address book. Just think how much you will have cheered everyone up!
Now, about those French houses… Part One
People who talk of getting a house in France become dewy-eyed, don’t they? Their faces light up with rosy-cheeked excitement engendered by daydreams of blissful cottages, jolly sunflowers, those crusty baguettes that you nibble at on the way home from the boulangerie; ripe, plump cheeses; plentiful inexpensive wine, croissants for breakfast and all that sort of thing.
And that’s all just fine and it’s all there for the taking. It’s real. No exaggeration. Not a bit.
However.
There’s a lot more to it than that, as I know, having been an owner of French properties, off and on, since back in 2003. To my joy and chagrin.
I must first tell you that I’m the world’s least practical man. With old houses, this is generally a problem. It should probably be a deal-breaker, truth be told. Just picking up a screwdriver puts me into frozen indecision. A hammer fares little better in my grasp. It shouldn’t be this way because my dad was a painter and decorator and so you’d think that he would have schooled me from an early age on household care and maintenance but no, not a bit of it.
I, along with my two brothers, were never shown how any of it worked. Dad would go off to work in the morning, come home and that was that. At weekends, when decorating the various houses we lived in, we kids were pretty much kept to one side. I suspect it was so that we didn’t hear all the swearing..
It took Dad years to decorate the houses we lived in. I get that. It’s normal that you wouldn’t want to spend the weekend doing what you do all week but the problem was that our parents would buy places that were in shocking condition and then spend seven years doing them up, at which point they would sell them and buy another place in miserable order. So, it was as if we lived our lives on a construction site for much of the time.
Anyway, I never learned how to decorate and the truth is, I’ve never been the slightest bit interested in it.
Leona and I got the French house bug back in around 2002. Me filled with thoughts of Asterix and she with the country homemakers’ idealism. We visited the Dordogne region after much goggle-eyed online research, marvelling at the ready supply of pretty houses in what has become known as “Dordogneshire”, due to the region’s popularity with the British. We found exactly what we were looking for; a typical Dordogne-style three-bedroomed holiday home in a small hamlet nestled in a beautiful shallow river valley. The price was miniscule by British standards and we couldn’t wait to do the deal.
The story surrounding this purchase is quirky and I suspect, unique but I will keep that for another time. Suffice it to say that the French certainly do things their own way and it will make for a fun read when I get round to it.
The house itself was of type known as a “sous-sol”. This translates literally as “basement” but what it actually means is that there isn’t a cellar but the ground floor takes that rôle, meaning that you actually live on the first floor. (Unless you’re American, in which case you live on the second floor.)
With this house, there was also a very large loft space that could have been developed but as it was, it was simply a big, long-neglected chamber festooned with cobwebs.
Thankfully, though, apart from the big, dark loft and the big, dark cellar on the ground floor, the place didn’t need much doing to it. On the first floor, the living area, there was a shiny, modern “cuisine americaine” (fitted kitchen), a generously-proportioned bathroom with twin vanity units, shower and bath and there were also three decent-sized bedrooms and a vast lounge-dining room. The most we would have to do was give the walls a spattering of paint.
We collected the keys and took ownership.
After a couple of short visits, involving wine-drinking and loafing about, Leona suggested that we break out the paint brushes and crack open a tin of paint. After all, the walls were a bit scruffy. This we did, with predictable results on my part. You’d think a reasonably intelligent man in his early forties could manage a bit of wall painting, wouldn’t you? Not so! I seemed unable to handle the paint roller any better than if it had been a heated poker and such were my efforts that Leona told me to leave her to it and go to the café and drink beer. I slunk away.
She knows how to hurt a man, I can tell you..
As you can see, it really was true that I just had no aptitude for decorating. And that was not all. Our happiness at finding this dream home was about to be challenged in a way that I really should have seen coming.
Now, not only am I utterly useless at decorating but I also suffer with severe arachnophobia. Those big, dark house spiders cause a powerful nervous reaction in me and I can’t be in the same room as them. I behave like the maid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, standing on the furniture to get my feet off the floor and calling for help like a six-year-old. I wouldn’t harm any creature if I could help it but spiders don’t count, I’m afraid. It’s just as well that Leona, although disliking them, doesn’t have the phobia, so we have a deal; she gets rid of the spiders and I get rid of everything else.
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that living above a dark, ancient cellar out in the countryside, under a loft the size of a tennis court, absolutely draped in huge, pendulous webs, would be a problem. I soon found out what was in store though, finding great black spiders with bodies the size of my thumb, lumbering about the place as if it was theirs.
Around this time I also discovered chemical warfare. We were out shopping at a supermarket one day when I came across an aerosol product called “Halte Araignée”, which translates as “Stop Spider”. And it really isn’t kidding. This is lethal in every way, though harmless to humans and pets.
Honestly, if you have the phobia, you need this stuff!
The idea is to spray it around every window and door, every ventilation point, along the skirting board and behind any bit of furniture that backs onto a wall. Once this is done, spiders won’t cross where you’ve sprayed. Well, most of them, anyway. The ones who do, you find dead. This stuff is lethal and if it’s applied every three or four months, you won’t see an eight-legged beastie in your house.
Property managers use it all the time. Not because of any phobia, though. Have you ever been woken in the night by a burglar alarm going off on a nearby industrial estate and just whining on without anyone turning it off? It’s usually because a spider - and we must assume that the spider is deaf - is busily building its web right across the movement sensor of the alarm. This doesn’t happen as much as it used to because today, property managers spray the alarms every few months to keep from having to drag themselves out of bed, bleary-eyed at three in the morning every day or two. They’re not trying to kill the spiders so much as to discourage them from keeping the neighbours awake.
Now, those of you without the phobia are probably sneering already. “Oh, they’re more scared of you than you are of them!” you cry. “They don’t bite!” “They eat all the flies!” Well, there’s no use in using logic to dispel a phobia. Phobias aren’t logical, really, although the ancient origin of this one derives from the fact that the little blighters DO bite and in some cases, that is flippin’ dangerous!
And using logic against emotion never does work, when you think about it.
In fact, arachnaphobia is one of the two most common phobias known to man, the other being a fear of heights. Which I also suffer with. I have the two most common phobias, so I’m probably quite normal.
We kept our house for five years but sold it in the end. That was in 2008, when you could still make a few quid in the French property market. It didn’t take us long to get the bug again, though. We were back in 2011, this time taking ownership of a huge townhouse.
Witha huge, dark, neglected loft space the size of a tennis court and a huge, dark and cavernous cellar……
What could go wrong?
More next time but for now, here’s your usual link to another of my videos, this time a timelapse selfie. You’ll find a link taking you to other films as well.
Subscribe to the channel while you’re there, won’t you?