Lost day

Not entirely sure what happened to today but I have not been out of the door once. Nell and I stayed safely indoors this morning whilst weedkiller operations were in progress and subjected ourselves to other hazardous chemicals in the ongoing attempts to clean this place up. We deployed limescale remover and a quite vicious tub of soapy substance which was a highly effective cleaner and for which I will have to be careful to wear rubber gloves...

Other possible hazards emerged when Nell and Mr L went for a walk and disturbed a snake... a large one. He was quite rattled. No pun intended.

Mr L went out this afternoon to hire a car. Vincent is not currently safe to drive and we are a little cut off, hiring a car seems the only thing to do just now. There are no car hire places here that would deliver to us but our estate agent and neighbour came through by offering a lift to Leclerc in Montmorillon. She also helped out with the hire process and deployed her excellent French on our behalf.

All the major supermarket chains offer car hire here and it is strikingly cheap - Leclerc have cars from €4 a day. But not today in Montmorillon. We have a €6 a day car, with 12c a kilometre charge on top. Still a great deal, we think.

There was a shopping fail on Imperial socket spanners for fixing the van. eBay or Amazon will have to come to the rescue.

Nell and I cooked up a Ratatouille-style vegetable sauce to have with pasta later in the wek, in order to salvage some vegetables from the fridge. We are taking our cue from the thrifty French and wasting nothing (it is the best way, with the complicated refuse disposal arrangements here) so an afternoon of menu planning and deployment of leftovers followed.

The French disapprove of wasting bread, and no wonder at €1 a baguette, hence their love of eggy bread aka Pain Perdu, or Lost Bread. Unfortunately it was too hot this morning to be eating such a sturdy breakfast so I soaked my very lost indeed pain in milk all day and then turned it into a cheese pudding for our dinner, utilising an array of ends of cheese from the cheese box. Half a cauliflower was rescued and roasted with spices to go alongside a green salad.

We felt quite proud of our efforts and made room in the fridge for the extravagances brought home from the supermarket.

A portable radio came home in the hire car and also a Soda stream machine. It should cut down on the number of emergency shopping trips to buy lemonade... I foresee a need for ample hydration this summer.