Samedi 17/07 2010

There is no refuse collection in the Bretagne countryside, so no dustbin man. We have to take our rubbish to the nearest decheterie or the nearest group of bins which are strategically placed near to groups of houses. At the decheterie we can sort the rubbish as there is a bottle bank. There are different bins for magazines and papers and plastics and general household rubbish. I went to the decheterie this morning and saw no-one on the way there. On my return I passed a sans permit being driven by a friend in the village who is one of six sisters. Then I stopped and allowed a cyclist to pass. She almost fell off waving to let me know she knew me. There are lots of male cyclists and there are some female cyclists, but they are usually on what I call ladies shopping cycles. I don't know much about bikes, but I remember these. They are the ones that the ladies in the Cheshire town I knew used to shop. The town had no hills in fact it was completely flat. The bicycles had a large basket in front and a rear rack to hold the shopping. I also remember the chopper. I remember these because they came in just as my brother bought a cycle shop. I was allowed to manage it for about 3 months. I tried to stock choppers but there were none available from the manufacturers which was Raleigh. Racers were popular also but mainly for boys and men in cycle clubs. I bought a 2-wheeler for my son, and he was too scared to ride it eventually we bought him some stabilisers which he refused to remove. We visited my sisters, and he rode his cousin's bike without thinking and then he couldn't wait to get home to take the stabilisers off his bike.

Flexing the Muscle

All the writing advice tells us to flex the writing muscle daily so for the umpteenth time I resolve to do that. My problem is I forget where I do it. After so much trouble with laptops and computers and phones and printers maybe it has all settled down at last including my toothache. The dentist removed the nerve a few days ago.
So, what about getting old.
I do not want to wear purple or spit in the street. I want to do much more interesting things than that. That is why I moved to France and tried to learn French. So here I am living in France and finding learning a language gets harder as one gets older but hey, I am doing it. I am part of the commune, and I am dancing and playing music; I am swimming and walking. I am going to BBQ's. I am writing for the local paper. I even manage to paint from time to time. I am bored with old people. The ones who say I'll be xty in July and expect you to say, 'Oh really, you don't look a day over xty!' They seem to think that all one needs to do when growing old is to look younger than one's age. That's just sour grapes because I grow wrinkles by the hour, and I hate mirrors because I don't find myself in there. Sometimes I see my sister who was 10 years older than me but died aged 57. Sometimes I see my mother who died aged 93. That should be a comfort if I live as long as her. My neighbour here is 100. She still lives alone and sings and tells jokes at local meals without a crib sheet and without spectacles.

photo of me

No more stories

since stories in blogs are considered to have been published and are therefore not eligkble for competitions no more stories here but I can continue to blog my babble

Forgetting

I often think that blogging is a time waster but when I go back to read my old posts I find myself quite interesting is that egotistical?
Anyway apart from the fact that I often forget how to get into them I am going to make an effort to write more.

"How interesting I find myself." Virginia Woolf