Adieu, Dad

His struggle and frustration with his deteriorating health is over. My Dad George, who many people knew as Stan, died in the Royal Surrey County Hospital just as the sun was rising over Guildford cathedral on 25th October. Thankfully, I was with him. He simply faded away in in his sleep, just as he wanted.

Given the pleasure he got from the internet after he had a PC for his 80th birthday eight years ago, it seems appropriate that I post these words from his brother John on these pages. I'm sure, too, Dad would have loved the idea that his friends and family in far-flung places (or closer to home) could add to this post with their own memories. John's recovering from an operation so couldn't be at the funeral so his eulogy was read by Jill, his wife.

We also read the final part of 'Hiawatha's Departure' as a reminder of Dad's love of words and the fun he and I had reading the 'Song of Hiawatha' alound when I was a child. I had to include 'Do not go gentle into that good night'; I don't think he knew this poem but it helped me understand his anger and frustration with what life had become for him.

BROTHER JOHN’S EULOGY TO GEORGE

"First let me say what a great sadness it is that I cannot be here myself to say farewell to my brother.

It is remarkable that we spent so much time apart. At age 14 he fell in love with Iris and became practically a part of the Rattray household, which I must say was jollier than ours and suited the outgoing part of George’s nature.

The war, of course, separated our family as it did thousands of others.

In 1938 the threat of fascism was in the air and at age 18 George joined the 9^th Battalion of the Middlesex regiment of the Territorial Army. He was embodied into the regular forces before the war began.

In the TA his officer qualities were noted and he was commissioned. After serving some time with Searchlight batteries of the Royal Artillery in this country, he was posted to join the Kings’ African Rifles in Kenya. He served with them through the operations in Burma and then returned to Kenya. Another part of the separation caused by the war, I joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 so we never met up during the war at all.

He was later awarded a Territorial decoration for long service in the ‘Terries’.

When hostilities ceased George was demobbed in Kenya and at the young age of 25 was given the job of running a huge estate in Kenya. He loved the job and the African people.

Having married early in the war, Iris joined George in Kenya and stayed with him until the Mau Mau atrocities so terrified her that they returned to the UK. George brought back with him his love of the African people and a facility with Ki-Swahili, with which later he entertained Sarah and me.

He then worked for the Income Tax department until the Broads called him where he and Iris joined Iris’s sister and her husband – Ollie and Vic. It was typical of George, that when his request to the Income Tax Department for a transfer to Norfolk was refused, he just went anyway and soon joined the Norfolk County Council’s local Education Administration Department where he stayed until retirement.

He, Iris and Sarah became an important part of the Catfield community and Sarah still has friends from that time. He was Parish Councillor and a very active member of the local British legion, regularly bearing the legion’s standard at local and regional events and being awarded a gold badge for his work. In 1971 he and Iris were invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Legion’s golden jubilee year. George also became a mason. He really appreciated the fellowship and good works of the masons and in time he became Master of his Lodge. He was dedicated to the practical welfare of members of both groups and other local people in need, as was Iris.

It was here that Margaret and I, and later Jill , my second wife and I, were asked to stay and invited to Masonic dinners where we saw George at his most popular and outgoing self.

After Iris died George remarried and moved to a beautiful part of Scotland – which was his new wife’s birthplace. He had always enjoyed travelling – indeed he and Iris had earlier been pioneers of motorcycle combination travel and went to Spain with two friends.

In Scotland he saw my elder son Christopher regularly and a strong relationship developed. It is Christopher’s great regret that he is unable to be here today.

After his second wife died George came to Farnham to be near Sarah and lived in a retirement home until his recent illness. It was here that he met Florence who was a very good and supportive friend throughout. Jill and I visited them both several times and enjoyed their company. George came to life at family gatherings and was very popular with the younger members.

Even with the separations through our lives there was a strong bond of brotherhood between us - in fact he was ‘bruv’ and I was ‘uverbruv’ to George.

In fact as I have got older I have realised how much like him I am – in speech and mannerisms. Jill often says – gosh that was George!

George was a very loving father to a very loving daughter. Sarah’s devotion to him during the frustrating time when he was tied to his flat at the end of an oxygen line was a tribute to their mutual love. I must here mention how supportive Jonathan, Sarah’s partner, has been throughout. It was good to know that George, after a brief showing of his old self in hospital, died peacefully with Sarah by his side.

Sadly he always seemed to underestimate his achievements which were remarkable.

Throughout, George was always George. He was straight and open; you knew where you stood with him; and you always knew that he cared for you."

It’s been a long time…..

It’s been, as the song (almost) goes, a long time since I’ve done any blog writing, not because there’s been nothing going on (if only!) or because I’ve been too busy. To be honest I’ve struggled to know how to set down on these electronic pages what’s been going on since the beginning of the year.

But there are so many happy things to write about that I must get over this hurdle, so here goes……..

A week after my Dad had a bout of pneumonia which put him in hospital for a few days in January, Jonathan’s Mum, Pat (pictured here with Circé last Autumn), who’s a very fit 74, was knocked over as she was crossing the road on the way home from a shopping trip. The car which hit her was driven by a 93-year-old who subsequently failed the police eyesight test. She had multiple and very severe injuries, including two broken legs, 10 broken ribs, a cracked vertebra and severe internal injuries. A nasty knock on her head was also very worrying. She was airlifted to the Royal London hospital (did you see ‘Casualty 1907?) where, frankly, the trauma team saved her life.

Three and a half months later, she’s still in hospital, thankfully a bit closer to their home in Farnham than the Royal London, and is making good progress. Nevertheless it’s a long haul and we’re still not sure when she’ll be home or when she’ll be walking again. Perhaps the most upsetting thing is that she’d worked really hard to get fit and mobile after her second hip replacement last June and was just starting to enjoy swimming, gardening and country walks again when she was knocked down; it wasn’t just a huge physical knock she suffered.

Needless to say this has had unimaginable ramifications for the whole family. Luckily we’ve found a fantastic live-in helper for Jonathan’s Dad, Dennis, while Pat’s in hospital as managing at home alone for such a long period of time would have been very hard for him. Jonathan’s sister, Alison, who lives in London, has inevitably shouldered much of the responsibility for overseeing Pat’s care and making sure Dennis is OK. Jonathan has spent quite a bit of time in away from home since the beginning of February but we’ve been apart more than we would have been if the UK authorities didn’t take such stringent precautions against rabies. This will be easier at the beginning of June, six months after Circe’s rabies jab, when she’ll be able to visit the UK for the first time.

As if this wasn’t enough, my Dad, who’s been increasingly frustrated by his state of health for several months now, was taken ill while on holiday with us in France. Although spending a couple of weeks in hospital is not the way anyone would choose to spend the second half of their holiday he learnt quite a few French words and I think he chatted up the nurses a bit, too. Since he came out of the French hospital I’ve spent a bit of time helping him settle back into life at his home and to be with him for his most recent hospital appointment.

So, that’s where we are. Whichever devil prevented me from writing about all the other things which have been going on is now expunged. Now I can tell you about the good things: planning the vegetable plot, enjoying Circé growing up, finalising the plans for the house and barns and last but not least the arrival of Circé’s first doggy house guest later today.

2007 - a Good Vintage in Spite of the Weather

One of the reasons I started this blog was to save a few trees and use it at Christmas to keep friends and family up to date with our news. My motives weren’t completely altruistic, though, and were partly prompted by the slog of printing out 60-odd double-sided copies on our ink-jet printer, then folding them and stuffing them in the envelopes. So, if you got one last year, I hope you appreciate that it was a real labour of love!

However, the problem with avoiding the donkey work is that I’ve had more time to write this piece, so I apologise for it being so long. There’s no prize for getting to the end, and I won’t be offended if you give up half-way through!

It’s hard to believe we’re into our second year of our new life in France. We feel very well established in the village, with Sarah doing a spot of English tuition for friends’ children, and occasional sessions at the local primary school. Jonathan has also been helping village friends with the odd computer problem, and regularly plays tennis locally.

Through local contacts, Sarah has also started helping a lawyer in the nearby town to improve his English and is really enjoying it. We’ve also been far more involved in community activities than we were ever able to do in Godalming. Jonathan won third prize in the bowling at the village celebrations for the national day on 14^th July and as a result was pictured in the local paper. We’ve also both enjoyed being invited to classical piano concerts and French song evenings.

Probably our most important news this year is that we’re the proud (or should I say besotted?) owners of a girl golden Labrador puppy called Circé (pronounced ‘Seer-say’). We’ve both always been fond of dogs but it’s only been feasible to have one since we left the rat race; neither of us felt it was fair to have a dog while we were both working. Our feeling that it would be best to wait until after the building work was put to one side after we adopted a lost Labrador for a weekend last year. Although his owner retrieved him (sorry for the pun) after a couple of days, he left a big gap when he went and we decided we couldn’t wait; probably a good job as we’ve not progressed as much as we’d hoped with our building plans this year, but more of that later.

We were both very keen to find a reputable breeder and through the website of the French equivalent of the Kennel Club we tracked down a really nice Labrador breeder about an hour’s drive from home. We first met Circé when she was three weeks old and she came home at the beginning of October when she was almost three months. Since then, as you can imagine, our lives have not been entirely our own and we’re enjoying every minute of it. She’s settled down really well, is as bright as a button and has quite a penchant for brushes, as you can see from the picture!

The other thing that’s taken up much of Sarah’s time since the Spring is the vegetable patch she’s renting from friends. It’s about ten minutes’ walk away from the house in a lovely spot by a stream with beautiful views across fields to the village. From what people have told us this part of Cirfontaines could have been the vegetable farm for the monastery down the road at Clairvaux. It’s quite a thought that people may have been growing vegetables on Sarah’s patch since the 13^th century! It’s quite a big plot – 27 metres by 9 – and although Jonathan has helped in the evenings and at weekends, Sarah has done most of the graft. She’s found it’s been a great way to meet people, as her fellow plot-owners have given her lots of advice, much appreciated as the growing season here is completely different to what she was used to in Surrey. Her ‘brouette anglaise’ (a folding wheelbarrow she bought at a Hampton Court flower show several years ago) and the English tools she uses have been quite a talking point.

Weather-wise 2007 wasn’t a good year to be a vegetable-growing debutante but we’ve been in good company as even the older people in the village thought this was the worst and wettest summer they could remember and, following a very mild winter, this made for a plague of enormous slugs. The worst thing was losing the whole tomato crop (more than 70 plants!) to mildew, but the consolation was that so did most other people, even those who had less compunction about using all sorts of chemicals.

However, the courgettes went mad in all the rain (even the slugs couldn’t keep up with them) and Sarah’s very proud to have grown such a wide range of vegetables on the plot, including fennel, peppers, chillies, sweetcorn, broccoli, carrots, celeriac, cucumbers, parsnips, French beans and squash. The spinach is still going strong and we only picked the last of the lettuces a few days ago. So who knows what’s possible if we have a good summer!

Circé enjoys going to the vegetable patch and has been a great help with the harvest, as you can see!

Jonathan’s also done his fair share of gardening, and has enjoyed it even more since he bought himself a tractor-mower and trailer at the end of the summer. Although Sarah wasn’t convinced at first that he needed one, she was won over after Jonathan nobbled one of her friends to tell her how much he needed one! He was right as it’s reduced by half the time it takes him to cut the grass.

The wet summer means we haven’t enjoyed the pool this year as much as we did last year, although when Jonathan’s nephew, William, and his friend Coryan visited in September they were determined to swim every day! We were very hopeful when we had the pool opened up for the season at the end of April, as we’d been enjoying what turned out to be some of the best weather of the year in the early Spring. We were foiled, though, when the pool maintenance men (or piscinistes) spotted that the plastic liner had cracked and would need replacing. Without boring you with the technical detail this meant draining the pool of all 100,000 litres of water, removing the old liner and its felt ‘underlay’ then getting a new one fitted before re-filling the pool. Mind you, when we bought the house the former owner told us that it had already outlived its 10-year life expectancy so the last two years have been a bonus.

After all the sun we’d had in the spring, this was very disappointing, but a couple of days after this news the weather broke and it rained for pretty much all of May and early June. While this compensated for our disappointment, it also delayed the fitting of the replacement liner which can only be done in completely dry weather. Normally the removal of the old liner and the fitting of the new one would take two days, but after having one fitting appointment rained off, we decided to remove the old liner ourselves, meaning the specialists only needed one dry day.

Taking the liner our was the easy part but stripping off the underfelt from the concrete pool walls was a devil of a job, made more unsavoury by the swamp of green slimy rainwater which had collected in the deepest part of the pool. We only achieved this with a lot of help from our old friends Lis and Will and their two girls, Josie and Pippa, who came over from Switzerland for a working weekend in May.

Picture: Josie, William and Jonathan scraping the felt by the swamp at the bottom of the empty pool.

Eventually we had a few days respite from the rain in the middle of June and the piscinistes fitted the new liner in blazing sunshine. Of course a week later, by the time we’d re-filled the pool with another 100,000 litres of water (and yes, we’re metred!) the rainy weather had set in again.

The frustrating thing is that we had a really good Autumn and if the pool had been heated we’d probably have been able to swim until mid-October. Unfortunately the water never had the chance to get properly warm during the summer so while the air temperature was warm later in the year, the water was far too cold for any but the hardiest swimmer. In fact we do have the means to heat it using the central heating boiler but as this is powered by propane and you could probably see the dial on the tank moving steadily down as the temperature of those 100,000 litres inched up (or should I say centimetred up?) we’ve never attempted it. This has spurred Jonathan to research other means of heating the pool and, given we’ve got a huge almost south-facing roof at the back of the house, we’re planning to have solar heating installed.

This is only one of Jonathan’s plans to save the world. Since a friend bought him George Monbiot’s book ‘Heat’ for his birthday in January (at my suggestion, I have to admit), Jonathan’s been a man with a mission. He’s replaced all our light bulbs and is in the middle of his insulation programme before the winter sets in. He’s becoming an authority on alternative energy and I expect by this time next year we’ll have a log-fuelled central heating boiler and will be selling electricity to EDF! I jest not.

This brings us, finally, to news of our building work. We engaged an architect to draw up plans for the house and both outbuildings in September 2006. By March we’d got plans for the house but not for the two barns which we also want to renovate. Worse, the proposed costs were around three times the budget we’d set. While we’re canny enough to know that projects like ours typically go over budget and we had allowed a bit of a ‘cushion’, we were disappointed that all this had taken so long. The cardinal sin from our point of view was the fact that this news was communicated in a letter rather than in person! Sacking him, in French, was one of the hardest things Sarah has done, especially as he and his team were so nice. So we found ourselves back to square one in the Spring with no plans and no architect. Once again we turned to the internet, found the website of the French professional association of architects and got on the phone. After organising on-site meetings with three local architects, we’ve found one who’s easy to communicate with, understands what we want and is very enthusiastic about the project. So as we come to the end of the year we have plans for all three buildings including creating a two-bedroomed holiday cottage from one of the barns as well as adding a bedroom, more bathrooms and an office for Jonathan to our house. The outline figures look much better, too, so we’re hoping we can get going with the planning approval and tendering for builders in the new year.

We’ve had a lot of pleasure from the visits of friends and family this year; Sarah’s dad has enjoyed several visits and helped her paint the front gates in March. Although he’s not been in the best of health recently, he’s looking forward to spending Christmas and new year with us. Jonathan’s parents have had the best of the weather, coming in both April and then September – probably the best two months as far as sunshine was concerned. We love welcoming friends and family to our home and exploring with them this lovely and unspoilt corner of France.

Lots of interesting things happened in 2007 which never made it onto these (electronic) pages so one of my resolutions for 2008 will be to update this blog more often. If you’d like to get more of our news by email, use the ‘Subscribe’ option on the right hand side of the screen near the beginning of this newsletter (underneath the photo of me!).

We hope 2007 was a good year for you, too and that 2008 is at least as good for you and everyone close to you.

On trains

As someone who commuted into London from Surrey before escaping to France, I was intrigued when Jonathan came back from his weekly trip to the office in Paris yesterday with a sorry story about dreadful delays on his way there. His tale of being stuck behind a broken down train and then being shunted backwards and forwards down suburban sidelines before arriving an hour and three quarters late would strike a chord with anyone who commuted on South West trains in the late 1990’s. Giving credit where credit is due, though, things had improved by the time I abandoned the commuting life.

But it wasn’t the similarity with horror stories from England which struck me, but rather the difference in the way customers were treated afterwards. Jonathan was completely gobsmacked when he and his fellow passengers were greeted on the concourse at Gare de l’Est by an army of SNCF staff handing out forms to enable the weary passengers to claim compensation for the delay.

How different from my Dad’s experience when he came over to visit us from England for the New Year. We made the mistake of booking his travel for 27^th Dec, after a Christmas engineering-fest on the line into Waterloo. His journey, which usually takes an hour, took about three so he was too late to have any chance of catching his connecting train to us from Lille, as there’s only one TGV per day serving that route. Unsurprisingly there were no South West trains staff ready and waiting with claim forms when his train did eventually arrive! When I later checked whether there was anything we could claim I drew a blank; as far as South West Trains were concerned they did all they needed to do by getting him to Waterloo, and how long it took to do this and any resulting problems were not considered.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that everything’s rosy with the trains over here. The Eurostar staff at Waterloo were incredibly helpful when my Dad had these problems in December, and I’ve always found the English Eurostar people incredible helpful whenever I’ve rung them (which is quite often, given we often help friends and family change their arrangements for coming to see us). I wish I could say the same about the Eurostar people at Gare du Nord this week.

My Dad comes to see us every couple of months and I’m really proud that he’s undaunted by doing the journey on his own, even though he’s well over 60 (he probably wouldn’t thank me for revealing his age on the world wide web but he was born in 1920). He had a great couple of weeks here with us and I accompanied him back to Paris on the first leg of his return trip last Thursday.

There was a bit of a spanner in the works when we discovered he’d lost his return Eurostar ticket. The really helpful chap on the Eurostar helpline told me that the ticket office in Paris could produce a duplicate ticket for a small charge. But it would have been even more helpful if he’d also told us to avoid lunchtime on Thursday 22^nd March because that’s when his Paris colleagues would be entering the French customer non-service awards.

If you know the Eurostar ticket office at Gare du Nord, you’ll know that there are two doors into the same ticket hall, one for business class passengers and one for the rest of us, with service desks designated for each passenger group. Even without that insider knowledge you can probably picture the scene – practically no-one in the business class queue and about twenty squeezed into the two metres between the head of the pleb queue and the door. As each transaction was taking about ten minutes and it was less than an hour before the next departure, everyone was getting pretty antsy. Now, I’m a great fan of the French commitment to proper lunch breaks and think much of the UK’s work-related stress would be resolved it we did the same but when first one and then another of the clerks went off for lunch and their replacements took some time to appear it did increase stress levels in our queue!

We were pretty relieved when we got to the head of the queue after about 20 minutes but these people were pretty serious about those customer non-service awards so our ordeal was by no means over. After explaining that the ticket was lost and that the Eurostar customer service centre had told us that we could get a replacement from the Paris ticket desk, the service agent went off to the back office, presumably to check with a manager. She was back after about 5 minutes, to confirm what we’d already told her. Then her colleague at the next desk arrived back from her break and so they had a bit of a chat. They perfectly judged how long to carry on with this because she started stamping papers in the way that only French people can do at just the point when my fairly high tolerance level was breached and I’d formulated in my head what I was going to say to get her back to the job in hand. After a few more clicks of the mouse she handed over the new ticket, a handwritten form detailing that the original ticket had been lost and a third, rather strange document which pretended to be a ticket to Calais but was, she assured us, really the receipt for the 23 euros we’d just paid for this experience. All in all about 15 minutes to do something which sounded so simple when I spoke to Eurostar on the phone!

After all that I’ll be disappointed if the Gare du Nord Eurostar ticket office don’t win one of those awards after the grief we went through to help them.