Sunday 15 March 2015
Cloudy with sun later
14 degrees
Mothering Sunday
No contact at all from eldest. He will have been very busy making lovely lunches for other people's mothers so can't claim he didn't know it was Mothering Sunday. WF sent card but didn't bother ringing and he only sent card because OH reminded him. Feel seriously unappreciated. I should have had girls.
Woke up excited about going to the Floralie with a good friend. The phone rang at 9 am and my friend is in tears because her former husband has just died unexpectedly. She is in a terrible state and is going back to the UK immediately. Give her a big virtual hug. He is the father of her boys and although a lot of thrashing water has gone under their bridge, she is still very upset and is going back to support her boys during the weeks to come.
Have tea in bed and decide to go anyhow. I do enjoy going places on my own - it gives me the opportunity to take my own route, stop to take photos or coffee, and spend as much or as little time at the venue as desired. The motorways are empty, especially the one going to the vast city to the north which opened three years ago, and is so expensive that no one goes on it. I do 20 kms and am charged 3 euros for the privilege. If I tell you the full length is 200 kms, you will have an idea.
Leaving the motorway, the landscape becomes flattened out and the architectural style evolves into beautiful river stone and slate rooves. The road rises and the village is perched on the top, its tall church looking out over the resting fields and the distant haze of the mountains.
For a small village, it is crammed with cars and I have to bump up on a pavement. I ring OH to tell him I have arrived and he says he can't talk long as he has accidentally super glued his fingers together. That will keep him busy. Remind him that he promised to cook dinner tonight.
The flower show is spread out in front of the Mayor's office. The central courtyard is full of plants and shrubs, with a particularly fine display of roses. Mustn't buy anything big. I am tempted and plump for some salvia argentii, some medium height echiums and an interestingly ribbed and rampant prostrate euphorbia. Hats off to anyone who wants to hold the National Collection of that family. With 7500 species in 275 genera, the spurge family is huge. If you want to pop along to Oxford Botanic Garden, you can see a mere 2000 of them
http://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/euphorbia-collection
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| a euphorbia sort of like the one I bought |
http://www.anniesannuals.com/plants/view/?id=907
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| Oh no said OH, it reminds me of death. |
For good measure, the show also included some small farmyard animals including chickens, cockerels, a pig with a long shoelace tail, some vocal goats and their sooty black kids.
By roads (almost) unadopted and woodlanded ways, I drove back home through the early Spring haze. Email from my Russian clients saying their want to speak tomorrow on Skype and that they had really enjoyed their day with us, that it was like a breath of fresh air and that the lady and I were soul mates. After all the (word that sounds like twits) of last year, they are a joy.
After dinner (OH had unstuck his fingers), the seller of the house in town rings me and is at her wits end. She said her would be buyer (wbb) would not stop ringing and emailing and what was I going to do about it. Her other phone then rang and she said, Merde its them again and hung up. Her phone was then engaged for quite some time and she finally rang me back and said that they were insisting on buying because they had made the first offer and they were threatening to take her to Tribunal to force her to sell. I calmed her down and said I would ring wbb but before I could dial his number, the phone rang again. I told wbb that he could not threaten the seller, that it was very bad form and that he had no legal grounds to do so as she had not co signed his offer. I also told him that he needed to up his offer significantly, which he did. I then rang back the seller, who still sounded fraught, poor woman, and told her the new offer. This cheered her up no end until she spoke to the other agent who told her that, because she had co signed the offer made by his buyers, that they could actually take her to the Tribunal and force her to sell. I rang various people and no one answered so I googled it and it appears the other agent is correct. In the eleven years I have worked in real estate, a number of buyers have backed out but I have never encountered a seller who has wished to do so. I need legal backup from the head office.
Watched the rest of Metropolis and actually managed to keep awake. It grew on me but the acting is seriously, and I mean seriously, OTT.
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