Making an honest man out of him indoors

Every now and then, I tackle the paper work, wrestle with it for some time before surrendering, to the law of chaos which has served both my filing system and my life plans, well enough so far.  But once again, the discrepancies between my various names, have cropped up - passport in one name, bankcard in another, it makes booking airline tickets a complicated  experience.  I am alternatively Vassal, Ring , Vassal-Ring not to mention that, the name of my ex also keeps propping up whenever I deal with anything to do with my children! I am  confused, muddled, developing multiple personalities and it all started 12 years ago:
you see, 12 years ago, him indoors and I, we got married in Thailand.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, we saved our respective family and friends  a few bob and the embarrassment of having to attend a rather unconventional union.  So, instead of spending thousands, wining and dining people in exchange for some toasters, we would have a very selfish time, somewhere where the rain was warm.
As soon as divorce was legal in Ireland ( 8 years and a referendum) we were off to Siam, to drink Singha beer.
We got married the day after our arrival.  Someone had slip a note under the bedroom  door, saying "marriage tomorrow at 10 am", a week earlier than planned! So my great plan of having a wonderful Neru cream silk suit, made for the occasion,  failed miserably, and I ended up wearing a blue shirt belonging to him indoors, which covered all the 3  dicta " something blue, something new and something borrowed" at once.  I was sporting runners and  jet lag,  a look hardly redeemed by  the very pink bridal bouquet, shoved in my hands before getting into the vw van/taxi. I remember queuing up amongst soldiers with machine guns before signing something in Thai (my kidneys?). And that was it!
We had our wedding dinner at Fisherman's Seafood, where you picked various strange sea creatures before choosing, out of hundreds of delicious sounding recipes, which way you wanted them cooked.  We had an absolute banquet -clams, prawns, lobsters and blue clawed crabs washed down with beer and coconut juice ... total -15 £  for both of us! 
Anyway...it was fast, it was fun and, after receiving some beautiful certificates, 5 to be precise, 3 in Thai and 2 in English, we felt, we knew, we were very much married...
Some months later, I  had to apply to the French Embassy ( we lived in Ireland then) for a new passport, in my new name.  It is then that I found out, that we were married in Thailand...Oh yes and in Ireland too , and in all the rest of the entire world, as a matter of fact ...but not in France! 
To cut a long story involving embassies and consulates,  short,  it seems that we were never married here, at least!
So, what was a girl to do but make an honest man out of him indoors?
After living in sin for nearly 20 years (only whilst in France of course), we decided that on the anniversary of our first kiss ( he had been complaining that he couldn't handle any more anniversaries!), we would tie the knot once more...à la française this time, all legal.
Him indoors asked our daughter to be his witness.  We had the date, the restaurant...so off I went to the Mairie to get the forms, encounters with the administration, are never an easy task but I felt very positive and confident.  Such a happy experience, after the 4 funerals this year, this was the wedding we so needed , OURS....
A Gallic eyebrow was raised when I gave our respective birth dates, but I had been expecting that -no worries.  Things started getting complicated however, when I mentioned that him indoors wasn't French.
Nice Mairie lady Irish? Has he got a permis de séjour?
Me - No, he is a member  of the EEC 
NML - Is he now?  I'll have to check.
Eventually, after some time and   much delving in big tomes of international regulations and phone calls to friends in Montauban, she found out that Ireland was indeed in Europe .  Everything was going swimmingly.
Or was it?
NML-  So now we need his birth certificate and an official  document that states he has never been married before.
Me - Well, as a matter of fact he is married to me but we have to get married again because France won't accept our marriage.  There was an embarrassed silence, I cleared my throat.
We got married in Thailand.  Bangkok?  Still silence.  I realised that our marriage had just short circuited the well oiled bureaucratic French machine.  Eventually she recovered and started  phoning all sorts of secret organizations which I believe rule the French world, whilst looking at me, as if I had just announced I was  about to contaminate the whole world with a deadly virus and she had 48 hours to save humanity! She took back the half filled forms, rather impatiently - you won't be needing those.
NML -You can't get married because your husband is married already.
Me -Yes, I know, he is married to me and I am not considered married here.
NML -Yes but he is married abroad...That would make him a bigamist
Me - but he is married to me!He cannot be a bigamist
The whole surreal scene lasted until lunch time, a sacred truce in France, even for the bureaucracy, especially for the bureaucracy.  So there will be no wedding apparently.  Yet I know that somewhere in the bowels of the French administration,   400 volumes exist, dedicated to our very problem, but until they are found 
 I am  single here and he is not !

Recovering the past or maybe not

Just got back on ze blog. I had, again, lost my various passwords, making it impossible to access these pages or the gmail account where they kept sending me access to a new password! I am taking loads of ginkgo biloba now and hoping to see some improvement in my flailing memory before I forget who I am.  It's not all bad, sometimes I do stumble upon poems,  beer mats scrawled with plans for a nov etc. but in all honesty this happens seldom enough and there are very few advantages to memory loss otherwise!
I had hoped, once,  to forget the more dastardly deeds of my youth but...no...I remember those quite clearly.  And though I have forgotten a lot of the good times and some of my lovers, I remember ancient enemies, long since forgiven  and a  plethora of offenses not to mention some of the very embarrassing moments that would be better forgotten ( but would make good if slightly humiliating reading).
Basically it is a simple process -  anything that could make life  easier and more fun - ie passwords, telephone numbers, and happy moments, I forget.  
But no such luck with the guilt inducing memories or the downright  excruciating ones, they are here to stay it would seem! 
Anyway I am back now... for a while hopefully.
So were was I? February I think.  Winter?  Very cold, very broke and very sad...but not unhappy.  That about sums it up.
But we are still blessed to be here  and Anma came to life with the first violets.  This year we have started a vegetable garden.  We are complete novices and have made some mistakes, ok a lot of mistakes, but it's a learning process I believe.   Him indoors is quite appalled at the amount of pumpkins we are growing and reckons I should be researching recipes and the possibilities of a business venture because it looks like we have enough of them to feed a small country, possibly Monaco, though I doubt that the "Monégasques" would change their Champagne diet, to one made exclusively of pumpkin.  

  It has been unbelievably hot for the last month, the thermometer reached 50° on a few occasions, and the garden after a splendid show of irises and roses this spring, is now bone coloured, invaded by thistles and giant weeds. 
It's too hot to garden, too hot to even eat outside. The beauty of an old house is that the walls are thick and the inside temperature stays around 26°, I am hoping for much less next year when we have shutters that close.  Meanwhile, we have turned into vampires.  We only venture outdoors at dusk to weed and water the dehydrated vegetable patch and enjoy a glass or 3 of chilled rosé whilst being tapas for the ferocious and sex discrimative mosquitoes who won't take a bite from Him indoors.  Being tastier than him is no consolation either.

This autumn, possibly/maybe, the work on Anma will start, hopefully! The roof and the doors and windows (none of which currently close, never mind lock!) are the priority apparently, though a proper bathroom -with a bath- would  be nice to have, as would a pleasant looking bedroom, as the current" hovel"  look is becoming a bit overpowering and slightly passé.   I am not being extravagant, I would just like some plaster on the walls and a ceiling! Ok so, maybe I am being extravagant.

Back on the range: winning some, losing some..

I have neglected this blog for a very simple reason - I had lost it (the blog I mean)!
Yeps, too much time spent on myface/spacebook,  totally erased its address from my brain and today, whilst I decided I should recreate an account so as to  follow a certain blog,  it revealed itself once more...The mysteries of the internet...
It finally looks like spring is here and about time.  The snow was wonderful and totally magical.

Our daughter who watches television, had warned us of the coming artic conditions (to quote a favourite media cliché) so we did get intelligently snowed in. By this I mean with masses of provisions and a gargantuan pot au feu. We took a long walks in the champagne powder that glistened under a turquoise sky.  Dougal loved it.
The whole landscape was ...Oh gosh I can feel another cliché coming on...splendid.
On the down side, the wonderful looking stove which was supposed to be the heart of this outfit, turned out to be like some people, you know the type,  high maintenance, flashy and full of promises but who inevitably let you down when you most need them...
First it covered the kitchen floor in black goo (which I am still trying to remove), it never really lit beyond filling the place with black smoke, so much so, we had to stay outside for a couple of hours (in -5°) to avoid monoxide poisoning.
Most nights, we went to bed fully clothed,  armed with oil heater (a toasty 9°), hot water bottles, cats and sheep skins( hims indoors uses them for  yoga in case you wondered).  The oil inevitably ran out during the night and we woke up to 2° in the bedroom...Yes... I know... I have become a bit obsessive with the old thermometer, but I bet you would too, given the circumstances!
It turned out that the wood - from my beloved wood pile (see a previous blog) was wet or rather truly soaked and it clogged up the chimney with tar.
The  chimney sweep who came to the rescue two weeks later,  pulled a huge cork of solidified black matter and said we were lucky the whole machine was still working.
Lesson?  Don't trust your friendly neighbour who swears the wood is dry as dry can be, when he probably cut it two hours ago.
Really, I should have known better as he had already tried to pull a fast one on us over THE field.   A previous life in the Kerry mountains, has made me very sheep weary( a long story) so,  at the first sign of  the animals appearing on our land, I phoned him.  He implied that the Marie-Antoinette thing to do,  for us "les anglais",  would be to allow his sheep to graze the sweet grass of our field and thus create a bucolic scene as well as keeping the grass down in an ecological manner!  Tempting as it was, my genetic collective "French"peasant memory struggled to be heard over the rural dream and rang the alarm bells of ...DROIT DE FERMAGE.   A well kept secret amongst the French farming folks (FFF) the chances are that if you find out about it, you have already fallen victim to  the dastardly legislation and your so helpful and ecologically minded neighbour, is growing genetically modified spuds in your garden (or, as was the case of mine- wild boars...yes! seriously! though I still prefers them to GMC). This is one bizarre and idiotic French piece of law making.  Basically it says that if you agree to someone using your land it basically becomes theirs for ever, to dowhat they wish with it, as long as it is agricultural...there is no way out and the land gets passed from generation to generation....As there is no need, in this case for a written contract, a vaguely consenting  sentence from you, such as -  yeah sure let them, they're doing no harm, more cake anyone? clinches the deal.

Another stupid law born of the Revolution, totally outdated, is the one that allows  hunters to hunt on your land...up to a hundred and fifty meters from your house and much closer if they have their back turned.

We lost our beautiful cat Mishkin on the opening day of the hunt... and that made so very sad and so very angry and motivated. I fought single-handedly, the French hunters, a veritable army, and a very powerful lobby here.  We are now a NO HUNTING ZONE...well nearly...just a few more months.  Most mornings, I see deers (see very blurred photo) in the field and pray they will escape the hunters until the 13th of August.