Christmas subterfuge

The bike is fixed and the fitness regime has commenced. After breaking the chain with over exuberant exercise last week, I had taken the bike into a scruffy bike place in L A (Littlehampton), who had promised to fix it. I bought a couple of bells for both our bikes and it cost in total £5, stunningly cheap after the relentless rip off that is Australia.

It was another lovely start to the day, as good as yesterday when I took this picture just down the coast at Clymping. It is promised to be dry today, note, not sunny , just dry and that seems to be it before Christmas. Wet, windy weather will woar (a rare deliberate spelling mistake for the sake if alliteration) Wednesday when we will welcome winter. What a horrible sentence. Yes, according to the weather forecasters today will be the last dry day before the 25th will be today.

The coast at Clymping

Weather forecasting; now that is a curious job to want to perform. You get the blame when the weather is crap, which in the UK, is almost all the time and you get no praise when it is good, if you want to do that job and be popular you would be better off going to the south of France. At least you would be less unpopular. I bring this up as I can see my friends in Valbonne on Facebook all enjoying lunches on the beach and sitting around in shorts in December, exactly what I would be doing but for M. Sarkozy and M. Hollande.

The Christmas tree has arrived, all three feet of it. Gone are the days of a 7 ft tree as we have a house with very low beams, and just one set of lights is plenty. Presents have begun to appear beneath it, mainly it has to be said, to wind up Sprog 2 who spends every Christmas checking under the tree each day and making a note of how many of the presents are for her. Personally I don’t think it is cruel deliberately to mis-label the presents. Others may take a different view. In earlier years she has spent so much time touching and counting the gifts with her name on them, that we have had to resort to subterfuge.

She has often been able to ruin the surprise, either by continual examination, holding, shaking, caressing and smelling the gifts and managed to guess their contents . I think the most extreme example was when we suspected she had employed a metal detector. Hiding present around the house on cupboards, in the loft or under the beds does not work, she has powers of search and deduction that would be the envy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The best method is obscuring the wrapped contents has been disguise. Add fake shapes, adding perfume or herbs has thrown her off the scent (eek…), wrapping up a brick in the package has been known to work but she is wise to that now. Wrapping them up like a pass the parcel has usually worked, but she is getting clever. You would think that by the age of 18 she might have grown out of this, but no.

Today I must finish the final edit of The Valbonne Monologues if I am to have any chance of making the 24th January as a delivery date. It will require a herculean effort but, as the raw material is so easy to read and I want to know what happens and how out ends, there is at least half a chance it will be finished today.

Once again I am proud to say thy there is no plug today for the excellent foreign exchange service offered by Currencies Direct. Oh , I have just read that back and I am wrong, there is.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News