Articles tagged as 'noel'

Double trip

It is possible to go shopping in Bluewater without feeling like a salmon battling the current.

It’s mince pies time again

For once I had excelled myself and arrived with a shopping list. For Florian life was looking harder. How do you go shopping when you are not really sure what you want and for whom.

Why is swede so expensive in France ?

Living this close to the coast means that both myself and the family get the chance to profit from the special offers on both sides of the sheugh. You wont find mince pies gracing the shelves of Carrefour or Auchan and there is little to no chance that you will find tresses of smoked garlic fumigating the veggies’ aisle in Sainsbury’s or Waitrose.

Making deliveries

So, once the parents had got over they brought with them the goodies for my French friends (I like somebody else doing the shopping, it’s a bit like using Tesco’s on-line). Of course I then have to get them out to people.

Deliveries can only be made at the weekend because of course everybody else on the planet (except my neighbours) works, and I can’t afford to leave things too late because of the vagaries in the weather.

It was sod’s law that the Sunday before the holidays when I had organised the long run out to Cambrai would be the day that we had more snow than the previous week.
I knew that life was going to be difficult straight away because the car wouldn’t negotiate the backroad over the hill; I had to drive down the valley and out via the main road.

Buckets of snow – the repeat

Last year the family got snowed off the week before Christmas. This year we had the cunning plan of organising ourselves two weeks earlier. This accounted for everything except Kent getting all of its snow, two weeks earlier.

The weather in France has been most unusual with very cold air coming from the north with great waftings of warm air coming from the south. Where it meets in the middle we are getting snow. We are also getting crazy temperatures. Freezing in the north but almost balmy a few hundred kilometres away to the south.

Near the coast we have been reasonably spared but with winds often touching 100 kph any snow that has been left lying has been blown across the roads.