It’s the Twilight Barking outside. Have they all been reading 101 Dalmatians? Are there lost puppies to find? Why, then, are all the dogs up and down the road all barking their collective heads off? All except mine, though. Yes, Tiggy is laid out under the hedge as usual, with one ear up and one ear down, listening with disdain to all the plebby dogs and their demented woofing as if she’s miles above it all. Well, I suppose she may have been born in France but she’s in an English family now, the old stiff upper lip wot, wot, ‘barking at the moon is so common you know’. Huh, are we ever in denial. She knows as well as I do that as soon as some spotty student strolls past hoping for a quiet walk home from the station after a hard day slogging over a hot text-book she’s going to jump up and bark like a one-headed Cerberus, scaring the cheese out of him. I’ve had to put up signs warning people that the innocent looking hedge they are sauntering past is about to come alive like the gates of hell. I’ve even heard screaming out there before now. And lately she’s taken to trotting in the house afterwards with her tongue hanging out and her tail wagging as if to say ‘I got another one, Mum!!’ Bless.

Well, I am supposed to be doing the house insurance form at the moment but I really can’t be bothered. I mean, I have actually placed a value on all our worldly goods, but I did it my own way and now I have to re-format it all to fit the nightmare form I have been sent. Apparently I have until next Tuesday night to complete it so I can afford to procrastinate a bit longer. Besides, why should everyone else have all the fun? Nobby has been in Budapest since Sunday and I know he’s currently watching Angelina Jolie ‘avin’ it large in her new film and the kids are still messing about instead of sleeping, as usual. I dunno where they get the energy from frankly. Our day would have floored an elephant – swimming, dog walking, playdate and a trip to the farm – and I’m pretty wobbly myself… but not them. Pickle just found the energy to jump up and down on an up-turned washing basket. Until it broke. That’s when I found the energy to take the stairs two at a time to find out what the almighty noise was. Poor little lamb dissolved into tears at that point. I tried to comfort him by saying Mummy wasn’t too upset about the broken basket because that means she can go shopping to get a new one. At which he let out an extra loud sob wailing ‘but I HATE shopping!’ Oh well, I tried.

Speaking of shopping, I have had another run-in with the infamous French Customer Service. Our lovely Krups coffee machine - a must for the discerning espresso drinker - has been playing up lately. I dug out the receipt, convinced that we only bought it last autumn or something only to find it was last March and the damned thing is out of warranty. Blast. (May I refer you back to a prior rant about all things electrical? I love it when I’m right. ) So I took it back to Darty (French version of Dixons) in case they had any words of wisdom to help me get it fixed before we fly the coop next week. Oh, this one was a pearl.

‘Vare are you moving to, Madame?’

‘Hungary.’

‘Well, I ‘ope ze water is better in ‘ungary zen. It’s the water ‘ere in France; it eez so ‘ard eet wrecks all zees machines de café.’

‘Yes, but I have always used filtered water in the machine.’

‘Ees no matter. Filter, bottled, eets all ze same.’

They really should change the name of that Service Desk to just The Desk. He told me I could send it away for an estimate, which would take two weeks and cost 22 euros. Then if I decided I’d still like to get it repaired it would take another two weeks. The part about me leaving France in less than a fortnight was clearly lost on him. As Rose would say, it was about as much help as t*ts on a nun.

So, I think I will get back to the sofa and another episode of Friends, ‘up yours’ to the insurance form. I have sorted out the spare room, tidied the playroom and extracted my son from the wreckage of an ex- laundry basket this evening while the kids play and Nobby ogles Jolie’s jubblies; I think I deserve another episode. Unlike Rose, Nobby has never understood my obsession with Friends (a bit like me and his football, by the way) but now I have the entire set he had said he may try a few episodes, see if he can get into it. ‘After all, they’re only 22 minutes a go.’ Ever the numbers man, that’s my Nobby. Personally I think he’s missing the point and I can’t wait till the football season restarts so I can tell him ‘after all, it’s only a game.’

Dare me?!!

Quick! I have time for a mini-Blog while the kids are having a lie-in instead of lumming round my ankles. There’s a price, of course. They are lying in because they didn’t settle down until gone 11 o’clock last night. I did my best to stop them mucking about but once my bottom is on the sofa having done my story-reading duties at 8pm the last thing I want to do is keep trudging up the stairs to shout at them. So I only have myself to blame when they do the same thing again tonight having not surfaced until 10 in the morning. Don’t you just love the holidays.

But we are moving house a week on Friday! How did it come round so quick? And as things stand the whole process is in a mess. I had such plans to get every room sorted and all the junk chucked out before the packers came and until school broke up I was making excellent progress. However, since the end of term even scheduling a trip to the toilet has become a major feat with all the lumming going on plus there’s the lorry-load of books and drawings and other ‘cheese’ they brought home which has been dumped on my desk in a menacing looking mountain. Then I took a peek at the medical claim forms I have managed to accumulate since the E101 ran out in February. Bad idea. And it’s not just in the house that things are bad. Just when you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row having negotiated the removers down from a 7 day move to a more respectable 3, you find out that no-one has told the relocation agent at the Hungary end which date you are arriving and so the rental contract they’ve spent 6 weeks getting signed doesn’t start until five days afterwards. So today I either have to get the contract changed or rebook the removers, dog transporters, flights and hotels and persuade the tenants who want to follow us into this house they need to wait. ARRRRGH!! This move is driving me to drink.

There is some good news though - I found my driving license!! I have only been looking for it since our last holiday which is, oh, about 8 weeks. It turned up in my black winter handbag of course. I am on a summery brown one at the moment. Der.

Plus my parents have been over again for another life saving visit. While they were here playing Lego and Barbies with the brats I managed to motor through a couple of rooms, including the garage which was very satisfying. And with their help Pickle had a lovely birthday party for 14 of his little friends. Well, the kids had a lovely time but since it was raining yet again on the big day the rest of us found it pretty hard work keeping 14 boys out of mischief inside the house. I can tell you, it was ‘wine o’clock’ a lot earlier than usual that night.

I had my own little ‘leaving do’ party this past Saturday night. I managed to get through the whole of it without blubbing, despite a lot of Tequila and some heartfelt speeches and gifts from my closest buddies. I won’t list them all or I’ll start welling up but I must mention that Rose gave me the entire box-set of Friends DVDs. Now that nearly got me going then and there since she knows I have wanted it for years. I can’t say how much I am going to miss the wonderful friends I have made here. It’s so hard to leave them all behind despite the exciting adventure we have ahead of us. I just hope Nobby is prepared for the phone bills!

Anyway, the beasts are stirring upstairs and there are fighter planes zooming over the house so I think I need to take cover. (Its July 14^th, the planes are just on their way to the Champs Elysee for the parade but it’s still pretty unnerving!) And I have a house move to get back on track, what am I doing still sitting here?! Wish me luck.

What’s it all about?!!!

There are several things bothering me today. Not least of which is why-oh-why it takes me weeks at a time to get back to the keyboard for some therapeutic ranting on my Blog. But I am also pondering the following; perhaps you can help (answers on a postcard etc).

Firstly, why do I get Spam websites opening up every 2 minutes when I log on to my computer, whether I block pop-ups or cookies or not – and what is a cookie anyway? Why can’t they call these things after stuff that won’t make me hungry, like pebbles, or mothballs or something? And who out there in the ether looks at my email and Blog activities and decides that I need the latest information on internet dating and last minute flights to Dubai anyway?

And why can’t I get through my to-do list AT ALL no matter how I plan to fit it all in? I have started several tasks towards getting us ready to move house but they are now lying all over the house half finished so that I still can’t tick them off the list yet. Maybe it’s because every session at the computer takes twice as long as I close down all these extra windows offering me cheap porn and cheaper car insurance? I did say ‘sod the immigration questionnaire’ but that was only supposed to be for the night and I still haven’t done it.

Here’s another thing: why have the children chosen to adopt two scarab beetles from the forest as pets? Are they trying to motivate me into getting the rabbit they keep banging on about by sitting on the sofa letting nasty little creepy crawlies climb up their arms whilst cooing fondly to them and giving them names like Fred and George??? I’m sorry, they may be small and harmless (apart from the plethora of revolting germs they must be sporting having been rolling around in all the crap on our local forest floor) but frankly the only beetles you’ll ever find me anywhere near have four wheels and a distinctive VW engine noise. Why won’t they just accept my simple yet compelling excuse that we already have a dog and dogs eat rabbits?

Also, why don’t my childhood toys and games seem as much fun this time round? Poppet just got into ‘French skipping’, which was a favourite of all the girls in my school back when I was seven. We would raid our mums sewing boxes for every morsel of elastic we could get our hands on, tie them together into the biggest possible loop then take votes on who would be the suckers standing with it wrapped round the backs of their legs while the others all jumped in an out of it. These days of course ToysRUs have cottoned on to this line of business and the new generation will not stoop to using ordinary knicker-elastic like we did. It has to be at least five metres long, softly coated to protect those bare ankles, rainbow coloured and costing a ridiculous amount from the toy shop. Luckily Poppet got hers for her birthday and I was initially really up for giving it another go several decades on to see if I could still manage ‘kneesies’ and ‘thighsies’. Somehow it’s just not as appealing as it used to be though, but the weirdest thing is the déjà vu of having a dominant playmate who only really wants me to act as one end of the loop while they perfect their own moves to impress their friends in the playground. That is exactly what used to happen to me with one little ‘friend’ in particular who would invite me round for the whole afternoon just so I could stand opposite a wheelie bin and watch her skip. Fortunately here in France we have 2 wheelie bins so I am off the hook and Poppet can do her thing without me.

One kid ‘thing’ I am enjoying is ‘the sleepover’. Not when they come here of course – Poppet had a friend to stay on Sunday night and I swear I lost half a kilo running up and down the stairs to yell at them to shut up and go to sleep. But tonight it’s her turn to stay with her friend so I only had one kiddie to put to bed, and it was the easy one because Pickle will at least admit when he’s tired and take himself off without too much trouble.

Meanwhile, Nobby and I now have a shared obsession, and no, I haven’t suddenly ‘got’ football and he hasn’t suddenly fallen in love with ‘Friends’. Someone asked me what he would like as a leaving present from his French team before he moves on to Hungary and I suggested a Nintendo DS with the Brain Training programme. Inspired! But now I can’t wrestle it away from him to do my daily training and my brain was down to 28 years old yesterday, the selfish old thing. Pity my body is feeling slightly older, as proven by the monstrous bruises I am modelling since my final jujitsu session on Saturday which consisted of a demonstration in the village square in front of my fellow residents. I was fighting a girl young enough to be my daughter and considerably shorter than me but she nevertheless managed to splat me so hard I am still sore now. With it being the end of the year there was a little BBQ afterwards which was very pleasant. All I’ll say is we put away an impressive amount of wine, these hard-core black-belts got as mushy as drunken teenagers when it was time for me to leave and bid them adieu for the final time, and it was a good job there were no police around on the drive home.

My final rant for the day is why, why why is Dr Who about to regenerate??!! I could not believe the end of that last episode where a Darlek got him with a lucky shot and they’re going to replace David Tenant with another bloke. It just isn’t right; he’s the best Dr Who since Tom Baker (and now I am really giving away my age…) I am dreading Saturday night to see who they replace him with. If I don’t like him I may have to renounce my love affair with science fiction and go back to my knitting. Sob.