Living
as we now do in the depths of rural France: in the words of Monty
Python, we must ‘make our own entertainment’. Gone are the days when an
enjoyable Saturday was spent brunching with jolly ex-pat chums and the other
beautiful people at The Atlantis, Dubai
or taking in a Broadway show!
The
pinnacle of excitement this week was the early return of the migrating swallows
to the village (see how creative we can be in the manufacture of entertainment
when needs must). This followed record numbers of migrating cranes a few weeks
ago, (can you stand all this entertainment?).
With
such exciting tales to recount and a craving for social intercourse, I accosted
one of my French friends outside the boulangerie. Hoping to impress, I explained
the old English (I had assumed) saying ‘one swallow does not a summer make’.
As
I stumbled over French tenses and genders, her features assumed an expression
of disbelief. In the quest for a more favourable response, I embellished with a
few more ‘old English’ summertime sayings; ‘ne’er cast a clout ‘till May is
out’ and ‘if there’s enough blue sky to make a sailor’s trousers’, each to her abject
bewilderment and mounting boredom.
When
she was finally able to ‘get a word in edgewise’, she gently observed that she
had learned the phrase ‘one swallow does not a summer make’ at school. Far from
being an old English saying, she counselled, it was from the proverbs of
Erasmus in the 16th century. The true meaning, she explained is that
‘single data points cannot be relied upon to extrapolate a trend’.
Seeing
my disappointment at having so disastrously failed to entertain, she offered to
show me ‘swallow-cam’ to cheer me up. We entered her terraced cottage whence a
complex array of surveillance equipment beamed a bird’s eye view of the soon to
be nesting sparrows from her outbuilding to her sitting room. I was both
entertained and impressed and I told her so. ‘Yes but the “hirondelles”
are only entertaining for a few weeks a year,’ she shrugged. ‘The rest of the
time, I use it to spy on my neighbours. You can see and hear everything.’ Her
eyes widened as she emphasised the word ‘everything’ with a single raised
eyebrow.
I
resolve to be more inventive when ‘making entertainment’ in future. I will need
to if I am to impress my French friends and neighbours in future bouts of social
intercourse.
Author page
Dear delicious lady of Poumeroux or is Puma-rue or any other rue. So sad to have missed you outside the bakers as I would have understood your English weather jingles. Looking forward to the social event in the village which will be the 15th August. Hope to see you there.
ReplyDelete