Andy gets stuck on a mountain

I'm not really the worrying type. I've learned to accept that when Andy heads off to do one of the many dangerous activities he likes to call fun, there is little point in me worrying about whether or not he's still alive, as it won't make much difference to the outcome. I have been through the scenario of the policeman knocking on the door with a grave look on his face too many times now to keep going through it. When Andy is away climbing/mountaineering/ski-touring/biking I just distract myself with other things. And so it was on Sunday, as Andy had headed off to the Alps to do a late-season route with a colleague from CERN.

We had enjoyed a lovely Saturday together, visiting the Grottes des Cerdon, near Nantua - a hugely impressive series of caves beneath the mountainside, full of some of the most spectacular cave formations I'd ever seen.

You are taken up to the cave entrance in a little train, and you then descend around 100m through the caves to arrive in an enormous cavern which was once used as a fromagerie.

That night Andy reviewed all the options for the next day's climb and decided that doing the route they had originally planned - the Midi Plan Traverse - wasn't really an option. The first cable car didn't leave until 8.30am, and the last cable car back down was at 4.30pm. The route would take 4 hours, plus 4 hours to return to the cable car station, and since it would take at least 30 minutes to an hour for them to get started after catching that first cable car, it would be impossible to complete in the time available. The maths just didn't stack up. The only other option would be to descend from the end of the ridge and catch the train from Montenvers, but time was a bit tight to do that too. They decided to do another route that was much shorter and didn't involve these logistical problems. Andy had a plane to catch to London the next morning, so getting stuck on a mountain wasn't an option.

But get stuck on a mountain he did. After whiling away the morning visiting the excellent market in Thoiry, finishing off my latest book (The Most Beautiful Thing by Fiona Robyn, definitely recommended) and doing various chores, I was quite pleased with how well I had distracted myself from Andy's mountainous adventures. Then at 3pm I received a text (I'll omit the sweary bits): 'Disaster. Decided to do the ridge after all. Just at the summit now. Definitely missed the last cable car. Going to have to descend the glacier.' Don't panic, I thought (ignoring my incredulity that they'd decided to do the one route that they definitely didn't have time for). They'll descend the glacier and if they're lucky they'll get to Montenvers just in time to catch the last train down. I spoke to him a little while later and he told me the descent to the nearest hut should take a couple of hours and they'd ring me and update me when they got there. If I hadn't heard from them in 3 hours I was to assume a) they had no phone reception or b) they were in trouble.

I rang 3 hours later. They were still stuck in the middle of the glacier, barely two thirds of the way down it and winding their way around ridiculous crevasses and seracs in the fading light. It sounded pretty hairy, by all accounts, and we made a deal that if they were still on the glacier in half an hour and the light had disappeared that they would call mountain rescue. Another hour to the hut, they reckoned. I distracted myself with a film and tried not to picture them at the bottom of a crevasse, singing 'Brown Girl in the Ring' by Boney M (this reference only makes sense if you've read/seen Touching The Void). An hour later and they had just about finished the glacier and reckoned another half hour to the hut. By this time, it was 8pm and their only option was to sleep in the hut overnight and get up very early to continue their descent. Catching the plane to London was no longer an option.

Unfortunately, they never found the hut. I spoke to Andy again at around 11pm (thank goodness for mobile phones, or I'd have called out mountain rescue long before this) and they were effectively lost. At 2am he rang me to say they'd decided to bivvy (camp rough without a sleeping bag, mat or anything at all) on the mountain and continue their descent at first light. At 6am, I awoke to an immense thunderstorm which crashed around for a good hour or so - the same thunderstorm that would later hit the mountain Andy was on in Chamonix...

Having expected Andy home around 7.30pm on Sunday evening, he finally arrived home at 2.30pm on Monday afternoon, tired and full of aches but otherwise in one piece. The 3-hour descent promised by the guidebook took them 11 hours. Today he is hobbling around on a very swollen ankle and I am trying to remain sympathetic. I can't help feeling that my preferred option - market/reading/afternoon at home - turned out to be the better option.

Rabbit rabbit rabbit

When we moved into the house in Logras, we agreed to look after our landlord's two rabbits. Actually, I practically begged them. I'm a bit of an animal lover and fortunately Andy indulges me in this most of the time. In our seven years together our menagerie has included a dog, a cat, several rats and a hamster, but rabbits have not been part of the Buckley household - until now.

Our landlords had just acquired the two rabbits a few weeks before they were due to move back to the UK and, for various reasons, they ended up leaving them behind in the care of one of the neighbours. This particular neighbour has many rabbits of her own - and several chickens and a couple of goats - but none of them are pets. They are destined for the pot. Perhaps with this in mind, our landlords agreed that it would be a lot nicer for their two to come back 'home' to live with us and we happily agreed. Unfortunately, it hasn't all been happy families since then...

Snowy, for some reason sitting in her poo

 

Jura

The two rabbits, Snowy and Jura, are sisters and Snowy is very much the dominant of the two. She has always beaten Jura up a bit, but from what I understand it's never been a problem - Jura just stays out of Snowy's way most of the time. But when we took them back from the neighbour, Jura was covered in lots of lumps and scabs - it looked like Snowy had really been taking it out on her in the intervening couple of weeks. They hadn't had a split level cage at the neighbour's, so we hoped that when they were back in their usual two-floor hutch with us, they'd have a bit more space to themselves and things would improve. Sadly Jura's wounds didn't seem to heal and we had to separate them to stop more damage being done. Then, last Saturday, we were horrified to see one morning that one of Jura's scabs had opened up on her back into a huge open wound. Evidently, in her efforts to clean herself, she'd begun pulling off the scabby bits and had managed to make things worse. I won't post the picture, but it was pretty gruesome.

We called the vet out that day and he agreed that Jura needed to go to a vet clinic as soon as possible to have everything cleaned up and looked at properly. It took until Wednesday for us to get an appointment, and by this time we were fearing they would take one look at her and say that putting her down would be the kindest solution. But she is such a happy rabbit, and she had been eating and drinking and seeming quite content throughout the whole ordeal, that they they simply suggested cleaning her up and treating her with antibiotics. They kept her in overnight, anaesthetised her, shaved off her fur (!) cleaned her up and called the next day to say I could collect her. I arrived to be greeted by a little blue bundle:

 

We now have to take her back to the vets every three days to have her dressing changed, and she has to receive antibiotics twice a day - fed to her orally with a syringe. The first attempt at this wasn't terribly successful and most of it went on my shoe. Fortunately, she's since discovered that she loves the taste of the antibiotics, and she gleefully laps away at them with her little tongue. Fingers crossed, in about a month's time, she'll be rid of her big blue bandage and the fur will have begun growing back. It's still a very big wound to heal but we're hopeful. Snowy, meanwhile, is going to be relocated to a happier home where she can have the place to herself and not take out her grievances on anyone else. Who would have thought rabbits were so complicated?

CERN's quirks - part one

For those who have never been to CERN, I imagine it must seem like some kind of mythical place, where state-of-the-art technology and science boffins come together every day to make new discoveries and plough undaunted into the unknown in the name of science. And to some degree it is. But the reality is also a lot more mundane than some of the news report would have us believe.

It isn't, I'm afraid, a very visually attractive place. You might think that all that state-of-the-art technology would be carried over into the buildings themselves, and that walking around the site would be like wandering around a series of space age glass boxes, with holograms on the walls and giant pieces of particle-finding equipment around every other corner. Sorry to disappoint. If anything, CERN looks more like a big industrial estate or set of factories. When you think about all that atom-smashing equipment, they've got to make it somewhere, and a lot of the big buildings at CERN are dedicated to making stuff. Most of the rest of the buildings are dedicated to housing the thousands of people who work there, along long dark corridors of identical-looking offices.

But it has its quirks. All of the buildings are given numbers instead of names - Andy works in Building 40, Restaurant 1 is in in Building 501. These happen to be more or less side-by-side, so don't let the numbering system lull you into thinking there is a sensible pattern to it. The roads (of course there are roads, the site spans several square kilometres) are named after notable scientists:

Some famous scientist or other

The site has two restaurants, Restaurant 1 and Restaurant 2, and the bigger and busier of the two, Restaurant 1, serves an absurdly wide-ranging choice of food. It's not your average work canteen. (Until recently, the food options were called 'Menu proton' and 'Menu neutron'. It's a little sad to me that they abolished this fun (if slightly cheesy) naming system. Perhaps CERN weren't making any money out of 'Menu neutron' because it has no charge? Ba-dum-tssh. Thank you. I'm here all week.) Between the hours of 12 and 2, the restaurant swarms with hundreds of people, and you can choose from up to three different main courses, two lavish salad bars, freshly baked pizza, pasta, sushi, soup or just plain old sandwiches. And that's before we've got on to the patisserie counter with its huge array of beautiful freshly-made tarts and fancies.

But if you're the shy type and would prefer not to mingle with people at lunchtime, there's always the vending machine. Not the kind of vending machine that sells crisps and chocolate bars. The kind of vending machine that sells packets of cooked ham, cans of sweetcorn, bags of pasta, bottles of milk and processed sausages.

It's easy to see why some people might decide to hide away in their rooms sometimes. Physics chat is pretty much a constant at CERN, from first thing at breakfast (over freshly-made pastries, but you have to arrive early to get the custard-filled ones, or the beautifully-named frivolité d'abricot - or 'apricot frivolity') to last thing at night as people sit around outside drinking beer and looking out to the Mont Blanc in the distance. And while you're lunching, you can catch up on how things are going underground, on one of the beam monitors stationed around the restaurant:

If this is starting to sound a bit more like the CERN you had pictured, then here are a few more titbits to keep you happy. On the grass outside the restaurant, they've stationed one of the dipoles (giant magnets) for the LHC:

The dipole, with Mont Blanc's snowy peaks just visible in the background

And the inside of Building 40 has a giant mural of the CMS experiment emblazoned across it (bad news for the ATLAS folk who share the same office space):

Building 40

If you're lucky enough to have a guide, or a husband with an access card, you can also be taken down to the ATLAS control room to see the boffins in action, as they monitor what's going on within the LHC itself. The very best thing about this part (sadly not pictured) is the giant red button that they've put in the viewing area that sets off some flashing red lights just so visitors can legitimately press a Big Red Button (apparently it's quite distracting for those actually working behind the glass). 

ATLAS control room

The LHC has four 'experiments' around its 27km ring, and ATLAS (Andy's experiment) happens to be stationed right on the main CERN site (well, just across the road beside the swimming pool actually). I am one of the lucky folk who was able to descend in a lift some 100 metres underground and take a tour of ATLAS before the cavern was closed up and the LHC was started. It was quite a staggering sight. The cavern itself is the size of St Paul's Cathedral, but pretty much all of that available space is filled with something: from the huge pieces of structural metal to the tiny colourful electronics and hundreds and thousands of wires. And a human being - or several human beings - decided where each and every bit should go. What you see on the TV doesn't capture the magnitude of it. CERN may not be very pretty to look at on the outside, but what's going on inside is pretty exciting.

20 weeks: inside and out

20 weeks down and 20 weeks to go: Baby Buckley is half-cooked. It seems like such a long time since that morning in May when we found out we were expecting a baby. But that quite extraordinary meeting of two miniscule little cells has now grown into something around 6 inches long with two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet and all the appropriate digits.

I went back to Edinburgh on Monday for my 20-week scan. Not knowing how quickly I would be able to sort out healthcare in France, and not wanting to miss out on any scans I decided this was the best option. Unfortunately Andy couldn't join me but my mum decided last-minute that she would catch the train to Edinburgh and come with me to the hospital, which made it so much more exciting. Mum had never seen an ultrasound scan before and she thought it was magical. Forget all those fuzzy black and white static images that people gleefully show you when they announce the news: for most of us it's difficult to tell on these blurry pictures what's a head, what's leg and what's just background smudge. Here's the latest snapshot of Baby Buckley:

If you can spot the baby's outstretched arm lolling up by its head and just glimpse a hand on the other side then you get full marks.

When you see it all moving around on screen it's something else. Unlike the 12-week scan - where ultrasound technicians are only interested in three things: 1) How many of them are in there? 2) Does it have a heartbeat? and 3) How long is it? - the 20-week scan is a whole lot more detailed. In the UK, unless there are any unexpected problems/queries, it's the last time you'll see your baby before you give birth and I wasn't quite prepared for how much they need to check. They start with the head and move gradually down the body: measure head circumference, check size and shape of brain, check for two eyes and - amazingly - check the lenses on the eyes, check the nose and lips and look to see if the palate is intact, check the spine and make sure there is skin running all the way along the back of it (if there isn't this could be a sign of spina bifida or a similar spinal defect), look for two arms and two hands (difficult when the baby is lying back casually resting on/hiding one of its arms) check the heart and make sure the ventricles are coming off it in the right direction, look at the intestines, check the kidneys... skirt quickly over its privates if you don't want to know the sex (we don't) and carry on down to the legs. Are there two of them? Are the feet coming off at the right angle? What length is its femur (3cm, since you ask)? How many toes? The list goes on... Thankfully everything was present and correct, and although the baby didn't fancy cooperating and refused to pose for proper pictures, it was pretty special.

On the outside, things are starting to become evident too. I seem to be a bit of a slow grower, because every time I tell something that I'm pregnant (enceinte) they look down at my belly and back up at me as if to say, 'Are you sure...?' But at 20 weeks I now have a growing bump - and it's not all pain au chocolats.

I went for my first visit with the local doctor in France last week. She prodded me, weighed me, took my blood pressure and announced that everything was parfait. Unlike the UK, I will continue to see her - rather than a midwife - every month throughout my pregnancy. In December and January I'll have appointments at the local hospital, including a final scan at 8 months. And also unlike the UK, I'll be paying for the privilege each time: 30 euros for each doctor appointment, 100 euros for a scan and as for the birth... well, that could be quite expensive, depending on how it all turns out. Let's hope for a quick, no-fuss, in and out in 3 hours birth, shall we?

It's definitely an exciting time. The baby now kicks and squirms and somersaults throughout the day, and with a bit of patience Andy was lucky enough to feel one of them the other evening. Mum has presented me with yet more knitwear for its wardrobe - including a very precious loan from my sister, a cardigan knitted by my late grandma - and we've ordered the pram, car seat etc etc. Looks like we really are having a baby.

Buckleys went to mow, went to mow a meadow...

Today, there is only one topic worth writing about. The ride-on lawnmower.

We have what we estimate to be about an acre of garden, and it's pretty much all grass. There is a stream running down the middle and the various fruit trees dotted around but there's very little of what you might call 'landscaped garden'. It's really one big meadow. And to tackle this kind of grassy area you need one of these (husband optional, not included as standard):

It has five gears (plus neutral and reverse), its own handbrake, a choke, and even headlamps, so by most vehicle standards its fairly roadworthy. There are six grass-cutting levels, so you can choose between scalped tennis court or long, lustrous meadow grass, depending on your own particular penchant or the local fashion. After a slightly lurching start, which nearly saw Andy plough into the house, it was actually pretty smooth-going and he was soon ramping it up to fifth gear and tackling tight bends with ease.

I mentioned the trees. These, however, do present some problems on the mower.

Now I know you're all thinking: 'What about pregnant ladies, can they drive the mower too?' Indeed they can. When I saw the local doctor the other day, she told me: 'No parachuting, no diving. Anything else is fine.' She didn't say anything about not riding around my garden on a little tractor.

We all believe we're better than average drivers, and I now believe I am also a better than average mower driver. Even the chickens looked on with awe.

With all the mowing and strimming and raking up the cuttings it did take us the best part of three hours to do the job. But it was a bit like going to the funfair and having a go on the dodgems, except it was free, in your back garden and with none of the nasty bumping. Visitor passes are also available for selected lucky guests.

What to do when you've nothing to do

Technically, I'm not working while we're in France this year. I say technically, because I am still writing programme notes for various people and continuing my admin work for Delphian Records, but these are just little nuggets of activity nestled among the long stretches of time spent being a housewife. It's a bit of a novelty for me. This time last year, I was juggling seven different freelance jobs and I had a PhD to finish, leaving very little time for anything at all. So what does one do, when one has nothing to do?

So far, I can't really say I've had much 'free' time. I'm enjoying filling it up with as many nice things as possible. One of the perks of being attached to CERN in one way or another is the availability of clubs, people and organisations who do stuff. Yesterday, I went along to the CERN Women's Club coffee morning (yes, I know) and became a member, which allows me to join any of the activity groups that they run. I think there are a lot of jam-makers and jumper-knitters and cake-bakers among them - although that is certainly no bad thing - but generally it is an organisation that supports us hangers-on, or the WAGS as I like to think of ourselves. Apparently, they recently voted on whether or not they should allow men to join, as CERN employees are not all male and there could, of course, be CERN husbands who have come along for the ride and are looking for people to get to know etc etc. I would have thought the clue was in the title 'Women's Club' but I hear that it spawned a big debate on discrimination and diversity and so on...

Anyway, for me the first port of call is learning French. I have an A in GCSE French but that seems like so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I've decided that in the 5 months left before Baby Buckley arrives, I must at least get my French to a level where I can explain that I'm in labour and ask for the right forms of pain relief. CERN have a series of language classes for people from beginners to advanced, so I took an online test to see which group I should join. There are 6 levels, running through A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 to C2, with A1 being for total beginners and C2 being for near-native speakers. Alarmingly, given that the test was multiple choice and I had no idea what most of the words meant, and guessed at least 50% of the questions, I came out as B2: "On level B2 the speaker has reached a level of independence that allows them to express their opinion, elaborate a point of view and negotiate. The learner is well versed in using the acquired language and is able to correct their own mistakes." Well, I suppose I am capable of telling people that I have one cat, one husband, two brothers and two sisters, that they are called Bella, Andy, James, Martin, Helen and Julie respectively (elaboration) that I like some of them but not all of them (expressing opinion) and that I would be prepared to trade some in for others (negotiation), and I know to say 'Merde! Pardon!' if I make a mistake. But I emailed the teacher to say I'd prefer to join the B1 class. Her response: if you are joining B1 or B2 you should be writing to me in French. Ouch. Failure at the first hurdle.

I've also signed up to yoga, to give my body a chance to stretch now that I'm having trouble reaching down to put my socks on. I've been swimming in the lovely outdoor pool opposite CERN, and walking down to our local patisserie (work-based rewards system), and cooking lots and lots.I've also made my first contribution towards the baby's extensive knitwear collection, a pair of booties:

For those who are interested in such things, the baby is now a full-time kicker and if I watch closely, I can see my tummy twitch as it wriggles around. Andy says I have a little alien inside, which is a bit disconcerting. I'll be back in Edinburgh next week for my 20-week scan, so it will be fun to see just how many arms and legs it has now. It only had two of each at the 12-week scan but if the wriggling is anything to go by I fear it may have morphed into an octopus since then.

A weekend of exploration

With the good weather continuing, we had a weekend of exploration in the sunshine. We live in an area known as Pays de Gex, which may just be one of the prettiest areas of France, the Alps aside. The Gex area includes the beautiful Jura mountains, which loom over us and the chain of other villages that are dotted along their foothills. In the winter, there’s some fairly decent skiing here and who can complain when it’s just 10 minutes from your door? (Well, me actually, as Baby Buckley is preventing me from skiing this year.) And in the summer, the mountains, their forests, lakes and plateaus are a haven for walkers and mountain bikers – those who don’t want to travel that extra 90 minutes to get to the Alps. I suddenly realise I'm starting to sound like a tourist brochure...

On Saturday, after a slow and lazy start, we took a trip up to Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, which is one of the bigger towns in the Gex area. It wasn’t as picturesque as we’d hoped so we carried on up the road to try and find a gorge marked on our map with a pretty little picture of tumbling waterfalls and rocks. No one appears to be concerned with signing things well in France, not even for what would be considered a fairly decent tourist attraction in the UK, so it wasn't terribly easy to find. We eventually located an almost deserted car park with a map of the gorge and wound our way down the rocky paths to the river.

Happy Jo.

The Valserine river (a tributary of the Rhone) has done some impressive carving away of the limestone here over the ages, leaving strange holes and inlets in the rock, as well as creating a series of deep river gorges and mini waterfalls. While Andy peered precariously over the edge and gave me small heart palpitations as he hopped between the mossy covered rocks, I sat back and watched the lizards scuttling around the rocks. 

Spot Andy, a little too close to the edge for my liking

In need of some lunch, we decided to follow a roadside sign advertising an auberge, although the once again excellent signing ensured there was no indication of how far away it would be. As we would our way up the mountainside, climbing gradually higher and higher, it became clear to us that the auberge doubled as a mountain-top cafe for skiers in the winter and that we would, in fact, be following the mountain road right to the top. I comforted myself with the knowledge that this would surely be a quaint and picturesque cafe with some of the best views in the area, and that they would be able to serve me a lovely fresh salad as Andy sipped on a beer and we gazed out over the mountains. My dream nearly came true: it did indeed have some jaw-dropping views out over the valley, but since it was 2.30pm they had already stopped serving lunch. When you are pregnant and you are hungry you have to have food NOW, so sadly we had to leave the beautiful views behind and set off back down the mountainside in search of actual nourishment.

On the way back home, we stopped off at a viewpoint Andy remembered from some years ago, which looks out over the Rhone and the impressive Fort L’Ecluse, which somehow manages to cling to the rocky mountainside.

The Rhone, cutting through the Jura at Fort L'Ecluse

Fort L'Ecluse, just about visible against the mountainside

On Sunday, we went further afield, in search of some mountain biking for Andy. A few years ago we did a paragliding course in Morzine, just on the edge of the Alps, and they also have some great mountain biking trails in the summer. With the lifts due to close this weekend, Andy wanted to make the most of the last opportunity to get out there, so while he hurtled downhill quite fast on his bike, I sat at the top of the cable car station enjoying the view, reading my book and tucking into the nice salad that I'd been denied the day before. Being pregnant is tough.

The view from the cable car at Les Gets, near Morzine

La fin d'été

The day after we arrived in France, we woke up to pouring rain. Later that day the car thermometer read 14 degrees and I had to pull on a cardigan. I don't know if you have your own French dream but I do, and this wasn't it. Chatting to our neighbour over the garden fence later that day, he confirmed our suspicions: 'La fin d'été', he said, pointing at the sky. 

We have a lovely balcony that looks over the garden from our living room and I had pictured lots of lunches outside, barbecues in the evening and the late summer sunshine sending me a light brown colour before winter sets in. I am really quite looking forward to a proper winter here, as the mountains around us turn white and the trees in our garden become heavy with snow. I'm just not ready for it yet. We left behind grey drizzle in Scotland and I was hoping for a little burst of summer before hibernating begins in earnest. 

A week after our arrival and today the sun has finally obliged. It is 26 degrees outside, and I've just had to move indoors after getting too hot eating lunch out in the sunshine. I even had breakfast on the balcony, looking up to the Jura mountains. 

The temperature is set to be around 30 degrees at the weekend, which is almost a little too hot, if I'm being picky. 

Yesterday wasn't too bad either, and Andy and I barbecued our dinner, as much for the novelty as anything else. I also got a little carried away reading cookbooks during the afternoon, so we ended up having three courses for no particular reason. A very French starter of Anchoiade served on toasted croutons, followed by homemade burgers and salad, and a plum tart for dessert. The plum tart was made on demand for Andy, who jumped into the car on Wednesday evening saying: 'Everyone is fasting tomorrow so you have to make plum tart.' The full explanation makes a little more sense. Thursday was a local holiday in Geneva, called jeune genevois (meaning Genevan fast). Historically, people fasted on this day, as our friend Wikipedia explains:

Geneva was a cradle of Protestantism and the Reformation. There was a Geneva-wide fast in the beginning of October 1567 as a sign of friendship with Protestants undergoing persecution in Lyon, France and this was most likely the first Jeûne genevois (Genevan fast). Five years later, news of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the slaughter of several thousand Huguenots beginning on 24 August 1572 triggered a fast throughout Geneva on the following 3 September, which could be why the date of later yearly fasts was shifted back by almost month.

By 1640, through sway of the reformed cantons, the fast had become yearly and was carried on even after the Genevan revolution of 1792. Jeûne genevois later became a patriotic holiday, symbolizing both Geneva's proud identity and its Protestantism. By the beginning of the Helvetic Republic folklore had thoroughly linked Jeûne genevois with the widely remembered St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and fasting in Geneva as the slaughter of whole Protestant families carried on throughout France. 

The holiday has now largely lost its religious significance but many businesses still take the day as a holiday. So why the plum tart? This part is stil slightly unclear. It is thought that, with Genevan plums being very much in season at the moment, people would make the plum tart the night before to allow them to spend the day dedicating themselves to prayer. The tart would then be eaten at the end of the fast - but not, as we did, following two other courses. And we missed out the fasting part too...

In any case, I made a plum tart, not entirely the same as the local variety, but it turned out pretty well. 

An appointment with the bank manager

We seem to have been drowning in paperwork over the past week. There are the forms to apply for a Swiss card (for Andy), the forms to apply for a French card (for both of us), the forms to apply for Green Plates (which exempt our car from French tax), the application for a CERN car parking pass... Then there's applying for a bank account, which you can't do unless you have proof of residence, but proof of residence is usually provided by a utility bill - but you can't pay for any utilities until you have a bank account set up... We also need to set up a phone line and internet connection at the house, and get our new French mobile phones, but we need a French account open in order to do these too. It seems to have been an endless spiral of signatures and printouts, but today we emerged victorious.

We had an appointment at the bank at 9am this morning. A bank where you have to press a buzzer to be let in and - curiously - to be let out. It all looked rather official, so we turned up promptly and looking reasonably smart, ready to meet our 'bank manager'. In the UK there's this antiquated habit where people talk about needing to see their 'bank manager' to secure a loan, or to get advice on changing their mortgage - when really what they mean is that they need to visit their local branch and speak to whoever happens to be working that day. Very few people, as far as I can tell, have had any kind of personal relationship with an individual 'bank manager' since the 1960s. Not so in France.

We were greeted by a very smiley lady called Annabelle, whose wall was bedecked with pictures drawn by her children, and who talked us through the ins and outs of opening an account, lamenting as she did so the fact that 'the Francais, they love paper... so much paper'. She wasn't wrong. The printer kept spewing out printout after printout, which we had to initial, sign, check, sign again... As we continued dealing with the ever-increasing mountain of paperwork, Annabelle would occasionally divert to exclaim: 'Oh! You must go to Yvoire! It's very beautiful, on the lake and you can eat fresh... how you say... perche? Perch, yes.' Then she would look back at the computer screen and continue entering our passport details before remembering to add: 'But only go there in the summer. In the winter you must go to Les Rousses. Let me show you pictures of Les Rousses...' And up comes a new tab on Internet Explorer and she turns her screen towards us to show pictures of a very beautiful looking mountainside village. 'The food here is excellent, and the views are beautiful. Lyon is also nice... Do you know Lyon? Lyon is only 2 hours drive, maximum, it is famous for its food...' We emerged an hour later with her saying: 'Here is my email address. You can email at any time if you have any questions. Either about the bank account or if you just want to know which restaurants to try...'

Another win for the Buckleys. We chose this particular bank simply because they offer the option of having two accounts in one: one that uses Swiss Francs and another in Euros. The problem with living right on the border of two countries with different currencies is that you have to carry two sets of cash around and if you pay for something in France on a Swiss card, you incur a charge - just the same as if you use your UK card abroad. With this bank, we can have separate cards for each account, so that if we're in Switzerland we pay in Francs, and if we're in France we pay in Euros. It also turned out that we had, by happy chance, joined the French equivalent of the Co-op bank, so we walked out very happy customers and marched onwards the Orange shop ready to shuffle another load of paperwork in the name of a new telelphone line.

What we left behind... and what we've gained.

The saddest thing about leaving the UK for a year is leaving behind our wonderful set of friends and neighbours in Beech Place. We moved into Riverside Cottage just short of 2 years ago and it's been such a happy time. Our little cul-de-sac of seven old stone cottages in Penicuik is a lovely little community, and we've got to know and grow fond of all of our neighbours over the time there. Bella the cat has also become a bit of a local feline celebrity, regularly appearing from their linen cupboards or materialising from an upstairs bedroom where she's been sleeping for the afternoon, having casually let herself in through an open window.

Apparently, Beech Place has revolted in protest at our moving. In the two years we were there, we had some pretty bad weather - 3 feet of snow in the back garden, enough rain to make the river at the bottom of the garden rise a couple of feet closer to my veg patch and some powerful storms that knocked out our elecricity for a day - but it's never flooded. All that changed when we left. The day we packed up, last Wednesday, we left the house at about 11am in the midst of some unpleasant drizzle. We drove across to Carlisle where the rain was pelting down and there was a fair amount of surface water on the roads. Apparently, the same bad weather took it upon itself to visit Beech Place, as I took a call from our neighbour around 6pm, who had come home to find that flood waters had saturated Beech Place and risen a foot up the walls on the inside of her house. She kindly took a look inside our place and we hadn't fared much better.

The flood waters had travelled all the way along our corridor, taking lots of mud with them and soaking the carpet in my study. The garage is the first thing the waters would have reached as they coursed down the hill, so it saw the brunt of it.

 

But actually, we were very fortunate. Had we moved out a day later, all of our belongings would have been sitting in boxes on the hall floor, and would have been wrecked by the water. Although our letting agents had a mild panic when I told them the news - with our tenants scheduled to move in just a couple of weeks later - no major damage has been caused, and the floors simply needed a good clean to rid them of the mud. We have a film company coming to use the house for a few days before the tenants arrive so hopefully it will all be back to normal by then.

Our neighbours in France have a lot to live up to, if they're going to match the friendliness and helpfulness of those we left behind. But the signs are good. We dropped in to see our next-door-neighbours-but-one on Sunday, and they promptly served Andy a beer and fixed me a pregnancy-friendly decaf coffee, before launching in to lots of useful information about the local area. Out came a whole batch of brochures and information booklets about what to do nearby. One of them even offered to make me an appointment to register with the local doctor and - if I understood correctly - is going to accompany me there on Wednesday evening. The only snag is that they don't speak English and our French is still pretty rusty. We were told what was apparently a very funny story right at the end, which we understood completely... right up until the punchline. We smiled anyway but I've no idea what they said. I think it was something about rabbits. After an hour of smiling, nodding and saying 'erm....' and attempting to describe the intricacies of paying for French versus Swiss healthcare with half-forgotten GCSE French we emerged with our heads in a bit of a spin. At least I have the next 5 months to get my French up to scratch before the baby arrives, and by then I hope I've found the words for 'ow, that really hurts', 'no one told me it was twins' and 'please can someone ring my husband and prise him away from work to witness the birth of his first child.' Wish me luck.

Nous habitons en France

2012 is proving to be a big year for us Buckleys. In the space of just a few months, I finally completed my PhD, Andy was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Royal Society, we found out we were expecting our first baby and we upped sticks and moved ourselves to France, where Andy is taking up an Associateship at CERN for a year (technically, CERN is in Switzerland... although part of it is in France, as it crosses the border... but more of those border complications later).

We're living in Logras for the year - a small village just outside Peron, about 10 kilometres from CERN on the French side. Since I'm not working while we're here, instead dedicating myself to be the very best CERN wife I can be (which so far largely seems to involve doing the paperwork, producing tasty meals and growing a baby), I thought I would blog about the year's experiences.

It's been a good start so far, although not quite the French dream I had expected. As we drove all the way from Edinburgh and made our way through most of France, I anticipated a scenic drive in the late-August sunshine through sleepy French villages, beautiful vineyards and stunning countryside, with the occasional stop en route for a freshly-baked pastry and a jus d'orange. It turns out that the drive from Calais to Logras is essentially one long and very boring motorway. France is really big. And most of it is made up of fields. We drove through the rain for 6 hours along one péage after another (toll motorways, for which we paid around 50 EUR for the privelege) without any notable change in the scenery. Finally, out of sheer bordeom we decided to detour through the Jura mountains for the final couple of hours. Even though we were exhausted from two days of travelling, it was a good decision as this was a beautiful route, if a little hard on the fuel consumption as we climbed to around 1000m and navigated the many hairpin bends. We saw plenty of vaches with their jangling cow-bells around their necks, wound through the sleepy villages I'd hoped for several hours earlier and stopped at the oddest pizza restaurant I've ever come across in Champagnole (www.bigbenpizza.com), where we were served (after a lengthy wait) by an unfriendly proprieter who had dedicated his restaurant to rock memorabilia of the strangest kinds.

When we finally arrived in Logras at c. 9.30pm (having left Dover at 7.30am that morning), we were too tired to really take everything in. But we appeared to have agreed to rent a mansion with more rooms than we could possibly need and a basement as big as our house in Penicuik. It looked more than a little daunting for us to fill. We woke up the next morning to heavy rain and the realisation that we live in a whole new country with neighbours who don't speak a word of English.

But we're not complaining. Our village is a true French mountainside rural idyll, with winding streets that amble up the hillside, tumbeldown barns, old stone water fountains at the crossroads, just one small cafe that only opens at 5pm each day, an antiquated, disused train station, and views of Mont Blanc on a clear day. We have a acre's worth of garden with a small stream running through it, four different types of apple tree, plus cherry and walnut trees, with goats and chickens in the next-door neighbour's garden and mountains looming over us in the background. It's really beautiful and we think we're going to like it.