Category: Daily life

Christmas and new year

The Christmas holiday has been quite relaxed and low-key. It rained almost non-stop for the first 10 days, and we hardly went out of the house. We spent Christmas day at home, and went for a walk in the afternoon. The kids were spoiled, with presents from family and friends.

We spent new years eve with brothers ans sisters from the church and welcomed the new year together.

One of the main activities of this holiday was to move the study to a bigger room. I am now sharing with Jean-Baptiste’s bedroom. It’s not ideal, but we hope it will work out fine for the time being. Maxime and Benjamin are now sharing a bedroom, where the study used to be.

The holiday is coming to an end and the children will go back to school on Monday.

Monsieur Bleu

monsieur bleuOn Saturday, I went to the theatre. It was the first time in probably 20 years, at least. Maxime had been given an invitation to a show called “Monsieur Bleu”, and I thought it would be good to spend some time with my boy. We sat on the stage, in front of the two actresses. There were probably about 30 other people, maybe a bit more. Everything was blue. We laughed and had a lot of fun.

The School Christmas show

Once again, the school had organised a Christmas show with the children performing. It’s the third one we go to, and this year’s was the best so far. Only half the school was taking part (the younger ones), so there were less people and the show was much shorter. We had the opportunity to see some faces and catch up with the news. We were glad to be there. At the end of the show, Father Christmas came to distribute sweets to the children.

Our school being a state school, there are no references to Christ, but we are getting used to that.

Sometimes, French bureaucracy reminds me of Kafka

I hate bureaucracy, especially filling in forms. I dread receiving papers to fill in. It always takes me ages to fill them in. They end up at the bottom of a pile of stuff, and I remember them after receiving the first or second reminder. And the French system is well known for its intricacies. Our recent experience with French Children benefit has not reconciled me with French Bureaucracy.

When we moved out of the UK, our rights to receive UK children Benefit stopped. That’s fair enough, we were not UK residents any more. After leaving the paperwork for a while, I started filling in the paperwork to get French children benefit. That’s when the Kafkaesque experience started. After sending the paper, it took over a year before we were able to get any money from them. They claimed we were not supposed to get money, because we have a British employer… According to them we were supposed to get UK child benefit. We exchanged a lot of letter, I sent them all the documents I could proving we were declaring our income in France (although it is too low to pay income tax here) and that we could not get UK child benefits. Then it stopped. Eventually, we received a letter saying that we should have received money from them all along. They even back payed all the money they owed us (about 2 years worth). The key words with French Bureaucracy are: patience, patience, patience.

A weekend in the life

On Saturday morning, I went to a meeting organised by our local MP on the subject of Gay marriage. About 30 people had come along. Our MP gave her reasons for supporting the change in the law, and had invited a few people to speak, all in support of her own position. It was quite disappointing. I had gone to listen to their arguments in favor of the change. To be honest, it’s pretty thin. My impression before going was that it is mainly a pragmatic reason: society has changed, relationships also, so we need to change the law. This was confirmed by one of the people speaking who himself admitted it was a pragmatic law. Appart from that, teh key issue at the end is our definition of marriage. Their position is that is is only a civil contract between two person, and started in France in 1804. How were people relating to each other before 1804, I wonder?

After that, I went with Jean-Baptiste and maxime to Jean-Baptiste’s football match. It rained and lot and we got soaked. In the evening, we watched a film together and went to bed.

On Sunday, I was preaching in St Brieuc. I had a good time. I felt very unprepared, but It seems the message went through if I believe the discussions I had at the end. I went home for lunch, And we stayed inside all afternoon.

The worst journey ever

We left Ecouen at 2 pm, looking forward to a 550 km journey (310 Miles) which should have taken 5 1/2 hours. But soon after leaving, we got stuck in traffic. It took 1 1/2 hour to drive about 10 miles. There was heavy traffic for most of the journey, more traffic jams in Caen, and when we reached Brittany, it started raining heavily. We stopped in MacDonald’s in Lamballe for food and arrived home at 11pm, after a 9 hours journey. We were exhausted. The kids were great and very patient since they didn’t have proper food until we stopped in Lamballe.

I was grateful for God’s common grace which kept everyone from bad accident. It’s amazing the number of near miss you can see when the traffic is so dense.