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4. Meubles

We don't sell pallets

The dog is an asshole.
Today, he arrived while we were eating breakfast, spent about 15 minutes staring intently at our baguettes and then stole, destroyed and ultimately hid Sam’s ball in what is becoming an increasing fraction of our stuff that he is hiding in his castle. Speaking to him firmly appears to only encourage him. I fear this may go on for some time.
Yesterday I underwent a minor blogging crisis, having had a day which mainly involved trips to the park and a pleasant bike ride, which was very enjoyable but terrible from a writing perspective. The reader can henceforth assume that if I’m not writing, we’re having a nice time.
We set off for our last day in our blue tank of a van to acquire the remaining furniture - the shops having been closed yesterday, only to find that for the second hand furniture shops, the weekend appears to also stretch into Monday. Many people had also suggested that we used the French craigslist equivalent ‘le bon coin’ - but all our emails went without reply, leaving the terrifying prospect of negotiating a craigslist transaction over the phone in French.
In a slightly desperate state of mind, I decided we could construct all of our furniture out of shipping pallets - so we crossed town which involved lots of terrifying autoroute driving to a pallet recycling center near the airport. The place had, perhaps 50,000 pallets stacked outside, so when I walked into the office and said ‘on veut 24 palletes’ was met with ‘Désolé, ce n’est pas possible’. I was somewhat perplexed and walked out, wondering how many pallets they would need before they felt secure and happy.
At this point we cracked, and went to a soulless furniture warehouse near the airport and simply bought all the things we needed - which was both pleasing in its efficiency, and ethically inexcusable. Our blue Renault monstrosity swallowed all les meubles with ease - almost begging us to go back into the shop to buy more mattresses, just because we could.
We went for dinner with some of Rosie’s future collaborators who mercifully spoke English. Sam was entranced by their 9 year old son, staying up for hours then collapsing in a heap at 11pm. We suspected afterwards that perhaps we had been too complimentary about France in our conversation, and that in order to be accepted in French culture, one has to complain about it. There is much to learn...

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 25, 2018 at 2:09 PM

    You need some tough cats to take care of the dog!

    Hang in there.

    ReplyDelete

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