Mad Darby Diaries

As I understand it Parliament voted to take control of Brexit and then voted against their own 8 alternatives.  In the US the Mueller report was finished but no-one has seen it but the Attorney General who more or less declared Trump innocent of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.  The dictators of this world must be laughing themselves silly at how absurdly our democracies are functioning, or not functioning, not in any sensible and fair way anyway. Apparently the garbage men are on strike.  My neighbours and I didn't know this but after the bins sat outside for three days someone at the tennis club said the tip was closed as well due to strike action.  No-one seems to know how long the strike will last or what they are striking about and no-one seems that bothered about it either, which is normal in France. As my bruises turn to purple and my body gets stiffer I am contemplating whether I have any chance of winning my match on Saturday.  I doubt it but...

Yesterday I tried to play tennis but with a bruised hand I couldn't actually hold the racquet, a somewhat important requirement when playing tennis, so I gave up.  On the way back I dropped into the newly refurbished supermarket in the village. I selected six or seven items and put them on the counter.  The girl serving weighed the apples then went to the display to find out how much they were.  She returned and wrote the price on a piece of paper under the heading 'fruit' (well in French obviously).  The next item was a bag of onions.  Once again she trotted off to see how much they were and came back and wrote down the amount.  She did this with every item.  I glanced behind me and there was a queue of about six people, some of whom were workmen just wanting to buy their lunch.  When the assistant had laboriously repeated this searching, writing method for each item she picked up a calculator and added it up.  I wouldn't have been surpri...

Yesterday our tennis match took us south of Niort, an hour and a half drive away and it was my turn to drive.  I played my single's match and won but I had to play a double's match straight away.  It was in the second set when I was running backwards and looking up that my feet tangled round each other and I fell very heavily on my right side.  It hurt.  We were playing  outside on a hard court so there was nothing to cushion my fall.  I did what I always tell children to do when they fall over and started counting.  Un, deux, trois,....I had reached huit by the time the  other players had gathered round to see if I was alright and for a moment there I believe they thought I was delirious with my counting,  At ten I got up and said I was fine.  I lied of course, I hurt everywhere and blood was pouring from a cut elbow.  I continued playing but a few minutes later I hit myself rather spectacularly at the base of my nose with my ow...

Someone has just asked me if I can play in a tennis tournament on the 25 May.  I just about know what is happening on the 25th March, April is still in the future and May is another lifetime.  Today I did the re-organised walk from yesterday.  Everybody had an opinion on the direction we should be going but I managed to keep them on course until the last half hour.  'Turn left', I said authoritatively.  Four turned right, five went straight on and the rest looked bewildered.  No-one turned left.  The majority won.  I shouted that it was muddy down there (having squelched my way through it yesterday) and that we must turn left.  No wonder Napoleon lost.  They ignored me. It is amazing that members of a walking group turn up wearing trainers, casual shoes and even 'proper shoes'.  They all ploughed on and soon came up against wet and mud.  Was this a 'I told you so moment?'  No.  I listened to their ohs! and ahs! a...

I put on 2 kilos in weight while I was in the UK.  This is unusual for me as I don't normally put on any weight.  I mention it in passing because at the end of the week it will be a distant memory. On Sunday I had a tennis match for the club team.  I lost and although I have managed to keep my place in the 2nd team I suspect that next season I will be demoted to the 3rd.  On Tuesday I played 2 matches, one in the morning and one in the evening.  What idiot agrees to do that?  I lost the one in the morning, which I thought I would win and won the one in the evening, which I felt sure I would lose. On Monday I met up with friends to discuss the walk, which I am going to lead tomorrow.  They had planned the route but weren't able to do the actual walk.  After detailed explanations I suspected that they didn't really have confidence that I wouldn't lose 12 people in the French countryside.  I told them not to worry, I got it, but truthfully ...

I know people who dream of moving to a pretty village in France with character, ancient walls and customs, a cafe, a market and a peaceful river trickling through this idyllic scene and there are thousands of villages just like that.  Unfortunately my village has none of the above and has been described as the ugliest village in France. There is a river a kilometre away and it did flood last June racing across the fields and filling the street with about a foot of water so for one day at least you could say we had a river running through the village.  We did have a cafe/bar but that closed as did the butcher, the baker, the post office, and surprisingly the funeral parlour, and even when they were open the setting was pretty dire.  Even the church caught fire and has remained closed for 2 or 3 years.  There is a supermarket, which stocks out of date goods, fly covered fruit and pretty awful bottles of wine run by a lady who just wants to sell it and retire somewhe...

My sisters, 3 of them, and I are like chalk and cheese but when we get together we laugh a lot.  We all see the funny side of the ridiculous and we take the mickey out of each other, in fact we are merciless.   Our politics are diverse, in fact so diverse that we need an umpire but then we put the kettle on and agree to disagree, and go back to laughing, no political correctness where we are concerned.  Last week I picked up one sister in Hampshire, drove to Cardiff to pick up another sister and then I drove all the way to Cornwall to visit our eldest sister who hasn't been well.  Not having the stamina to stay in the crazy hotel near our sister's house, I had booked us into another one, more remote.  As the lanes became narrower and all road signs disappeared a voice from the back of the car said (as though I wasn't there) 'I hope she hasn't booked us into a caravan' at which point we passed a sign saying 'used caravans for sale'.   When we fina...

The Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.  That has  been my favourite quote since I first heard it about 50 years ago and it would do well for the world to take it on board.  By knocking down statues, removing plaques and changing names of buildings it is trying to cleanse history.  Slavery happened, unfair justice systems happened, we can't change what happened .  All we can do is ensure that those practices don't happen now or in the future.  Keeping a statue of someone who may have had dubious opinions at a time when those opinions were normal is denying history and erasing memories.  It is like 1984. In the States a group are trying to change the name of the John Wayne airport and remove his statue because in 1971 he said black people could be accepted when they were better educated.  Yes that is offensive to us now but not in 1971 when there was still outrageous racism in the States.  Instead of tearing down ...