This weekend we had some visitors – my former colleague from Euronews, Toks, and his wife Laurence.
We took them on a tour of Aix and also fitted in a trip to the seaside at La Çiotat.

The weather was lovely and eating by the port made me remember how lucky we are to live here at the moment.

And it was lovely to see some friends from Lyon again.

À bientôt

As you may remember Aix is celebrating its most famous son Paul Cezanne and there is an exhibition of the work he made at his family home in Jas de Bouffan.

It is a really impressive exhibition with lots of drawings and paintings by the great man including les joueurs de cartes (the card players), plenty of self portraits and still lifes – nature morte in French.

I love his nature morte – he painted a lot of fruit – pears, cherries and apples.

His use of colour is really eye-catching. I didn’t take any photos of the paintings in the exhibition so here’s a quick photo of the bookshop’s offerings.

If you are in Aix before 12 October I would highly recommend buying a ticket.

We are continuing our house hunting and had spotted a potential new home in an estate agents’ window in La Tour d’Aigue.

The house itself was in Cucuron – a nice little village not far from where we are now that is quite lively – with plenty of bars and restaurants and un marché nocture.

The lovely agent showed us round. The house is made up of a top floor flat with three bedrooms and a couple of terraces.

There is also a completely self-contained guest flat on the ground floor and a studio that is currently rented out to a doctor.

It was right in the heart of the village but with a garage and a pool – our ideal combination of a mix between quieter countryside but not quite as remote as where we are now.

It could be a good opportunity to try our hand at renting out a flat in the summer to visitors to Provence – AirB&B style.

We are planning on going back for another look.

I had to go to a workshop at the French unemployment office France Travail.

As ever, it was an opportunity for me to practice my French listening and speaking skills.
After having sat through a presentation about another way to potentially find work we all had to give our opinion on what we had heard.
The woman in front of me was an artist and so said it wasn’t really her thing but that she had to come.
She then asked: je peux m’eclipser? and the woman running the workshop said of course.
I had to look it up but it means Can I sneak out?
I like that and will make sure I try to use it when appropriate.
On the job front, I saw a couple of interesting leaflets asking for applicants.
Might give this one a go.

Without a 9-5 job or children at school how can we tell that c’est la rentrée à Venelles?

Of course it’s the return of the lunchtime queue at our local boulangerie Lavarenne.

It is the time of year for all the associations of Venelles to come together and attract new members.

From dance classes to tennis to archery (tir à l’arc) there was lots to see.

A couple of things caught my eye. To say playing table tennis you can say faire du ping.

And despite Venelles being quite a small place, some people are passionate about it getting its own railway station. 3,200 of them so far.

We didn’t add our names to the list.

We made a swift visit to the UK to see Matthew on his birthday and help my brother celebrate his 30th wedding anniversary.

While walking around central London we stumbled across this bottle of wine outside a restaurant.

It was a nice reminder of our French home.

We heard an unusual bird call in our driveway so I turned on the Merlin app which identified it as a bee-eater – un guêpier.

We couldn’t spot it though but suddenly there were five of them flying above our heads.

The next moment there were 15 and then about 20 guêpiers spent the next 30 minutes circling our house and, I guess, feasting on bees.

They didn’t stop for a moment so you’ll have to forgive the quality of the photos.

Our son Matthew was visiting and we saw that they was un marché nocturne at Cucuron so we went to see what it was like.

There were a lot of stalls and food trucks and beer tents.

And plenty of things to buy.

There was also a games corner where Matthew and I had a go at this:

And there was hoopla for some smaller children.

It was a popular evening and it was good to see a small town so full of people on an August evening.

I went to Aix to meet up again with some fellow entrepreneurs.

As it was Thursday it was market day which meant some pretty impressive displays.

This one reminded me of a day in Limonest when we had bumped into a man with a lot of garlic.

But there was a lot more on show here.