Day 83 (Tuesday)

Super sweaty again today but at least I don’t have to go out until later, there is usually a nice gentle breeze on the terrace. I did a lot of practice of French on duolingo today and after about two hours my score went up from 37% to 38% - not exactly encouraging!

After lunch we walked down to town to meet Mara at 3pm to go and see a flat for sale in the old town in the street adjacent to where I used to live and above the Caravel restaurant. It didn’t look much from the outside…

… but on the inside it was stunning and it has a fireplace, not that we would need one. The living room is huge, there used to be two bedrooms but they converted it into one bedroom making the living room massive for a place in the old town.

 
The owner’s name is Marie and this is her (on the left)sitting with Mara while we looked around

And she had the sweetest, friendliest small dog I’ve ever met.

The one remaining bedroom with a glass wall adding to the already sunny brightness of the whole flat

There is an ultramodern newly fitted kitchen with the biggest fridge in France, which also has an ice dispenser.

She is moving back to Lille in the north of France and needs to sell the flat to buy somewhere in Lille. She doesn’t really want to move but her husband is retiring and their children live in Lille. She is leaving all the furniture, two sofas, a gorgeous dresser, a dining table with 6 chairs, an enormous TV etc. etc. and to top it all off there is a sea view. 

We said our thank yous and went for a cold drink with Mara along the seafront. She has known Marie for a very long time and thinks the deal is sound and some taxes and other expenses could be avoided by doing this privately. There is certainly a lot to think about – if it wasn’t for sodding Brexit all of this malarkey would be a whole lot easier.

Spent a few hours working on my duolingo course and at the beginning of the session I was 37% fluent and after two hours I went up to 39%, for some reason the microphone on the site isn’t working, hope it comes back soon because it’s useful for pronunciation.

We met Andy in his bar (which is actually called Le Phare) just before 8pm and had a drink there before going to his flat – a two-minute walk away. As with the flat we saw earlier it looks quite ordinary and small from the inside but it was surprisingly big. The bedroom was windowless and looked a bit like a cave but the rest of the flat was lovely. He had prepared a dinner of wild boar and gnocchi and it was delicious. We spent a lovely evening the boys talking about music and Andy and I reminisced about the good old yachtie days, remembering old friends. I wish we’d had emails back then, maybe some of us would have stayed in touch, it’s virtually impossible now as I don’t even know what their surnames are. In the days before email addresses and mobiles we didn’t tend to use surnames, did we? When we left and said goodbye we planned for him to come for a lasagna at our place next week.

This is the view from Andy’s flat and if we had bought Philippe’s flat last year he can see into the flat across the way. There are neighbours and there are close neighbours!

Our flat would have been the one with the shutters slightly open on the first floor and the balcony you can see near the light would have been our balcony. We wouldn’t have needed to use phones, we could have just shouted across the square!