Day 965 (Thursday) 30^th January 2020

I was in a bit of a grumpy mood for a while last night because it feels like that every time I check my emails or answer my phone one of my many schools wants something from me and I said something about passing the buck and realised I didn’t know what a ’buck’ was and neither did Huw so I looked it up and found this…

"Passing the buck" originated from a ritual practiced during card games. Card players used to place a marker, called a "buck," in front of the person who was the dealer. That marker was passed to the next player along with the responsibility of dealing. Eventually "passing the buck" became synonymous with passing on responsibility.

I was hoping for a more exciting explanation but it’s interesting enough.

Huw went up to the big apartment this morning to let an electrician in to fix the intercom phones so he has earned some more beer money! I walked up the hill to the bus stop and I had to carry my jacket because it was so warm but I know that it will get cold when I leave school at 6pm.

I left home a bit later today because I keep getting to Monaco early and have to hang around a lot and I’m happy to say that my timing was greatly improved today and I was only 20 minutes early. Some parts of Monaco are quite lovely

But most of it looks like this

I am not warming to Monaco at all.

I enjoyed my 90 minutes with Christina and then went for a walk to fill in the hour and a half gap – my new boss assures me that this won’t happen again. This is the school

My classroom today

The kids were particularly noisy today constantly talking over me in French – I really hate working with small people. We did ‘telling the time’ and the little boy got it but it went over the girl’s head. I got a text from Dee offering me a lift home so I was home before 7pm. 

I found this article in The Local France (what would I do without The Local?)

There's a beach where Garfield phones have been washing up for 30 years

France has many stunning beaches - it's one of the reasons the country is so popular with tourists - but one stretch of coastline in Brittany has its own very strange claim to fame.

A stretch of beaches in the Bay of Brest have for the last 30 years regularly seen plastic novelty phones shaped like cartoon character Garfield wash ashore.

In 2018 alone around 200 phones washed up on the 24km stretch of coastline and they have been appearing regularly in the same place for the past 30 years.

It is generally assumed that the items come from a container that fell off a ship in the area some time in the 1980s, but the problem is that nobody can find any records of such a loss.

(this photo isn’t mine)

One local farmer thought he had solved the mystery when he recalled a storage container washing ashore in the late 1980s, but although the container is still there it is now empty - and yet the phones keep arriving.

The plastic phones - which are about 30cm long and have eyes that open and close when the receiver is lifted - have had one good effect though.

Local environmental groups say that because of the novelty value of the phones they find it easy to recruit volunteers for regular beach-cleaning events in the area.

“The beach sweeps become almost like a treasure hunt,” said local environmentalist Claire Simonin Le Meur.