24/03/2008 by Brigid.

It is John’s birthday today. Since Easter Monday is a jour ferié, and no-one had to get up early for school, we had his birthday party yesterday. We hadn’t really had the opportunity to test our room layout with guests, so we invited Billy and Mrs F and the four ef-lets for an evening’s home cinema. With a bit of rearrangement of furniture, we managed, quite comfortably, to seat eight for dinner in the kitchen. The only issue arose over the pudding, when we discovered we couldn’t open the freezer door …

Back at the beginning of last month, John made a request for a chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Easy enough. Particularly as it gave me the opportunity to use a really good American recipe for Devil’s Food Cake from the Rombauers’ “Joy of Cooking”.

American food is a bit of a paradox. We were once approached by a friendly school-teacher in an Idaho (“Famous Potatos”) gas station. He told us how much he had enjoyed visiting England, but finished by telling us that “the only problem with you Brits, is you don’t know how to eat”. Since this guy weighed about 20-stone, he clearly did. But I bit my tongue. Nevertheless, it does seem odd that the nation of “all you can eat” buffets, Waffle Houses, luke-warm tea, and gloopy orange-coloured ‘French’ dressing, was once better known for its fine tradition of home cooking. I mean, People, what happened?!

I digress. Eventually, the birthday cake was a collaborative effort. Shaped like an armchair, my chocolate-covered cake did, initially, bear an unfortunate resemblance to a large brown turd. Not for long. Mrs F’s birthday cakes are legendary (see Betty’s 80th), and she had made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. So, while John was still half asleep on Saturday morning, I whisked it round to Bonrepos for the finishing touches.

Good. Don’t you think?

The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice the wording on John’s green top: an irreverend reference to John’s ‘relaxed stomach muscles’ and our extensive collection of Harley Davidson T-shirts. Billy’s work, not Mrs F’s …

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19/03/2008 by Brigid.

There was an unscheduled change to tonight’s menu in the Rynne household. Normally, at the risk of deterring potential dinner guests, I would not admit to feeding my husband anything less than the finest, freshest, meat. However, this evening’s plat du jour had a decidedly recycled flavour to it.

It all started yesterday afternoon, when a roar from John alerted me to a feline misdemeanour downstairs. I was, at the time, in the process of patching a small hole that Foggy had chewed in my new living room curtains. But that is another story.

I arrived on the ground floor in time to see Foggy’s tail vanish under our coffee table, pursued by John uttering a torrent of Anglo-Saxon invective. The evidence for the prosecution was, indeed, compelling. The frozen chicken that I had left, still in its wrapper, to thaw on the kitchen window-sill had found its way across the work surface, and was now missing a substantial amount of breast meat.

Cats are very sensitive creatures, but not always the most intelligent. Seeing me upset, Fog made the fundamental error of emerging from his hiding place to find out what was wrong. For which stupidity, I chased him round the living room brandishing said half-defrosted fowl. John, understandably, said “I’m not eating that, it has teeth marks in it. I’ll do a Bolognese tonight”, but parsimony prevented me from chucking the whole thing in the bin.

Instead I carefully jointed the chicken, cooked the remains of the breast for the cats, and turned the untouched legs and wings into a nice casserole. “It isn’t often that one has to share the cats’ dinner”, said John, carefully examining the contents of his fork.

I’ll gladly drink to that.

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14/03/2008 by Brigid.

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It is exactly three weeks since my last post.

There are, of course, mitigating circumstances for my lack of news.I have been a busy little bee.

Despite the shrinking snow line, half term passed off without any major incidents or injuries. With temperatures exceeding 17°C in the car park at 1600m on most days, the pisteurs had their work cut out keeping the resort open for the holiday hoards. Driving over the Col de Peyrasourde, the pistes at Les Agudes looked like thin white ribbons against increasingly brown hillsides. The snow had the consistency of mashed potato even at 10am, but this was the kids’ best chance of skiing this season, and they were not about to be deterred. And, having initially worried about losing other people’s children in the crowd, I quickly learned to spot their unique silhouettes: Suzy, the only snowboarder amongst us, Catwoman with a green wooly hat and goggles; Claudia, all long legs and pigtails; Flora, a diminutive 60’s starlet in dark glasses and pink angora cowl - an image quickly dispelled thanks to frequent noisy collisions with Claudia; and William, whose skiing style defies all laws of physics, being a cross between Mr Bendy and a flying starfish.

With the exception of Claudia and Flora, who seemed to have an almost magnetic attraction to one another, the rest of the party managed to avoid any serious collisions. This, when you consider the very limited skiable domain and the number of out-of-control maniacs wearing helmets and snow-blades, was nothing short of miraculous. At 2pm each day I would breath a sign of relief as I handed over responsibility for the kids’ safety to Vincent and Alex, their snowboard and ski instructors. I had done my best to get my ski legs back for their benefit, but my knees were, it has to be said, no match for the ligament-wrenching snow conditions. We had previously agreed that Tuesday’s lesson would be the last skiing of the holiday. But, when Flora announced that she needed the bathroom shortly after 1pm, less than 15 minutes after saying there was too much of a queue to bother to wait, I felt no remorse escorting them all back to the base station half an hour early.

On Wednesday, Billy and Mrs F came over to collect Stripes, or “Stumpy No Nuts”, as he has rather unkindly been rechristened, and I got down to the serious business of catching up with some household chores. Top of the list was to deodourise our car which, since collecting the cats from the vet the previous week, was smelling less than fragrant. I was due to drive back to the UK the following day to retrieve my husband, and I knew that John was likely to have a severe sense-of-humour-failure if the car smelled of pee-pee du chat.

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