Welcome to the Blog part of the website. This is my attempt to make sense of Kate and I living in France, the lifestyle,the french, my home and animals and anything else that seems amusing to me. Sorry I have a strange sense of humour!! 

The blog is written on a monthly basis with regular  news of my adventures and those of my animals at La Godefrere.  You can now look us up on our new facebook page - La Godefrere.

This website can no longer host my blog so I have changed to using wordpress. This can be accessed through the following link:

Link to my blog

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Browsing Archive: June, 2014

In which we go around the world in 80 minutes; remain stoical; fiddle with fruit; work out wifi; count cats; and discover the Great Hamster of Alsace

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, June 29, 2014,
It is a wet Sunday in rural France. All the shops are shut, all our visitors have gone home. So a return to domestic duties for Mrs. Parish and me. After cleaning the house this morning we decide that we should get on with some more rustic pursuits and so we turn to our fruit supplies for inspiration.

Mrs. Parish decides to make blackcurrant jam with the blackcurrants she recently harvested from the allotment. This requires picking the fruit from a bush which seems a particularly backbreaking ...

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In which we wiggle our bales; hay goes and wood arrives; the 100 years war restarts; World Cup agony and ecstasy; granny and granddad arrive Le Mans style.

Posted by Graham Parish on Monday, June 23, 2014,
It will have to be a relatively quick blog this week as we have yet more visitors. This time it is a royal visit from Mrs. Parish’s mum and dad always referred to as Granny and Granddad by our children and by us. This has meant much travelling this week as on Tuesday at 5am I had to get up to drive Amy and Joyce back to Ouistreham to catch the morning ferry. It is a two hour drive and quite nice once the shock of being up early has passed. Of course a big advantage of driving on French road...

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Summer arrives, we watch the grass grow; see swallows swoop; meet baby alpacas; become expert hay stackers while Archie becomes le chat sauvage and the world cup begins.

Posted by Graham Parish on Monday, June 16, 2014,
Summer has well and truly arrived at La Godefrere and all last week has been solid sunshine and really hot days. At this time of year you can almost see the grass growing as we have warm weather following wet weather. This has positive and negative effects. Within the garden and orchard this means cutting the grass at least once a week. This means of course plenty of work for the tractor driver as I also have to cut the pathway round the big field as well as one side of the lane from La Godef...

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A novel approach - The Sound of Thunder; The Anger of the Aubergines; L’Argent; The Visitors; The Boys from Brazil; The Constant Gardener, 100 years of Solitude and The Cat who sang for the Birds

Posted by Graham Parish on Monday, June 9, 2014,
I can hear the Sound of Thunder. Today is a wet and thundery bank holiday in France and so I am confined indoors and catching up with the blog. I decide to introduce a bit of culture to this week’s blog and so have linked all the subjects to an appropriate title of a novel. There is a prize for anyone who knows the authors of all the novels in the heading above. I am working on the basis that no one will know them all as I haven’t actually thought of a prize or a way of getting it to you ...

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The Euro elections; a new MEP arrives; we open the Ant Experience; the Red Ramblers arrive and we eat the whole weekend away and we find about putting a potato in your bed!!

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, June 1, 2014,
I finished last week’s blog before we knew the results of the Elections for the European Parliament and they turned out to be a mixed blessing. The Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle) did not do terribly well. In the Department of Mayenne there were 98,025 votes cast around 45% of the electorate. In this area the Lutte Ouvriere got 1167 votes a quite respectable 1.26% while their left wing rivals the Communistes got 2 votes (interestingly the same as in 2009!) and the Mouvement socialiste alt...

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About Me


Graham Parish Graham Parish is a former UNISON Trade Union official who retired to France with Kate (a previous self employed gardener and now resident gardener here) to start a new life of wine, cheese, french bread and a vegetable garden on a large rural french farm with holiday gite, and associated animals.

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