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: August, 2017

La Godefrere on tour; forest encounters; Chateaux formidable; meals “gastronomique”; toilets bizarre and I get bitten

Posted by Graham Parish on Monday, August 28, 2017,
This past week has been one of anniversaries. It has been 5 years since we arrived to live in France and it is 45 years since Mrs. Parish and I got married. We never imagined in 1972 that one day we would be living in France. So, to celebrate these two anniversaries we decided to have a few days away on a little holiday. Luckily my daughter Jo was here with some friends and they looked after the cats and chickens.

We decided to stay near Chartres which is only a few miles from Paris. This fact...

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Peace and calm return to La Godefrere; Ice cream calva; the amazing cardboard man and sheep sagas

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, August 20, 2017,
All is calm once again here at La Godefrere after a challenging week. This morning Mrs. Parish and I took mother in law back to Rennes airport to catch the plane back to Exeter. She had been with us for a week, although at times it seemed longer! My brother in law John had accompanied her.

Mother in law is going well for a woman of 86 and she can certainly eat and drink! She polished off a full menu of food and even did justice to a full-on French meal at our favourite restaurant, La Marjolain...

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The strange world of firewood including steres and cords; Lord of the flies, the resurrection flies of Mayenne;

Posted by Graham Parish on Monday, August 14, 2017,
It is a bit fraught here at La Godefrere as we are experiencing a visit from my dear mother in law. She is now well into her 80’s and can be a disruption to the normal routines here. Hence the blog is a day late as we had to drive down to Rennes airport yesterday to collect her and my brother in law, John.

Like most mother in laws she abhors a vacuum and so tends to fill any space by talking. The 90-minute drive back from the airport was therefore challenging as there was no escape! When we ...

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Louis the bugler; ironing; France is closed in August; we visit the last “poursuite sur terre” and the cats call for a new publicity deal.

Posted by Graham Parish on Sunday, August 6, 2017,
One of the pleasant things about living in rural France is that you get to meet such interesting people. I think it helps that we are good friends with our neighbours, Giselle and Daniel and with Emile and Yvette. In a rural community, they seem to know everybody and in a lot of cases are distantly related. For example, we have got to know a French famer, Olivier and his wife, Valerie through some English friends. It turns out that Valerie is a distant cousin of Giselle.

Anyway, we were at hom...

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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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