Our Sunday flight out
As soon as we arose on sunday morning an email greeted us announcing potential delays on our flight to Nice. We still needed to arrive on time to the airport. Messages like this are so infuriating. They sit between two stools, leaving you hopeful that it’s just a cautionary email and angry that you may have to hang around for several hours.
We duly arrived on time and made our way to the lounge where we had a fairly early lunch. Suddenly we are told to make our way to the gate for the original flight time. Great we will arrive in Nice at roughly 4:10 and I will be able to watch the Carabao Cup final between Arsenal and Manchester City due at 5:30 pm French time. The next announcement confirms that the air traffic controllers have started playing silly buggers and our captain had decided that we should get on board. We will move to a waiting area of the airport until we have the green light to take off. Our captain doesn’t know when we will take-off.
My hopes of watching my beloved Arsenal looking to be fading away.
We arrive at the holding area and almost immediately we receive permission to start our journey. We actually land at 4:15. I have every chance now of seeing the game. I booked for us to pick up the car from Terminal 1 for a change, but I don’t know if this saves you a lot of time because the formalities seem to take longer.
Carabao Cup Final
We arrive at the house just before kick. I plug in all the internet and power cables for the TV, but notice the box that connects our system to the outside world has a flashing red light. We have not internet. I have spent a good 25 minutes fiddling with various options and come to the conclusion that I can’t fix it. I turn on the Humax Box which provides our with a satellite connect to live TV and to my surprise the match is playing on ITV.
I see the last 5 minutes of the 1st half and all the second half. A score of 0-0 at the interval turns into a 2-0 win for Manchester City. The faraway dream of Arsenal achieving the quadruple has just gone up in flames. In fact they didn’t deserve to win, they seemed to be lifeless and just gave the ball away continuously.
We sat down to a diet of live TV on Sunday night which remind me of ancient times with my parents.
Fix the Internet
First thing on Monday morning Maggi and I set off for Cagnes-sur-Mer to talk to the staff at Bouygues Telecom. Mathieu told us he couldn’t do anything except book a call with the engineering team. We arranged the call for 6 pm., but they won’t call an English mobile. It has to be a French number, so we gave them Nathalie’s mobile and when we arrived home contacted her.
We soon found out Nathalie and Olivier wouldn’t have any chance of answering the phone as they sit in Guadeloupe in the Caraibean on their holiday. I drove back to Cagnes-Sur-Mer and Bouygues Telecom to ask them to change the number to Fanny’s phone. No they couldn’t do that, they couldn’t do anything, not even cancel the call. I returned home and asked if Fanny could come over to us and we could try and get in touch with Bouygues over the phone.
Maggi and I couldn’t cope with the speed of the speech of the automatic answering system with its AI bot. After a considerable time Fanny managed to locate an operator who arranged for us to pick up a 4G dongle in Vence with would provide interest connectivity. He couldn’t sort out the time for an engineer to visit and we had to call back the next morning.
We called in the morning and managed to reach an English speaking operator. He sorted out the engineer for the following day, but he wouldn’t arrive unless he had a french phone number to call. We gave him Fanny’s number.
She didn’t let us down. On Wednesday morning I received a call from Fanny to say that the engineer would arrive in 5 minutes, 45 minutes early. It took him about a minute to realise that the problem rested outside of the house. He walked to the electricity cabinet outside the gate and found a disconnected wire. He reconnected it. All came back to life.
Trips to Vence
All in all I made three trips to Vence and the Bouygues Telecom. On Monday I drove to see if the guy would alter our appointment time and contact details and found the shop closed for the day. On Tuesday Maggi and I parked up and picked up the 4G dongle arranged by the phone engineer and finally on Wednesday we returned the 4G dongle.
On one of our trips we took the opportunity to sit in the main square and bathe in the morning sun. On our Wednesday trip we popped into our bank to withdraw money for our pool man Richard and buy a couple of plants and soil for the garden, All in all the only wasted journey happened on Monday when the shop remained unexpectedly closed.
When I returned the dongle two people sat waiting in thee shop. Both of them had the most miserable expressions on their faces as if the world had already come to an end. I wondered if their internet had fallen over as well. when we arrived and found we could only contact the outside world by mobile data I felt a quiet panic inside. The biggest question I asked, how would we entertain ourselves without an internet connection. But we may not have been able to watch anything other than the TV in real time, but that also opened up choices we would have shunned before. Perhaps we should do without a bit more.
Thursday 26th
As Maggi and I left Chemin de la Puade and waited for the gates to close Maggi blew up and said some very unkind things about me. I didn’t respond and remained silent.
Since we landed in France Maggi has remained on tender hooks and being more critical than usual. This morning however she seemed to over react without warning. She objected when I said, “where is the restaurant we are going to?” We had a conversation about not being able to book, but I have no recollection of her showing me where in the old town it was situated. I was accused of never listening and it all flowed on from there.
The journey to Nice continued in silence. We arrived at the underground car park and emerged still in silence. Maggi still did not tell me the name of the restaurant but held her phone and let google maps guide her. Eventually Maggi asked me if I would continue to be non-communicative before we entered Restaurant Acchiardo.
Three brothers apparently run the restaurant and one of them greeted me with a very cheerful air. We hadn’t booked and his brother showed us downstairs to a quieter room, which soon filled up with more clients. Apparently this is one of the busiest eateries in old town Nice and we were lucky to secure a table without booking. The warm and friendly staff made us feel relaxed and eased the tense atmosphere between us which slowly defused during the course of the meal. Despite the ordinary food that I had as my main course, veal escalope I enjoyed our stay and will probably come back in May with Jane and Ray.
Maggi wanted a pudding and we jointly chose the Swiss Chard Tart, an unusual main ingredient for a desert. The Swiss Chard had raisins mixed in and the contents of the tart tasted similar to mincemeat, so I thought we had been presented with a large mince pie, but with better pastry.
By the time the meal had finished we both had recovered our cool and continued life as before.
Friday 27th March
Cagnes-sur-Mer
Before our agreed meeting time with Madeline and Tom Maggi and I drove to the coast and found a sheltered spot to read our respective books. The sun shone brightly but a chill wind blew so we needed to hide away from the stiff breeze.
Spelt
Time up and we headed north to Tourette-sur-Loup for our rendezvous-vous. Madeleine had booked Spelt Restaurant which sits in the Tourette’s old town. We have eaten here many times before and always had a very good meal.
We entered and found all the seats in the downstairs dining room taken. I smiled to myself because I much prefer to eat upstairs where the restaurant has more light and a greater sense of space.
I’d had a whisky the night before, but the itching had started to return almost immediately so I decided to avoid alcohol today. I still enjoyed the meal. In fact the chef put out a particularly good menu today. I started with the beetroot salad, some delicate flavours accompanied the powerful taste of beetroot and created a very nice balance.
The main course of fish (an unidentified white fish) with mussels had a lovely sauce, light, subtle and enhancing the taste of the fish.. Again gorgeous food to feed the soul. Finally the pudding arrived and again it tasted wonderful, and I don’t normally like or have enough room to eat a pudding.
After our meal we wandered around Tourette looking at the normal tourist sights of the village and finally having a cup of tea in one of the bars.
Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th
Our final two days in La Colle we spent messing around. As a recap our week had seen us encounter two major issues, the internet which Bouygues Telecom managed to fix after 3 days, a broken swimming pool pump and a change to our sale price. As I write this I still don’t know if the pool pump is fixed or whether changing the price of the house will mean we sell it.