Over the past weeks, I’ve often been made aware of how our age has impacted on the way we approach what should be straightforward matters. There is an undercurrent of anxiety and hesitancy when faced with certain tasks, and the first one we were forced to address was the dreaded telephone call. Not just a telephone call, you will understand, but a telephone call in French! Richard was the first to be faced with this, within days of our arrival, as he had to find a doctor and make an appointment to get his blocked up ears sorted out. Having his hair cut by the only hairdresser in the village, he managed to get her to understand he needed the services of a doctor, or maybe she had already spotted that his ‘oreilles’ weren’t performing as they should! She told him that there were two doctors in the village, an older male doctor and a younger female doctor. Richard made his selection based I suspect, (no, I know!), on the two words ‘younger’ and ‘female’. He tracked down her surgery and the notice on the door stated firmly that a telephone call to make an appointment was essential. There followed a couple of hours hard work with Google Translate composing various sentences in French that would explain who he was and what his problem was. To his credit, having rung the number and made contact, he managed, not without a certain amount of difficulty, to get the crucial words understood (oreilles, la cire, sourd) and that proved enough for a ‘rendezvous’ to be offered and booked.
My telephone challenge was to make an appointment for Laddie with a Vet. Laddie had started perpetually worrying and scratching himself, his rear end clearly being the focus of his distress. I suspected a problem with his ‘glande anale’, a problem I was not able, and certainly not keen, to deal with. We discovered there was a Vet in the next village and located it, only to discover on paying it a visit, as Richard had with the doctor, that a telephone call was required to make an appointment. So, home we go and I get stuck into Google Translate for the vocabulary I would require (gratter, à sa queue, glande anale etc.). Then, armed with my French words and sentences, I nervously dial the number. After a couple of rings, I am met with a flood of indecipherable French words and, as I try to interrupt, a long ‘beeeep’! The penny drops. I realise it was a recorded message. Anticlimax! I wait a bit, plucking up courage again, and ring once more with exactly the same result and with no greater success at understanding the message. However, third time lucky, someone answered and as we made vocal contact, with the nerves fully stretched, every word of French I had ever learnt left my head! I did, however, eventually get enough of my newly acquired words out to get my message across and a rendezvous was arranged. Success, but I know that even ten years ago I would have addressed the whole exercise with much greater calm and confidence.
Anyway, we both duly attended our appointments at the right time and on the right day. Richard was very disappointed to find that Doctor Laetitia Salomon was far from the delightful French woman he had imagined. Not only was she as wide as she was tall with a personality by-pass, but she ticked him off for the state of his ears, and dug fiercely at the ploughed field she found within, even drawing blood from one ear. Laddie and I had a similar experience with the Vet. She had the personality of a gnat and never spoke to Laddie to reassure him that what she was about to do at his rear wouldn’t hurt. So, no surprise that when she started her investigation Laddie reacted with venom, swung round attempting to bury his teeth into some part of her anatomy, and screamed loudly enough to empty her entire waiting room instantly. She retaliated by summoning reinforcements in the shape of her assistant who clapped a plastic muzzle over his nose. The experience left Laddie and me in shock. However, to give them their due, both Doctor Laetitia and the Vet diagnosed and prescribed with accuracy. Richard’s hearing returned to its normal state of inadequate but not totally deaf, and Laddie’s scratching (likely cause an allergic reaction to a ‘puce’) disappeared overnight! In both cases recovery aided by the determination never to darken either door again!
I try to make allowances for Richard, when he constantly points out perils on the road that he seems to think I can’t possibly have noticed. He’ll draw my attention to a car coming towards us, a vehicle turning out onto the road, a ‘Stop’ sign, a pedestrian. I pretend not to notice when his right leg slams into the floor searching for the brake, or he tells me “we’re not in any great hurry you know”, but it does take a certain amount of self control! To his credit Richard has clearly become more aware of the irritation factor caused by this habit and he has, it appears subconsciously, developed a new way to control himself., he whistles a tune under his breath. I began to notice this when he was driving and whenever we were approaching a crossroads, or a vehicle approached us at speed, I heard him begin to whistle under his breath. When I pointed this out to him he was astonished, as he had no idea he was doing it! We now regularly burst out laughing when we become aware of a little tune starting up as we approach a road junction or tackle a roundabout! He does it when he’s driving as well as when I’m at the wheel. I hope he doesn’t revert to his former method as, from my point of view, this is a much more acceptable means of subduing his anxiety!
On the subject of the car, there has been an added anxiety about it since about the second day of our trip. This is a different problem to the power steering problem mentioned in an earlier blog. The car has developed an obvious whine noise, somewhere at its rear. We both noticed it separately and both decided to say nothing for fear, in my case, of increasing Richard’s general anxiety about the reliability of our usually very reliable Subaru. However, the noise became so pronounced at times that eventually the subject had to be broached. Richard admitted it was causing him a great deal of concern, particularly as the only Subaru dealer he could locate in our vicinity was 50 miles away. The logistics of getting the car there, of getting the problem diagnosed, and how we’d cope if the car needed to stay at the garage for days (or weeks?!) was not helping him sleep at night. However, by a piece of good fortune, an English speaking plumber who lives in the village came to the house to sort out a problem with the shower. Richard mentioned his dilemma with the car and the plumber directed him to a mechanic with a very good reputation, who worked at a small Peugeot dealership in the village. He also warned Richard that this mechanic didn’t speak a word of English. It took us some time to locate the Peugeot garage, but having done so and armed with an extensive vocabulary of mechanical terms and the translation for the ‘differential’, which was Richard’s suspected diagnosis, in he marched with everything crossed. He did his best, struggling with an explanation to the female receptionist of exactly why he was there, and she said she’d go and get her husband. To Richard’s delight and surprise, when the mechanic appeared he had clearly been passed an accurate description of the problem, as told by Richard to his wife.. He didn’t think it sounded like the ‘differential’ but asked if he could give the car a test drive to fully understand the problem.
I meanwhile had been sitting in the passenger seat of the car, with both dogs in the back, fiddling idly with the radio, looking for some feasible French station. Suddenly, the driver’s door is flung open and a tall bearded man leaps in. I don’t know who was more surprised, he or I, as I don’t think he knew there would be a passenger! Unabashed, he greeted me with a hearty “Bonjour!”, started up the engine, switched off my radio and muttering something about driving right hand drive cars, he swung out of the garage and shot off at high speed down the road. Richard was left in a cloud of dust watching as his wife and two dogs disappeared at an alarming rate! He says he went back into the garage and said in his best French to the receptionist “Your husband has just driven off with my wife!” After a brief pause while she rearranged his French sentence in her head, she understood and roared with laughter!
I survived a very exhilarating drive, and as things stand today, the problem has been diagnosed as a ‘rear wheel bearing’, the car is booked in at the end of this week, and my husband’s relief is positively palpable.
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