Mary Fleming

Finding the Feng Shui (cont'd)

Friday, 22 September Mid-August, I got a shocking email. It was from Orange, our telecommunications provider. They are (slowly) installing fibre optic access in our area and needed details on our living arrangements. The message included a satellite photo that must have been taken last summer: Was it really that

Finding the Feng Shui

Friday, 8 September The restless, migrating spirit of the swallows that once lived here must still have been with us: no sooner had I pushed send on my last blog in July than we were once again moving furniture, reappointing rooms.   They say you should live in a place for

Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Friday, 14 July Here in France, it’s a weekend of grand départ. In fact, it’s grander than usual this mid-July because besides the normal flow of people leaving on their summer holiday, Bastille Day makes a three-day weekend. But having just returned from 10 days away in Ireland

Safe Haven II (Maybe)

Friday, 30 June No sooner had my friend Trevor, who was staying chez nous in Paris last week with his husband Dana, said: “It’s not crowded,” than I was on my bike and pedalling across the Seine to the recently renovated Hôtel de la Marine on the place de

Why We're Here

Friday, 16 June It’s been a while since David has said: “I know we bought this house for that damn dog.” He is of course talking about Deux Champs, the property we purchased four years ago in the Perche, and our rescue dog Tasha (aka la Princesse). I can

Food for Thought

Friday, 26 May Let me ask you a question: is it odd that a blogger who lives in France never blogs about food? I think so, especially given how much the writer in question, me, loves food and all things culinary. Okay, there was once an entry about Indian cuisine,

Finishing Touches

Friday, 12 May “Is it finished?” ask some (genuinely wondering). “It’s finished, right?” ask others (as in: after all this time, it’s gotta be…). “It’s finished,” state still others (no inflection, since there’s no way it couldn’t be done by now).   My answers, depending on

Ode to April

Friday, 21 April “April is the cruellest month.” What an overused way to start a piece of writing concerning the fourth month of the year. Worse, it is often misused, thus spoiling all the irony that TS Eliot infused into the first line of his 1922 poem The Waste Land.

The Demos and the Kratos

Friday, 7 April “What is a simple definition of democracy? “The word democracy comes from the Greek words ‘demos’, meaning people, and ‘kratos’ meaning power; so democracy can be thought of as ‘power of the people’: a way of governing which depends on the will of the people.” Thus spoke

Of Puddles and Ponds

Friday, 24 March My family often accuses me of being a glass half-empty kind of person. Someone who imagines the worst-case scenario at every turn. While I admit that my mind can tend to misadventure, I would argue that in many instances, I am just being a realist, particularly when

Guest Apparence

Friday, 10 March Last week I dreamt I went to Berlin again... Actually, unlike the narrator of Rebecca who made a nocturnal visit to her former home Manderley, I did physically return to the city where I once lived. It just felt like a dream. For more recent readers, some

New Friends

Friday, 24 February Here's a new word for (most of) you: dendrolatry, the worship of trees. My admiration may not quite attain the level of adoration, but this winter I've been counting my arboreal blessings. When you buy a property in the country, it's not just the bricks (or in

Building Time

Friday, 10 February Early on in my Paris years, I learned an expression that made me feel I really knew my way around town: les dix minutes parisiennes. It means that whether you are attending a meeting and certainly a dinner party in Paris, you are not only allowed to

Notice, and thanks

Friday, 27 January In January, my Paris dog-walking friend Nathaële and I always remark how the days may be getting longer but to all appearances, not in the morning. Beyond the glare of the city lights on the terraces of the Tuileries Gardens, you can’t see a thing, including

Macro vs Micro

Friday, 13 January Tell me if you’ve felt anything similar recently*: every time I give or receive a Happy New Year this January – with many of those received accompanied by a Thank God 2022 is over – I experience a small internal wince. The frisson occurs because it seems to

Things, Glorious Things

Friday, 16 December I love things. Big things, little things, things that belong to me and things that do not. Sometimes I am uneasy about this proclivity. It can seem materialistic, trifling, overly personal, boringly bourgeois. But if the current exhibition scene in Paris is any indication, I’m right

With or Without Us

Friday, 25 November If you’ve read this blog even spottily, you will know that since we bought our house in the Perche in 2019, we’ve altered just about everything, inside and out. Even our fields have changed both farmers and farming practices, as we shifted from 'conventional' (with

The Saga of a Swamp

Friday, 4 November For a long time I've known that the section of the VII arrondissement of Paris where we live was originally a swamp. Yesterday I learned that it was also an area where wood that travelled down the Seine was stocked. Such a place is called un chantier,

Safe Havens

Friday, 14 October Every morning I do a stupid thing. After some work and before walking Tasha, I peek at the news in the The Guardian's newsletter that arrives in my email box. Yesterday the cover photo showed four soulful sea lion pups and the headline said: "The Age of

Team Claire

Friday, 30 September “What about the garden?” my husband David began asking two years ago, not long after the renovation of the inside of our Perche house got underway. As regular readers know, it has been a refrain ever since. For more recent readers, and since I have trouble keeping

It's a Long Story

Friday, 16 September Trick question: what is the oldest monument in Paris? People who don't know the city well might answer Notre Dame (1163-1345), but Our Lady isn't even the oldest church, with Saint-Germain-des-Près preceding it by a few hundred years (founded in 558 by Childebert I, rebuilt at the

The Light in August

Friday, 2 September Most years, I watch the light in August with a tinge of regret, a pinch of anticipated nostalgia. The days are getting noticeably shorter. Evenings, out come the candles by supper's end. Mornings, I wake, make my coffee and get down to work in the dark. With

Attempted Getaway, II

Friday, 15 July To prevent my Paris-Perche Diary from becoming a cahier de doléances, the register of complaints presented by citizens to the king during national assemblies of the Ancien Régime, I did not write a blog last week as planned. The list of minor misfortunes I enumerated in Best

Best Laid Plans

Friday, 24 June The past week has left my mind softened and scrambled, and whether or not it's up to telling you about it today, we’ll see. First, let's back up a bit. You may remember that in April I declared our house works in the Perche, except for

Not My Kind of Music

Friday, 10 June Right now, this early morning, all I can hear through the open window is a pair of cooing wood pigeons and the faint, intermittent din of traffic on the boulevard Saint Germain. But in the next hours, the noise will ratchet up, be close to unbearable by