Anyone remember this wonderful piano playing and funny song by Victoria Wood?? Stumbled across it this morning, I had forgotten how wonderfully funny she is. She writes all her own music and lyrics, a very talented lady. Of course this is pretty old stuff, you’ll notice that by the hairstyles and dress sense of the audience!! Such a shame they never continued with the series she did with Julie Walters, “Wood & Walters”, it was so funny. Well enjoy the clip and let me know your thoughts.
Just love this picture of our pool, it was taken by our very first customers who stayed in our gite. I got up this morning to the most beautiful day, sun shining, clear blue skies, birds singing. The weather is sooo hot at the moment, I think we are in for a very long hot summer.
The kids are lucky this weekend as there are no customers in, so they’ve got free run of the swimming pool…They need it to cool off in this heat. Glad the weather is so good as we’ve been invited to a barbeque tonight, so looking forward to that.
A few pictures walking around the property. There are plenty of wild shrubs and flowers. I like that as it attracts butterflies and other pretty insects, all in abundance here.
It’s hard to keep the grass green in the heat of the summer. Constant watering does the trick, but there are often water restrictions when it hasn’t rained for a long time.
The kids love the outdoors, and as you can see, there’s plenty of room for them to let off steam. To the right the swimming pool, and the much used swings.
And to finish off, there’s nothing like a good old fashioned French game of “Boules”, before retiring to the terrace for a barbeque and a nice glass of red.
For those of you who enjoy the apprentice, or even those who do not, or do not know what it is, I was passed this edited video done by an amateur and it is hilarious. I wanted to post the actual video on my blog but for technical reasons, reasons beyond my control, or maybe I’m just plain dumb, I couldn’t upload the video. So here’s the link, just click on it if you want a good laugh; http://cassetteboy.wordpress.com
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!!!!
The pretty colourful flowers bowing at the suns heat, almost transparent to it’s rays. Our village is beautiful, and the sun just makes it that much better.
I found this map on Face book and was able to pin point all the places in the world that I’ve visited. Unfortunately i couldn’t copy the whole map as you needed to scroll left or right so some of the countries or cities are probably missing. When I had finished pinning, I was very surprised to see the amount of places I’ve been, 96 in total in 46 different countries!! All that thanks to working on cruise liners, notably the QE2 and the love of travel. What places have you visited and have you ever thought about compiling your own travel map…you might be surprised at the outcome…
Last nights Britain’s Got Talent results didn’t come as much of a surprise to me, and possibly not to anyone else either. Susan Boyle, the singer, was voted through by the viewers first choice, and Diversity, the dance group, by the judges. there seems to be a bit of Boyle mania going around the world and everyone’s talking about her, even here in France I heard them chatting about BGT and Susan Boyle on the radio, and that was local radio! I’m not sure if it really is singing talent that has made her so popular or if it’s more to do with, firstly the shock of hearing that voice come out of her, or secondly guilt because everybody laughed at her before she began to sing, thinking “oh, here we go, another loser!”. Personally, I liked Diversity, young, very talented and very different to any other act. Reckon they might be hard to beat come the final…
But I have to add that as I write this they’ve all gone out, all gone out now that I’ve finished! The house is quiet now…all I can hear is Deal Or No Deal in the distance. Ah well, I’m going to take full advantage of the peace & quiet and veg out a bit on my lovely sofa§ I’ll try to think of a more interesting post tomorrow……
Yes, it’s the movie everyone’s talking about, and I haven’t seen it. Unfortunately things take a little longer here in France, and even then you have to watch it dubbed….it’s not the same :( . i see our friend, (or fiend!), from Heroes is playing Spok, think that’s how it’s spelt, what a great choice of character! Wouldn’t it be freat if life really was like that. Transporting from one place to another in an instant, phaser guns and all that…how exciting! Anyway, can’t wait to see the movie, but I’m afraid if I want to see it in English I’m going to have to wait quite a bit longer!!
So Norway did it, they won the Eurovision Song Contest 2009…and very deservedly so! Alexander Rybak did a fine job on stage and off as I believe that it was him that actually wrote the song. Young vibrant and with a very catchy tune, i think it was a forgone thing. Great Britain, though excelled themselves this year with an equally talented Jade Ewen. i think she has a beautiful voice, kind of reminds me of Leona Lewis a bit. 5th place is not to be sniffed at especially when we’ve done so dreadfully in the past I don’t know how many years! mind you, I tend to agree with Sir Terry Wogan on that score, definitely a lot of political underhand stuff going on there. Not that I’m a Eurovision fan or anything, in fact I dropped off before half time but that’s nothing new……..it just gets more boring every year, especially now that we don’t have Terry and all his snide comments. You gotta love him!!
These two are our twins, so lucky to have a boy & a girl, aren’t they gorgeous? Well I would think that I’m their mum!! They are now 11, and also growing too fast. Coping with twins was very hard work at first, especially with a little one biting at your ankles at the same time, but once you’ve found a routine it’s down hill all the way! They were born 2 months too early and weighed just 4lbs each!! Just goes to show that good things really do come in small packages!!!
My eldest son has taken a week out from school this week to do his first work experience, (they start them young in France). After months of swapping and changing his mind about which field to work in he finally decided to follow in his mother’s footsteps and chose the hotel/restaurant trade. This surprised me as normally he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, but, and in his words, “I love to eat so being around fine food all day would be good”. I’m not sure it’s good enough reason to become a chef but you never know. So he started in the kitchen of a local hotel on Monday. The hours are pretty cool, 10.30am to 3pm, but invariably I get a call at around 2pm saying that he’s finished early. Unfortunately I have been unable to get him to do anything else for the rest of the day as he’s too tired after, “A long hard day at work”! 4 hours…4 hours in a kitchen and he’s good for nothing! I think that maybe next time I’ll sign him up for work experience as a parent..cook, cleaner, manager, chamber maid, juggler, taxi driver, accountant, referee etc..the list could go on forever, in fact by doing all that he could become a highly qualified person!!
Whilst there was lots of good sailing weather, this wasn’t always the case. I was fortunate enough to have good sea legs, and I’d already worked on other liners and never suffered with sea-sickness. Unfortunately for others as soon as the ship keeled even just a little, the queue outside the doctors surgery was enormous. I have it on good authority, though, that the good old doc had a very good cure! The weather was particularly bad on this occasion, as we were travelling across the North Sea, originally to Norway, when we got an emergency call that an oil rig had collapsed and people needed rescuing. We were the nearest ship so the captain changed course to try to help. Unfortunately we weren’t much use as the ship was too big and caused more damage than good. A lot of the passengers missed all the excitement as they were ill. If I remember rightly we had a brilliant viewing spot as the Queen’s Grill was totally empty, along with all the other restaurants.
And this is me in one of them….I’m the one in the white uniform, by the way!!!
These two pictures I took in Sydney, Australia, the top one was taken from one of the upper decks of the QE2, looking down on all the people who had travelled to Sydney Harbour to see her sail in, don’t they look tiny. Strangely enough, whilst I was up there taking that photo, somebody on the quayside recognized me, and I could just here this tiny voice above the din calling my name. It turned out to be an ex crew member of another ship on which I had worked who was on holiday in Sydney..small world eh?? Below you can see the ship in the harbour with the Sydney Opera House in the background.
A few shots of the inside of the Royal Princess. One of the upper deck suites, the most expensive ones! You can see how neatly and prettily the towel had to be folded in the bathroom, and the king-size bed above
As I mentioned, the view from the glass bottomed helicopter was pretty scary, but amazing. Here you can see the Pacific Princess underneath us as we were coming back to land. It really is a huge ship but it looks so small from way up there!
Next are some turtles I snapped in Aruba in the Caribbean, aren't they just gorgeous, they look so peaceful, lapping up the warm water in the sun.
I suppose it's a relatively small iceberg, at least on the surface, but the ship did sail incredibly close to them! This picture was taken on board P&O Pacific Princess.........Remind you of a famous film maybe??
Taken on board P&O Royal Princess going through the Panama Canal. The passenger all eagerly watching for wildlife on the shore side. There was always a commentator who boarded ship before going through and sometime he would joke that there was a crocodile or bear to the left or right. It was fun seeing the passenger suddenly run to one or the other side of the ship, cameras in hand
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The proud P&O Pacific Princess, which was used to film the old series "The Love Boat", any Americans reading will already know this!
Her sister, and newer, ship P&O Royal Princess. Larger and more modern than Pacific. The suites were far more grand and the crew areas much more fun!!
And finally, the last ship I worked on, the QE2. Proudly docked and pictured with almost all the crew on her deck. I met my husband on board, he worked in the engineering department, and I worked in the hotel & catering department. I did the world cruise 1991, as well as many other trans-Atlantic, Caribbean and European cruises. I was doing a map on Face book the other day to see how many places I had visited, the result...I have visited 97 cities in 40 countries...I am a very lucky girl!!
