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I was in the north of France for the last week without an internet connection so that will explain why things have been quiet chez-moi the last while. We were staying in a holiday house in a small coastal resort called Fort Mahon Plage. The place was pretty quiet at this time of year as the French did not have school holidays and the resorts around there cater very much for the French market. The children really enjoyed being there which is the main thing.
I got to road test my French again after a long time out of action. French is one of those languages where lack of practice causes rapid deterioration of your accent. I notice as an English speaker that it is very hard to speak French both correctly and at conversational speed. In shops and restaurants I went for speed above quality and things went well enough though I know that they must have thought that I had a most awful English accent. I enjoyed listening to French radio and Fun Radio is already added to my internet radio favourites.
Ironically my ability to read French at speed is improving all the time and I made my way through half of a novel called "Je m'appelle Élisabeth" by Anne Wiazemsky. That novel is set around a psychiatric hospital and as things would have it I am reading "The Secret Scripture" by Sebastian Barry in parallel which shares the same setting. To keep the momentum up I bought some novels in French by Yasmina Khadra and Florian Zeller.
One thing we love about France are the hypermarkets which we do not have here in Holland. We came home with a whole load of delicious French produce. One brilliant range of juices, jams, biscuits etc. is called Reflets de France. I really think that that has major export potential.
In our house we only had British satellite tv so that meant a rather different televisual diet than usual. The dish did provide Irish radio which was great and the kids had loads of cartoon channels. I watched a fair bit of S4C, the Welsh channel, and BBC Alba (in Scots Gaelic). The latter was not so interesting though I could understand a fair bit, there were too many programs about the language rather than it from what I saw. Welsh is almost incomprehensible to me but after watching a bit (including the Heineken Cup highlights, thank you Wales!) I thought that I was hearing conjunctions like ach and mar as in Irish but I cannot be sure. I was really impressed at how alive Welsh is and I want to learn more about how Welsh has done compared to Irish despite not having had the same state support or preferential status as Irish.
Anyway, duty calls so sin a bhfuil for today.