yesterday, was a totally hurried day, of packing and preparing to leave. B back to Paris on the TGV and Pat and me to NY for ten days. My ninety year old neighbour and his wife, would look after my prized geraniums for me, while we're away. As we were washing the last of the dinner dishes, I took a plate and placed the remaining giant, red Rousillon grapes and apricots on it, to take over to M. Roger and to give him our courtyard gate key. Pat said, don't let this take an hour now. As I've said before, conversations in the village, go slowly. Things that we normally take five minutes to do, take an hour. So, I said, ok will you please take this and the key. Tell him, this is la cle pour la porte, ok. Pats French is improving, slowly:-))!! He said I should stand by, in case. I stood well back and listened. And then laughed so hard that I could feel the joy seeping into all of my tired cells. M. Roger is a proud Catalanian, as are most of the villagers. The more Pat tried to convince Madame Jeanine, that he ne parle pas francais, the louder she rattled off in Catalanian. Utterly convinced, that the louder she spoke, the more he'd understand. That's when M. Roger, joined in. Now there were two of them, going hammer and thongs and Pat trying to be polite. The final straw came when I heard M. Roger saying demaing, instead of the French demain and I hear Pat repeating demaing after him!!! Finally, he returned to the kitchen, white faced and frustrated, only to find me bent over in laughter, unable to move!! I'm seriously going to learn to speak French now, he says!! Not sure what he's going to learn in our village. I teach him French but all the neighbours teach him Catalanian and he's too polite to say anything:-))!!! So, soon he'll be speaking a good mix of the two:-)). To be honest, the Catalanian is way easier..our neighbour Chantelle keeps referring to the veng mareng. Le vent Marin, actually. The sea wind!! I had to stop myself. Like a tune that you can't get out of your head, I kept repeating veng mareng in my head, because it rhymes so well.  Well, time to prepare to board our next flight from Paris to NY, so... A la prochaine xx