The church wasn't as exciting as the one at St Maurice but the school at Bussieres was very much so. Apart from the site, being three storeys tall, it was an experimental school teaching the Freynet method and the teacher, Marcel Mercier, was famous throughout Europe for his efforts. In the period 1938 - 1941 he sent his children out to interview all of the elderly people in the village and to write up the results of their interviews. The resultant book - Notre Petite Commune - "Our Little District" - is a classic of its time and one of the people on the walk was actually one of the students at this period, he had a copy of the book and he's lent it to Marianne. As well as that, Mercier was also a novelist and wrote one that was quite famous, the name of which I have completely forgotten.
But I needed to leave the house and go out as I've given so many people a piece of my mind today that I don't think that I have any left. Mindless, you might say.
Firstly, the courier company to whom I entrusted 6 parcels over 4 weeks ago still has three of them in its warehouse. They didn't know where the other 3 were, but nothing has been forwarded on. So I'm surprised that I still have a phone connection this evening, seeing the amount of heat that was generated while I was ... errr ... discussing the issue with them.
Secondly, the phone that I purchased four weeks ago has still not arrived despite the "24-hour guaranteed delivery". It seems that the courier company won't deliver it here as "the address is inadequate" - which translated into English, means that the driver is too lazy to step out of the van and look for the name on one of the five mailboxes here. I had them on the phone today too and once more I was surprised that the wire didn't melt. But then again they had just seen the review that I had posted on their Amazon page - trust Amazon to remind me to review my "purchase" this morning.
At the Intermarche I went in for a loaf of bread. That took seconds but going through the checkout took half an hour as a stagiare - a summer student who had been left on her own at the tills tried her best to deal with a queue of 20 people.
At the petrol station I bought a bottle of gas - my first for 15 months seeing as I have a decent woodstove that I cooked on all through the winter. Last year the gas cost €25 - this year it's €36, and I had a few things to say about that too.
Better news at the Post Office. I've sent back the Nikon camera for repair - downloaded all of the instructions and the address label and so on. When I sent the old Pentax back last year it cost me an arm and a leg to post it, but when I handed over the parcel and label ,and enquired about the price, I was told that it was "carriage-paid". Well, good old Nikon, hey?
Anyway, let's see what happens about that.
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