Greetings from the salle de lecture (reading room) at the Archives nationales in Paris. Here one places one’s order for a box of stuff, then goes to one’s place and sits for an hour and a half waiting for it to turn up. The French have two words for wait – attendre, which is sort of immediate, and patienter, which means you’ll have to sit around for a fair while. Here in the Archives the signs don’t direct you to order your stuff and attendez, but to patientez… and so we wait, patiently or impatiently as the case may be. It’s lunchtime now and I’m awfully hungry…
Anyway, it’s nice to be in Paris, although my heart and my thoughts are in Victoria this terrible week. On the Eurostar on Saturday afternoon, I was looking out at the snowy landscape, so lovely and so stark, and seeing it all black, like a negative.
We are, though, enjoying as always the lovely local community – our fifth floor neighbour dropped in minutes after we arrived on Saturday evening, then knocked on our door yesterday afternoon and offered to drive us across Paris to her work, where I could get on their broadband internet and read and watch and listen to everything on the ABC and The Age websites. This meant a lot. We’ve had a good chat with Spanish José, who runs the little framing/gardening/fix-it shop next door, and who we enjoyed talking about our Central American travels. Yesterday morning we enjoyed the rue de Martyrs; the street is closed to traffic on Sunday mornings and everybody comes and does their shopping and stops for conversations. Then last night we took the communal dog for a walk (she nominally lives on the fourth floor, but the fifth floor neighbour minds her a lot, and us too now and again); we feel very Parisian, taking such a French-looking dog out in the evening. (Incidentally, she has the strangest weeing style I’ve ever seen – she backs up to things and walks her back paws up them, so she’s sort of doing a handstand – sometimes she doesn’t even need a wall or whatever to rest her back legs on, but just flips forward and balances on her two front paws with the back ones high in the air.) And this morning we stepped out our door and were greeted by Daniel, who lives on the first floor, with handshakes and bisous and New Year wishes. This is all very pleasant indeed.
The snow stayed on the ground in London for much of the week, at least in places that weren’t walked on (the footpaths quickly became icy, and the stairs from our flat down to the street were pretty treacherous). On Tuesday we were in at the Royal Academy and enjoyed a quick detour through Regent’s Park on the way back to the Tube, checking out snowmen (despite people moaning on the news about the disruption and London’s unpreparedness for the snow, most Londoners have been very happy, especially the kids who got two days off school – snowmen and snowball fights happening all over the place). By Thursday it was beginning to melt in Morden, but that evening we had to drive a little further out of London to pick up our newly repaired espresso machine (yay!), and we found that there was much more snow still lying there. So we snatched an evening walk along an almost-countryish road and around a field, where the snow was quite deep and still untouched (by people anyway). It was getting dark and there was a very thick mist, and everything was shades of white and grey, snowy fields fading imperceptibly into the mist. Quite eerie but very beautiful. We did, however, make haste to find our way back to the road before it got completely dark… We also enjoyed looking at all the bird and animal tracks in the snow – large birds seemed to be particularly indecisive, wandering around in spirals and circles and taking strange detours; a whole bunch of them had evidently had a party in one corner of the field.
Tomorrow we’re going to stay with friends near Tours, in the Loire, for two nights, then Thursday we’re back at work in the Archives (perhaps our boxes will have turned up by then).

22. While you lot have been sweltering…

…we’ve been having a lovely time!

(note the real iceberg roses!)

21. Told you it was cold…

So we drove down to Weybridge to have dinner with roy’s sister Helen tonight. Roy was feeling a little sleepy, so I offered to drive home and he poured himself another glass of wine. He was halfway through it when we looked out the window and realised that a whole lot of snow had just fallen. I think that it was very generous of me to allow him to finish his glass and drive home myself through thickly falling snow…

Still, we got there and it is beautiful. Even Morden looks almost romantic (that’s our dustbin below, not our toilet).

Looking out our bedroom window at the London Road