If you go to the end of our French house driveway, turn left and keep going for 12kms, you hit this. It's the coastline at a pretty little seaside village called Portbail, in Normandy.There is a bridge of 13 arches that spans these sandy flats and takes you to the actual beach, where there is a sailing club and proper "bucket and spade" sand. But I love this view for the sky - the acres and acres of sky.
We are back from a week in Normandy, which was delightful. We hung curtains and paintings and entertained our first guests and took delivery of the first of our solid pine and zinc units for the new kitchen. What I really loved about sharing the house with others was that there was laughter and music and the feeling that we were bringing love and life back to the house again. We moved some furniture around and I painted the huge dining table, which had been stained with an alarming red wood stain. All little things that made the place feel more as if it belonged to us, and wasn't a rather dismal holiday let, which is how it felt at first.
I am dreaming up quilts for the French house. The sofas there are old and shabby so they need disguises and the simplest way I know of doing this with sofas is to throw quilts on them. So I'm planning two complementary but not matching quilts to take back when we go again in June.
I said that we wouldn't spend this visit painting and apart from the table, which was a whim, we didn't. We visited Portbail and we went to Bricbeque, a small town with the remains of a big castle. We went for walks and explored our own little town a bit more. It was restful and fun.
We haven't introduced ourselves to any of the locals yet, although the 3 or 4 checkout girls in the local SuperU recognise me now and speak to me very slowly in French, with an encouraging smile. I wish I had faith enough in my slowly improving French to engage with them on a deeper level than "can I have another bag please?" One day.
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