Photos of Montauban

Link: Photos of Montauban

I’ve finally added some photos of our home town to my photo web-site. 

Nice place to live…

http://www.philhyde.photos/375583/6218037/france/montauban

Typically French

Stop car. Stand in middle of road. Take photo. Dodge traffic.

Photography is scary.

Bottoms

This is rapidly becoming one of the worlds most popular words in the English language, although how it translates into other languages may not be so amusing. I know that it is popular here because I hear myself saying it quite a lot. Well, someone has to listen to me don’t they?

Looking back through my wildlife photography, it dawned on me that maybe I have a thing about bottoms.

It also reminded me that I have spent a very significant amount of time with my arm up bottoms of various descriptions. Mostly cattle, but loads of horses and even buffalo and zebra.

Kinda wierd looking back at it (pun intended).

It has certainly produced a few worried expressions…

Psychoanalysis has shown me that the roots of my problem go back to university. The then professor of anatomy, whom incidentally was as anal retentive as they come, was giving us an introduction to rectal palpation. This was one of the few times that I saw him animated. In fact, it was one of the few times that I saw him at all, as his lectures were reknowned the world over for their interminable boredom and, more importantly, their factual inaccuracy.

Fumbling around in the dark as you might say.

Despite this complete lack of signs of intelligence, and his absence of any trace of a sense of humour, he did say one thing that will forever remain in my somewhat turbid mind.

Whilst standing behind a cow brought into the lecture theatre incase none of us had seen one before, he lifted its tail and pointed at the tightly constricted orrifice saying “rectal palpation; it’s a whole new world in there…” (Foriegn readers should know that for ‘whole’ we heard 'hole’.)

His bemused expression as we rolled around the floor holding our stomachs was one to behold.

I went on to visit the good old United States of America as a student, where I shoved my arm up something like a hundred plus cow’s bottoms a day. Not many people can say that…

Inevitably, my life headed towards that specific memorable moment that we all have had in our youth. Conversation in a house full of students will always tend towards toilet humour. Add into this mix the fact that the students were veterinary and medical, the toilet humour tended to have a rectal bent. on regaling the medical students with tales of arm thrusting humour, one particular female medic enquired how we dealt with the smaller members of our patient list, before coming out with the immortal line “There’s no way you’re getting your hand in my pussy…”

Speechless.

All this childhood abuse has had deviant effects on my photography.

That and the fact that wildlife knows just how to deal with photographers…

I think I’ve probably gone as far as I can with this blog. I hope I haven’t put anyone off their lunch.

Phil

128 days and counting ... er ... coughing

Why do they call it the 100-day cough if it’s gonna last (so far) more than 128 days!? It must have been named by the same publicists who named the 100-year war. Which, incidentally, still technically hasn’t ended…

This bleeding cough is driving me nuts, sending me ga-ga, although no one appears to have noticed. There’s me struggling to breathe, and all people can think of is, well, someone else.

Take my youngest little boy for instance. 30 years old? Big deal, I’ll be there soon. (Well, 30 years coughing maybe.)

Cute isn’t he? Er … wasn’t he…

Then there’s my youngest daughter, due to sprog in about four months. Everyone’s clucking around her excited that she’s to have a baby hormonal time-bomb (aka baby girl). No one seems to care that my ducks are busy laying eggs…

My father-in-law is still fading away in hospital (even I draw the line at making light of this) which leaves my mother-in-law (I sense a ‘humour opportunity’ coming) living with us, clucking around me whilst gently mocking my cooking skills. If nothing else it is helping me practice my Peter Sellers french accent.

There is certainly a lot of clucking going on. And coughing.

In a vain attempt at lifting spirits I tried turning once more to rugby.

Despite Montauban doing well, England have gone and spoilt it all by narrowly missing out on the six-nations cup. Made worse by my continuing failure to grasp some of the more basic French vocabulary, thinking ‘Samedi’ meant ‘Sunday’ thus missing the bloody match altogether.

So how about some respite in the Pyrénées?

Beautiful but (there’s always a but) this was the last opportunity to ski as the resort is closing today, despite there being shit-loads of snow. Added to which, because we are, ahem, responsible adults, our stay was restricted to only one day so that we could spend time trying to get comfortable sitting on a hospital floor.

Now there’s something not quite right about hospitals. The general idea, I had reasoned, was that you go into hospital because you are unwell and require aid to get back to one’s normal state. This seems perfectly logical to me. Hey! I run a couple of animal hospitals, I know about these things!

So why does someone like my ‘papa’ get admitted because of having pretty much end-stage aspiration pneumonia, and get pretty much ignored for a couple of weeks (quote: “don’t bother pressing the alarm button in the night because we won’t come to you anyway”) until they realise that the bacteria that they have incompetently given him to add to his woes (in his case both C. difficile and MRSA!) are potentially hazardous to other inpatients (and staff, and visitors) thus then throwing the medical book at him, plus, just to make him feel really on top of the world, shove him into isolation where the only way to visit him is to wear fancy dress! That includes masks that we’ve taken to writting our names on so that he can tell who we are…

Well, there is a life outside hospital (although clearly not a great deal inside it) and to cheer us up a little, it looks as though the farm purchase is going to happen (long live the strong pound). This place is just down the road…

So, having got all that off my chest, I’ll bid you farewell as the sun settles behind the mountains of the Vallée de Ger.

Well, I’d like to, but we’re still in Montauban where it’s bloody pissing down…

A bientôt

Phil

Pax Vobiscum

Well, Sophie’s gone and done it. She’s tied the knot. Got hitched. Got spliced. Joined together, and other such phrases that’ll confuse the hell out of google translate…

Yup, my youngest girl… who’d have thought?



She and Ulrich left their flat this morning as free people…



… to get PACSed.

A PACS is, well, um, it’s sort of means going in to a room separately, and coming out together. With a piece of paper. A contract.



It takes a couple of minutes and that’s that.

Thankfully the hoards were waiting…



…then off we trundled to the, er, reception in a local coffee house..



…before making our way through the cloisters of Place National…



…to dinner, where we had the traditional blowing up the cake ceremony…



…then the traditional eating the cake ceremony…



…before the happy couple went off to see ISIS…



(Isis is their dog by the way, named after the Egyptian Goddess, not, well, you know…)

…before finally riding off into the sunset…



… and they lived happily ever after…

Pax vobiscum - peace be with you.

Bittersweet

And so… 20 years of being hitched to my beloved have passed us by. The traditional gift to give on this great occasion is usually china. Having decided against buying each other an entire continent, we settled on the obvious; a farm and parents…

This may appear confusing to some, but please bear with me…

The year started with us, as usual, in the Pyrénées. We love this corner of France and try to see as much of it as we can. This has proven a little difficult of late due in part to my ‘100-day cough’. Now on day 110 and feeling somewhat unhealthy, we decided to buy an electric wheelchair:

This is Lady Muck awaiting her chauffeur.

Well, it certainly gets us to places previously impenetrable to my war-torn body.



We love our little cabin in the forest soooooo much. It may be creaky and old, but for some reason that makes me feel at home. Because of this we got to thinking of our house in Montauban and decided to look around for something with more character.

We’ve found a little farm in Lamothe Capdeville, just north of Montauban. Houses in France are ridiculously cheap at the moment. If the sale goes through, we will set about renovating it with a view to moving in permanently.



This explains the 'farm’ bit of the traditional gift exchange, but what about the 'parents’ bit? Well, sadly Annick’s mum and dad are not doing too well, and have moved in with us. The word 'temporaire’ gets used a lot; I think it means 'Don’t ask’. Papa has since moved on to hospital, where things do not look too good.

I then spent a couple of days in Wales catching up with the kiddos and with work (yes indeed, I am still technically a vet, and have finally been given the dubious honour of using the title 'Doctor’). I thought I’d take some pictures of another crumbling ruin (more here).



Which brings us to today, the 9th March. As we pass by our 20 year mark, Sophie starts into hers as, today at 10am, she enters into a PACS (a French contractual version of marriage) with her one true love, Ulrich. I’ll post some photos later I hope.



How times change. This was us 20 years ago…



My parents gone, and Papa feeble, failing but fighting.

Bittersweet.

 

Dr Phil

Another one bites the dust.

Day 91…

My friend Cock-a-whoop (nearly French for whooping cough) is still with me, keeping me awake at nights partying. I thought he was going away, but has decided to come back like a bad penny…

This hasn’t stopped me trying to find nirvana in the mountain tops…

We’ve had a house full in the Pyrénées this week, two of the fantastic four (Lisa with Christian and Luke with friend Dave) along with my really old schoolmate Geoff (really old, er, as in same age as me…) and Chrystelle and her two kids (Victor & Max). Ten of us, most of whom seemed intent on throwing themselves off mountains. Their success has been well documented by Queen…

Cue lyrics:

Another one bites the dirt…(Victor)

… and another one down (Christian)

… and another one down (Dave)

… and another one bites the dust (Luke)


…

All this falling about caused multiple bruises and the occasional broken bone. Fun eh?

None of which took my eye off the views, which, with the cloud layers below us, were nothing short of stunning.

Same view, different clouds…

and when the sun burst through these self same clouds … Magic!

A great week, apart from the sodding coughing.

Next week, another few days coughing in the snow. Not a bad form of convalescence eh? …

All this coughing lark has had an effect unthought of by whomever designed my bacterial friend. It has given me time. Time spent not sleeping. Time spent not expending energy. Time well spent irritating the world by writing.

5 chapters finished and 15 to go on my photography book(s) with a veterinary bent.

Please read that line carefully.

Check it out at www.philhyde.photos French translation to follow.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes…

…

Hey, I’m gonna get you too. Another one bites the dust. (Lisa)

All photos of me falling in the snow have been deemed unreliable evidence.

Phil

… with Geoff trying to photo-bomb.