Loiseau

Well, the Académie Française has weighed up its thoughts on Covid-19, and decreed that it is FEMININE. (Though Coronavirus itself remains masculine!) Sorry for non-live link: https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/bourgogne-franche-comte/ne-dites-plus-covid-19-covid-19-1826816.html

What a wonderful word, mint! Thanks. Will try and drop it into a conversation one day...

Is there some minimum number of posts a new member has to make before they can use the private messaging service? Might be easier if you PM your email to the OP, Lori. Or not...

Deffo dodgy, Norman. 1. Doesn’t address you by name 2. Full of threats if you don’t respond quickly 3. Click on Reply and then look at what the sender's email address is. Usually something rubbish.

She certainly is ?☠️

The confiture de lait is a bit more runny than what we kids used to call "stiff caramel".

Like the wooly one, I seem to have lost half a stone since lockdown started, in spite of eating like a horse and drinking my usual two glasses of wine a night. Surely it can't just be due to my 10 minutes a day of Joe Wicks exercises for seniors? Anyway, I took delivery of a new pair of jeans a size smaller than usual yesterday! ?

Actually, idun, you can get "confiture de lait" now in France, which is pretty much the same thing. Years ago, the evening before quitting our rented flat, I was boiling up a tin in the traditional manner you describe. Sadly, while busy cleaning and packaging I allowed it to boil dry; the tin exploded, and festooned the ceiling with stalactites of sticky caramel. That was a cleaning job I hadn’t anticipated...

160 loo rolls, GG!? Are you going to paper the house with them?

Courage, auxadrets, from another Angela! I rooted around my fabric offcuts to see if I could make any masks, but they were all bits of curtain fabric, and too thick for the job.

Brilliant!

Gosh yes, another week over. Thanks for asking, idun. The days seem to pass easily enough. Joe Wicks exercises first thing, finishing some odd craft jobs, tidying the garden, watching the alliums and roses coming out, phone calls to check on friends, Zoom gatherings, family Facetime, jigsaw puzzles. Reading "Mrs Dalloway" for book group next week. Very true about little spending! The cost of my weekly evening foray to the local shops is limited by what I can carry home. Fingers crossed for your move, Lori. Keep us posted!

I agree, idun, about the time flying past. I started lockdown full of good intentions to turn out drawers and clean out the kitchen cupboards. Halfway through that, I became distracted with jigsaw puzzles. And now the sun is out, I am spending more time tidying up my small London garden. I hunted the shelves for some seeds to plant, and so far have stuck in some radishes (already showing through) and french beans (no sign of them yet after a week, but they were about three years out of date!). I discovered some flower seeds a friend had saved from her garden for me, so I made a cocktail of those and sowed them in tubs. Wonder what they will look like. And I am almost exhausted by the relentless virtual socialising on Zoom! One yesterday, two today, and another planned for tomorrow. Sadly, a neighbour died last week (not of CV). His funeral of course will be a tiny family affair, but arrangements are being made for the hearse to pass along our road on the way to it, at 11am on Friday, so we can all wave him goodbye.

Just been listening to the Covent Garden production of Handel's "Alcis and Galatea," shown last night and available on YouTube for the next week, I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmfv7TSCVck They are offering a different opera every Friday, 7pm.

Crumbs, Norman. As if the police didn’t have enough on their plates. As an aside, I do love that word “guet-apens". It always sounds so un- French. Here in London, I am lucky enough to have a small garden, and to watch spring springing in it. Small local shops would deliver if I needed, though my month-ago supermarket run is still holding up. I should accomplish much more each day than I do, but it’s amazing how one can scale activity down. I make soups and do baking; cleared out some drawers ( and found five hand-gels in the process!); do some Joe Wicks online exercises each morning; have telephone conversations with other friends on their own; and tonight am due to have apéro with my daughter and some friends using Zoom. Biggest time wasters I am finding are jigsaw puzzles; you can always drift back to one for an hour or so, and let other plans go hang...

If Trump did get it, you can bet he would be telling us that he had the biggliest version anyone had ever had, and how the doctors were amazed at how he knew so much about his own treatment, etc etc

I think this is a new twist on an old joke, but worth re-telling: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, the Pope and a ten-year-old schoolboy are on a plane, that is going down. There are only four parachutes. Trump declares, "I'm the smartest person in the U.S.A., the country needs me." He grabs one and jumps. Johnson declares, "Britain can't survive without me," as he grabs one and jumps. The Pope declares, "More than a billion Catholics need me," as he grabs one and jumps. Merkel looks at the boy and says, "You take the last one. You have a whole life ahead of you." The boy replies, "It's OK, there's two parachutes left. The smartest man in the U.S.A. took my school bag."

My wonderful daughter had some delivered to me yesterday, to be on the safe side!

All sounds delicious, idun! I felt dead after I had sneaked to my local bookshop to pick up an order, without realising what a horrendous east wind was blowing. I had forgotten my woolly hat, so returned cold and mis, and had to have a good sit down to recover. Been out better-clad since then though, so all good.

That Amazon call is definitely a scam. A friend of mine had one, and begun to smell a rat when they wanted her to enter a code to let them take control of her computer. Luckily her daughter had just popped in, heard what was going on and put a stop to the call.

...and, here in the UK, those spring highlights the Boat Race and the Grand National have both been cancelled.

Good to see you back, Betty. Virtual bisous heartily reciprocated!

Idun, I think in South American Spanish they don’t use the "th" sound. Makes them sound like peasants when they get to real Spain, though!

I agree, mint, bizarre about tobacconists! But I guess they sell newspapers, magazines and stamps, and are there still those expensive stamps that are a sort of tax you have to affix to certain official documents? (Maybe I am a few decades behind the times here.) They haven’t mentioned if post offices are to close, have they?

I agree, idun, it was a lovely wallow in nostalgia to see those old names...