Hello for Christmas part 1

Hiya. Thank you for coming to have a look. We wish all you and yours a very Happy Christmas and all God's blessings for the coming year.

We've been in France now since 1993. Time flies. Those amazing heady years living in the inner city in the North of France in an 80% Muslim quarter, 5% Buddhist with the Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, seem a life time away now. We still get homesick for there. We were then in the Ardèche with the youth and activity centre doing international hospitality amongst other things for 4 years and we were invited to help with the church here in Nyons in 1999. We came here to live in 2000. We did try to move back to England several times but were too poorly to face the move. Most of you will know that Colin went back to live there in 2009.


Here's Joanna having a laugh with Ginger.


And Ruth with Tommy. Joanna runs a friendly forum called TeahouseMB. She can't go on all the time, but she's got it set up so she has helpers who keep an eye on it when she can't now. She's taught herself to crochet and makes other craft things when she can. Colours and cheerful things are so important to help keep the chin up.

 Ruth is interested in plastics and polymers. She's taken up repairing Bratz and Barbie dolls. This is a familiar gruesome sight - they've got white stuff on the stains then are left in the sun till they fade. She also re-roots the hair and sells them again for pocket money prices on the internet so she can buy more wrecks to makeover. Just have to be grateful it's not cars really. Takes up less space :-)


We all got ME in 1996 - the triggers for the girls was definitely the vaccinations. For us it may have been stress amongst other things - but what is stupid is that we were happy there and really enjoying our work supporting families in unstable situations.

 Who would have believed that after all those years of living in run down and inner city places that we would end up living somewhere so pretty ! Our flat is top left. No lift - that's why the rent isn't over the top. When we first here the family in the flat next door were here because they'd had to hide from problems in Marseilles, and the family below had a son on drugs who'd come home in a state in the early hours - real home from home for us. But it's all calmed down. Most of the flats are owner occupied now as house prices have shot through the roof. We got here just at the right time. 
We have a good landlord who has kept the rent down in return for not having done any modernising on the flat but he did come and put in a new water heater this week.

The sky really is this blue sometimes - these pics are taken in the winter when the mistral wind has blown away any sign of clouds.

We have the river bank nearby - (below) which is beautiful. It all gets very burnt and dusty looking in the summer. It's not baking every summer, this isn't Spain - whew ! I'm still a northerner at heart. The trees in the pic are a bit odd - the trunks are too short. I found out that when they wanted to build on the flat land by the river but had to reinforce the banks to stop flooding they didn't know what to do with the lovely avenue of trees beside it - so they included them in the new raised banks by just building up round them.