Once again, Liz and I are travelling across France in our little motorhome, looking for restaurants to eat at and lakes to swim in. The weather hasn’t been great but at least it hasn’t been cold, although a little less cloud and a little more sun would have been nice.
We don’t tend to do a great deal on holiday apart from swimming, eating and reading and despite the overall lack of sunshine I’ve still managed to do a little sun lounging. Here are one or two thoughts that came to me as I relaxed.
French Supermarkets.
What on earth happens in France at supermarket checkouts? In the UK they seem to move along at a fair pace but in France, when the shopping has been scanned there is a sort of lull while the customers seem to take forever to pay. Many seem to pay by cheque which is surprising as I can’t even remember the last time I wrote a cheque but here in France, the customer pulls out his cheque book, spends forever writing it out and eventually they move on. For us British, it’s a quick tap of the card and the payment goes through and that’s it.
Kebabs.
One day when we were travelling along we ended up at a kebab takeaway which are very few and far between in France. We were probably heading for one of our favourite restaurants which of course, this being France, was closed. Restaurants here seem to close for staff holidays which means the entire establishment is shut unlike similar places in the UK which stagger their staff holidays. Strange!
Anyway, back to the kebab shop. We ordered our kebabs and frites and then the manager invited us to sit down on the couch and turned on the tv. Wait a minute, this was a fast food emporium,wasn’t it? Sorry, I forgot the French don’t do fast food. Slow food yes but not fast food. We watched most of the French news bulletin while the kebab man presumably peeled some spuds, dropped them in the frying pan and then sorted out the kebab meat. I asked if he had any chilli sauce but that seemed to confuse him. Sauce piquant I ventured? Ah, he did have some samurai sauce which seemed to sound pretty hot. It wasn’t but it was pretty nice.
Space Travel 2024.
While I curled up one night and surfed the internet I happened to read about the new Boeing Starliner, the latest in a series of new spacecraft which have been produced to replace the space shuttle. The Starliner reached the orbiting international space station but there were a few issues with the thrusters and so the spacecraft was returned to Earth without its crew. They were on a mission lasting eight days but will now be stuck up in space until February.
Returning without the two crew members was a safety precaution and although the craft landed without any issues a few of the thrusters did fail so it was better to be safe than sorry. The crew will return on another spacecraft, the Space X ship but what I found really odd was that the crew’s Starliner space suits are not compatible with the Space X spacecraft.
The two spacecraft are of course made by different companies but even so I thought that this particular issue was addressed during the Apollo program. If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13 you will know that a small explosion on the service module meant that the crew had to move into the lunar excursion vehicle in order to conserve power and oxygen in the command module.
The lunar module and the command module were made by different manufacturers and many of the systems were not compatible and engineers on the ground had to work out how to make the two craft function together by rigging up temporary connections. Those procedures were then radioed up to Apollo 13 for the three man crew to set up. One item that had to be put together was something to clear the carbon dioxide out of the air. You would think that after all that, NASA would make sure that there were universal fittings between spacecraft, especially in the vital area of space suits.
Reading.
Life at the Top by John Braine.
This is a follow up to Room at the Top, one of the original kitchen sink dramas about a council house boy determined to make it to the top. In the first book, Joe Lampton seems to have made good. He has married the daughter of one of the area’s top businessmen, Councillor Brown. To do so he had no choice but to dump his lover, a married woman much older than himself, who then got drunk and was killed in a car accident.
Ten years later Joe is not that happy. He works for his father-in-law who has bought the couple a new house, all in Joe’s wife’s name of course. They have two children but Joe is bored and fed up.
He becomes a councillor just to satisfy the father-in-law but is shocked to find that his wife has been having an affair with the husband of his wife’s friend. That spurs him on to have his own affair and as you can imagine, it all ends in tears.
This novel, unlike its predecessor, reads a little like a soap opera and I found myself having little interest in whether Joe stays with his wife or leaves her or any of the goings on either at the council or in Joe’s home.
Verdict: 5/10
Anyway, that’s enough random thoughts for now, time for a swim!
Letters from an Unknown Author! 