What do bloggers do when they meet?

T 
they photograph each other

We had a lovely day yesterday:  Joss, alias the Crowing Crone and her husband Gerard are on a yearlong trip from Canada to visit their French roots.  As they are staying in a nearby village, it was a given that we would get in touch.

They arrived for coffee, having taken a few unforeseen detours, and we found a zillion things to talk and laugh about, a fair proportion in French, for an hour or so before driving the fifty yards to the village café where the laughter continued while we consumed a good meal (except for Gerard, who chose steak tartare in memory of a dish his mother used to make).  He enjoyed it, and ate every scrap, but I cannot abide the sight of raw meat, let alone think of eating it, so the rest of us had a more conventional meal of local sausage with chips!  As you can see, we partook of the vin du pays – viz cidre bouché.

Internet deprivation during their travels was relieved as Joss checked emails on my pc and Gerard worked on the laptop – after a post-prandial nap.

Joss gave me a wonderful book* she’d written about her experience  of years of fibromyalgia and her way of coping by listening to her body.  “Pain shouts”  she says, and she’s right on the button there, as I can confirm from my own current experience.  Each chapter is followed by beautiful poetry before moving on to a new phase of the story.  The debilitating and painful dis-ease has been in abeyance now for nine years, and she is plainly profiting by living life to the full.

Vowing to repeat the exercise while they’re still staying nearby, we set them on the right road home with regret that the time had passed so quickly.

*What I know about Fibro by Joss Burnel