Trips, trips and trip-ups.

Plans are now progressing for our trip to UK next month. We shall be in the country for eight full days, which looks like two days in Wales, two in Plymouth, two in Wiltshire/Hampshire (one full day of which I shall spend with The Hawk Conservancy Trust) and two in Hampshire/Berkshire. There are a number of people we want to see and a number of things we want to do. Let's hope we can fit it all in. Clare's Dad will be here looking after the dogs for us whilst we are away, for which we are very grateful.

Speaking of dogs, Flash is having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer a young dog - in fact, at almost fourteen years old he is, for a Greyhound, positively aged. Every time we come home, even after an absence of less than an hour, he likes to greet us with a few very quick laps of the ground at the front of the house. Most times, on a quick turn, his back legs give out on him. Usually, he recovers from that very quickly and carries on. One day last week we noticed, after his laps (or is it after his lapse?), a trail of blood leading from the front door to him. Unseen by us, he had managed, probably as part of his leg-giving-out exercise, to snag the dew claw on one of his front legs. It was bleeding profusely and causing him discomfort, but he wouldn't let us bandage it. He set to licking it constantly for some time and the bleeding stopped, although it was still sore. It didn't affect his getting around, but we still couldn't touch it to bandage it for him. However, later in the day, we saw that it had gone. We don't know how or where, but the result is as shown below and it has now healed up very nicely.


The rat trap I mentioned last week has been doing well - one adult and one young have so far been relocated - and we have caught another mouse in one of the live traps. It will be relocated later today. Living in farmland, with the type of construction we have, it is inevitable that there will be rodents. We are not too worried about the wild areas of our garden, or the pond - we know there is something in there, but are not absolutely sure what - but we do want to keep the little blighters out of the house and, as far as we can, away from the bird feeders (which are very close to the house).

We have been having a good time with bureaucracy lately. Way back in the early part of June I applied for a CEAM (EHIC in French - I still think it should be called an E111, we all know what that is!). It arrived within three weeks. Since then we have been trying to get one for Clare. The first response was 'Sorry, we can't issue the card as you are not covered by [the French healthcare system] '. Once Clare had registered a médecin traitant (if you aren't sure what that is, see the August 31 entry and do try to keep up), we tried again. This time we gave both her and my Social Security numbers. The reply? 'I regret to inform you that neither you nor your husband is insured with the French health insurance system in Puy-de-Dôme/Haute Loire/Cantal/Allier. Please redirect your request to the office where you are covered'. I sent them a copy of the confirmation we received a week ago that our cover is renewed, a copy of the latest attestation, a copy of each of the covering letters we had received with our Cartes Vitales and a copy of the letter with which I received my CEAM. All of these documents came from CPAM du Puy-de-Dôme.

It looks like they found our files, because, the very next day they confirmed they were preparing Clare's CEAM. I imagine the files were in transit following renewal of our cover. The card should arrive in about three weeks (as everything is sent out using a very low priority tariff) but, as we need it before then, they will send out a temporary three-month cover letter by priority post. You may be wondering, as we are, whether it wouldn't be cheaper to simply sent out the original card high priority - especially as it has not yet been produced - but we are learning that it is easier to work with the system than to try to question it. We may not always understand why things work as they do, but they do work, and we need to keep in mind that the Gallic temperament differs from the Britannic one and that, as immigrants, we should not attempt to impose our way of thinking on our hosts (immigrants to the UK please note!).

I have recently had some emails sent out through Orange France rejected by the recipient. So far, this seems only to be Tiscali, and it seems to be because the Orange mailserver is blacklisted. A lot of research reveals that this is due to spam passing through unauthenticated accounts with Orange. There is a solution (which I ought to have found a lot more quickly than I did). It involves using an authenticated connection on a different server, which goes out through port 587 rather than through port 25. For Orange France the solution is here.

Have a good week.

À la prochaine