A new year and some people would say the start of a new decade but I`ve inly calculated 9 years gone and the new decade shouldnt start til the end of 2010.
Thats a thought. 2010 is it going to be promounced as "Two Thousand and Ten" or "Twenty Ten"
Anyway, hope everyone had a great xmas and New Year and wish everyone the very best and keep checking in for more taxitales as and when they happen.
Bill and Bob would like to wish you all a Happy New year.
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Thursday, December 31
2010
You make your own happiness, you choose your own attitude, you receive a reflection of what you give --
Make it a good year for yourself,
for everyone around you
and for our world!
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Tuesday, December 29
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
3 sleeps
to Christmas!
to Christmas!
to Christmas!
to Christmas!
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Tuesday, December 22
Xmas and New Year
Its that time of year where it is our busiest and this means working right through with not much time off so please bear with us whilst we do this work and hopefully can come back in the new year and post somethings about what has happened over the festive period.
Taking a short break from the blog and returning sometime during the first week of January so please keep checking back.
Meanwhile, Bob (The blog owner) and myself would like to wish each and every one of our readers, drivers and passengers a Merry Christmas and wish you all the very best for 2010
See you in 2010
Taking a short break from the blog and returning sometime during the first week of January so please keep checking back.
Meanwhile, Bob (The blog owner) and myself would like to wish each and every one of our readers, drivers and passengers a Merry Christmas and wish you all the very best for 2010
See you in 2010
Monday, December 21
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
sleeps to Christmas!
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Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Black eye Friday
The last Friday before Christmas is traditionally nicknamed Black Eye Friday as it usually the busiest day of the year for us and as people tend to have a little too much toi drink then fights start and hence the name Black Eye Friday.
However, this years seemed quite peaceful. It was a very busy night with lots of people out but I didnt once see a single fight. No doubt it was happening somewhere but just not near to anywhere I was.
Driving conditions were bad due to blck ice as the temperatures plummeted to -5 degrees Celcius
(23 degrees farenheit) but we got by and apart from slip sliding away in some places we made it through the night
However, this years seemed quite peaceful. It was a very busy night with lots of people out but I didnt once see a single fight. No doubt it was happening somewhere but just not near to anywhere I was.
Driving conditions were bad due to blck ice as the temperatures plummeted to -5 degrees Celcius
(23 degrees farenheit) but we got by and apart from slip sliding away in some places we made it through the night
Magical Dordogne evenings celebrating friendship, the festive season -- and life!
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
sleeps to Christmas!
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Sunday, December 20
Snow
Where we live we never get much snow as we are surrounded by mountains that seem to fend off the bad weather so its possible that the rest of the country could get it except us and when we do get it then we know everywhere else gets it bad.
We got it pretty bad today. Snow, Ice, freezing conditions, black ice. I slid around in the car trying to pick up and drop off fares and tried to avoid going out of town but it wasnt an easy task.
During the day and nights workload I saw one car slide into a stationary car and shunt that one into another car. The first car was going very slow but it caused a lot of damage.
Later on in the night I had to rescue one of our drivers and her passengers as they had become stuck on ide at the top of a steep road. I went to their assistance and got stuck myself but with the help of neighbours who had seen what was going in and come out to help we managed to get some Rock Salt" on the road and get a grip and drive to a safe place
All in all a busy night but an eventful one as well. All the customers were understanding and very patient and all worked out ok in the end.
Just hope that it doesnt last and we can get back to normal soon.
We got it pretty bad today. Snow, Ice, freezing conditions, black ice. I slid around in the car trying to pick up and drop off fares and tried to avoid going out of town but it wasnt an easy task.
During the day and nights workload I saw one car slide into a stationary car and shunt that one into another car. The first car was going very slow but it caused a lot of damage.
Later on in the night I had to rescue one of our drivers and her passengers as they had become stuck on ide at the top of a steep road. I went to their assistance and got stuck myself but with the help of neighbours who had seen what was going in and come out to help we managed to get some Rock Salt" on the road and get a grip and drive to a safe place
All in all a busy night but an eventful one as well. All the customers were understanding and very patient and all worked out ok in the end.
Just hope that it doesnt last and we can get back to normal soon.
Saturday, December 19
sleeps to Christmas!
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Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
La Contessa di Duci -- La chatte du chateau -- a farewell.
Duci moved with me to France -- a long, long car trip that she spent on my lap sleeping, once in a while sitting up and looking out the window, then at me -- as if to ask "are we almost there?" From the moment she arrived at Chateau Lalinde, she was home. She loved exploring all the rooms, finding where the sun poured in, a golden pool of light where she would curl up and go to sleep -- until the sun moved and she would get up, stretch out, and move off to the next room, the next pool of light. From time to time she was terrorized by the alley cats of the village, but this did not deter her from stalking the fat lizards lazing in the sun on the terrace, or from a high vantage point on the window sill, gazing longingly at the swallows swooping past.She listened quietly to my rants and raves, to my whoops of joy and my sobs of sorrow, she chirped like a little bird when she wanted to tell me a story and mewed sweetly when she needed me to come downstairs to feed her. She was there when I returned home and walked through the front door, coming down the stairs to greet me, stroke my legs and purr a gentle welcome. She softly prodded my face in the morning to tell me it is time to wake up and she nudged my hand to say good night before going off to curl into a ball at the foot of my bed.
I shall miss you, my little cat. Thank you -- and fare thee well...
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
sleeps to Christmas!
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Friday, December 18
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
sleeps to Christmas!
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Thursday, December 17
Time For Bed
Theres nothing like putting my foot in it when a female passenger got into the car with a very young child.
I asked her where she was going to and she answered me and in the same sentence she spoke to the child but I didnt realise this.
Her reply and I quote, was "Lumley Street, - When we get home I`m taking you to bed"
Obviously (or maybe not obviously, the address part was meant for me and the rest she was saying to her child but it didn't sound that way to me and my ears pricked up and I answered her by saying that it was a very kind offer but I really couldn't as I had other fares to pick up.
She gave me a disgusting look and I pointed out to her what she had said she then realised and fortunately we both had a good laugh about it.
I asked her where she was going to and she answered me and in the same sentence she spoke to the child but I didnt realise this.
Her reply and I quote, was "Lumley Street, - When we get home I`m taking you to bed"
Obviously (or maybe not obviously, the address part was meant for me and the rest she was saying to her child but it didn't sound that way to me and my ears pricked up and I answered her by saying that it was a very kind offer but I really couldn't as I had other fares to pick up.
She gave me a disgusting look and I pointed out to her what she had said she then realised and fortunately we both had a good laugh about it.
Wednesday, December 16
Chateau Lalinde Advent Calendar
sleeps to Christmas!
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
sleeps to Christmas!
Click on Link:
Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
Tuesday, December 15
Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio's latest book is available in English -- Bliss!
DESERT
By J. M. G. Le Clézio
Translated by C. Dickson
352 pp. Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. $25.95
Le Clézio has a Moroccan family and spends much of his time in the desert with the Touareg. His understanding of the desert and its peoples is compassionate and intense and you never doubt that his characters are all real and part of his actual life. (Also see his beautiful collaboration with Jémia, his lovely Moroccan wife and Bruno Barbey in their book Maroc )This excerpt from the review by Elizabeth Hawes in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times :
“Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille. His central characters are the stalwart young boy Nour, who in 1909 is migrating north across the Western Sahara in
a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy, copper-skinned young orphan named Lalla, descended from the blue men, whose parentage helps her survive immigrant life in the 1970s. There are secondary characters, historical figures like the legendary sheik Ma al-Ainine, revered by his people and demonized as a fanatic by the French, and such fablelike creations as Lalla’s two kindred spirits (the Hartani, a mute shepherd who can communicate with animals, and Naman, the old fisherman who tells her wise stories) or the pretty Gypsy boy Radicz, who is being trained as a thief on the streets of Marseille. In an important way, however, the presiding force of “Desert” is the land itself. As the omission of the definite article in the title seems to suggest, the desert, the jagged rocks and blistering heat, the maze of dunes, the waves of open space, “timeless,” “deep in their bodies,” is not only a setting, but also a kingdom, a resource and a state of mind.
“Desert” moves slowly, its pace set in the beginning by the tortuous trek across the Sahara and by Le Clézio’s way with language — the minutely detailed descriptions of the suffering, the recurring images of the sky, birds, the wind and light, the long waves of insistent prose designed to saturate and surround, like music. Repetitions are deliberate, rhythmic, metaphors are meant to enlighten and reflect. “Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.” Le Clézio is writing about people who are close to the earth and sea, whose stories come from there, and at the same time about the vast epic of nature and its sustaining force. The connection between the land and all its creatures, humans, plants, animals, insects, has been a passionate theme in Le Clézio’s later work, and it is the lesson of Nour and more directly Lalla, who, to escape the harsh realities of her life, inhabits the mystical world of her ancestors, fed by visions of whirling winds and glistening sand and her communion with al-Ser, the spirit of the blue man warrior, “a dream that has come from afar.” He has the light of the desert in his eyes, as Lalla does too, which helps account for her success as the international fashion model Hawa — a career she abandons to return to her old neighborhood in Tangier and give birth.
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Chateau Lalinde : The perfect venue for your event
