The Wounded Soldier and Other Stories

I can't say I've been a very assiduous blogger recently. Not that I care, mind. But when I see the last post written was on May 7, it comes a quite a surprise. Time seems to have accelerated since then.

My DB misjudged a set of steps whilst riding his bicycle, thought he could dive over them as he had done many a time. Unfortunately, this time there was a motorbike blocking some of the access and instead of sailing successfully down the three steps, he went sailing over the top of his handlebars and landed on his wrists. Could have been his chin and a smashed jaw, so he's counting his blessings. It still means his left arm is encased in plaster from hand to elbow, and his right hand has a removable brace (like the braces kids with scoliosis wear). The doc wanted to encase both his wrists but my DB lives alone and couldn't see how he could survive being totally incapacitated. As it is, I'm trying to fit working full time around ferrying him about to appointments, feeding him and driving him to and from chez moi. I'm counting my blessings that I don't have to wipe his bottie because I'm not sure our relationship could survive such ignominy at this stage (not sure it could at any stage if I'm honest...)...

You should have seen us walking round the adventure motorcycle expo organised by Touratech in Orange. I drove us there as we couldn't take the bike, and he got sympathetic looks from all the hard-core adventure bikers. He actually looked like he'd been involved in a little too much adventure except that he'd just fallen off his bicycle. The shame! It'll be a while before he can go off on his own adventures again. Instead, we were happy to sit and watch a presentation by Anne Girardin from annamotodiva.com recounting her trip from Alaska to the south of Argentina over a period of ten months. She had barely even sat on a motorbike before she undertook this mammoth ride! It was a very inspiring presentation, and her photos were fabulous.

I've also been doing a lot of reading for friends. One asked me to proof-read his latest book and then, later, to leave a review on Goodreads. I found the review quite tricky because I'd been reading it to find errors, not getting to grips with the story. I also wrote it a couple of weeks after I read it so my recollection of the story was a little hazy.

Then I bought the Kindle version of a book by another FB friend entitled Little Yellow Stickies: Security through Absurdity. Once I'd finished reading it, the author asked me to write a review for Amazon.com. I already had on the UK site (because I always write book reviews), so popped over to copy and paste my review into .com.

Then this weekend, I received fellow blogger Samantha Vérant's pre-publication edition of her romantic memoir 'Seven Letters from Paris'. I finished it this evening, and have to send the book on to the next on the list of pre-publication readers. We will all leave a review on Goodreads the day it's published on Oct 1. I'll have to write something down before then or I'll have forgotten it long before. I've known about this book for some time but reading it was something else. Sam's done a great job telling the story of how she met her husband, or should I say, she met him, then went back to the US.  He wrote seven truly romantic letters to her after she went back to the US, the stuff you dream of receiving, but she ignored him for twenty years, until she finally came to her senses and sent him an apology. To his credit, he wrote back and they picked up where they'd left off. He needs a medal for perseverance, I reckon!

I was telling my (French) DB about Sam's husband Jean-Luc. My DB is not very romantic so when I was telling him about everything that Jean-Luc had done for Sam, he said he needed a good talking to as he had just raised the bar for every Frenchman who wanted to get intimate with an American girl... After reading that book they'd be expecting castles, romantic letters and all sorts of effort. He perked up though when I told him that JL had previously been married to a young Russian. From being a bit of a traitor, JL suddenly became a Person of Interest. It's always been my DB's pie in the sky fantasy to have a young Russian hanging off his arm. Luckily for him he's got me now so he doesn't need to think about trying to seduce either young Americans or young Russians (and have his fantasy crash to earth if JL's ex is typical...)!

There's never a dull moment with my DB...