Judging by the title you might be fooled into thinking this could be a long one, but alack, with only 40 minutes till lunch, Paolo Nutini crooning me softly to sleep and some sweeping still to be done it might not even make past two paragraphs, we’ll see how it all pans out…

So, the whole idea of blogging does seems a little egocentric if not fully unhinged, but assuming most people reading this have at least a minute interest in my life then I’ll give it my best shot, if we end up wavering into an aimless study on all things Andy then feel free to log off, but you wouldn’t wanna do that now would you?

So since I’ve been here I’ve set about making friends, learning French and generally helping out with whatever and whoever, this has ranged from the uber manly sawing down and carrying of Christmas trees to the frank emasculation of 2 and a half hours of covering myself and anything within 20 metres of me in tinsel. So it’s been a pretty fun ride, weekly fixtures including Cafe Connect every Thursday which is basically a Bible study / cake binge, Youth Cell Friday nights, Rugby training twice a week and obviously church on Sundays. Everything else apart form all that has been a bit hit and miss, in true Bless and French style, sticking to a weekly plan here is about as popular as Thierry Henry being the next lead in Riverdance.

Student-esque I’ve been blagging myself numerous free meals, I’ve scored Banks’, Eudeline’s, Dognon’s more times than I can count, Rocke’s, Long’s and a couple others to boot. French cuisine has treated me ok, my new favourite meal is this Raclette thing I had the other week, basically just buffet meat and potatoe with this buff melted cheese all over it, and they call that a main meal here - Genius!

I’m getting bored of this already now so I can only imagine what’s happening to the semblance of a readership I’ve attracted so I’ll leave you with two of the best things to ever happen to me ever…

1) Yesterday in setting up for the Christmas type Sunday thing, we found these little baskets in the attic, basically they amout to small scale hot air balloons, there’s 4 and each one’s about 3 times as big as me, they’re all a random mixture of colours and garishly pronounce “Joyeux Noel” to anyone who happens to be going by at the time. I had an absolute ball attempting to set one up inside, as I’m sure you can imagine, chaos ensued, chairs went flying as this thing wrecked everything in its path in its attempt to expand, far too big to ever fit inside the church, it was brilliant. The only problem I have now is how to get it back to England on the Eurostar to use as a Christmas present…

2) Joel, (the pastor’s son, good lad, funny guy) came up with possibly my favourite quote of all since I got here the other day, he’s a French dude but he’s fluent(ish) in English and he was talking to a new family in the church who are English but have lived in Holland for the last 4 years, so like him they’re bilingual. After thinking a while about how living in France would clearly lead to learning French fluently (hasn’t worked for me yet…) he pronounced to the youngest of them them, with all gusto…

“That’s well cool, in a few months you’ll be a triangle!”

That made my day if not my week…