Manny's Blog

Sharing our French adventure as we live and work and renovate our forever home in the Haute Loire.

All posts in: “My Family”

Summer 2024 … here comes the sun :)

Hot on the heels of the very late last blog, I thought I’d use the Euros as my time to write another post ! The band Singing and performing is one of my happy places – and I am so thrilled to be singing with a band again ! We got together during Lockdown pauses…

The Staircase, Christmas ’23 and lots of Snow

I want to get things up to date – we’ve just celebrated the summer solstice for goodness sake, and this post has been waiting a few months to be uploaded !! So here’s a quick whizz through the missing bits of house progress and family life ! The staircase I know I’ve talked about the…

Throw back to summer ’23

I was so excited to share the kitchen progress last blog that I didn’t talk about last summer ! We had the most beautiful long, hot summer last year – a glorious few weeks of all the family here at the same time… and the big excitement of the birth of our second grandson Noah…

The Summer of ’22

September 2022 – it’s been a jam-packed roller coaster of a year so far! My sister Sasha got married; I turned 60 and caught Covid; Oscar turned one and was Christened and and on the same day (June 5th) we lost Joe’s much-loved Dad, Dave. So the year has involved quite a few trips to…

A Blue Skied Autumn and the first snow of winter

Quite a cliffhanger I left you dangling on in June… the night of our darling, beautiful grandson Oscar’s birth. Sorry about that! As always I thought I’d be back to my blog sooner… but as always, it’s taken longer than expected to get back here! Oscar is now six months old (nearly seven months!)- he…

Summer’s been a long time coming

(May 9th) I’m writing from a top floor room in a cosy Parisian Hotel – the windows open, curtains billowing in the warm breeze, and the soothing sounds of the city evoking distant memories of city-dwelling many moons ago! Curfew still in place from 7pm, so hardly any sounds of folks on the street, but…

Christmas… so last year!

We had ourselves a Merry Little Christmas here in Solignac – even though we couldn’t all be together physically, we were all with our loved ones, and we were together in spirit. Beth’s Christmas video this year summed up our year with such grace…and her beautiful voice. And with all the difficulties and obstacles and…

Summer on the farm!

As we approach the end of September, I can hardly believe it’s been more than four months since I last wrote a blog! The year of Covid strangeness meant a summer at home, with very little travelling for Joe and I, however we were truly blessed to catch a month with Beth here in France,…

Lockdown Birthdays and Anniversaries …and Nairobi!

One month almost to the day since my last blog, one month more in ‘confinement’, and how does it feel now? We have definitely settled in to a ‘new normal’ and a slower more conscious rhythm to our life, but at the same time we start de-confinement today, 11th May… my birthday! And whilst it’s…