Monday 28th of October continued

Well I’ve got my titre de séjour. It was all pretty painless until I pointed out that they had said Eiserlohn, where I was born, was in England when in fact of course it’s in Germany. I could’ve kicked myself but I eventually persuaded the nice French female bureaucrat  that really I had been born in England because at the time my father was in the British Army and anywhere the British army was was by definition British territory. In any case she said that once we actually leave the EU (if that ever happens) we’ll all have to be issued with new cards.  The couple before me were not so lucky; they had driven two hours from Chatellrault to find that her card was there but his wasn’t and they would have to come back again to collect his.

I wanted to celebrate on the way back but of course being Monday everything was shut so no possibility of even a coffee. I was listening to a radio 4 program about Bo Xi Lai, the former mayor of Chonqing and the murder of the British businessman Neil Hayward in the Lake View Hotel. And another radio 4 program about digging a tunnel underneath the Berlin wall which ended badly with the Stasi finding out and arresting 100 hopeful escapees. And the Netflix series I have been watching, living with myself, and the film I started to watch, replicas, werep also both rather dark.  I think I found the radio 4 documentaries particularly depressing because they are about the darker side of life, the exact opposite of what S and I had been wassapping  about this morning. And it’s a rather grey day.