Liberté, egalité, etc

Sunday is the local election here, the first time voting in France for me. Very complicated. We elect 11 councillors, the most voted for of whom will be Mayor. With 22 candidates and 200 odd voters, it all seems a bit over the top.

They are running in two 'lists', so I can vote for either list, or mix it up. It's a tricky choice though. One list wants to support our (private, Catholic) primary school, the other wants a state primary school opened in its place. The second list includes several of my neighbours and friends. Pictured is my voting card and the blurb from the first list folk. The second list folk haven't sent any blurb yet, probably because they've lost their computers in the house fire.

My principles are firmly with state, non-denominational education. But I'm on the governing body of the private Catholic school (no, I don't understand why either) so have a moral duty to it. And my son goes there. Honestly. Tribal UK politics is so much simpler....

Cold today. Much battling with IT at school. No computer was willing to print the invoices due, I think, to a problem with the excessively complicated print management system (is that really necessary in a 1PC 1 printer set up?) Additionally, or perhaps causally, the Remote Desktop doodah we use to do such things would not let me print directly, ie evading the print management thingy, and would only very reluctantly and after a long tussle, let me save PDFs to my hard drive to print off-line. And it won't acknowledge the cheques paid in yesterday so I gave up and amended the bills by hand.

But, CarbBoy warmed my heart this morning by getting up early to prepare an envelope of Pokemon cards to give to his pal who lost his in the fire. And he added his 20 euro holiday money too. (Which I have stolen and turned into a book token instead.)

With a return to warmer weather forecast tomorrow, I will be mostly ignoring my aching back and continuing the battle to tame the wilderness of my garden (that's not a euphemism).