French Onion Soup!, Rod Fleming's World

10/06/2025

RIP My Lovely

Originally posted 2014-01-08 18:13:22.

Sniff! She died. She’s been with me these last five years, and she’d been around a good few years before we met. She was like a female character out of a Springsteen lyric, kinda worn and raggedy, but she stuck with me through thick and thin. I don’t know how many films or repeats of TV series I’ve watched with her, or how many words I wrote with her, but I do know the paint was gone from most of her keys at the end…I did explain it was my old laptop that died, didn’t I?

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10/06/2025

Man-Trap!

Originally posted 2013-12-30 21:09:44.

Ever seen a real man-trap?

My neighbour was given this with a load of other bits and bobs. She thought it was a toy, but closer examination made me disagree. For a start, it was quite clearly a gun of some order, but it didn’t have any kind of handle. There wasn’t a conventional trigger either.

It might have been a toy cannon, but it didn’t have a carriage. Yet opening it up revealed that it was chambered to take a real twelve-bore shotgun cartridge. Plus it’s made of very heavy cast iron. It’s just not like a child’s toy at all.

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10/06/2025

French Onion Soup! A Mad Scotsman in France

Originally posted 2021-03-16 21:20:07.

French Onion Soup! tells the story of a mad Scotsman (me) taking his family to live in France.

It’s full of hilarious anecdotes as well as lots of useful information that you’ll need if you are planning something similar. Most of all, perhaps, there is lots of humour…because moving to a different country will make you laugh or cry, and laughing is a lot more fun.

Brilliantly funny tales of the life of a mad Scotsman, his wife, children, two dogs and a cat, who escaped the rat-race to live their dream in a country house in France. In 1993, photographer, journalist and Francophile, Rod Fleming and his artist wife bought a house in France. French Onion Soup! is the first in a series of books describing their life in France.

Published by: PlashMill Press

Print ISBN: 978-0-9565007-3-1

Amazon

Buy the eBook:

Buy on Amazon.co.uk

Buy on Amazon.com

10/06/2025

A House in France: Finding and buying

Originally posted 2018-10-21 06:37:51.

There can be no question that actually finding a property is one of the most exciting phases of the whole process of acquiring a house in France.

[kofi]

The doorstep that is two inches too low to prevent the quagmire outside seeping into the house, the drainage system made of two-inch pipe that turns the courtyard into a lake when it blocks, which of course it will do several times every winter, the dripping and split gutters, the multitude of little leaks in the roof, the rising damp and the access road that has turned into a single-lane swamp. All of these delights will provide you and your partner – if you have one – with hours of after-dinner chat.